High fidelity takes backseat to portability

[JSngry]

Where is here? Where is there? Is a single activity the same single activity as it used to be? If the fundamentals still apply (and I believe they do), does it follow that the way they get acted out will? Can a cumulative little ultimately used to play out what was once the result an isolated lot? Not in method, but in result?

"Listening to music" is, by itself, a pretty empty activity. What are you doing other than passively receiving somebody else's input? Illusions of "quality time" are pretty much that unless there's some sort of other activity involved. The "listening" is/should be merely a facilitator for this other activity. And yeah, I'm talking at a level "deeper" than mere "social functionality". If you're "listening digital" and "living analog", then yeah, there's likely to be a problem at some point. But otherwise, who knows? The jury's still out on that one, I think.

Lots of rope being made available. Time will tell.

[porcy62]

New technology is great for music and musicians, now you can listen to music at decent level quality with a couple of ,00 $ less then twenty years ago, w/o speaking of the costs of producing a record, that is now probably some ,00000 $ less then twenty years ago.

What I pointed out was the fact that, because the availability of music twenty five years ago was harder then now, looking for music was an active behavior for me, not a passive one. So my habit is still active when I listen to music now. I put on a record, or a cd, and I literally have to listen carefully to it: often I listen to the same record twice or more, just in order to appreciate the bass lines or the drumming only.

Obviously for a musician could be great to jump from one track to another and let the music growing in his musical inconscious, without order. For dummy listener like me all this overwhelming availability of music is scaring. Same with information: Too Much Informations=No Informations. Once we had critics, dedicated magazines, that filtered the outputs, you couldn't agree with them, but they created a sort of map, and you could always leave the path in search of new landscape. Now you have a labyrinth and often you lost in it, for younger people this is normal, they growned in it, for me is often hard to find the way out.

[J Larsen]

Where is here? Where is there? Is a single activity the same single activity as it used to be? If the fundamentals still apply (and I believe they do), does it follow that the way they get acted out will? Can a cumulative little ultimately used to play out what was once the result an isolated lot? Not in method, but in result?

"Listening to music" is, by itself, a pretty empty activity. What are you doing other than passively receiving somebody else's input? Illusions of "quality time" are pretty much that unless there's some sort of other activity involved. The "listening" is/should be merely a facilitator for this other activity. And yeah, I'm talking at a level "deeper" than mere "social functionality". If you're "listening digital" and "living analog", then yeah, there's likely to be a problem at some point. But otherwise, who knows? The jury's still out on that one, I think.

Lots of rope being made available. Time will tell.

Fair points - as with many people as they age, it may be that I miss something that isn't worth missing...

[Chalupa]

From yesterday's NYT....

November 25, 2007

Hard to Be an Audiophile in an iPod World

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

IN the heyday of the stereophonic recording boom, during the 1960s and later, there were several magazines for serious classical music buffs with reviews of almost every new recording. But what truly defined these publications, like High Fidelity and Stereo Review, were critical reports on stereo equipment. The big advertising bucks came from the makers of hi-fi equipment, and well more than half the pages of such magazines were devoted to coverage of the latest stereo system products.

There were reviews of new speakers and amplifiers, reports on the latest developments in woofers and tweeters, jargon-filled analyses of new styluses, even feisty columns on the relative merits of locating one’s home stereo system in a room with carpet as opposed to hardwood floors.

Such articles were aimed at classical recording collectors for whom the holy grail of musical life was to have the best home sound system they could afford, a system that would bring the concert hall into their living rooms. Those fanatical consumers came to be known as audiophiles.

But over the last decade the ranks of true audiophiles have been thinning, in large part because of the growing popularity of MP3 players and iPods. These nifty devices enable you to store thousands of hours of your favorite music and take it with you as you bop through your day. You can listen while shopping, while jogging or even, depending on your job, while at work. No one, not even devoted users of MP3s or iPods, claims that the sound reproduction on these technological marvels is equal to that of the best home CD systems. After all, they work by eliminating some of the digitized sound bits to open up storage space for multiple compressed files of music, rendering the sound a little thinner. Still, for consumers, easy access has trumped high fidelity.

This is certainly the view of Mark Katz, an assistant professor of music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of “Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music,” published by the University of California Press in 2004.

“An important shift in the rhetoric of recordings has occurred,” Mr. Katz said in a recent telephone interview. Historically “the stock rhetoric concerned fidelity.” Looking back through his research files, Mr. Katz found fascinating advertisements from as early as the 1890s touting the Berlin Grammophon. “It does not imitate,” a typical ad states. “It reproduces sound with lifelike purity and tone.” That mystique lasted a good hundred years, Mr. Katz said.

