Re: 5 Things AppleTV needs to be a MUST BUY by Apple Gazette

[Charlton Wilbur]

On Apr 7, 2007, at 5:32 AM, Ashley Aitken wrote:

> Sure, if you look you can easily see compression in video, but I  
> would say if you know what to listen for you can hear compression  
> in audio just as easily.
>
> Me, I'm no poser, I don't know what to listen for, although I would  
> like to know some day. To be able to perceive quality is, at least  
> for me, an attractive attribute.

There's an old joke -- a music lover is someone who listens to the  
music; an audiophile is someone who listens to the stereo equipment.

Artifacts of compression are pretty easy to hear, but the quality of  
the recording is only one factor in the quality of the music, and a  
not very important one at that.  All other things being equal, yes, a  
well-encoded audio track is preferable to a poorly-encoded one, but  
all other things are rarely equal.

>> 	my guess is that [Steve Jobs] listens to iTunes on an iPod HIFI,  
>> and doesn't watch TV.
>
> And let his US$50+K true high fidelity audio system waste away in  
> the corner of the room?  I think not.
>
> I think he would only ever listen to compressed tracks (perhaps  
> even lossless only) on his iPod(s), and anything else only for  
> product reviews.

In the environments most people use iPods -- at the gym, commuting,  
where it's mainly portable music -- there's no real benefit from very  
high bit rate encoding, because the reproduction quality is so low.   
Lossless is great, but if the headphones and environment you're  
listening in are not really good themselves, the environment is  
introducing more noise than the audio compression.

It wouldn't surprise me if he *had* a $50K audio system, but I think  
you're ascribing a level of ridiculously stupid audio snobbery to  
him, and I think he's smarter than that.

> I think he probably has digitally remastered (whatever that means)  
> copies of all the Beatles, Dylan, and the classical he listens to.
>
> I'd like to listen to music like that some day, as well.

Why not do it now?  "Digitally remastered" is a marketing buzzword;  
if you're listening to older music on CD, you're listening to  
digitally remastered music.  All it means is that there was formerly  
a master copy used for duplication, and that someone made a new copy  
of it in digital format.  It has nothing at all to do with audio  
quality; in fact, a lot of rock music fans find that the sort of  
audio sweetening that record companies do when they remaster albums  
has really hurt some older classic albums.

Fools, money, etc.

Charlton


-- 
Charlton Wilbur
cwilbur at gmail.com