The one part of that video that I really didn't like was it portrayed all digital recordings as being lossy compressed.
But you need to look at the signal to noise ratio, bandwidth and dynamic headroom inside any recording. Yes, an MP3 trashes any recording by cutting out actual data from what was there. But what about some of the rather good digital compression codecs that are out there.
Think of music like a large text file. You can have a printed page in front of you, and it's the exact same as having a digital replica of that page on the computer. But the digital copy I can zip (rar, lhz...) that will take that digital copy and compress it but do it so that zero loss occurred.
Now back to music. There are compression codecs that can take sound and do the same. FLAC, ALAC, APE...) that will save space over a WAV or AIFF file but still sound identical when played back.
What the video didn't bother to mention was how every recording is in fact a lossy process. Think of it. You record has background noise that is not part of the original sound produced. The tape is controlled by the amount of magnetic particles and the Inches Per Second it was recorded at. The digital recording is by the number of bits (16, 24, 32) and sample rate (44.1, 96, 192khz). all are technically loosing data, but is the data lost important or not?
I'd like to see artists start selling the 24b/96khz recordings for me in FLAC. and I would hazzard to guess it probably would have a better SNR and DH than any record pressed.
Last edited by oakvillematt; 08/04/14 08:26 PM.
