MP3 is the VHS of the audio world, and you should stop listening to it
A simple conceptual comparison of audio format "quality" to video format "quality";
MP3 = VHS (Great, if we're in 1980)
CD = DVD (Ok for the 1990's)
24/96KHz FLAC = Blu-Ray (Now we're in the 21st Century)
Double rate DSD = 4K (More than we need?)
Roughly speaking, at least as a comparision, it's simple and easy for anyone to understand how these audio formats rank.
Much like watching a VHS movie and then seeing it on Blu-Ray, sure it's the same exact scenes, they didn't add more actors in the Blu-ray version, however the "noise" and distrotion on the VHS version really can ruin an otherwise good film. And exactly like the remastering process can greatly improve any version of a film, remastering a CD release often makes a huge improvement. In fact most of the gain in either video or audio comes from the remastering, not so much the storage format, however the quality of the remaster shouldn't be degraded or limited by using antiquated storage format.
It should be clear from the above comperison, the MP3 format, including Spotify streams, is very poor quality. MP3 is what's known as a compressed, losey format, effitivally MP3 delates a bunch of the sonic info to save space. MP3 was invented when we were on dial up modems and used floppy discs. Now we have Cable Modems and TeraByte harddrives.
1 TB will hold around 3,000 CDs in lossless FLAC format.
Even phones now have 4G LTE download speeds and 128GB SD cards.
128GB will hold about 5,000 songs in lossless FLAC format.
There's no longer any needed for lossy music formats like MP3. Most people can do with 1,000 songs on their phone and use the other 80% of the space for a couple thousand selfies.
Next, it's time to kill CDs off.
The CD format, much like MP3, was created long, long ago, to deal with the space and bandwidth limits of those times. 16 bits of storage at 44,100 Htz rate was all that Sony and Philips could put onto a 5.25 shiny disc with the media and laser tech of 1980. In order to squeeze music recorded on 24 tracks at 96HTzs into 2 tracks at 44,100 Htz it need to be compressed, combine and downsampled to the lower rate. Of course this meant loosing a lot of the sound of the original recording. The CD format was long ago surpassed, first by greater bit dencity of DVD, then by greater still media and laser improvements of Blu-ray. In fact Sony and Philips introduced in 1999 a successor to the CD format known as SACD, same size disc but using the much higher quality DSD recording format.
There's the good news, we have and have had for 20 years much better storage formats than CD, so we don't need to be stuck with the squeezed and downsampled limitations of CDs any longer!
The problem is, these new storage formats are already dead. And that's in part due to MP3 downloads. There simply isn't any reason to use DVD, Blu-ray or SACDs when you can and should be just downloading albums in 24/96, 6 channel format from iTunes and Amazon. Why wait for a disc to come in the mail, there's simply no reason to transition any music to any disc format.
All the confusing new formats! DSD, 16/44.1, 24/96, 24/192 Double Rate, etc
As the below chart shows, you are getting 40x more sonic info per song at 24/96 than you get with MP3.
Bits Rate Bit Rate File size for 1 Stereo Minute
MP3 128 k/bit 0.13 Mbit/sec 0.94 MB
16 44,100 1.35 Mbit/sec 10.1 MB (CD rate)
24 96,000 4.39 Mbit/sec 33.0 MB
24/96 means a song is stored at a sample rate of 96khz with number size of 24 bits.
To make it all simple, 24/96 is great, you'll hear greater definition and clarity than the CD rate of 16/44.1. The other high rate formats are "technically better" but it's questionable if you could hear any difference between a song at 24/96 or at 24/192 on average home audio gear. Or even on high end gear. It seems 24/96 is the sweet spot that captures all the sound that you're capable of hearing, the level where most people can precive an improvement over CD sound. Of course DSD and higher sample rate are nice, but you may not be able to tell any differnce over 24/96, so consider 24/96 where you want to be at least. Much like people have trouble seeing 4K's advantage over 1080p, unless someone tells them it's 4K and they look really close, on a very expensive tv.
To go to the next level beyond 24/96, we need more channels. 2 stereo channels at 24/96 are great, but 6 channels at 24/96 is amazing, like sitting in the studio while it's being recorded amazing! And you can play that format on the now very common 5.1 home audio systems.
