Hey, Whatever Happened to "High Resolution" Audio?

[Anderton]

Ever seen anyone with a Pono? What happened to Sony trying to resurrect DSD last fall? How about all those web sites that were going to offer "hi-res" versions of material?

 

And what about Tidal, where a lot of its premise was higher-res audio?

 

Seems like nobody cares. I'm not surprised...the only thing that's surprised me on the "high-res front" is that recording at higher sample rates can sound better than recording at lower sample rates if you do all your recording inside the box, and have plug-ins that don't oversample.

 

So where does it go from here? FLAC? Nostalgia for CDs? I dunno...perhaps some of the problem with the "record industry" has something to do with not having an accepted, common delivery medium.

[techristian]

First of all, the general public can't hear the difference. I have recorded with 24 bit and I can hear the difference ,at home, but when I'm driving in my Corvette down the highway, with my motor humming, listening to my mp3s , it doesn't make a difference anymore. For me and many others, it is what you hear while you are driving that counts, and then, MORE COMPRESSION is better. I very seldom just LISTEN to music. Most of my exposure to new music, and just music, is youtube videos, THE VOICE , etc.

 

The second thing is who is willing to PAY for this? New players, higher bandwidth, and overall higher cost to the consumers is probably what is driving them away.

 

That's just my 2 cents.

 

Dan

[Notes_Norton]

I don't know if the general public can hear the difference or not.

 

My take is the general public doesn't care (to a point).

 

After all let me list some of the things we listened to our music with

 

• 45 RPM records (low fidelity)
  
• 8 tracks that even split songs in two to change tracks and successfully nixed all high friequencies
  
• Cassette tapes - didn't change tracks, but what high frequencies?
  
• mp3 files
  
• lousy earbuds
  
• bookshelf radios with a 3" speaker
  
• non-boom - boom boxes (again with tiny speakers)
  
• CDs (especially early dump-ware ones)
  

 

and so on.

 

I think for the most part, people just want to hear the song.

 

By that I mean mostly the hook. Take "Blurred Lines" - the words, especially the rap lyrics are quite misogynistic. But at least in my middle-aged to adult market, who requests it and jams the floor? Females that would slap me if I talked like that to them.

 

Go figure.

 

Insights and incites by Notes

[blue2blue]

Right. The only way you can hear the diff between 16 bit and 24 bit with properly mastered material is by turning up the volume on reverb tails and fade outs. And that's because the healthy human ear has an effectively 'sliding' dynamic range of around 90 dB or so. Our overall dynamic range is much higher -- but when we are being bombarded with very loud sounds, we lose the ability to hear the very quiet, so at any one time, it's limited.

 

Also, as we are painfully aware, most folks listen to ridiculously undynamic music, anyway. Me, I listen to a fair bit of classical/orchestral -- and have seen over 170 unamplified symphonic concerts. And that music does have dynamic range -- sometimes more than the CD format can accommodate. Should we have a higher dynamic range?

 

On one hand, I might be tempted, old hi fi buff that I am, to say: sure -- the only thing lost is storage space, bandwidth and processing overhead.

 

But... here's the thing. Even as it is with CD's ~90 dB range I still sometimes find myself having to turn the volume up and down listening to some heavily dynamic pieces at home. In the concert hall, we may be accustomed to straining forward to hear a delicate cello solo part and then bracing ourselves for the full orchestra and concert bass drum. (That freak is LOUD, baby! -- A while back I heard a cello concerto that had a duet passage between cello and concert bass drum... holy fudge... talk about dynamic range... completely painful every time that bass drum sounded. I literally had my fingers over my ears the whole time.)

 

But listening at home, I'm really not crazy about having to adjust the volume through a piece just for my comfort. Is that a betrayal of the music? I dunno. Maybe. But when I'm listening to music, I want to allow myself to be transported. I don't want to have to continually take myself out of the moment to raise or lower the volume just to protect my ears/neighbors while not missing the very quiet bits.

 

 

So... yes... on one hand having greater dynamic range would allow a more or less linear transcription, dynamically speaking -- but is that something that is even desirable for normal music playback?

