That’s actually the reason I think it’s not a big deal. It’s not blind, but I can hear the flaws in the random country song I’m listening to right now. But…there’s no way I could listen that careful in a club at 110dB when I’m wearing earplugs anyway.
Anyone not wearing earplugs has probably destroyed the parts of their hearing that would pick up on the subtleties.
So, when it comes to your audience…you’ve got 3 groups of people: people who are too deaf to hear it, people who’s earplugs are too cheap to hear it, and people who spent a lot of money on custom musicians plugs and wear them clubbing.
Realistically, the 3rd group is effing small. I think I just buy wavs at this point because of a combination of habit and the off chance that I’d want to do an edit. Plus, it bugs me when I’m listening for fun and think about it.
I wouldn’t bet on it. Filters on DACs are getting pretty good. I’d bet if anything, they’d be objectively worse either because they’re distorting to get as loud or just won’t get as loud because of reproducing HF content that is basically just noise. It really just depends on the type of AA filtering the sound card did. And for reproduction, 24-bit audio is just wasteful…16-bit audio already has a crap ton more dynamic range than the vast majority of analog DJ mxiers……and people liked them okay.
I haven’t bought new music in a while. I have big crates at 3 different online shops stored……but I just can’t bring myself to actually buy the tracks right now. Too much other stuff to pay for: other toys, food, fucking gasoline.
Skipped to end of thread because I couldn’t be arsed to read the whole thread. I saw the first page and all the hoo-haa about ‘can you tell between MP3 and WAV’, and to do a subjective listening test. Only issue with that is that it isn’t pumping out of a 10K system. Music sounds so different at high volume!
As an example, I tried using keylock on a CDJ that had always sounded totally fine at home, but through a large PA, it sounded absolutely awful. I love my 320 MP3s and use them all the time. On a 6K PA I used a 192 (and ashamed to say, a 128 of a tune that I couldn’t find anywhere else) and none of these sounded as bad as keylock. I think you’d be better off spending your time paying attention to interconnects and the quality of PA in general, rather than 320 vs WAV, because if the equipment is turd, doesn’t matter how much you polish it by putting through a 1000000Mhz 256bit file, it ain’t gonna sound good.
Also, no good running WAVs through a Realtek built-in soundcard… it’s never going to sound as an MP3 through a top end Echo or Sapphire soundcard solution. Save the money you would spend on WAVs and put it into a pot to buy a better soundcard.
As a final note, no-one ever seems to pay attention to digital outs. Everyone just uses RCA blindly. The DACs on a DB4 WILL be better than the DACs on a CDJ and using this option, you cut out a digital(CDJ)>analog(RCA)>digital(DB4) conversion which inherently adds noise. You will also not get any RF interference on the RCA line from the CDJ to the mixer using this method. Hell, why are we not lusting after all digital connects (AES/EBU) to speaker (esp. now that mixers are going all digital), rather than worrying about the minutiae of WAV vs MP3?
Therefore to conclude, WAV or MP3 should be about #5 or #6 on your list when looking at audio quality. Admittedly, even with a shit system, a WAV will always be an unlossy WAV, so when you do get an absolutely kick ass system, the WAV will be ready to go in all it’s uncompressed glory, but you’ll STILL be pushed to tell the difference between the two. Save your money and get 320… and a badass soundcard.
We’ll have to agree to disagree on that. My tests were done on a high end, tuned to the 9’s flat response professional sound stage and the difference between 320 MP3 & wav was night and day. I do, however agree with your other points about the signal chain, hardware and extra DA/AD conversions, as the overall signal is only as good as the weakest link in the chain.
I’m with Sir in that I don’t think the audio interface makes that big of a difference. It’ll never sound better than your source, for one thing, and the differences between a crap DJ interface and a good one are hardly night & day. Diminishing returns kicks in real quick.
@SirReal and @soundmotiondj - did you record or publish these experiments? or do you have links to similar experiments? I’m actually finding less “hard data” on these topics than I expected while researching this, and there’s a lot of bizarre claims being bandied about in the “audiophile” press regarding digital data (The Absolute Sound recently had a really strange series of articles comparing WAV to FLAC with some conclusions that defy basic principles of computer science, for example).
That happens a lot. There’s a lot of stuff out there that defies physics too.
Hell, Bernie Grundman (I think…could have been someone simlar) is a top-end mastering engineer who doesn’t seem to know anything about digital audio. The guy’s a genius at getting records to sound as good/loud as they possibly can and has a lot of grammys/platinum records to his credit.
But he also runs a word clock that–based on his description–seems to have been modded to run based on cesium decay……because he thinks that the commercial word clock (even the high end ones) aren’t precise enough. He honestly believes he can hear jitter in stuff that makes the Apogee Big Ben look cheap. He also thinks he can hear jitter between different brands of CDs…which isn’t really possible. And he prefers for people to mail him a hard drive because copying digital data–to him–reduces quality similar to copying a tape.
The guy’s brilliant at what he does…but he spends a lot of money on crap that has zero audible effect.
I use mp3, from 256bps quality and upwards, even though I am an audiophile with a 10000 dollar hifi-system from Linn at home I have come to the conclusion that in a crowded club it doesn’t matter as much the quality of your MP3, as the PA is not suitable of reproducing high quality sound, it’s made to deliver booming loud sound to the crowd.
