FOR A MUSIC LOVER and musician who spent his childhood cradled by Mozart, schooled by Mick Jagger and comforted by Aretha Franklin, I haven’t been treating my music—or my ears—very well lately. On my daily commute into San Francisco, I listen to music that’s been digitally squashed, then squeezed out through little white earbuds. At home, with kids running around and schedules to keep, a battery-powered Jawbone Jambox has replaced the 4-foot-tall speakers I had growing up.
I decided I had to do something about this in January, when I was at the Consumer Electronics Show. I was talking to musician
Neil Young,
who was promoting his Pono audio player and music store. He looked me in the eye and told me that I was listening to music wrong. For years, he’s been railing against the audio quality of the tracks most of us buy these days. “With MP3s, you could only recognize songs, you couldn’t hear them,” he told me. MP3s and even CDs have sucked the life out of recorded music, he contends.
His solution is one that’s been gaining attention lately: high-resolution audio files. This downloadable music resembles what’s sold on iTunes—except that it contains up to 10 times more data than what used to be the gold standard for audio quality: CD. By capturing a wider range of frequencies, say acolytes, hi-res albums sound more spacious and alive.
This niche audiophile obsession is no longer so niche, partly due to the rise of more affordable hardware. Everything from portable players—like Mr. Young’s Pono—to wireless speakers and audio amplifiers can now read the format. And music lovers are taking note.
The hitch is that many people can’t hear the difference between hi-res and CD. (Skeptics say it’s physiologically impossible to detect.) I figured my ears might be sensitive enough to hear…something, and decided to find out. In the weeks of listening that ensued, much of what I heard moved me to near-euphoria; the music files, and the systems I borrowed to play them on, were a huge improvement over the tinny sound I’d accepted as my lot. I discovered that with the right recording, the sound is pretty close to what the artist hears in the studio. But I also uncovered something shocking: Many great albums have been converted to the format in a way that doesn’t sound as good—let alone better—than CD.
THE ‘PEPSI’ CHALLENGE
Experts I spoke to said that the best way to enjoy high-res music is with speakers, not headphones. So I started out by setting up a listening room at work: KEF R300 speakers, priced at $1,800 a pair, and a $1,000 NAD D 7050 amp. I invited five colleagues to compare high-resolution songs from HDTracks.com with CD-quality and iTunes-download versions. One by one, my colleagues noted the excellent sound, the in-your-face highs and the oh-so-subtle lows. And one by one, each failed to guess which tracks were high-resolution. The truth was, it all sounded good.
To make sure that the sound system wasn’t the problem, I visited the headquarters of Magico in Hayward, Calif., where
Alon Wolf,
a craftsman and classical musician, builds $600,000 speakers. (His entry-level models start at $12,000.) Mr. Wolf believes high-resolution audio is a “fundamental” improvement—but one that you notice over time, not by comparison-testing short snippets of music. Mr. Wolf also warned me that not all hi-res albums deliver. Some sound amazing, others sound terrible.
I relaxed into a seat in front of Magico’s $229,000 Q7 Mark II speakers. Mr. Wolf played a jazz track from the album “Mirror,” by saxophonist Charles Lloyd—first in CD quality, then in high-resolution—and spoke of the subtle difference, a richness that hi-res delivers. I believed I could hear it, too. But maybe I just wanted to.
Then I asked him to play the hi-res songs that I’d been listening to for the previous few weeks. In many cases, that richness was missing. In fact, when we compared my hi-res tracks for Norah Jones’s “Feelin’ the Same Way” and Paul Simon’s “Homeless” to his CD-quality versions, we agreed that the CD actually sounded better.
I was dumbfounded. I understood hi-res might be indistinguishable from CD, but I had no idea how it could sound worse.
GOING TO THE SOURCE
The answer lies in the version of the recording that was used to make the CD or hi-res files, said Portland, Maine-based mastering engineer
Bob Ludwig.
He’s the man who has put the finishing touches on albums by everyone from the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin to Daft Punk and She Him. He also oversees the transfer of many classic analog and digital recordings to hi-res formats. He explained that the most popular albums tend to be remastered and reissued, with each version sounding slightly different. The version used to create the hi-res file could make or break the listening experience.
So what’s a curious music lover to do? Stick with newer albums, which are almost always recorded in 24-bit high-resolution audio. When, say, Daft Punk’s “Random Access Memory” is sold as hi-res, it is a bit-for-bit facsimile of the master. (Every other format, including CD, suffers from at least some potentially audible processing.) With these albums, “almost without exception, hi-res sounds either dramatically to marginally better than the CD,” Mr. Ludwig said.
