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Things You Should Know About Digital Music Quality (Part 2)

4. The search for an ideal is harmful.
Each of us wants the world and its components to be ideal; this is the axiom. Any DJ wants to have speakers in clubs connected and in tune, every track in the collection shines with quality mastering, and so on. But only the results of the work done are taken into account, each of us is forced to make commitments every day.

So interestingly, this also applies to the quality of the music. We already noted at the beginning that this is an important point, but not enough to deny the space of options and the possibilities of making decisions, perfectionism is completely out of place here. For example, an original underground producer puts out a new track at 128 KBPS, and it will definitely break the crowd. A dilemma arises: to play it or not?
Purists will answer negatively. But you have to be honest with yourself and judge by the emotions you want to convey through music. If the cumulative mass of factors exceeds five minutes of not-so-high-quality sound on your computer, the doubt can be dismissed. Don’t let dogma and the false pursuit of perfection damage your mission as an artist. You can buy the version in the best quality later. For now, do your thing.

5.Music is created with the playing environment in mind.
Good sound producers listen to the tracks as if they are making them in every possible system: in earplugs, cheap plastic speakers for a computer, etc., with the idea of ​​how other people will eventually hear it.
This brings us back to the first point: the work of the producer and the mastering engineer decides much more than the minor aspects. Club tracks with abundant bass sub-registers sound bad on the radio, and loud, howling radio mixes with tight dynamic range sound bad in the club. And the file format is irrelevant here. Producers are forced to compromise – this is an integral part of their workflow, and no expensive equipment or ghost software can affect this like you can.

6. The “golden age of audio” is fiction.
People ooze feelings or chant mantras too often, as was good in the past. That, in general, does not stand up to criticism: Stereo as such did not exist until the late 1960s, and the golden age of declining pop music gave rise to formats as unhealthy as eight-track cassettes.
Amplifiers and monitors have changed dramatically for the better, keeping pace with advances in technology. Yes, in the 70s and 80s it was possible to achieve good sound from high quality printed records, but in proportion to them there were many terrible circulations and publications that just sounded disgusting, ask older DJs and music lovers.

7. Technology comes first.
Thanks to technological progress, we can listen to as much music as ever, good or bad, until we can tell. The most suitable music fans are happy to listen to a variety of genres and styles in different formats on different devices and have fun. Because the main thing is the music, if it is good in itself, you can abstract from background noise and interference from shortwave radio, a joke club stereo system, and excessive volume.
So, gentlemen, intellectual audiophiles and expensive equipment manufacturers, we perfectly feel the difference. A hamburger eaten at the race on Wednesday does not prohibit a gourmet restaurant on Saturday. Everything must have its place and its time
Wireless audio systems, streaming, portable players … all have contributed to making music available to more people than ever. But even such a positive dynamic meets fierce resistance from fans of luxury sound at any price and sacrifice.
You have the option to choose between two completely contradictory situations. In the first, you find yourself in a sound-dampened listening room, where a stereo system is playing for thousands of dollars, and your friends stroking their beards and curling their mustaches, praising the “delicious” sound of the hi-hat and noticing “Texture” of the percussion nuances in the bass player’s performance. And in the second, you’re tearing up a crowded little bar, playing your set on lousy gear at full volume, where the girls start turning the tables because you’ve just started a crazy 128 kilobits-per-second remix.

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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?

The benefits of digital audio

The basics of “numbers”

Each of the multimedia devices on sale today, be it a CD player, a voice recorder or a flash memory player, uses many different types of presentation of data streams, which are then converted into sound. And even more sound formats used for professional purposes have been invented. An inexperienced buyer is forced to gather information about designations on boxes and devices from a variety of sources, often receiving incorrect information or even more confusion.

Almost all devices in the “Portable Audio” section of the ZOOM.CNews.ru catalog support multiple sound formats at the same time, and many devices that do not belong in this category are also tagged with support for playing sound files. To help our reader, we decided to create a short glossary of abbreviations and talk about the most common formats. We plan to leave it open for updates and modifications, adding new formats and describing in more detail the advantages and disadvantages of the already common or forgotten ones.

A little theory

To begin with, remember that digital sound is nothing more than a collection of numbers. The determining factor is the system by which sound as air pressure is converted into data streams and encoded for further processing and reproduction. Consequently, digital sound is usually included in computer files with various extensions, which more often (but not always) can determine their format. And the same concept of format can have, paradoxically, two meanings. First, the format may exist as a general characteristic, including both the type and the physical characteristics of the medium (disk or cassette), recording method, encoding principles, and protection against errors. Second, the format can only be understood as the method of encoding and compressing sound, as standard media are used for transfer, for example a computer.

