What's the successor of the CD ?
Originally I wanted to write something about the new Metallica album, but I haven't listened to it enough yet. I try not to judge an album until I know it. Some of my favourite CDs are the ones where I intially thought "Ough, what a waste of money"
... so this is gonna be about something that was occupying my mind a lot recently. What's gonna be the next physical music medium? Is there even gonna be one?
I fear it's gonna be mp3 more or less only sold online or some crap like that. Wait! mp3 is a bad thing? Well, not per se in my opinion, there is a place for lossy formats and there is a place for high quality. (I try not to use "high fidelity" because there is too much voodoo involved nowadays). mp3 is something mobile, but nothing for really listening to music. Some people might interpose that they are listening to music in the car and when they are using their iPod ... sorry to burst your bubble, but you are not. You are just creating background noise that is more pleasant than the actual background noise. Unless you spent thousands of bucks on your car stereo (and another few grand on sound insulation and dampening) or using air tight studio headphones the quality of the music doesn't matter. The compact cassette (CC) was more than enough for that.
I don't even want to think about how many people are using mp3 on their home stereos and actually claim they're listening to music.
Why that? Because everyone knows - let me rephrase that - everybody SHOULD know that mp3 is a lossy format, based on the concept that every sound under a certain level (relative to the average level) is not registered by the brain, which means, your brain filters useless information out, or to put it differently your brain is a lossy format. So everything's fine with mp3, right? WRONG. Standard mp3 is at 128kbit/s, which is around CC level, CD would be more like 160 or 192kbit/s, which actually is the bitrate I encode my mp3s to.
But there's more going on than just "reducing to the max". Sound is NOT made of particles, it's waves (and no, the wave-particle-dualism is for light waves not for sound), which means, if you remove something then you alter the whole wave-form. A part of that happens already in the A/D-converter when the analogue sound wave is forced into a digital format, the real damage is done when it's compressed. From then on no matter what you do you'll never hear the original signal again.
That again means no matter how small the "unimportant" detail was that you compressed away, it formed that soundwave and may have not been noticeable or may have been the magic. I'm not exaggerating here, a lot of today's music just sounds dead, which is at least to a certain degree the fault of digital recording.
And there even is another side to it: I'm not sure whether I use the term correctly, but I'm gonna call it psychoaccoustic anyway. What the brain makes out of sound is different from what you actually notice on a conscious level. Your brain is a supercomputer that shows interesting patterns and pretty colors on an internal screen that you define as hearing (not so far off, the picture, there's a "syndrome" where people hear colors). Even if you don't register something on a conscious level the shade of the color might be different.
There's pretty good example of what the human brain makes out of sound: The telephone
A standard telephone has an acoustic range of 300 to 3000 Hz. The base frequency of the human voice is in the range of 60-150Hz (male) or 120-250Hz (female). YES, even a high female voice is normally deeper than what the telephone transmits. The brain is constructing the base frequency out of the harmonies that are transmitted by the phone, so you hear something that is not even there. Cool, huh?
Back to the problem: If the brain is constructing something that is not there then you can lose it, right? Nope, sorry, wrong again. It's exactly the little things that form the final picture, not the loud heavy stuff (it's there no matter what). So what is the really silent, subliminal stuff that makes the difference between dead/boring and pleasant/pretty? It's all the harmonies that form the sound and unfortunately those get lost.
I guess everyone stopped reading by now, but anyways: Basically, digital is ugly, analogue is pretty. It's again a matter of harmonies. 2nd and 4th harmonies are especially pretty (for the human brain), 3rd harmonies are ugly, but interesting and so on (even is more pretty, odd is more interesting, but the higher the number the more ugly). Which is - by the way - why a tube amp sounds better than a transistor amp (mostly for guitar and bass equipment). If you drive a tube into clipping it produces a lot of even harmonies and some odd ones. Transistors produce more odds and some chaotic ones. Digital produces only chaotic, which is why you want a tube to distort (distortin is producing harmonies, nothing else), you may want a transistor to distort, but definitely don't want digital distortion.
Of course the transistor amp is the "better" amp, because the resulting signal resembles the orignal signal (unless you have clipping) while a tube adds and subtracts, BUT in a pleasant way. What do you want when you listen to music? The original signal or a good sounding one? Huh?
So tube > transistor > digital? Basically yes, but there is more to it. Noise for example, it's lower in digital or the dynamic range, which is better again in digital (NOT mp3!). A CD has a better dynamic range than a vinyl record, no matter what some voodoo fanatics may say, but the vinyl record still sounds better. The best is still the good old tape - reel to reel, not the compact cassette. Again there's a problem: What to record on it? CD? Vinyl? Radio? The copy can never be better than the source and pre-recorded tapes are almost unavailable.
