There is hardly any good music that has been produced in the last 20 years. the old timer bands still use analog.
Speaking of contemporary music, I have spent the last 20 years recognising the old music they are imitating
. There is so much stuff that is derivative. However, those who do follow the music scene rather than allowing themselves to get stuck in 1974 assure me there is good stuff, and some youtube surfing actually proves they are right!
hyeah:
Added to which the is the vast library of
classical music, of course still performed, and of course still recorded. If classical music (East or West) is not a person's cup of tea, I'd be the last to force-feed their ears. We do, after all, listen to music for pleasure! However, if a person wants to exercise their hifi and their hearing, there is nothing like a symphony orchestra to do just that. Nothing else will fill the entire frequency range; nothing else will provide such dynamic variation. Nothing else will provide such variety of instruments and sound.
There is no need at all for audio technology, or any specific application of it, to be stuck in the past.
Now, I hope I am not asking an off-track question...but do all digital formats use some sort of compression? I know, there is flac, but it is completely lossless? As it is a digital format, the way it is stored, is there any sort of compression/loss?? What are other lossless formats?
I believe that this question should be answered by an expert in the technology, and it won't be easy to
really understand the answer. We toss around words like compression and sampling, and attach our assumptions to them --- and then we find a forum to beat each other with those assumptions :lol:.
Here are some of mine
...
The digital technology that
we mostly use is lossless. Compression, of they type of which you speak, only enters the picture when people want to minimise the file size for storage or transmission of music. Want to get hours and hours and hours of music on a CD? MP3 is your friend. You might not enjoy listening to it though!
The music that you
buy on a standard audio CD is lossless. The music that you rip from that CD is lossy or lossless according to
your choice. There are numerous file formats: WAV is lossless; FLAC is compressed but lossless; OGG and MP3 are examples of file formats that are
lossy compressed.
So --- a
lossless format gives you
exactly what you ripped, regardless of whether it is compressed or not: no better, no worse. A
lossy format does not: some of the content is discarded.
But --- the digital music we use (eg a CD) is
sampled, and doesn't the word "sample" imply that it is not "all" the music? That's where the assumptions kick in, and my understanding (maths duffer) kicks out. My assumption is that 41,100 samples
per second Is enough to perceive all of the music and cover the entire frequency range ( a formula states that the frequency range is limited to half the sampling rate) of human hearing. Other assumptions say that that is not enough. Many people including music technologists say that the CD standard is not perfect. On the other hand, I've seen the mathematical theory, and the graphs, which
I do not understand that shows that, somehow, sampled though it may be, we
do get the stuff in the gaps too! That baffles me, so please don't argue this with me: argue it with a mathematician/cryptologist/encoding expert!
Some of those people might say that vinyl is not perfect either: after all, the sound needs to be distorted to get it into an LP groove and undistorted to play it back. I have nothing against vinyl, I've known it for forty years, but I do think that people's
assumptions overdo the vinyl-is-natural thing. How about tape, guys? Re[ea]l tape, of course, not cassettes.
It's a bit like the naturopathy thing. Common assumption: herbs are natural, how could they do you any harm? Fact: many gardens contain enough poison to kill a person, and qualified herbal practitioners (Eastern and Western) prescribe poisons just like alopathic doctors do.
I think that the
hard lines that are drawn between analogue (or, rather, LP) and digital are mostly the result of these assumptions, and, whilst continuing to listen to whatever source/equipment combination suits us best, it really does not need to be a battle line. And, if it
must be a battle line, lets keep the logic err...
logical.
reubensm said:
At the end of the day, when it comes to listening to music, its all about "me" and not about audiophile traditions, standards, methods and practices. I do what appeals best to "me".
That makes perfect sense. It's the way to go. But it is still fun and a learning process to chew the theoretical cud.
They are so bowled over by the format and talk very highly of it, saying its better than CD. However, they also maintain parallel collections of CDs (wherever possible) and prefer to play CDs for general listening or when friends come over, saying that CD sound is more main-stream and appealing to the average ear while vinyl listening is niche and will appeal only to those who understand the format (I think this is the audiophile excuse of the century)
That's just weird. If it sounds good it sounds good.
.