Probably true. But, as you’ve pointed out before, the S4’s metering makes it very hard to not hit that limiter. Also, even when I turned down the gain to avoid clipping, it still sounded flat. YMMV, but I was not impressed with the sound quality.
IDK…I’ve never used one extensively. But I’d bet money against the S4 being sub-bar. NI does make it really hard to run their stuff right sometimes. Part of me is amazed they’re as successful as they are, but on the other hand……I’m still impressed when I see a DJ who isn’t pegging the peak light of his mixer all night and Pioneer started incorporating a post-meter attenuator to try and fix those problems, so……yeah…
I actually think my s2 sounds pretty crisp. i got the limiter off and play well within any clipping (i think) and with a nice fresh Inland Knights AIFF (who always deliver their tunes at -6db for pro mastering and are pretty audiophile with their productions) and my vxt4s hooked direct all sounds super crystal and pretty lush.
In theory its a an audio 6 sc in there so no reason it shouldn’t sound clean.
I raised this very thread on a completely different forum (a popular British psychedelic one) the other day and funnily enough the answers read pretty much identically the same.
Thing is, whilst the audiophile community may be technically correct, there are a number of different aspects at play for djs which change the criteria dramatically.
Firstly the way we hear it - I think for djs, while we might listen to our tunes ultra carefully on low volume in the middle of the night, when we’re mixing it is all about how it feels, we sidestep the stage of critically analysing every sound and go directly to the overall feeling the tune gives us, in which scenario the microscopic details such as reverb and delay tails, and the dynamics in the highs and lows, suddenly take on much more importance than they would do in the traditional home listening environment, even on very hi-def equipment, simply because the way that we are listening to, and hearing, the music is different. That is why we use monitors, which might sound harsh in hi-fi terms, but allow us to perceive our music in a more “sound system oriented” kind of way.
Secondly, is a point raised, funnily enough, by the proponents of the audiophile point of view themselves, and that is, that the experience of listening to music is subjective. While it may be true that even the most seasoned DJ might fail to successfully identify the mp3 in a double blind test, nevertheless when you are standing in front of a crowd, and you know, even if nobody else does, that the music you are playing is a feeble imitation of the real thing on a lossy format, can you really, deep down inside yourself, throw it down with the same passion and voracity as you would if you knew you were blasting out the pure, unabridged, passionate fury as the artist put on the record?
This reporter says no.
Nice post, goat. I agree with you very much in general with a few caveats.
First, people may not be able to articulate or scientifically identify a good source from a bad one (statistically, most people can’t). But the difference is still there, and between the vibes of people who can tell and subtle things that people don’t consciously perceive…there may still be a difference. Does it matter? Who knows?! I’m not a researcher, and I’m not a doctor (though I do play a laywer on TV sometimes).
There’s at least one DJ whom I very much respect that posted–several years ago–that he believed CDJs were a horrible medium for DJs. It wasn’t because of the sound quality, it was because vinyl records with a needle on them respond to the room. All the noise that the party makes, the reverb in the room, etc. gets picked up (to a very minute degree) in the form of feedback. Too much and it sounds terrible, obviously. But he believed that feeding that happy noise back to the party, however subtle, made a positive difference on the party. He suggested that CD DJs hook up a microphone and point it at the crowd (placed so it doesn’t get feedback from the booth monitors) on an open channel with the gain really low all night to simulate the effect.
Was he full of shit? Almost certainly, yes. But he’s still an amazing DJ, and if he believes it makes a difference…it makes a difference to him that comes through in his performance. Frankly, if I see a mic in the booth and have time to deal with feedback issues during sound check (if there is one) I’d do it just to pay homage to him.
……which brings me to this awesome metaphor:
The only reason I haven’t dropped Your Love by Jamie Principle at a party is because I feel weird not playing it on vinyl.
I can pass some blind ABX tests (though I’ve never done a full scale one with lots of repeated measures and statistics), and I feel bad playing MP3s if I have another option. Whether or not the difference in sound is perceptible to my audience…if I’m aware of what I’m playing, it might make a difference in my performance. I’m not at nearly a high enough level to really tell.
But that’s worth $1/song…easily.
That being said, if the only way I had to play a dope ass song was a standard home audio cassette recorded straight off a broke-ass behringer recording console, you better effing believe I’d do it. But with what we’re discussing, that’s not at all the case. And if I were in that situation, I’d probably have the opportunity to re-record it for the artist anyway.
[quote=“mostapha, post:58, topic:41277, username:mostapha”]
But that’s worth $1/song…easily.
[/quote].
If we are talking about a certain website’s “handling fee” it isn’t the cost that people gripe at though, it is the bullshit.
Now, if Beatport sold only WAV, and it was only available at the higher price bracket, no option, would we complain? Would we fuck, we would talk about our music with pride, because we would feel like the cost reflected the value of the music, not some arbitrary bitchass mark up.
Please excuse my language, I fear I am somewhat in my cups…
This was pretty much the conclusion of the Absolute Sound “study” - they claimed that if you converted WAV->FLAC->back to WAV that the resulting WAV file sounded worse. Supposedly in blind studies. And that if you did it again (back to FLAC, back to WAV) there was even further degradation, like copying a cassette tape. We’re talking bit-perfect copies here; no different than copying the file from one hard drive to another. Bizarre.
