Article: Audio Engineering Matters, Not The Format

[BattleScarze]

Great article, I’ve been saying this for years, but many people just don’t get it or are offended because they’ve got to justify their purchases. 

 

We are at a point in history where we can technically make the most realistic recordings, yet we are stuck with some of the worst. This applies to live concerts too...sound engineering in the auditoriums are as hot as the recordings. 

 

This is the new normal folks. 

[HalSF]

What the hell is wrong with you JoeWhip?!?!? Have you gone completely sane?

 

 

[ednaz]

On 12/14/2018 at 9:13 AM, The Computer Audiophile said:

Take a step back and please think about the difference between the delivery format and what happens as part of the playback process. 

 

We must separate the file format or music format (PCM/DSD) from what happens “inside” the DAC. Many DACs oversample to 768kHz internally. This shouldn’t be a call to find 768kHz recordings because they must be better. 

Exactly. When HD music started to become readily available, I was unfortunate enough to have the first few HD albums I purchased be spectacularly produced and engineered. I thought, hell, I'm not buying that 256K Apple junk ever again. And screw the CD. 

 

Then I had a few things show up that were reissues of various sorts, where I owned the music on CD, or Apple's better quality compressed format. Hearing near zero difference between what I owned and the new releases on some albums and massive differences on others kicked me into analytical mode. Where I ended up was, not rebuying ANYTHING unless I can hear a sample to see if it's been well re-engineered. Interesting that's hearable on a 256k streamed sample.

 

I also started messing with upsampling to exotic PCM levels, or to DSD. No surprise... for some albums it sounded better, for reasons I couldn't explain. (Thanks for the images, Miska... now I do understand what changes.) For some albums it sounded no different. You can't fix bad engineering with upsampling, and albums with a DR of 3 don't sound any different as an Apple AAC as-is than they do in an HD form upsampled to 4x DSD. I would guess that some things might end up sounding worse upsampled, because you could better hear annoying things. I also found that it only made a large noticeable difference on one of my systems... and not the one with the most expensive DAC, and way more with headphones than through speakers.

 

Where I've ended up is, if I buy stuff that's a casualty in the loudness wars (my first live concert was the MC5, so yeah, I do...), I buy it in a cheap format. The good things that higher def and upsampling can do for sound just don't improve things for flat DR music- or at least not in a way I can hear. An artist I love, clumsily engineered, red book format it is. The good stuff is worth the extra cost for HD. I don't upsample what I stream from my server - only when I'm sitting down to listen deeply in, with headphones, on the one DAC where I know it matters a lot, with a local source. If I'm writing, or printing, or cooking, just living, playing through speakers in any of the four imperfect listening environments I've got, bit perfect is perfect enough.

 

There is such a thing as "good enough." 

[sdolezalek]

This thread once again highlights one of the challenges of Internet acquired knowledge.  Because it is accessible to all, it also generally means that all can add their own two cents.  Thereafter, figuring out whose comments and advice are worth paying attention to are largely a function of how long you have been reading Computer Audiophile -- the longer you have been here the more you get a sense of whose content is backed by sound logic, learning and expertise.  The problem is that there is always a new generation of readers and commentators -- who typically don't know who to pay attention to and who to ignore; often those new visitors add content of their own, which the rest of us then need to determine whether it is worth paying attention to.  

 

The end result is that there is a ton of information here, but it isn't easy to find the really good stuff....

As to the topic at hand, we should really separate Computer Audio Playback into three separate layers:

1. Recording. How it was recorded, quality of the artists, performance, venue, recording devices, recording medium and mastering and more;

2. Data Storage. How it is stored (which is where all the "format wars" occur) -- LP, CD, 16/44, Hi-Res and so forth

3. Playback Hardware/Software. How it is played back (which is what many of the really interested threads here are about) -- not just the hardware (computers, cables, power supplies, DACs, etc.) but also the software and what the software does with the recorded "format" and how those format "changes" interact with the users hardware;

 

Some general rules that I have learned from five years of hanging around CA:

1. Nothing you do in Data Storage or Playback can make a bad Recording into a good one -- so start with good recordings and make that your highest priority