But the type of music also matters. You’re more likely to hear the difference with jazz and classical, for example. “When you get into rock ‘n’ roll, there’s some material where lower fidelity sounds better,” Mr. Ludwig added. “I’m actually remastering an old Nirvana track right now. This thing ain’t gonna make much difference in high resolution, because the source was very low resolution on purpose.”
Unlike new recordings of classical, jazz and other genres where nuance matters a lot, pop can be tricky. Many chart-topping songs may have been recorded at the most sophisticated studios, but are mixed to sound great on the radio, MP3 or YouTube—their range is “compressed” so that even quieter sounds end up much louder. When these overly compressed tracks are released in hi-res, all the echoes, harmonics and other ephemera from the original recording—the “transients,” as Ludwig calls them—“are lost forever.”
This is most apparent on some classic albums that have been remastered in the past decade or two. For instance, when you compare the original 1986 version of Paul Simon’s “Graceland” to the 25th-anniversary edition, released in 2012, you’ll find that the new tracks are much louder even though you haven’t touched the volume knob. Mr. Ludwig said that the new version was known for being highly compressed, which would mask the benefits of hi-res; this would explain why I didn’t notice a difference in hi-res. (A Sony spokesperson said that the 25th-anniversary edition that the hi-res was created from was approved by the original producer of “Graceland,” Roy Halee.)
PRESERVING THE PAST
And then there are the hi-res versions of albums recorded decades ago. If a label takes the time to turn a vintage recording into a great-sounding hi-def download, the results can rival the Daft Punk album.
Don Was—a Grammy-winning producer of Bonnie Raitt, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison and Willie Nelson, among others—is now president of the jazz label Blue Note. For the past two years, his mission has been to take all of Blue Note’s classic recordings, those made up until 1972, and convert them to digital for the last time. “This should never ever have to be done again,” he says.
He and his team start by making a digital transfer of the original analog tape, going so far as to see how different power supplies for the computers used in the process affected the sound. Their goal, said Mr. Was: to create as neutral a digital facsimile as possible.
Albums That Shine in Hi-Res
ENLARGE
HDtracks.com and Pono (ponomusic.com) are two popular sources for hi-res music, with albums generally starting at $18.
Daft Punk – “Random Access Memories” | When Daft Punk orchestrated this album, it included more sounds than you’re ever going to hear over Spotify.
Natalie Merchant – “Natalie Merchant” | Austere acoustic guitar passages and blaring brass arrangements alike sparkle in hi-res.
Keith Jarrett – “The Köln Concert” | This improvised, solo piano performance Mr. Jarrett gave in 1975 sounds especially rich and spacious.
Paul McCartney Wings – “Band on the Run” | When classic albums are rereleased, they’re often made to sound louder. In a rare instance, “Band on the Run” was released in two hi-res versions: the louder remaster and an “uncompressed” version more reminiscent of the original. Go for the uncompressed.
That transfer, however, “doesn’t feel the way you remember the records feeling,” said Mr. Was. The next step is to replicate the vibe of vinyl by applying subtle equalization and compression. Mr. Was and his team listen to the original vinyl records alongside the new mixes to ensure they are capturing that Blue Note sound. Only then is the album released for sale. (When I asked why Norah Jones’s “Come Away With Me” wasn’t as pristine, Mr. Was said the hi-res album was released before he took over and that he would look into it.)
The classical and jazz label ECM is another label with exceptional quality control. The label’s founder, Manfred Eicher, personally checks the analog-to-digital transfers of all albums released in hi-res, a company spokesperson said.
Naysayers may talk about hi-res being physically impossible to hear, but the format is only as good as the effort that’s gone into it. It’s the music industry’s obligation to preserve everything—and I mean everything—that’s on the master tapes of the all-time greatest albums. If they’re just being dumped into hi-res without care, both the music business and the music lover are in trouble.
While many of my favorite albums seemed to have been compromised on the stairway to hi-res heaven, it occurred to me that at least one record was probably handled with extreme care. I cued up Neil Young’s “Old Man,” from his 1972 album “Harvest.” It’s my favorite track, mostly because of the banjo that plucks its way into each chorus. Until then, I hadn’t compared it to a CD-quality file. The difference was clear. Mr. Young’s voice sounded gentler on the hi-res version, the accompanying instruments were more delicate. Although the CD version was louder, I felt I could hear the hi-res version more clearly, because it wasn’t a wall of sound.
I sighed. After all the testing, it was time to relax and enjoy music again. I recalled what Mr. Was had said to me. “Bottom line to the whole thing? Write good songs. Give soulful performances. If you don’t have that, it sounds like s— in every format.”
The post Hi-Res Audio Hijinx: Why Only Some Albums Truly Rock appeared first on IT Clips.
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