On Mar 20, 2005, at 9:13 AM, Kurt Bernhard Pruenner wrote:
quoted 5 lines Well, that's all well and good (and what I'm doing basically), but> Well, that's all well and good (and what I'm doing basically), but
> there's a hell of a load of 12"es you'll never get on CD that are on
> sale as MP3s here (not to mention that vinyl is probably worse than 192
> kbps MP3s from digital masters)... and don't even get me started about
> Digital Restrictions Management...
Yeah, I think it's fantastic they're offering this service. Don't get
me wrong... I don't like vinyl either (the artwork/liner notes are
awesome on vinyl though). I own a few dozen pieces on vinyl but the
surest way for an artist to get me not to listen to something is to
offer it only on vinyl and/or put it out in some ridiculously hard to
open limited edition box/digipack. If I can't get to the CD easily,
then I won't bother listening to it. And vinyl is such a chore to keep
dust-free, keep from skipping, having to flip over that I generally
don't bother. Lastly, vinyl is utterly impossible to play in a car/on
the move.
Before all the vinyl purists attack me, it sounds fantastic if you have
the proper equipment. But then there's the issue of degradation.
Every time you play vinyl it worsens the sound (unless you buy one of
those wonderfully expensive optical vinyl readers).
I think most vinyl purists would argue that vinyl (on proper equipment)
is miles better sounding than 192 kpbs mp3s, not to mention it is
conceivably better sounding than the digital masters themselves,
provided it were recorded entirely on professional analog equipment to
begin with. I'm a digital purist in every regard, but most audiophiles
concede that digital even at the highest resolution 24-bit, 192khz,
stereo isn't really as good as professional quality analog. I'm
talking about Studer 2" reel-to-reel, Neve/SSL, etc.
With all that said, it's a great idea. If the lossless audio files
were made directly from the digital copies (i.e. original source AIFF
or WAV files) then it'd be essentially a perfect bit-for-bit copy of
the original file before the vinyl was pressed (and certainly much
better than a mp3 copy).
quoted 3 lines Also, I'm encoding everything at 192kbps and I'm fine with that as long> Also, I'm encoding everything at 192kbps and I'm fine with that as long
> as I have backups (i.e. originals); I'll probably reencode the 320kbps
> files down to 192kbps for my MP3 discman...
The only problem with going mp3 (or AAC/Ogg) over
FLAC/Shorten/APE/Apple Lossless is that what about the future? What if
you want to make CD burns of the audio? What if you want to listen
with high quality Sennheiser (or whatever) headphones? I don't like
the idea of encoding my 2000+ CD collection in a lossy format because
of the future.
What I mean is... if you lock yourself in to a format like mp3, and
later this new whizbang codec comes out that only takes up 1 megabyte
for an entire CD and is a perfect lossless copy of the original CD...
then what will you do? If you go your route you'll have to "transcode"
from a lossy format to this new format.
Generally transcoding brings artifacts and other unwarranted
distortion/loss of audio fidelity. If you chose a lossless format you
get all the benefits of the original CD recording (i.e. absolutely no
loss of sound due to compression) with the added benefit of smaller
size AND the ability to uncompress back to the original WAV/AIFF source
material in case you want to go to a new codec in the future.
Obviously the compression ratio isn't as good as with mp3/aac/ogg, but
it's roughly half the size of the source AIFF/WAV/CD, which I can live
with.
Granted you (personally) still have the originals to extract from in
the future, but it's infinitely easier to extract it in mass (say, with
a batch process) from the lossless copies than it is to RE-rip your
entire collection and re-encode.
All in all, I'm very hesitant to use a lossy codec like mp3/AAC or Ogg
Vorbis due to all the factors I mentioned. And for the sake of
uniformity and audio fidelity, I expect that the music I buy also be
lossless.
Great idea, but more could be done. But kudos and props for the
effort. It's not unappreciated. :)
--
Mr. Tangent [the binary police]
www.mrtangent.com
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