Hey, Whatever Happened to "High Resolution" Audio?

[Folder]

 

You can make a case that hi-res audio was promoted; you can also make a case it wasn't promoted properly. However, I think that even if it had been promoted more extensively and with a bigger push, people still would have rejected it. I think they just don't perceive that the difference justifies the cost.

 

 

They didn't reject CDs.

 

I think the industry feels that they screwed up with hi-rez the first time around and that it's too late to try something again. The public was confused and didn't understand the formats or what they were supposed to do. It seems to me that the main focus of DVD-Audio was to promote it as a surround sound product and not hi-rez per se .

 

Had they come out with a product that was simple and backwards compatible, or if the hardware side of things had gotten on board and started producing players that were affordable and backwards compatible with CDs there could have been an eventual shift. But it seems to me they gave up pretty quick.

 

Most people want something they can just put in a disc player and not have to fumble with menus and sample rates etc...

 

For a while they were producing SACDs that had a CD red book PCM layer. Bob Dylan's stuff was all reissued in hybrid SCADs.

 

His regular CDs were discontinued and you could only buy the SACDs. But if you didn't have an SACD player you could still play it on your CD player while you saved up to buy that $5000 Sony SACD player.

 

Now if the industry had gotten behind the format, the prices of the players would have eventually fallen. CDs would have been discontinued because there would be no need for them anymore if only hybrid discs were available. The general public wouldn't really care much because they could buy the disc and play it on anything while the audiophiles could play them on their hi-end SACD players. And in 2016 CDs would probably be extinct.

 

 

[blue2blue]

[...]

 

I like symphonic music best of all for serious listening (mostly from Beethoven's 3rd symphony to the present). And I also know I'd rather listen to an inspired recording from long ago that is inspired than a new one that may be technically pristine but uninspired. Of course pristine and inspired is best. And even better is inspired and live in the concert hall. Especially a European concert hall (the audiences are more polite and don't whisper, crinkle candy wrappers, read their programs, and text while the music is playing).

For pure sonic experience, as far as I'm concerned, nothing compares with a good seat in a good concert hall filled with impassioned musicians playing a work worthy of the effort, with no sound reinforcement or other electronics in the way. And, yeah, an attentive audience that knows to save its ovations for the end of the work is also greatly appreciated.

[Anderton]

 

They didn't reject CDs.

 

Agreed, but it was significantly different from vinyl - smaller, shiny, no surface noise, you could skip around cuts easily, etc. An SACD looked like a CD and for most people, probably sounded like a CD.

 

Now if the industry had gotten behind the format, the prices of the players would have eventually fallen. CDs would have been discontinued because there would be no need for them anymore if only hybrid discs were available. The general public wouldn't really care much because they could buy the disc and play it on anything while the audiophiles could play them on their hi-end SACD players. And in 2016 CDs would probably be extinct.

 

IMHO you nailed it.

 

[Notes_Norton]

I think not properly promoted (but I could be wrong).

 

It needs to be mass media, especially on TV, and not just the ads, product placement.

 

If the protagonist on enough TVs or movies are swooning over the Hi-Res sounds, and when it's reinforced by lots of advertisements, it could happen.

 

The question is, will the market be large enough for the monetary investment?

 

On the other hand, perhaps the public was just tired of buying everything on a new format.

[Notes_Norton]

Plus you could play CDs in the car without the tape deck eating them for lunch.

[Beck]

Different formats often sound "The Same" because of limitations in the end-listeners sound system (playback system). So one system may reveal nuance while another system may mask nuance. The differences in quality are there, but a weak link in the chain makes it effectively undetectable. Imagine trying to listen to music while you are in one room and the music is in another, so you're listening to whatever you can hear through a wall. That's an extreme example of how you can make many formats of varying quality sound the same, but it proves the concept. I can still hear the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit and different sampling rates on a good system. I can't hear the difference on a crappy system because the crappy system doesn't deliver.

 

And there's the age-old debate about the difference between audiophiles and average listeners. I think there's something to it. Of course there is. We're all created equal, but that doesn't mean we're all created the same. Some people have better hearing. Some people are just more attuned to their senses in general... more alive... more sensual perhaps. Some people are happy with missionary sex in the dark and never know anything else. Not me mister! "I just want to live while I'm alive" and I feel very alive.

 

I've known people all my life no matter what age they are who are mostly dead... not well connected to their senses. Between those mostly dead people and we really alive people there is a range of sensitivity to sound, light, touch, taste, etc. Some people are born blind. Some people are born deaf. People who are born with vision and hearing don't all hear and see things the same.

