How music streaming is righting a wrong of the Compact Disc

[What Hi-Fi?]

As we wave goodbye to the CD format, it turns out silver discs were largely imaginary all along...

How music streaming is righting a wrong of the Compact Disc : Read more

 

[Mrmason62]

So CD is in terminal decline.
Currently CD out sells vinyl by 2 to 1.
CD does not benefit from things such as record store day to boost sales.
The industry wants to see the end of CD as vinyl makes much higher profits.
In reality a digital vinyl record is no more than a cd pressed on to vinyl. They come from the same digital master.
In the UK CD is still massively the largest physical format. Sales dwarf those of vinyl.
Please stop doing the work of big business and spreading the lies that cd is not popular in the UK.
If cd is unpopular in the UK then what does that make vinyl?
I love analogue vinyl. But digital vinyl is often a waste of money.
Prices for digital vinyl are rediculous.

 

[manicm]

I don't know what the hell the author of this piece is on about.

 

[sobercats]

Most of that is way over my head but I do know one thing to be factual. When I play the same song via my phone versus a CD, the sound quality of the CD blows the streaming version out of the water. Not even close. Like I said, I may be missing the point but for my listening pleasure, I'll take the CD all day

 

[Silsoe123]

CDs are still relatively cheap, they enable ownership, some recordings are only available on physical and personally have found them sounding consistently better with less faff than vinyl. It is no fluke they were so popular and remain so. I am looking forward to upgrading my cd player. Thanks

 

[b.roberts]

First of all, any word length (bit depth) and sampling frequency (sample rate) other than master native, if the master is digital, does absolutely nothing for fidelity. If it changes at all, it is distortion. When I see streams touting 24/96k (or even higher) when I have first hand knowledge of the actual master, it has been manipulated. Different is not necessarily better. DAT tops out at 16/48k.

Many DATs were made at 16/44.1k. Some DATs for projects beyond the 63min maximum of the DAT master tape itself were done at 16/32k! It turned slower allowing more time. Rare, but it happened.


If you record vinyl to CD, chances are you will not hear the difference. Try it.


CD music quality suffered only because of-


Analogue masters.


Analogue master tape deterioration.

Linage of converters.

Poor machine alignment.

Poor choices concerning levels during the transfer.

Over eager "mastering engineers" attempting to make it "better." (sad, that)

2nd, 3rd or 4th Gen tape being used.

Tape mislabling.


As per digital mastering-


Going outside of the native bit rate/sampling frequency does NOTHING to improve fidelity from the original master. If it sounds "better," congratulate yourself. You enjoy euphonic distortion or perhaps prefer something outside of genuine.

 

[Silsoe123]

I reckon I have heard consistent better sound from cd because it does not suffer from fluff on the needle, wear and tear of the record or stylus. That said a box fresh record would I dare say trump a cd. Hiccups mastering are upstream of all physical and digital formats.

 

[szoze.ernany]

The intellectual level of What Hi-Fi has been a terminal decline since it started. It is simply incredible that a garbage magazine like this still sells and that anyone reads these "expert" articles.

 

[schlechtj]

Whoa, 96kbps being the standard for the entire run of cds since 1982? A decade later ADAT was released with only the option for 44.1 or 48k and most early adopters of pro tools were certainly recording at these lower bit rates due to lack of processing power on computers of that era.

You mentioned the Nyquest theorem and that really means that as long as your sampling frequency is over twice the highest frequency (and as you mentioned a little give for the low pass filter slope), the resulting file will reproduce the original b waveform "perfectly" with an emphasis on PERFECT. Sessions may be recorded internally at higher but rates to accommodate for but loss in the mixing process but the final mixdown bit rate has zero effect on the 20 - 20khz spectrum the human ear can detect.

I'm a home studio musician and record all the time to 44.1k. When producers ask me for a higher sampling rate, I just convert it and they cannot tell the difference, I never get any complaints.

Cassettes really aren't making a comeback... In 2023 the total industry sales of pre-recorded tapes was under a half a million.

