I Spy with my Spotify something beginning with Neil Young…
31 January 2022 · News · Podcastinfo
Opinion from Jen Seyderhelm and Peter Saxon.
Did you know that Neil Young is technically a one hit wonder in Australia?
I’m going to presume that the bulk of you would be surprised at this, ...
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The lossless audio debate is something that's been going on for years. Neil Young doesn't really like CD quality digital audio. Neil Young has only two songs that still receive occasional commercial radio airplay and they're both from his Harvest album. Today, they'd mostly be played on AM Gold stations. Recorded in 1971, it wasn't an example of the best audio quality analog technology eventually had to offer. The early digital CD masters of the album are probably the most accurate copies to the original master tapes that exist today. The master tapes are probably too deteriorated by now for any newer high res remasters to reveal anything new. Neil Young attempted to release his own hi res online download platform attached to a proprietary hardware player he had designed called the Pono. It seems like his venture was a commercial failure. Lossless audio is good for broadcasters because it's good to start with the best quality source material if you can. It protects the audio from deterioration further down the line when lossy compression is likely to be applied in digital broadcasting channels. Having said that though, I have some songs from the Apple Store encoded with AAC at 256kbps that sound better than orginial CD copies of the same songs because the Apple versions were more artfully mastered. Spotify uses the Vorbis audio compression algorithm at varying bitrates upto a maximum of 320kbps depending upon available bandwidth which to the average listener is good enough.