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Topic: Victor's plan to turn CDs into high resolution (Read 11943 times) previous topic - next topic
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Victor's plan to turn CDs into high resolution

From "What Hi-Fi?" magazine.

Victor's plan to turn CDs into high resolution threatens the entire HD music industry

http://www.whathifi.com/blog/victors-plan-...-music-industry

by     
Andrew Everard

Interesting – or rather worrying – news out of Japan that Victor Entertainment, the music division of JVC has developed a way to convert CD-quality recordings so they can be sold as HD music.
Kevin Graf :: aka Speedskater

Victor's plan to turn CDs into high resolution

Reply #1
and the proof for the superiority of these HD conversions will be brickwall limited CD releases of the same material

Victor's plan to turn CDs into high resolution

Reply #2
Let the free market decide if people want fake upsampling. My guess is these 'fakers' are doomed to stay on the shelf.

Victor's plan to turn CDs into high resolution

Reply #3
Uh...if we're taking 16/44 and doing some DSP, wouldn't it just be better to do that on playback instead of on the distribution media? I realize JVC wants to resell CDs to people again, but this is delightfully silly.
Was that a 1 or a 0?

Victor's plan to turn CDs into high resolution

Reply #4
Most of the practices applied to CD masters today would be better applied on the consumer end, like amplification until clipping distortion occurs or aggressive dynamic range compression. Until those in charge realize whwere the problem really lies nothing will improve. It's funny that certain circles tout high-res media as a salvation, when most mainstream music today has an effective dynamic range of 12 bits or less, and the only advantage of high sample rates is the accurate representation of square waves due to digital clipping.
It's only audiophile if it's inconvenient.

Victor's plan to turn CDs into high resolution

Reply #5
Are hi-rez placebophiles really interested in today's mainstream music?  My impression is that they predominantly aren't; rather, they are interested in music from previous generations, recorded to analog tape long before the hideous practice of reducing dynamic range that began in the early '90s.

Victor's plan to turn CDs into high resolution

Reply #6
I confident they will "cook the demo" by covertly introducing some mild EQ and/or other processing (that somehow never gets mentioned in the press releases) and has nothing to do with the "HI-rez" part, just to be sure the public "hears" the difference.

The real test will be the Meyer-Moran method to see if transcoding down through a fast CD recorder's A to D to A loop, carefully level matched, makes any audible difference.

Victor's plan to turn CDs into high resolution

Reply #7
Considering that hi res media that are actually recorded in hi res like SACD aren't exactly selling like hotcakes, how well do they think fake ones will do?

Victor's plan to turn CDs into high resolution

Reply #8
I think they are just doing more systematically what they have been doing before: creating fake high-res, but now they just don't feel anymore the need to hide it.

Victor's plan to turn CDs into high resolution

Reply #9
Quote
Even worse, it threatens to undermine the hi-res music concept, and bring the entire house of cards tumbling down before it has a chance to establish itself as a viable business model.

For me, this is the most interesting part of the What HiFi article.
Anything which has the potential to bring down the hi-res scam sounds like a good thing to me.

Victor's plan to turn CDs into high resolution

Reply #10
Perhaps they're introducing fake hi-res, knowing that it will be shouted down, and hoping that this will increase the demand for true hi-res.

Victor's plan to turn CDs into high resolution

Reply #11
Perhaps they're introducing fake hi-res, knowing that it will be shouted down, and hoping that this will increase the demand for true hi-res.


That smells like an expensive gambit in what has become a rather low profit business.

And even if they were trying to poison the well in order to drive water seekers towards a different one, does Victor even have a stake in "true hi-res"?
Creature of habit.

Victor's plan to turn CDs into high resolution

Reply #12
Are hi-rez placebophiles really interested in today's mainstream music?  My impression is that they predominantly aren't; rather, they are interested in music from previous generations, recorded to analog tape long before the hideous practice of reducing dynamic range that began in the early '90s.


That's a small market. They might be trying to turn the mass market on to it. And by delivering a different mix, so it certainly sounds different.
The record industry has made many attempts to sell the same recordings over and over again, so why not try once more.

Victor's plan to turn CDs into high resolution

Reply #13
From "What Hi-Fi?" magazine.

Victor's plan to turn CDs into high resolution threatens the entire HD music industry

http://www.whathifi.com/blog/victors-plan-...-music-industry

by     
Andrew Everard

Interesting – or rather worrying – news out of Japan that Victor Entertainment, the music division of JVC has developed a way to convert CD-quality recordings so they can be sold as HD music.


There is an existing technology that will in the opinion of many listeners "...Improve the quality of song recordings used for conventional CD..." in ways that can yield reliable results in a blind test. It is called remastering. This low-tech approach will work particularly well if the original release was badly mastered, hypercompressed for example, particularly the original grand master can be found and remastered with a good dollop of sanity.

;-)

Victor's plan to turn CDs into high resolution

Reply #14
Quote
True, 20kHz is beyond the limits of the hearing of almost all listeners – let's not include the fmaily pets! – but there's plenty to suggest that harmonics up in this high-frequency area can affect the way we hear what's going on in the more conventional audible band.


Hmmmmm...

But bog standard red book will record this, yes?

You don't need to record the frequencies that cause these changes, just the changes...

If of course they exist in the first place.

