Articles: The Sound of Music – Part 1 – 57

In the first part of Tone’s major music investigation, Phil Hanson examines the available formats for recorded sound.

It’s a blustery sort of evening, the brisk breeze shunting threatening clouds in a magenta dusk. But at this Matakana vineyard north of Auckland, all eyes are on the stage where Bic Runga’s making a sweet start to her Acoustic Winery Tour.

To one side of the stage – actually it’s the back of a truck but few notice or care – audio engineer Andre Upston tends his ProToll recording equipment, capturing the concert via the stereo feed from the front-of-house desk for what is something a bit different for New Zealand – providing an ‘instant’ CD for concert-goers to remember the evening long after Bic’s final notes have faded into the night.

Upston was named Best Engineer at the 2006 NZ Music Awards, for Runga’s latest album Birds, so he’s an appropriately qualified person for a job like this. Bic Runga is the first major New Zealand artist to offer on-demand CDs to fans at a concert. Overseas, the on-demand concert CD has become serious business, although Upston says he first read about it only weeks before being asked to record the Runga gigs.

“We saw this as an opportunity to offer fans a genuine musical souvenir of Bic’s shows,” explains Paul McKessar of CRS Music Management. “A high quality, authorised CD certainly beats a dodgy bootleg tape recording.” The CDs could only be pre-ordered on the night, limited to 250 copies of each concert. And at just $25 including courier delivery a few days after the concert it all seemed like a pretty good deal.

True, concert CDs overseas are often available right after the show – like 10 minutes – but there was no suitable mobile CD replication facility available here. For this job, Upston had the luxury of a couple of days to master and tweak the recordings before delivering them to Media Technology in Auckland for pressing. “Generally live audio needs a lot of fixing up – and I had a deadline,” he says. “But although it’s not of good enough quality for general commercial release, I can listen to it and there’s not much I’m upset about.”

The Bic Runga vineyard CDs are notable not only for their novelty, but also because they show that, while reports of its imminent doom are ongoing and dire, there are still new and interesting things to do with the format.

Indeed, a whole industry seems to have sprung up prophesising the end of the spinning, sparkling disc and pushing “formats of the future” – almost all of which are internet-based. This is against a background of falling CD sales worldwide and massive annual leaps in the numbers of people choosing to download their music, so it seems the doomsayers are working to fairly good odds.

“We believe that music is going to be completely digital (as in coming to consumers as downloads) over the next 10 to 15 years,” says David Goldberg, general manager of Yahoo! Music. The international Research and Markets organisation agrees. In a recent major study on music trends it predicted that, by 2010, legal downloading will account for more than one third of consumer spending on recorded music, although the time-lag while older consumers get used to the new technology will mean that CDs will remain the main format for “years to come”.

Growth in recorded products has come from music on DVD, and has marked a shift towards a more ‘visual’ appreciation of music and its performers.

I have heard the future, and unfortunately a lot of it is crap. Most of what’s available to download is in the compressed MP3 format, lacking dynamic range, tiring to listen to – but meant to be reproduced cheerfully on handheld devices or personal computers, through tiny speakers or earbuds.

For the downloading revolution to make the CD obsolete, sites will need to cater for those who want quality, uncompressed music – sites like the US MusicGiants. “If you’re only listening to compressed music using your iPod earbuds, you won’t notice much difference from a CD,” says the founder of MusicGiants. “But once you play it on a good home stereo, the difference is huge.” Tone found the same thing when it conducted a blind test of CD vs MP3 music back in issue 48.

Indeed, a whole industry seems to have sprung up, prophesizing the end of the spinning, sparkling disc and pushing ‘formats of the future’

For now, MP3 has become the most significant of formats – the one that has paved the way for a future without pre-recorded CDs or any other physical medium. MP3 players have changed people’s listening habits. We no longer carry around folders of CDs. We listen to playlists rather than individual CDs. We copy all our music to MP3 players so it’s available at our fingertips. No more bothersome burning of CDs. Jam is off the menu.

MP3 will also be behind what some see as one of the Next Big Things, the download kiosk, rather like those photo kiosks in malls and shops where you can make inexpensive prints of your digital photo files.

A multi-terabyte, hard hard drive-based, multi-user kiosk could hold almost every piece of music ever recorded, Apple has been selling music as downloads via iTunes since 2002, but couldn’t sell an iPod with music loaded onto it. Now the iPod may become the new CD, if Apple starts offering cheap shuffle ‘Pods pre-loaded with new albums or artists’ catalogues.

Apple has been prevented from doing just this by a contract with Apple Corps, the Beatles’ music company. It stopped Apple from acting as a music company and from selling CDs or “physical media delivering pre-recorded content” and has seen the two parties facing-off in court three times in as many decades. Now, however, the differences have been resolved.

Agreement between the two Apples means the consumer electronics company is expected to offer a range of pre-loaded iPods, the first of which will likely be a special-edition Yellow Submarine iPod. Apple will also load sample tunes onto new iPods, just as Microsoft’s Zune does.

