Mar 10, 2010
Whatever happened to the audiophile?
UPDATE: 8 SEP 2011 – The Register follows up on the loudness wars – “It is a standard sound engineer complaint, as well as of serious listeners. And, those that have simply listened and (easily) heard the difference. It was propelled by increased CD listening in cars (to further standout over more background noise). Louder and faster records on radio and jukeboxes are earlier variants. Louder ads on radio and TV is another.”
This video, which I think I saw at the time I wrote my original article highlights the difference between the sound engineering of today and yesteryear:
Back in the 1970s my parents had friends who had stacks of hi-fi separates with gold contact wiring and speaker stands on metal spikes. They were only playing Perry Como on vinyl, but that was their idea of fun, so good luck to them. When the CD emerged on to the market with its claims of superior quality and scratch resistance, the hi-fi enthusiasts split into two camps: those who clung to their “warmer” but crackly analogue vinyl and their hissy tapes and those who went digital and got optical wires to hook up their shiny new CD player to those spiky speakers.
Manufacturers propagated the upward spiral for both camps marketing ever more elaborate systems and even selling green pens to colour the edge of a CD to prevent laser leakage. Personally, I grew up with a “stereogram” and a personal radio-cassette and was quite happy with it, whiling away countless hours listening to prog rock, Jean Michel Jarre, Talking Heads, and the occasional Perry Como album.
But, was it all for nothing? Within another generation the notion of digital audio had been compressed using the audio equivalent of the lossy image format jpeg and music fans were listening on pocket devices or watching Youtube clips with embedded music on poor-quality computer speakers and really not caring either way, whether the sound was great or not.
Jerald Hughes of University of Texas Pan American in Edinburg writing in the International Journal Services and Standards has a nice table showing the technical specification of the human ear and comparing it to the various analogue formats:
| Audio system | Frequency range/Hz | Decibel range/dB |
| Human ear | 20-22,000 | 110+ |
| Vinyl LP | 30-15,000 | 50-60 |
| 8-track tape | 45-8000 | 45 |
| Cassette tape | 50-12,000 | 45-50 |
| Chrome cassette | 50-16,000 | 60 |
| Reel to reel | 30-20,000+ | 66+ |
So, the only system that ever came close to the full range of human hearing was reel-to-reel and I don’t recall seeing many of those around even among the most extravagant separates hi-fi aficionados of my parents’ acquaintance.
So, how does the CD fit into this picture?
| Audio system | Frequency range/Hz | Decibel range/dB |
| Human ear | 20-22,000 | 110+ |
| Compact disc | 20-22,000 | 90+ |
| DVD audio | 10-95,000 | 144 |
Not bad? It really was a golden era, then, apart from that lack of “warmth” and “colour” that the analogue stalwarts claimed. And, with DVD audio quality (and SACD, superaudio CD) far outstripping even CD. These latter formats are well-known to devoted adherents of jazz and classical where dynamic range and complex frequency content tends to be more common than in rock and pop, although there are serious mastering problems with many modern recordings in all genres.
Today, there are almost as many audio “formats” as there are audio files. One can choose a download or rip at almost any rate, a lossy or lossless compression algorithm, and countless other options and codecs to playback a music file on myriad devices. But, consumers in general, have gravitated towards a quality that is much lower than the human ear is capable of discerning and much lower than top-end equipment is capable of reproducing. It’s as if the hi-fi nuts never existed…
Perhaps that’s the point though, my generation was perfectly content to listen to vinyl albums duplicated on cassette tapes (remember: home taping is skill in music killing music, it never did) and today, the kids are quite happy to listen to downloaded 128kbps mp3 files through the cheap earbuds that come with portable music players.
Human senses and sensibilities have limits. It’s not that the human ear cannot receive the finest of musical details, it most certainly can, it’s just that most people perceive satisfaction in listening to a good-quality mp3 and are not worried about the top notes or the quiet moments that might be lost in the compression process that squeezes their collection of thousands of songs on to a sliver of silicon embedded in a case no bigger than a thumbnail.
