Death of Hi Fi

[MikeHunt79]

I'm sure most of you are sick of over compressed albums, it looks like people are starting to notice...

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/17777619/the_death_of_high_fidelity

 

[Edinho]

Like the article says is the guy listening to a 128bit mp3 through his £10 hi-fi speakers really going to care?

I know a guy who listens to all his music through his monitor speakers and when I ask why doesnt he buy some kit for £100 looks at me daft.

 

[Mr_Sukebe]

It's good news that there's more press articles on it. Hopefully the industry might actually respond and improve the quality of albums.

 

[-Ad-]

It's good news that there's more press articles on it. Hopefully the industry might actually respond and improve the quality of albums.

+1

But I very much doubt it as most people who buy the albums won't be that bothered about the sound through their logitech THX ULTRA speakers or sony micro hi-fi.

It's a pity the execs are soo stupid at these companies enforcing mastering studios to crak up the volume to make tracks+albums 'more noticable'

Don't they realise that a volume knob is present in amps, mp3 players, hi-fi, and even in windows. Tried arctic monkeys first album again this weekend actually and it did sound pretty dire, flat, lifeless, and pretty much the same vollume throughout. Whatever happend to 'forte' and 'Pianissimo' ?

 

[Corasik]

I dont get why they feel the need to master the CD's up to the point of distortion, just to make it sound better for MP3 players. Surely the CD ripping software could offer a compression option to do the same thing if it truely makes it sound "better" on mp3 players, or PC speakers.

The "CD" itself should be mastered to retain as much of the detail as possible.

The article mentions how SACD and DVD-A both failed to take off, but that was no surprise to me, two incompatible formats.. Format battles kill formats. Anyway both DVD-A and SACD seemed more concerned with 5.1 mixes than a pure top quality 2 channel mix.

All we need is CD+ with 24bit, and 96k sampling, in stereo. But with current mixing they would just compress t signal into to be as loud as possible, negating all benifits of switching to a 24bit system.

If we're not carefull movies will go the same way, 2gig "Hi Definition" downloads with lower quality than the lower resolution DVD's due to gross overcompression.