[Notes_Norton]

Good points. And I must add that some people favor some senses over others. One person could be attuned to visual arts, or be a foodie, and not care about high fidelity audio.

 

Last night I listened to true hi-rez audio. It's something my friend with thousands of dollars worth of gear in a well tuned listening room can't attain.

 

I went to a concert hall to hear 110 musicians, the Russian Symphony Orchestra, play a piece by Borodin, another by Prokofiev, another by Stravinsky and two encores. Brilliant performance, nice concert hall (if you know where to sit), and only an hour and a half drive from my house.

 

Plus the concert hall was filled with others enjoying the experience.

 

You can't get that sound any other way.

 

Insights and incites by Notes

[blue2blue]

Different formats often sound "The Same" because of limitations in the end-listeners sound system (playback system). So one system may reveal nuance while another system may mask nuance. The differences in quality are there, but a weak link in the chain makes it effectively undetectable. Imagine trying to listen to music while you are in one room and the music is in another, so you're listening to whatever you can hear through a wall. That's an extreme example of how you can make many formats of varying quality sound the same, but it proves the concept. I can still hear the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit and different sampling rates on a good system. I can't hear the difference on a crappy system because the crappy system doesn't deliver.

 

And there's the age-old debate about the difference between audiophiles and average listeners. I think there's something to it. Of course there is. We're all created equal, but that doesn't mean we're all created the same. Some people have better hearing. Some people are just more attuned to their senses in general... more alive... more sensual perhaps. Some people are happy with missionary sex in the dark and never know anything else. Not me mister! "I just want to live while I'm alive" and I feel very alive.

 

I've known people all my life no matter what age they are who are mostly dead... not well connected to their senses. Between those mostly dead people and we really alive people there is a range of sensitivity to sound, light, touch, taste, etc. Some people are born blind. Some people are born deaf. People who are born with vision and hearing don't all hear and see things the same.

Higher fidelity playback reveals more, period.

 

With properly mastered material from the same mix and session, over a very, very good playback system, vinyl and CD can sound very close except for a slightly higher vinyl noise floor (even with virgin vinyl, there is always the sound of needle in groove) and higher distortion.

 

One of my pals has a very, very nice system, a $10K turntable and arm, 300 very high quality watts of tube amplification from Audio Research (downgraded from a BTU-spewing Audio Research 400W dual monoblock rig), Benchmark converters, and a pair of Vandersteen Model 5a Carbon -- and vinyl sounds very good on his rig. Almost as good to my ear as CD. (It should be noted that my pal is a big vinyl aficionado who typically buys top-end vinyl but also has an enormous CD library. We've done head to head comparisons on a few things -- but you simply never know what has happened in the mastering processes for the different releases. As anyone who has poked through the stream-o-sphere knows, some real mangling can go on in mastering/remastering -- much of it undocumented.)

[blue2blue]

Good points. And I must add that some people favor some senses over others. One person could be attuned to visual arts, or be a foodie, and not care about high fidelity audio.

 

Last night I listened to true hi-rez audio. It's something my friend with thousands of dollars worth of gear in a well tuned listening room can't attain.

 

I went to a concert hall to hear 110 musicians, the Russian Symphony Orchestra, play a piece by Borodin, another by Prokofiev, another by Stravinsky and two encores. Brilliant performance, nice concert hall (if you know where to sit), and only an hour and a half drive from my house.

 

Plus the concert hall was filled with others enjoying the experience.

 

You can't get that sound any other way.

 

Insights and incites by Notes

Right. Nothing sounds like the real thing. Uncaptured, unamplified.

 

The 'problem' isn't so much the media, I wouldn't say -- the best of direct-to-groove tracking can get a very good recording with minimal speed/phase distortion and dynamic range adequate for most normal listening, though not nearly as accurate as digital -- the real 'problem' is capture. The closest we can come is binaural, dummy head capture -- but only if that capture is then reproduced by headphone. The illusion can, for a short time, be pretty stunning. But most people, when they are listening to live music in a real environment, are continually moving their head, even if only by a few degrees of inclination or an inch or two of position. But those 'tiny' differences can make a big difference in our psychoacoustic understanding of the music and environment.

 

So we try various mic placements, Decca Trees, enhanced trees, soundtrack-style spot miking, etc And as we all know, the more mics, the more phase and imaging confusion. And then we're on the slippery slope that leads from accurate environmental capture to gimmicky soundtrack style...

