Mastered for iTunes - ARS Test

[mjb]

"Apple's push to increase the quality of songs distributed via iTunes has been formally realized in the company's Mastered for iTunes program—but does it really make music sound better?"

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/04/does-mastered-for-itunes-matter-to-music-ars-puts-it-to-the-test.ars/1

[impala454]

These kinds of debates always fascinate me. There tends to be fifteen sides to the coin, ranging from "the human ear is only capable of X" to "my equipment is Y so of course it can sound way better with Z codec".

What I find even more fascinating is statements like this in said articles:

Human hearing, mathematics, and audio equipment all have their limits. Combined, they make selling direct-from-the-studio, 24-bit 96kHz (some files come in sampling rates as high as 192kHz) audio files impractical, if not outright useless.

I'm a little baffled how statements like this can be made. I get that most of the writers of these types of articles are thinking from a purely technical perspective, however what makes these files impractical or useless to a company?

Let's think about this in terms that are absolutely concrete, money. Forget all the debates about sound quality. There's no arguing that there's plenty of people who feel the sound quality is better, and is worth paying for. How many of us on here have a decent collection of SACD/DVDA/high res audio? How many of us have spent thousands (if not tens of thousands) of dollars on our equipment. We're talking about a file that sits on a server, waiting for someone to pay money to download it. The overhead in acquiring/licensing/storing that file, no matter what the size (at least in terms of music) is minuscule compared to the money it will make if even only a small market share buys into it. And I suspect even the naysayers would be too tempted by the right price to pass up the higher res files as well.

[madmac]

I don't know about the rest of you all, but to my ears, 24 bit recordings simply sound better......Period!!. If someone is going to tell me I can't hear the difference, then they are just plain wrong!!. I DO hear the difference!!. I can also easily hear the difference between a movie on DVD vs. BD too!!. :T

Now, I can't say you're going to hear a major difference on portable audio devices however, mostly due to the limitations of the earphones most of these units come with.

[PewterTA]

I think a lot of it has to do with precision. CDs only sample at a certain rate... so a 30Khz signal will be sampled 15K times... Well what about the other 15K times that it could also be sampled... The higher resolution gives you more times of sampling and a more accurate representation of that signal.

It's like driving down a highway at two different speads and looking at the dotted line pass by... the faster you go, you're going to miss counting the line as it passes, however the slower the more accurate you'll be with your count.

I mean... mastered tracks wouldn't be in the 1 - 5GB in size for a ~5 minute track if this possibly wasn't the case.

I want to know in this age why do people still keep complaining that high res files are useless, take up too much space, can't sound any different.

If we keep to this type of logic, then that PC with a Pentium 3 must be just as fast the your latest i7 6 core. That new 600HP engine in your car must be the same as the 300HP engine build 20 years ago... Things advance and we realize there's more to things than we really think...

Yes numbers don't lie and you can make the point that looking just at the numbers, CD quality is all you'd ever need. But when you take into effect that one is trying to make an analog signal (at the end of the day)... your ears will tell you what sounds better.

For me, I think the hi-res has an advantage. My little Adobe Audition CS5.5 & 6 can't seem to compress a track from 96K or 192K to 44.1K well enough that I can't hear loss.

Now I will say, I have compressed to 44.1K and listened back on a Kaleidescape system (bit perfect output) into a Classe SSP-800 with Classe 2200 amp into the B&W 802Diamonds and was very very impressed and felt it was almost a true representation to the hi-res file that I was used to hearing on my system (Rotel 1098/1090/B&W604s3)...

So for me, that's saying that my lowly system couldn't reproduce the lower res. file as good as the higher end file. SO my system, with it having more data to deal with, got things just about as accurately as the low res. conversion on the higher end system.

Now I wish I would've gotten a chance to play the hi-res through the system...but that'll have to wait until next time when I take my laptop...or get all that at my house (speakers are pretty surely coming though).

[Chris D]

I'm all for high-res audio. So far, I've been able to tell the difference in higher rate audio. Whether I would be able to with this new proposed format, I couldn't say until I try it.

[madmac]

Obviously you need a decent system to hear a difference. I think a lot of people (Majority) are happy with their Ipods and lowly MP3 devices. Probably less than 5% of the people walking the planet has a system that can decern the difference between MP3 and 24 bit sound. I think that's where a lot of this indifference to hi def formats is coming from honestly.

Hey.....Maybe that new Ikea audio will finally be able to display the difference in hi rez audio!!??? Hehehe!!!

[Chris D]

yeahhhhhh... mac, I think the new IKEA audio is more likely (like Bose) to lead consumers to believe that IS high end audio. :roll:

[mjb]

madmac, audio equipment costs are extremely exponential - some (most) people just aren't prepared to pay 10 times as much for that "little bit extra", for others its a quest in achieving the Holy Grail - and where the fun is.