 

 

And with regard to higher sample rates, we come back around to the oddly contentious questions of how high normal humans can hear -- and then the oddball 'theories' that many audiophiles and non-tech types have proffered for how having higher frequency content than humans can hear improves the quality of the sound within the human hearing range. The latter notion, of course, has no current scientific support, but, worse, the inclusion of higher-than-human-hearing content means that some of that out-of-'normal'-band content may well produce intermodulation distortion in lesser quality playback systems that does create intermodulation distortion products in the audible range.

 

 

With regard to popular adoption... well... numbers can be hard to come by at the fringes of the business. But I think it's instructive that in a somewhat different product option choice where the differences are much greater by many measures -- the choice between up-to-320-kbps streams and fully lossless CD-quality offered by Tidal's $10/mo and $20/mo premium tiers... only three percent of pre-Jay-Z-purchase Tidal subscribers were paying for the high quality tier -- at a time when that high quality tier was the only notable selling point for Tidal.

 

As Stereogum wrote about that platform and the high quality tier:

 

And then there’s the whole “lossless” thing, which, I mean … look, until those Silicon Valley guys get Pied Piper out of beta, the prospect of wirelessly streaming lossless media is a pipe dream. Lossless files are massive; streaming them is immensely costly on the delivery end, and requires a strong wifi or ethernet connection on the user end. Even to the extent it’s possible to stream lossless audio via one’s mobile network — even if one weren’t driven insane by the buffering times — doing so would absolutely devastate one’s data plan. And needlessly so, as there’s still no scientific evidence that the human ear can detect a difference between a 320 kbps MP3 and a lossless file. There are — right now, at this very moment — many Tidal users paying the premium rate for lossless audio while unknowingly listening to highly compressed “radio-quality” MP3 streams. That is, unless those users have manually reset their phone’s preferences to play “HiFi” audio rather than the service’s factory-default “Normal” files (96 kbps MP3s).

http://www.stereogum.com/1848677/str...ounding-board/

[blue2blue]

From that Stereogum passage, here's an article on the study behind that 'scientific evidence' link...

 

Well-Crafted Study Shows Listeners Cannot Distinguish Between CD-Quality and High-Resolution Music Files

 

In a naturalistic survey of 140 respondents using high quality musical samples sourced from high-resolution 24/96 digital audio collected over 2 months, there was no evidence that 24-bit audio could be appreciably differentiated from the same music dithered down to 16-bits using a basic algorithm (Adobe Audition 3, flat triangular dither, 0.5 bits).

 

http://www.mcelhearn.com/well-crafte...n-music-files/

 

 

From the same site: Music, Not Sound: Why High-Resolution Music Is a Marketing Ploy

[Phil O'Keefe]

I can definitely hear a difference between a 16 bit and 24 bit uncompressed recording.. but whether or not it's worth the bandwidth to stream it ATM is another matter.

 

I had Tidal for a while, but it definitely has some issues, and I decided to stick with Spotify, which is fine for my needs. At some point the bandwidth won't be an issue... we'll all be running around with mobile connections with 300 Mbps up and download speeds and unlimited data - but that's in the future. When it happens, I'll be all for 24 bit streaming services. Until then, it doesn't make much sense to me.

[Anderton]

Blue, those are great references. I need to bookmark them

 

I think a major issue is that the "record industry" thinks that the solution to everything is a new format that requires people to re-buy the music they want to hear. In some cases, that works - e.g., when the cassette let music be portable, as opposed to being anchored to a turntable.

 

But that's going to work any more. People are satisfied with what they have. Apparently the only thing that makes music more attractive to people these days is how easily it can be carried around, and whether it can be listened to under any circumstances where you'd want to hear music.

[Phil O'Keefe]

 

But that's not going to work any more. People are satisfied with what they have. Apparently the only thing that makes music more attractive to people these days is how easily it can be carried around, and whether it can be listened to under any circumstances where you'd want to hear music.

 

 

 

The labels had their biggest payday when the CD allowed them to do exactly that - repackage and re-sell the most popular material in their catalog.

 

If they're waiting for that to happen again and for it to save the industry, they have a long wait coming. In the era of streaming, people may indeed be "paying again", but it's a completely different paradigm. In the future, unless the labels come up with new material that people actually want to hear in significant numbers, they're going to be hating life over time as the copyrights for the old stuff starts expiring. Plus, the new stuff isn't just competing with the other new releases from the same era - it's competing with the best of the best from the history of recorded music. The bar is set a lot higher today than it ever has been.

