[BC] Cascading Algorithms

[John Buffaloe]

OK.  Let's face the facts like real men.  Nobody under 30 (with the
exception of a few MIT engineering students) gives a crap any more about
audio quality.  All of us GEB's (of which Rich Wood is the Golden Ear Lobe
winner) are dinosaurs.  Audio quality has given way to convenience in
dragging around three thousand songs data bit mashed to hell so we can have
our entire libraries of songs we're sick of anyway available to us while we
visit the terlit on our 757 from Poughdunk to Sausagelito.  It's important
that we have these devices because everyone else that has a Donna Karan suit
has one too.  The difficulty is in fitting the Blue Tooth earpiece under the
Bose noise canceling headphones so that we can actually hear the phone call
and the right channel at the same time.  That is of course if you happen to
be right eared, but that's another topic and I digress.

Look back at the efforts we used to make to have the best studios, the best
monitoring, the best home systems, the best tube amplifiers, or whatever,
and look at the modern user that just wants convenience and what they want
when and where they want it.  I had the best sounding radio station in San
Diego running uncompressed CD's through an uncompressed digital STL with
processing sans clipping.  The PD decided to run compressed live assist
automation so the jocks could take more phone calls.  There was a marked
difference (loss) in the audio quality, but I'm just another old GEB.

Today, it's about convenient gizmos.  They don't have to sound the best,
they only have to fulfill the need for instant gratification.  It ain't
about the quality of the audio folks.  If it was, manufacturers would be
touting the latest full spectrum audio linear devices and selling them by
the boodle.  Seen one lately in your local "Tweeter?"

It defies logic to me, but so does the popularity of Rap and Hip Hop.

All of this reduced data stuff is crap packaged as perfume.  And the
multitudes are shelling out for it.  Not IBOC, but iPods, Sirius, XM, cell
phone MP3 players, ad nauseum.  Fine.  That's what they want, then give it
to them then go home and hug your kids.  Maybe they'll awaken to the
swinging pendulum and demand more when they hear what good audio sounds like
in the never ending game of "gadgets."

Sorry.  I think I had one glass of wine too many.

John A. Buffaloe
Bext, Inc.
1-888-BEXTINC

-----Original Message-----
From: broadcast-bounces at radiolists.net
[mailto:broadcast-bounces at radiolists.net] On Behalf Of Kevin Tekel
Sent: Sunday, July 02, 2006 8:37 PM
To: broadcast at radiolists.net
Subject: [BC] Cascading Algorithms

Rich Wood wrote:
 > I ask "how long can you listen to CDs with good quality earbuds." The
 > answer from everyone, so far, is some variation of "I can listen for
 > hours."  The second question is "how long can you listen to your MP3
 > player with good quality earbuds.?" The last response I got was
 > "about an hour. It hurts my ears." No discussion of codecs is involved.

That's nothing.  Try asking how long they can listen to XM through
earbuds. In a noisy store when played through cheap demo speakers it
already sounds hideous.  Listening to XM in a quiet environment through
earbuds or headphones would be like torture to me, and would surely give
me a headache after only a few minutes.  Its horrendous SBR "synthetic
treble" has all the mellowness of a swarm of screeching cicadas.  And
since it also uses SBR, IBOC has this same exact problem, especially now
that most FM IBOC stations are multicasting and bitrate of their main
audio channel has been severely compromised.

Sirius may not be aural heaven either, since they're still using the
Lucent PAC codec whose use with IBOC was embarrassingly rejected by the
NRSC, but since PAC does not use "synthetic treble" I actually find Sirius
to be less painful to my ears than XM or IBOC.  Sirius also limits their
treble response to 12 kHz and blends all audio above 1.8 kHz to mono,
which helps to mask a lot of the codec artifacts.  After all, there is no
need to try to squeeze full "digital-quality" stereo audio through a codec
which just can't handle it gracefully.

Another reason why XM sounds so bad is that they are deliberately
transcoding their audio.  Last I heard, their music is stored on their
servers as 384 kbps MP2 files.  That format by itself already has plenty
of audible artifacts, and when you transcode it to ~32 kbps AACplus for
transmission over XM, it surely isn't going to sound any better!  And yet
the RIAA is still getting their knickers in a knot over the concept of XM
subscribers being able to make "CD-quality" digital recordings of the
music that comes over their favorite channels.  Add in another layer of
transcoding when the received XM audio is saved as, say, a 128 kbps MP3
file, and the result is probably so poor that it would be the aural
equivalent of what you see when you try to dub a MacroVision-protected
video tape.



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