[bigburner]

I'm really enjoying the hi-rez audio tracks on Blu-ray concert discs. Standard DVDs have inferior SQ to my aging ears. It could all be in my imagination, but I don't think so.

Nigel.

[madmac]

yeahhhhhh... mac, I think the new IKEA audio is more likely (like Bose) to lead consumers to believe that IS high end audio. :roll:

Chris....Most pedestrian folk think even today that Bose IS high end audio!! 8O

[stuofsci02]

I think a lot of the better sound people hear in hi-rez files is due to better mastering from the get-go.

There are not a lot of people out there that will do a bad mastering job and then release in hi-rez. If there is a particular redbook CD that has the exact same mastering done for a hi-rez file, where there is a difference I would like to give it a try...

I suppose I could also take a hi-rez file and convert it to 16/44 to see... I might do this...

[mjb]

I think a lot of the better sound people hear in hi-rez files is due to better mastering from the get-go.

Bingo - hence "Mastered for iTunes". Some more comparison tests would be interesting.

[stuofsci02]

Bingo - hence "Mastered for iTunes". Some more comparison tests would be interesting.

But what does mastered for iTunes mean? I always equate iTunes with low fidelity... 13 year old girls listening to Justin B. on $3 headphones...

I don't want anything mastered for that...

[madmac]

But what does mastered for iTunes mean? I always equate iTunes with low fidelity... 13 year old girls listening to Justin B. on $3 headphones...

I don't want anything mastered for that...

You DON'T need anything mastered for that!! :roll:

[madmac]

I think a lot of the better sound people hear in hi-rez files is due to better mastering from the get-go.

There are not a lot of people out there that will do a bad mastering job and then release in hi-rez. If there is a particular redbook CD that has the exact same mastering done for a hi-rez file, where there is a difference I would like to give it a try...

I suppose I could also take a hi-rez file and convert it to 16/44 to see... I might do this...

This is a good point!!. The care and attention that goes into the recording and mastering is WAY more important than the bit rate it's played back with at the end of the day!. Agreed!!. However, I believe that if that same great mastering was done in both CD and Hi rez formats, that most people here on this forum with decent equipment and speakers would hear a very audible difference at the end of the day.

[Dmantis]

I'm a Musican , I have been since 1979. My family has been into music for generations and consist of Musicians.
Everyone can enjoy pure sounding music no matter what kind of music it is. The art of recording should be to faithfully reproduce what was , no more , no less.

I can't see why we can't have the very best quality , the master recordings are what we all should have available to use. Screw all these different bit rates , files sizes , HZ HMMMMMMMM TAAAAAAAA!!!!!! Just give us what was and this debate can be over. It's extremely old as I have been reading about it for years.

SACD and DVD AUDIO was a close to original mastering sound quality I ever heard , just make everything that quality and everyone will be happy. IF your replay system can't reproduce all the sound well at least what it can do will be on the recording.

Gee's it's like trying to get a chocolate cookie and not getting all the chips.

[madmac]

I'm a Musican , I have been since 1979. My family has been into music for generations and consist of Musicians.
Everyone can enjoy pure sounding music no matter what kind of music it is. The art of recording should be to faithfully reproduce what was , no more , no less.

I can't see why we can't have the very best quality , the master recordings are what we all should have available to use. Screw all these different bit rates , files sizes , HZ HMMMMMMMM TAAAAAAAA!!!!!! Just give us what was and this debate can be over. It's extremely old as I have been reading about it for years.

SACD and DVD AUDIO was a close to original mastering sound quality I ever heard , just make everything that quality and everyone will be happy. IF your replay system can't reproduce all the sound well at least what it can do will be on the recording.

Gee's it's like trying to get a chocolate cookie and not getting all the chips.

Amen !!! ;x(

[stuofsci02]

I'm a Musican , I have been since 1979. My family has been into music for generations and consist of Musicians.
Everyone can enjoy pure sounding music no matter what kind of music it is. The art of recording should be to faithfully reproduce what was , no more , no less.

I can't see why we can't have the very best quality , the master recordings are what we all should have available to use. Screw all these different bit rates , files sizes , HZ HMMMMMMMM TAAAAAAAA!!!!!! Just give us what was and this debate can be over. It's extremely old as I have been reading about it for years.

SACD and DVD AUDIO was a close to original mastering sound quality I ever heard , just make everything that quality and everyone will be happy. IF your replay system can't reproduce all the sound well at least what it can do will be on the recording.

Gee's it's like trying to get a chocolate cookie and not getting all the chips.

I don't think this will ever happen. As long as radio and cheap portable devices (ipods) dominate the market, there will always be mastering to make these devices sound better while making our HiFi sound worse..