 

 

[MikeRivers]

 

I think a major issue is that the "record industry" thinks that the solution to everything is a new format that requires people to re-buy the music they want to hear. In some cases, that works - e.g., when the cassette let music be portable, as opposed to being anchored to a turntable.

 

Yeah, you never know when they're going to have to start paying artists for the music, and that money's got to come from somewhere. And where did the idea that music had to be portable, anyway? When you're working out in the gym, or running 10 miles or driving to the store or flying across the country in an airplane, it's really hard to concentrate on the fidelity. Or at least it should be.

 

And if the point hasn't been made clearly yet, let me say that "High resolution digital audio" enables greater bandwidth and lower distortion. Modern music production and reproduction pretty much negates those benefits. I don't get why people aren't getting some HiRez hardware and saying WTF???? It seems that it's only the artistes who are pushing high resolution versions of their music so the consumer can hear just what they heard in the control room. It's nice to have something that sounds better than a phonograph record when I'm listening in my living room and not doing anything else. Othewise, who cares? 24-bit 96 kHz audio in my headphones isn't going to give me any more knee room on that cross country flight.

 

[blue2blue]

I can definitely hear a difference between a 16 bit and 24 bit uncompressed recording.. but whether or not it's worth the bandwidth to stream it ATM is another matter.

 

[...]

Of course... and that's why, when I talk about the issue, myself, I always try to use the qualifications, properly mastered material at normal listening levels.

 

As we all know, it's trivially easy to tell the diff if we simply zero in on a fade out or reverb tail and crank the level. But, as Meyer-Moran and others demonstrated, in double blind testing of professionally mastered and released material at normal listening levels, pretty much no one can reliably differentiate CD quality from 'higher resolution' formats.

[MikeRivers]

Well-Crafted Study Shows Listeners Cannot Distinguish Between CD-Quality and High-Resolution Music Files

 

 

 

 

Several years back, the Fraunhofer folks presented a paper at the AES conference with listening data indicating that most people couldn't tell the difference between a CD and a 256 kbps MP3 file taken from the same CD. And from those who could tell the difference, when asked which they preferred (not which was which), a statistically valid significant number preferred the MP3. Their conjecture was that it was what the listener was most accustomed to hearing.

[blue2blue]

Blue, those are great references. I need to bookmark them

 

I think a major issue is that the "record industry" thinks that the solution to everything is a new format that requires people to re-buy the music they want to hear. In some cases, that works - e.g., when the cassette let music be portable, as opposed to being anchored to a turntable.

 

But that's going to work any more. People are satisfied with what they have. Apparently the only thing that makes music more attractive to people these days is how easily it can be carried around, and whether it can be listened to under any circumstances where you'd want to hear music.

Yeah, I particularly like Kirk McElhearn's Kirkville blog at mcelhearn.com. I just stumbled across that this a.m. from the link in Stereogum. I like his calm, comprehensive approach.

[blue2blue]

 

 

 

Several years back, the Fraunhofer folks presented a paper at the AES conference with listening data indicating that most people couldn't tell the difference between a CD and a 256 kbps MP3 file taken from the same CD. And from those who could tell the difference, when asked which they preferred (not which was which), a statistically valid significant number preferred the MP3. Their conjecture was that it was what the listener was most accustomed to hearing.

Was that a plain old mp3 or their advanced mp4 codec (that's used for Apple's AAC)?

 

 

I was surprised to be able to reasonably reliably (~.9 probability, as I recall) tell the diff between a 256 kbps Mp3 and a 320 kbps (both LAME rips) but not the 320 from full lossless in ABX testing. (This was using a very familiar track I'd often used for codec/format testing before.)

 

Stereogum references the rather bogus 'listening tests' that were on Tidal's site (one of the file pairs was, as I recall, around a half dB different in level, though the rest were within the recommended .2 dB or less) and the automated test 'congratulated' the test taker on having excellent ears after only a single correct answer -- which, of course, is laughably insufficient to develop any confidence in results.

