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decline of civilzation? Vinyl Revival
"Steven Sullivan" wrote in message
... William Noble wrote: but to bring this back to the general topic of audio, perhaps it is truer now than 4 years ago that we are willing to tolerate digitization artifacts in our music due to the wide availability of highly compressed music. You may have noted a recent article about Mrs Zappa and how she is refusing permission for her late husband's music to be distributed in any compressed form because of the violence it does to his vision. Surely she is to be admired by this group? Not really...first, data compression can be lossless. Second, even when it's lossy, it can be psychoacoustically benign. Absolutely true - data CAN be lossless (good ol' ziv-Lempel being one example), and it CAN be psychacoustically benign. However, my point was that we (or at least the general public) is more tolerant of acoustic artifacts introduced by digitization. There is also another phenomena in recorded music - over compression - there was a good article in spectrum on this subject. You will notice it most clearly if you play some LP or other recording of popular music from say 1970 (or 1950, I don't care) and look at the dynamic range on the recording, and then play an equivalently popular (let's say it must be a top-40 tune) recorded item from the current charts. I really notice this effect, and I don't like it. Everything has to be louder. There are even measurements of bird songs in NYC that show that the birds of central NYC sing louder than their country cousins. |
#2
Posted to rec.audio.high-end
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decline of civilzation? Vinyl Revival
William Noble wrote:
"Steven Sullivan" wrote in message ... William Noble wrote: but to bring this back to the general topic of audio, perhaps it is truer now than 4 years ago that we are willing to tolerate digitization artifacts in our music due to the wide availability of highly compressed music. You may have noted a recent article about Mrs Zappa and how she is refusing permission for her late husband's music to be distributed in any compressed form because of the violence it does to his vision. Surely she is to be admired by this group? Not really...first, data compression can be lossless. Second, even when it's lossy, it can be psychoacoustically benign. Absolutely true - data CAN be lossless (good ol' ziv-Lempel being one example), and it CAN be psychacoustically benign. However, my point was that we (or at least the general public) is more tolerant of acoustic artifacts introduced by digitization. There is also another phenomena in recorded music - over compression - there was a good article in spectrum on this subject. You will notice it most clearly if you play some LP or other recording of popular music from say 1970 (or 1950, I don't care) and look at the dynamic range on the recording, and then play an equivalently popular (let's say it must be a top-40 tune) recorded item from the current charts. I really notice this effect, and I don't like it. Everything has to be louder. There are even measurements of bird songs in NYC that show that the birds of central NYC sing louder than their country cousins. But from what was written, it appeared to me that Mrs. Zappa (and by extension you) are conflating two very different meanings of 'compression' -- data/psychoacoustic compression versus dynamic range compression. For Mrs. Zappa to be against distribution of Frank's music in 'any compressed form' sounds like she is against lossless/lossy data compression, not dynamic range compression. Has she said otherwise? -- -S A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence. -- David Hume, "On Miracles" (1748) |
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