[impala454]

I think it's 100% bound to happen, simply because the rate at which available bandwidth and computing power and storage space is increasing, music will become the new "JPG" of the audio world. Remember when you had to actually decide which photos off your digital camera you wanted to keep, because keeping them all was a waste of space? Well nobody cares about that anymore and the dang files are upwards of 10-20MB a piece now. I see the same thing happening with music. My friend got his HTC One X yesterday and sent me a screenshot of the bandwidth over LTE, 32Mbps down and 24 up. My iPad has AT&T LTE and gets about the same. I think we're on the verge of "cost efficiency due to file sizes/bandwidth" being a non-issue.

[mjb]

Good points! In the old days, we all bought the same vinyl disk - just one version - enthusiasts strived for better "reproduction", and others didn't bother. In the digital age, there are too many versions/bit rates/formats. Now we blame audible shortcomings on having the "wrong" format, or DAC. Hopefully we will go back to buying one version again - if only anyone could agree what that means digitally

[Chris D]

I would hope so. But when I first built my iTunes library, I was ripping everything into Apple Lossless, being the A/V snob/glutton that I am. I very quickly realized that it was going to be WAYYY to big for a portable MP3 player, and I wanted to carry my entire library on it. As a compromise, since then, I've been ripping all my music into 320Kbps MP3. At first, it all fit onto an iPod, although I had to buy the biggest 160GB Classic model. Then a friend shared with me an entire music library, and now I have over 30,000 songs. Even with them at varying bitrates, (his library had as low as 80 Kbps... booo.....) they far exceed the ability to keep it all on the iPod. So I had to chop out a huge chunk--I'm not a country fan, so I do not sync any of those with my iPod for instance, and made the rest fit.

I realize I'm getting off track, but for years now, I've been on a project to listen to every song in my library the whole way through to quality check it for audible errors, (pops, dropouts, cut songs, etc) and then rate each song as to how I like it. The end goal is to have the entire library ated, which will give the genius function incredible detail on my music preferences, and if I want, I can pull up just my favorite songs, or those I can tolerate, or whatever. That also means I can make my library not sync songs to my iPod of 2 stars or below.

I was doing great with my project and only had a couple thousand songs left to go, and then when my buddy shared his library with me, suddenly I'm overwhelmed again. Disregarding country music, I'm almost back down to another 10,000 songs I need to rate.

[madmac]

I would hope so. But when I first built my iTunes library, I was ripping everything into Apple Lossless, being the A/V snob/glutton that I am. I very quickly realized that it was going to be WAYYY to big for a portable MP3 player, and I wanted to carry my entire library on it. As a compromise, since then, I've been ripping all my music into 320Kbps MP3. At first, it all fit onto an iPod, although I had to buy the biggest 160GB Classic model. Then a friend shared with me an entire music library, and now I have over 30,000 songs. Even with them at varying bitrates, (his library had as low as 80 Kbps... booo.....) they far exceed the ability to keep it all on the iPod. So I had to chop out a huge chunk--I'm not a country fan, so I do not sync any of those with my iPod for instance, and made the rest fit.

I realize I'm getting off track, but for years now, I've been on a project to listen to every song in my library the whole way through to quality check it for audible errors, (pops, dropouts, cut songs, etc) and then rate each song as to how I like it. The end goal is to have the entire library ated, which will give the genius function incredible detail on my music preferences, and if I want, I can pull up just my favorite songs, or those I can tolerate, or whatever. That also means I can make my library not sync songs to my iPod of 2 stars or below.

I was doing great with my project and only had a couple thousand songs left to go, and then when my buddy shared his library with me, suddenly I'm overwhelmed again. Disregarding country music, I'm almost back down to another 10,000 songs I need to rate.

I only have my absolute favorite on my MP3 (100 or so) at the highest quality that MP3 can offer. The rest is listened to at home on my 'real' system via CD, BD or other formats. :T

I consider portable audio to be used as a 'distraction' on the go, whereas my home system is something that I sit down, stay quiet, and listen to. :T

[PewterTA]

Stream Stream Streeaaaammmmmmm.

This is why I chose using Audiogalaxy and my phone instead of trying to keep an iPod of music. Much easier.

Only real downside is my server has to be on for me to enjoy it. So needless to say it's not on all the time...but when I know there's a chance I want to listen to it... I just make sure it's on (or use the WOL feature and wait about 4 minutes for it to power on).

Either way, Audiogalaxy streams all my lossless files, hi-res, everything and i have to say it's quality is beyond anything iPod device I've heard (course that's also phone dependant to get the best quality). But it sure is nice having everything at the tip of my fingers!

