Innovation or e-waste? Apple rumored to ditch headphone jack

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

The real problem with digital, at least with uniform PCM is that you store logarithmic data in a linear file format. Sure, adding a bit will add 6db to your dynamic range. But once you go to a more silent part of your music you lose resolution exponentially. A CD has 96db dynamic range on paper? You wish, since going to the range of -90db to -96db your resolution is one single bit - on or off in that whole 6db range - in practice completely unuseable.

This is the same with RAW-files in digital photography.

A color can range from 00 00 00 to FF FF FF, or pure black to pure white. That is 65.536 values. If you *don't* use that entire range (so your picture is not perfectly exposed), you lose at least one bit of dynamic range. So, you will get 2 to the power of 15, instead of 16, which is 32.768 values.

Therefore, not exposing your picture 100% correctly will lose you at least half of the dynamic range.

(Some people even go as far as pushing every picture to be as bright as possible, to use all the bits without overexposing, and then they darken the picture in the parts where necessary. This is called 'expose to the right', because traditionally, the brightness diagram has the dark values on the left and bright values on the right. This technique can create pictures with a huge dynamic range.)

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by jbjb

That's just the point at which the signal disappears into the quantisation noise floor (the bit-step quantum is significant compared with the signal amplitude). Vinyl would have given up long before that (the typical DR of a vinyl record is around 70dB - a factor of at least a hundred worse in terms of linear power dynamic range) so it's hard to see how that can be classified as a disadvantage of digital. It's not perfect, but it's much better than the analogue alternatives.

Logarithmically compressed PCM, of course, has it's own issues which are much worse (IMHO) for music reproduction.

Katsunami has it right - CD is technically massively superior to vinyl, but those advantages aren't always apparent due to a tendency for them to be royally messed with excessive DR compression etc.

/JB

I agree that CD is superior to vinyl...provided the CD is well mastered. However, bad mastering is one of the main problems with CD. CDs should be mastered in a way that make best use of the format, much like vinyl has to be mastered in a way that works best for vinyl.

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by Conan46

Katsunami, good point about wireless getting crowded. I can't imagine living in an apartment complex with all the wifi signals. Even in suburban areas it is getting more crowded, and I regularly reboot my router because I notice my neighbors piling up on the same 2.4ghz channel. The 5ghz band will buy us some time, but eventually it will be just as bad. I have my two Rokus wired directly, and considered wired the best option in general wherever possible.

Although this is a little off point it is related. In the book Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte, he makes a point that in the future wireless will be reserved for devices that move and wired will be used by devices that don't move. This is because the amount of bandwidth with wireless is limited, while the amount of bandwidth with wired is unlimited.

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by Shane R

What sort of music are you FLAC aficionados listening to?

For the music I rip from my own CDs, I use Red Book FLAC (16 bit/44.1 khz). For me, that is good enough since I listen to my music through my Walkman with okay headphones (although I'm always looking for better headphones).

Plus, for me the higher cost and larger file size of Hi-Rez FLACs (those above the Red Book FLAC standard) offers no advantage since I doubt I'd be able to hear the difference. I base that on my own ABXY testing of Red Book FLAC against the highest quality LAME-encoded MP3s where I could not tell which sounded better. In some cases I could sense a slight difference but I could not tell which was which.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

For the music I rip from my own CDs, I use Red Book FLAC (16 bit/44.1 khz). For me, that is good enough since I listen to my music through my Walkman with okay headphones (although I'm always looking for better headphones).

It's not only good enough, it's the only logical option. The music is *on the CD* in 16 bit, 44.1 kHz, so if you rip it, that will be your maximum quality. Trying to rip at a higher quality will just use up huge amounts of space for nothing.

Plus, for me the higher cost and larger file size of Hi-Rez FLACs (those above the Red Book FLAC standard) offers no advantage since I doubt I'd be able to hear the difference. I base that on my own ABXY testing of Red Book FLAC against the highest quality LAME-encoded MP3s where I could not tell which sounded better. In some cases I could sense a slight difference but I could not tell which was which.

