RE: 'casual listening'...
I guess I am different. I often put on some music as a background when I am doing something else like cooking or reading. ...
Well, I may have exaggerated a
teeny bit for effect
, but it's true that I rarely listen to music casually. It just really draws me in if it is great music, and demands my full attention. If I do put on some music while I'm doing some mindless task around the house, it's probably something with a rhythm and a song that I'm really familiar with, so it's almost more a reminder of the tune, and the music is in my head, if that makes any sense.
...On the other hand, I've got an old DBX Dynamic Range Expander I haven't hooked up in years. Wouldn't that make a noticeable difference? (
One Google result: "For FM, tapes and LPs I think they're worthwhile. For CDs they may not be necessary." Hmm.) ...
Makes sense. FM, tapes and LPs had a 'hard limit' on the maximum volume. For FM, it would be an FCC violation - your signal would bleed into the adjacent channel. Tapes would hit a saturation limit of the magnetization level (flux density if I recall the terms correctly). And an LP was limited - if the amplitude was too high the grooves had to be spaced further and you could not get as much time recorded. And/or the stylus would jump out of the groove (or distort and wear from slamming back and forth). BTW, that kind of volume limit is referred to as 'compression', but that is different from digital compression like mp3.
CDs have enough dynamic range to avoid this. But some recordings are made that way to make the average volume higher, to make them sound 'louder' and 'better' - but that is generally more 'boring' to discriminating ears. As much as I love the music of Carlos Santana, that pop song he did drives me nuts (Supernatural) - it's basically one volume level from start to finish. A decent song otherwise, but it has me screaming "Where are the dynamics ? ? ! !"
OK, semi-interesting little sidetrack on audio volume compression. The intro to The Byrds 'Tambourine Man' is one of those super recognizable guitar sounds. It is a 12 string electric guitar, and just rings like a bell. But Roger McGuinn said that Rickenbacker really just went 'thud' when you played a note.
But the recording engineer was really afraid that the signals directly from one of these new-fangled electric guitars might over-drive and harm his expensive recording equipment. So he put a compressor on the guitar, which would limit the max volume. Now these compressors are really variable-automatic volume controls, so when the note first was struck, the volume was instantly pulled down, and as the note faded, the volume was brought up. So this made the note 'ring' longer. And they can be set to keep bringing up the volume even higher as the note fades away, making them 'ring' even longer. McGuinn like the sound so much, he had the engineer put two compressors in series, to exaggerate the effect even further. And that turned a 'thud' into a beautiful bell-like tone.
And let's not get started on the pros and
cons of Neil Young's
Pono Player--a
debate of the fidelity of digital recordings.
Well now, you can't start it, and then say 'let's not get started'!
I had heard a bit (no pun intended) about this before, but was lacking details. From those links, I see he is promoting the FLAC format used at CD rez as the minimum. That's what I use, except for some occasional stuff on a portable player.
A few years back, I bought a CD/DVD player that was capable of just about every format out there. I had some demo SACD hybrid disc, and tried to A/B the SACD versus straight CD. I couldn't be certain I heard a difference, but I kinda sorta thought the SACD had more 'life' to it. Could have been placebo effect.
But logically, I can make the case that CD quality is somewhat marginal. The 96db theoretical dynamic range is reduced in practice (you need to 'dither' the bottom few bits). The 44.1KHz sample rate puts some heavy requirements on the filters, which
might have an audible effect. So there might be something to 'higher than CD rez', if you can find the source material.
I have probably mentioned this before, but a few years back I tried to test myself by creating tracks of the same songs with various bit-compression levels to compare to the original CD quality source. I was pretty shocked that I could not easily quickly tell the difference even going down to pretty extreme compression. But I found if I tried to listen to the compressed music more than a few minutes, that I found it boring and lifeless. That makes sense, as the compression 'throws away' some of the detail in the music, to concentrate the remaining bits on what is expected to be most noticeable. So it seems very likely that this 'less noticeable' sound is what gives detail and 'life' to the music, but still leaves the music very recognizable.
It would take some time to do a full double-blind test of this, but with hard drives so cheap, the cost versus quality and flexibility to re-encode a lossless FLAC format ( ~ 1/2 the size of a full CD quality, with zero bits lost) is a no-brainer for me.
-ERD50