Just read an article in the german SPIEGEL ONLINE magazin about the degeneration of music.

The author, editor of a renowned hi-fi music journal called "stereoplay", assumed and tested (not scientifically), that listening to psychoacustically compressed music could be more exhausing and stressing than listening to VINYL.
His thesis: Maybe that is because the brain has to supplement the "hidden" and missing signals of audio music.

What do you think about that? Any experiences?

In terms of me, I might agree with that because it's difficult for me to concentrate on "computer music" (but to be honest I guess it's just ME!).


JD

>here< is the article (in german)

Sounds like typical "audiophile" tripe. If he can't demonstrate it in a blind test, he's just throwing out conjecture. He has to demonstrate there is a real effect before he can realistically start guessing about the cause. It's like saying "I think the flying pigs are caused by rising thermal currents."

I listen to my Karma for several hours each day and find it no more or less exhausting than when I listened to CDs. On the other hand, music with a compressed dynamic range is fatiguing, I think.

The missing signals is a classic anxiety with newbies to psychoacoustics. I've seen some people use MPC --insane because it will preserve inaudible signals that are 'important' to their listening pleasure.

There is a point there...
Some years ago, after CDs have just been released, there was an interview with somebody who stated that vinyl has a warmer sound. Basically, the high and low tones aren't as clear as on CD and therefore only a narrow range of frequencies can be perceived. He compared the vinyl's frequency range to the human voice frequency range and noticed that they were pretty similar. The idea is that the brain feels well when listening to frequencies which it knows from the past (voice and nature sounds); deep bass or high frequencies aren't so common in the nature (you don't hear a 15 KHz tone in the forest for example) and therefore it reacts stressed.

Edit: He also admitted that vinyl doesn't sound as close to the original, as CDs do.

Just the audiophiles craptalk they offer from year to year.

Give him a vinyl and a digitally recorded, compressed file of that vinyl and perform a blind listening test: He won't be able to distinguish between both.

He'll probably tell you its because of the asteroids, bad karma, for whatever reason...

For one, vinyl is analog, and our ear is analog. Some people (e.g my guitar teacher) can distinguish a vinyl/tape (analog) to digital CD standard (not sure about higher sampling rate like DVD-Audios or whatever)

Maybe it's the analog that makes it's more natural, who knows

The output of a CD player is analog too, so I don't see the point.
Internally, a CD player is digital, not our ear, but internally, a turntable cartridge is electrical, not our ear.
You may argue that the internal ear converts the audio to electric pulses, but I could answer that these electric pulses are digital, but all this is really meaningless for the present discussion.



Of course, a vinyl has clicks and a cassette tape has hum, it is very easy to distinguish them from a CD.
The point would be to distinguish a vinyl from a CD copy of it. I've already tried (at 48000 Hz 16 bits) and failed ( see http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....=ST&f=21&t=7953 ).

Since you are new in the forum, it is normal that you are not familiar with the rules. Please, read carefully the article 8 of the Terms Of Service. In this discussion board, only differences proven by a scientifically setup blind listening test are taken into account. So your statement about your guitar teacher, (if he meant to distinguish a professional analog tape without hum not wow and flutter from a CD, or a CD copy of a vinyl or tape) goes against the rules, because the listening test is not detailed as being double blind etc.

Also, the myth of "missing" parts in the digital signal comes from a misunderstanding of the Fourier Theory. People argue that digital doesn't record between the samples. They forget that the ear doesn't listen between the samples either. Often people argue that a 10 kHz sine wave can't be distinguished from a square one on a CD. This is also the case on vinyl, cassette tape, or even real acoustic generation to our ears, because of bandwidth limitations.

Oh wait ! It certainly comes from that logologie guru : http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=5014

stereoplay, audio & co. are not a shadow of a touch of a reference. In every magazine there should be at least one article complaining about the loudness and clipression of modern CDs (according to the importance of this issue). The companies control them, so they say "Wow, this SACD sounds so much better than the CD version." (It may do, but because of better mixing/mastering.) The only magazine to trust is Stiftung Warentest.
After all, in my opinion, the whole lossy data reduction issue is irrelevant, compared to the loudness war.

As per the whole "lossy is exhausting" bit, I don't buy it. So, music compressed with something like 256kbps AAC or MPC --insane is supposedly more "exhausting" to listen to than a hissy analog cassette with a 60dB SNR or a crackly, rumbling LP record? Please.

Next they'll be telling us that those awful lossy-compressed DVD's (MPEG-2) are exhausting to watch as well and that we should watch superior analog VHS instead

The subject can be compared to moving picture frame rates, if you use a too low frame rate for movies your eye does get exhausted & the video becomes unpleasing, if compressed digital audio was the same case you could easliy ABX it just like you could a clip at 10 fps from 25 fps clip.

By analogy, then, viewing lossy JPEGs would lead to eye strain and - who knows? - eventual blindness, perhaps.

