Too bad.

Sony cheapens their brand by marketing products aimed at the pseudoscience fanatics. Maybe next they will introduce earbuds with connecting wires the size of pencils. Oh, and with "extra ions."

All sounds pretty reasonable to me. Except he third line is a bit fluffy and I would include 'CD' as being hi-res wrt data-reduced formats such as MP3...

geoff

It's a press release rehashed by someone clueless.

What the article fails to make clear is this is for streaming / mobile devices.
Sony has for a long time had high resolution audio, Direct Stream Digital (DSD) for recording and Super Audio CD (SACD) for delivery. SACD is in high demand in Japan and a lot of DSD recordings have been made in the Sydney Opera House.

Another oddity is that vinyl is the only segment of music sales that's been growing and those buying it are teenagers i.e. our grandchildren :)

Bob.

"Growth" can be a misleading statistic. A new hardware chain in Australia claims to be the fastest growing, because they have recently started from nothing. If sales of vinyl records went from say 10 to 20, that's an increase of 100%, but only 20 items were sold.

While I am at it I might point out that vinyl audio is usually amplitude compressed (or recorded with low dynamic range in the first place), because a vinyl record does not have the dynamic range of a CD, and a high bit rate MP3 recording might very well sound better. You can also get pre and post echoes from adjacent grooves. But if you worship something like vinyl records or valve amplifiers or old cars or steam trains, then argument is useless.

[I]" If sales of vinyl records went from say 10 to 20, that's an increase of 100%, but only 20 items were sold."[/I]


Increase in sales from $1M to $2M in a year!

Personally I have no interest in vinyl, tubes, Fujichrome Velvia or anything lace-up, be they boots or corsets but that's what the trendy set are into. I'm certain this has everything to do with fashion and nothing to do with technical excellence. The only thing I miss about vinyl was the cover art.

Bob.

While I do rather like the sound of my vintage 1964 McIntosh tube preamp and amplifier, I am absolutely baffled by the resurgence of vinyl records. I thought we had finally gotten rid of those horrid plastic discs. I guess a whole new generation can now enjoy ticks, pops, surface noise, inner groove distortion, turntable rumble and wow and flutter. I guess they don't care that 25% of the high end of the record is shaved off by the diamond stylus the very first time they play it. There is no accounting for taste.

[I]" I am absolutely baffled by the resurgence of vinyl records."[/I]

I'm not.
You play a record, it's an experience, a ritual. You hold the sleeve and study it while you listen to the music. That's what they got wrong with the CD, it should have been 12 inches.

Another thing. One night I'd dubbed a CD to a 10.5" reel of 1/4" and I was playing it, just because I could. The wife comes into the room, sits down looking at the deck and says "that sounds better." I say "impossible" and she says "But now I can see the music going around and around".

Bob.

Hi res audio is slowly making a comeback. There are an increasing number of hi res audio download sites making their appearance and people are swallowing the hook. The times are changing.... Storage space is cheap and compact, as bandwidth has increased and gotten faster over the years. As well, the playback equipment can be had at a fraction of the old day prices. There really is no need for such heavy compression these days.

As a result people are being treated to a better quality audio.... and liking it. If you visit any of the car stereo sites an increasing number of people are frowning on MP3 and actively looking for palyback equipment which does things like WAV and FLAC.

The MP3 is still acceptable in a pinch, but it's beginning to take a back seat to some of the better quality formats (thankfully!)

"I guess a whole new generation can now enjoy ticks, pops, surface noise, inner groove distortion, turntable rumble and wow and flutter. I guess they don't care that 25% of the high end of the record is shaved off by the diamond stylus the very first time they play it. There is no accounting for taste."

Just a guess, but those who have returned to vinyl have done so because they're tired of listening to the average mp3 which (noticeably) removes some of the music as well as the clicks/pops. It's one of the reasons hi res audio is coming back... people tired of the mp3 rubbish and have no place else to turn.

Don't forget to buy $1000 hi-res speaker cables and $1500 power cords.

Bob, I certainly get the ritual part. There is something very cool about the act of threading up a reel-to-reel audio tape machine and experiencing the clunking solenoids and the spinning reels and it does add a unique musical signature to the music. I have a Sony BVH-2800 1" video recorder that weighs at least 200 pounds and I still get a kick out of operating it, it's a whirring, spinning, incredibly noisy beast when it's fired up. Unfortunately, the output doesn't look that great by today's standards. Curious that there's all kinds of classic audio gear and absolutely no classic video gear and no market for classic computer gear either.

Rob Franks: But you can't hear the difference between, say, 192Kb mp3 and wav or flac. For that matter, it's very hard to hear the difference at 128. And in a car? Given the road and engine noise, maybe cassette is good enough!

So since one can't "hear" the difference, I would have to conclude that it's just imagination, the same way that imagination makes a surprisingly high percentage of people feel better even if given a placebo pill.