2. Higher resolution can, but does not have to, improve the ability to retain the quality of what was recorded; as resolution increases, the gains tend to become smaller

3. Most of the gains of higher resolution, or better Data Storage formats, have little to do with capturing or preserving music content above 20kHz -- what they do add is something most here still disagree about -- I, for one, believe higher resolution has its benefits, but not enough to justify starting with a poor recording  

4. The gains to be had through software upsampling or PCM to DSD conversions can't add something that wasn't there in the original Data Storage format; that isn't what they are about -- they are about sharing workload between computer and DAC hardware, and about using software to deliver to the DAC the format that makes the hardware work best.  Because these benefits are very equipment dependent, it is hard to make any generalizations.

5. There are things people say they can hear, but lack the ability to show data that would substantiate the improvement.  There are also things that data suggests are better, but critical listening suggests may be focusing on the wrong measurable, or may be improving something our ears pay little attention to while worsening something else that matters more to our ears.  The improvements worth paying attention to are those where both listening and data suggests a step forward.

6. Everyone has their own unique set of ears and their own unique brain for processing music content -- so just because it sounds great to someone else doesn't mean it will (or should) sound great to you.

 

[loop7]

A few of the most enjoyable music experiences I've had in the last few years is at a friend's house.

 

She has a Denon AVR, a pair of Pioneer bookshelf speakers on stands (Andrew Jones) and a cheap Polk sub. Her living room seems to have a nearly ideal amount of diffusion or some other factor but the soundstage is so tall and wide and the sound balanced. I've been back a few times and it's just great.

 

My room, on the other hand, is atrocious with high ceilings, tall windows and myriad other issues. Aside from installing very obtrusive acoustic aids, it's pretty bad. 

 

After hearing a very mediocre system in a great room, it made me completely re-think all the cash I've spent on my system.

[Kalimeratheriso]

After a session listening to music various, I always seem to finish up with either Paul Simon or Van Morrison cd (now through an Aurender N10) and relax

[barrows]

Ahh, no.

Of course the audio engineering is of tremendous importance, but to suggest that the recording format/resolution does not matter is absurd.  

Please give me recordings with superb engineering and recorded at native rates above 16/44.1 and DSD 64.

[afrancois]

On 12/13/2018 at 5:30 PM, PeterG said:

Hi Joe--nice post. A couple of thoughts.

 

First, I agree completely, that engineering, recording, mixing, etc is WAY more important than format, at least once we're at PCM.  The loudness wars are my personal bogeyman in all of this.  It is terribly sad that so many artists are reduced (or reduce themselves).

 

Second, I take issue with your argument on the room.  I agree that the room is critical.  But the room is often not controllable, or controllable only at great expense.  While $1,000 dollars in bass traps, just for example, might get be better bang for the buck than $10,000 on a new DAC or power treatment or whatever; you are assuming that each of us has complete control over the room itself.  But architecture and wives have a say on the room that can be more in the $100,000 to $1,000,000 range.  Seriously, I could drop $10,000 on a DAC, and my wife would barely raise an eyebrow, but it would be a complete nonstarter to drape the living room in treatments.

 

Many people still willingly ignore what DSP can do to correct some major/minor room problems, all because of the so called purity of the signal, while in fact it is the room that destroys their so called pure signal. 

[eworkflow]

There are also interesting two twists to the topic of high-resolution playback and emotional involvement. For one, not all types of emotional engagement aid objective quality evaluation: to maintain objectivity testers should avoid specific tracks that stimulate their own emotional responses prior to the test; feeling rather than hearing is quite natural. For that, my personal remedy is rather simple: use speech (or music with talking/shouting musicians) and all types of noise making recordings as the best source to test the audio path objectively. Another one is that cats very seldom react to noises coming from speakers but sometimes (as confirmed by certain professional reviewers) they do as it would be made by something alive in the room. That, alone, might be an ultimate grade for passing an audio test without any music-related emotional involvement at all. LOL. 