I find that having cd backups, perfect copies of the songs, is a good way of protecting yourself against crashes and screw ups when moving from computer to computer.

When watching movies at high definition, streaming seems to always leave banding and other compression artifacts that I wouldn't see if I used a Blu-ray. I suspiciously think that audio streaming is doing the same thing.

 

[Mrmason62]

Whoa, 96kbps being the standard for the entire run of cds since 1982? A decade later ADAT was released with only the option for 44.1 or 48k and most early adopters of pro tools were certainly recording at these lower bit rates due to lack of processing power on computers of that era.

You mentioned the Nyquest theorem and that really means that as long as your sampling frequency is over twice the highest frequency (and as you mentioned a little give for the low pass filter slope), the resulting file will reproduce the original b waveform "perfectly" with an emphasis on PERFECT. Sessions may be recorded internally at higher but rates to accommodate for but loss in the mixing process but the final mixdown bit rate has zero effect on the 20 - 20khz spectrum the human ear can detect.

I'm a home studio musician and record all the time to 44.1k. When producers ask me for a higher sampling rate, I just convert it and they cannot tell the difference, I never get any complaints.

Cassettes really aren't making a comeback... In 2023 the total industry sales of pre-recorded tapes was under a half a million.

I find that having cd backups, perfect copies of the songs, is a good way of protecting yourself against crashes and screw ups when moving from computer to computer.

When watching movies at high definition, streaming seems to always leave banding and other compression artifacts that I wouldn't see if I used a Blu-ray. I suspiciously think that audio streaming is doing the same thing.

Hires audio is basically inaudible. Its way beyond the human level of perception.
Nobody but nobody can discern the difference between 16 and 24bit sound
But you can clearly hear the difference between an analogue source and digital. They sound very different
I will always take analogue sound

 

[digloo]

This is all much ado about nothing. First, human hearing (what happens inside and behind the eardrums) degrades as we age. Second, the overall quality of what reaches our eardrums is affected by the entire signal chain, and is no better than the worst link in YOUR specific chain -- it could be the speakers or headphones or earpods or whatever; or the wires; or the quality of the DAC; or the internet speed; or the quality of the ADC; or, or, or ...

For two people with the exact same equipment listening to the exact same music, then what's going to differ the most is their ears and neurology. But the same two people will have much different listening experiences if one is in a very quiet room and the other is on a high-speed train or plane or car with the windows rolled down.

The comparable quality between an MP3 encoding vs. a WAV file is easy for most people to hear -- the MP3 sucks. The difference between a WAV file and a high-quality vinyl playback might not be as obvious, but a skilled person can still hear a difference.

Show me someone who can do an A/B test between a 44.1 and 48 kHz rendering and I'll be amazed.

Streaming services incur two main costs: bandwidth and storage. Their costs drop by using compression before storage, and then decompression at the user's end. Whatever they use may be fairly good, or it might not. But I bet if you get a hundred teens who have been using earpods or headphones since they were 10, I seriously doubt they could tell the difference between a WAV rendering or ANY compressed version of the same tracks.

My hearing is nowhere as good as when I was younger, and is fairly flat up to 4 kHz and then falls off to -50 dB at 8 kHz before it flattens out again. Each ear is slightly different. I got a pair of Nuraphones and they measure the response curves in each ear and then program an internal EQ to compensate, much like hearing aids do. Listening with them is like going from B&W to FULL COLOR! It's amazing!

My preferred music is 70's rock, which was mostly mastered to be pressed to vinyl and played over AM radio. Newer masterings make it much better, but at the end of the day, stuff recorded to analog tape is always going to sound different than stuff recorded digitally.

All of these arguments fall apart for things recorded to analog media.

For the roughly one-third of the population weaned on digital-only recordings, they're only hearing pristine sounds until they hit 20 or so, and then their ears start doing what happens to most of us, and then all bets are off.

