fevered ego

Lossless Audio

 

Here's a bunch of information that no one wants to know.

When we record we start recording at a rate of 192 kHz/24 Bit, but when we put anything up on the net we have to compress the signal down to 44.1 kHz/16 Bit,  so that they don't occupy a lot of disk space and they stream quickly. For those that don't know this refers to how many times the computer will listen to the sound source per second and how big of a string of data that it works with at a time. It's actually more involved than that, but this is a quick explanation.  This sounds (pun intended ) good but in really it doesn't sound as good as what we hear when we are making the music. There's  about 30 times more data in a lossless file than what we post. They're called "lossless" becaus there is no loss of data from the original. You can see the drop in quality from 192 down to 44.1 or best 48 just by looking at file sizes. Here are the stats on the size of a file as it is as we record it, a wav file, and as you hear it as a mp3 at its highest quality. 196,876 KB for the wav and 10,829 KB for the mp3.  Granted some of the frequencies can't be heard by the human ear but there is a definite loss in what I hear when I record and what I hear when its on the net. This is what Neil Young's new PONO player is about. But, if you listen to music on your computer and you have a decent sound system hooked up to your computer and a good 24bit 192kHz sound card then you can listen to the same high quality music on your computer. The sound cards are relativiely cheap, $25-$30 if you look, and there are numerous free players on the web that will play wav or flac files and other lossless file types.

See, told you, a bunch of information that no one wants to know.