“But recorded sound as a re-creation of reality has almost been dropped,” he added, pointing out that ads today for MP3s and iPods seldom make claims for the beauty of the sound. Instead typical ads depict stylish people with iPods as accessories to clothing, clipped on jeans, belts and shirts. Music has become portable, wearable. The reproduced sound, if not rich and deep, is clear and lively. That’s good enough.

For decades the pursuit of high-quality sound on high-end sound systems drove the recording industry, especially its classical music branch. “Good enough had never been good enough,” Mr. Katz said. But now, he added, for listeners and even the industry, “good enough is good enough.”

Any discussion of recording technology has to note one intriguing quirk in the story: Few musicians have been audiophiles. More than the average music-

loving amateur, working musicians understand the big gap between recorded music and the real thing. They can listen through the inadequacies of any recording and focus on what they want to hear.

That has certainly been my experience. Since college days I have owned the 13-LP Angel Records set of Artur Schnabel’s 1930s recordings of the complete Beethoven piano sonatas. By now these vinyl discs are well worn. My turntable (remember turntables?), though nearly 20 years old, still works fine. Listening to these LPs is hardly a luxurious sonic experience. Still, for me, the freshness, immediacy and probing insight of Schnabel’s performances cut right through the crackling surface noise and the slightly tinny tone.

In another twist to the story, though musicians tend not to be audiophiles, they do like their MP3s and iPods. The sound is acceptable, but convenience is the selling point. They typically spend lots of time listening to recordings for professional purposes. To get this listening accomplished while exercising on a treadmill or walking to a rehearsal is an efficient use of time.

Naturally, the contention that audiophiles are an endangered species is strongly contested by those in the sound reproduction industry. Go to Stereo Exchange on Broadway in the East Village, generally regarded as a dependable outlet for top-quality sound systems, and talk to Alan C, as he calls himself. He’s nicknamed the Audio Elf by audiophiles who have been turning to him for decades.

“The demand for the best audio equipment has never stopped,” he said when I spoke with him on a recent visit to the store. “Even the death of vinyl is simply not true.” He noted that turntables, with sales of five million a year in the United States, are making a comeback.

Maybe. But at Stereo Exchange I was struck by the rows of huge high-definition flat-screen televisions hooked up to inconspicuous CD and DVD players. The sight did not suggest that fanatical devotion to audio quality was driving sales. But Alan C insisted that HDTV has increased interest in home audio because people want “excellent sound with their TV.”

He demonstrated some of the latest items in sound-system equipment. He sells most of the familiar brands. Lately he has been very keen on amplifiers and CD players made by Cayin, a Chinese company, and on Totem Acoustic speakers, specifically the Rainmaker model, from Canada.

I listened to some of “Heroes and Villains,” the baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky’s new aria recording on the Delos label, on the modestly priced system ($1,295) that Alan C had selected. It sounded very good, not clinical and souped-up like some systems I have heard. He showed me what happens when you add an extra woofer to the mix: It enhances the resonance of the bass. But in deference to the musician in me, I must say that I enjoyed this recording every bit as much during a recent flight, when I listened on my new noise-

filtering headphones and inexpensive portable CD player.

As for CDs themselves, when digital technology and compact disc recordings galvanized the classical music market in the mid-1980s (and innovations in the industry were historically driven by classical music audiophiles), they were touted as space-saving conveniences, much as MP3s are touted today. Still, the real selling point was the sound quality: free of surface noise and crackle, crystal clear, not subject to deterioration. But as CDs gained popularity, a backlash came from traditional audiophiles, who castigated the sampling of sound involved in the new technology.

Digital recording does indeed sample sound: little slices, called bits, are recorded at the stunning rate of 44,100 times per second. Defenders of the old analog technology used in stereo recordings said that the infinitesimal missing slices of music on CDs undermined the sound quality. Yes, the sound was clear and flawless, but it lacked warmth and richness, they said; it was cold in comparison with the best vinyl recordings played on top-quality stereo systems.

That debate has never been settled, though even holdouts for analog technology have to concede that the quality of digital recording has vastly improved over the years.

The MP3 samples sound as well, but at a significantly reduced rate. The technology is complicated, and I don’t pretend to understand it. The term MP3, as Mr. Katz explains in his book, was taken from Motion Picture Experts Group 1, Level 3, “a name that reveals little about its current use.” The technology was developed to make it possible to compress huge amounts of video and audio data into manageable files that could be zipped through e-mail messages around the world.

Engineers argue that a sound recording has large amounts of irrelevant data; a cymbal crash in a symphonic work, for example, will temporarily obscure the sound of other instruments. So why not remove some of the covered sounds, which could not be heard anyway, to compress the file into a transferable format?

