Simple Steps to Better Audio

Everyone deserves better audio, and every music artist deserves your best effort to hear the sound that they created. I know personally my wife gets really upset when I only here half of what she is saying.  I can only assume that musicians and film producers alike are driven crazy by the common acceptance of listening to half of the song or music track they produce.  This is what audio compression has done for us in this digital age of high tech gadgets and portable gizmos; it has cut our experience in half.
  Compression is the enemy of Quality, but understandably there always has to be some form of compromise. After all, not everyone is going to be able to afford a studio quality sound system in their home, and the convenience of portability has become so mandatory that it out ways quality by a long shot.

Ok, let me stop here and explain a couple things.  I am talking about quality and it occurs to me that some (like my wife) might not understand how quality in audio works.  There are basically two ways to store audio, digitally (the most common) and analogue.  When we speak we are sending an analogue signal and when we hear that is analogue as well.  It’s a physical change in the atmosphere around us in the form of sound waves.  An analogue signal is the highest quality possible because it is the original format the sound was created in, but in the same breath, it is the easiest to destroy; and thus recreating high quality analogue audio is extremely difficult and expensive! A digital recording takes an analogue signal and converts it into bytes of data which can be stored for play back in different formats.

Analogue devices were the only way to record and play back audio until the invention of computers and the “digital age”.  The records our parents have tucked away in the closet and the cassette tape of Michel Jackson singing Thriller we use to listen to on our walkman are all forms of Analogue recordings.  The first analogue recording device was basically a tube with a diaphragm on the end of it connected to a needle that would scratch out on a piece of glass the vibrations sent down the tube as someone talked into it.  Obviously it was not functional for playing the audio back, but it worked much the same way that Tomas Edison’s Phonograph did. The phonograph would use a needle to etch into a cylinder of clay the vibrations from the recording, then when playing back that needle would vibrate a diaphragm recreating those vibrations.  Records worked much the same way, only they changed the signal from vibrations to electrical pulses.  Cassette tapes used the electrical pulses to add magnetic pulses to a thin magnetic sensitive tape for playback later. It wasn’t until Laser Disks and then Compact Disks came along that the digital music format became mainstream.

When digital devices came along there were a couple limitations when it came to the recording and playback process of audio.  First it was how fast could audio be read and processed (bit rate) and second how much space was available to store the recorded data (bytes, megabytes, etc.)  CDs, the most common form of high quality digital audio, have a finite amount of storage space available (5,872,025,600 bits to be exact) and the speed (44,100 samples per second) was based on technology that was available to reproduce the sound waves that are audible to the human ear.  You could look at it this way, every second a digital recording looks at 44,100 moments in time and reproduces what you hear from those moments.  You are not going to hear a whole lot of difference between the audio lost on a CD recording and a live performance, but there is some loss. The big problem comes when you transfer your very high bit rate CD to a format that can be played on your computer or a portable device.

Red Line Represents Analogue Sound Wave
Black line represents Digital recreation.

Most software used to record audio from a CD onto a computer hard drive come defaulted to take storage space as a great consideration.  Storage is an important part of portable music and is probably the most expensive part; well it has been in the past.  So a small file size was very important, after all what good would a portable audio player be if you could only have a hand full of music tracks stored on it.  So what they did was to compress the data, or in other words, leave data out. The bit rate for most “ripping” software (i.e.  Windows Media Player, Apple iTunes, etc.) comes defaulted to a bit rate of somewhere around 128Kbps which is about 1 eleventh of the quality from a CD recording.  This enabled mass storage of music files in a relatively small space, but that is a pretty significant drop in quality just to enable your iPod to hold elevendybillion songs.  I don’t think it is worth it.

In most software you can go into the settings and change the CD ripping quality from that deplorable 128Kbps (usually MP3 format) to a higher quality or better yet Lossless format.  Remember the higher the bit rate, the better the audio and the bigger the file size.  So before you go to rip Taylor Swift’s new album “Speak Now” do her a favor and make sure you have your system set to duplicate the audio in the highest quality possible.

Finally when it comes to better audio, if you cannot afford a Hi-Fi sound setup and a dedicated listening room, invest in some decent headphones or ear buds.  I purchased some for about $20 and they do a great job reproducing quality audio when I’m in the truck or on the go. Just take a couple of simple steps and enjoy a better sound that will get you hearing things more like they were intended to be heard.