Not that all audio experts will agree with me. Not that many people will have any idea what I'm talking about.
You see there's a streaming audio revolution. The bitch twenty years ago was about the sound quality of MP3s. They were compressed, data was thrown away, they sounded inherently inferior...mostly to the people who made the music and those who were anti-internet, but as for the public...MP3s sounded just fine, especially since their playback equipment was so primitive, so limited.
Apple used AAC, a different codec, and ultimately bumped everything from 128 to 256 and...it was hard to find any complaints.
But there still were some. From the same anti-streaming audio, pro-CD people on the creator side, but they'd never read Clayton Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma," which states that disruption comes from outside the box, away from the mainstream, and at first it's cheap and of poor quality and then it gets better and it ultimately displaces the status quo. And now we have CD quality streaming, even better than that, we've now got 192kHz, assuming you have the DAC to decode it, which few do. But at least Apple can say they're offering this quality, something Amazon offered already, and unlike Apple's tracks you don't have to change any settings to listen in higher resolution, but with both you need a DAC to listen at 192kHz.
Now if you're into headphones, you know they sound much better with amplification. But the truth is most people today are listening on AirPods, they're the status symbol Sennheiser and its brethren used to be. But the truth is Sennheiser sold its headphone division this year, it can't keep up, what the public demands is the opposite of what the company specializes in. The public wants cheap and wireless, and certainly doesn't want to pay much for audio quality, which you can't really hear on cheap headphones anyway. Furthermore, the standard is now Bluetooth, which is inherently substandard. You might think you want Bluetooth, but this is the selling point of Sonos, transmission in high quality sound up to 24 bit/48kHz, but not yet 24 bit/192kHz. Then again, Sonos has even bowed to the crowd and now allows Bluetooth and even AirPlay on its recent portable products like the Move, and the astounding Roam. But do you want to play $169 for a tiny portable speaker? You will if you hear it, it far outstrips the quality of comparable products, then again many see this as too high a price.
So there's been a lot of noise re the Apple lossless products. Unfortunately it's been trumped by the botched launch of its Atmos remixes, not that the final chapter has been written, then again quad and surround never caught fire, what you've got is cool technology that most people don't need, like lossless audio, especially at 192kHz.
Now the truth is my iMac supports 192kHz digital audio, but you have to have a TOSLINK optical cable to hear it, and I don't, have the cable that is. But if I did, I could listen to Amazon Music at 192.
So today I've been playing the music of an act I wanted to write about last night and then I shifted to something else and for some reason I thought about quality and that's when I saw the Cypher Labs Theorem 720 DAC that the company sent me when I had no real use for it (although there is an amplifier in the unit too, but I'd been using the ALO International for that) sitting atop the box for my Sennheiser HD800 headphones. I decided to check it out.
You've got to follow the instructions with electronic equipment, it's easy to blow stuff up, I've done it. Not that it's hard, but not that the instructions are that good. And ultimately I figured it out. But then I wondered if the International would be just as good, but my research told me the Theorem would be better re the DAC, so...
Now superior sound requires superior equipment to hear it. So I plugged in a pair of $700 Audeze headphones, but the sound was too bright, there really wasn't enough power to drive them properly, so then I plugged in my Sennheiser HD800s, for years considered the absolute best headphones, with a price tag to match, but there wasn't enough power to drive them to a reasonable loudness. So then I went into the house and got my go-to headphones, Sennheiser HD 595s, which were in the neighborhood of $200+ fifteen years ago, not that I paid for any of these pairs. And I plugged them in and...
The truth is headphones are not a speaker experience, you get clarity but you don't get the bottom, but...
Everything worked swimmingly on Amazon Music, but it switches automatically.
So I did the research on Apple Music and found I had to go into the settings on my iPhone, where I had three options:
"High Quality AAC 256kbps"
"Lossless ALAC up to 24 bit/48kHz"
"High-Resolution Lossless ALAC up to 24 bit/192kHz"
And then I started listening. To James Taylor's "Greatest Hits"...like I said, quiet works better on headphones. And the songs were playing while I was researching online and then I was stopped in my tracks by the sound, it was so much more clear and present than what I was used to, on a track that's far from my favorite, "You've Got A Friend."
Now the truth is that was on Amazon Music HD, but I immediately switched to Apple Lossless and heard the same sounds and now I got excited.
I mean it used to be different, we wanted to get closer to the music, hear things nobody else could. I remember listening to "Strawberry Fields Forever" via headphones and hearing "I'm very cold" at the end, a year and a half later they said it was "I buried Paul," but no one talked about these words at all before that point, because almost no one heard them!
Now at first I thought Amazon Music HD sounded a bit better than Apple Lossless, but let's leave that for another day, at least I was now listening to both in 192, and I hadn't been this close to the music in eons.
Now the truth is I love James, but I was not in the mood for his music, so I switched to Led Zeppelin and I started with "Physical Graffiti" but then I wanted something simpler, a bit airier, I went back to the first album, and it was "Dazed and Confused" that mesmerized me. It was John Paul Jones's bass. It was no longer a sound, it was an INSTRUMENT! Instead of narrow, the sound was broad. And I kept switching between the three sound choice qualities. And honestly, for most people 256 was plenty good, but if you have superior equipment and care, the 48kHz lossless was definitely superior, and then at 192 it was not only John Paul Jones's bass, but Bonzo's cymbals at the beginning of "Good Times Bad Times," he's been dead for forty years, but I could see him in my mind's eye sitting behind the kit hitting the cymbals and then a wooden block or cowbell softly and suddenly I was not listening to the music, I was IN IT!
And the fatness of Jimmy's guitar, the slight distortion. WHEW!!
And the more I listened, the more I was into it.
Now my experiment had told me I could hear the difference between 48 and 192, but I know audio engineers oftentimes say no so I started researching online and almost instantly I read the words of an engineer who said he couldn't hear the difference on each and every track/instrument, but when it was all mixed together, 192 was more open. EXACTLY!
So, the truth is this is an argument between very few, and there will never be a definitive conclusion, because we can't measure people's hearing, can't get insight statistically into their brains.
But the listening experience at this audio quality is definitely different.
I mean it's Saturday and I've spent all afternoon listening to music, getting closer. And not only is the experience out of date, but so is the music, because now most music is made on the cheap, it's made to be disposable, and in any event it's compressed in mastering to jump out at you losing all subtlety in the process. Ever notice your old vinyl is so much quieter than your CDs?
Of course I listened to Supertramp's "Crime of the Century," one of the best engineered albums ever.
And the truth is way back when, when half speed mastering was a thing, I bought "Crime of the Century" and also Heart's debut, because I didn't own it all, and I wanted it.
And the truth is "Dreamboat Annie" was cut up north by the less experienced, but when "Magic Man" came on I woke up, my head turned, wow, the sound!
Now the truth is some of the best music doesn't sound that good, and it is about the feel more than the detail, but back when musicians were an elite breed who were gods for their creativity not their brand extensions, we needed to get closer.
And today I am, more than ever.
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