Chekhov’s Mistess

34.7 Days

Start with Miles Davis’s ‘Round Midnight round about midnight tonight and keep going until you reach the “Symphonic Elegy for String Orchestra” concluding Wozzeck and you will have listened to the contents of my iTunes through the afternoon of March 22nd.

That comes out to 34.7 days, 10,865 “items,” or 191.09 gigabytes; pick your measure. I’ve been slowly recording my CD collection for something like a year now and have finally finished (actually, I ran out of room on my hard drive, there are about 50 CDs left).

What follows are some thoughts I had (that I culled from a post I made on another site, but have since deleted):

What happens to the quality of my music – will I just unfortunately learn to accept a lower standard? I import my music in the Apple Lossless format, which I’m told is the same as CD quality yet takes up less hard-drive space. Still I’m skeptical; and what of the transport mechanism – is my computer up to the task of playing my music on my stereo (and wirelessly to boot)? Does it matter? I don’t know the answer to these questions and I’ve seen very little in the way of audiophile attention to the subject – not that I am one – because that group, the purists anyway, seem intent on bringing back the album.

I also wonder what I will end up doing with the liner notes on all my recordings. I imagine that when the idea takes hold, liner notes will be digital too and they’ll probably be a lot more interactive, contextual perhaps where you can interrupt a particular piece of music with commentary on it. I already have one CD (Anne-Sophie Mutter’s Beethoven Violin Sonatas) with an accompanying score that plays along with the music, which is very a appealing visual way of appreciating the music. It’s not something I’ve used more than a time or two, but with digital distribution that sort of thing would be more accessible and play a role in enlightening the music I think. So far you can’t download music from iTunes, or anywhere that I know of, in the lossless format.

Personally I wish you could choose on iTunes (using that brand somewhat generically) to listen to a sample once in its entirety or the 30 second snippets limitlessly. In jazz and classical where it’s impossible to judge a piece in 30 seconds. I mentioned in an earlier post an album on iTunes where Eugene Drucker has audio notes discussing Mendelssohn quartets. He says in one track “notice how the introduction erupts into the allegro vivace” and because of the 30 second sample, we just never get the eruption.

Classical music is certainly the proverbial red-headed step child of the digital music world, as in some ways it is in the music world generally these days. Track titles aren’t embedded in the CDs themselves, so iTunes pulls them from Gracenotes database. More often than not, the classical music track titles are wrong, or the composer is listed in place of the artist and numerous other errors, all of which require manually entry on my part.

Still, it all seems to be worth it. Putting all of my music at only a keystroke away makes it accessible in many ways. I listen to things that I barely dusted off before, it’s easier to sample something before committing listening time and I can create custom playlists on a grand scale, just like all those cassettes I used to put together so many years ago.

I love shuffle too. My collection spans from baroque classical music to modern classical, eastern music like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; Irish, Cuban, Portuguese and Iranian music to a lot of jazz from the 50s to 70s to whatever happens to be popular right now (not even mentioning all the children’s music we listen to these days). I’ll sometimes put the entire collection on shuffle and see what happens – the results can be astonishingly good, jumping from a Bach fugue to a piece from Coletrane’s “A love Supreme” to K.D. Lang to an Elvis (either) song and over to an aria from Tchaikovsky’s opera, Eugene Onegin and back around to Hugh Masekela or the Fugees. All improbable but interestingly frenetic combinations.

That exercise could be more interesting if the databases for music were more robust with very specific fields, so that every artists on a recording were given credit, composers were filled in for all music (they are often not for pop music), some notes were made part of the database, various dates, like recording dates, publishing dates etc. This would go along way toward developing relationships between different types of music both within and outside of genre.

So now my 900ish albums, of which maybe 10% consist of one or two songs and not the whole album, live in a happy coexistence. Every time I box up another batch of CDs I question whether I’m doing the right thing, particularly since the entire collection sits on one hard-drive, yet to be backed-up. It’s certainly one more tie to my computer, seemingly inevitably and perhaps one more thing to promote spending money, but it will certainly be easier around moving time.

comments

A bit of information for you, hope it helps

Lossless files sound absolutely 100% exactly the same as the CD, since when decoded they produce the exact same information as you originally encoded, unlike lossy files which remove data in order to lower file size drastically.

