Music is a little more bass intensive than it was last century

Cacofonix

according to Fender R&D - at 4:00 +



I think this is because we are all listening through MP3 which removes bass in the compression algorithm.  So when MP3 is superseded, and amps get less bassy, will people hark back to the old days when amps had decent bottom end in a live situation?

Discuss.

Deijavoo

Ooh, what a topic. Personally that diagram that gets bounded around Facebook showing "X" amount of money on this bit of studio gear and "X" amount on that all being played through a cheap mp3 player and cheap earphones says it all. 

I love the convenience of 320kbps mp3s but the day that a common, portable and most importantly quality replacement comes in the better. 

Deijavoo

For example FLAC, I don't use it as I'm locked into Apple genepool currently, but I'd be tempted to fuck them off if I could find a player I liked as much as my 120gb ipod classic with FLAC compatibility. 

Any FLAC users here?

ICBM

Music does have more bass content than it did, I'm pretty sure - but it's not really to do with mp3, it's just down to listener taste as the Fender chap says. The same bass-heavy mixes are put on CDs.

mp3 doesn't take that much bass out anyway - it depends on the playback system. I play 128kbps mp3s through a huge 1950s speaker cab driven from the *headphone* output of my computer - no amp, just directly from the jack, so 50mW max I think - and it has enough bass to shake the room even at little more than talking volume. That's because the bass driver is huge, underdamped and rear-ported - the bass frequencies to drive it are there, no problem.

I use 128kpbs because that's the only way to get 30,000+ songs on a 160GB iPod. The question for me would be that if they do ever make a 1TB iPod, whether I would use that to load all my music in at CD quality, or just use it to allow me to increase my music library to around 200,000 songs…

I love bass-heavy sounds on guitar amps - not so much because I actually like that amount of bass in the mix, I tend to raise the amp up on purpose, partly to reduce it - but because it makes the amp sound much looser, more open and more responsive. Unless the amp really has way too much (rare), my normal setting for the bass control is full up.

Some good sounds and nice playing in that video too. When he plays the Gretsch he really does sound quite like Townshend, and the white-blonde/maple/single-ply Tele is beautiful.

Cacofonix

I did an A/B test between CD quality and MP3 quality on my ipod, and there was a big difference.  Compression on the bass is the largest in terms of difference.

Not sure about the bass-heavy mixes on CDs - I would need to research what the DJ dudes of the day are doing, but Amazon is pushing MP3s in the time period between order and delivery of CDs.  Great idea, but again flags up the bass differences.

When lossless compression gets de rigeur, I suspect there may be a change in mixes. 

Cacofonix

For example:  this



MP3 version

Roland

Deijavoo said:

Any FLAC users here?

Yep. Logitech Musicserver can use FLAC

richardhomer

Bass was less prevalent on older recordings as deep, loud bass took up too much groove-space on an LP. This was why 12" singles became popular - particularly with club DJs - they could be 'cut' louder.

To the best of my knowledge, none of the 'lossy' digital formats reduce bass, in terms of either extension (depth) or volume. All they do is reduce resolution - in other words they do not represent the analogue signal in as much 'detail' as higher resolution formats do.

Btw, I didn't think the Fender amp sounded particularly magical....

Danny1969

We don't tend to go mad on bass these days for different  reasons, one being the majority of people nowadays don't listen on anything capable of playing back anything with any real low end .... it's all laptops, iPods, phones etc. It changes the way you mix cos you need the kick drum for example to be audible on laptop speakers and such. 

Also like it or not your finished product has to be mastered loud, and the more low end on a track the harder that is to do unless it's a very sparse arrangement (like some hip hop) 

Regarding flac, it's a great format but ss storage is getting so large now that in ten years time your iPod nano will probably be 256Gb and the big ones more like 2Tb. Once that happens any compression is unessacry 

 

Drew_TNBD

This is a good read:
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/apr12/articles/lost-in-translation.htm

EricTheWeary

^ as I understand it this meant you could get better bass on the outer grooves of an LP and running order was often determined by this.

monquixote

Drew_fx said:

This is a good read:
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/apr12/articles/lost-in-translation.htm

Great article. 

I don't know why people bother using MP3, it's quite an old format now. You will get better results with AAC and Vorbis. 

ICBM

monquixote said:

I don't know why people bother using MP3, it's quite an old format now. You will get better results with AAC and Vorbis.

I use it because it's a universal format which guarantees you can play it on anything. I don't see much point in "better" unless it's full CD quality.

The newer mp3 encodings are better-sounding than older ones even at the same bit rate too, I think.

monquixote

ICBM said:

monquixote said:

I don't know why people bother using MP3, it's quite an old format now. You will get better results with AAC and Vorbis.

I use it because it's a universal format which guarantees you can play it on anything. I don't see much point in "better" unless it's full CD quality.

The newer mp3 encodings are better-sounding than older ones even at the same bit rate too, I think.

I usually use LAME some of the older ones were quite shady. 

Anything I'm interested in plays AAC and at 128 or 96 it's quite a big difference.

ICBM

monquixote said:

Anything I'm interested in plays AAC and at 128 or 96 it's quite a big difference.

I know, I just can't be bothered going back over a music library my size and redoing everything, and in the interests of consistency I've never changed the settings, or see any point in doing so if it means that one day I might not be able to play them on something.

The important thing is that I don't use one format for everything, as seems to be the assumption that a lot of people make - I use low-bitrate mp3 for transportable high-capacity background listening, and CD for proper listening. I don't care very much about the quality for the former, and I don't care about the space for the latter, so I don't see much point in anything in the middle... trying to do either job but not as well.

monquixote

I use Spotify which is 320 Vorbis and it's pretty much great for everything.

I'm not sure it's really worth going to CD quality given the quality of my hifi and acoustics of my room.

Rocker

I store all my music on a 1TB hard drive, files saved as FLAC. A Squeezebox or Sonus will send it to my hi-fi system. Random selections or saved Favourites is my usual way of listening to music. Highly recommended.