Indeed, some of us just really enjoy having that physical CD in our hands, opening it up, and reading the liner notes while gazing at the pictures. Some of use couldn’t be bothered, and look at the CD as a clumsy, limited capacity medium, that can easily get damaged, and doesn’t fit in anything small enough to carry comfortably.
Which ever camp you belong to I thought an open request to those cutting new ITM records (and those who have files for downloading already) might be in order. Something with a short like;
"Please give us the option of a high quality file like an AIFF and/ WAV file downloads. This has been going on in other genres of music and would work just as well in this genre. We would be happy to pay an up-charge for this option. If you have files up on CDBaby now (or whichever host), please add the high-quality file download as an option. Also, your uploaded MP3s should be a minimum of 256kbs. Included in the downloads, give us the same pics and liner notes that those purchasing a physical CD get. We know this is more material to upload, but we are some of your biggest fans that enjoy the highest quality audio, as much as we like to read the liner notes and gaze at pictures, too. "
I have many students and friends that pay extra for a WAV or AIFF download, in order to have the highest quality audio file. Would you?
I buy most of my music from mp3 websites such as Amazon MP3 Downloader.
The idea of higher quality sounds great, but unless I’m missing something, you can’t burn it to a disk… which is a problem for people like me who have only a CD player in their car, and no way to play those higher quality formats in their vehicle. I can’t imagine driving without a nice pipes/whiste/flute soundtrack accompanying it!
The choice would be great, and I definitely agree. However, I hope things don’t switch to completely using those larger high-quality formats anytime soon.
Actually, I think you are (missing something). You can easily burn it to a disk.
MP3 is an acoustically compressed format, while CD audio is uncompressed. When a CD track is converted to MP3, details of the original audio waveform are simplified to achieve compression. The result is a loss of fidelity. Roughly, the lower the MP3 bitrate, the less the fidelity.
When you burn an MP3 back to a CD for your car, you’re converting it back to an uncompressed format. But you can’t restore the missing fidelity information that was squeezed out of the MP3. The burned MP3 track on the CD will sound no better, at best, than the original MP3.
By contrast, WAV and AIFF are both uncompressed (raw PCM with metadata). In fact, they are exactly what you get when you rip a CD to disk. And whether the file is one you ripped yourself or one that you purchased, burning it back to CD is basically just copying it back - un-ripping it, as it were. There’s no compression either way, the burned track is an exact copy of the original CD track, and full fidelity is preserved.
So what Brazenkane is asking is for just a matter of sound quality, not technical difficulty. You can make your car cruising CDs just as easily from MP3 or WAV/AIFF.
The main reasons that WAV/AIFF are not more common are probably that 1. The files can be considerably larger than compressed MP3, requiring more server storage and bandwidth, and 2. The lower fidelity of compressed MP3s still offers an incentive for audiophiles to continue to purchase physical CDs.
Okay, I was confusing something here and had something else in mind when I wrote that.
When I downloaded the “Stony Steps” Matt Molloy album from iTunes, it downloaded it in “MPEG-4” audio format. I was confusing this with the names of the higher quality formats mentioned here. Is this also a higher quality than mp3? The problem I was having is that I wanted to then burn that to a disk, but it wasn’t in the correct format to do so. I was under the impression that only mp3 music files could be burnt to a disk and played in a CD player. I never used iTunes after buying that one album.
So, which formats can be put onto a disk and a CD player at least a decade old will play them?
Thanks very much for the explanation MTGuru, that cleared up lot of confusion I was having. So, does this mean that in the reverse situation, where I buy a CD then want to rip it to my computer, I should rip the material off of the CD in WAV format to get better audio quality when I listen to it on my laptop with headphones?
So, WAV, IAFF, and MP3 are the formats that can be put onto a disk, with the first two being higher quality than mp3? And m4a, where does that lie on the quality spectrum? As mentioned, iTunes uses that solely, and I assumed that the different format is used because it’s higher quality.. am I mistaken here as well?