Perhaps the tsunami of music-on-the-move technology is partly responsible for the relatively ho-hum reception accorded recent, much-touted ‘quality’ formats like HDCD (High Definition Compatible Digital), Sony’s SACD (Super Audio CD) and DVD-A (A for audio). There has also been the problem of early adopters paying a high price to be first with the latest. And unlike the ubiquitous CD, these are not really home-recordable formats. A good thing about HDCDs is that they can be played on most ‘ordinary’ CD players, which just ignore the extra bits. Meanwhile, thanks to more precise filtering circuitry in HDCD chips, regular CDs sound fuller and more natural on an HDCD CD player.

SACD has a number of strong points. CDs are tied to a 44.1kHz sampling rate, but SACD samples at 2.8224MHz and with a storage capacity of 4.7GB can accommodate separate stereo and six-channel mixes of 100 minutes each. They also have enough capacity to include such extras as still photos, liner notes, printed lyrics, or even sheet music. SACD players are backward compatible with conventional CDs, and SACD discs can (but may not necessarily) be dual-layer discs with PCM content that can be played in standard CD players.

Agreement between the two Apples means the consumer electronics company is expected to offer a range of pre-loaded iPods, the first of which will likely be a special-edition Yellow Submarine iPod

Newcomers HD-DVD and Blu-ray offer significant advantages in presenting the combined audio/visual music experience, as we explained in Tone 54, but they’re so new in this country that their potential impact is hard to gauge. Player prices are high and the discs themselves scarce.

Music Formats

Here’s and overview of terms and terminology in and around the world of recorded music:

Apple Lossless (aka Apple Lossless Audio Codec, ALAC or Apple Lossless Encoder, ALE ) A codec – see below – from Apple for lossless compression of digital music. Files are typically 40 to 60 percent the size of an original.

ATRAC Adaptive TRansform Acoustic Coding was developed to compress information onto MiniDiscs and other Sony-branded audio players. MiniDisc manufacturers including Panasonic and Sharp use other versions. Last year, a hybrid lossless compression scheme was added.

AIFF Audio Interchange File Format is a file format for storing CD-quality sound on personal computers, most commonly on Apple Macs.

Andrew Upton – Best Engineer 2006 NZ Music Awards

Blu-ray Disc (also called BD) A recent high-density optical disc format for storing digital media. Read all about it in Tone 54.

Codec Coder-decoder (or compressor/decompressor) An analogue-to-digital (A/D) and digital-toanalogue (D/A) converter for translating signals.

Compact Disc (CD) An optical disc able to store digital data, the CD became the standard medium for audio recordings. Tracks are stored using 16-bit PCM coding at a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz.

Digital Audio Tape (DAT or R-DAT) Was developed by Sony in the mid-1980s.

DTS (Digital Theatre Systems) A multi-channel digital surround sound format used for in-movie sound both on film and on DVD. Unlike surround formats such as SACD and DVD audio that usually require a special player, DTS-CD is compatible with standard CD players using digital (S/PDIF) output, needing only a receiver able to decode DTS tracks.

DualDisc A type of double-sided optical disc developed by big-name record companies that uses an audio layer similar to a CD’s on one side and a standard DVD layer on the other. The format was widely introduced in the US in February 2005.

DVD (Digital Versatile Disc or Digital Video Disc) An optical disc storage medium that look similar to a CD but which is encoded in a different format, at a much higher density.

DVD-A DVD-Audio takes advantage of the storage capacity of a DVD disc and is based on the Pulse Code Modulation signal process of the CD standard with extended dynamic range and several sampling rates and bit rates ranging from 12 to 24bits.

HDCD High Definition Compatible Digital is a variation of the CD standard. By extending the information stored in the CD signal 20bits from 16, HDCD can extend the sonic capacity of current CDs while enabling them to be played on non-HDCD CD players.

HD -DVD High Density DVD, or High-Definition DVD, is designed for the storage of high-definition video and data. See the full story in Tone 54.

Lossy A term describing losing data during compression or conversion. Lossless means you don’t.

MiniDisc (MD ) Originally a magneticoptical disc-based storage device to hold up to 80 minutes of digitised audio, it has developed, as the Hi-MD, into a generalpurpose storage medium. Developed by Sony, it’s big in Japan but not widely used worldwide.

MP3 A contraction of MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, it’s one of the most popular digital audio encoding and lossy compression formats, squeezing down the data yet still sounding pretty much like the original. Sort of.

PCM Pulse-code modulation is a digitalrepresentation of an analogue signal andis the standard form for digital audio in computers. Also used in digital telephone systems and digital video.

SACD Super Audio CD is a read-only optical audio disc developed by Sony and Philips to provide better audio reproduction than the CD. It has not won widespread consumer acceptance.

WAV (Waveform audio format) A Microsoft/IBM audio file format for storing audio on PCs and now the main format used on Windows for raw audio. The most common WAV format contains uncompressed audio in the PCM.

WMA Windows Media Audio is acompressed audio file format developed by Microsoft as an MP3 rival. A strength is its high quality output at lower file sizes.