In a long inteview, Neil Young mentions the effects the technological race to the bottom is having on music and our ability to appreciate it. From ear buds to compounded lossy compression algorithms, most people have lost access to anything resembling the traditional dynamic range and chromatic range that music requires. What to call the sounds that are left? Neil goes into a lot of detail on the problems and some of the, so far unsuccessful, steps he has taken to try to fix the problem.
Neil Young is crankier than a hermit being stung by bees. He hates Spotify. He hates Facebook. He hates Apple. He hates Steve Jobs. He hates what digital technology is doing to music. "I'm only one person standing there going, 'Hey, this is [expletive] up!' " he shouted, ranting away on the porch of his longtime manager Elliot Roberts's house overlooking Malibu Canyon in the sunblasted desert north of Los Angeles.
[...] Producers and engineers often responded to the smaller size and lower quality of these packages by using cheap engineering tricks, like making the softest parts of the song as loud as the loudest parts. This flattened out the sound of recordings and fooled listeners' brains into ignoring the stuff that wasn't there anymore, i.e., the resonant combinations of specific human beings producing different notes and sounds in specific spaces at sometimes ultraweird angles that the era of magnetic tape and vinyl had so successfully captured.
It's a long read, but quite interesting and he has thought about both the problem and solutions. More importantly he has been working to solve the problem, even if it may be an uphill fight.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @07:24PM (23 children)
People who want the quality can get it - storage, processing power, and com speed are more than adequate to produce and use non-lossy high-quality recordings.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by RS3 on Saturday August 24 2019, @07:47PM (6 children)
You're absolutely correct. In fact, long ago they started using DVDs for "HD" audio- 24 bit, 96KHz. They exist, but never really took off. And I knew people who used VHS HiFi to record audio- the specs were that good or better.
The main reason for all the mess is the CD format. 16 bits is actually not great, because in PCM (Pulse Code Modulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-code_modulation [wikipedia.org] the quieter sounds don't use all of the bits and they sound distorted. Sound engineers / mixers / masterers had to use all of the 16 bits, and it became a fairly standard practice to compress- individual tracks (raw multi-track tracks), the overall mix, then use a mastering multi-band leveler (more compression) and finally a limiter that does magic but still compresses (dynamically, and maybe a LOT where it needs to).
And then you have YouTube, Spotify, etc., and you don't know what reprocessing they do besides obviously encode to .mp3, and even then there are many options besides bit rate.
I've never done multi-track to magnetic tape, but I've read about the magic that some engineers used- basically you had to know the tape head and tape magnetic saturation, and what pre-amps and levels would give you the best sound, intentionally using a little head/tape saturation as a nice soft limiter. You'd think someone could emulate that in electronics or software, but I'm not sure if there are any really good emulators / plugins because I only dabble in that world.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @10:34PM (3 children)
That is not why they sound distorted. The best way to understand the limitation of CDs and how hard they are to mix is that PCM is linear, but our hearing is logarithmic. A sound that is twice as loud on the PCM stream (e.g. moving from the values 128 to 256 or 32767 to 65534) is not perceived as twice as loud to us. You can move the same distance linearly, but depending on where you are on the scale, it will sound different. It is the same reason why people complained about the volume knob on early versions of Windows and Mac OS (but not BeOS). It is difficult to map logarithmic values to linear and back over a large range, so compression artificially limits the dynamic range in order to try and preserve the differences that people will notice the most. It also helps to even out the sound of the ensemble and reduce unwanted sounds like heavy hits out of nowhere and sibilant noises. While adding more and more bits gives you more room to do said mapping, there is a good argument to be made that the real solution is to use a floating-point representation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @01:15AM
Huh?
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday August 25 2019, @11:12AM (1 child)
Range != granularity Yes, humans can hear a wide dynamic range. Humans cannot distinguish between infinite gradations of volume.
You can represent an arbitrarily wide dynamic range with just a single bit: let 0 be the lowest value of the range and 1 be the highest. Oh, you wanted more granularity? Let's add more bits then.
16 bits is more than enough. Humans cannot meaningfully distinguish between 2^16 different gradations of volume. As you say, our hearing is logarithmic. We don't need to represent 32767 differently than 32768 or 32769. No one can tell the difference anyway.
24 bits is used during mixing so one has more leeway to be sloppy. If you want to keep it in the final master, fine. But claiming that we need even more bits suggests ignorance about digital audio.
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(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday August 25 2019, @12:57PM
But with 2^16 gradations of volume we might still have to distinguish 5 from 6.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @12:14AM
You two are way off the mark. If you read TFA you'll notice eg:
-recording studios don't record nor keep the same quality of recording
-production tools and standards are discarding meaningful data
-production tools make resulting tracks which don't correspond to what a live performance could ever sound like
Now, these aren't inherently bad. "Pull the cymbals up a bit they're too faint" might make sense. But Neil Young is arguing that, like the 70s pile carpets and mustard colours fad, the aesthetic delivered is bad, and that the monoculture due to major labels and publication streams is ensuring that if you want 50s baby blue or 90s beige, you're NOT able to get it - it's simply not being made.