Blu-Spec / Super High Material CD, there's two things you need to know, and both contain the phrase "idiotic". First, these formats were introduced to improve the process of getting data into and back out of a standard Redbook CD, mostly aimed at lowering the error rate. Which as explained above is idiotic, why transition a musical recording in and out of a media when you could simply just download the original recording directly! And here's what makes BSCD/SHM good. If you have more reflective metrials, precisis blue lasers, and more transparent cover layers, why would you not use it? Continting to use manufacture technects and materials from the 1980 in the 21st century would indeed be idiotic. But the end, new CD player sales today are non-existant, so BSCD/SHM is building a better Ocean liner in the age of airplanes.
Can you really hear a difference in "Hi-Res" audio? No, but I can!
Blind listening tests are often referenced (notice I didn't say sighted), where they sit random people down and play a CD and then 24/96 FLAC, DSD, of the same music and in most cases the people can't tell the difference.
Of course not. They didn't add any instruments to the recordings, nothing that will jump out at you, or that you would be able to lock on to in a brief listening session to identify one recording from another. Where you hear it - listen to the DSD version for several weeks. Then switch back to the CD version. There you will begin to notice, something's missing from the CD, it sounds flat and lacking in details, depth and clarity compared to the DSD recording. You'll not only be able tell the CD from the DSD version, but you'll be able to hear the CD sounds noticably worse. Even when both have been produced from the same remaster.
The Pono Hi-Res Media player flap
Hi-Res audio got a major kick start and real it's first public notice when a high profile artist (Neil Young) released his entire recordings in 24/192khz format. Never mind Genesis did it years before, in stunning DSD, 6 channel format. What Neil did along with the music was produce a portable player, the Pono.
And almost immediately a dozen articles popped from Prominent Editors of highend audio pubucantltions saying Neil Young's Pono Player was completely a waste of money, Hi-Res music format was unnecessary, the iPhone was better and certainly the format Apple was selling (compressed, 16/44.1) was good enough. This coming from the same editors saying we need to be buying $3,000 DACs and $2,000 turntables to make our music sound better. But suddenly they decried the Pono, with a high end DAC and Hi-Res music to be a waste of money?
I've not heard such a media outcry followed by ridicule since UFOs landed at Rosewell! Could it be that the reason is Apple's iTune's entire catalog of music is in the 16/44.1, compressed, lossy format? I was expecting Lynyrd Skynyrd to come out with an iTunes exclusive song defending iTune's culture for Mr Young's ascertains we need Hi-Res audio.
And of course here we are 5 years later what do we see, is the the Pono's "Hi-Res" player format dead? Surely since all these great music editors panned it as "snake oil" and unnecessary, the Pono has gone to Betamax hell lined up with MiniDisc every other dead format! But, it seems not so, in fact since the Pono came out every single major electronics manufacture on Earth not only has a Pono clone on the market, they are all including 24/96 FLAC and DSD support in their console products. Of course the Sony PlayStation supports DSD / SACD discs. And it wouldn't be there without demand. Someone must be hearing a difference. Neil Young, yet again, a true pioneer.
link
Vinyl?
Why, just why are we here again with vinyl when we already got to the point where we can directly download master quality recordings, how is transitioning the sound in and out of a phyiscal media going to make it sound better?!? Take that 1960's analog 4-track and download it as a 4 channel DSD, guaranteed that'll sound way better than any LP. Check out any disc from the Doors Perception box set where they transfered the 4 and 8 track tapes to DVD-Audio at 24/96 for a good comparision to the vinyl releases. That said, vintage vinyl's a fun hobbie. But I can't see using vinyl for new releases, or camparing new CDs to new vinyls. CD's a dead format, how about camparing new vinyl to Blu-Ray audio?
Speaking of Vinyl, vinyl rips are all the rage now. And they are all done at 24/192. Let's consider this, the master tapes are at 24/192 digital (no one has analog mastering gear anymore with a few exceptions), which they mix and re-eq down to a record pressing, which people then rip to digital at 24/192, and audio experts claim both that records "sound better", and 24/192 is a waste of space for digital downloads.
