http://m.rollingstone.com/?redirurl...pono-digital-to-analog-music-service-20120927
Is anyone curious about this? I'm happy he's pushing for greater resolution becoming a norm instead of MP3, but a new ecosystem is a tough sell.
What do you listen on? Are you concerned about the quality of your digital music collection?
James, I'm so glad you brought this up!
I never had major objections to full-resolution, full bandwidth digital music, though I've always preferred analog. But I can't listen to an mp3. I can't even listen to it in the car.
Even the trade-offs inherent in 16/44.1 vs. analog were not unacceptable to me as a listener. And I've recorded with the old Sony DASH format, the 1 bit formats, and a few other digital encoding methods that did sound very good. But more could have been done, of course.
One of the tradeoffs has been in the area of frequency bandwidth. Because of the Nyquist theory, digital recording requires brickwall filtering. Limitations in storage and encoding media meant that in the past the brickwall had to be 44.1 kHz, thus limiting the frequency response to 22,050 Hz. This was because higher resolution in terms of bit rate and bandwidth meant big data files, and in those days you couldn't squuze enough information onto the limited media of the time; CD was as good as it got.
The additional justification made for choosing this limitation was that no one but dogs could hear frequencies higher than that. But this isn't quite true; we perceive certain overtones even when we can't identify the pitch of the test tones, and moreover, these overtones affect frequencies we can hear.
The presence of this high frequency information was widely acknowledged back in the day, and because of it, engineers in the 60s, 70s and 80s insisted on high bandwidth (some of the better analog tape machines' frequency responses, such as my old Otari, went literally from DC to over 40,000 HZ!). People like the legendary Rupert Neve also insisted on that kind of bandwidth for his preamp and mixing console products, and that is one reason that they sound superior and have been copied/emulated for many years.
We've all heard people say that analog is "warmer." I think this is a misnomer. It's not that analog is warmer; it's that even through analog's noise, we hear more of what's there. Without brickwall anti-alias filtering, without having to interpolate digital information into a real waveform, you hear real-time detail. One reason a Neve preamp sounds good is the transformers, of course; but another significant reason that Rupert himself points to is that the bandwidth was very high (in the case of a classic 1073, to about 70-80,000 Hz). "Warmer" isn't the sound of tubes, necessarily (and Neve gear was solid state); it's the effect of getting more good information from the medium.
So the closer we can get to that - which means higher frequency bandwidth, and greater resolution in terms of how many times the waveform is sampled per second - the better the recordings sound. 24/192 simply has more potential than what most of us are listening to now.
And real-time detail is exactly what is lacking in a so-called "compressed" format like mp3.
Mp3 turned not only bandwidth, but information we use to identify instruments, harmonic content, and other very basic things we do hear in recordings conceptually on their head. They call it "compressed."
Well, it isn't compressed, what the lossy formats do is take information and simply remove what the algorithm postulates people don't really hear. Trouble is, we do hear everything. Mp3s sound like cardboard to me. YMMV, usual disclaimers here. I can only speak for myself - I dislike listening to mp3.
Even AACs and other formats that are supposedly somewhat less "lossy" than mp3 are unlistenable for me. At one point, I could understand the mp3 argument; limited speed of modems, and limitations in storage media, made the format kind of a substitute for the old analog cassette, though IMHO cassettes sound a LOT better than an mp3. But this now is unacceptable in an age when storage media is so inexpensive that most peoples' CD collections will fit easily on a 1TB drive, and the software to make accessing the music on the drive is readily available. 24/192 source material is a superior solution. And our modems are fast.
So I'm all for this higher resolution stuff, better converters, etc.
In my small company, our policy is to provide music for client review only in full-res file formats, like AIFF or WAV. The broadcast standard has been 24/48 for years, which is a slight improvement over 16/44.1, and that's how we provide it to clients. We will only provide an mp3 for client review if a client insists and is stuck somewhere that a full-res download would be a problem. I've actually driven CDs with full resolution files over to a client's office rather than have them listen to an mp3, but this isn't practical if a client is out of town and can't wait for overnight delivery. I think we've only had to send an mp3 once in the past year, by the way.
I'd like to see the audio postproduction industry (as well as the record industry) move to 24/192 as soon as possible, though it would be a big changeover for some companies, we are equipped for it. Still, it might revitalize the recording business and change the model somewhat.
However this is done, a new ecosystem isn't necessarily required. The information could be decoded and managed in multiple ways, and really shouldn't be a problem. There have been inexpensive 24/192 converters on the market for a long time, and a consumer version would be even less expensive due to economies of production scale. One thing I've been doing over the past couple of years is transferring my CDs to hard disk, so I can access all of the music from my computer, and play it back through my studio's D/A converters. This way, I get better D/A conversion, can use software to organize what I have, don't have to search for CDs, etc. For me this process is considerably better than having my material organized via mp3. Still, I'd much rather get higher resolution files, and they could live on the same hard disk as my 16/44.1 files anyway.
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