In the meantime, I thought I would post on something simpler and easier. So it seems. That subject is stereo.
We live in an interactive age and I can more than occasionally appreciate our newfound preference for the interactivity of the internet over that of passively watching television, film or even listening to a CD or attending a concert. In each of the latter scenarios you are reduced to a passive receptacle. The internet allows you to sometimes find scores online while listening to music on iTunes and discussing things at the same time. In this set up, access to music formatted for storage on computers or iPods/phones becomes important.
The trouble is that an MP3 type of "lossy format" is rather like a low resolution JPEG image.
Instead of becoming pixilated, the sound becomes rather glassy, shallow, and harsh. In this world, it becomes absolutely pointless in having the music in stereo format. You are better off in dumping the two channel audio (ie left and right information) and reducing things down to a single channel in twice the resolution. There is another word for single channel audio and that is "mono":
Notice that in this photo, there is only a single centre speaker rather than a left and right speaker - that can be a good thing, as one quality speaker is better than two mediocre ones.
What most kids listen to these days is for all intents and purposes "mono" that sounds similar in audio quality to 1950s radio, substitute digital audio "pixilation" for analog hiss. They take it all granted because they have never known anything better. The sad reality is that it takes a very sophisticated audio set up to get real stereo—and iPods, iMacs, or any other desktop computer set ups fail to come anywhere near close to fulfilling the minimum requirements to achieve soundstaging. If you listen to an MP3 or AAC file through your iPhone or iPod, you will not get any significant spacial effect. And to produce the spacial effect, you need twice the amount of encoded data—one set of data for the left channel and another for the right channel. It is similar to achieving an extra dimension in a visual image:
Trying to achieve meaningful dimensionality with ear bud headphones or standard computer speakers is totally pointless and merely a sales pitch. So, you are, in reality, better off having iTunes downloads in higher resolution mono to reduce the harshness of the sound. That way you only need to worry about one channel of information, which is fed simultaneously to both earphones or speakers. If you have ever heard a classic EMI recording from the 1950s you can be surprised at how ambient the sound can be.
In the past, the classical music recording industry set the standards for audio quality. Many a young person was seduced into this world by the quality of spectacularly engineered recordings. It was said that if you wanted sound staging you had to listen to classical, where you could close your eyes and you could see in your mind's eye where on the stage the violins and cellos were seated. Alas, most teenagers these days wouldn't even know what stereo was, let alone sound staging, as the set-ups with which they have grown up is incapable of reproducing it. Even these supposedly "high fi" computer speakers with a nasty subwoofer that merely delivers bloated lower mid range are a complete joke:
Fortunately, this Christmas I have purchased myself a pair of Bowers and Wilkens MM-1 computer speakers. I have connected these up with my iMac. I think this is definitely the future of audio, for better and for worse. As hard drives become bigger with space increasingly being measured in terabytes, you will be able to store more music on them. Hopefully, the music will be stored in rather bigger, lossless formats that sound better. Even better, you might one day be to be able to see the lyrics (or libretto) and even the score of the music as you listen, as well as discuss the music interactively. That is all good, and probably more than compensates for the losses.
As yet things remain primitive. Yes, that's right: PRIMITIVE. You read that one correctly. Computers today are still primitive and unevolved. The present format of iTunes downloads is totally archaic and lossy. Even ten years ago it was considered primitive, and the fact these sorts of formats (MP3 or AAC) are still standard on iTunes goes to show that we are in still in the Stone Age. Even more astonishing is the iTunes still only permits downloads in AAC 256 format rather than the maximum 320 kbps format. It is like downloading an 80 kb JPEG image, when you really prefer an 8 MB RAW image. The reasons are obvious - many users would rapidly run out of hard drive space if iTunes downloads were in the audio equivalent of a RAW image format—namely Apple Lossless Format (ALAC). It would also consume a great deal of bandwidth over the iTunes website. Apple would have to go back and reformat thousands of music files into the Lossless format. An album downloaded in 24/192 Studio Master quality ALAC format can easily involve a 2 GB download. However, internet speeds are getting faster and hard drives bigger.
In time, Apple Lossless files won't look like the big disc space and bandwidth eating monsters that they appear to be today. Until that day comes, we are still in the Stone Age:
That's not all either - the standard 16-bit format of ordinary CDs (the so-called Sony-Phillips Red Book format) have significantly inferior sound quality to the LPs they were supposed to have "improved" on. To get digital audio on par with the sound of high end analog, you need to go to a higher resolution format such as SACD (Super Audio CD) or Studio Master Formats (24 bit and up to 192 kbps). The trouble is that music files in this even higher resolution format take up vastly more disc space and bandwidth, and even more so if they were ever to package the full score of the music with it. Those of us with large collections would need petabytes of hard drive space.
The B&W MM1s gives us a glimpse into a high resolution computerised musical future. These are hardly an audiophile's wet dream, but they are very good indeed for computer speakers, and a class above the vast majority of the competition—though this comes at a price. These give meaning to storing audio files in high resolution formats, though even then the sound is still more like a very sumptuous mono.
I think some people tend to get lost in all this audio talk and forget about what really matters: the music. The B&W MM1s help here, since above all, it makes concentrated computer based study of music easier as I have imported the Act III prelude to Wagner's Siegried into iTunes. You can hear more of Wagner's detailed orchestration coming through. I can now sit at my computer with the score on my lap and with the click of a mouse flick between recordings by Furtwängler, Böhm, Boulez, Keilberth, Krauss, Karajan, Thielemann, Haenchen, Swarovsky or even—gasp!— heaven forbid—Solti. More on this subject later...
Right. Enough of audio tech talk. If you want a more detailed audiophile orientated review of the MM1s, I could write that too, but I am not going to and if you were hoping to see that here, then you are reading the wrong blog. If what you really crave is perfect sound staging, perfectly crisp transients, ideal bass response then go to a live concert.
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