MP3 = VHS (Great, if we're in 1980)
CD = DVD (Ok for the 1990's)
24/96KHz FLAC = Blu-Ray (Now we're in the 21st Century)
Double rate DSD = 4K (More than we need?)
Roughly speaking, at least as a comparision, it's simple and easy for anyone to understand how these audio formats rank.
Much like watching a VHS movie and then seeing it on Blu-Ray, sure it's the same exact scenes, they didn't add more actors in the Blu-ray version, however the "noise" and distrotion on the VHS version really can ruin an otherwise good film. And exactly like the remastering process can greatly improve any version of a film, remastering a CD release often makes a huge improvement. In fact most of the gain in either video or audio comes from the remastering, not so much the storage format, however the quality of the remaster shouldn't be degraded or limited by using antiquated storage format.
It should be clear from the above comperison, the MP3 format, including Spotify streams, is very poor quality. MP3 is what's known as a compressed, losey format, effitivally MP3 delates a bunch of the sonic info to save space. MP3 was invented when we were on dial up modems and used floppy discs. Now we have Cable Modems and TeraByte harddrives.
1 TB will hold around 3,000 CDs in lossless FLAC format.
Even phones now have 4G LTE download speeds and 128GB SD cards.
128GB will hold about 5,000 songs in lossless FLAC format.
There's no longer any needed for lossy music formats like MP3. Most people can do with 1,000 songs on their phone and use the other 80% of the space for a couple thousand selfies.
Next, it's time to kill CDs off.
The CD format, much like MP3, was created long, long ago, to deal with the space and bandwidth limits of those times. 16 bits of storage at 44,100 Htz rate was all that Sony and Philips could put onto a 5.25 shiny disc with the media and laser tech of 1980. In order to squeeze music recorded on 24 tracks at 96HTzs into 2 tracks at 44,100 Htz it need to be compressed, combine and downsampled to the lower rate. Of course this meant loosing a lot of the sound of the original recording. The CD format was long ago surpassed, first by greater bit dencity of DVD, then by greater still media and laser improvements of Blu-ray. In fact Sony and Philips introduced in 1999 a successor to the CD format known as SACD, same size disc but using the much higher quality DSD recording format.
There's the good news, we have and have had for 20 years much better storage formats than CD, so we don't need to be stuck with the squeezed and downsampled limitations of CDs any longer!
The problem is, these new storage formats are already dead. And that's in part due to MP3 downloads. There simply isn't any reason to use DVD, Blu-ray or SACDs when you can and should be just downloading albums in 24/96, 6 channel format from iTunes and Amazon. Why wait for a disc to come in the mail, there's simply no reason to transition any music to any disc format.
All the confusing new formats! DSD, 16/44.1, 24/96, 24/192 Double Rate, etc
As the below chart shows, you are getting 40x more sonic info per song at 24/96 than you get with MP3.
Bits Rate Bit Rate File size for 1 Stereo Minute
MP3 128 k/bit 0.13 Mbit/sec 0.94 MB
16 44,100 1.35 Mbit/sec 10.1 MB (CD rate)
24 96,000 4.39 Mbit/sec 33.0 MB
24/96 means a song is stored at a sample rate of 96khz with number size of 24 bits.
To make it all simple, 24/96 is great, you'll hear greater definition and clarity than the CD rate of 16/44.1. The other high rate formats are "technically better" but it's questionable if you could hear any difference between a song at 24/96 or at 24/192 on average home audio gear. Or even on high end gear. It seems 24/96 is the sweet spot that captures all the sound that you're capable of hearing, the level where most people can precive an improvement over CD sound. Of course DSD and higher sample rate are nice, but you may not be able to tell any differnce over 24/96, so consider 24/96 where you want to be at least. Much like people have trouble seeing 4K's advantage over 1080p, unless someone tells them it's 4K and they look really close, on a very expensive tv.
To go to the next level beyond 24/96, we need more channels. 2 stereo channels at 24/96 are great, but 6 channels at 24/96 is amazing, like sitting in the studio while it's being recorded amazing! And you can play that format on the now very common 5.1 home audio systems.