Analog sound, unlike digital, is reproduced on analog devices and has a number of significant differences. While not a data stream, analog audio is represented as a continuous electrical signal that represents a change in the sound wave. To translate it into digital format, the sound is “digitized”, that is, it is divided into certain segments, in which the numerical value of the amplitude is fixed at that moment. We will not delve into the principles of digital sound creation, but it is absolutely necessary to note that the more often a sound segment is divided and its characteristics described, the clearer and more complete the sound image itself is created.

This process generates an enormous flow of data that describes the sound, and it is clear that each digital audio format is nothing more than a compromise between the need to present the sound as loud as possible and the limitations of the memory of the computer or device. Of reproduction.

A little more theory. In most cases, the human ear perceives sound with a frequency no higher than 22,000 Hz and, to describe it fully in digital form, a sampling frequency of at least 44.1 kHz is required. Since it is absolutely impossible to determine the value of the signal at any given moment, during digitization quantization occurs, that is, the replacement of the actual values ​​of the signal by approximate values. The more levels of audio quantization, the more accurately the signal level is described. As a result, each standard CD carries an audio signal with a sampling frequency of the same 44.1 kHz and a 16-bit quantization level,

The benefits of digital audio

And now, briefly on why this algorithm was developed. Digital sound has enormous advantages over analog, although we must not forget its certain disadvantages. The main value of digital sound is the possibility of infinitely long storage and endless playback of material without losing the original quality, while analog sound loses quality with each re-recording. In addition, the transmission of sound and its processing by modern digital means is facilitated, first of all, by specialized computers. Furthermore, the digital signal on transmission lines is more resistant to interference than the analog signal. It is also important that digital technology,

Historically, digital sound was undoubtedly the initiative of company engineers who adopted Philips-developed Audio-CDs, also called CDDA – Compact Disk Digital Audio.

Digital audio encoding

In fact, this or that digital form of representation of analog audio signals is already a coding method. – a sequence of numbers that describes an analog audio signal is itself a digital code.

However, the encoding that we are going to talk about now is something else. Now let’s look at the methods of encoding digital audio signals.
A digitized audio signal “in its pure form” (for example, in the form of one of the PCM variations discussed above) is a fairly accurate, but not the most compact, way of recording the original analog signal.

Judge for yourself. To obtain complete information about the original analog signal in the frequency range 0-20 kHz (in the audible frequency range), the analog signal must be sampled at a frequency of at least 40 kHz. Thus, the CD – DA standard (the standard for recording data on audio CDs familiar to all) establishes the following encoding parameters: recording of two or one channel in PCM format with a sampling frequency of 44.1 kHz and a depth 16-bit quantization bits. One hour of music in this format takes approximately 600 MB (60 minutes * 60 seconds * 2 channels * 44100 samples per second * 2 bytes per sample = approximately 605 MB). Considering that, for example, an ordinary music lover’s music collection may have 5000 tracks with an average length of about 3 minutes each, the amount of memory required to store it in its original digital form turns out to be very impressive. . Therefore, storing relatively large amounts of audio data, ensuring fairly good sound quality, requires the use of various “tricks” to compress the data.

In general, all existing methods for encoding audio information can be conditionally divided into only two types.

1. Lossless data compression (“Lossless encoding”) is a method of encoding (compacting) digital audio information, which enables one hundred percent recovery of the original data from the compressed stream (the term “data Original “here means the original form of the digitized audio data). This method of data compression is used in cases where one hundred percent absolute preservation of the quality of the original audio data is required. Lossless compression algorithms that exist today can reduce the volume of data occupied by 20-50% and at the same time guarantee a 100% recovery of the original digital material from the compressed data. The operating mechanisms of such encoders are similar to the operating mechanisms of general data archivers, such as ZIP or RAR, but at the same time they are specially adapted to compress audio data …. Lossless encoding While it is ideal in terms of preserving the quality of audio materials, it cannot provide a high level of compression.

2. There is another more modern form of data compaction. This so-called lossy data compression (Engl. “Lossy encoding”) The purpose of encoding is to achieve the highest data compression rate by all means while keeping sound quality at an acceptable level. The idea behind lossy encoding is based on two simple underlying considerations:

original digital audio data is redundant: it contains a lot of unnecessary information that is useless to the ear, which can be removed, thereby increasing the compression ratio;
Requirements for the sound quality of audio material may vary and depend on specific purposes and areas of use.
Lossy encoding is therefore called “lossy”, which results in the loss of some of the audio information. Such encoding leads to the fact that the decoded signal, when reproduced, sounds similar to the original, but in reality it is no longer identical to it. Most lossy coding methods rely on the use of psychoacoustic properties of the human auditory system, as well as various tricks associated with resampling and resampling the signal. In frequency, during the compression process, the encoder analyzes the audio data to identify various details of the sound that can be ignored. Disguised frequencies, inaudible and inaudible sound details can be sacrificed for a higher compression ratio. There, where only intelligibility is important in sound (for example, in telephony, where the presence of frequencies above 4 kHz is not necessary), the audio information in the encoding process is seriously “simplified”.