Fortunately, I suspect most people listen to songs from our teens for most of our lives, and we're more interested in the songs than their sonic quality. Listening to a remastered digital version of the Doors or old Pink Floyd albums is a very different experience than listening to the same albums played on a cassette in your car while you're barreling down the highway with the windows open. Trust me when I say there's no way to tell the difference between an FM radio version recorded to a cassette and a 96 kHz remastered digital version in that scenario.

But most importantly, NOBODY CARES! It's the MUSIC that matters!

 

[Mrmason62]

The actual movement to get people to move from physical media to streaming has absolutely nothing to do with quality and content.
Its basically about conditioning people away from an ownership model to a renting model.
Its done in such a way that people dont even realise the difference.
The majority of people dont care about quality anymore. We live in an era where so many think that phones are hifi. They arent. They are lofi.
When it comes to video you have people spending very large amounts on 4k tv and then they stream or watch terrestrial TV.,
Thus negating the need for an expensive TV. Most dont even calibrate their panels.
We live in a world where enough people dont care about quality. Such people will have been conditioned away from owning to renting.
Theres actually a bleak future for quality.

 

[podknocker]

I'm not bothered about owning music and I don't mind 'renting' music via streaming services. More than 99% of the music I listen to online cannot be found on CD anyway. Even if it was available on CD, to own all the music I listen to would cost around £100k and where would I keep thousands of CDs? I don't understand the obsession with hoarding physical copies of music. Life's too short to be so precious about it. The problem associated with internet dropouts hasn't happened to me in years and if I couldn't stream, I would dig out one of my 250 CDs and listen to that for a while. I've always loved music, but I don't fixate about it and my life doesn't revolve around it, or depend upon it. I can double click on a track on Spotify and this playlist will continue for 16 hours and be a pleasure to listen to. Some people get a bit serious about sleeve notes and limited edition boxsets and collecting and organising etc. I think many people need to recalibrate their lives and realise what is really important. Music can heal and lift your spirits, but there are many other things to enjoy and worry about. A little perspective would be useful I think. I've sacrificed a little on sound quality for the ease of use and the access to millions of tunes. How would anyone be able to replicate a huge chunk of online music on CD or indeed vinyl? A high res streaming service should use masters of albums used for CD production. If they are bit for bit copies, then they will be identical to the CDs. A CD quality FLAC file, for example, through the same DAC will sound identical to the CD version, because it is identical. CD does sound great, but it's now into its 5th decade. All the CDs and vinyl out there will end up in a skip when you're dead and nobody will care about it. It's just 'stuff'. The delivery of music online is a fantastic invention and was inevitable and is a lot greener than making physical things and shipping them round the world. All the music on one server, cooled using solar energy, will be so much cheaper and better for the world than everyone buying CDs and vinyl and then all the shipping and distribution involved. The less material stuff we make and dispose of, the better for everyone. I'm sure most people would favour emails and not have the world return to letters and stamps etc. Technology improves and we adapt, but sadly some of us can't or won't and want the world to stand still while holding onto antiques. We have a vinyl revival. Wow! It's old technology and pointless and I will never care. I did buy a double LP of one of my favourite albums, because I know the royalties from streaming are so poor. I wanted to help the artist involved and if the album had been available on CD, I would have bought that instead. It's really weird releasing an album on a very old, worse quality format, because it's fashionable, when people would rather have a better quality version and one that's easier to use. Being a rebel, or Luddite, 'fighting the future' doesn't make sense to me. I don't understand the stubborn nature of some people and why they fear change so much. You can stick to your ancient stuff, but eventually, the world will leave you behind. The analogue and digital argument does amuse me. All music can be recorded on analogue or digital devices, but a streaming amp will contain a DAC and other circuitry in the analogue realm. Nothing is as black and white as some people suggest. My system sounds really good and I don't think it sounds digital, or analogue. How would I know the difference? The route you take to eventually vibrating air molecules in your living room can be varied, but I don't think there is a digital sound, or an analogue sound these days. People have been told there is an analogue sound and then a digital one, without being told how these things ultimately differ, even if they do and people simply believe it and then totally dismiss a digital device, because they've been convinced it's an inferior method of reproducing music. There's no real evidence for this and many people need to be more rational when considering this and not just fall for the brainwashing nonsense. I doubt anyone could tell the difference between my system and a vinyl system, apart from clicks and surface noise, which are things we should firmly avoid in a modern HIFI system. Optical formats will be around for years. The limitation when trying to establish new ones will be the wavelength of the laser and the size of the pits and bumps on the metallic layer. I know shorter wavelength lasers exist, but will they ever find a place in media players? The idea of having every Tom Cruise film on a single, multi layer disc for example, does sound appealing and it will be interesting watching how much further this laser based technology can be pushed.