Blu-Spec / Super High Material CD, there's two things you need to know, and both contain the phrase "idiotic". First, these formats were introduced to improve the process of getting data into and back out of a standard Redbook CD, mostly aimed at lowering the error rate. Which as explained above is idiotic, why transition a musical recording in and out of a media when you could simply just download the original recording directly! And here's what makes BSCD/SHM good. If you have more reflective metrials, precisis blue lasers, and more transparent cover layers, why would you not use it? Continting to use manufacture technects and materials from the 1980 in the 21st century would indeed be idiotic. But the end, new CD player sales today are non-existant, so BSCD/SHM is building a better Ocean liner in the age of airplanes.
Can you really hear a difference in "Hi-Res" audio? No, but I can!
Blind listening tests are often referenced (notice I didn't say sighted), where they sit random people down and play a CD and then 24/96 FLAC, DSD, of the same music and in most cases the people can't tell the difference.
Of course not. They didn't add any instruments to the recordings, nothing that will jump out at you, or that you would be able to lock on to in a brief listening session to identify one recording from another. Where you hear it - listen to the DSD version for several weeks. Then switch back to the CD version. There you will begin to notice, something's missing from the CD, it sounds flat and lacking in details, depth and clarity compared to the DSD recording. You'll not only be able tell the CD from the DSD version, but you'll be able to hear the CD sounds noticably worse. Even when both have been produced from the same remaster.
The Pono Hi-Res Media player flap
Hi-Res audio got a major kick start and real it's first public notice when a high profile artist (Neil Young) released his entire recordings in 24/192khz format. Never mind Genesis did it years before, in stunning DSD, 6 channel format. What Neil did along with the music was produce a portable player, the Pono.
And almost immediately a dozen articles popped from Prominent Editors of highend audio pubucantltions saying Neil Young's Pono Player was completely a waste of money, Hi-Res music format was unnecessary, the iPhone was better and certainly the format Apple was selling (compressed, 16/44.1) was good enough. This coming from the same editors saying we need to be buying $3,000 DACs and $2,000 turntables to make our music sound better. But suddenly they decried the Pono, with a high end DAC and Hi-Res music to be a waste of money?
I've not heard such a media outcry followed by ridicule since UFOs landed at Rosewell! Could it be that the reason is Apple's iTune's entire catalog of music is in the 16/44.1, compressed, lossy format? I was expecting Lynyrd Skynyrd to come out with an iTunes exclusive song defending iTune's culture for Mr Young's ascertains we need Hi-Res audio.
And of course here we are 5 years later what do we see, is the the Pono's "Hi-Res" player format dead? Surely since all these great music editors panned it as "snake oil" and unnecessary, the Pono has gone to Betamax hell lined up with MiniDisc every other dead format! But, it seems not so, in fact since the Pono came out every single major electronics manufacture on Earth not only has a Pono clone on the market, they are all including 24/96 FLAC and DSD support in their console products. Of course the Sony PlayStation supports DSD / SACD discs. And it wouldn't be there without demand. Someone must be hearing a difference. Neil Young, yet again, a true pioneer.
link
Vinyl?
Why, just why are we here again with vinyl when we already got to the point where we can directly download master quality recordings, how is transitioning the sound in and out of a phyiscal media going to make it sound better?!? Take that 1960's analog 4-track and download it as a 4 channel DSD, guaranteed that'll sound way better than any LP. Check out any disc from the Doors Perception box set where they transfered the 4 and 8 track tapes to DVD-Audio at 24/96 for a good comparision to the vinyl releases. That said, vintage vinyl's a fun hobbie. But I can't see using vinyl for new releases, or camparing new CDs to new vinyls. CD's a dead format, how about camparing new vinyl to Blu-Ray audio?
Speaking of Vinyl, vinyl rips are all the rage now. And they are all done at 24/192. Let's consider this, the master tapes are at 24/192 digital (no one has analog mastering gear anymore with a few exceptions), which they mix and re-eq down to a record pressing, which people then rip to digital at 24/192, and audio experts claim both that records "sound better", and 24/192 is a waste of space for digital downloads.
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