Spotify to offer Lossless Streaming

[mcduman]

I worked as an engineer at Philips CD Lab from 1985-1990 and I can reassure you that the 74 minutes requirement only directed the choice for the diameter of the disc (otherwise it would have been a bit smaller to only handle 60mins of audio like a C60 cassette tape). The desire to comfortably encode frequencies audible to humans was what drove the choice for bit-depth and sampling rates, with a little extra headroom for good measure. The bits/sec put on the actual disc is substantially higher due to clever techniques like interleaving data and adding redundancy checksums and such so that errors due to normal scratches can be completely eradicated.

It’s not that less is good, it’s that enough is enough. Armstrong didn’t have to shave himself the morning he stepped on the moon because we couldn’t see his stubble from earth when looking up at the moon with our naked eyes anyway...

hi philchillbill,

i remember that even sony and philips recognized the shortcomings of the cd format and went on to introduce the sacd. why do you think that happened?

anyways, i do not need to mention that i will upgrade to spotify hi-fi when it is available. i have respect for those who find happiness with 320k or lower, too.

[d6jg]

You can buy a 200 mph Ferrari, but you won’t get from London to Paris any faster than a Honda Civic.

Sorry to be pendantic but you would get there marginally faster in a Ferrari due to its faster acceleration from 0-60 and better brakes assuming that both vehicles travel at the maximum permitted speed limit.
Each time there was a speed limit change the Ferrari would gain a few milliseconds over its rival.

[Jaca]

Sorry to be pendantic but you would get there marginally faster in a Ferrari due to its faster acceleration from 0-60 and better brakes assuming that both vehicles travel at the maximum permitted speed limit.
Each time there was a speed limit change the Ferrari would gain a few milliseconds over its rival.

Also as Ferrari owner you are more likely to don't care / afford speeding tickets

[d6jg]

PS and it would be much more fun in a Ferrari

[philchillbill]

hi philchillbill,

i remember that even sony and philips recognized the shortcomings of the cd format and went on to introduce the sacd. why do you think that happened?

anyways, i do not need to mention that i will upgrade to spotify hi-fi when it is available. i have respect for those who find happiness with 320k or lower, too.

They only went on to do SACD for marketing reasons, not technical. If people will buy bottled leprechaun pee then some entrepreneur will bottle it because there are buyers for it.

I never understood the fascination with vinyl over CD. Don’t people hear the surface noise of the needle in the groove? The noise floor is abysmally high with vinyl. But the golden ears accept that as non-disturbing. Makes one wonder...

[d6jg]

Bigger / newer / faster / more…… isn’t always “better”.

You can grow a bigger tomato, but that doesn’t make it a better tomato.
You can use a newer and “technologically “ advanced HD TV antenna, but you won’t get a better HD TV picture than your grand parents 1948 TV antenna.
You can buy a 200 mph Ferrari, but you won’t get from London to Paris any faster than a Honda Civic.
You can have a 100,000 song music library, but that doesn’t make it better music than a 1,000 song library.

They only went on to do SACD for marketing reasons, not technical. If people will buy bottled leprechaun pee then some entrepreneur will bottle it because there are buyers for it.

I never understood the fascination with vinyl over CD. Don’t people hear the surface noise of the needle in the groove? The noise floor is abysmally high with vinyl. But the golden ears accept that as non-disturbing. Makes one wonder...

Careful.
We will all end up downstairs with the audiofools if we are not careful!

[slartibartfast]

They only went on to do SACD for marketing reasons, not technical. If people will buy bottled leprechaun pee then some entrepreneur will bottle it because there are buyers for it.

I never understood the fascination with vinyl over CD. Don’t people hear the surface noise of the needle in the groove? The noise floor is abysmally high with vinyl. But the golden ears accept that as non-disturbing. Makes one wonder...

They also use a different master for SACD etc to make absolutely sure you can tell the difference

Sent from my Pixel 3a using Tapatalk

[garym]

Careful.
We will all end up downstairs with the audiofools if we are not careful!

Amen!

[Grumpy Bob]

They only went on to do SACD for marketing reasons, not technical. If people will buy bottled leprechaun pee then some entrepreneur will bottle it because there are buyers for it.

