
“Streaming has ended for me. I hope this is ok for my fans” - balbaugh
https://www.facebook.com/NeilYoung/posts/10155765667375317:0
======
Fr0styMatt8
EDIT: Just a bit more context. Neil Young has been trying to sell an
'audiophile' grade audio player. This post seems like nothing more than trying
to stealthily promote the supposed virtues of his own product.

I'm sorry but what an utter absolute load of crap. Especially given this:

[http://gizmodo.com/dont-buy-what-neil-young-is-
selling-16784...](http://gizmodo.com/dont-buy-what-neil-young-is-
selling-1678446860)

Read some of the comments down on his Facebook also. His fans are not happy
(rightfully so).

~~~
cellularmitosis
Indeed. The part I find most ridiculous is that he is pushing a _portable_
music player on the strength of its high bitrate digital source.

The key thing to realize is that there are a lot of pieces in this signal path
(bits to brain). The best you can do is start with the highest quality source
possible, and then focus on minimizing the reduction in quality which happens
at each step past that.

His intentions are good with choosing a high quality source. However, the idea
that a _portable_ music player is going to have a good enough DAC, good enough
analog amplification / filtering, that the user will select good enough
headphones, and will be listening in a low enough noise-floor environment
(sitting absolutely still in a dead room with the A/C turned off) to be able
to come anywhere close to hearing the difference made by that high quality
source is laughable.

Is it possible to detect the difference between 320kbps streaming and
192kHz/24bit lossless? Sure, you'd see it on an oscilloscope. But could you
hear it through $50 ear buds while walking down the street?

One way to reason about sound quality is to mentally model it as two sounds
mixed together: a loud, perfect signal, and a much quieter distortion signal.
For humans, loud sounds mask quieter sounds, and if the amplitude difference
is great enough, you simply can't perceive the quieter sound at all.

Now, take that one step futher: model the sound as a loud, perfect signal
mixed with five or six small distortion signals (A, B, C, D, etc, each
representing a step in the path from bits to brain). Neil's player reduces
distortion signal A by a tiny fraction. Great! But that reduction is only
perpectible if it isn't swamped by distortion signals B, C, D, E, and the
noise floor created by whatever environment you happen to be sitting in
(ultimately, "is this reduction in distortion swamped by the noise floor
created by the sound of blood rushing through the veins in my ears?")

~~~
Fr0styMatt8
A friend pointed out to me that his stance is even funnier when you consider
this:

[http://consequenceofsound.net/2014/03/neil-young-confirms-
ne...](http://consequenceofsound.net/2014/03/neil-young-confirms-new-album-
was-recorded-in-jack-whites-1947-voice-o-graph-booth/)

The sad part is that his PR has probably achieved what they wanted to. I mean,
I'm on here writing a comment about the Pono Player and talking about it with
friends. So yeah....

------
timothya
An interesting stance he's taking.

Spotify, Google Play Music, and Rdio all stream at 320kbps MP3 or OGG, and
Apple Music streams at 256kbps AAC (which is approximately the same quality as
320kbps MP3). [0][1]

Yet, the vast majority of people cannot tell the difference between 256kbps
MP3 and lossless, let alone between 320kbps MP3 and lossless (tested many
times, for example: [2]). I'm not sure Neil has much of an argument to make
here when it comes to audio quality, particularly for the use case of casual
listening.

[0]: [http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/30/8863315/streaming-music-
se...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/30/8863315/streaming-music-service-
comparison-apple-music)

[1]: [http://www.whathifi.com/news/apple-music-tracks-
are-256kbps-...](http://www.whathifi.com/news/apple-music-tracks-are-256kbps-
aac-files)

[2]: [http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-great-mp3-bitrate-
experimen...](http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-great-mp3-bitrate-experiment/)

~~~
sowhatquestion
Hmm, I thought Google Play (and possibly Spotify as well) used OGG. MP3 is a
very old format at this point.

~~~
TD-Linux
Spotify uses Ogg Vorbis.

Google Play uses MP3, which is kind of sad these days because Ogg Vorbis or
Ogg Opus would both be much better choices.

------
davidgerard
> the worst quality in the history of broadcasting

because his stuff was never transmitted by FM radio, let alone AM radio. What.

Seriously, Neil Young is 69 and has played feedback-drenched noise for the
past forty years. If he can tell compressed stream quality from source CD in
A/B/X testing, I'll give you and him a lollipop. Two lollipops.

------
sambeau
I assume, by the same logic, he'll be removing his music from Radio, too?

~~~
RubyPinch
Probably not.

    
    
        I was there.
        AM radio kicked streaming's ass.
        Analog Cassettes and 8 tracks also kicked streaming's ass,
        and absolutely rocked compared to streaming.

~~~
Oletros
How radio kicked ass streaming?

~~~
exDM69
Analog transmission artifacts make sound quality worse. Digital transmission
errors make playback choppy and intermittent, which completely ruins the
rhythm and flow of the music.

~~~
lewisl9029
Isn't that what buffering is for?

