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Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

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Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#171

Post by acdha »

marcan_42 wrote: post #89
alfalfasprout wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless. But Balvin can. And it sounds "bigger and stronger". On the contrary, you can actually do these tests yourself ( https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/... ). I and many others running good high end gear can repeatedly score well on these tests. Of course, it's not only the…

This is largely because MP3 is a crappy, old format. Try high-bitrate Opus on most samples and you're a lot less likely to get above-chance results on an ABX test, pretty much ever, at high bitrates. Ultimately though, lossy compression is always program-dependent ("program" here means the song, not the app). The encoders use psychoacoustic algorithms, and there is no way to prove they will perform well on all sample…

> This is largely because MP3 is a crappy, old format. Try high-bitrate Opus on most samples and you're a lot less likely to get above-chance results on an ABX test, pretty much ever, at high bitrates.

This is such a key point: MP3 has known weaknesses with certain common sound profiles (e.g. sharp transitions such as a cymbal or snare drum) which aren't really fixable. For me the threshold was AAC 256kpbs where I stopped noticing artifacting.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#172

Post by stephc_int13 »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #38
cies wrote: post #23

From the article: > J Balvin said: [...] With Lossless, everything in the music is going to sound bigger and stronger but more importantly, it will be better quality. [...] There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless. But Balvin can. And it sounds "bigger and stronger". The extra quality of lossless is nice when mixing/remixing the sound, a…

> There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless. But Balvin can. And it sounds "bigger and stronger". On the contrary, you can actually do these tests yourself ( https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/... ). I and many others running good high end gear can repeatedly score well on these tests. Of course, it's not only the…

I tried it with my decade old entry-level Seinheiser headset plugged into my desktop computer.

4/6 with two errors where I confused 320Kbps and raw wav.

But to be honest, I could hardly distinguish between the samples and I mostly guessed.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#173

Post by PaulHoule »

solarmist wrote: post #108
PaulHoule wrote: post #74

I don't believe it. If I read that right they claim that they can deliver "spatial" audio via headphones using a multi-channel/object-based Dolby Atmos (as opposed to a binaural recording or something that else that is mixed for two channels ahead of time) For years there has been talk about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-related_transfer_function and for years I have tried demos that are unimpressive, particular…

Sure, but commercial spatial audio is in its infancy. We’re maybe in the 1920’s if you compare it to video. So as the techniques expands and people adjust and both sides gain experience we’ll be able to compensate for the perceived shortcomings by exaggerating effectively to make it seem better than our natural spacial hearing.

To get there people have to have a clear perception of what "the gap" is between what is and what's possible -- like the error signal in a negative feedback loop.

In reality people will think a service sounds better if Dr. Dre, Jay-Z or Neil Young is behind it.

If people watch a bad orchestra playing in good clothes or they watch a good orchestra play in bad clothes they'll likely think the well dressed orchestra sounds better.

A world like that just doesn't have the capacity to improve.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#174

Post by dinglefairy »

PaulHoule wrote: post #74

I don't believe it. If I read that right they claim that they can deliver "spatial" audio via headphones using a multi-channel/object-based Dolby Atmos (as opposed to a binaural recording or something that else that is mixed for two channels ahead of time) For years there has been talk about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-related_transfer_function and for years I have tried demos that are unimpressive, particular…

we need ray tracing for audio! also, materials handling.

maybe these early attempts are not great examples yet, but headed in the right direction. spatial sound i think makes sense in applications like gaming or, say, a vr chat room or something, but music? you don't want spatial music. you want a nice warm hug from the music or you want to be fucked by it, you want to be inside the music or it to be inside you; from every possible angle.

we are really drowning ourselves in these first world problems with hyper gimmicky useless crap. stick to the basics and do it better. keep it simple stupids.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#175

Post by moogly »

yehaaa wrote: post #62
cies wrote: post #23

From the article: > J Balvin said: [...] With Lossless, everything in the music is going to sound bigger and stronger but more importantly, it will be better quality. [...] There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless. But Balvin can. And it sounds "bigger and stronger". The extra quality of lossless is nice when mixing/remixing the sound, a…

The format is ALAC, it’s not proprietary but an open spec. Secondly Apple has been using AAC since forever which is a successor to mp3 and an MPEG standard.