Oh btw. my home stereo equipment is from the 70s and early 80s (CD Player is newer, cause the stupid things break every 3 years). That was the last time someone cared about quality and good (pleasant) sound and not just "louder" or "better looking"
Woohoo, we are finally back on topic. So far we have: Tape (reel to reel), Tape (compact cassette), vinyl records, CD, SACD and Audio-DVD. Sound quality wise Tape (R2R), SACD and Audio-DVD are the best ones, but almost unavailable. CD is still THE standard, but for how long? People like their lousy mp3s, the compact cassette almost killed vinyl and is long dead by now. Why? Cheap and easy to use, the only downside EVER to tape was, that you can't just jump to the next title and it ages badly. CD was said to age, but I can't confirm that so far, my oldest CDs are 20 years old by now and still working. Vinyl will basically last forever.
I refuse to accept that mp3 is the future. I cringe when I see DJs burning CDs from their archive on the computer consisting of bad mp3s (128kbit/s).
Damn, memory capacity was never as cheap as it is today and it will only be cheaper in the future and what is it we're doing? Compressing? Seriously? Ripping a CD to harddisc 1:1 is not a problem anymore, it's still more than around 700CDs on a 500GB drive ... the latest iPod has 320GB, 450 CDs uncompressed ... and we're compressing? You gotta be shitting me
What about downloading? Yeah, what about it? 700MByte is a piece of cake. 16MBit/s is almost standard nowadays, which is 350 seconds for the whole CD uncompressed, yes, that's not even 6 minutes. And we are compressing?
Great, just great, solid state memory will hit the 100GB mark next year (affordable), harddisks are almost for free by now and we accept lousy quality music as our new standard.
Hey, just copy the fucking music on a USB stick. 4GB of music is Audio-DVD quality, it's smaller than a CD and if I'd get a nice USB stick with good music on it, it wouldn't feel so much like a rip-off, because the fucking plastic plate called CD costs all of 3cents in the making and I have to pay 20 euro for it. But at least it's physical, with mp3 you get nothing, pay 99Cent on itunes and what do you get? 10010011101011... haha, yes. Why is it that everyone copies software like crazy? Yes, cause it's nothing physical and if you can't hold it in your hand, it's for free, right?
There is no reason for getting music as mp3, for the same price you get better quality, a nice booklet and something to put on your shelves ('cause reading is out of fashion anyway), if you buy the CD. (and you even get the mp3s for free as a bonus for your questionable mobile pleasures, because you can just copy and compress (blergh) it to your computer). So far I bought around 50 songs on itunes (yes, it hurt), because the records are long out of production, all my other music I have on CD or vinyl.
I have not lost all hope, but it looks really dark. Until now every successor was quality wise better than what it replaced or had at least some advantages, but today? The future should not be some lossy mp3 bullshit, the future is better quality, 32Bit 192kHz for everyone, UNCOMPRESSED
... so this is gonna be about something that was occupying my mind a lot recently. What's gonna be the next physical music medium? Is there even gonna be one?
I fear it's gonna be mp3 more or less only sold online or some crap like that. Wait! mp3 is a bad thing? Well, not per se in my opinion, there is a place for lossy formats and there is a place for high quality. (I try not to use "high fidelity" because there is too much voodoo involved nowadays). mp3 is something mobile, but nothing for really listening to music. Some people might interpose that they are listening to music in the car and when they are using their iPod ... sorry to burst your bubble, but you are not. You are just creating background noise that is more pleasant than the actual background noise. Unless you spent thousands of bucks on your car stereo (and another few grand on sound insulation and dampening) or using air tight studio headphones the quality of the music doesn't matter. The compact cassette (CC) was more than enough for that.
I don't even want to think about how many people are using mp3 on their home stereos and actually claim they're listening to music.
Why that? Because everyone knows - let me rephrase that - everybody SHOULD know that mp3 is a lossy format, based on the concept that every sound under a certain level (relative to the average level) is not registered by the brain, which means, your brain filters useless information out, or to put it differently your brain is a lossy format. So everything's fine with mp3, right? WRONG. Standard mp3 is at 128kbit/s, which is around CC level, CD would be more like 160 or 192kbit/s, which actually is the bitrate I encode my mp3s to.
But there's more going on than just "reducing to the max". Sound is NOT made of particles, it's waves (and no, the wave-particle-dualism is for light waves not for sound), which means, if you remove something then you alter the whole wave-form. A part of that happens already in the A/D-converter when the analogue sound wave is forced into a digital format, the real damage is done when it's compressed. From then on no matter what you do you'll never hear the original signal again.
That again means no matter how small the "unimportant" detail was that you compressed away, it formed that soundwave and may have not been noticeable or may have been the magic. I'm not exaggerating here, a lot of today's music just sounds dead, which is at least to a certain degree the fault of digital recording.
And there even is another side to it: I'm not sure whether I use the term correctly, but I'm gonna call it psychoaccoustic anyway. What the brain makes out of sound is different from what you actually notice on a conscious level. Your brain is a supercomputer that shows interesting patterns and pretty colors on an internal screen that you define as hearing (not so far off, the picture, there's a "syndrome" where people hear colors). Even if you don't register something on a conscious level the shade of the color might be different.