Not until peer-to-peer, or P2P, networking was developed in the 1990s, championed by Napster, did the potential of file sharing and the applicability of the MP3 as a portable sound system for music become apparent. Mr. Katz invokes a charming metaphor to explain the concept of peer-to-peer transferring, as opposed to the traditional method of client-server downloading, in which information flows from a central source to individual users.

“If a public library is analogous to a client-server model,” he writes, “P2P is more like the arrangement my wife, her mother and her aunt have to circulate their collection of mystery novels among one another.”

In any event, these breakthroughs gave us the MP3 and, later, Apple’s iPod. But neither manufacturers nor ardent users of these devices made exaggerated claims for the high quality of their sound. Convenience was the appeal, and the sound was, well, good enough.

One thing is certain: The users who are delighted by these handy new devices are not audiophiles in the old sense. Mr. Katz acknowledges that he is no audiophile. His stereo system is hardly fancy; the headphones he bought in 1988 still serve him well.

On the other hand, he explained, he could not imagine teaching without an MP3. This semester he is offering an introductory course in rock and a seminar titled “The Art and Culture of the Hip-Hop D.J.” It would be impossible to assemble all the CDs he would need for those classes. But with his MP3 and his laptop, he has every recording he needs right at his fingertips. If a student asks about the Rolling Stones, he can immediately call up any of 60 songs. And students never complain about sound quality.

Meanwhile, in the November issue of the British magazine Gramophone, a widely read journal devoted to reviews of classical recordings and DVDs, only a few back pages out of 138 are given to short reports on sound equipment. One article, “Choosing Desktop Speakers,” offers advice on how to “dock your iPod on a speaker system.”

The target consumers are not audiophiles.

[Daniel A]

No one, not even devoted users of MP3s or iPods, claims that the sound reproduction on these technological marvels is equal to that of the best home CD systems. After all, they work by eliminating some of the digitized sound bits to open up storage space for multiple compressed files of music, rendering the sound a little thinner.

Again (as has been stated by me and others before) there are a lot of misconceptions about the sound quality of MP3s. Many of those who have judgements along the lines of "thinner sound" or "digitally compressed" have actually never conducted blind tests themselves. A portable device cannot have the same technical specifications as those of home audio equipment, but as for the format itself, it is - with the right settings and compression software - transparent (indistiguishable from the original) for most listeners, most of the time.

[Hot Ptah]

John Atkinson of Stereophile magazine ran the same set of tests on a 4thGen iPod as he runs on CD players in the multi-kilobuck range. His conclusion?

"The iPod's measured behavior is better than many CD players—ironic, considering that most of the time it will be used to play MP3 and AAC files, which will not immediately benefit from such good performance. But if you're willing to trade off maximum playing time against the ability to play uncompressed AIFF or WAV files, the iPod will do an excellent job of decoding them. Excellent, cost-effective audio engineering from an unexpected source."

Here is the complete article, without graphics:

Sidebar 3: Measurements

To measure the iPod's technical performance, I used Bias Peak 3.0 running on my Macintosh PowerBook to prepare uncompressed AIFF files of the 16-bit test signals I use to assess CD players, and prepared a playlist using Apple's iTunes program. Plugging the iPod into the laptop with its FireWire connection automatically updated the contents of its hard disk; from then on, I merely selected the appropriate track with the iPod's menu button.

With a full-scale signal, the output clipped at the two highest levels of the volume control. The maximum distortion-free output level into 100k ohms was 911mV at 1kHz—more than enough to drive typical headphones to unbearably loud levels. The iPod didn't invert absolute polarity, and the source impedance was a suitably low 5.5 ohms over most of the audioband, rising slightly to 15 ohms at 20Hz. (All figures include the series resistance of a 5' interconnect.) The iPod should be able to drive all but the low-impedance Grados and the AKG K1000 with impunity. (I got great sound with it driving Sony MDR-7506 closed-back headphones.)

The iPod's frequency response was flat (fig.1), but I couldn't get it to correctly play back pre-emphasized files. More correctly, I couldn't get any of the CD-ripping programs I have, PC or Mac, to preserve the emphasis flag when I prepared either AIFF or WAV files. Channel separation was fundamentally good in both directions (fig.2), but slightly if inconsequentially compromised at low frequencies by the battery power supply's rising impedance in this region.

Fig.1 Apple iPod, frequency response at -12dBFS into 100k ohms (right channel dashed, 0.5dB/vertical div.).

Fig.2 Apple iPod, channel separation (10dB/vertical div.).

