The LP vs CD vs MP3 / audiophile topic - heaven for all the audio loonies

The National Music Publishers' Association has requested an increase to 15 cents per track sold online, up from 9 cents as it is now.



Bye-bye crappy iTunes only downloads and downloads period!

Some big Apple guy said that they'd rather shut down the store than increase the price of a song. Big talk, though, imho.

That's what I thought when I read this. Apple think that they are so big that they can threaten people by saying they are going to take their ball home if they don't get their way. I hope that their bluff is called.

"The veiled threat to shut down iTunes if royalty rates on downloaded songs were hiked has been averted. The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) opted to keep the status quo and turned down a request to increase royalties from 9 to 15 cents on songs bought online..."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7649770.stm

What goes around comes around

The optical cable helps in the CD process too, although the difference is minimal. Speakers are the major key in your listening system.

I really really want to find out more about this

In fact I've found a shop that has a huge selection of LP's. The problem is their not catalogued, yikes.

And a lot of people will listen from there hard drive on headphones, all of which is less than. Better technology today=less quality listening. Stupid, but that is the way of the world.

The problem is not better technology Tom. That can do wonders.

The problem is CHEAPER and CHEAPER new technology.

That amount isn't exactly in the cheap area So you're not part of what i am saying here as "cheap" technology.

As for the audiophile thingy, it's nice that people pay huge loads of money to get audio equipment that lets them listen to stuff that can't be otherwise heard, but a friendly reminder of some things if you like:

1. Every sound engineer, recordist and mixer, has their own identity and the way they work, just like the composers, arrangers and orchestrators, and the musicians, like everyone else. Some like to compress in high ratios and limit down the dynamic range, thus giving a loud and in your face, modern listen but with minimum dynamic changes, others like to compress very lightly and leave it loose, to breath, with large dynamic range but with lower perceived audio levels and not so much presence, 'kick'. Others are in-between, others work the eq and the hell out of the pieces, etc etc. It's all fine with me, just like every other professional out there leaves their mark in their job, in any field outside than music.

2. Thing is that when you listen through headphones, you have to remember 2 things: 1. audio equipment, no matter the prices paid, produces their trademarked electric noise and of course through the way the hardware is built and the materials / connections used, 'colors' the audio (frequency range and response). So if you test 100 audio pieces (be it headphones or speakers), you'll hear 100 different results.

3. It all also depends on one's ears, musical data (how he's been musically and aurally grown up) and perception (psychoacoustics).

4. No sound engineer mixes or edits using headphones. Headphones have a very precise and unique localization of the sound sources in one's heads and are very unique in their psychoacoustics behavior. If everyone records, listens, edits and mixes in standardized self-powered industry studio monitors (mackie, m-audio, jbl, etc etc), then by listening to headphones you have to realize that you're listening to something entirely different and new, in all aspects (studio monitors, be it 2 channel stereophony or the surround variation (5.1 and so on) has very different psychoacoustics and audio behavior and characteristics than any headphone system).

5. By going down to such details, it really sucks the enjoyment and the pleasure / meaning of listening to music in the first place. It can be a fun but simultaneously dangerous loop to get into. Plus getting expensive audio equipment, doesn't make one an audio engineer; opinions should be respectful.

It's nice to relax, let go and simply appreciate / enjoy the work of the composers / sound engineers instead for a change

So sound editors and mixers are producing their final products that are optimised for systems no consumer actually has? And individual listeners can't hope to get the full benefit of the music because of the limitations of their equipment?

So, in audio terms, who's the music being produced for?

Remember, it's a discussion?

All I know is that I don't appreciate that sound engineers apparently think its ok to leave clipping artifacts in mixes that are nearly as bad and disruptive to the listening experience as adding fart sounds, just because the majority of the population doesn't understand that music can sound better than it does on $20 PC speakers, free iPod headphones or, worst of all, live concerts of popular music.

If it were actually a matter of
then I would be the first to agree that we should instead

but the things I'm complaining about are painfully, horrifyingly* obvious to the point that they aggressively, forcefully disrupt my enjoyment of the meaning of the production. I didn't set out to nitpick, I was just peacefully sitting around enjoying my music collection, and suddenly my ears are attacked by horrible crackling noises just at the points in the music where the recording most needs to be sonically convincing.

*assuming that when one listens to a music recording, one expects it to be a reasonable accurate reproduction of live music. which is apparently not the case anymore.