Why not stream in ~256kbps AAC or Opus? The audible quality drop is objectively proven to be zero. Make peace with the placebo effect and enjoy your life.
Those listening tests are done on stereo headphones. I often listen to music through a 5.1 system, which processes the stereo signal through a Dolby Pro Logic II decoder in order to feed the 5 speakers. This stresses lossy codecs much more than listening through headphones; phase information is used for sound placement, and sounds that would normally be masked often end up sufficiently localised to discern (this is part of the fun of a surround system). I can definitely hear outright artefacts at rates and codecs purported to be transparent.
You never know how a piece of audio might be used, and once you've thrown away information you can't get it back.
I agree in principle, however I disagree with the logic insofar as anyone who is listening to music through Pro Logic (or a similar matrix decoder) is by definition not a target audience for pedantic degrees of audio signal preservation.
Not really sure what you're trying to say. Why am I not allowed to be in the "target audience" for not wanting artefacts in my music?
Your reasoning seems to be "only deluded, pedantic audiophiles want lossless, and audiophiles don't listen though matrix decoders". But that begs the question - the whole point of relating my personal experience was to show how a perfectly reasonable and commonplace listening style could benefit from lossless encoding.
Please don't put words in my mouth. I would never say that you have to be deluded or pedantic or an audiophile in order to justify lossless audio file. And I would never ever say that "audiophiles don't listen though matrix decoders".
I completely accept that matrix decoding is a legitimate way to listen to music. I do it myself on occasion. But even before you throw lossy compression into play, it's worth acknowledging that Pro Logic decoding of a non-Pro Logic signal is hit-and-miss at best, which can often trip up or be generally unpleasant with many types of material.
Oh, I forgot one big deal: Bluetooth audio. I use bluetooth headphones when commuting and I have a Bluetooth receiver at home for convenience. Here it's a big deal if you compress with a lossy compression two times: once to MP3 and again when using Bluetooth. The loss in quality is significant.
Decent bluetooth receivers can decode mp3 / mp4 & a correctly setup sound path should pass the mp3 packets straight from source to speaker without a decode/encode stage.
Weirdly, this seems to be one of those tech things where it’s impossible to actually find out whether a bluetooth devices supports more than just the mandatory codecs & it’s equally impossible to find out whether your sound path is passing the source through or not. It’s all completely opaque.
I really need a technology like Bluetooth, but there seems to be no other that works with all devices. Bluetooth audio is a black box and you never can't be sure what happens between the device and receiver.
APT-X is a proprietary codec that performs far better than the original bluetooth audio codec & can be used for things that said codec really was’t up to. (It also includes a lossless mode for the audio purists amongst us.)
Modern bluetooth devices can also negotiate various other codecs as part of the A2DP spec: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Bluetooth_profiles#Adv... including mpeg3/mpeg4 encodings but only SBC is mandatory and it seems to be impossible to tell what codec any particular Bluetooth audio device is using on any platform: I’ve not seen anything that will tell you what it’s really sending over the air.
If you're able to test with an Android device running 4.4 or later, you should be able to turn on Bluetooth Logging in Developer Options.
Wireshark can read bt_hcisnoop.log as a Symbian OS Bluetooth Log (really). From a bit of fiddling you're looking for a series of AVDTP requests with GetCapabilites (to your speakers/headset/whatever) and then SetConfiguration (from your phone/player). Filtering by btavdtp.service will get you this.
I can tell you my phone is ignoring SBC and AAC support and asking for APT-X only.
That is impressively convoluted. I have a feeling it ought to be possible to write a gstreamer plugin to do this, but it’s one of those minor projects that never got over the do-I-care-that-much hump.
I've got a feeling that by the time an audio stream gets to GStreamer it's not in the original format. Also you'd have to get an A2DP sink working (to make your phone think the computer is a headset / speaker)
You shouldn't be using bluetooth headphones with lossy compression if you care about audio quality.
(And it should be made clear that I have no in-principle issue with anyone purchasing or storing their local music library in a lossless format. It's a valid decision, particularly if you're establishing your music library in the last 5-10 years.)