TFA is literally claiming (and others in this thread discuss the technical realities of those claims) that no you cannot get arbitrarily high quality - not without going to a live performance - not because we don't have the tech, but because we've settled on bad technical and social standards.
Someone else pointed to the Loudness Wars, which alone refute the idea that arbitrary quality up to human perception is available. Oh I have the perfect metaphor! It's like watching a movie through a fish eye lens! The data is transformed and recognizeable, but some details are expanded and some are reduced past human discernment, and the experience is distorted. Watch through it long enough and seeing a movie without that lens on would seem weird, and bad!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by shortscreen on Sunday August 25 2019, @01:22AM
I disagree entirely. 16 bits is more than adequate for playback. The purpose of greater bit depths (ie. 24-bit) is to prevent data loss during the mixing process, because when you amplify, attenuate, or combine two 16-bit samples you need additional bits to represent a precise result.
16 bits gives you a signal to noise ratio of 96dB. Can you hear white noise at -96dB? Only in audiophile fantasy land. It doesn't really matter if one part of a recording is quieter than the rest, the noise floor is still at -96dB (in theory... but if your equipment is rubbish and adds a massive amount of noise itself, that is a separate issue which also can't be solved with more bits) which means it's not audible. Unless the listener cranks the volume WAY up for that section... and then turns it down again before the next track starts so they don't go deaf.
Dynamic range compression causes distortion. At low bit depths it could mitigate noise problems... but at 16 bits there is no noise problem to begin with. Instead it's being abused for the sake of the loudness war, so that CDs from the '00s are heavily distorted compared to CDs from the '80s.
(Score: 5, Informative) by pTamok on Saturday August 24 2019, @08:12PM (4 children)
Actually, it is getting increasingly difficult to find CDs pressed from masters produced before the before the loudness wars. Many 'classic' albums have been remastered after having been butchered - the Wikipedia page on Loudness war [wikipedia.org] gives clear examples.
Codecs have become very good - Opus is excellent, but as you say, both processing and disk space have become very cheap, so there's no technological impediment to storing and playing uncompressed CD-audio [wikipedia.org] (two-channel signed 16-bit Linear PCM sampled at 44,100 Hz). As 'Monty' Montogomery of Xiph.org points out, 16-bits is enough [xiph.org].
Getting hold of CD-Audio datasets is more difficult than it should be. Copyright laws don't help in this regard.
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:25PM (2 children)
This is 100% spot on, and is the single biggest issue with quality of modern recordings. One of the reasons that vinyl records sound good is because you simply can't use those "loud" squashed-to-death mixes, as the needle would literally jump out of the groove. CDs made the loudness war possible, but the stupid decision to mix that way "because we can" thus removing all the dynamics from music is the biggest problem and not the available technology.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:49PM (1 child)
You've got that backwards. You have to squash the dynamic range on vinyl or it will skip. The relationship between volume and skipping is somewhat more complicated. The loudness on CDs is a compression, not a volume increase as such. They've compressed things by bringing the quiet bits up, but also by clipping the drums.
CDs do have less dynamic range now, but only because the quieter bits aren't being used.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RS3 on Monday August 26 2019, @12:39AM
Thank you thank you. There is SO much misinformation here it's too painful to respond to most of it. People are getting modded to +5 for complete nonsense and mental exercises. This is mostly a theory / philosophical discussion. I actually DO this work (part-time) and worked for years under a Grammy-winning recording engineer.
Part of my reason for not wanting to comment too much more is that I know some of the secrets of the recording / mixing / mastering world. And I don't want to brag about my degree.
There are comments above talking about recording in 24 bits for processing. WTF? DAWs have processed the internal mixing and math in the highest bit-count possible in the machine for 30 years. To anyone who might care: if you have a 64-bit CPU, you can do 64-bit math directly, even if you're running in a 16-bit OS. I have done it (in assembler).
Since you might be sane, I'll write this one more time: If I have a 16-bit ADC, but my pre-amp level (gain / trim) is set too low so that I only use 8 of the bits, I'm recording in 8-bits. It's that simple. If I'm recording something with large dynamic range (like most things), then some of the quieter parts will only use, wait for it, 8 bits of ADC. So when I then add compression, which means I'm going to squash the loud parts, but also gain up the quiet parts (that are low bit-counts) and thereby make the low bit-count distortion much more audible than it would be if I did little or no compression. And this is _well known_ in the actual audio engineering world. We use 24 bit ADC recording (or 32) so that quiet parts still get 16-20 bits of quantization (A to D conversion).
To dovetail with a few comments above: 16-bit playback is okay if you record in 24-32 and carefully process and "dither" (convert from 24 -> 16 bits) during render.
We also record at 96 KHz (or 192 if we're feeling masochistic about HD space) to get far far away from any possibility of aliasing.