[MikeRivers]

Was that a plain old mp3 or their advanced mp4 codec (that's used for Apple's AAC)?

 

Probably a plain ol' MP3, what most people (at least at the time) were listening to. They didn't have to look too hard to find people who could tell a 64 kpbs file from a CD, but it got kind of iffy when the bit rate hit 128 kpbs. What I don't know is what material they were using, or how much variety. there was in their listening tests. Clearly some forms of music get buggered worse than others.

 

 

[tbry]

 

Yeah, you never know when they're going to have to start paying artists for the music, and that money's got to come from somewhere. And where did the idea that music had to be portable, anyway? When you're working out in the gym, or running 10 miles or driving to the store or flying across the country in an airplane, it's really hard to concentrate on the fidelity. Or at least it should be.

 

And if the point hasn't been made clearly yet, let me say that "High resolution digital audio" enables greater bandwidth and lower distortion. Modern music production and reproduction pretty much negates those benefits. I don't get why people aren't getting some HiRez hardware and saying WTF???? It seems that it's only the artistes who are pushing high resolution versions of their music so the consumer can hear just what they heard in the control room. It's nice to have something that sounds better than a phonograph record when I'm listening in my living room and not doing anything else. Othewise, who cares? 24-bit 96 kHz audio in my headphones isn't going to give me any more knee room on that cross country flight.

 

Just reading along with you guys and though most of the tech stuff is beyond me I can mostly relate to these comments above...I like nice sounding music but paying a premium for it isn't high on my list...Flying across country it helps to have some nice music but a nice pair of headphones works for me...also getting and setting up an expensive stereo system at home and all that goes with it just isn't worth it...A nice Bose bluetooth unit isn't the highest quality but dang it sure is good for the size...Youtube vids with some desk top speakers and a sub woofer sounds pretty darn good...I am one of those consumers that can't really hear the difference. I am listening to more music than I ever have in my life with portable units and the internet...You guys that are recording engineers can tell the difference but most people can't tell....as long as it is pretty good or better than something lo-fi we are all in.

[philboking]

Check out this

http://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/mqa-best-high-resolution-file-format-htc/?&utm_term=DT+Newsletter+-+Daily+Subscribers

[Anderton]

It seems that it's only the artistes who are pushing high resolution versions of their music so the consumer can hear just what they heard in the control room.

 

Actually I think it's the music industry pushing hi-res and saying it so you can hear what artists hear in the control room...if the artists are saying that, I think it's because they have a financial stake in the success of high-res audio.

 

Yes, WAVs sound better than MP3s. And a classic Chateauneuf-du-Pape tastes better than the Barefoot Cabernet I'll have with dinner. But I just want a glass of wine with dinner, y'know? A world=class chef would be horrified...but it works for me.

 

It's clear that the music industry is adrift. However, we will be running a guest editorial in the next Harmony Central Newsletter that explains everything. Really. It's brilliant, which is why we reached out to see if we could reprint it.

 

[blue2blue]

 

Probably a plain ol' MP3, what most people (at least at the time) were listening to. They didn't have to look too hard to find people who could tell a 64 kpbs file from a CD, but it got kind of iffy when the bit rate hit 128 kpbs. What I don't know is what material they were using, or how much variety. there was in their listening tests. Clearly some forms of music get buggered worse than others.

 

Yeah, I am so often near-dumbstruck by folks' choice of material for format testing. (One of the issues with the Tidal test, for that matter -- but in that case it was working against them, since the pop/R&B they were using offered little opportunity for the lossless to especially shine.) But it's not just pop media outfits -- I'd say the overwhelming majority of A/B differentiation examples I see from recording types are mid-fi rock and pop mixes to begin with. WTH?

[blue2blue]

Check out this

http://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/mqa-best-high-resolution-file-format-htc/?&utm_term=DT+Newsletter+-+Daily+Subscribers

Sounds like they let the marketing department poets loose on that one...

 

A peek inside the sausage factory is a bit different...

 

The basic premise is, akin to XRCD/HDCD/aptX in some ways, to hierarchically compress the relatively little energy in the higher frequency bands into compressed data streams, which are then embedded into the lower frequency bands using proprietary dithering techniques.