I never understood the fascination with vinyl over CD. Don’t people hear the surface noise of the needle in the groove? The noise floor is abysmally high with vinyl. But the golden ears accept that as non-disturbing. Makes one wonder...

I like vinyl because of the aesthetic quality of the product, especially the artwork of the sleeve. And the fact that there's some care required to listen to them. Nowadays most LPs come with a download anyway.

And I like the rigmarole around playing the records!

Probably my views are coloured by the fact that I grew up with vinyl as the best format. When I digitised all my LPs, I found I could remember the circumstances around their purchase in just about every case. Now, some of this reflects my age and interests at the time, but it also reflects an engagement with the format that I never had with CDs.

Most music I buy is as a download, the most common physical format I buy is LP - I very rarely buy CDs these days. I have tried hi-res, but cannot perceive a difference over red book CD resolution.

And for the subject of this thread, I doubt I would go for Spotify Lossless streaming over the current format.

Robert

[pablolie]

Since it seems Kees Schouhamer himself answered some points :-D just briefly:

The bit depth and sampling rate for the CD format were never a compromise. You can mathematically prove you can *perfectly* recreate any analog signal if you sample it at twice the frequency. It's called Nyquist-Shannon. Fourier skills required. And the best golden ear human hearing is 20Hz-20kHz. So yes, 44kHz covers it. The 16 bit depth is harder to prove mathematically, but an SNR of 96dB is pretty darn awesome. It wasn't a compromise - they implemented the format when the technology was able to produce practically perfect sound, not earlier - and it was very costly at first. Lots of experts and musicians were also there to make sure the format was "perfect", Herbert von Karajan was notoriously perfectionist, for example.

And, while I know the theory, to me what matters is listening to music. I have listened to music long enough to know what sounds good or bad... to *me*, and don't need crutches. I go "this is as good as it will ever sound, and boy is the music sweet" - done.

I do recall some DDD CDs in the late 80s that sounded horribly sharp to me, but hey, I was glad to never buy vinyl again, and never looked back.

Then, very importantly, when I got my first Squeezebox (I think it was 2004 or 2005) and discovered the awesome convenience of streaming music, and merely using my high end CD player (an Accuphase) as a DAC... I spent many, many hours testing and convincing myself there was zero difference between the CD and the streamed flac. I also established the vast majority of recordings didn't even merit flac. I did rip all my jazz and classical CDs to flac no matter what, though, for archive accuracy and because yes, psychologically it mattered to me there was no loss in any way. Jazz and classical is where I really obsess over sound.

I also collected R&B and salsa and some hip hop, and for those... 320k is plenty and very often overkill. So that's how I ripped them because it made things more universal when it came to listening to music on early MP3 players that were storage constrained. A decision I have never second guessed.

I just checked my library, and I own over 4k albums (all legally too, I like to support my favorite artists or their estate). I'd guess only 30% of them are flac, and honestly I'd be surprised if even 10% truly deserve to be. And it's not because I buy a lot of crap music, but many albums from even great labels are not recorded with the obsessive, meticulous engineering that allows one to really hear differences. And yes, I do have songs where I can quickly and with 100% accuracy tell if I am listening to the CD-quality or the 320k version of it, but that's more of a party trick, it doesn't impact my enjoyment of the music at all, both sound awesome really. Now - give me 192 and I'll start to raise my eyebrows with such well-engineered tracks...

So it's not that I am not discerning, it's simply that I know when I am happy. And convenience is a HUGE factor there - it brought the CD (and its superior sound quality to boot), then the Squeezebox of course... and now Spotify, the library is unbeatable. Queue management bothers me as a purist that wants strict control, especially at home. And honestly, other than for listening at home 320k or sometimes in the office (good headphones and good DAC), even 320k is overkill. I certainly don't really need it when I am in the gym or go for a long walk... but hey it's nice to have.

Most importantly though - to each their own when it comes to their ways of enjoying music, more power to all music aficionados and their very own ways. I never tell anyone else how they should enjoy their music, but in turn I don't like to be told I should not enjoy listening to music they way I chose to. ;-)