Praise to you There are people who vehemently argue that they can hear a difference between WAV and FLAC, which is just bullshit, of course. If you take a WAV, and then make a FLAC out of it, and back to WAV, the two WAV-files will be 100% identical (if nothing went wrong). When playing a FLAC-file, the audio player is just decompressing on the fly, and will effectively be sending a WAV to the soundcard. The only reason for a FLAC to sound different is when some sort of weird decoding stuff or postprocessing is going on.

The only reason for me to use FLAC and take the storage penalty over MP3 is that FLAC is lossless and can be reconverted to other lossless formats shoud I ever need or want to do so. I also have a FLAC music player because I'm too lazy to create a separate MP3-library. I couldn't hear a difference between a 320 kbps MP3 and FLAC if my life depended on it.

[GlennD]

LAME encoded with VBR in high quality mode has been my go-to, and seems to be a good balance of quality vs size. In my case I've got all of my original CDs (and I still refuse to buy digital files unless that is my only option), so those are my lossless backups.

[GlennD]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Everybody does. Listening to music in that way is an activity, just like browsing Facebook or Youtube is, or reading, or watching series on TV. Many people who think they have no time would have too much time if they should quit following 20 series on TV, browse Facebook, and look at 147 cat video's on Youtube each day. (OK, I'm exaggerating, but you get the point.)

You're 100% right of course. It's all in how you choose to spend your time.

When I listened to vinyl as a kid it was in my parents' room (for some reason the turntable was in there) and I'd go sit down and listen to it, doing nothing else. As I started recording on to cassettes I'd buy a record, record it the first time it played, and then go to my room with the liner notes to read the lyrics while listening. But I haven't sat down with a new album and the lyrics for a full listen-through for a long, long time.

I just picked up the new Dream Theater CD - a two hour plus concept album. I don't have any idea when I'll have the chance to sit down and give it the attention it's intended for.

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

It's not only good enough, it's the only logical option. The music is *on the CD* in 16 bit, 44.1 kHz, so if you rip it, that will be your maximum quality. Trying to rip at a higher quality will just use up huge amounts of space for nothing.



Praise to you There are people who vehemently argue that they can hear a difference between WAV and FLAC, which is just bullshit, of course. If you take a WAV, and then make a FLAC out of it, and back to WAV, the two WAV-files will be 100% identical (if nothing went wrong). When playing a FLAC-file, the audio player is just decompressing on the fly, and will effectively be sending a WAV to the soundcard. The only reason for a FLAC to sound different is when some sort of weird decoding stuff or postprocessing is going on.

The only reason for me to use FLAC and take the storage penalty over MP3 is that FLAC is lossless and can be reconverted to other lossless formats shoud I ever need or want to do so. I also have a FLAC music player because I'm too lazy to create a separate MP3-library. I couldn't hear a difference between a 320 kbps MP3 and FLAC if my life depended on it.

Although I rip my CDs as Red Book FLAC, if I was purchasing lossless downloads on line I'd buy the Red Book version since, based on my own experience previously mentioned, purchasing the Hi-Rez version wouldn't make any difference to my own listening.

I do rip to FLAC as my source file for the same reason you do, as a source for my player with the option to convert if needed (the main disadvantage being that it takes much longer to load the files on my player since it must convert each file as it loads it on my player). I use Sony's Media Go to manage my music and it will autoconvert from FLAC to MP3 or AAC if needed when it loads them on my player.

My current player, a Sony NWZ-A17 player, supports FLAC and Hi-Rez FLAC and provides enough storage space to allow me to load Red Book FLACs on my player. Due to this I don't worry too much about converting to other formats except in certain circumstances (see below).

Originally Posted by GlennD

LAME encoded with VBR in high quality mode has been my go-to, and seems to be a good balance of quality vs size. In my case I've got all of my original CDs (and I still refuse to buy digital files unless that is my only option), so those are my lossless backups.

Although I have the CDs for my FLAC rips, I use an external hard drive as a backup for my digital library mainly so that I don't lose the metadata for my files. It saves me from having to re-research the information (such as the actual year for songs, the creative team, and my own additions like including the original song information with song parodies) that I'd have to do again if I had to re-rip the CDs.