Victor's plan to turn CDs into high resolution

Reply #15
Quote
It's right up there with 'Colorizing' Casablanca or old Laurel and Hardy shorts, or taking clasic movies and retrofitting them with 3D.
No its not. B&W>colour and 2D>3D conversions create something that upsampled CDs lack: a noticeable difference!

Quote
Even worse, it threatens to undermine the hi-res music concept, and bring the entire house of cards tumbling down before it has a chance to establish itself as a viable business model.
I thought the iPod had already done that? A decade ago?

Cheers,
David.

Victor's plan to turn CDs into high resolution

Reply #16
[...] 2D>3D conversions create something that upsampled CDs lack: a noticeable difference!

Though too bad we let marketers to shape our language like that, in this case - "2D" films already contain most of the cues we humans use for depth perception. Also, there are more "3D" techniques than stereography - a technique which, the way it must be used with films, is quite limited and even does some cues more wrong, notably with very unnatural parallax.
(hopefully I'll live to see proper holographic video displays - they should feel kinda like a window or mirror)

Quote
Quote
Even worse, it threatens to undermine the hi-res music concept, and bring the entire house of cards tumbling down before it has a chance to establish itself as a viable business model.
I thought the iPod had already done that? A decade ago?

A bit less than a decade perhaps - a decade ago, it hardly registered: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ipod_sales_per_quarter.svg

Perhaps more telling, more illustrative of large scale habits & rejection of hi-res music concept, was the rise of p2p music sharing a decade+ ago - even if at first for playback from computers and/or burned to Red Book CD-Rs (and probably even still recorded to cassettes, at least for portable use), only later consumed often also from many different DAPs and... mobile phones (I remember some article, IIRC from ~2007, about how ~20% of European mobile subscribers uses their handsets for music listening - that alone already meant more people than all iPods ever produced).

Victor's plan to turn CDs into high resolution

Reply #17
Sorry mates, can't get the sense of those last posts. Are you telling that the average listener is not much interested in the (still to be proven) superior perceivable quality of hi-res formats (higher than 16/44.1, according to the subject) because he's got used to the poor lossy encoded music circulating in the wilderness? Right?
... I live by long distance.

Victor's plan to turn CDs into high resolution

Reply #18
I interpret it to mean that most listeners are listening on relatively low quality equipment (bud earphones, iPod docking stations, laptop speakers), so the low quality of the music is not immediately apparent.
Regards,
   Don Hills
"People hear what they see." - Doris Day

Victor's plan to turn CDs into high resolution

Reply #19
I interpret it to mean that most listeners are listening on relatively low quality equipment (bud earphones, iPod docking stations, laptop speakers), so the low quality of the music is not immediately apparent.


I take it that if they aren't willing to pay for CD quality, they won't pay more for supersized either.

Victor's plan to turn CDs into high resolution

Reply #20
Nessuno, I'm just saying that people are apparently quite happy to consume "poor" quality music - whatever the reason. Maybe it's simply a matter of "good enough" ...and "free"?

(nice avatar BTW  )

Victor's plan to turn CDs into high resolution

Reply #21
My daughter (18) and a lot of her friends listen to music on Youtube, very few of them download albums or songs from pirate sites, even though they can and are able to do that. The reason is simple - a simple google-like search gives them song they want. They even don't use sites like Grooveshark, where the quality of some music uploads is better.
And they really don't care about 24 bits, 96 kHz, analog-digital sound wars. They just want to listen to music they like.

Face it, old folks, new generations don't really care about these "improvements" - they are used to laptop speakers and cheap earbuds.
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Victor's plan to turn CDs into high resolution

Reply #22
I'm just listening to a Youtube album at the moment and I do that quite often. It's a great way to discover new albums and bands (don't need CD quality for that). When I like a CD enough, I just go and buy it physical. Sometimes, buying the stuff I hear on YT is not even possible (live performance, limited release etc.).

Victor's plan to turn CDs into high resolution

Reply #23
When I was 18 we had FM radio instead of YT and compact cassette in place of file sharing. And the SQ spread (hem... pardon EU mates ) between those media and LPs was wider than nowadays equivalents, but just then the CD started to grow unstoppably because the perceivable SQ was vastly superior than that times best to anyone's ear.

As I see it, hi-res formats are not actually making the grade because they aren't the same quality leap as CD to analog. Simple and plain.
What I fear instead, as I told other times before, is that the music business will forcefully differentiate using ad hoc mastering or worse, gambling games like the one this thread is about!
... I live by long distance.

Victor's plan to turn CDs into high resolution

Reply #24
Sorry mates, can't get the sense of those last posts.

Those two posts are now long gone*. The aftermath from them can be found in this thread split to the off-topic forum:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=98329

(*) I was able to pull this from Google's cache, however:
Quote from: extrabigmehdi link=msg=0 date=
Quote from: zima link=msg=0 date=
Perhaps more telling, more illustrative of large scale habits & rejection of hi-res music concept, was the rise of p2p music sharing a decade+ ago

Problem with p2p , is that poorly encoded mp3 are circulating, and sometimes even re-encoded.
At least on the <redacted> network.

Moderation note: TOS #9 violation corrected, user has been suspended for two days. We take this seriously, folks.

Quote from: zima link=msg=0 date=
Yes extrabigmehdi - but that's also the point, many people still don't mind such "poor"(?) quality (re)encoded files. Similar when listening music uploaded to YT.