bhaagensen wrote: > Assuming you are right and they actually have this ability, audiophile > sound quality is far from their core product - nor have they so claimed. > They are a commercial tech company whose main concerns rightfully > include maximizing profits. For sure Apple's commercial goals drive their product development. But the resulting sub-optimal performance of the devices may well be one of the core reasons why excessive compression is now commonplace....
1. People are doing more and more of their listening on portable devices in noisy environments. 2. iPods are overwhelmingly the most common such device. 3. iPods do not offer compression during playback, therefore well mastered recordings don't sound good. 4. Hence recordings are compressed so that they *do* sound OK on iPods. This is actually a vicious circle. We have reached the stage where many modern releases only sound listenable on a portable player. And so people are gently pushed in the direction of doing even more of their listening on portables, which in turn reinforces the need to add compression. (Apple do very nicely out of this of course, by selling even more iPods). I'm not suggesting that any of this is some kind of conspiracy or even a conscious decision on the part of mastering engineers - more that there has been a slow but steady drift towards it because of the reaction of the marketplace, which will naturally gravitate towards compressed recordings that sound OK on portables. And now we've arrived at the position where extreme compression in mastering is a dogma. There is a generation of so-called mastering engineers who simply "know" that adding tons of compression is "the way it should be done". ------------------------------------------------------------------------ cliveb's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=348 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=97105 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