Sorry for drifting the thread a tad OT, I’m trying to understand the different formats available. But on the topic of the thread- If I could pay extra for something and get higher quality while still being able to put it to use in the same way as mp3’s (minus extra space usage), then yes, I’d be all for it and pay extra for higher quality!
Not necessarily. mp3 is actually MPEG-1 Layer III. MPEG-4 (m4a) is a newer standard. Specifically, it incorporates AAC encoding/compression which, all things being equal, should give better fidelity for a given bitrate. For example, 128k AAC m4a is supposed to be roughly equivalent to 160k mp3. But they’re both compressed, lossy formats, and a higher bitrate mp3 may sound better than a lower bitrate m4a. And in either case you’re not getting the same potential quality as the original CD tracks.
I’m not sure what iTunes sells nowadays; most tracks in my old iTunes collection are 128k m4a (you can check “Get Info” for the bitrates). So in theory, a 256k MP3 will sound better, and a lossless WAV/AIFF will sound better still. In practice, for example in a noisy car, most people won’t hear much difference. And we’ve all gotten used to listening to compressed audio anyway. But objectively, you’re getting/buying better audio quality with CD/WAV/AIFF tracks.
Old iTunes tracks used DRM (copy protection) to control copying, burning and exporting. Newer iTunes tracks should be DRM-free. You should be able to export to mp3, copy, and burn them.
Any of them! There’s plenty of standard software that can convert and burn any common audio format files to a CD. And the basic CD disc format hasn’t changed in a decade, so your old CD player should be golden. Basically, if you can hear it, you can burn it and play it.
I’m in the same boat with my old car CD and even a portable CD Walkman (!). Fortunately, they both read CD-RW fine, so I can change out the music I burn and carry when I want, without spending a fortune on discs.
Yep, that’s exactly what Brazenkane is saying, too.
There are very few portable music players, phones or computers on the market that will have good enough analog/digital converters to make use of the better quality offered by a lossless audio file.
In addition to a good converter you’ll need a good quality set of cans or speakers too.
Most people won’t have access to this equipment or want to spend the extra money on it, so a compressed file is good enough. Hell, YouTube is an increasingly popular source of music and the quality there is shocking.
For those in the know, and with the right gear, there can be no greater pleasure than a lossless audio track and a good audio setup.
I was at a party a while ago. There were some aerospace executives there who made good money. In the backyard they were playing some rock from a cd player that was connected to this speaker that looked like an elongated football. The owner of the speaker came up to me and said " thats a xxxxxx speaker" the best you can buy. He said it cost him $1000. He then started to brag about his stereo system at home. He had invested about $30000 in that. He was going on about the frequency response and other features of his system. But he was in his late 60s. So i said to him… Hey… At your age you have lost about 50% or more in the high frequency range. You could put a million dollars in your stereo system and not hear those high freq sounds any better. He stopped talking to me and found another person to brag about his system.
The moral of the story, for me, at age 62, with decades of rock and roll, a few years as a jet aircraft pilot, and a decade as a rocket test engineer (all lots of high db )… Even the lower sampled mp3 tunes on my jambox sound as good as can be.
Look, the bottom line is that when listening in your car you get what you get. Quiet cars cost loads of money, not to mention the sound system, so lets skip that.
I’m talking about home listening. Yes, if you go down speaker-purchase-lane, and you start to go audiophile on yourself (which is a sin in the Catholic Church), you’ll run out of money before you run out of gear to buy. I’m simply pointing towards being a listening buff who wants to hear every key click, bellows pump, and teeth gnash of the performer. For us, a lossless file option would do well.
Unfortunately this is my case as well, I gave up on hi-fi sound a decade ago or more. Actually, my piping is the main impetus to get hearing aids now (despite the urging of my wife for a long time). I’m having a hard time hearing nuances from recordings and also in tuning my drones without a tuner.
True, but if it’s actually for a car, then it probably won’t make any difference anyway, over the engine and road noise
I mainly like to buy CDs, because I find them convenient, permanent, and fun to look at. I have bought a few albums on iTunes. Mainly stuff I either couldn’t find in CD, or stuff I just really wanted to hear right now. I’ve burned some of those to CD and I really can’t say that I can hear anything in them that makes me go “oh, that’s an mp3” Or whatever iTunes uses for compression.
