Producers howl over sound cut out by MP3 compression

Full article here

 

Interesting article. The summary of compressed file formats was good.

 

Yeah, it was interesting, but when they got to the FLAC description, they stumbled a bit by saying this:
"It reduces storage space by 30 percent to 50 percent, but without compression."
Uhm, no, there IS compression but it's lossless. Otherwise, a good article.

 

I think this has been posted here before.

FLAC favored by Grateful Dead tape traders? Huh?

 

See also: News Item: MP3 Music: Pros, Cons (storage space vs. sound quality)

 

Unfortunately, if one reads the comments in the "Soundoff" section, there's still people who are confusing *data* compression with *dynamics* compression...lol.

 

i rememeber phish tapes used to always be traded in shn (shorten) format.

 

ha, this is one of the worst articles I have ever seen. Interesting responses to this article over at HA.

 

I think those guys over at HA are overreacting a bit. The article had some inaccuracies and that's unfortunate, but the point I think was to raise awareness about the poor sound quality of this mp3 society that exists today.

The part about the brain needed more meat for that argument to be made.

 

1. I guess you mean Phish shows. (Cassette) tapes are analog. SHN is a lossless codec used on digital audio files. Cassette tapes can be digitized to a file and compressed using the SHN format.
2. SHN format is still used for older seeds. There's no reason to use it for new seeds now that FLAC is available.

 

Digital recordings of shows are still referred to as tapes in some circles (and the recorders still referred to as tapers).

 

thanks for correcting me.

;o)

 

It's great to see articles written about these compression problems.

 

They could've done it without having blatantly incorrect statements and huge misconceptions (i.e. the compression vs encoding mixup). That article is like the movie Loose Change--interesting idea, but on the wrong track, and then it destroys itself with incorrect information. Is everyone missing how absolutely wrong some of those statements are?

Furthermore, they are not catering to the audiophile group, they are catering to "normal" people (the article was in the regular newspaper). And as many (or every?) ABX tests have shown, good ol' MP3's are transparent for almost everyone.

But I've noticed that here at the SH forums, ABX testing and lossy codecs aren't well received (or well practiced), so I'll take my personal experiences with blind testing and back out of this right now

 

Ok.

 

It is inaccurate, for FLAC it says:

FLAC uses compression, it is lossless compression which means the original data can be reconstructed so that it is mathematically identical to the uncompressed source.

Also, the writer confuses compression of dynamics (to increase loudness) with data compression, and assumed from self appointed experts that all data compression is the same.

These sorts of basic errors are spread throughout the article, but the major mistake is the assertion that when it comes to listening to audio, "we don't know how the brain works." That is just rubbish, there is a whole field of psychology called psychoacoustics that has created mountains of data on this very issue.

Such a fundamental mistake should make one wary of anything that person has to say.