People really ought to know better, what with their years of everyday experience with all types of audio and video codecs. It's really quite amazing how these nonsensical statements gain any currency whatsoever. But of course I have to remind myself that the vast majority of the public has no problems with compressed audio and/or video. They quite like it, in fact.

No, it's that so-called "educated" wacko "audiophile" minority (a very whiny, albeit LOUD minority) who will jump all over the most blatantly stupid - not to mention unsubstantiated - statements. You know of whom I'm speaking.

I completely agree that maximized mastering is the truly exhausting culprit. I'll take a properly encoded 192 kbps mp3 or an MD recording of a well-mastered recording that actually contains dynamic range over a maxed out CD (or SACD or DVD-A). I know which sounds better here, and, in this scenario, it doesn't take much to tell.

It's also funny how so many of the most ludicrous audiophile forums (the ones who dismiss all digital, "pry my vinyl from my cold dead hands." etc.) seem to see no contradiction in enthusiastically embracing DVD - compressed video, compressed audio, and all.

Right on!

Rainer.

Lots of audiophiles are eager to say that digital sources in general are "harsh" compared to analog.

Perhaps this fellow is just straining to hear artifacts and tiring that way. A kind of expectation bias.

I keep having to say this;

but isn't it strange that the 'industry', while whinging and wringing it's hands about 'illegal' downloading and file-swapping, makes it's 'product' so amenable to lossy-compression with this dynamic "clipression"?

R.

I don't understand what's so "strange" with the above statement. Does it state how much compression he's talking about? I mean just listen to 96kbps, mp3-file in decent cans. Of course it's fatiguing...what's so strange? (I'm not talking about heavily compressed CDs, which as someone stated are fatiguing anyway)...

I agree with you on the result, but one should not forget that you need *exact* value for each sample to be in the Fourier model. Missing parts is not a myth (even considering 20kHz as limit upper frequency). The point is that you (at least I) won't hear the difference.

What I'm saying is that many/most CD releases are now so heavily compressed/clipped (shit sounding) that they sound no worse encoded via MP3/WMA, whatever, at 128KBs or less.

So why should anyone want to buy the CD if thay can get the same sound in few MB's of file-transfer? The illegible liner-notes?

Properly done transfers, using even RedBook CD's limited resolution cannot be 'transparently' compressed at such bit-rates

I think CD as a hi-fi 'music-carrier' is dead anyway, by order of the corperations, so this is all moot anyway,

Rainer.

Hm... as far as I understood the claim was that psychoaccustically compressed music is generally exhausting, not specifically exhausting for the ears!?

Unfortunately I did not read the article, but the topic posted also does not claim that the author of Stereoplay claimed to distinguish compressed songs and uncompressed ones.

Can anyone explain what the psychoaccustic models are exactly about?

Is the ear not able to perceive the "missing" sounds, or is it able to catch everything?

Is the brain able to "calculate" all perceived data? Does it add "missing" parts (like it does when you couldn't understand what a person said, but after some seconds could make up the spoken sentence correctly anyway), does it work by interpolating?

If the first is true, then the ear didn't get the missing sounds anyway and the brain wont be working any harder.

If the second is true, then at least it does sound quite logical to me that the added (unconscious!) brainwork can be exhausting.

All in all I hardly expect those psychoaccustics to work for all people equally well, and maybe even more important, all those ABX stuff tests are done consciously, while most of the brain/body (including ears) works unconsciously. At least I have never been able to consciously turn off my ears (to even only specific sounds).

Consider how certain sounds evoke mood and 'visions'. If all this subconcious stuff really happens then wouldn't lossless produce a different mood than lossy ? It really should but in practice it just doesn't happen with me. Sure there is a slight warm fuzzy feeling but that's because i now what's playing. The mood stays the same.

http://www.mp3-tech.org/
-> MP3
-> Overview of the MP3 techniques

Note: encoders like mpc, mp3, Vorbis, aac and the likes DO NOT REMOVE PARTS OF THE SIGNAL (except the lowpass/highpass). Instead they are introducing quantization noise.
Taking this into consideration, the brain does not have to "reconstruct missing parts".

Really ? The artifacts of clipping, dynamics compression and lossy data reduction are all very different. If I take a clipressed recording (general modern clipression amount, wavegain values of about -9dB) and make a 128kbps mp3, it still sounds worse. But I think "It's already shit, so it doesn't matter at all." In general, I'd say 128kbps mp3 is about as annoying as the clipression.

I find it much less annoying ! It seems it is the case for other people too. Lame -V5 --athaa-sensitivity 1 got 4.2 in Roberto's 128 kbps test, with the error bar being completely above the 4.0 mark, which stands for "perceptible, but not annoying". Clipression, on the other hand, is annoying.

Well, are there any objective ways of measuring the annoyingness of clipression and/or data reduction, except the opinion of the majority ?
I've seen dynamically compressed CDs with album gains of -9dB or so, but without clipping, and they still sounded good, "not annoying", for me.