 

[Richard Brand]

Here's an interesting twist. The UK-based on-line classical music store, Presto, which used to provide silver disks, now also operates an excellent internet-based service for classical music. Music can be streamed, but also can be downloaded as files. Why is this important? Well, the very word streaming denotes an internet service which prioritizes timeliness over accuracy. How does it do this? If need be, it just drops packets from the stream. With a bit of luck, the beat remains intact even if some of the music is missing.
A file download over the Internet, on the other hand, will be bit perfect. Any packets which have errors are re-transmitted until they are error free. That's how computer programs (executable files) manage to still work without additional bugs after being downloaded.
How do we know a packet of data has errors in it? Extra data is added, first with a simple parity bit so every computer word plus its parity bit has, say, an even number of bits. If one bit is wrong, it is detected. Now add a second parity bit (imagine at right angles to a 'square' set of words) and now you can detect when two bits are wrong and correct every single bit error.
CD takes this a massive step further. Instead of adding a few error detection bits, the actual content is expanded to about 8 times its size by Reed-Solomon error correction code. This can detect and correct about 4000 consecutive bit errors. Early demonstrations showed CDs playing flawlessly with an 1/8 inch hole drilled through them.
But wait, there's more! CDs don't actually have holes punched in them as the article suggests but are designed to be stamped out by record companies just like vinyl records. So the record company stamps out what it hopes will be the required number of disks. If they sell out, it can stamp out another batch, or just delete the issue from its catalogue. A much later development allowed PCs to use a laser to 'burn' pits in a blank disk, giving rise to copying at the silver disk level. Now Presto and Decca are offering to provide Decca's back catalogue through a burn-on-demand service, delivering silver disks. Brilliant!
Me? I generally buy SACDs - remember these are multi-channel megahertz recordings which Philips and Sony invented to replace CDs about 25 years ago. I stream the CD quality version to see if I like the performance before ordering the silver disk. I am not aware of any service that streams in SACD quality.
As we should all know by now, the internet is not always available.

 

[Winter]

I don't know what the hell the author of this piece is on about.

 

[Winter]

So who the the hell ifs waving cd goodbye ! Me I Would like to know what that fella was on before he wrote it .

 

[djh1697]

I had a Naim CD5 with a Flatcap, I said goodbye to this when I discovered streaming in 2007. I ripped a CD to my computer, using dbPoweramp, then played it back using LMS, into the optical in on my CD recorder, it was obvious to me, within ten minutes, that the CD was going to disappear, in favour of ripped/streamed music.

My CD collection, in the main part, is now stored on an SSD drive. I have a Roon based PC, that outputs in DSD256, feeding a Topping D90LE DAC. I have both Tidal and Qobuz subscriptions, as well as my locally stored music.

My other source is a Pink Triangle turntable, there are negligible differences, however, the PT does have a very neutral sound with lots of PRaT.

