Neil Young on digital audio: You're doing it wrong

This article was released in the last couple of days. Notice how if you scroll down a bit to see the actual player you can see one of the tracks as being Born In The USA by Bruce Springsteen? The same thing happened a few weeks ago and Dire Straits was listed on the player's play list. Could this be a clue that high resolution music from these artists will be made available exclusively via the Pono Music store when it opens in October 2014?

You can also see Bob Dylan but Neil has already admitted that the Bob Dylan albums (or at least some of them, if not all of them) will be available through the Pono Music store.

http://mashable.com/2014/04/12/neil-young-pono-kickstarter/

 

Got rid of SACD Player and the dozen or so discs I owned, after it broke a few years ago.

No to blu-ray audio discs, prices are too crazy for me to re-buy stuff again at $20.00 a pop.

Did have Hi-Res downloads and a computer set up capable of playing back, but gave up on them also. For many various reasons.

My basic issue with SACD and Hi-Res downloads was not that there was not some advantage sound wise, but that the advantage was just not all of what I was expecting it to be, especially for the money it all cost.

I felt as if it was a niche, and I would end up with a tiny library of stuff and gradually lost interest. If everything was on SACD and it was mastered well enough, that there was no doubt it was better quality, I would have bought a new SACD player and kept with it.
I sorta felt its future was limited also.

I am thinking about getting back into "hi-res" though, just not sure. I need convincing I guess.

 

I can say that when I got into SACD shortly after it emerged it was my hope and belief that it would replace CDs. It sounded so much better.

I was reading the latest Absolute Sound - last page, interview with Jim White of Aesthetix. "I believe future music will be in three significant forms: vinyl, local storage (i.e. hard drives) and streaming. I believe that the CD and other "hard" digital formats are done."

 

For 200 bucks more, you may as well buy that and have everything that Pono doesn't offer.

 

Is exactly my story.
This

 

Hard drives (fiber channel), LTO tapes, DTF2 tapes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checksum

I suspect you and I have different experiences.

 

Guaranteed, almost none of it will be exclusive, because the record labels make that decision -- not Pono. I tend to doubt even Neil Young would tell Apple, "naaaaa, I have no interest in my own high-res albums being made available on the iTunes Music Store." Everybody's gonna have this stuff. The record labels are desperately interested in making money, and exclusive deals do not make them more money.

I think all of this is true, and I knew it in 1999 when I was at the press conference where Sony exec David Kawakami introduced SACD at CES. But I still bought four or five SACD players over the years, and still own hundreds of discs. I love the idea of the format, and a lot of the discs sound great.

I do think 80% of the differences are in the mastering and not in the high-res/high-bit-depth, but there are a lot of "it depends" in that proposition. Still, above all, I would never object to somebody proposing a higher-quality consumer format for anything, audio or video. Higher quality is always a good thing. I have some quibbles with the way Neil Young does business, but I respect him for promoting something better than crap MP3 downloads. It's more than Apple ever did, and I criticized Steve Jobs for many years for not getting on that bandwagon when he had the chance.

 

At least it's a sign that these artists are going to release their back catalogue (or some of it) in high resolution, whether it is exclusive to the Pono Music store or not.

 

Yes, I'm excited by that, too. We know that the Beatles' 2009 reissues exist as 96kHz/24-bit files, since they released them on USB. But not on download... yet.

 

Peak-limited 24/44 only...

 

Really? <in Johnny Carson's voice> I did not know that. Well, we know the 96kHz/24-bit versions exist in the EMI vaults. In fact, I seem to recall Giles Martin supervising the transfer of every scrap of Beatles tracks to 96kHz digital a few years ago when he did the Love remixes for the Vegas show. There's some dispute as to whether the mastering was done at 96kHz or not, and I've seen some arguments online about this. Pretty much all the Pro Tools plug-ins that work at 48kHz also work for 96kHz (since the mid-2000s), so I'm not sure why they wouldn't do it in high res.

 

Weren't the files on that USB device 24bit/44.1? Although it should've been 24bit/96kHz. I believe before the mastering stage the original 2-track masters were transferred flat to 24bit/192kHz. The question is whether Pono Music will be selling music at 24bit/44.1kHz or will the minimum be 24bit/96kHz? I hope it's the latter, provided they don't provide files that have been upsampled from 24/44.1 (such as The Beatles) to 24/96 or 192.

 

I seem to recall the statement from Pono is that they're going to sell whatever the record label gives them, so it's not their decision to make. In truth, I'm kind of skeptical that there's any information above 48kHz on any analogue tapes made prior to 1970 anyway, and the best S/N ratio I've ever seen on machines and tape formulations of that era is maybe 60dB on a good day. But I'm more interested in the lossless application of these new HR downloads. No question, this is a big step up from MP3s.

The story of the 2009 Beatles remasters has been told and argued many times on this site. One of the many interviews was in Sound & Vision magazine, and a more thorough one was in the UK Sound on Sound magazine:

http://www.soundandvision.com/content/inside-making-beatles-remastered-catalog

https://www.soundonsound.com/sos/oct09/articles/beatlesremasters.htm

They say the analogue Abbey Road tapes were done at 192kHz/24-bit. I think the two reasons why this was done was 1) so that any manipulation or processing was done at a higher level for theoretically "more pure" processing, and 2) so that no die hard fans could dispute that EMI did everything they could to preserve the sound quality at every stage. I certainly don't think it does any harm, but I'm kind of dubious that it really makes a difference with 50-year-old tapes.