There's pretty good example of what the human brain makes out of sound: The telephone
A standard telephone has an acoustic range of 300 to 3000 Hz. The base frequency of the human voice is in the range of 60-150Hz (male) or 120-250Hz (female). YES, even a high female voice is normally deeper than what the telephone transmits. The brain is constructing the base frequency out of the harmonies that are transmitted by the phone, so you hear something that is not even there. Cool, huh?
Back to the problem: If the brain is constructing something that is not there then you can lose it, right? Nope, sorry, wrong again. It's exactly the little things that form the final picture, not the loud heavy stuff (it's there no matter what). So what is the really silent, subliminal stuff that makes the difference between dead/boring and pleasant/pretty? It's all the harmonies that form the sound and unfortunately those get lost.
I guess everyone stopped reading by now, but anyways: Basically, digital is ugly, analogue is pretty. It's again a matter of harmonies. 2nd and 4th harmonies are especially pretty (for the human brain), 3rd harmonies are ugly, but interesting and so on (even is more pretty, odd is more interesting, but the higher the number the more ugly). Which is - by the way - why a tube amp sounds better than a transistor amp (mostly for guitar and bass equipment). If you drive a tube into clipping it produces a lot of even harmonies and some odd ones. Transistors produce more odds and some chaotic ones. Digital produces only chaotic, which is why you want a tube to distort (distortin is producing harmonies, nothing else), you may want a transistor to distort, but definitely don't want digital distortion.
Of course the transistor amp is the "better" amp, because the resulting signal resembles the orignal signal (unless you have clipping) while a tube adds and subtracts, BUT in a pleasant way. What do you want when you listen to music? The original signal or a good sounding one? Huh?
So tube > transistor > digital? Basically yes, but there is more to it. Noise for example, it's lower in digital or the dynamic range, which is better again in digital (NOT mp3!). A CD has a better dynamic range than a vinyl record, no matter what some voodoo fanatics may say, but the vinyl record still sounds better. The best is still the good old tape - reel to reel, not the compact cassette. Again there's a problem: What to record on it? CD? Vinyl? Radio? The copy can never be better than the source and pre-recorded tapes are almost unavailable.
Oh btw. my home stereo equipment is from the 70s and early 80s (CD Player is newer, cause the stupid things break every 3 years). That was the last time someone cared about quality and good (pleasant) sound and not just "louder" or "better looking"
Woohoo, we are finally back on topic. So far we have: Tape (reel to reel), Tape (compact cassette), vinyl records, CD, SACD and Audio-DVD. Sound quality wise Tape (R2R), SACD and Audio-DVD are the best ones, but almost unavailable. CD is still THE standard, but for how long? People like their lousy mp3s, the compact cassette almost killed vinyl and is long dead by now. Why? Cheap and easy to use, the only downside EVER to tape was, that you can't just jump to the next title and it ages badly. CD was said to age, but I can't confirm that so far, my oldest CDs are 20 years old by now and still working. Vinyl will basically last forever.
I refuse to accept that mp3 is the future. I cringe when I see DJs burning CDs from their archive on the computer consisting of bad mp3s (128kbit/s).
Damn, memory capacity was never as cheap as it is today and it will only be cheaper in the future and what is it we're doing? Compressing? Seriously? Ripping a CD to harddisc 1:1 is not a problem anymore, it's still more than around 700CDs on a 500GB drive ... the latest iPod has 320GB, 450 CDs uncompressed ... and we're compressing? You gotta be shitting me
What about downloading? Yeah, what about it? 700MByte is a piece of cake. 16MBit/s is almost standard nowadays, which is 350 seconds for the whole CD uncompressed, yes, that's not even 6 minutes. And we are compressing?
Great, just great, solid state memory will hit the 100GB mark next year (affordable), harddisks are almost for free by now and we accept lousy quality music as our new standard.
Hey, just copy the fucking music on a USB stick. 4GB of music is Audio-DVD quality, it's smaller than a CD and if I'd get a nice USB stick with good music on it, it wouldn't feel so much like a rip-off, because the fucking plastic plate called CD costs all of 3cents in the making and I have to pay 20 euro for it. But at least it's physical, with mp3 you get nothing, pay 99Cent on itunes and what do you get? 10010011101011... haha, yes. Why is it that everyone copies software like crazy? Yes, cause it's nothing physical and if you can't hold it in your hand, it's for free, right?
There is no reason for getting music as mp3, for the same price you get better quality, a nice booklet and something to put on your shelves ('cause reading is out of fashion anyway), if you buy the CD. (and you even get the mp3s for free as a bonus for your questionable mobile pleasures, because you can just copy and compress (blergh) it to your computer). So far I bought around 50 songs on itunes (yes, it hurt), because the records are long out of production, all my other music I have on CD or vinyl.
I have not lost all hope, but it looks really dark. Until now every successor was quality wise better than what it replaced or had at least some advantages, but today? The future should not be some lossy mp3 bullshit, the future is better quality, 32Bit 192kHz for everyone, UNCOMPRESSED