> The format is ALAC, it’s not proprietary but an open spec

True. No one else bothers with it though, because why should they when FLAC exists? That makes ALAC, in practice, largely an Apple-only format.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#177

Post by kjakm »

Saint_Genet wrote: post #92

I sure hope spatial audio won't be the only way music will be delivered in the future. It'd be a complete nightmare for people like me who has severely impaired hearing on one ear.

Wouldn't that also apply to mono v stereo? I would guess that if you had one earphone in, they would fallback to a mono/stereo mix. It kinda works like that currently with AirPods. If you take out one, instead of only getting one channel through the remaining AirPod, you get both channels diverted to the one AirPod.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#178

Post by tachyonbeam »

simias wrote: post #98
cies wrote: post #23

From the article: > J Balvin said: [...] With Lossless, everything in the music is going to sound bigger and stronger but more importantly, it will be better quality. [...] There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless. But Balvin can. And it sounds "bigger and stronger". The extra quality of lossless is nice when mixing/remixing the sound, a…

It doesn't matter, it's good marketing. It's not rational, but it lets Apple posture as being "high end". The utter majority of people won't be able to tell the difference but then again the utter majority of people won't even try to test it. I know that I personally can't even tell the difference between Spotify's "mid" and "high" quality settings the vast majority of the time even in perfect listening conditions wi…

People are downvoting you but you're not wrong. One of the biggest factors behind Apple's success is that they've positioned themselves as a status symbol. They're the Prada of the tech world. I switched from an iPhone to an Android recently and found the quality of the device and software to be just as good if not better, but an Android doesn't say "I'm upper middle class" like an iPhone does.

Me, I see spatial audio and I'm like... Ah, that's annoying, because it's yet another proprietary gimmick, and it means the format will likely be incompatible with everything else. You could see a proliferation of audio files that are only usable on Apple devices. Stereo seems... Based in physical reality, ubiquitous, and very practical. I hope Google doesn't try to copy them just like they did after Apple decided to remove the headphone jack, because that wasn't an upgrade. Deprecating trusted, reliable technology to try to entice buyers is not an upgrade.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#179

Post by Workaccount2 »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #38
cies wrote: post #23

From the article: > J Balvin said: [...] With Lossless, everything in the music is going to sound bigger and stronger but more importantly, it will be better quality. [...] There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless. But Balvin can. And it sounds "bigger and stronger". The extra quality of lossless is nice when mixing/remixing the sound, a…

> There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless. But Balvin can. And it sounds "bigger and stronger". On the contrary, you can actually do these tests yourself ( https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/... ). I and many others running good high end gear can repeatedly score well on these tests. Of course, it's not only the…

I highly suggest that people check out/try out "ABX comparator" plugin for Foobar2000 player. You give it two files (say a 128kbps mp3 version and a lossless flac verison) and it runs you through a double blind test of the two versions, quizzing you along the way. It's not just "listen to A" "listen to B", it gives you lots of options to listen to them and compare them in different ways, including obfuscating what track is A and what track is B.

If you think you can really hear fine differences in audio, it can be very eye opening (ear opening?).

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#180

Post by andybak »

marcan_42 wrote: post #157
andybak wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MP3 with a good compressor and reasonable bitrate has repeatedly shown to be indistinguishable from uncompressed. The reason to avoid mp3 is to be able to squeeze the bitrate and save on storage bandwidth - but that has mattered less year on year. I'm personally baffled and irritated by this move from Apple. They'll be selling healing crystals next.

> MP3 with a good compressor and reasonable bitrate has repeatedly shown to be indistinguishable from uncompressed. With most samples, yes. The issue, as I said, is that psychoacoustic codecs are basically heuristic by definition, and so you can pretty much always find counterexamples. It's possible to say 320kbps MP3 is indistinguishable from uncompressed for most samples; it is not possible to say it is indistingui…

> it is not possible to say it is indistinguishable for all samples, present and future.

Are there likely to be real-world cases where this happens - and the effect is detrimental enough to actually matter to anyone?

Surely we're debating "when is it good enough for anyone sane and reasonable?" not "when could a hypothetical oracle be fooled 100%"?

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