I’ve been to parties where they played audio ripped from youtube and no one complained about the quality – it’s not hard to hear problems in the audio from youtube, but most people seem to not know the difference.
An interesting experiment would be to take a few people and put them a room with their backs to the stereo equipment. Play the same tune on vinyl, a cd, itunes , ripped from cd mp3 at low and high sample rate. Then see if the listeners can identify the source or at least which sound better.
Anyone who has ever heard a needle find a groove will immediately identify the vinyl, but as for the rest, you can actually do it yourself. You get ABX software and you give it two files – one an mp3, one a wav, or whatever. It plays a bit of A and B, and then a bit selected from either A or B. You have to identify which it came from, A or B. If you can’t consistently match the expert to the source it means you can’t hear a difference. That’s the first step – if you can’t hear a difference, then you can’t logically claim one sounds better. Many people, when subjected to ABX testing, find out that they really can’t hear a difference between the one they thought sounded so much better and the one they have been disparaging.
Sure, depends on the car. The interior of my old Cadillac land yacht was almost as quiet as a living room. My roadster convertible with the top down, not so much.
Quick rundown - there are two types of compression. One is taking loud and soft sounds in a recording and making them more equal. Usually, the whole lot is then turned up to the maximum level the recording medium can sustain.
If you do this correctly, you get a recording at a comfortable volume that can be clearly heard and you remove minor changes in volume that weren’t intentional, such as loud and quiet spots in a vocal track. If you overdo it, you end up with mush. A lot of commercial CDs are deliberately overcompressed.
The second type is file compression, same as zipping a file, but with a method that’s particularly suited to sound. Lossless compression retains the exact sound content, but can only compress so much. Lossy compression throws away a certain amount of content, meaning much more efficient compression. Ideally you only throw away sound you cannot hear but at a certain point the effect becomes audible, more so if you know what you’re listening for. For example, pick noise on a guitar tends to disappear on MP3 vs a CD original, or if drones are recorded closely the sound of the bass reed tongue hitting the body.
Vacuum tubes are used in amplifiers, not turntables and can in theory be used with any sound source. As for their value…
I am guessing in Uilleann recordings They must use compression to get rid of the bellow sounds, and the ‘click’ of the regulator keys hitting each-other. I wonder, is that why some people prefer vinyl? Because Vinyl is not compressed? (Or is it?)
No, such things are generally done with careful microphone placement. There are a few tracks on the Drones & Chanters 2 (I think) where you can hear key clicking and so on through a good system.
As I said previously vinyl can in theory be a better medium. For the most part, though, it is nostalgia because most of us grew up hearing formative music on vinyl.
Eliminating performance sounds is usually a question of microphone technique.
Vinyl has less dynamic range than CD, so some recordings would necessarily be compressed to fit on vinyl. Niel Young says (or said, anyway, in an interview many years ago) that analog is like looking out your window, and digital is like looking through a screen where each cell has been filled in with the average color.
Audio compression will equalize louds and softs in performance, but a mixing engineer can do that with the faders too. Where it is really useful is changing the envelope of a note. So if you have a kick drum there is a HUGE impulse that fades out real quickly. Compression tames that impulse. With a whistle, it equalizes the octaves and smooths out the attacks. Compression is what makes an electric guitar sound like it does – not through a device called a compressor, but the clipping in the tubes has that effect; clamping down on the individual components of the wave has the effect of increasing the harmonic content (you can hear more of the softer harmonics because the louder ones are reduced).
Some people like the ritual of vinyl. Some like the look and feel. I should get a new cartridge for my turntable. Usually the first time I play a record when I haven’t for a while it’s magic. I can’t explain why, but it just sounds good. Before there were transistors turntables had vacuum tubes. I’m not aware of any modern turntables that have them, but there could be – there are microphones with tubes in them, so why not turntables.
