So will Apple cater to audiophiles? No. Will they cater to margins? For damned sure they will if it serves them and those they entice to sign over content. Why would they switch to 1080P otherwise?
Also: given device sizes it would be nice to have raw uncompressed/lossless and I could downsample at will to suit specific devices/systems.
Lossy formats are useless to me since I can't remix them without it sounding like crap. I also feel I'm getting ripped-off when they charge near CD price for lossy tracks.
Also, 20 years from now I'm going to want to convert my music to whatever fancy lossy codec has supplanted MP3 and AAC. By archiving in an open lossless format like FLAC (or now ALAC), I can do this without introducing artifacts.
Two things strike me as astonishing. The first is that anyone remains unconvinced that vinyl has any redeeming technical aspects whatsoever, other than the touchy-feely emotional stuff, and self-deception.
The second is that the music you referenced is so unashamedly digital, that the notion of purchasing it on a vinyl record is like buying a copy of Angry Birds printed on tree bark.
A 256 kbps AAC file (as sold by iTunes) is so very nearly transparent, only a small fraction of 1 percent of people would be able to identify the vanishingly minute differences. The difference is so small, it would be comprehensively outweighed by meaningful factors such as your choice of speakers, the shape of your room, and the presence of any ambient noise.
Whereas vinyl has crackle (unless you're playing a pristine copy in a dust-free environment), clicks, pops, rumble, wow distortion, and intentionally limited dynamic and tonal range. Fidelity progressively reduces as you move to the inner grooves, and high frequencies are literally scratched away as the stylus scrapes past -- every time you play a vinyl, it will sound poorer than the last. You can mitigate some of these problems, but generally at great effort or expense.
Of course, to make that music useful, you'll need to rip it back into your computer. You'd have to be mentally ill to believe that a [Lossless > AAC-256 > Lossless] conversion is more detrimental than [Lossless > equalisation > analogue mastering > lathe cutting > vinyl stamping > stylus scraping > pre-amplification > ADC > Lossless].
big slowdowns also sound 'ugly' with lossless formats (a 44kHz sampled track at half the speed is only 22kHz).
but who plays a track at halfspeed..? :)
i dont want to make a case for vinyl -- sjwright has given a nice overview of arguments against it, that i can all underline.
but there is one thing that a physical soundwave, pressed in a disc of vinyl, never needs to do: anti-aliassing. but since the tracks usually get delivered digitally to the vinyl-press; it is the vinyl press that does the anti-aliassing for you :)
What you completely failed to realise, is that technical superiority is not the only factor as to how music sounds.
CD mastering these days is almost invariably awful. The real advantage to vinyl (which comes partly because it is a niche format, and partly because of how it is made) is that it has better mastering. This is not subtle on anything better than PC speakers.
You tend to not be able to use formats because hardly anyone used them in the past. MP3 is too popular for that to happen. (As is JPEG, PDF and probably AAC.)
(Also, given the less-than-subtle music you linked to, I doubt that it really matters.)
I've been playing classic violin since the age of 3, and I'm very sensitive to details. Just because you don't find a particular genre of music "subtle" doesn't it's not susceptible to the compression artifacts I'm talking about.
It depends on how well you know the album, what the music is.
Try Paper Tiger by Beck off of Sea Change... strings and bass at the same time is challenging to lossy compression.
Try Page One by Charlatans off of Between 10th and 11th... same problem.
I don't use an iPod for that reason. I have an external sound card and use Fidelia on my Mac for that reason. I own good headphones for that reason.
When you listen to music you think you know and your heart skips a beat as you hear something new and it moves you... why compromise ever again?
Isn't this the superlative experience that Apple used to deliver? The ability to make you experience something that moves you. Music really can, but when you compress you deaden it, you kill the sound stage, some of the noise is lost.
Listen to a compressed Double Dutch by Malcolm McLaren the skips sound like a synth, listen to the lossless on a capable system and you can hear the distinctiveness of every rotation and hit of the rope on the floor. The latter puts you there, you picture it more.
Sound is even more important than vision. We are all rushing to 1080p and hopefully better, but sound is what fires the imagination more. Film directors have long known this, music producers have long known this... sound is the thing to get right, and when it's right, you fall in love every time you hear the music.
If you're buying any music equipment, find a good retailer and do a blind test of the equipment. I would be very surprised if most consumers would pick compressed audio and poor equipment... more likely they will settle for the point at which they no longer perceive a noticeable difference, but that point is after you've discovered lossless.
The main reason compression is accepted is that on crappy computer speakers, when listening on headphones whilst you have high background noise (commuting)... you could not hear the difference. Everywhere else, the difference is almost black and white, chalk and cheese.
I'd love to do a blind hearing test if you can set one up - but you have to do it with a song that I enjoy. I suppose I could even set one up myself as a study. It would be pretty interesting.
Notice you won't see the visual effects industry using JPG's to build their shots ... no, they use very high resolution 4k ~48-bit color depth files, that are then combined and then scaled down in resolution/color to theater/blu-ray output. This maintains the highest quality throughout.
You could also think of it the same way as free software (although not the perfect metaphor). Software may pick up compatibility bugs over the years. You'll want the community to have the ability to make fixes or risk losing it.
All these are examples of "keeping your options open," which people value. Now that the cost is not prohibitive and only getting lower there's not much reason not to.
All the people who claim to be audiophiles and think that thousand dollar wooden knobs make their music sound more rich certainly do.
Yeah, this kind of thinking is pervasive in the music industry which is why I make sure they never get any of my money. You're always paying for the licensing, not the delivery method (so they don't need to replace your CD at cost), unless they can make a buck by making you pay for that, in which case you are no longer paying for the license, but rather the delivery method.
As such I don't even know what the fuck I'd be paying for if I bought a song on iTunes or whatever else.