[PeterG]

On 12/24/2018 at 7:02 PM, eworkflow said:

There are also interesting two twists to the topic of high-resolution playback and emotional involvement. For one, not all types of emotional engagement aid objective quality evaluation: to maintain objectivity testers should avoid specific tracks that stimulate their own emotional responses prior to the test; feeling rather than hearing is quite natural. For that, my personal remedy is rather simple: use speech (or music with talking/shouting musicians) and all types of noise making recordings as the best source to test the audio path objectively.

 

You raise an interesting philosophical question--should we evaluate a system's ability to reproduce art which is (presumably) created to move us by removing the system's ability to move us?  My answer would be absolutely not, but there are obvious arguments on both sides of the equation and I would not expect unanimity on this point.

 

To the specific remedy you propose--a system's ability to reproduce voce is critical, but so is a system's ability to reproduce bass and everything else in between.  So I would describe your voice test as perhaps helpful but not sufficient.

[eworkflow]

On 12/26/2018 at 10:52 AM, PeterG said:

So I would describe your voice test as perhaps helpful but not sufficient.

I agree. Using a high-quality recording of speech/shouting/knocking to test audio system is not sufficient to test the performance of an audio system but it is a darn good starting point because they are instinctively familiar to us. I am also referring to a path synergy I experienced a few times while testing various installation: being startled by a sound right in the room (feeling like it couldn't come from the speaker or headphones). We must agree that it's always a good thing.

[CVJ]

A relevant article in The N.Y. TIMES Magazine today about Neil Simon:

But he is stumped. Let’s take a moment to look at the future of recorded sound, the topic that has got him so overheated. The invention of the phonograph in 1877 by Thomas Alva Edison, a k a the Wizard of Menlo Park, and one of the great visionaries in American history, marked the culmination of several decades of attempts to capture the magic of sound in physical, reproducible form. Early sound recorders used a large cone to capture the air pressure produced by sonic waves created by a human voice or an instrument. The cone directed sound waves against a diaphragm attached to a stylus, which thereby inscribed an analog of those waves onto a roll of paper or a wax-coated cylinder. The use of electrical microphones and amplifiers by the 1920s made it possible to record a far greater range of sound with far greater fidelity.

Magnetic tape, which was pioneered in Germany during the 1930s, propelled another giant leap forward in fidelity, while also beginning the process of freeing sound from the physical mediums on which it was recorded. Tape could be snipped and edited and combined in ways that allowed artists, producers and engineers to create symphonies in their own minds and then assemble them out of multiple takes performed in different places and at different times. The introduction of high-end consumer digital-sound-recording systems by companies including Sony and 3M further loosened music’s connection to a physical medium, thereby rendering sound infinitely plastic and, in theory, infinitely reproducible. Then came the internet, which delivered on the mind-boggling promise of infinitely reproducible sound at a cost approaching zero.

[Read more about sound fidelity and the biggest disaster in the history of the music business.]

At ground level, which is to say not the level where technologists live but the level where artists write and record songs for people who care about the human experience of listening to music, the internet was as if a meteor had wiped out the existing planet of sound. The compressed, hollow sound of free streaming music was a big step down from the CD. “Huge step down from vinyl,” Young said. Each step eliminated levels of sonic detail and shading by squeezing down the amount of information contained in the package in which music was delivered. Or, as Young told me, you are left with “5 percent of the original music for your listening enjoyment.”

Producers and engineers often responded to the smaller size and lower quality of these packages by using cheap engineering tricks, like making the softest parts of the song as loud as the loudest parts. This flattened out the sound of recordings and fooled listeners’ brains into ignoring the stuff that wasn’t there anymore, i.e., the resonant combinations of specific human beings producing different notes and sounds in specific spaces at sometimes ultraweird angles that the era of magnetic tape and vinyl had so successfully captured.

If you want to envision how Young feels about the possibility of having to listen to not only his music but also American jazz, rock ’n’ roll and popular song via our dominant streaming formats, imagine walking into the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Musée d’Orsay one morning and finding that all of the great canvases in those museums were gone and the only way to experience the work of Gustave Courbet or Vincent van Gogh was to click on pixelated thumbnails.

