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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: 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.