 

 

[blue2blue]

Speaking of high resolution digital capture vis a vis analog transcription (particularly tape), I was fascinated to finally catch up with the Plangent Processes master recovery system, which helps remove time domain distortion from groove and tape recordings, from wow and flutter to the phase-scale distortion induced by tape head scrape.

 

At first blush, it sounds like voodoo or, at best, an awkward technological fix for compromised tech of the past. But then maybe you read about the high end engineers, musicians, and producers who have lauded it and you dig into the technology and maybe listen to some of the examples on their site and you start really thinking about it.

 

While their site has some pretty amazing worst case examples they've greatly cleaned up -- I found one of the 'best case' scenarios even more illuminating. On their examples page you can hear a couple sections of Earth Wind and Fire's "Shining Star" -- and the original sounds like one remembers -- pretty clean. But then you hear the version with the time distortion corrected (or corrected as much as possible) -- and, by comparing the two, you can hear the intermodulation distortion induced by the time domain problems with the tape masters, it's subtle, to be sure, but when you listen to the post-Plangent version, you can hear that the fixed version has less less 'micro-rattle' (IM-style) distortion and distinctly smoother, more clear detail in things like reverb envelopes and other subtle aspects with HF content.

[MikeRivers]

Speaking of high resolution digital capture vis a vis analog transcription (particularly tape), I was fascinated to finally catch up with the Plangent Processes master recovery system, which helps remove time domain distortion from groove and tape recordings, from wow and flutter to the phase-scale distortion induced by tape head scrape.

 

At first blush, it sounds like voodoo or, at best, an awkward technological fix for compromised tech of the past. But then maybe you read about the high end engineers, musicians, and producers who have lauded it and you dig into the technology and maybe listen to some of the examples on their site and you start really thinking about it.

 

Plangent is a restoration process and it's truly a great thing. But today, finally, we have good A/D and D/A converters which don't have the problems that Plangent corrects. There's no reason why any recording made today can't sound as good as a 40 or 50 year old Plangent-restored recording. Does it? Often, not. I firmly beieve that a lot of "the vinyl sound" or "the tape sound" is more about what's in front of the microphones than the distortion introduced by the recording process.

[WRGKMC]

Digital radio blows for sound quality, especially the satellite stuff. The satellite sample rate quality is lower the MP3s and the artifacts in the high frequency range are horrible. I'm not impressed with the way the FM stations are sounding since moving to digital either. Sounds like homogenized dog poop in comparison to how FM used to sound.

[WRGKMC]

The link that existed between hardware manufacturers of audio gear and formats studios chose to release music on has been permanently severed,

 

It began with burnable CD's and computers and software being able to make exact duplicates. People moved to string music on computers and high quality Hi Fi systems dropped off the list of must have items for an entire generation of new kids growing up.

 

The replacement was ear buds. It started with the Walkman, then portable CD players, MP3 players, and now cell phones. All the young people are glued to their cell phones for everything musical now. Portability takes priority over quality and I don't see that changing.

 

The quality is available, but memory on a phone comes at a high premium.

 

I surely don't see any possibility of another medium change on the horizon at this point. The internet is the delivery system that's been chosen and its not owned by the studios and they do not have the power to force the changes like they have in the past. Video is still a monopoly. Cable and satellite companies give you a free HD recorder and it records whatever they stream. You're given a choice of HD and normal and HD takes up more drive space.

 

If streaming companies were wise they might have been able to put a lock box on their music libraries by following the Movie industries lead.

I do have DVD burners, still have my VCR and even a SS Mpeg movie burner. Its too much of a hassle to use them. I can simply push a button on a menu and save what I want to watch. Music would need that same convenience and the big companies that own musical libraries would need to monopolize by doing the same thing.

 

Since phones are the most popular they would need to offer free phones optimized for audio and get subscribers. I doubt it would work at this point but it would be the only method I can see working at this point.

[Anderton]

Since phones are the most popular they would need to offer free phones optimized for audio and get subscribers. I doubt it would work at this point but it would be the only method I can see working at this point.

 

Actually there's a cell phone provider in India, MTS. They realized they could never compete for voice with the Indian equivalent of AT&T and Verizon, so they decided to concentrate on data and I believe they're #2 or at least in the top 5. They did this by essentially turning their service into an entertainment platform. Pretty clever...