johnny greenwood on mp3s and audio quality

gumdrops

Well-known member
hes wrong about the pixellation thing. photos in low pixel rates just look shit. esp if you try to blow up a photo that was taken at low pixel rates.

Dithering: Jonny Greenwood
This Dithering series, on the sound quality of recorded music, will be a feast, but it will include vegetables. To understand what’s at stake, we’ll need to get technical. We need to pin down how and why the standards for recorded music dropped in a way that they didn’t for, say, full-length movies in theaters. We need to measure the amount of information lost between a master recording and an MP3. These data are your vegetables. This information will be wicked cool and relatively easy to understand, but not as sexy as Amy Winehouse singing “You’re Wondering Now” with The Specials or Noel quitting Oasis. So, to get you hooked, we’ll start with a few thoughts from Jonny Greenwood. You may know his film scores.

SASHA FRERE-JONES: Is the MP3 a satisfactory medium for your music?

JONNY GREENWOOD: They sound fine to me. They can even put a helpful crunchiness onto some recordings. We listened to a lot of nineties hip-hop during our last album, all as MP3s, all via AirTunes. They sounded great, even with all that technology in the way. MP3s might not compare that well to a CD recording of, say, string quartets, but then, that’s not really their point.

SFJ: Do you ever hear from your fans about audio fidelity?

JG: We had a few complaints that the MP3s of our last record wasn’t encoded at a high enough rate. Some even suggested we should have used FLACs, but if you even know what one of those is, and have strong opinions on them, you’re already lost to the world of high fidelity and have probably spent far too much money on your speaker-stands.

SFJ: Do you think any of the MP3 generation—ten- to twenty-five-year-olds—want a higher quality experience?

JG: No. That comes later. It’s those thirty-something men who lurk in hi-fi shops, discussing signal purity and oxygen-free cables and FLACs. I should know—I was very nearly one of them.

SFJ: What are your feelings about the various audio formats?

JG: Sonic quality is important. I’d feel frustrated if we couldn’t release CDs as a band, but then, it only costs us a slight shaving of sound quality to get to the convenience of the MP3. It’s like putting up with tape hiss on a cassette. I was happy using cassettes when I was fifteen, but I’m sure they were sneered at in their day by audiophiles. If I’m on a train, with headphones, MP3s are great. At home, I prefer CD or vinyl, partly because they sound a little better in a quiet room and partly because they’re finite in length and separate things, unlike the endless days and days of music stored on my laptop.

SFJ: Do you record any differently now, knowing that the end result will likely be an MP3?

JG: No, but it was interesting how some tracks fared the conversion to MP3 better than others. It was never bad.

SFJ: What are your favorite and least favorite aspects of the MP3 age?

JG: The downside is that people are encouraged to own far more music than they can ever give their full attention to. People will have MP3s of every Miles Davis’ record but never think of hearing any of them twice in a row—there’s just too much to get through. You’re thinking, “I’ve got ‘Sketches of Spain and ‘Bitches Brew’—let’s zip through those while I’m finishing that e-mail.” That abundance can push any music into background music, furniture music.

SFJ: Freestyle here. Inject any relevant, burning thoughts.

JG: I find this sound quality stuff both fascinating and ridiculous. It’s like the pixel resolution of digital cameras: higher numbers are better, but that discussion always pushes the actual photography to one side, somehow.
 

BareBones

wheezy
totally agree with him here though

Jonny Greenwood said:
The downside is that people are encouraged to own far more music than they can ever give their full attention to. People will have MP3s of every Miles Davis’ record but never think of hearing any of them twice in a row—there’s just too much to get through. You’re thinking, “I’ve got ‘Sketches of Spain and ‘Bitches Brew’—let’s zip through those while I’m finishing that e-mail.” That abundance can push any music into background music, furniture music.

i find myself doing this with spotify, the choice is almost overwhelming. i'm never even two thirds of a way through a song before i'm searching for something else. it's annoying. i'm annoying myself.
 

mms

sometimes
totally agree with him here though



i find myself doing this with spotify, the choice is almost overwhelming. i'm never even two thirds of a way through a song before i'm searching for something else. it's annoying. i'm annoying myself.

yes thats why i abandoned my mp3 player when it broke really.
 