Surely the average data plan could handle ~300kbps streaming with enough of an
overhead such that buffering would make interruptions extremely unlikely?

I'd take that over having _noticeably_ degraded sound quality _almost all the
time_ with radio.

------
andybak
[http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0671/2309/products/57_5726a...](http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0671/2309/products/57_5726a8fc-253f-4c0d-9374-bf4b9fdcba53_grande.jpeg?v=1421885938)

------
geomark
Based on the comments over there he certainly isn't getting much love for the
stance he is taking.

~~~
acqq
Neil Young has his own digital music service, it's not surprising that he
tries to promote it even indirectly by not allowing streaming of his own
music:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pono_%28digital_music_service%...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pono_%28digital_music_service%29)

The service offers "higher" sound quality, so of course he can write "it's
about sound quality." But in fact this is only about trying to bring attention
to his own service. Still I can't imagine it won't remain a specialized
market, offering only "more bits" that anybody not doing remixing can't use.
Better use of the bandwidth would be offering more channels -- then the users
would at least be able to hear individual instruments -- but that would give
them "too much power," more than having the sources of the software -- music
is easier to understand and reuse than the code.

~~~
freehunter
He's trying to pull a Taylor Swift or a Garth Brooks. We'll see how it plays
out for him.

------
ulfw
Huh? I am sure he is completely fine having his music streamed over the
analogue airwaves on FM Radio stations. Now THAT isn't exactly great
quality...

------
Oletros
I suppose that Young will stop selling its music through iTunes, Play Music
and other music stores if he is so worried about sound quality.

------
djmollusk
Hope Neil Young will remember, streamers don't need him around anyhow.

------
danieldk
I like Neil Young. I have a lot of his albums, but this will probably just
result in me listening to his music less. Streaming music just provides so
much more comfort, and must people will not be able to hear the difference
through cheap ear buds.

I would've respected his decision a lot more if he just said that it is about
the money. There is definitely a hidden agenda here, especially considering
that many of his albums had a pretty miserable recording quality to begin
with.

------
thehooplehead
They needed a much better explanation. I listen to most of my music on the
subway with a lot of background noise; I never worry about low sound quality.

------
WalterBright
I have never heard any stereo remotely duplicate the sound of hearing, say, a
violin acoustically live. I don't think the difference is a higher effective
bit rate. There's something else going on. Maybe it's the shape of our ears.

If someone wants to revolutionize music reproduction, how about solving this
problem?

~~~
Fr0styMatt8
Absolutely. When you listen to a violin live, you're of course not just
getting the violin, but you're getting all the reverb of the environment, the
spatial cues created by sound bouncing off your body and around your ears,
etc.

So taking a violin sound and then playing it out of a speaker, you're playing
into a totally different environment and it's going to sound different. If
you've also captured the sound of the environment in which the violin was
played, you're then also playing THOSE sounds into a different environment.
The reverb still gets affected by the environment your speakers are in.

I think the closest you can get is binaural recordings done with mics worn on
your own ears and then played back using suitable headphones.

Even that still doesn't cover the tactile dimension of sound (think about the
feeling you get when bass goes through large stage monitors). There are
products that try and reproduce this - I haven't tried any of them but would
be eager to, as I primarily listen to music with headphones.

Nor does it cover spatialization properly either - without some form of
processing, the sound source won't stay in position when you move your head.

A bit off-topic, but the more I think along these lines, the more I imagine
the ideal music delivery medium being dry multitrack recordings with mixing
and reverb supplied as metadata that's then applied with real-time audio
processing. That'd be pretty wild!

~~~
lowmagnet
You can also tweak the sound with impulse sampling of speakers in your room
and use DSP to correct for the room response. I went this route and couldn't
be happier with the result.

~~~
fr0styMatt2
Interesting!

What did you use to do this?

------
uptownJimmy
The gulf between Neil Young and anyting resembling consensual reality seems
vast. Wealth sure can be isolating.

------
XorNot
Personally sound quality is more important to me. I'd be a lot happier if
Taylor Swift had put her foot down for FLAC-encoded downloads being made
available or something.

Because trying to find those is literally impossible.

~~~
tomkwok
> Because trying to find those is literally impossible.

Well, 'nearly' impossible. Google 'FLAC streaming service' and you'll find
tidal.com. I don't know if there's any other. If you don't pay for music
downloads, then finding them isn't a problem [1] but rather troublesome.

Most people don't know FLAC exists and they don't care about sound quality.
Take a look at the top 100 music torrents on thepiratebay [2]. None of them is
FLAC.

[1]: [https://thepiratebay.gd/top/104](https://thepiratebay.gd/top/104)

[2]: [https://thepiratebay.gd/top/101](https://thepiratebay.gd/top/101)

~~~
XorNot
Conversely I've never had any trouble finding Flac-encoded torrents of any
track I've wanted. There's just no way to pay the artist (usually) for them,
because for some reason record companies think CD sales are worth protecting.

~~~
bitJericho
So buy the cd and encode that?

~~~
njloof
For back catalog that's often cheaper than buying the tracks online. Why pay
$9.99 for an album I can get used for $6?