 

iTunes turn away music if the master is anything less than 24/96 if the artist or record company want it to be promoted as "Mastered For iTunes", so it wouldn't be the first time a download music store set a standard for what is given to them by the record labels. Pono Music is all about studio master quality after all.

I hope the main reason The Beatles catalogue was backed-up at 24/192 is so to preserve these recordings. I bet these files are stored on more than one hard drive hard, just for safety.

One of the main reasons I like high resolution music is the extra stereo width a space you hear which is obviously how the analogue masters sounded. I have high resolution copies of the Dire Straits albums and the difference with the extra stereo width and space is unbelievable, especially when you then compare the same file converted down to 16/44.1 and the CD releases as well.

Although very old now, The Beatles albums that were recorded in stereo (the majority of them) have good stereo width even when listening on CD, so I can only imagine how they will sound if they were mastered and put out at 24/96. I must admit I didn't hear much difference between the 2009 CDs and the 24/44.1 versions. They were a bit too compressed as well.

All The Doors albums are available in 24/96 which were also recorded in the 1960's (up until The Soft Parade) and these are a big improvement over 16/44.1, again, with extra stereo width and space.

 

If you've never heard the actual analogue masters, how do you know for sure?

I have made actual analogue masters and transferred them to 192kHz and 96kHz digital, as well as 48kHz digital, and to me, there isn't a helluva lotta difference.

There are many here who feel, with some justification, that the mono mixes are far better all the way through Sgt. Pepper...

 

I've done this on a regular basis for many years now, and I have yet to hear any difference.

 

From an interview with Neil for Pono:

"after them" doesn't instill much hope that Pono will have any pull with the record companies. I don't see how the Pono music store will be any different than HDTracks.

 

Stereo all the way for me.

I wasn't talking about The Beatles master tapes, but there must be some reason why you get that much better wider stereo effect with more space every time you listen to analogue recorded music in high resolution. I've noticed this on virtually all high resolution releases... all coincidence? 16bit/44.1kHz is just not capable of replicating this kind of audio from analogue tapes. I was listening to the high resolution version of L.A. Woman album by The Doors earlier on in 24bit/96kHz. At the beginning of the title track you can hear a car coming from the left to the right (as if it is driving by). You really can hear it gradually getting louder and louder until it passes, a bit like if you were actually standing by the road and a loud car passes you. When listening to the CD that wide stereo range is lost. You can still here it coming from the left to the right, but you've lost that wide space which makes the car sound like it's coming from the left to the middle and past to the right a lot quicker without that slow approach.

This is not effect that has been put on during the high resolution mastering, or else that would be more than just remastering. It's just the 24/96 representation is giving you all the elements of the 2-track master. Both of these versions I compared were the original 2-track mixes by The Doors and not the 40th Anniversary remixes.

 

I said that for at least 30 years until I opened up my ears in the 1990s and started listening again to the mono Beatles mixes and realized what I was missing. All of them are good, but the truth is, they put a lot more effort into the monos. It's a very different experience. It's not all about range; it's about emotional impact, which is something beyond resolution and bit-depth.

 

I had a very similar experience just yesterday listening for the first time to Glenn Gould's rather famous recorded performances of the Goldberg Variations. It's from 1955 and mono, but it just rocks.

 

CD sales have been in decline for the past decade because more and more people are moving towards downloads and streaming. Jim White is no prophet. Anyone who is even partially paying attention could have made that statement. I stopped buying CD's years ago when, after doing several A/B comparisons, I realized 256 VBR AAC and CD sounded exactly the same to me.

 

I think the biggest issue I have, besides all the very obvious "Audiophile Warhorse Releases", is that most typical or average stuff, (Pop/rock) is not usually very well recorded. Yes some is, but I think that is more the exception than the rule.

Jazz, acoustic stuff, classical, and a few odd gems here and there are very well recorded.

I just do not see "hi-res" making "The difference", as far as it can not make the original recording go from a 5 or 6 on the quality scale to a 8 or 9 ever.

A bland, mediocre or simply average to somewhat good recording will still be the same, but with maybe some small amount of ambiance or what have you retained better.

It will not turn the vast majority of stuff into "Aja's" or "Supertramp's" is what I mean.

In the end you will still have only a slightly more accurate version of an average recording.

For showing off the warhorse's, sure it is great. But run of the mill recordings?

The couple dozen CD's I have that sound fantastic, are that way cause of what was captured originally. The original recording still makes all the difference.

Short of drastically remastering or remixing stuff, not all recordings are fantastic, and being bottlenecked by the end media. If anything it is the other way around.

 

I guess for me, and this will be a very unpopular opinion, is that it already sounds as good as I need it to. I've tried HDTracks and was completely unimpressed when I compared it to CD versions.

Have never done SACD, but simply don't care to. It's just not worth the investment for me.

 

Regarding the "death" of CD media, for the stuff I seek, it generally cannot be found in download form. Reissues of obscure 70s and 80s stuff, for example, you would never find in the iTunes store. So I suppose that if CDs are already "niche", I've been in that niche for a while now.

It probably seems unfathomable now, but a CD renaissance sometime in the future is all but guaranteed. It probably won't be hipster driven the way vinyl is today, but what comes around always goes around. There's just too many CDs out there for them all to disappear in the next 50 years.

 

Sure, we all know that. Nevertheless, I don't remember reading such a categorical statement from a manufacturer in one of the leading hifi magazines - they tend to hedge their bets in print, no matter what they may think.