Can the Cloud Satisfy an Army of Musical Bit Snobs?

I am a music owner and I demand accurate sound reproduction, having converted my entire physical collection to weightless digital form, CD quality or better. But, in the words of self-described futurist Gerd Leonhold, "Access [to music] is replacing ownership, like it or not. Participate or become insignificant." Bob Lefsetz was more blunt: "Ownership is for pussies."

Cloud-based streaming services provide access to low-bit-rate compressed music, typically no higher than 128 Kbps, targeting low-fi mobile devices. Over 7% of all mobile internet traffic in North America is streaming audio.  What does the music industry think of this listener experience? Neil Young: We're in the 21st century and we have the worst sound that we've ever had. It's worse than a 78 [rpm record]." T-Bone Burnett: "A xerox of a poloroid of a photo of a painting." Lefsetz, again: "Instead of soul, we have two-dimensional garbage."

Ownership is for pussies but lossy compressed music is garbage. What is a music-owning bit snob to do, other than become insignificant?

More than 90 million CDs were purchased in the first half of 2012. Let's say an average buyer purchases one title per month. Sales figures therefore represent an army of roughly 15 million listeners who can potentially be moved from ownership to access. If we all switched over tomorrow, could some new streaming service in the Cloud duplicate the listener experience of playing the CD quality or high-res digital audio we already own? Let's run the numbers.

Storage. I'd want to upload my personal library to the cloud for streaming. Most cloud-based storage services offer 5 GB of space for free. But high-res audio is big data. My collection runs 800 GB. Assuming some room for growth, I'll need 1,000 GB (1 TB) of space. The going retail rate for disc space is roughly five cents per GB, so I can buy 1 TB for fifty bucks. Or, I can rent 1 TB from Amazon for $1,000/yr. (Say it out loud: a thousand dollars a year.) Advantage: ownership.

Content. There really is no need to have 15 million individual copies of Abbey Road (the best-selling LP of both 1969 and 2011) in the Cloud. All owners could share one cloud-based copy. Instead of storing our personal libraries, the Cloud would merely have to provide a CD-quality (or higher) digital copy of the collective holdings of 15 million listeners. Let's start with a copy of ECM 1206 from my collection. Unfortunately not available from the label, never released on CD. I'll stick with my high-res digital transfer from the out-of-print LP I bought way back. Advantage: ownership.

Network Traffic.  According to Sandvine, median monthly usage on North American fixed access networks in the first half of 2012 was 10.3 GB and mean monthly usage was 32.1 GB. Streaming CD-quality audio just two hours a day (assuming a 1.4 Mbps connection) would increase mean monthly usage by 50%. Streaming 24/96 audio for the same period (assuming a 4.6 Mbps connection) would increase that figure by almost 300%. Multiply that load by 15 million new streamers and carriers hasten their cessation of unlimited data plans. Add hordes of young people addicted to streaming — now shown to prefer CD quality audio over lossy alternatives — and the internet comes to a halt. Advantage: ownership.

Intangibles. I don't want to have to register with Facebook to listen to my music (I'm talking to you, Spotify). I will not have the experience interrupted by advertising (commercial services). I don't want promoted content inserted into every playlist I create (Pandora). Advantage: ownership.

The spirit may be willing, but the Cloud is weak. Until the issues of bandwidth and freedom of choice are addressed, I'll content myself streaming high-fidelity owned digital audio through the Fog (the wireless cloud inside my house).


             Vinyl-to-Digital Restoration #38            

Artist: Keith Jarrett

Title: Concerts (München, June 2, 1981)
Title: Concerts (Bergenz, July 28, 1981)
Genre: Solo Piano Improvisation
Year: 1981


One of the pleasures of ephemeralizing physical media to weightless digital is breaking arbitrary physical boundaries to organize the source material in personal ways. I group all my Keith Jarrett solo material by concert date, transforming this 3-LP set with a generic title into a more natural set of two specific shows. Let's see the Cloud do that.

© 2012 Thomas G. Dennehy. All rights reserved.

Mastered for Mom: The High-Resolution Audio Debate Hits Home

Rolling Stone reported that musician and studio-quality digital audio advocate Neil Young has applied for trademarks indicating he has a high-res audio streaming service in development. The inventor of a lossy compressed audio codec used his website to argue that high-res digital is a waste of bandwidth. So who gets caught in the middle of this high-fidelity debate? My mother.

Mom now has an iPod, a birthday gift from some of my siblings. And I have accepted the challenge that, by Mothers Day 2012, I will have transformed two shoeboxes of her cassette tapes into a collection of iPod-friendly digital song files. The project enables me to confront the high-res v. compressed audio debate head-on.

The tapes cut a swath through some of the easiest of Easy Listening: Michael Crawford, Vic Damone, Ferrante & Teicher, Kathy Lee Gifford. (When did KLG record and release enough material to have a 2-tape "Best of ..." collection?) Cynics or audiophiles would argue that some combination of my mother's untrained ear, her relatively low-fi playback path (iPod to JBL personal speaker) and a lack of subjective artistic merit in the material would justify a quick-and-dirty A2D transfer process. But we don't advocate quick-and-dirty at In Aurem.