I am more than happy with my current system

 

[djh1697]

Here's an interesting twist. The UK-based on-line classical music store, Presto, which used to provide silver disks, now also operates an excellent internet-based service for classical music. Music can be streamed, but also can be downloaded as files. Why is this important? Well, the very word streaming denotes an internet service which prioritizes timeliness over accuracy. How does it do this? If need be, it just drops packets from the stream. With a bit of luck, the beat remains intact even if some of the music is missing.
A file download over the Internet, on the other hand, will be bit perfect. Any packets which have errors are re-transmitted until they are error free. That's how computer programs (executable files) manage to still work without additional bugs after being downloaded.
How do we know a packet of data has errors in it? Extra data is added, first with a simple parity bit so every computer word plus its parity bit has, say, an even number of bits. If one bit is wrong, it is detected. Now add a second parity bit (imagine at right angles to a 'square' set of words) and now you can detect when two bits are wrong and correct every single bit error.
CD takes this a massive step further. Instead of adding a few error detection bits, the actual content is expanded to about 8 times its size by Reed-Solomon error correction code. This can detect and correct about 4000 consecutive bit errors. Early demonstrations showed CDs playing flawlessly with an 1/8 inch hole drilled through them.
But wait, there's more! CDs don't actually have holes punched in them as the article suggests but are designed to be stamped out by record companies just like vinyl records. So the record company stamps out what it hopes will be the required number of disks. If they sell out, it can stamp out another batch, or just delete the issue from its catalogue. A much later development allowed PCs to use a laser to 'burn' pits in a blank disk, giving rise to copying at the silver disk level. Now Presto and Decca are offering to provide Decca's back catalogue through a burn-on-demand service, delivering silver disks. Brilliant!
Me? I generally buy SACDs - remember these are multi-channel megahertz recordings which Philips and Sony invented to replace CDs about 25 years ago. I stream the CD quality version to see if I like the performance before ordering the silver disk. I am not aware of any service that streams in SACD quality.
As we should all know by now, the internet is not always available.

SACD's are not streamed because they use the DSD64 format. Very difficult to send in "packet data". However, clever software like Roon will convert a PCM encoded signal to DSD, all the way up to DSD512, or Quad rate. I listen in DSD 256, three times the rate of an SACD. I can hear the difference. However, I would still enjoy the music if it was 44.1/16 PCM.

If you watch a film in 4k HD or 720i, it is enjoyable because of the actual content, and not the resolution of the screen.

 

[Richard Brand]

Any digital stream including DSD can be packetized and transmitted as packets over the internet, or over other packet technologies such as Ethernet. You just chop it into packet-size lengths and top and tail it with packet metadata.

If you do the maths, a 5 channel SACD contains almost 10 times as much content as the equivalent CD. Streaming services have only just caught up to CD quality. In case you think streaming is good for 4K video, look at the huge compression applied compared with the same video on a silver disk! In my limited experience the sound is much worse too.

The eyes are nowhere as good as the ears - they can only detect three colours and grey for a start, and they think a 50-Hz refresh rate delivers a solid picture. I would rather watch the same film in 4K compared to 720i in part because the sound is likely to be much better, even though the picture is very likely to have been mastered in 2K or less.

 

[Ian AV]

Any digital stream including DSD can be packetized and transmitted as packets over the internet, or over other packet technologies such as Ethernet. You just chop it into packet-size lengths and top and tail it with packet metadata.

If you do the maths, a 5 channel SACD contains almost 10 times as much content as the equivalent CD. Streaming services have only just caught up to CD quality. In case you think streaming is good for 4K video, look at the huge compression applied compared with the same video on a silver disk! In my limited experience the sound is much worse too.

The eyes are nowhere as good as the ears - they can only detect three colours and grey for a start, and they think a 50-Hz refresh rate delivers a solid picture. I would rather watch the same film in 4K compared to 720i in part because the sound is likely to be much better, even though the picture is very likely to have been mastered in 2K or less.

The eye can detect around million colours and a hundred trillion candela which is it's dynamic range. Far more data than the ears can ever process even those with golden ones at far greater frequency.

 

[Ian AV]

Whoa, 96kbps being the standard for the entire run of cds since 1982? A decade later ADAT was released with only the option for 44.1 or 48k and most early adopters of pro tools were certainly recording at these lower bit rates due to lack of processing power on computers of that era.