But Young hears something creepier and more insidious in the new music too. We are poisoning ourselves with degraded sound, he believes, the same way that Monsanto is poisoning our food with genetically engineered seeds. The development of our brains is led by our senses; take away too many of the necessary cues, and we are trapped inside a room with no doors or windows. Substituting smoothed-out algorithms for the contingent complexity of biological existence is bad for us, Young thinks. He doesn’t care much about being called a crank. “It’s an insult to the human mind and the human soul,” he once told Greg Kot of The Chicago Tribune. Or as Young put it to me, “I’m not content to be content.”

 

[firedog]

13 minutes ago, CVJ said:

A relevant article in The N.Y. TIMES Magazine today about Neil Simon:

But he is stumped. Let’s take a moment to look at the future of recorded sound, the topic that has got him so overheated. The invention of the phonograph in 1877 by Thomas Alva Edison, a k a the Wizard of Menlo Park, and one of the great visionaries in American history, marked the culmination of several decades of attempts to capture the magic of sound in physical, reproducible form. Early sound recorders used a large cone to capture the air pressure produced by sonic waves created by a human voice or an instrument. The cone directed sound waves against a diaphragm attached to a stylus, which thereby inscribed an analog of those waves onto a roll of paper or a wax-coated cylinder. The use of electrical microphones and amplifiers by the 1920s made it possible to record a far greater range of sound with far greater fidelity.

Magnetic tape, which was pioneered in Germany during the 1930s, propelled another giant leap forward in fidelity, while also beginning the process of freeing sound from the physical mediums on which it was recorded. Tape could be snipped and edited and combined in ways that allowed artists, producers and engineers to create symphonies in their own minds and then assemble them out of multiple takes performed in different places and at different times. The introduction of high-end consumer digital-sound-recording systems by companies including Sony and 3M further loosened music’s connection to a physical medium, thereby rendering sound infinitely plastic and, in theory, infinitely reproducible. Then came the internet, which delivered on the mind-boggling promise of infinitely reproducible sound at a cost approaching zero.

[Read more about sound fidelity and the biggest disaster in the history of the music business.]

At ground level, which is to say not the level where technologists live but the level where artists write and record songs for people who care about the human experience of listening to music, the internet was as if a meteor had wiped out the existing planet of sound. The compressed, hollow sound of free streaming music was a big step down from the CD. “Huge step down from vinyl,” Young said. Each step eliminated levels of sonic detail and shading by squeezing down the amount of information contained in the package in which music was delivered. Or, as Young told me, you are left with “5 percent of the original music for your listening enjoyment.”

Producers and engineers often responded to the smaller size and lower quality of these packages by using cheap engineering tricks, like making the softest parts of the song as loud as the loudest parts. This flattened out the sound of recordings and fooled listeners’ brains into ignoring the stuff that wasn’t there anymore, i.e., the resonant combinations of specific human beings producing different notes and sounds in specific spaces at sometimes ultraweird angles that the era of magnetic tape and vinyl had so successfully captured.

If you want to envision how Young feels about the possibility of having to listen to not only his music but also American jazz, rock ’n’ roll and popular song via our dominant streaming formats, imagine walking into the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Musée d’Orsay one morning and finding that all of the great canvases in those museums were gone and the only way to experience the work of Gustave Courbet or Vincent van Gogh was to click on pixelated thumbnails.

But Young hears something creepier and more insidious in the new music too. We are poisoning ourselves with degraded sound, he believes, the same way that Monsanto is poisoning our food with genetically engineered seeds. The development of our brains is led by our senses; take away too many of the necessary cues, and we are trapped inside a room with no doors or windows. Substituting smoothed-out algorithms for the contingent complexity of biological existence is bad for us, Young thinks. He doesn’t care much about being called a crank. “It’s an insult to the human mind and the human soul,” he once told Greg Kot of The Chicago Tribune. Or as Young put it to me, “I’m not content to be content.”

 

Do you think posting a quote in giant bold letters improves your point? I think it actually makes it less likely to be read. 

[wgscott]

20 minutes ago, firedog said:

Do you think posting a quote in giant bold letters improves your point? I think it actually makes it less likely to be read. 

 

That was exactly the effect it had on me, as I scrolled through the mess quickly and then landed upon your post.  

 

One must also wonder about the necropost motivation.

[Ralf11]

it also reminds us that NY is not a developmental biologist...