The extent to which lossy files remove data depends on the bitrate; a high bitrate will remove data that the human ear can’t hear in the first place, resulting in a lower file size than lossless encoding but for all intents and purposes the same sound quality. To find the limit at which you can perceive the differences between lossy encoding and the lossless original, you can run an ABX or double-blind test, in which you’re played a clip of a song 20-or-so times and must guess whether it’s the original version or the lossy version. If you don’t feel up to that, it might be worth knowing that 99+% of people cannot perceive the difference between ~192kbps VBR MP3s and the original recordings, even on high quality equipment; many people claim to be able to - perhaps to justify said expensive equipment - but this rarely holds up in double-blind testing.

And I would certainly agree - transferring my music collection to my computer was one of the best decisions I ever made. I dread the day I ever have to fiddle around putting CDs in trays again when I want to listen to an album

    – rob (02/17  at  10:33 PM)

Thanks, Rob, that is helpful. I use the Lossless mostly on classical and kind of in the spirit of archiving rather than anything else, although in classical music there are far more extremes and subtleties I would be afraid of losing, and those things, while not necessarily perceptible in a pepsi challenge sort of way, may change your experience with a piece of music with repeated, close listening.

I’d be interested to know if you know or know where to read more about the quality of delivery mechanisms (i.e. is a computer as good as a cd player, that is, all things being equal at the source, say lossless and cd). I see some companies are selling music “servers” of sorts, stereo receivers with a big hard drive. Is that any better than just playing on the computer? I ask because the computer is something you use anyway, while, if the same, a special receiver is probably a waste of money.

Lastly, what I’d like to see, since storage is getting cheaper, do you know if record companies are thinking about putting out any super-high-quality recordings, like SACD type of things, which I’ve read have the bandwidth (or whatever the proper term for more information) more like vinyl records?

    – Bud (02/18  at  09:34 AM)

You’ve definitely hit on something most people miss; after all, what’s the point in archiving your music in perfect quality if you’re listening to it through some £10 headphones from your onboard sound card?

That said, it’s incredibly easy to go overboard - although not as much as with standalone stereo systems, on which people spend hundreds of thousands. Buying a good quality soundcard and a good set of speakers or (preferably) headphones will be perfectly adequate for all but the most ardent of audiophiles.

I’m guessing (from your punctuation style, oddly enough) that you’re US-based, so I’ll base my quick recommendations on that.

I’d recommend the Chaintech AV-710 soundcard regardless of budget - don’t be put off by its low price tag, it’s more than capable of competing with cards ten times its price (especially those made by the abomination that is Creative).

Headphones depends largely on budget. If you’re really limited, the Sennheiser HD-201s are a mere $25 but offer fantastic quality for the price. Stepping up, the Sennheiser HD-280 Pros are $99 but worth much more - they’re excellent value. More expensive still are the Sennheiser HD-555s, which at $150 offer even more quality. That said, there are tons of great headphones from tons of brands, and you’d do well to browse The Head Room and check out a few reviews.

Whilst I’ve not seen the receivers that you mentioned, I’d steer clear. Just stick with your PC and you’ll have a system that’s easier to upgrade and probably much cheaper.

To address your last point: I’m not really sure about the worth of SACDs in terms of the higher fidelity they offer over CDs. CDs are capable of producing sounds at a sampling rate of 40Khz, far outside the human range of hearing which is below 20Hz. However, both SACDs and DVD-Audio offer 5.1 sound, which is a very cool feature that I’d personally upgrade for; YMMV.

Hope I helped

Rob

    – rob (02/19  at  09:49 PM)

Thanks, Rob, you did.

    – Bud (02/20  at  10:31 PM)

Me? I’m very pleased to see someone taking an interest in these matters. If you take a look at my blog you’ll see that I address several of these issues.

With regard to the quality though, and to one of the previous comments, lossless coding is terrific, supposing that what is compressed is the original CD data. From the size of iTune’s files I strongly suspect that they are not even close to CD quality. Lossless coding reduces file sizes by approx 50%, so a CD should still take up 300-350 meg. Is that what you’re getting - I imagine not.

- yes I know....VBR-VBR-VBR!