Apparenly, neither does Neil Young. According to the press release, his Pono service will present "the studio quality sound that artists and producers heard when they created their original recordings." Mom's music deserves nothing less. Recording the digital archive copy of a tape is linear and real-time; recording at low bit rate saves you no time over recording at high bit rate. So why not record in high resolution? Your downstream tools in the audio clean-and-repair pipeline produce better results with more information to chew on.

Christopher "Monty" Montgomery (of Ogg Vorbis fame) would take exception to that. But all his time-worn perceptual and subjective arguments — 16-bit/48 KHz source resolution is "good enough" and compression effects are "inaudible" — can be dismissed by the fact that 24-bit/96KHz (or higher sampling rate) is the standard for digital recording. If we can accommodate the bandwidth and storage, we might as well play back the studio master that the talent approved.

Only, I don't have the bandwidth and storage in this case. I have an 8 GB iPod and a lot of material to store on it. Ulitmately, I need an iPod-compatible compressed format in which to export my 24/96 masters, striking the optimal balance of fidelity to the original and small footprint. The finalists are:

1. 256KBit/sec constant-rate Apple AAC produced from iTunes.
2. 256KBit/sec constant-rate MP3.
3. Variable bit-rate MP3 targeting "standard" quality.

Using the methodology and test set from my "Mastered for iTunes" analysis, the variable-bit-rate MP3 was proven to be closest (or near-closest) to the 24/96 master than the other two formats in all cases, and produced a signifcantly (>20%) smaller file in all cases. Results below.

(Blue text represents best result per column.)

Fidelity is always important. Compression is sometimes necessary. My approach to Mom's music is: 1) record in 24/96; 2) process in 32-bit floating-point; and 3) export tracks to "-V 2" variable-bit-rate MP3 files. The results so far are proving it was the correct choice. See you on Mothers Day.


            Analog-to-Digital Restoration #27           

Artist: Frank Sinatra

Title: Point of No Return
Genre: Vocal
Year: 1951



As they used to sing on Sesame Street, "one of these things is not like the others." Standing apart from the Easy Listening titles in my mother's shoeboxes is this Sinatra collection of brooding ballads. I may keep a high-res copy for myself; a little something, you know, for the effort.

© 2012 Thomas G. Dennehy. All rights reserved.

All Bits are Significant; Some are More Significant Than Others

Neil Young told MTV News that listeners of MP3 audio hear only "5 percent" of the data in an original recording. He continued: "We're in the 21st century and we have the worst sound that we've ever had. It's worse than a 78 [rpm record]."

The math is solid. Looking at raw numbers, 24-bit/96KHz LPCM sound has 18x the bit rate of a 256K MP3. Invert that, and you get an MP3 worth roughly 5% of the original.

[Image credit: ~4ntigravity.]



But is bit rate alone a good relative measure? I'd like to convince you that it is not. Sample size is key.

In any discussion of bit rates, a chart like this is employed at some point. I'm guilty of using it myself. The trouble is, if you're trying to be more specific in making format comparisons than simply 'more is better,' reducing the argument to numeric multipliers is simplistic. All bits are significant; some are more significant than others.

Information increases exponentially with bit width.

Information is a measure of decrease in uncertainty. Saying that a sound sample can be encoded in N bits implies that N yes/no questions must be answered to resolve the uncertainty of its actual value. The maximal uncertainty to resolve (and hence potential information content) grows exponentially as sample size N increases.

As Carl Sagan said, not all bits have equal value. The greatest uncertainty is  removed by question 1, or the most significant bit (MSB), so this bit has the highest information value. The smallest uncertainty is removed by question N, or the least significant bit (LSB), so this bit has the lowest information value. Paradoxically, answering the questions becomes increasingly harder as you progress from MSB to LSB due to greater detail being supplied, i.e. the more sample bits you want, the more difficult they become to obtain.

In contrast, information content grows linearly with sampling rate. Doubling your rate produces twice as much information. Tripling the rate triples information, and so on.

Thus information contributed by sample size and sampling rate increase on different scales. While 24 16-bit samples and 16 24-bit samples have the same bit total, the larger samples took more effort to obtain and are more valuable bit-for-bit. I previously said you should seek and preserve maximum bits in the vinyl-to-digital transfer process. What I really meant was, seek and preserve information value.

Choose bigger samples over higher sampling rate if you can't maximize both.

              Vinyl-to-Digital Restoration #12              

Title: Live Rust
Artist: Neil Young & Crazy Horse
Genre: Rock
Year: 1979



Music buyers who only know an industry dominated by iTunes can't imagine a time when you needed to buy an entire double LP set just to get the one or two tracks you really wanted. The most significant bits for me on this title are from "Powderfinger" and "Like a Hurricane." Well worth the effort to obtain.

© 2012 Thomas G. Dennehy. All rights reserved.