[Sebastian Kaliszewski]

Harry Lavo wrote:
"bob" wrote in message
...
On Jan 25, 10:15=A0am, Audio Empire wrote:

I'm suspecting
that a lot of this audiophile interest =A0in high-resolution
downloads ma=
y be
the result of dissatisfaction with the quality of commercial CDs.
If so, =
then
that interest may be misplaced. IOW, these dissatisfied listeners
(includ=
ing
me) may be blaming CD for something of which it is NOT guilty; I.E.
being=
a
low-resolution medium when in reality, it's the production
practices of t=
he
record companies that are causing folks to long for higher resolution
recordings, not the inherent CAPABILITIES of the medium.
And what a shame it is that the high-end community has spent the
better part of three decades wailing about the inadequacies of CD as a
medium, rather than about the quality of the recordings.

bob

Well, the whole interesting question to me is: why isn't the
compression (or lack thereof) part of the delivery vehicle, rather than
the medium itself. In other words, if car audio requires compression for
audibility, then why hasn't that been a standard part of car electronics
for the last twenty years.....why did the music companies take on that
burden, rather than preparing the best sounding music they could and
letting it be "adjusted" (or not) according to the listening
circumstances. Certainly blanket compression has always been relatively
simple to achieve (look at the "night mode" that has been built into
almost all tvs/dvd and blueray players, etc for the last decade.

Well, moderate compression could be done that (automatic) way, but
heavier compression will tend to have significant artifacts. Strong
compression requires varius tricks, like making parts of music around
it's level peaks slightly softer to emphasise peaks and make compression
more acceptable (or do even more compression at the same
(un)acceptability level). Strong compression ofthen include some
equalization riding together with gain changes, as well as different
gain at different freq bands.

Night mode typically is a combination of moderate compression and
equalization (for differences of ear freq sensitivity at variuos sound
levels as well as making sound a bit harder to propagate outside the room).


Seems to me that with a little foresight and cooperation this mess
could have been avoided. And still could be.



There is/was technical possibility of other solution -- simply include
compression track/stream along music data track/stream. Compression
stream does not require much data (many times less than actual audio
stream). Then music player would have a knob to regulate amount of
compression applied (from nothing to full amount prescribed). That track
would include both gain and equalization changes.


rgds
\SK
--
"Never underestimate the power of human stupidity" -- L. Lang
--
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