Fig.3 shows a 1/3-octave analysis of the iPod's output while it decoded uncompressed data representing a dithered 1kHz tone at -90dBFS. A very small amount of second-harmonic content can be seen, but the fundamental peaks at exactly -90dB, as it should. The noise floor below 1kHz is above that of the dither used to encode the signal, and is presumably analog noise emanating from the output circuitry. This can also be seen in fig.4, a similar but wider-band spectral analysis of the player's output while it decoded 16-bit "digital black" data. The rise in the noise floor above the audioband is presumably due to the noise-shaping used by the DAC.

Fig.3 Apple iPod, 1/3-octave spectrum of dithered 1kHz tone at -90dBFS, with noise and spuriae, 16-bit AIF data (right channel dashed).

Fig.4 Apple iPod, 1/3-octave spectrum of digital black, with noise and spuriae, 16-bit AIF data (right channel dashed).

I tried repeating these measurements with 24-bit data files, but they wouldn't play on the iPod, which jumped to the next track. Neither would the iPod play files with sample rates greater than 48kHz.

The noise floor also affects the two measurements I usually take to assess a digital component's DAC linearity error: the amplitude error as a dithered 500Hz tone fades to zero (fig.5), and the waveform of an undithered 1kHz tone at exactly -90.31dBFS (fig.6). But even with the noise overlaying the plots, the iPod's behavior suggested good DAC performance on these tests, with linearity error remaining below 2dB down to -110dBFS on the former, and the three voltage levels described by the latter clearly visible.

Fig.5 Apple iPod, right-channel departure from linearity, 16-bit AIF data (2dB/vertical div.).

Fig.6 Apple iPod, waveform of undithered 1kHz sinewave at -90.31dBFS, 16-bit AIF data.

At low frequencies and high levels, the iPod's distortion spectrum featured primarily second and third harmonics (fig.7), with other harmonics below -90dB (0.003%). The second was the highest in level, at 0.1% (-60dB). The overall distortion level was lower at higher frequencies, with the second harmonic—still the highest—at -73dB (0.022%) into a 100 ohm load (fig.8), though the upper harmonics are still visible. However, intermodulation distortion is low in level, even at high playback levels into 100 ohms (fig.9). Note the presence of a strong component at 24.1kHz in this graph; this suggests that the iPod's reconstruction filter is relatively "leaky."

Fig.7 Apple iPod, spectrum of 50Hz sinewave, DC-1kHz, at -3dBFS into 150 ohms, 16-bit AIF data (linear frequency scale).

Fig.8 Apple iPod, spectrum of 1kHz sinewave, DC-10kHz, at -3dBFS into 100 ohms, 16-bit AIF data (linear frequency scale).

Fig.9 Apple iPod, HF intermodulation spectrum, DC-25kHz, 19+20kHz at 0dBFS into 8k ohms, 16-bit AIF data (linear frequency scale).

Finally, I used the Miller Audio Research Jitter Analyzer to look for word-clock jitter-related spuriae in the iPod's analog output signal. The diagnostic signal, as usual, was a high-level sinewave tone at one quarter the sample rate, over which has been superimposed an LSB-amplitude squarewave at approximately 229Hz. Both signal frequencies are exact integer fractions of the sample rate, so the signal is free from quantizing artifacts. Any spuriae that appear in a player's output are therefore a result of something it is doing wrong.

The Miller Analyzer performs a narrowband spectral analysis of a player's output signal, then searches for symmetrical sideband pairs around the 11.025kHz fundamental. The result for the iPod is shown graphically in fig.10: while the noise floor is around 6dB higher than is theoretically possible from a 16-bit system, only a few sidebands can be seen above the noise. Those circled in red and/or indicated with red numbers are spaced at multiples of 229Hz on either side of the central peak and are therefore data-related. Those indicated with purple circles and numbers are due to other, unknown sources of jitter. The overall result is superbly low, at 225 picoseconds peak-peak.

Fig.10 Apple iPod, high-resolution jitter spectrum of analog output signal, 16-bit AIF data (11.025kHz at -6dBFS sampled at 44.1kHz with LSB toggled at 229Hz). Center frequency of trace, 11.025kHz; frequency range, ±3.5kHz.

The iPod's measured behavior is better than many CD players—ironic, considering that most of the time it will be used to play MP3 and AAC files, which will not immediately benefit from such good performance. But if you're willing to trade off maximum playing time against the ability to play uncompressed AIFF or WAV files, the iPod will do an excellent job of decoding them. Excellent, cost-effective audio engineering from an unexpected source.—John Atkinson

Edited November 26, 2007 by Hot Ptah

[porcy62]

It might be, but I did a blind test with my wife and my son with the iPod hooked on my system and the cd player. Guess who won?