05 July 2009
T-Bone Burnett Interview
In this interview, T-Bone talks about his new audio delivery system and music in general. Awesome!
Cancelling My Emusic.com Account; Sound Geekery
I’ve been a big fan of emusic.com for years, but it’s time to let them go. Not because they recently raised prices (they also expanded their catalog), but because all they offer is shitty MP3s.
Raising prices is fine, and I’m really glad for them that they’ve managed to expand their catalog. That must have involved intense negotiations with the major label goats.
However, even high bit-rate MP3s are noticeably worse than CDs or WAVs — do a back-to-back listening test on decent home stereo gear, it’s pathetic — but emusic sells only 192Kbps (VBR) MP3s. Sorry, guys... CDs really were an improvement over cassette tapes.
A couple years ago I did an MP3 (192Kbps) vs. WAV listening test with some metal (Gojira’s “Ocean Planet”), and had a friend do the same experiment. I didn’t tell him what I heard, but he responded that he heard exactly what I did: the bass frequencies were “richer and fuller” on the WAV (ripped from CD). I also thought the stereo imaging suffered in the MP3. The end result was that the tricky interplay between the drums and the bass guitar was muted in the MP3 — I think the sound difference actually affected the musical content of the song. And that was metal; the problem is worse for more subtle music.
Emusic subscribers are asking about quality, too. They aren’t getting any answers.
Lossy compression is dead. It was a solution to a problem that no longer exists: poor bandwidth and expensive storage. In 2009, we get megabits per second to the home and a GB of storage is $0.10 or less.
Add to this the fact that quality control suffers (almost every audiobook I’ve downloaded form emusic has had at least one terrible error — the emusic commenters complain too) and parts of their catalog have disappeared (I can’t re-download some stuff I got before), and emusic is no longer looking like such a good deal. I’ll spend my $30 per month at Amoeba instead.
In fact, even “CD-quality” sound (44,100 16-bit samples per second) is really not good enough to capture all the sound a human can hear. Producer and musician T-Bone Burnett has started releasing albums on DVDs with 96,000 24-bit samples per second. I hope, although doubt, that it will take off.
According to my handy Computer Music Tutorial, the dynamic range (in decibels) is roughly 6 times the sample width, and to avoid aliasing (high frequencies mangled into lower frequencies) you need to sample at a rate at least twice as high as the highest pitch you’re trying to record. (See here for more nerd details.) Although the theoretical maximum of 16/44.1 recording is pretty damn good, and although the loudness war does more damage than the digitization process does, you never really get the theoretical maximum. Digital recording is done at 24/96 (or even better), and it’s only downsampled and truncated in the last stage to fit the CD format.
16/44.1 can sound very good indeed... but in 2009, that’s the minimum.
Raising prices is fine, and I’m really glad for them that they’ve managed to expand their catalog. That must have involved intense negotiations with the major label goats.
However, even high bit-rate MP3s are noticeably worse than CDs or WAVs — do a back-to-back listening test on decent home stereo gear, it’s pathetic — but emusic sells only 192Kbps (VBR) MP3s. Sorry, guys... CDs really were an improvement over cassette tapes.
A couple years ago I did an MP3 (192Kbps) vs. WAV listening test with some metal (Gojira’s “Ocean Planet”), and had a friend do the same experiment. I didn’t tell him what I heard, but he responded that he heard exactly what I did: the bass frequencies were “richer and fuller” on the WAV (ripped from CD). I also thought the stereo imaging suffered in the MP3. The end result was that the tricky interplay between the drums and the bass guitar was muted in the MP3 — I think the sound difference actually affected the musical content of the song. And that was metal; the problem is worse for more subtle music.
Emusic subscribers are asking about quality, too. They aren’t getting any answers.
Lossy compression is dead. It was a solution to a problem that no longer exists: poor bandwidth and expensive storage. In 2009, we get megabits per second to the home and a GB of storage is $0.10 or less.
Add to this the fact that quality control suffers (almost every audiobook I’ve downloaded form emusic has had at least one terrible error — the emusic commenters complain too) and parts of their catalog have disappeared (I can’t re-download some stuff I got before), and emusic is no longer looking like such a good deal. I’ll spend my $30 per month at Amoeba instead.
In fact, even “CD-quality” sound (44,100 16-bit samples per second) is really not good enough to capture all the sound a human can hear. Producer and musician T-Bone Burnett has started releasing albums on DVDs with 96,000 24-bit samples per second. I hope, although doubt, that it will take off.
According to my handy Computer Music Tutorial, the dynamic range (in decibels) is roughly 6 times the sample width, and to avoid aliasing (high frequencies mangled into lower frequencies) you need to sample at a rate at least twice as high as the highest pitch you’re trying to record. (See here for more nerd details.) Although the theoretical maximum of 16/44.1 recording is pretty damn good, and although the loudness war does more damage than the digitization process does, you never really get the theoretical maximum. Digital recording is done at 24/96 (or even better), and it’s only downsampled and truncated in the last stage to fit the CD format.
16/44.1 can sound very good indeed... but in 2009, that’s the minimum.
Does Twitter Have a Better Business Model Than Warner Music?
From Techdirt (http://techdirt.com/articles/20090623/2337095343.shtml):
Oops.
In related news, I recently saw Suffocation and Necrophagist (Suffocation is on Roadrunner). Awesome show. I went with Phil, who had a video on YouTube of himself drumming along to a Suffocation song. He got caught in the Warner jihad, and only after contacting Warner, Roadrunner, the founders of YouTube, and Suffocation did he finally get his video back up. More than 3 million views, and Warner wants to shoot themselves in the foot. So Suffocation put him on the guest list and gave him some all-access badges, and they were his biggest fans! It was an adorable love-fest. Fuck you, Warner!
On the other hand, this story on Techdirt leaves a lot of questions unanswered, as the commenters point out.
We keep talking about artists who are connecting with fans, and giving them a reason to buy, and it seems like every day we hear of more and more new and creative ways that artists are doing this — even as the naysayers stop by daily to insist it’s impossible for such things to scale. It’s a blast to see it scale more and more every day and prove them wrong. The latest example comes from Amanda Palmer — who we’ve written about a few times before. She's the singer who has been fighting with her major record label (Warner Music’s Roadrunner) for not just being a pain to deal with, but for making it harder for her to both connect with fans and give them reasons to buy. For example, she got caught in Warner's stubborn decision to fight YouTube over payments, and had all her videos taken down from YouTube against her wishes. So, at a concert, she told fans to upload the video to YouTube as she sang a song begging her label to drop her.
[...]
However, now she’s going much further, much of it using Twitter to closely connect with fans. She recently explained three separate experiments, all done on a whim this month, which allowed her to bring in $19,000,
Oops.
In related news, I recently saw Suffocation and Necrophagist (Suffocation is on Roadrunner). Awesome show. I went with Phil, who had a video on YouTube of himself drumming along to a Suffocation song. He got caught in the Warner jihad, and only after contacting Warner, Roadrunner, the founders of YouTube, and Suffocation did he finally get his video back up. More than 3 million views, and Warner wants to shoot themselves in the foot. So Suffocation put him on the guest list and gave him some all-access badges, and they were his biggest fans! It was an adorable love-fest. Fuck you, Warner!
On the other hand, this story on Techdirt leaves a lot of questions unanswered, as the commenters point out.
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