There are, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, two distinct strands in the development of digital audio technology: ‘easier‘ and ‘better‘.
One takes us in the direction of increased convenience: portability; minaturisation; downloadability; searchability; range of consumer choice. Easier.
The other takes us in the direction of greater fidelity: SACD and DVD-Audio; 5.1 surround; 96kHz sampling; enhanced features. Better.
The trouble with digital radio services – whether of the terrestrial DAB variety, the subscriber satellite category or the HD-Radio /IBOC ‘slow kid’ of the bunch – is that they’ve tried fairly aggressively to pretend they’re achieving both, when in reality, they’re aiming at neither.
Digital radio doesn’t improve portability compared to its predecessor. We’ve long been able to take the transistor radio to the beach.
It’s not more convenient. It’s no smaller. You can’t access it in any spectacularly new ways (you could ‘timeshift’ radio shows just as easily before with the help of a cassette deck).
And while it’s true there are new channels and services, that’s always going to happen when you allow broadcasters access to more bandwidth – ‘digitalness’ has less to do with it than the commercial impulse toward expansionism does.
It’s more about dominating market share than it is about providing better service.
On the other hand, digital radio is hardly an audiophile’s platform either. While satellite platforms are at least making an effort in this area, most broadcasters are still pumping their output through the brutal compressors in their FM processing rack before it leaves the building. And traditional broadcasters streaming their signal online are by the far the worst offenders.
Listening tests put the average digital radio signal around (or just above) a good quality FM reception – mostly because the broadcasters are trying to fit as many channels onto the multiplex as they can get away with, for the reasons stated above.
And when there’s distortion, rather than the tolerable fuzz of analogue, it’s like hitting the insides of your ears against a brick wall – only in Tron.
But sometimes (almost always) the developing technology ignores the wishes of those who controlled the old medium and starts changing the playing field around a bit.
Enter aacPlus.
Slate magazine calls it “The skinny new audio format that will replace MP3s—and revolutionize Internet radio”.
In short – better sound quality out of a considerably lower bandwidth.
Better and easier. More and faster.
But aacPlus is not simply an internet streaming technology. You can go through the process of converting your CD collection all over again – and fit twice as much onto your hard drive in the process.
XM implemented it into their satellite broadcasts, simultaneously increasing in the number of channels they can broadcast and appealing to the audiophile tendencies in those of us who care about that sort of thing.
Thee aacPlus codec works more or less how mp3 compression works. Based on Apple’s Quicktime, eliminates all of the information that cannot be perceived by the human ear (a sizable chunk, as it happens), but then it goes beyond the capabilities of the iTunes default codec AAC by treating high frequencies differently. Rather than simply truncate the extreme top end to save space, it uses a small amount of data to allow it to extrapolate the vast majority of them from the rest of the audio data.
From the Coding Technology website:
MPEG-4 aacPlus is the combination of three MPEG technologies comprising Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), coupled with Coding Technologies’ Spectral Band Replication (SBR), and Parametric Stereo (PS) technologies. SBR is a unique bandwidth extension technique which enables audio codecs to deliver the same quality at half the bit rate. PS significantly increases the codec efficiency a second time for low bit rate stereo signals.
SBR and PS are both forward and backward compatible methods to enhance the efficiency of any audio codec. As a result, aacPlus delivers streaming and downloadable 5.1 multichannel audio at 128 kbps, near CD-quality stereo at 32 kbps, excellent quality stereo at 24 kbps, and good quality for mixed content even below 16 kbps mono. This level of efficiency fundamentally enables new applications in the markets of mobile and digital broadcast.
In other words, aacPlus uses less data more cleverly at the encode end in order to deliver more information at the decode end. And it’s the high-frequencies that our brain uses as a clue to the faithfulness of the audio reproduction. Independent listening tests put aacPlus very close to CD quality even at dialup modem-friendly rates.
And now WinAMP, the preferred platform for listeners of streaming content everywhere, has incorporated aacPlus capability into its new player.
So it looks like we might be leapfrogging over Ogg Vorbis (shame really, but my iTunes software still can’t stream it) and straight into the open source-ish (though actually rather proprietary) aacPlus format – both for file storage and playback as well as for streaming.
After all, the crowd with the best online music retail platform, the best all round desktop music player/organiser, the best portable player and currently the biggest stake in leading the digital audio movement (50 million!!!) – are also the ones with the biggest stake in the format itself.
Bodes well…
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61. Tommy – 4000 Years Loop 2004
62. Kasabian – Kasabian Arista 2004
63. Brian Eno – Ambient 1: Music for Airports EG 1978
64. New Order – Low Life Warner 1985
65. La India – Llego La India (Via Eddie Palmieri) Sony 1992
66. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – No More Shall We Part Reprise 2001
…and I watched Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense on DVD.
Good music day.