[PewterTA]

Course tonight my friend and I just did an experiment of playing iTunes plus files outputted through my system vs. playing the same files through Foobar2000 using ASIO4All. iTunes could not even come close playing the file and we could not come up with anything to make iTunes sound as good.

iTunes was on a Mac Book Pro and Foobar on Win7...

iTunes went directly into my CA 840c CDP and Foobar outputted through my Musical Fidelity V-Link. Other than that everything tested was identical...

Now I KNOW the V-Link isn't really worth the money for outputting, but it was the easiest way to get things out (and by comparison, CDs sound better played in the 840c vs through Foobar). SO I can't say the real "magic" for it sounding better was the V-link. I personally think the V-Link is the real weakest link in my system....

Anyways, I was completely surprised that we couldn't make iTunes sound great...yet so many people use it to output to their systems... Am I missing some setting or something??? I'd love to know... well my friend would really like to find out, he was sort of upset with his mac book pro.

[Dmantis]

Chris....Most pedestrian folk think even today that Bose IS high end audio!! 8O

Compared to what most people buy or own , Bose is high end. Bose is one of those companies that make people happy. I say if it makes people happy then they are doing something right. They have earned their place in the audio world. Doesn't mean everyone has to like them but at least give respect where it's due.

[Dmantis]

Good points! In the old days, we all bought the same vinyl disk - just one version - enthusiasts strived for better "reproduction", and others didn't bother. In the digital age, there are too many versions/bit rates/formats. Now we blame audible shortcomings on having the "wrong" format, or DAC. Hopefully we will go back to buying one version again - if only anyone could agree what that means digitally

I would love for the industry to offer just one version , the one that was recorded. Thats all we need. Today most of us use TB size drives and can handle the highest bit rate biggest files out there.
I have not done a side by side compare of iTunes and mastered for iTunes but I plan on doing this listening test myself. I'm a heavy user of iTunes but I don't buy all my music there. I usually buy the CD when sound quality is my priority then I rip it lossless so I can listen on all my I devices. I still spin Cd's on my critical listening as I can hear a difference between ripped and actual. When I finally hear no difference I'll purchase everything online download style. Until then I still enjoy buying CD's.

[bigburner]

We could all buy recordings on vinyl of course. They generally have less compression and therefore greater dynamic range. The vinyl record industry is greatly indebted to the iPod and its equivalents.

If only vinyl wasn't so bulky and basically... well... outdated!

Nigel.

[madmac]

We could all buy recordings on vinyl of course. They generally have less compression and therefore greater dynamic range. The vinyl record industry is greatly indebted to the iPod and its equivalents.

If only vinyl wasn't so bulky and basically... well... outdated!

Nigel.

Vinyl has less dynamic range than digital. Just sayin' !!! :W

[madmac]

Compared to what most people buy or own , Bose is high end. Bose is one of those companies that make people happy. I say if it makes people happy then they are doing something right. They have earned their place in the audio world. Doesn't mean everyone has to like them but at least give respect where it's due.

Ok I'll admit it. My first set of bought speakers were Bose 501's, circa 1976. In those days, they made decent speakers. They actually sounded very nice!. Only when I bought good modern speakers in 1994 did I realize that there was a huge, gaping hole in their midrange section!!. :W

[wkhanna]

ka clink

ka clink


FYI, the sound of my chambers being loaded.

I'll have my say shortly. :W

[madmac]

ka clink

ka clink


FYI, the sound of my chambers being loaded.

I'll have my say shortly. :W

o

don't shoot!!!.....I didn't know any better at the time and bought them used!!. I plead ignorance to the laws of audio back then!! 8O

[Dmantis]

Ok I'll admit it. My first set of bought speakers were Bose 501's, circa 1976. In those days, they made decent speakers. They actually sounded very nice!. Only when I bought good modern speakers in 1994 did I realize that there was a huge, gaping hole in their midrange section!!. :W

There is nothing wrong with striving for audio perfection on any level. When a company like Bose no longer suits that need , then yeah it's time to move on.
I say that about any speaker company for that matter. One mans trash is another mans treasure. Trash my sound harsh but to the last owner they are done with said product.

[Dmantis]

I don't think this will ever happen. As long as radio and cheap portable devices (ipods) dominate the market, there will always be mastering to make these devices sound better while making our HiFi sound worse..

When one buys a cheap portable device or listen to a generic radio , how could one expect audio perfection? What change recordings to justify these purchases? I still feel there is no reason on this planet earth that we can't get what was recorded.

I think it's time wasted changing what is. leave our music alone please.

[wkhanna]

No No, Madmac.

I'm not concerned with the 501's.

Hell, back in the 80’s if you didn’t own a set of Bose, your best friend did. They played at ear damaging levels fed by underpowered distortion laden signals in nearly every frat house and bar in America. The fact they could without self destructing IMHO has contributed greatly to their legacy.

As soon as I get a little more time, I’ll have some more to say about formats and resolution.