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Death of the CDAs the CD is now the centre of most peoples Hi-Fi systems nowadays it is important to realise that it will not be tomorrow.
The format is being killed by mis-use from the record companies. Their tactic is short-term and self defeating - in fact the defeat is here now, CD sales are falling, MP3s are booming. Why? Because a lot of MP3s sound better. The reason is Digital Clipping.
The process of creating an MP3 (even ones created from the faulty CD) compresses the sound as a series of tones that cannot quite mimic a full digital clip, so playback of an MP3 is actually slightly 'decipped' in a crude type of way, which makes the DAC and analog filtering much happier.
Why do record companies ruin their product?It's the new technique to make a CD 'stand out' on the radio. Sadly the record company deliberately sells the very same clipped CD to the buying public, complete with digital clipping. The short term aim of making 'their' CD stand out in practice makes it tiring and unpleasant to listen to - the effect being proportional to the degree of compression and clipping in roughly equal measure. When all record companies do this to all CDs, the cumulative effect now means that no one stands out - and they are all rubbish.
Even medium clipped CDs have waveforms that look awful:
What about the RIAA standards body?In the Vinyl age the RIAA supplied standards for equalisation which allowed all record companies a level playing field to compete on, as all records played correctly on all playback equipment.
Today the RIAA has a chance to enforce a CD standard that prohibits clipping and excess compression. This was a natural by-product of vinyl but needs to be enforced in the short-term age of the deliberately distorted digital CD.
Instead the RIAA spends its efforts chasing down people who have decided that (thanks to digital clipping and over-compression) the content is not so valuable after all, and that MP3s sound just as good or better than CDs. Like an ostrich with it's head firmly buried in the concrete, the RIAA is busy chasing down the symptoms of it's own demise, instead of implementing a cheap and simple remedy that would earn them money and respect, instead of derison.
The irony is that the lower bandwidh MP3s contain less clipping artifacts that the 'better' MP3s and CDs, and therefore are less tiring to listen to. If you want to hear your CDs largely distortion free, you'll need to use a CD restoration program like DeClip/Remaster.
How interesting do you think this track sounds?
Without dynamics, music becomes a monologue. This is what the record industry is trying to sell today.
What is digital clipping?Digital clipping is a very harsh form of distortion that (depending on amount) ranges from tiring to ruining a CD. Digital clipping makes the loudest parts of a song (when you really need the quality) to break up and you get a rough, harsh, unpleasant sound.
The exact effect depends entirely on the playback device - the sound it totally uncontrolled - because the effect and waveform that the clip generates very much depends upon the way the DAC and analog circuitry in the CD player reacts to it.
If (as it quite common) the output saturates then an inaudible 4 sample clip could because a very audible 500 sample distortion, just recovering in time for the next clip - ending up in a recurring dreadful noise in the louder parts of the CD.
With modern compression and clipping - most parts of a CD are now loud:
The Black-Eyed-Peas, Rock My Shit UK Bonus Track:
This is not Hi-Fi.
The freely available open source DeClip/Remaster program (free declipping and CD distortion repair/restoration for hot masters) can reconstruct even this waveform, remastering the track - but obviously the original sound would be best, and much more accessible that this ironically named track.
Hi-FiHi-Fi is quite an interesting subject, a very subjective subject and the industry contains some real characters and opinions. The industry currently seems to operate at these distinct levels:
- Home theatre - surround sound, dvds, plasma screens
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Mid price 'Richer Sounds' type - money equates to features and power.
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Expensive 'serious' hi-fi, very fashion conscious - select the right cables!
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Top-flite esoteric, amps to £19,000 etc.
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DIY
The is also that strange animal, the Hi-Fi equivalent of Now! or Cosmo - the Hi-Fi Magazine with it's reviews of the latest interconnects, spikes and units.
After a visit to the 2004 Hi-Fi show I was able to experience and view all of the categories at once. In general I think it's fair to say that Hi-Fi has a particular 'sound', that bears little relation to the real world at times.
In fact some top systems sounded so dreadful, spitty, brittle, bass light and generally unpleasant that I was quite happy with my own system from the 70's.
The best room of the show was filled with Usher (now imported into the UK by Hi-audio ) stuff. This looked better than anything else, sounded better and was in fact much cheaper than all comparable Hi-Fi. They've been making Hi-Fi in Taiwan for 30 years now - and doing a pretty good job of it too!
Other Hi-Fi of note was McIntosh and Dali .
Interesting links (updated Feb 2005)
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