After a series of such manipulations, the downsampled 44 kHz/16bit data (dithered partially with the last-step data stream), the layered data streams, and a final "touchup" stream (compressed difference between the lossy signal from unpacking all layers and the original) are provided to the playback device. Given the low amount of energy expected in higher frequencies, and using only 1 extra frequency band layer (upper 44 kHz band of 96/24 packed into dither of 48/16) and one touchup stream (compressed difference between original 96/24 and 48/16) are together distributed as a 48/24 stream, of which 48/16 bit-decimated part can be played by normal 48/16 playback equipment.

One more difference to standard formats is the sampling process. The audio stream is sampled convolved with a triangle function, and interpolated later during playback. Theory of such sampling is explained in these slides: http://icms.org.uk/downloads/BtG/Dragotti.pdf

Compared to FLAC/ALAC and other lossless formats, there is no factual bandwidth saving, and the 48/16 signal has easily identifiable high-frequency noise in the 3 LSB bits. Based on information available, the fully decoded MQA signal is 352 kHz at 24 bits. Whether it's lossless or "only keeps timing information to remove ringing and echo" remains to be seen.

 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_Quality_Authenticated

[AlamoJoe]

I think tbry hit the nail on the head here.

The majority of music consumers are not musicians. Musicians have an entirely different metric when it comes to listening than the majority of music consumers.

 

My kid brother gave me an epiphany decades ago when we were on a road trip to West Texas to go see my sister. He's not a player at all, but grew up listening to the records I listened to, so we share some tastes. he's also nearly 10 years younger than me.

 

He brought some of his cassettes along and we took turns listening to the stuff the other had brought. He looked bored after listening to Side One of "Birds of Fire" and I asked if he dug it and he said "Man I know you like that stuff, it's cool". I said "No, go ahead and pop in another of yours, Mahavishnu aint for everybody".

 

He put in "Bad Company" and was clearly enjoying it. Side One finished and he asked for Side 2 and I said "Sure". He asked if I dug 'em..And I said, "Not really, I think their playing is pretty common stuff". The he gave me the wisdom...

 

He said, "Man you gotta realize that rest of us just listen to the overall Jam Man!"

 

Hit me like a ton of bricks...He said "Wanna play sumthin else?"...I said no..."Let's just listen to the jam ".

 

I thought about what he said for the next 200 miles....I'm still thinking about it.

 

I remember digging on Beatles tunes blasting from a transistor radio with a 2" speaker.

 

The quality of the music will cut through regardless of the quality of the playback.

 

True Audiophiles aren't going to save the Music industry...Only music that moves people to believe in it can do that.

 

You hit the nail on the head tbry my man...

 

 

 

 

 

[Phil O'Keefe]

 

Actually I think it's the music industry pushing hi-res and saying it so you can hear what artists hear in the control room...if the artists are saying that, I think it's because they have a financial stake in the success of high-res audio.

 

 

 

Money aside, that's something I've always lamented - the fact we get to hear it better than anyone else ever will. As soon as it leaves the control room, no one else will ever hear it the same way again. It's not just the audio resolution - the studio monitors and control room acoustics also shape what the artists, producer and engineer are hearing as they're working on the recording and mix. Bumping up the resolution of what the consumers are listening to and making it the same as the original recording masters will help, but it won't completely solve the problem. I think we're going to have to wait for computerized adaptive acoustics for home listening until we can do that.

 

But as others have said, will the majority of consumers even care? Probably not. But I sure as hell do.

[nat whilk II]

My armchair cultural analysis FWIW is that more is going on here than "people don't care" about high fidelity.

 

The sensitive, discriminating, informed, serious art lover (whichever art) is one of society's clowns that we laugh at when they get knocked down. The public contempt for aesthetes of any type always boils down to the same old anecdotes and jokes, repacked for the minor variances of the moment. There is no distinction drawn between "I can't tell the difference" and "there is no difference". It's basically uncool to be too much into fine distinctions (they sound made up anyway, right?)

 

What the public really can't tell is the difference between the snob and the serious.

 

Basically a failure of education, but that's another yuuuuuger topic.

 

nat whilk ii

[t_e_l_e]

first of all a hi quality audio listening system helps a lot. but the majority of music consumers do not have that anymore.

may it be lousy computer speakers, or may it be some lousy earbuds or the annoying sound system which produces terrible noise 24/7 in the mall they visit.

