cliveb wrote: > 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".
3 . I have yet to find a portable so bad that good master don't sounds better in 99% of the cases my dirt cheap Cowon i7 is better with a good mastering and my iPad to . I listen on air-planes without noise cancelling earphones and still the good masters sounds better ,you may not hear all subtle details , but your atleast free from the cross artefacts ? and you may ne forced to use volume controll now and then . But for listening to classical in-flight noise cancellation or a gently compression mode like dolby's night settings for home cinema may indeed be necessary . ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mnyb's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4143 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=97105 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