Martin Dust

Techno Zen Master
That's a good point actually, sometimes you can have too much and the other thing I found is it's totally fucked up my memory about some tracks I use't to like :)
 

Logos

Ghosts of my life
If he knew what flacs were (spend 30 seconds reading wkipedia) then he'd know that they are as almost as convinient as MP3s especially since bandwidth and storage questions are becoming moot.
 

hint

party record with a siren
He knows what FLACs are.

He doesn't suggest that low pixel rates don't look worse.
 

Martin Dust

Techno Zen Master
how do you mean? like you can't remember tunes you used to like?

For example, I had a girlfriend who was mad into Japan and I have good memories of those albums and the time, rose tinted of course but not anymore after a day of listening to every release - should have left it alone.
 

whygohome10

Wild Horses
JG: The downside is that people are encouraged to own far more music than they can ever give their full attention to. People will have MP3s of every Miles Davis’ record but never think of hearing any of them twice in a row—there’s just too much to get through. You’re thinking, “I’ve got ‘Sketches of Spain and ‘Bitches Brew’—let’s zip through those while I’m finishing that e-mail.” That abundance can push any music into background music, furniture music.

This used to happen to me all the time when i used to torrent all my music illegaly. I would always download the whole discography of an artist but only listen to like one album.

& i never listen to my iPod anymore just cause it sounds like crap.
 

gumdrops

Well-known member
This used to happen to me all the time when i used to torrent all my music illegaly. I would always download the whole discography of an artist but only listen to like one album.

& i never listen to my iPod anymore just cause it sounds like crap.

^this. i dunno if its that my ipod is fucked cos its a bit old now or if thats how it always was but it sounds like shit most of the time. its just good for holding long pirate radio sets and mixes.
 

michael

Bring out the vacuum
Yeah, I saw that Dithering thing the other day and was pleasantly surprised at what Greenwood had to say. Well, at least inasmuch as I totally agree with him. :)

Always bugs me when people complain about wanting FLAC / ALAC whatever and then are just cruising the streets listening on little earbuds. Who the fuck cares in that environment?
 

UFO over easy

online mahjong
joey said:
this generation will feel lucky that they can find any music they want at the click of a finger. I'm certainly grateful for that.

you can't though

i was pretty underwhelmed with spotify. impressive that the streaming never seems to get interrupted, it's better than youtube on that front, but there's nowhere near as much music
 
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DJ PIMP

Well-known member
Mixing, engineering, and mastering have a greater effect on the end product than the digital format (FLAC, CD, MP3).

Also disagree on the blanket hate of pixels in photos. I love the grain you can get in film photography - and digital pixellation is comparable and sometimes desirable, depending on subject matter and style etc. I see your crisp shiny digital future and raise you some noise!

Also, it's nearly 2010, how is it that we're still debating the merits of MP3?

Music is still represented physically in the objects we use to store it. MP3 players, laptops, etc -- even the internet has a wire-frame body model. And physical media is no great loss for music. Sound is disembodied by nature, a transient state of energy becoming entropy. What better means to represent the process of stasis and release than 1s and 0s? It's beautiful.
 

luka

Well-known member
are they fuck

this generation will feel lucky that they can find any music they want at the click of a finger.

this is so obviously right im amazed it needs saying. if you'd made my dreams come true when i was 15 this is exactly what would have happened, even youtube is utterly magical. for example, being able to hear the 2 bad mice song for the first time in close to 20 years has totally made my day. (thank you andy and marcus)
i hated not being able to afford to hear all the music i read about/heard on the radio.
kids are blessed. the musicians less so perhaps.
 

Tentative Andy

I'm in the Meal Deal
being able to hear the 2 bad mice song for the first time in close to 20 years has totally made my day. (thank you andy and marcus)

No problem. It's a great tune. Guaranteed to put a big smile on your face. :D

*****
There are some dodgy quality mp3s out there if you're just nabbing them off soulseek or whatever, but then that's just the chance you take. Almost all commercially released ones I've bought have been more than adequate for the formats you're most likely to listen to them in - i.e. on computer, on ipod/other personal mp3 player, perhaps burnt to cd on an average-quality home stereo.
I don't have anything else worthwhile to say about this topic, I don't think I understand it enough.
 
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