For those of you reading from the UK, you will be very familiar with the tradition of the “Sunday Papers” – buying them first-thing Sunday Morning (i.e. today), and the sitting back with a coffee or tea mid-morning and reading them (in fact that timing could equally well be mid-afternoon, whilst the re-run of EastEnders is on!)
Anyhow….. within one of the UK Sunday Papers, The Mail on Sunday, is a supplement called Live! This is the supposed “masculine” magazine – and often features gadgets etc
Today, they have a story about the B&O/Samsung Serenata – nothing new I hear you say – and quite rightly so.
But but but, the story has a spin on the lack of “lossless” audio that we get from our Mobile (and indeed portable) devices. Interestingly I had EXACTLY the same thought only a few days earlier, which walking through London listening to **** (I’ll leave you to guess what audio device that might have been).
Basically (and I’m on course for a semi-rant here), the quality of audio has been steadily declining since the ‘classic’ LP – from there we went to CDs, to MP3s, and now via a zig-zag route through DRM and Mobile devices, to things like AAC+.
The trouble with any of these new codecs/algorithms for shrinking sound is two-fold:
(1) whatever the hype/PR associated with how “revolutionary” the codec is at making music sound great, it STILL loses lots of info – check out the size of a WAV audio file versus an AAC+…. it could be 1/20th the size easily, so where does all that extra info that is discarded, end up? Lost, not just from the file, but from your audio experience
(2) given the choice between maintaining bit-rate to ensure better-sounding files (anyone heard a 256kbps AAC+ file, they sound amazing!), and using the codec as a lever to drop bit-rate, the ‘content provider’ will virtually always choose the latter – yes, smaller file, but as we just discussed, dumping lots of data using low bitrate encoding (however clever the codec) ultimately degrades the music!
Ultimately my point actually ends up being posed rhetorically – how much as we willing to have the quality of our audio degraded, just for the sake of portability? Are our Mobile devices just ‘convenient copies’ containers, acting as a fill-in between the home audio experiences?
Maybe, but I bet most people do the highest percentage of their listening to music on the move these days…… probably just not with great ‘quality’ music….
(Note: I am not in any way suggesting the B&O Serenata doesn’t have great music quality – in fact that’s one of it’s selling points – but I’ve not played with/listened to one, to be able to tell you – now I wonder where I can find one……!)