iTunes Music Store Quality Comparison

[krazygluon]

Hey All,
Just wondering if anyone has had the luck of hearing the same song/album on CD/DVD/SACD/Whatever and on the AAC format downloaded from iTunes to give comparison between the two. I like the convenience of buying via a direct download, but the other night in the car I noticed for some reason the Gorillaz' Feel Good Inc. sounded way better coming off the radio than it usually does off my ipod w/better than the usual headphones. Is this just the lossy nature of mpeg encoding that missed something capable of coming through via FM or was it just the moment? (though it was driving alone at night which aside from the driving part is how I listen to music most of the time)

Feel free to move this if it isn't the right category...

 

[rextrade]

Quote:

Originally Posted by krazygluon Hey All, Just wondering if anyone has had the luck of hearing the same song/album on CD/DVD/SACD/Whatever and on the AAC format downloaded from iTunes to give comparison between the two. I like the convenience of buying via a direct download, but the other night in the car I noticed for some reason the Gorillaz' Feel Good Inc. sounded way better coming off the radio than it usually does off my ipod w/better than the usual headphones. Is this just the lossy nature of mpeg encoding that missed something capable of coming through via FM or was it just the moment? (though it was driving alone at night which aside from the driving part is how I listen to music most of the time) Feel free to move this if it isn't the right category...

The quality of itunes (128 kbps) is significantly and noticeably worse than a CD, let alone SACD (I'm usually a big proponent of the idea that most people that get too picky about compression are just fooling themselves, but at 128 kbps you can definitely tell a difference).

As for listening to the song on the radio, what you are probably noticing is that it is much LOUDER than normal--radio stations sqash the signal to make is sound louder (I think that's what's going on, someone here will correct me if I'm wrong), which at first listen sounds better, because louder sounds better/more exciting to the ear. In reality, you lose a lot of dynamics in that squashed signal, so it really sounds worse, but when your driving in your car and want to hear punchy music, the compression sounds better.

 

[blip]

Quote:

Originally Posted by rextrade As for listening to the song on the radio, what you are probably noticing is that it is much LOUDER than normal--radio stations sqash the signal to make is sound louder (I think that's what's going on, someone here will correct me if I'm wrong), which at first listen sounds better, because louder sounds better/more exciting to the ear. In reality, you lose a lot of dynamics in that squashed signal, so it really sounds worse, but when your driving in your car and want to hear punchy music, the compression sounds better.

Basically right. Compression (that is equalization of loud and soft dynamics) combined with playing the music "hot" (i.e. amping it way up before transmission) creates a flat but punchy sound. Since one of the peculiarities of psychoacoustics is that louder music sounds better rendered (this is how the sell Bose speakers), this creates a false sense about the quality of a radio signal. Furthermore, many songs you hear on the radio are edited specifically for the radio... sometimes with different EQ settings to push through background noise.

In addition, I've observed that car radios can sometimes sound great because all of the background noise leaves you easy to impress. So when something sounds at all good on the radio, I think you expect it to sound GREAT at home. Yet when you get home, you discover that that thing (whatever it was) that you subconsciously thought existed underneath the background noise isn't there at all.

 

[MusicJunkie]

I've found that when I download an entire album from iTunes I get low quality but when I download individual songs the quality is much better. I have set my download preferences in iTunes to wav files. When I rip a CD it takes up about 10 megs per minute of music. When I download individual songs from iTunes it also takes up about 10 megs per minute of song. When I download an entire album it takes up much less space per minute. I am crazy? Has anyone else noticed this?

MJ

 

[Jahn]

some of it is pretty good for 128, other is horrible. use the preview to get an inkling on how bad it is.

 

[Factor]

The iTunes store only carries 128 AAC. They don't offer a non-lossy format, and if they did you'd better believe they'd go with Apple Lossless over WAV. Sounds like your iTunes is decompressing the downloads to WAV once the transfer finishes, but somehow skips that step for full albums.

128 MP3 is horrid but 128 AAC is passable. It really is a much better codec. I did a faux-blind comparison between 128 and 320 AAC with two different tracks. Both times I correctly figured out which was which, but both times I was astounded at how slim the difference was. The 320 files had a very, very, very slight bit more top-end shine to them. They sounded so close that I opted to stick with 128.

 

[Twombly]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Factor They don't offer a non-lossy format, and if they did you'd better believe they'd go with Apple Lossless over WAV.

Lossless is lossless, no?

 

[SunByrne]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Twombly Lossless is lossless, no?

Yes and no. Compressed, even lossless, would be faster to download. Apple Lossless also supports all kinds of tagging, including artwork and lyrics, which aren't supported in WAV or AIFF.

 

[Jahn]

btw folks, you gotta listen to this on itunes, even a preview -

We've Only Just BegunNancy FinbergAcoustic


it doesn't sound bad at all with 128AAC!

 

[Factor]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Twombly Lossless is lossless, no?

As far as the actual audio is concerned, the uncompressed formats like WAV and AIFF and the compressed formats like Apple Lossless and FLAC should theoretically lose no quality whatsoever. What I'm saying is that if Apple does eventually decide to offer full quality songs for download, they will doubtlessly offer the files in Apple Lossless, their own proprietary, iPod-exclusive format, instead of standard WAV which is less Apple-ish and also less space-efficient. So if the iTunes store is yielding WAV files it's because they're being decompressed after the download.

 

[krazygluon]

Sounds like I'm back to buying hard-copies soon then. Can DVD-A be ripped to FLAC?

 

[Factor]

I think there are special apps that extract the 24/96 audio file from DVD-Audio. You could probably then downconvert that to 16/44, and then crunch it down to FLAC. But it would only sound as good as 16/44.