Audio cassettes were popular because they were convenient – mix tapes, copying albumbs, recording off the radio all infinitely simpler with cassettes than with a reel-to-reel machine. In the post-digital era of music on chips rather than disks consumers are trading-off audio quality for convenience just the same as they ever did. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.
Jerald Hughes (2009). Emergent quality standards for digital entertainment experience goods: the case of consumer audio Int. J. Services and Standards, 5 (4), 333-353
I spoke to Hughes who confessed that he too is a prog-rock fan, and admitted that the first album he ever bought with his own money was the YesSongs triple live album. He also told me he is still listening to his Technics direct-drive turntable with hyperelliptical stylus through Bose 501 speakers and said, “it really IS ‘warmer’…”
@Jerald I think we could easily collapse into a discussion of the relative merits of different musical genres if we aren’t careful. While much of pop and rock essentially doesn’t suffer, there are some artists whose work can be described as being just as dynamic and exquisite as any jazz, or even classical. However, that doesn’t tend to be the music listened to by mass audiences, it’s a long-tail effect and those of us who enjoy exquisite more than loudest suffer because the industry (hardware and music) follows the market rather than chasing the tails…
There’s a related issue, which is the actual content that comes from the studio after the mastering engineer has completed his work. In order to be more prominent in music videos and for radio airplay, there has been a steady progression in pop music towards greater and greater compression, closer and closer to the 0 dB signal ceiling that is possible. The basic theory is, “Loudest track wins”. You may occasionally notice the same phenomenon in television commercials, which are often far louder than the programs they interrupt.
The result is pop music tracks with a dynamic range of 10 dB or even less, with no audible detail of any kind. Music of this kind suffers little, if at all, from MP3 compression used in moderation, or from lower-quality earphones. So the source material itself of pop music is also evolving towards lower quality, purely for reasons of prominence during broadcast. For jazz and classical, of course, it’s a very different story.
@CCCCpppp:
The A/D converter can potentially suffer from jitter. Although in the most pristine studio settings this is a consideration, individuals recording for fun or on their own won’t notice any artifacts from jitter, unless they have **really** cheap equipment. Anti-alias filtering could also be a problem, but most recording microphones don’t have the ability to capture frequency content above 20kHz anyway, so it’s a minor issue.
The filters for D/A are another story. All consumers needed D/A converters for playback, and the early models did a poorer job of reconverting the stair-step waveform stored in PCM coding back to a smooth function.
Non-lossy compression, absolutely. Or better still, don’t bother to compress. Save the uncompressed data, the hard drive is huge.
I do think early CD’s were designed to be the very best that engineers could imagine and manage at that time. Experiencing digital music taught us some things about signals, and about human hearing, that we didn’t know before. The harshness and shortcomings are often a matter of trade-offs made for the sake of better profit margins in mass production factory lines, something which plagues products of all kinds, not just CDs.
Can’t comment on the mega-expensive Sure canal-phones, but I dropped a pretty penny on a pair of the original Etymotic Research ER4 canal phones years back, and would never travel without them – only problem is, the sound is so good I’ve been moved to tears more than once on a crowded airplane!
Guess that puts me into the audiophool category :-/
Very timely post given a discussion I’ve been having with my mid-to-late-forties peers, all about technology events that ‘blew our minds’. I’ll blog on that shortly but, on the sound front, for me the big event was the first time I heard music through stereo headphones plugged into what was then (1978ish) a fancy Ferguson stereo cassette deck my brother had bought for uni. (He was also an early CD player adopter shortly after). Point being, I too was a stereogram child, where the speaker separation on the unit was about 2ft., speakers were two paper cones, and graphic equalisation was via ‘bass’ and ‘treble’ knobs (we were poor but happy :-) ) So, stereo plus the higher frequency response of the phones on the tape deck worked some magic for me. I think the weak link in the chain has shifted, and suspect the expensive bits today are not source related. Today, I listen to music on-the-go on an N95 phone, but am very picky about film sound on my home cinema set-up; but think that again comes down I think to the speakers more than anything.
Talking about shifting weak links, it’s interesting to compare the audio situation with what has happened in photography. In digital, sensors were the limiting factor for years; now with the best professional DSLRS, I believe the lens is the limiting factor again. Ho hum.