A lot of people are suddenly questioning whether their recording and production quality standards can be lowered if they are strictly using online delivery, and the music is going to be reduced to the quality of mp3 and AAC anyway.
Here is the surprising truth: The quality of your production chain is MORE important if any of the data-compressed formats are going to be the primary delivery medium. AAC for iTunes or mp3, even at the highest kbps rate, are not near the quality of CD audio. When your music is converted to these formats, it will lose quality. So the better the quality of your final mastered project, the better the data-compressed files will sound. That may seem like a very obvious statement to some, but surprisingly a lot of people see it backwards; the delivery medium is of relatively low quality, so the quality of the original recording is less important. They couldn't be more wrong. In this age of internet delivery, from tracking to mixing to mastering you need to pay more attention to quality than ever before.
Interesting blog topic and first posting topic; thanks.
ReplyDeleteI have wondered about this, thinking high quality surely will never be wasted (or at least one would not be sorry to have it as the basis of the sound.) I am glad to know it is still important to have high quality for original recordings even if they are expected to only be delivered online.
Plus it's always a good idea to have your finished work archived in as high resolution digital format as possible. That way you are ready to re-release in a higher quality format at a future date. If you properly down-convert a high resolution track, it will still retain much of its quality. But if you up-convert a low resolution track - mp3 to CD-Audio for instance - not only do you not gain quality, you still lose quality. So the up-converted CD-Audio will actually sound worse than the original mp3.
ReplyDeleteAnother factor to consider is the evolution of music delivery - it wasn't that long ago that the idea of instant digital delivery with acceptable fidelity seemed ridiculous. But the development of mp3, AAC and the like - which coincided with huge leaps in delivery speeds and the widespread adoption of the once-esoteric internet - happened remarkably fast. Odds are we'll eventually have much higher resolution of "convenience-level" audio deliverables, and the widespread adoption of "home theater experience" hardware should mean that the marketing mojo of the words "hi def" will soon be applied to consumer music. Which all means that someday, you may really wish you'd recorded everything at 24 or 96k; essentially the same conundrum facing indie filmmakers who didn't shoot recent projects in hi-def, struggling to uprez their images to blue-ray level.
ReplyDeleteCorrect Cloudy. As a hint that this is indeed in our future, Sonic has released their first consumer product, a hi-resolution audio engine that works with iTunes called Amarra. http://www.amarraaudio.com/
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