There was often a rule that a recording should sound OK played in a car. But it wasn’t the default listening location. Lots of things have changed since the 70’s. Back then many people only had AM radio in the car, FM radio was just taking off. The AM radio stations used (and still do) their own compressors to shape the sound to fit the very narrow bandwidth, dynamic range, and expected listening environment. (This causes more problems, the radio station’s compressors running on top of a modern over compressed recording is not a happy result.) FM stations also compress, although not as much, for the reason that they too are looking to sound good in their expected listening environment. Indeed radio stations can be identified by a certain “sound”, which is basically their chosen compressor settings. A classical music station will have very different settings to one playing rock and roll.
The problem now is that the default listening environment is now either the car, or a cheap pair of in-ear headphones and an iPod.
The problem is that producers of popular recordings have engaged in a loudness war. The ide being to make their recording sound loudest for the same playback volume. So they compress the hell out of it. Bacially this is just stupid. So what the AM radio stations did to cope with the less than optimal transmission and listening environments, you get imposed upon you. And you can’t undo it. Once the music has been smashed like this there is no going back. The loudness wars are a quite recent thing.
Nah, just me being dopey and not thinking as I wrote. It has been slang in some areas, but not my excuse. Nice article cited. The names bring back memories, Scott Dorsey and Bill Vermillion are long time good guys.
It’s gotten to the point that even a non-audiophile like me can understand what’s going on with supercompression and why it sucks. I held out on buying an iPod for sound quality reasons. I got one as a gift and by now I guess I’m used to it. They still don’t sound very good but it’s enough that I am sure the niche market for better sounding music (whether or not it’s vinyl) is not going to go away.
The thing about an iPod is that it isn’t intrinsically a bad device. In fact they can sound very very good. The exact model matters, as they have different DACs and analog electronics, but as a device to store and replay music, they are pretty good. Where things fall down badly is in the headphones, and the expected environment. Once you have a good listening environment, and good headphones they can be improved with an external amplifier, but for most people an amp probably is a step too far. But the heaphones will cost as much as the iPod, and many people find this just too great a sticking point. With lossless compression and good headphones you are in a true high fidelity reproduction regime. Most people however use the $2 nasties that are supplied with the iPod, and listen in noisy environments. Given this you end up with the mess we have with recordings.
As an example, I have a Gen-4 iPod (so far seen no reason to upgrade, I have no need of anything except music from it) and listen with Etymotic ER-4S earphones. I also have a Headroom Total BitHead, which acts as both a USB DAC (uses a TI 2702, which is not bad) and provides a quite reasonable discrete amplifier for the headphones. It can sound so good that you forget what you are supposed to be doing. The downside is that a critical part of the success of the headphones is that they have very high noise immunity. So much so that they are dangerous to wear if you need to hear things around you. You can’t ride a bike, jog, anything in traffic at all. But in the office, on a plane, they cut enough noise out that they make for a very enjoyable experience.
By default an iPod (and iTunes) does a fair bit of processing to the music on reply. It is important to turn it all off.
Iiiinteresting. I’m overdue for new headphones, so maybe I’ll get something a bit nicer than the earbuds. Do you know how I can alter the processing settings?
You’ll get the best sound for your money with full-size open-backed headphones. Even a $70 pair will sound worlds better than cheap earbuds. The drawback is that they provide no isolation, so you need a reasonably quiet environment to listen in. Open phones are clearer than closed ones because the sound from the back of the diaphragm goes off into the room instead being trapped inside the phones and interfering with the direct sound. If you don’t have a quiet environment, you’ll have to use closed-back phones or in-ear headphones.
Basically, for good reproduction, turn the equaliser to off. Not just flat - which is the default, but off. Same in iTunes, and don’t have any default equalisation set when ripping. Best to also set your encoding rate to - at least 265kb/s AAC, and if you can, go lossless. It isn’t hard to hear the difference between the default encoding rate and 256k, and on the right music lossless is noticably better too. Although there is an argument that you learn to pick the artifacts rather than lossless being really all that much better. But considering the amount of time it takes to feed CDs to the machine, I think it is better to go lossless first time and be done. Disk is cheap.
If you want to get on the slippery slope to the dark side of headphones, you could do worse than visit www.head-fi.org. They have a welcome: “Welcome to Head-Fi - sorry about your wallet.”
I’ll revisit this when I get a new computer and set up my own iTunes, but I checked the settings on my iPod and I see the equaliser has never been turned on. Maybe that’s why it sounds better than I thought it would.
Great thread, but let’s talk to me: Joe Sixpack Listener. I listen to music on the computer or in the car. I don’t need anything fancy. But, I will admit that throwing an old record on the turntable or a cassette in the player makes me slackjawed with incredulity that we actually listened to that stuff.
What am I missing? Are my records too old or the speakers too old? What type of product should I buy to get the best bang for my buck out of my music experience?
