by Metal Child Media
The quality of downloading music is always questionable. Using i-Pod, i-Phone and labtop as the main sources of downloading and listening to music is popular in the student market as they often provide the main source of entertainment, both musical and visual.
There are obviously many restrictions to the sound quality due to the limitations of the equipment. I would hesitate to declare ipod, iphone and labtop are good for music. Good sound quality requires costly and very well behaved power supplies and also extremely tight regulation of performance. The chips and mother board designs of i-Pod, i-Phone, labtop, etc are extremely low rent, mass produced, densely single or multi-layer components with byzantine grounding schemes. High-interference switching creating complex noise harmonics right on the board. Furthermore, the primary power supply is usually a shoddy piece of work, much of this noise and “emptiness” will inevitably end up where you least want it because of its’ imperfect isolation. Electrically, all those chips have been reduced to extremely small sizes for the sake of convenience (portable). It is no angel, it has greatly reduced your hearing pleasure. i-Pod is obviously only a big pendrive with playback function.
A) COMPATIBILITY
If you use a less advanced device such as i-Pod for music listening, definitely you don’t need a high quality music file like what we have in a CD as it is considered redundant. i-Pod can not really play a high quality music file as it can not detect the details in music at all. Therefore, i-Pod and high quality music files are not compatible. Neither audio transducers nor power amplifiers are 100% free from distortion*, let along iPod (*meaning out of tunes, not refers to guitar distortion).
Distortion tends to increase rapidly at the lowest and highest frequencies. In order not to expose the weaknesses in i-Pod, “Top & Bottom” of the frequencies have to be cut, the middle part (mid-range)also has to be cut here and there so as to reduce to the desired file sizes. Do not forget the “Top & Bottom” frequencies are the essence of Rock and Metal.
B) GOOD QUALITY COMPRESSED FILE ?
The term loseless music file is only applicable to the low profile device, not to high end product such as Hi-Fi system. In another words, a so called highly compressed music file can only be fully “optimized” by an i-Pod without losing its quality “within the range” that an i-Pod can handle.
Using an i-Pod while jogging does not really raise a quality issue, many people tend to move between two or more places in a day, as we are not always staying at home for work reasons. It is a wonderful thing to be able to carry a good number of favourite songs in an i-Pod as WAV files. But we may also take the followings into consideration :
- Who has the time for 1,000 songs in a day ?
- Who has the time to browse or remember all the titles of the songs ?
- Who has the time to select and play their favorite songs from 1,000 songs in their i-Pod ?
- If all the 1,000 songs are not all your favorite, then why should you store them in your i-Pod ?
- If all the songs are actually your favorite, then what for you make selection before you push play ?
- If all the songs are your favorite and you don’t make selection, then go to the first question, who has time for 1,000 songs ?
Downloaded music today is all pervasive and is more heard than listened to. To acheive a quality listening to music, you need to have a clean environment for music (not in a train or bus), if you have 45-60 mins, sit properly, trying to listen and understand the concept of a full album. Who has a quality 60 mins in a day for music ? All of us.
i-Pod was never meant to be real quality of sound as Hi-Fi. Playing low-resolution tracks through an i-Pod docking station that feeds into a decent Hi-Fi system is a disaster. I dont like the output stages of the i-Pod and feels WAV files cannot rescue the poor player. All WAV tracks suffering from heavy compression.
In music, we need contrasts as contrasts bring out impact and feelings, such as soft and hard rhythms in a song. WAV file sounds fake, tight, hard and electronic. Every parts in a song (include the soft parts) have been “intensify” so that the song can deliver a fake quality sound. It is very similar to a poor quality picture or image, a designer has to use the “sharpen” effect by graphic software to highlight/ touch up in order to make it looks more contrast. If you take a closer look, you will find it looks quite fake and not natural at all.
if majority of music listeners settle for highly compressed formats of music by “intensifying” it by special effect and willing to buy it as if a high quality music file then the music producers will not waste their resourses on producing high quality recordings anymore, because it would be commercially unnecessary, even if recording engineers wanted to achieve the best they could.
After all, an MP3 or AAC file, the iTunes default format, downloaded at 128 kbps is only about 1/11 the size of a full resolution 1411 kbps of a CD track/ song, so that the quality is inevitably far inferior, information is irretrievably lost and the full dynamic range is lacking. Downloaded music files have been reprocessed to cut down details in order to fit them into an i-Pod. If a loseless music file is as good as it claimed, then sound engineers sould have thrown away their sound production systems in their recording studio. Music labels just have to produce lossless file in the recording studio will do, save time, save money. So called loseless file is actually only a marketing gimmick. May be many people can't tell or don't care about the difference anyway, but it's especially matters to serious listeners who need clean audio to “work with”.
High frquency range is irrelevant to high fidelity audio data or file, eventhough both of them are the end results that internally essential to several modern digital audio techniques. A producer or sound engineer do not have to care about if the best quality he wants to acheive is based on what type of frquency range, he would only maximize his effort for the highest quality that he could achieve, eventually how big is the file size does not seem matter to him, as long as the music files can be saved in a CD format. A good quality file has to be in big size but always not an issue for the storage in a CD format (by far the largest media).
Some music CDs tend to travel between sound systems. So I have listened to music on many different systems in my time. in fact I found that different aspects of recordings have been presented by different kinds of audio systems. When I was younger I always struggle on with acheiving a splendid isolation in players, trying to achieve some kind of audio nirvana but never quite getting there, until I decided to manage music seriously. Self-exploring different aspects in music is not a tedious task, I believe you could derive a lot of enjoyments through the journey.