 

for them it makes no difference if the playing/streaming material is hi-res or not.

 

for me personally i started listening to cds again with my kids a couple of years ago again while i was listening just to the computer for over 10 years. i now have a nice mid size hifi sound system in my living room and i make selecting and listening to music an experience for me and my kids. standing in front of the shelf, thinking what we can hear next, selecting something we haven't heard for a long time, having a small debate with the kids what they want to hear, putting the cd in the player, taking care for the one just removed putting it in the right case at the right place in the shelf again aso...

 

altough i have unlimited data traffic and high bandwidth, mobile and at home, i do not like streaming service, cause the selection process is all done by software, you get suggestions by your habits and it seems to me you always listen to the same stuff over and over, instead of finding a gem you haven't heard in a long time, or something completely new surprising.

 

when i was just listening on my computer my mp3 collection was very huge, but i found my self only putting the same 15 to 20 albums in the playlist and i haven't heard the half of my collection only once...

 

as far for pono, i support the idea, but i already have a great mp3 player for to go, why should i throw it away?

i have all my hundreds of cds ripped to mp3 in highest quality myself, why should i rebuy another highres version of it, when my version is already good enough?

 

but as musician/producer/artist what ever we should focus to make the most advanced high res material possible and should always try to raise the quality instead of being happy with just good enough.

 

[blue2blue]

I think tbry hit the nail on the head here.

The majority of music consumers are not musicians. Musicians have an entirely different metric when it comes to listening than the majority of music consumers.

 

My kid brother gave me an epiphany decades ago when we were on a road trip to West Texas to go see my sister. He's not a player at all, but grew up listening to the records I listened to, so we share some tastes. he's also nearly 10 years younger than me.

 

He brought some of his cassettes along and we took turns listening to the stuff the other had brought. He looked bored after listening to Side One of "Birds of Fire" and I asked if he dug it and he said "Man I know you like that stuff, it's cool". I said "No, go ahead and pop in another of yours, Mahavishnu aint for everybody".

 

He put in "Bad Company" and was clearly enjoying it. Side One finished and he asked for Side 2 and I said "Sure". He asked if I dug 'em..And I said, "Not really, I think their playing is pretty common stuff". The he gave me the wisdom...

 

He said, "Man you gotta realize that rest of us just listen to the overall Jam Man!"

 

Hit me like a ton of bricks...He said "Wanna play sumthin else?"...I said no..."Let's just listen to the jam ".

 

I thought about what he said for the next 200 miles....I'm still thinking about it.

 

I remember digging on Beatles tunes blasting from a transistor radio with a 2" speaker.

 

The quality of the music will cut through regardless of the quality of the playback.

 

True Audiophiles aren't going to save the Music industry...Only music that moves people to believe in it can do that.

 

You hit the nail on the head tbry my man...

 

 

 

 

Well, I didn't grow up playing. I grew up listening -- and I just listen to the jam, too.

 

And, for sure, the first few times I listened to a couple of Bad Company songs, I thought there might be something interesting. But then I heard the rest and ultimately found it pretty boring. (That said, if a given song talks to a listener, finds some inner resonance, that is, in a sense, a transcendence that brings added, synergistic value. No accounting for folks' relationship with music. There are some downright dumb-ass songs that I just love. Whaddya gonna do? )

 

Birds of Fire is maybe an extreme case -- it's packed with interlocking intricacies and unlike traditional jazz is not based on traditional pop writing or structures. But, while Bad Company's music (for me) became thinner and thinner with every listen, music like Birds of Fire, to my way of thinking, just keeps unfolding -- it will give back what you put in.

[blue2blue]

first of all a hi quality audio listening system helps a lot. but the majority of music consumers do not have that anymore.

may it be lousy computer speakers, or may it be some lousy earbuds or the annoying sound system which produces terrible noise 24/7 in the mall they visit.

 

for them it makes no difference if the playing/streaming material is hi-res or not.