So to summarize my thoughts (had a nice cup of coffee and thinking, Sunday anyways), the people I allow to do compression for the music I buy is the artist/producer herself or me. I really don't like having a third party in the middle turning the knobs for the music I buy.
You are of course aware that what you are listening has already been tweaked, knob-turned and filtered by the recording studio, sound engineers, artists and whoever else was involved. In the end music is subjective. It sounds different and pretty much every playback system. And to the listener, it either sounds good or not. It's never "correct".
Of course. The typical music I listen to (techno mainly) goes through the producer's studio and usually has another person doing the mastering. Until now all compression is done by professionals who have ear how the end product should sound (with their Genelec studio monitors, of course). I'm fine with this.
What I don't want to have is an automatic lossy compression done by systems which the artist has no influence. Depending on the sound of the original music, this might have no effect or then the compression completely ruins the dynamics and sound of the original production.
On this time and age, bandwidth is cheap and the connections are fast. Disk space is cheap and cloud storage is cheap. I don't see so many reasons to use lossy files anymore and with flac I can be sure that I have the closest possible copy of the production that left the artist's studio.
Yes, you are definitely conflating dynamic range compression (dynamics) and data compression (codecs). These are very different, completely unrelated issues that unfortunately bear the same linguistic shorthand of "compression".
In the way they are commonly used, lossy compression codecs have zero impact on dynamics. Correctly used, lossy compression can have zero audible consequence no matter how good the equipment or how "golden" the ears.
That said, a recording studio shouldn't ever be dealing with lossy codecs, because there's simply no need to, and because there's a sliver of possibility that the inaudible lossy artefacts could compound into an audible artefact over multiple generations.
The only time a lossy codec should ever be used is by distribution networks and/or end users.
> Correctly used, lossy compression can have zero audible consequence no matter how good the equipment or how "golden" the ears.
That's why the compression should be done by me or by the original producer to have it done correctly case by case. Lossless is a good compromise it being easier to apply automatically for any kind of music.
For some definitions of "all" I agree. i.e. for Hifi quality Stereo Music to end users where file size and bandwidth are not so important, yes fine, but in situations where space or bandwidth are limited / expensive, AAC can achieve transparency at well below 256kbps with most music, to most people, in which case it would often be overkill --especially for Audio Books, lectures, plays or other mainly speech content... conversely for 5.1 or greater multi-channel audio it's often insufficient.
But this still doesn't solve the original issue: if I buy music, it should be me who packs the files if I need to lose some information and I should own the original copies lossless. And as I also said, bandwidth and storage space are super cheap nowadays, so I really don't see so many reasons to use lossy codecs.
They don't have to be conflating those things. For example are you sure Youtube doesn't apply dynamic processing to uploaded files? I wouldn't be surprised if there is some sound processing performed to help make the average phone video sound better.
Depends on the kind of music. If you're listening to the recording of an harpsichordist playing Scarlatti in a room, then you can measure the difference between what you hear through your speakers and what you would have heard if you were sitting five meters behind during the play. And then being more correct means having less difference.
When you refer to what an artist or producer is doing, you may be talking about a different kind of compression (dynamic range compression) than this topic covers (data compression).
I don't want artists or producers having any say in audio encoding formats – because the audio encoding format should be transparent and therefore have zero impact on the actual artwork.
The point isn't about audio quality. It's about having a free and open way to do it at all!
Who cares what uses it has? It's a whole new area of capability. Somebody could find a new use for it. If we limit our choices based what's currently possible, we get nowhere.
AAC is mostly Apple-stuff and I'm out of those pictures. Where do you have a music streaming platform that serves Opus? Flac is the best trade-off. I get the original quality, I can store my files to a cloud service and stream the music without using too much bandwidth (it's 2016 anyways). I have seriously good headphone system at work (for the price of a new iPhone) and at least with Style Jukebox I can switch between 320 kbps mp3 and the original flac where I definitely see a difference.
There is no price difference when buying mp3 or flac and storage + bandwidth is cheap nowadays. If I need a lossy compression, I want to have a control on the compression parameters.
Mp3 is really useful if I transcode and stream some music while having data caps. But do I really have any valid reasons to archive the music I own with a lossy codec?
And as I said in another branch in this discussion, mp3 + bluetooth compression is pretty awful already.