And as for what people can and cannot hear - surely its not hard to conceive of qualities and nuances that are perceptible without being OBVIOUSLY audible or easily distinguishable. Happily, not everything in life can yet be reduced to ones and zeros. Besides, almost all technological improvements these days - especially in the arts - are incremental. If we disregard everything that’s not easily quantifiable, we’ll be stuck with low-fi, low-res, low-fat forever....which sounds like a lot of fun?

If you think for a minute, the ONLY reason we’re being flogged this stuff is because of current/past limitations of download speed. If you’re going to archive your CD collection (I’m sorry - it’s too late in your case) why not archive the full bandwidth WAV files? Then they won’t be outdated in 6 months time.

With regard to hi-resolution downloads, keep an eye on opus1classical.com Something very interesting in the making…

    – guthrytrojan (02/21  at  07:03 PM)

I’m not so sure I agree with you on the wav vs. lossless, except for the fact that it is a format subject to not being able to be read at some point in the future - although the same can be said for CDs; run out to your local hi-fi store and try to buy an eight-track player or maybe even a cassette player.

I do agree with you on the idea of slowly lowering our standards, however, the way I understand it is that they guys who still love vinyl do so because of bandwidth - the amount of information contained in those grooves (I have to imagine this is where that perceived warmth is because even on vinyl you lose quite a bit. If we remove the medium - the CD that is - we remove the constraint that we had of fitting information onto the finite space of the disc and thus open the world up to super high-fidelity recordings + extended liner notes, scores, etc.

    – Bud (02/21  at  10:51 PM)

If you don’t think everything can be “reduced to ones and zeros”, what do you listen to your music on? Cassettes and vinyl are the only feasible analogue formats and both of them sound terrible. Sure, vinyl has more “bandwidth” but what use is it when it’s outside the realm of human hearing, as well as the fact that vinyl decreases in quality with each listen?

    – rob (02/22  at  02:18 PM)

In reply to Bud:

CD’s carry WAV files which is a well established file system, destined to continue at least until file sizes exceed several Gig - quite some way off yet. Even then, the replacement [whose name escapes me for the moment] will be backwards compatible with WAVs. They’re here to stay - at least for the medium term.

I’m afraid to say that as far as I’m concerned the vinyl route is a mighty deviation - there is no reason that I know of why far higher bandwidth should not be recorded and reproduced by digital recording technology...without the hiss, surface noise and other aforementioned distractions of vinyl.

With your suggestion that we remove the format - CD - I couldn’t agree more. And I’m in the process of organising such a distribution system for a proper, high-resolution music download service.

In answer to Rob:-

My comment that not everything can be reduced to ones and zeros, was intended in a quasi-metaphorical sense to mean that because I believe we are sensible to nuances and subtleties that are not easily quantifiable we really ought always to try to attain the highest audio standards possible instead of dumbing down to the popular common denominator. In other words, ensure that we employ as many ones and zeros as possible in the representation of our music.

THe DSD format supported by SACD carries an awful lot of information you know - I’m not relying on cassettes

GT

    – guthrytrojan (02/22  at  03:21 PM)

if you are looking for an excess of information about digital music encoding and playback, the hydrogen audio forums are a good place to start.

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php

    – andrew s. (02/23  at  09:32 AM)

I still don’t think I agree, guthry. Humans have a finite hearing range (regardless of what audiophiles will claim about “unquantifiable nuances” and other such rubbish), and your hearing will only ever deteriorate as you get older; so, a format is transparent - that is, if it and the original are indistinguishable to you - then why waste precious hard drive space with superfluous “ones and zeroes”?

Of course, what format is transparent varies from person to person, naturally. My 78 year old grandmother might be happy with 160kbps CBR MP3, I as an 18 year old might be happy with ~200kbps VBR MP3, and someone with fantastic hearing and a top notch stereo might only settle for FLAC/some other lossless codec. My point is that whilst it’s ridiculous to claim that one standard is good enough for everyone, I would very much doubt the ability of most people who claim to be able to tell the different between ~200kbps VBR MP3 and the lossless source, and the cynic in me seems to think they’re justifying their expensive purchases with hocus pocus

    – rob (02/24  at  12:49 AM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: February 16, 2006
• Filed Under:
  Music

• Comments:10
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