(Score: 2) by Acabatag on Monday August 26 2019, @01:31AM
I buy a lot of early CDs at thrift stores. The ones before the 'loudness wars' have that old block of text somewhere on the insert 'apologizing' for the fact that "the sound material came from an Analog source and there will be inherent defects because of that." The irony is kind of rich.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @08:17PM (5 children)
this isn't about lossyness as much as it is about dynamic range. .. and the violence done to it. imagine having the culture required to go to a classical music performance in a real concert hall, then coming home and realizing just how limited what you can reproduce is. its really pretty dramatic how bad our imaginary listener's sense of good dynamic range is.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by anubi on Saturday August 24 2019, @09:36PM
Exactly nailed it.
I believe the codecs are logarithmic. Our ears have an incredibly large dynamic range, and make digital sampling artifacts, aliasing, and other sampling phenomena show up. And it doesn't "sound right".
I'm glad there's a few people still around that treasure the beauty of a job done right. It's all too common these days to build the bare minimum product that is one step from being junk, to maximize profitability.
Usually, the customer was the Congress of the United States. They get to award contracts without having their dog in the fight, while having the authority to compel everyone else's dog to support it.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Touché) by mhajicek on Sunday August 25 2019, @01:03AM (3 children)
Dynamic range means the loud parts are too loud and the quiet parts are too quiet. When I listen to music I've either got road noise or machine noise competing for my ears.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 4, Insightful) by RS3 on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:49AM
That's spot-on, and I've thought for years that listening devices should have a variable compression adjustment so that people can adjust the dynamic range to suit their environment. That said, many car radios do that automatically. The radio in my dad's car, somewhat older, adjusts its volume to road speed, and that effect is somewhat adjustable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:54PM
The consumer tools to do that have been around for ages, but there's still no way for a consumer to turn that compressed junk back into music.
I have my whole collection ripped to FLAC cue files. If I need or want the compression, I can have my computer do it all in a short time period and convert to a different format at the same time
I remember some months ago hearing one of the songs I loved from the 90s and it was terrible. The processing and compression led to it being flat and boring.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday August 26 2019, @12:55AM
I'll add some numbers: average car interior is on the order of 60-70 dB SPL. That doesn't mean the music has to be above 70 to hear it, but it certainly sets a rough baseline.
Yes, humans can hear 140 dB dynamic range, but it's not pleasant for most normal people. Music is pretty loud at 85 dB. So you might want your music in the 75-80 dB range in your car, but background noise is a problem, so you'll turn it up, but too much dynamic range in the source makes it tedious to hear the quiet parts.
Again, some nice adjustable compression would be great, and I know many cars have auto-compensating systems (as do some high-end home audio systems.)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by qzm on Saturday August 24 2019, @10:20PM (2 children)
Could we please change the title to 'Neil Young, promoting his commercial product, the PONO music player, said....'
And yet what he says still makes little sense. There is nothing inate in in these technologies that FORCES producers to shorten and over-compress their music.
It is simply the choice the commercial producers and promoters are making.
He should be saying 'modern music production is crap' - because buying his overprices and technically of minor advantage music planer/service isnt going to make the production of music any better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pono_(digital_music_service) [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by qzm on Saturday August 24 2019, @10:34PM
Just to point out, yes I know PONO is dead, but Neil is well known for beating the dead horse ;)
His website for 'high quality streaming' is still going, which apparently cost him over a million dollars (really? you need to find some better techies Neil).
I suspect he has been suckered by someone, and they are milking him for money in the name of 'helping him save good music' - poor guy.
But really, this stuff is just rubbish - there are plenty of ways to get good music - the problem is little modern music is being produced with much quality.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Sunday August 25 2019, @12:11AM
Modded you insightful on both, but as TFA (along with everything else I've ever read about the guy) the problem is that he's a true believer. He did PONO not only to make money - although he doesn't perform for free, either... - but also because he does really believe in the passion of preserving quality sound. And, point, as you stated he crashed and burned with PONO yet he still advocates for the cause.
"In the clearing stands a Boxer and a fighter by his trade. And he carries the reminders of every glove that laid him down or cut him 'till he cried out in his anger and his rage, 'I am leaving, I am leaving,' but the fighter still remains."
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Snotnose on Sunday August 25 2019, @12:46AM (1 child)
Not really. When the only source the consumer has access to is over compressed then it doesn't matter the quality of your receiver, speakers, com speed, NAS size, whatever. If the original source sucks, then your best results will suck a bit less. Unless you have access to the master tapes, which takes a lot more money than that $1000 receiver, $2k speakers, and $200/month internet speed.
My ducks are not in a row. I don't know where some of them are, and I'm pretty sure one of them is a turkey.
(Score: 2) by ilPapa on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:35AM
But my ceramic cable elevators still matter, right? Please tell me they still matter.
http://www.charismaaudio.com/?page_id=1728 [charismaaudio.com]
You are still welcome on my lawn.