Is compression the Achilles heel of digital?

Mike

Mike

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Let's get this out of the way right at the outset: there are compressed sounding vinyl albums. Not a lot, but some. Period.

Now, what I've been wondering about is whether the over use and flat out abuse of compression with digital formats is the Achilles heel of digital reaching its full potential?

I think a lot of the digital vs analog debates stem from the extensive growing use of compression with digital formats.

Take for example the 50th anniversary Edition of Sgt. Peppers. The vinyl version is sublime. However, with respect to the digital version, SOME of the songs are compressed.

When you hear an uncompressed digital recording on a good DAC, it is good, damn good. Take for example, the first song on The Who's Tommy Soundtrack. Amazing.

Thoughts?


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This is the reason that I avoid many of the remastered redbook CDs in favor of the older versions. The loudness war often means compression. However, you have to listen to the each version and make your own determinations as to which version is best. I tend to prefer any remaster that included Steve Hoffman as one of the audio engineers.

Ken
 
Scared me for a moment. I thought this thread might be trying to argue uncompressed files are better sounding than files using lossless compression. :)

I put the loudness aspect into the mastering category. Poor mastering equals poor sound, at least for me. Apparently though, some like it. I don't think there is an monetary gain to create a poor recording, so somebody must think it sounds better.
 
Great topic, Mike.

Ken and Bud already pointed out the key points of the loudness war to compensate for bad playback situations e.g. in radio broadcasting or use of lossy compression formats and the mastering manipulation as to adjust and compensate for the mentioned above problems.

The core of the evil is the industry trying to fix the digital playback problem on the wrong end, i.e. by tampering with the mastering to compensate for bad playback circumstances and lossy compression. It is really odd.

Another root cause is the lack of understanding of audio digitalization in the early days, which essentially rendered the first decade of CDs pretty much unlistenable. Sound engineers were too blindly following the Fraunhofer mp3 credo of frequencies not being essential you cannot hear anyways due to overlap or human hearing limitations. Today we know it is not quite that simple.


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I think so but I think there is an even bigger monster. Judicious use of compression is IMO necessary if one is to bring his music with him. What to me is unforgivable is the abuse of Normalization. I say, don't use it at all. :(
 
When I got into broadcast engineering way beck in the 1960's, compression was a problem. Later doing classical music recordings (still before digital) compression was a problem. What digital did was to lower the cost and make it a whole lot easier to get it wrong.
 
Normalization isn't inherently bad, it can be a very useful mastering tool. Like most tools, its effectiveness depends on how it is used.
 
Following along here since depending on popularity of the music, compression seems worse. This is nothing really new and why the CD of Santana Supernatural way back in 1999 sounded terrible thru Wilson Grand Slams and Whatever was the latest Krell gear back then. Too much compression so kids with boom cars can blast it from the cheap car radios.
 
I feel the whole push on compression is to please the mass listening crowd, those with the little smart phones and ear buds and the USB connection in your cars which outnumber the small segment of "audiophile types". Compression means louder and that suits the mass crowd who really just want their music and don't care about how its complied and that suits the record labels and that equals more sells. Just a thought. .
 
Welcome to the forum Speedskater, thank you for joining.



Speedskater said:
When I got into broadcast engineering way beck in the 1960's, compression was a problem. Later doing classical music recordings (still before digital) compression was a problem. What digital did was to lower the cost and make it a whole lot easier to get it wrong.
Click to expand...
 
At rock radio stations, the program director whats the station to seem louder than the other rock stations, that meant cranking up the compression.
At the classical music station, we didn't know what to do. Listeners in car need a good deal of compression in classical music. But if we turned it up, the serious listeners at home with good equipment would complain.
 
I understand it for radio stations. But I wish they wouldn't use it to master the music on an CD or record.

Please correct me if I'm wrong but if mastered properly - doesn't the CD have a much better dynamic range possibility than a record because of technical limits of a record? If this is the case it is really sad to not use it on a CD.
 
Mike said:
Let's get this out of the way right at the outset: there are compressed sounding vinyl albums. Not a lot, but some. Period.

Now, what I've been wondering about is whether the over use and flat out abuse of compression with digital formats is the Achilles heel of digital reaching its full potential?

I think a lot of the digital vs analog debates stem from the extensive growing use of compression with digital formats.

Take for example the 50th anniversary Edition of Sgt. Peppers. The vinyl version is sublime. However, with respect to the digital version, SOME of the songs are compressed.

When you hear an uncompressed digital recording on a good DAC, it is good, damn good. Take for example, the first song on The Who's Tommy Soundtrack. Amazing.

Thoughts?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Click to expand...

I think you nailed it, Mike, pointing to compression as a large issue in the analog/digital debate. While I also like rock, my own listening is mostly classical and jazz (or avantgarde in both genres). In classical there is usually no or minimal compression, and for the most part in jazz compression is also used judiciously, if at all.

Guess what, I am a digital only guy. As you say: "When you hear an uncompressed digital recording on a good DAC, it is good, damn good."

I like great analog as well, but it's just not for me.
 
It's the over use of compression and as JackD201 points out - normalization. If the album is recorded as is and is transferred to digital without compression or normalization, we are left with a damn good album - regardless of format.

What irks me is the comparing of the vinyl to the digital, more times than not, results on the digital sounding highly compressed.

Maybe it's not the vinyl format itself that people love, but it's rather the fact that the albums on vinyl aren't always compressed and normalized.

We've all heard incredible recordings and they should sound incredible across all formats. There is no excuse for record companies to manipulate an artists hard work for asinine reasons.


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Don't lump normalization with compression, please. If all rock albums were normalized (without much compression) to average RMS -18 dB, no one would ever mention the "loudness wars" and we would have much better sounding recordings.
 
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