 

for me personally i started listening to cds again with my kids a couple of years ago again while i was listening just to the computer for over 10 years. i now have a nice mid size hifi sound system in my living room and i make selecting and listening to music an experience for me and my kids. standing in front of the shelf, thinking what we can hear next, selecting something we haven't heard for a long time, having a small debate with the kids what they want to hear, putting the cd in the player, taking care for the one just removed putting it in the right case at the right place in the shelf again aso...

 

altough i have unlimited data traffic and high bandwidth, mobile and at home, i do not like streaming service, cause the selection process is all done by software, you get suggestions by your habits and it seems to me you always listen to the same stuff over and over, instead of finding a gem you haven't heard in a long time, or something completely new surprising.

 

when i was just listening on my computer my mp3 collection was very huge, but i found my self only putting the same 15 to 20 albums in the playlist and i haven't heard the half of my collection only once...

 

as far for pono, i support the idea, but i already have a great mp3 player for to go, why should i throw it away?

i have all my hundreds of cds ripped to mp3 in highest quality myself, why should i rebuy another highres version of it, when my version is already good enough?

 

but as musician/producer/artist what ever we should focus to make the most advanced high res material possible and should always try to raise the quality instead of being happy with just good enough.

We're all different and have different backgrounds and approaches, of course.

 

I've had my computer hooked up to my best sound system since I got my first soundcard in the 1980s -- so primitive/limited it could do 16 bit mono or 8 bit stereo! That was of somewhat limited value, but the next one became an adjunct to my recording rig, providing MIDI integration and sample playback from an integrated 4 MB sampler synth. When I added an i/o card to allow my twin ADAT rig to also work as the engine for an 8 channel DAW in '96, the computer started taking a central place. When I found myself swept up in the DIY-music-mania of the late 90s and the true indie musician scene that developed around the old Mp3.com, I found myself increasingly getting my music online.

 

Still, it took me some old-attitude-overcoming to get to a point where I was paying for a streaming music subscription in 2004-5. Through the 90s I had been buying CDs, but as my economic situation became strained, I found myself buying used CDs -- which kind of bothered me, since none of the proceeds from resale (in the US) go to the artist, just the record store. Great for the store, they take in a CD for a couple bucks and then flip it for $8 or $9. But not the artist. OTOH, with a streaming subscription, the rights holders get paid for every play. (It must be said that many labels have thoroughly abused their artists in this regard, but true indie musicians who own their own rights can do very well, assuming their music actually gets played.)

 

 

Now, I own around 1200 LPs, 500 CD's and a couple hundred 78s and singles.

 

But, happily, most of that is available in the subscription stream-o-sphere. And, at 320 kbps, it sounds very good. Much better, in many cases, than the vinyl in my collection. [And what isn't available commercially, my stream service, Google Music, allows me to upload from my own collection, so that I can integrate my own collection seamlessly with the stream-o-sphere.]

 

(And in at least a few cases, finally hearing the digital masters has revealed that it was not my playback that was imparting certain intermodulation distortions -- but rather that the distortion was baked into the mix masters before vinyl or CD. An odd sort of vindication -- but I sure as hell had wished I'd known out front that there was no way I was going to ever get rid of that distortion, no matter how much I duked around with the stylus weight, angle, anti-skate, etc.)

 

I'll certainly say that the 'tea ceremony' aspects of carefully taking out disks, cleaning them, carefully lining up the needle drop, etc, running in to lift the needle at the end of the disk, etc, were deeping ingrained in me. But, to be honest, I often preferred to put on a reel of tape I'd put a 'party mix' of music on and let it play. The quality was lower than directly playing the same records, of course, but it was great to be able to mix it up, and great to not have to leave the musical reverie every 15-18 minutes to deal with the mechanics. Much, much better for the romantic interludes of young adulthood, I have to tell you.

 

So, for me, subscription streaming is the future (perhaps a still nonetheless highly imperfect present) I was waiting for.

 

I'm continually delighted by the amazing breadth and depth of music available. I'm continually prodding and poking and trying to expand my musical horizons, both going forward (contemporary, as it were), backward to all the great music I love as well as the great music I missed but now have access to, as well as 'laterally' to music from around the world. [For the last few months I've been using Last.fm to track my stream listening. The log of my tracked plays is here, if anyone's curious.]

 

And I don't need no stinkin' curators telling me what to listen to, either.