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.

How Vinyl and iPods Ganged Up to Kill the Audio CD

NPR reported that CD sales tanked in 2010, particularly among younger buyers. The trend has continued until now and suggests that vinyl and iPods are sinking the audio CD into the so-called "fidelity belly," where mediocre products go to die.

[Image: Race to Obsolesence, David Lane.]

In his book Trade-Off, journalist Kevin Maney wote that a truly successful product provides either the richest user experience (fidelity) or the greatest convenience. Less successful products fall into what he labeled the fidelity belly, "the no-man's-land of consumer experience," characterized by commercial apathy, insufficient fidelity and insufficient convenience. (See diagram below right.)

Apple succeeds in the consumer computer market by providing the richest pre-sales experience in its retail stores. Dell and HP succeed by providing an ultra-convenient pre-sales experience online. Who is in the belly? Everyone else.

Sinking into the fidelity belly is essentially the fast track to obsolescence. Staying out of the belly is never assured, because customer expectations for fidelity and convenience constantly evolve.

While it may seem that the audio CD thrived for more than 20 years because of high fidelity, what it really offered over its fraternal twin on vinyl was convenience — better robustness, more portability, multi-disc changers, in-vehicle players, random/repeat play, remote control.

In the last decade the iPod arrived to match all the conveniences of the CD, adding small (and ever smaller) player size, ubiquitous portability, invisible storage, and greater (and ever greater) capacity. Nothing can match the convenience of weightless digital audio, now available in a variety of formats at both lower and higher resolution than CD quality (choice is convenient, too).

On several online forums catering to vinyl aficianados, I posed the question, "what is it about playing an LP that appeals to you?" After all, the fundamentals of record playback haven't significantly changed in 100 years. It isn't necessarily sound quality (except among self-described audiophiles). Almost unanimously, the response came back that the real appeal of vinyl stems from interaction with an LP as a satisfying physical object — large format album art, liner notes, even having to flip sides. Respondents were quite eloquent about it.

When was the last time you ever heard anyone wax rhapsodic about interacting with a CD? Has anyone ever considered a CD collectible for its nostalgia value or status as an art object? The audience for vinyl will keep it out of the belly by uniquely defining fidelity for themselves, establishing a multi-sense standard no other physical medium is likely to meet.

Thus the CD has been forced back along the convenience axis by dematerialized digital audio, forced down along the fidelity axis by vinyl, and ultimately swallowed up in the fidelity belly. It is now or will be soon become obsolete. (What to do with obsolete CDs? Here is one idea.) At least one study concluded that less than 10%  of listeners will be buying physical media in 2-4 years; that population will likely consist almost entirely of vinyl buyers, not CD buyers.

Way out in fidelity/convenience space is Maney's "fidelity mirage," a product that can deliver both super-high convenience and super-high fidelity. It is virtually impossible to do this in the commercial marketplace. Companies that attempt to reach the mirage usually fail and sink back into the belly.

But consider a high-resolution digital transfer of an LP, taken on the owner's own equipment, calibrated to his exact specifications, and restored in software to the best possible sound quality. The dematerialized result delivers super-high convenience, the original physical object retains its super-high fidelity. Is the fidelity mirage real?


            Vinyl-to-Digital Restoration #24           

Title: Social Studies

Artist: Carla Bley
Genre: Jazz
Year: 1981



Carla Bley (b. 1936) has composed and performed in a wide range of styles over her long career, including free jazz, jazz opera, political jazz with Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra, and one of most beautiful Christmas records ever. But the music that resonates most with me comes from the large ensemble with the ever-shifting lineup known as The Carla Bley Band. Social Studies is a fine example of their work. But, of all my Carla Bley LPs, I really chose to highlight this one here for its cover art still life of endangered physical media.


© 2012 Thomas G. Dennehy. All rights reserved.