It is extremely easy to demonstrate the failings of mp3 with Vegas. Just take a wav file, render it to mp3, put it on a new timeline underneath the wav file, and subtract. What you hear is the error signal. That signal, superimposed on the pure wav signal, gives you the mp3 version. I have a VERY hard time hearing that error signal.

Wow! REALLY? High end audio! Wow.

collective "meh...."

I agree the old rituals were kinda fun - the same way we used to build small fires and cook our fresh kill over it to eat... - rituals that grew out of the fact it was the only option at the time.

We can STILL put on headphones, look a album sleeves - except now it it on 60 inch flat panels, which is WAY COOLER if you think about it. I can find a bjillion album covers online now instead of just having a couple paper ones that bend, fall apart, tear or other eventual fail.

I've downloaded some high end audio from those sites recently... and I have recording studio monitors to listen through. (I'm an audio engineer) Wasn't any big thrill.
Actually working at recording studios is what made me GIVE UP my subscription to STEREO REVIEW and my audiophile ways... learning how everything, EVERYTHING was adjusted in the studio. Nothing is pure. Nothing.

I don't knock people who enjoy high end audio, I just don't see the point to it anymore.

"if it sounds good, it IS good"

"But now I can see the music going around and around".

Is that why TV channels, when presenting a telephone report, show a fake VU meter or spectrum that fluctuates up and down completely independently of the speech syllables?

[I]"But you can't hear the difference between, say, 192Kb mp3 and wav or flac. For that matter, it's very hard to hear the difference at 128"[/I]

I'd be a tad careful with that assumption. I used to make a dime encoding archival content to mp3. For sure off good tapes 128K was fine but then I had a title that was taken from old acetate disks and it really fell apart at 128K, 192K sounded noticeably better.

From my understanding lossy audio compression is much the same as lossy video compression. It works very well when there's redundant data but not so well when there isn't. Noise can really mess with the outcome.

What some in the industry are alarmed about is the trend to use lossy audio compression for archiving and mastering.

Bob.

" But you can't hear the difference between, say, 192Kb mp3 and wav or flac."

Sure you can.
Granted I can't tell with speakers but with a good set of headphones I can hear it. It's not apparent or clear at first but you can hear it if you play identical pieces back to back. There is something missing. Maybe the symbols don't sound quite as "shiny", or the S sounds from the voice don't quite seem to be there. You can't put your thumb on it really but there is a difference. A good quality flac just sounds fuller and more alive on the high end.

But aside from that, given a choice between working with a lossy format and a lossless one, it's a no brainer as to which one you should be working with.

"I don't knock people who enjoy high end audio, I just don't see the point to it anymore."

Sorry, but I find it a little hard to believe an "audio Engineer" would be saying that ;)

Farss, I think you're right, there is probably source material that can break mp3.

Rob, I remember years ago reading about double-blind tests that take any potential bias out of the A/B comparison. In any event, you can listen to the artifacts for yourself and compare them to the sound level of the source. I haven't done this recently but I remember being very surprised at how well mp3 did its job. Anyway, to each his own.

Rob, it was a simple evolution: start as a high end listener, advance into the studio where you learn about all the tricks to make stuff "sound real" or better and you understand suddenly, all my audiophile gear was moot. If I'm dropping money on big stereos, no matter how much I spend, it comes down to WHO mixed it and HOW. They (I) can make it sound like anything. My purchasing a sweet amp isn't going the change that they recorded the vocal through a beat up SM-57 mic, and $50 tube amp because they liked the dirty sound. If everything was "direct mic to listener" chain, yes my high end decisions would make a difference, but there is so much in between recording to final purchase. I LOVE mixing and mastering (last thing I worked on: http://www.amazon.com/The-Indemnus-Project-EP-INDEMNUS/dp/B00G9JN1Q6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1412654857&sr=8-1&keywords=indemnus+project ) but all the sound god-like controls in a mixing board negate all that high end gear. In my experience and opinion, of course.

I'm past the golden ear stage of life and I'll admit to making compromises in my lifetime to give 2.3 kids a college education instead of buying the audiophile system that I thought I richly deserved. I've thought it ironic at times the technology that people have applied to capture the sound of that Fender Twin-Amp that has an orange tinge from all the cigarette smoke in the clubs.


P.S.
The 0.3 kid makes the most money of the three by a large multiple.

I remember when I was still young and drooling after a better audio system (negative feedback, push-pull output, vented enclosures and negative output impedance were the topics then) someone said that by the time you can afford the ultimate system, your ears have deteriorated to the point where there is no longer any point in getting it.

True. I remember as a college freshman many years ago taking my new Sennheiser open-air cheap headphones into the audio lab at school to put them on the audio oscillator. All the way up to 22KHz I could hear output! Now I seem to go deaf at anything above 12.

I burned out those headphones a few minutes later by exploring the low bass. Below about 30Hz bass becomes more of a feeling than a tone, of course. I cranked up the output at 20Hz and ten seconds later smoke began drifting up from one of the drivers. Oh, well, they were cheap. I gave up pizza for a week so I could afford to buy another pair.