Comments on: Grief and Lossless: Steve Jobs was working on new audio format to replicate vinyl's sound quality

By: John Elliott

John Elliott — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:10:00 +0000

I find this laughable. [I won't even get into why it is that vinyl sounds better than digital even though it's a far smaller bandwidth, cos my, is that interesting.]

I love a lot of Jobs’ work, but it was Apple who pretty much nailed the coffin on audio quality due to their incessant need to supply people with ludicrous track/album counts. In their entire history I-Tunes has introduced audiological improvement that is comparable to jumping from a dated BASF 90 min tape that’s been dubbed a hundred times, to a new version of the same tape.

There is NO WAY Apple has anything in the pipeline that even resembles what Neil Young is blathering on about. He’s always been loose lipped, just asked Lynard Skynard.

By: justSaying

justSaying — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 03:35:00 +0000

not true. the current lossless standard 48kHz/24-bit .wav together with the integration functions that LPFs perform within DACs can reproduce sound more accurately than analog systems. Analog “sounds” better because the analog components filter the high end very smoothly and give it that characteristic “warm” sound that everyone so desperately wants. File size isn’t really the issue anymore when you are talking about lossless

By: justSaying

justSaying — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 03:30:00 +0000

As a college student learning about the inter workings of ADC/DAC and digital audio encoding this article was pretty stupid. Replicating vinyl wouldn’t involved an increase in fidelity of digital audio size as 192kHz/24-bit recordings already provide a arguably unnecessary degree of accuracy. Instead, replicating vinyl would involve decreasing the high end with a shelving filter that slopes very gradually to -124dB at 50kHz. In addition to this it would require a modeling of the harmonic distortion that occurs as the needle moves through the groove. Neil Young doesn’t understand digital audio, so he should keep his mouth shut. FACT should keep the audio stuff to the pros and post some more cool music.

By: PlayMusic

PlayMusic — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 13:35:00 +0000

No, fact added the bit about replicating vinyl by itself. It wasn’t helped by Young’s already confused analysis of music formats.

By: FlacLover

FlacLover — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 03:50:00 +0000

hmmm. and then he invented FLAC! but the industry killed it because pioneer deliberately keeps it away from cdj 2000′s.

By: Blublala

Blublala — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 03:49:00 +0000

that’s why it was going to replicate vinyl.

By: Bib

Bib — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 03:44:00 +0000

Yeah crap

By: Jar Sqwuid

Jar Sqwuid — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:19:00 +0000

These files would be huge. the whole reason digital doesn’t sound as good as analog is simply because more information = more space needed to store. It’s ridiculous to think you can get more out of less without sacrificing SOMETHING. When you convert analog to digital, computers have to convert the analog signal to bits. Those bits are steps, and if you to take (say film) the luma and lay that out on a graph, the analog signal would be nice and smooth. You’d have a beautiful, continuous lin from black to white and everything in between. Convert that signal to digital, and make it halfway manageable, and lay that out on a graph to express its luma qualities, and you’d get “steps.” (Sort of like if you were to take the nice, beautifully curved analog line and drew it out in MSPaint.) The more steps, the more data. The more data, the bigger the file. The bigger the file, the less you can fit on your ipod or whatever. Simply not gonna happen. It’s basic compression.

By: Jar Sqwuid

Jar Sqwuid — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:02:00 +0000

Of course they were willing to trade quality for convenience or price, they bought apple products lol.