Recording - March 2016 - 8

Note to faithful writers: When sending your letters by email,
please remember to include your name and where you hail from.
High-Resolution Audio, Please (And Thank You)
Wow, we seem to have touched a nerve! Mark
Abell, a young writer and music enthusiast, wrote a
Fade Out Column for our December 2015 issue entitled "High-Resolution Audio, Please," in which he
made a case for recording engineers of all kinds to try
and record their tracks in high resolution, and then to
find ways to distribute their music in high-res formats.
This editorial touched off an explosion of emails
from readers, taking many different stances on the
subject at varying degrees of angry fist-shaking. I am
reprinting three of the responses here, with author
names removed and some edits for brevity (and, in at
least two cases, to remove glaring scientifically-refuted
errors that totally undermined the stated opinions).-
MM
YES!
Hi Mark: Very timely article! A very real, undisclosed truth is that one hardly needs 'audiophile'
level gear to hear the significant difference between
a 320k MP3 and a 24-bit uncompressed file-it's
immediately self-evident, even on mediocre gear,
when A/Bed.
A second point I would wish to make would be
that of an artist. The only outlet I'm able to offer high
res audio at is soundcloud.com and, to some
degree, Bandcamp, which for me has been very successful as I, and many others, share/sell 24-bit
files-everything else is variations of MP3/AAC stuff.
I've purchased many albums from HDtracks.com,
love them!, but neither I nor other indie artists have
really found a way into that type of hi-res distribution-they are currently a closed door. If someone is
out there, please make yourself known; I and many
others have 96/24 and 192/24 WAV files we'd
definitely prefer people receive instead of the MP3
stuff. I wouldn't charge extra personally, I'd like it if
people were listening to closer to what we listened to
creating it-as an AES standard.
For most, internet speeds and storage mediums
have made it to where storing all of one's music
locally in a high resolution state is very possible and
convenient. Uncompressed 96/24 should be a standard for everyone from iTunes to Emusic to Amazon,
and likely will arrive sooner than we guess.
Artists, you're going to want to make sure you
have your masters handy, and I guess we'd go with
broadcast WAV, since then we could embed all pertinent metadata/graphics via ID3v2 tag, although
there's not a standard as of yet. With any luck at all,
it will hopefully spell a beginning of the end of the
loudness wars to some degree as well.

NO!
Even if we pretend there are a few golden ears who can hear
the difference between CD quality and high resolution, the difference is SUBTLE. Even if they could hear the difference in a careful
A/B test... without A/B, with nothing to compare to, there's no
way anybody can tell if they are listening to CD quality or something "better".
16/44.1 IS ALREADY BETTER THAN HUMAN HEARING. It's
like watching (your regular) TV across a football field. At that distance the video resolution is better than your eyesight and
nobody can tell if they are watching DVD or Blu-Ray.
MP3 and AAC can also be very good. We've all heard lowquality low-bitrate MP3s. But given a good quality MP3/AAC,
with most program material most listeners can't hear any difference between the lossy copy and the CD or high-resolution original in a proper, scientific, blind, level-matched ABX test. Again,
take away the A/B comparison and even fewer people can be
sure they are listening to a good quality lossy copy. I don't claim
to have golden ears, but personally, every time I've thought I'm
hearing an MP3 artifact on one of my MP3s (LAME V0 encoded)
and I've gone back and listened to the CD, I hear the same
"defect" on the original CD.
Abell talks about playing a 24/96 of "Strange Days" by The
Doors for musician Duddy Bushnell, who called it "dope".
"STRANGE DAYS" WAS RECORDED ON ANALOG TAPE!!! You
don't get Blu-Ray quality by copying your VHS tapes to Blu-Ray.
Assuming the analog noise floor was somewhere around -70 dB,
that means anything beyond about 13 bits is dominated by
(masked by) noise. Most of that noise (if not all) is at a very-low
level, so hopefully it's not audible. And of course, any "musical
detail" at those low levels (mixed with that noise) are equally
inaudible.
"Strange Days" sounds "dope" because it was a great performance, well recorded, well produced, and well mastered. If the
HD version sounds different (or better than) the CD, it could be a
different master. But we don't know if it sounds better, because
there was no A/B. I'm pretty sure an MP3 or AAC would sound
just as "dope" on the same headphones & DAC/headphone
amp. It's not even clear what Duddy was commenting on...
Maybe the song was "dope". Maybe it was the headphones.
Maybe it was the recording and production.
The "problem" with modern music production is not FILE compression, it's DYNAMIC compression. But of course that's intentional, so it's only a problem for those of us who appreciate
dynamics. It's an artistic choice, not a technical issue.
WHO CARES!
IMHO buying music files based on the resolution they are presented is akin to choosing a restaurant based on the technology
used to prepare its meals, regardless of your taste for the food.
Love your mag, keep it up. Peace.
Peace, indeed.-MM

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8

RECORDING March 2016

http://www.soundcloud.com http://www.HDtracks.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - March 2016