Hope Neil Young will remember, streamers don't need him around anyhow.
“Streaming has ended for me. I hope this is ok for my fans”
41–50 of 51 posts
Re: “Streaming has ended for me. I hope this is ok for my fans”
#42Based on the comments over there he certainly isn't getting much love for the stance he is taking.
Neil Young has his own digital music service, it's not surprising that he tries to promote it even indirectly by not allowing streaming of his own music: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pono_%28digital_music_service%... The service offers "higher" sound quality, so of course he can write "it's about sound quality." But in fact this is only about trying to bring attention to his own service. Still I can't imagine it won…
He's trying to pull a Taylor Swift or a Garth Brooks. We'll see how it plays out for him.
Re: “Streaming has ended for me. I hope this is ok for my fans”
#43EDIT: Just a bit more context. Neil Young has been trying to sell an 'audiophile' grade audio player. This post seems like nothing more than trying to stealthily promote the supposed virtues of his own product. I'm sorry but what an utter absolute load of crap. Especially given this: http://gizmodo.com/dont-buy-what-neil-young-is-selling-16784... Read some of the comments down on his Facebook also. His fans are not h…
Indeed. The part I find most ridiculous is that he is pushing a portable music player on the strength of its high bitrate digital source.
The key thing to realize is that there are a lot of pieces in this signal path (bits to brain). The best you can do is start with the highest quality source possible, and then focus on minimizing the reduction in quality which happens at each step past that.
His intentions are good with choosing a high quality source. However, the idea that a portable music player is going to have a good enough DAC, good enough analog amplification / filtering, that the user will select good enough headphones, and will be listening in a low enough noise-floor environment (sitting absolutely still in a dead room with the A/C turned off) to be able to come anywhere close to hearing the difference made by that high quality source is laughable.
Is it possible to detect the difference between 320kbps streaming and 192kHz/24bit lossless? Sure, you'd see it on an oscilloscope. But could you hear it through $50 ear buds while walking down the street?
One way to reason about sound quality is to mentally model it as two sounds mixed together: a loud, perfect signal, and a much quieter distortion signal. For humans, loud sounds mask quieter sounds, and if the amplitude difference is great enough, you simply can't perceive the quieter sound at all.
Now, take that one step futher: model the sound as a loud, perfect signal mixed with five or six small distortion signals (A, B, C, D, etc, each representing a step in the path from bits to brain). Neil's player reduces distortion signal A by a tiny fraction. Great! But that reduction is only perpectible if it isn't swamped by distortion signals B, C, D, E, and the noise floor created by whatever environment you happen to be sitting in (ultimately, "is this reduction in distortion swamped by the noise floor created by the sound of blood rushing through the veins in my ears?")
Re: “Streaming has ended for me. I hope this is ok for my fans”
#44I assume, by the same logic, he'll be removing his music from Radio, too?
Probably not. I was there. AM radio kicked streaming's ass. Analog Cassettes and 8 tracks also kicked streaming's ass, and absolutely rocked compared to streaming.
AM radio is monural. His argument is invalid. Source: we evolved two ears for some sort of evolutionary advantage.
Re: “Streaming has ended for me. I hope this is ok for my fans”
#45I have never heard any stereo remotely duplicate the sound of hearing, say, a violin acoustically live. I don't think the difference is a higher effective bit rate. There's something else going on. Maybe it's the shape of our ears. If someone wants to revolutionize music reproduction, how about solving this problem?
Absolutely. When you listen to a violin live, you're of course not just getting the violin, but you're getting all the reverb of the environment, the spatial cues created by sound bouncing off your body and around your ears, etc. So taking a violin sound and then playing it out of a speaker, you're playing into a totally different environment and it's going to sound different. If you've also captured the sound of the…
You can also tweak the sound with impulse sampling of speakers in your room and use DSP to correct for the room response. I went this route and couldn't be happier with the result.
Re: “Streaming has ended for me. I hope this is ok for my fans”
#46Re: “Streaming has ended for me. I hope this is ok for my fans”
#47EDIT: Just a bit more context. Neil Young has been trying to sell an 'audiophile' grade audio player. This post seems like nothing more than trying to stealthily promote the supposed virtues of his own product. I'm sorry but what an utter absolute load of crap. Especially given this: http://gizmodo.com/dont-buy-what-neil-young-is-selling-16784... Read some of the comments down on his Facebook also. His fans are not h…
Indeed. The part I find most ridiculous is that he is pushing a portable music player on the strength of its high bitrate digital source. The key thing to realize is that there are a lot of pieces in this signal path (bits to brain). The best you can do is start with the highest quality source possible, and then focus on minimizing the reduction in quality which happens at each step past that. His intentions are good…
A friend pointed out to me that his stance is even funnier when you consider this:
http://consequenceofsound.net/2014/03/neil-young-confirms-ne...
The sad part is that his PR has probably achieved what they wanted to. I mean, I'm on here writing a comment about the Pono Player and talking about it with friends. So yeah....
Re: “Streaming has ended for me. I hope this is ok for my fans”
#48EDIT: Just a bit more context. Neil Young has been trying to sell an 'audiophile' grade audio player. This post seems like nothing more than trying to stealthily promote the supposed virtues of his own product. I'm sorry but what an utter absolute load of crap. Especially given this: http://gizmodo.com/dont-buy-what-neil-young-is-selling-16784... Read some of the comments down on his Facebook also. His fans are not h…
Indeed. The part I find most ridiculous is that he is pushing a portable music player on the strength of its high bitrate digital source. The key thing to realize is that there are a lot of pieces in this signal path (bits to brain). The best you can do is start with the highest quality source possible, and then focus on minimizing the reduction in quality which happens at each step past that. His intentions are good…
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Re: “Streaming has ended for me. I hope this is ok for my fans”
#49Personally sound quality is more important to me. I'd be a lot happier if Taylor Swift had put her foot down for FLAC-encoded downloads being made available or something. Because trying to find those is literally impossible.
> Because trying to find those is literally impossible. Well, 'nearly' impossible. Google 'FLAC streaming service' and you'll find tidal.com. I don't know if there's any other. If you don't pay for music downloads, then finding them isn't a problem [1] but rather troublesome. Most people don't know FLAC exists and they don't care about sound quality. Take a look at the top 100 music torrents on thepiratebay [2]. None…
Qobuz (http://www.qobuz.com/fr-fr/plans/music-streaming-subscriptio...) does FLAC streaming, but it seems to be Europe-only, for some reason.
Re: “Streaming has ended for me. I hope this is ok for my fans”
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
How radio kicked ass streaming?
Analog transmission artifacts make sound quality worse. Digital transmission errors make playback choppy and intermittent, which completely ruins the rhythm and flow of the music.
Satellite radio does sound quite a bit worse than any recorded medium you can buy today. The difference isn't due to errors, but overcompression. That's not a problem with 128K or better AAC streams, or 192K MP3 streams for that matter, yet Young apparently isn't objecting to having his songs played on SiriusXM.
So: yeah, it's safe to say it's all about marketing his snake oil.