You mentioned the Nyquest theorem and that really means that as long as your sampling frequency is over twice the highest frequency (and as you mentioned a little give for the low pass filter slope), the resulting file will reproduce the original b waveform "perfectly" with an emphasis on PERFECT. Sessions may be recorded internally at higher but rates to accommodate for but loss in the mixing process but the final mixdown bit rate has zero effect on the 20 - 20khz spectrum the human ear can detect.

I'm a home studio musician and record all the time to 44.1k. When producers ask me for a higher sampling rate, I just convert it and they cannot tell the difference, I never get any complaints.

Cassettes really aren't making a comeback... In 2023 the total industry sales of pre-recorded tapes was under a half a million.

I find that having cd backups, perfect copies of the songs, is a good way of protecting yourself against crashes and screw ups when moving from computer to computer.

When watching movies at high definition, streaming seems to always leave banding and other compression artifacts that I wouldn't see if I used a Blu-ray. I suspiciously think that audio streaming is doing the same thing.

Agreed, movie streaming is no where near Blu-Ray quality. 4k streamed picture is roughly the same as HD Blu-Ray and HD streamed is roughly DVD quality to me.
Movie sound is diabolical, sounding highly compressed and sadly lacking in dynamics.

 

[Ian AV]

Hires audio is basically inaudible. Its way beyond the human level of perception.
Nobody but nobody can discern the difference between 16 and 24bit sound
But you can clearly hear the difference between an analogue source and digital. They sound very different
I will always take analogue sound

Yes they can, it's in the dynamics. 16 bit provides 96dBA, 24 bit provides 120+dBA. 24 bit is restricted due to the limits of the human ear and deafness. However, music is unlikely to benefit, but movies are a different matter. For example, at 16 bits, a gunshot sounds like a gunshot. At 24 bits, a gunshot is a gunshot. But it needs serious equipment to replicate it with very high power capability, which is out of reach for most.
The Skyfall scene in James Bond Skyfall is a perfect example. At our house it sounds like we are under siege ourselves. We don't just watch movies, we are part of them.

 

[Richard Brand]

The eye can detect around million colours and a hundred trillion candela which is it's dynamic range. Far more data than the ears can ever process even those with golden ones at far greater frequency.

For a good discussion of the human eye and its failings, I'd recommend Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion. The human ear has evolved as our primary warning of danger and it operates non-stop. The shape of the pinnae allows us to perceive where sounds come from in 3-D space, rather like the echo location system of bats. Ears are critical to our individual survival.

The eyes on the other hand most likely evolved to enable our ancestors to detect and pick ripe offerings in the tree canopy. They only detect colour at all near the focal point, the peripheral vision is monochrome. Our brains invent most of the 'picture' we perceive and colour it in from memory. In low light the colour sensors do not work at all and we can only see grey scale. There is a blind spot where the optic nerve penetrates the retina. These limitations are exploited in conjuring tricks and optical illusions. My favourite is a TV clip where viewers are asked to concentrate on a football and fail to see a man in a gorilla outfit walk across the scene.

One of Richard Dawkin's conclusions is that an Eye Witness is the worst type of witness because the eye/brain complex is so unreliable.

Until flat-screen TV was invented, colour TV involved a spot electron beam scanning hundreds of lines, dozens of times a second, lighting up just three types of phosphor. Yet we perceived moving pictures, in colour!

Despite these limitations, I'd rather watch an iMax film (great Australian invention) than the same thing reduced to VHS tape!

 

[Richard Brand]

The eye can detect around million colours and a hundred trillion candela which is it's dynamic range. Far more data than the ears can ever process even those with golden ones at far greater frequency.

This is a very complex subject. For what it is worth, in a well-lit scene the eye can detect brightness differences of about 100:1. It simply cannot discern details in shadows. Go into a darkened place and you will see nothing for a while. Eventually you may make out some grey-scale - reaching maximum accommodation after 30 minutes or so. A hundred trillion candela does not represent a (dynamic) range, it is a measure of luminance. The eye has an extremely non-linear response to changes in brightness - sunlit days and overcast days look much the same to us, but the difference in overall luminance is staggering.