For some uses I agree that a LAME-encoded VBR MP3 at the highest quality is a good option. One place I use them is with some audiobooks where putting them on my player as FLAC would make no sense, such as with an audiobook that features only one person speaking. Converting an audiobook to a lossy format would save a large amount of space with little noticeable difference in the sound quality.

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by MikeB1972

Any idea why they are trying to make CD's louder? Every device I have listened to a CD on, has either a magic spinny knob thing or buttons that make the volume go up or down.

Loud adverts on TV are annoying though.

The problem with The Loudness War isn't that the music can't be loud. The problem is that they make the entire song uniformly loud by compressing the song's dynamic range so that there is little difference between the loudest and soft parts of the song. The following video illustrates this:

[dgatwood]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

The real problem with digital, at least with uniform PCM is that you store logarithmic data in a linear file format. Sure, adding a bit will add 6db to your dynamic range. But once you go to a more silent part of your music you lose resolution exponentially. A CD has 96db dynamic range on paper? You wish, since going to the range of -90db to -96db your resolution is one single bit - on or off in that whole 6db range - in practice completely unuseable.

This is why nobody uses 16-bit audio for doing the actual recording; they move to 16 bits of precision only after they get the levels exactly right to maximize the amount of material that falls in the upper parts of that range.

To get back to the original subject, I think this is one of Apple's dumbest ideas to date. The Lightning connector was never designed to handle somebody dropping his or her phone with earbuds plugged into it.

I suspect that the average iPhone user breaks three or four pairs of wired earbuds over the three-year life of the device. Most of those break because of somebody yanking hard on the wires.

How many of those users are going to keep buying iPhones if they have to shell out $99 for an out-of-warranty repair to their Lightning jack every time they snag their headphone cord in something? I'm betting none, or very nearly none. So if Apple does this, it will probably be really, really bad for future iPhone sales.

Originally Posted by Phogg

Devices long passed the point where a majority of users put their devices in cases not just to protect them, but to make them thick enough to hold comfortably. Bob J. Gear specializes in making silicone bumper cases for tablets and ereaders.

Thinner jumped the shark.

You got that right.

[dgatwood]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

(Some people even go as far as pushing every picture to be as bright as possible, to use all the bits without overexposing, and then they darken the picture in the parts where necessary. This is called 'expose to the right', because traditionally, the brightness diagram has the dark values on the left and bright values on the right. This technique can create pictures with a huge dynamic range.)

Of course, the problem with that is that if some of those highs turn out to be something you need and they're blown out, there's no way to recover them.

IMO, it is usually far better to shoot RAW and avoid getting the values compressed down to 8 bits per subpixel (JPEG) from the original 14. That way, you don't have to worry so much about the exposure.

[Conan46]

Originally Posted by dgatwood

How many of those users are going to keep buying iPhones if they have to shell out $99 for an out-of-warranty repair to their Lightning jack every time they snag their headphone cord in something? I'm betting none, or very nearly none. So if Apple does this, it will probably be really, really bad for future iPhone sales.




You got that right.

Interesting. That 3.5 jack with earbuds plugged in my ears has actually saved my devices a few times. The device has slipped from my hands and the cord took tension off of the drop. If the jack had just let go of the earbuds the device would have hit much harder.

[dgatwood]

Originally Posted by Conan46

Interesting. That 3.5 jack with earbuds plugged in my ears has actually saved my devices a few times. The device has slipped from my hands and the cord took tension off of the drop. If the jack had just let go of the earbuds the device would have hit much harder.

Not to mention that the jack itself would take a major hit if the phone doesn't fall top-first. Odds are, the lightning blade would break off inside the device with regularity under that sort of abuse, and there's a good chance that it would stretch the contacts inside the jack in the process.

Lightning is NOT an appropriate connector for headphones. It is approximately as far from an appropriate connector as you could POSSIBLY get.

[GlennD]

If I understand the rumors correctly the idea is to get rid of both ports - headphone and lightning. Apple wants a truly wireless phone.

So no worries about lightning connected headphones.

[BretSingleton]

Apple gone environmentally friendly lol. How come that happen.