Things to know about the quality of digital music
One of the key aspects of a positive music experience is the quality of the recordings and the quality of the sound that we enjoy. This is a very speculative topic, clashing technologies, devices and, first of all, the listeners themselves. The mass of the common people oppose audiophiles of all kinds with views of varying degrees of radicalism, but with an equally high level of rejection of the habits of their opponents.
This crowd of connoisseurs of $ 500 cables, tube amps, and high-end stereos are joined by respected artists and producers who explain that music should sound great, that it sounded like that at the time of recording, but with the advent of digital technology (so there is a mastery of audio file compression and the general portability of playback devices), the quality of music inevitably deteriorates, and generally we need to do something about it. Stop the loudness race or buy expensive CDs, get a player, amplifier and speakers, for example, at a decent price.
They think we are fools that we buy MP3s from online retailers like iTunes. Who listen to satellite radio and the internet. Who get fresh music every day on popular digital audio platforms. Who are happy with DJ sets playing from flash drives.
But these “nuances” not only prevent us from listening to a large amount of music using the above methods, but also from enjoying it.
Without a doubt, the quality of the music plays an important role. For example, DJs know this very well, working with musical material much closer and closer than the public. There is a difference between a specially compressed MP3 file and its source on a CD; it is a fact. However, the authoritarian tone of audiophiles and high-end music equipment manufacturers should soften, and the rhetoric should become more mundane and closer to the average consumer of music products.
We decided to collect 7 data on sound quality that will dissipate the clouds a bit over digital formats and portable audio.
1. The file format is not critical.
What the producer of a track does with it in the studio is a thousand times more important than in what format the result of this work will be encoded. You can’t make candy out of shit – a decent track with an artistic message, properly produced, mixed, and mastered in an acceptable dynamic range (where you didn’t go overboard with compression in the first place), even on unimportant speakers, will sound better than a dull, gray and poorly mastered track. even if you hear it in lossless format on a stylish stereo system. Always. This should be obvious to everyone.
2. Compressing the file size by 80% does not reduce the audio quality proportionally.
When you compress digital audio, you get rid of the main ballast without affecting the quality of music the human ear can hear. This process is called lossless compression (very similar to RAR or ZIP files). If you want to reduce the size of the audio file even more radically, you will have to shred the source and its sound forever; this is already a case of the notorious “quality loss”. Yes, as a result, the track undergoes irreparable changes, but people too often create darkness, claiming that this happens indiscriminately.
It’s time to admit that most people can’t hear some of the details on the album. It’s just that our ears are not comparable to the hearing of a dog and other animals. You can get rid of a lot of secondary information in the audio and no one will know the difference. This is psychoacoustics in action, this is how lossy audio compression works. There is a certain threshold below which the difference begins to be heard (MP3 with a bitrate of 96 kilobits per second cannot be compared with an analog of 320), but this does not mean that the myth about the relationship between the percentage of compression and the end result is true. It is a myth.
3. People make the most of life when music isn’t of the best quality.
Life story. In the 90s, the article’s conditional hero came to an illegal rave, spent the whole night, and decided he would make DJing the profession of his life. A brave step and a fateful decision. But what happened to the sound at that party? Everything was wrong, remember. The needle flew, the EQ not tuned, and the amps periodically cut out. Has anyone fired on this? Barely.
Have you ever been to a nasty sounding party that changed your life? Danced all night by bad announcers in a strange club and left in the morning with your future life partner?
