Comment Re:Depends on the bitrate (Score 1) 749
If I look back at all the albums I have purchased or listened to (in whatever format), the one thing that stands out to me personally is that I have found less than 10% of them to be "recorded with care". And I'm not even being picky! Across the board, I can say that recording quality sucks when it comes to rock (which is what I listen to most often) - and I mean all kinds of rock.
If Neil Young's initiative (and even his Pono device) and Dave Grohl's initiatives are successful in improving the audio quality of music in general, I strongly suspect it will be because recording quality will be done with greater care, not because they decided to use a fancier digital format or use higher number of bits and samples to store their music. While everything becomes a factor by the time the music reaches your ears (heck, by the time it is processed by your brain, you even have to factor in psychoacoustics and gear bias and the "burn-in" syndrome) - the recording quality in general needs to improve (except for the jazz and classical pieces that audiophiles love to love, and are hence recorded with care), and this improvement will arguably make the biggest difference in audio quality.
Yes, this is it in a nutshell. What goes into mixing and mastering an album has far more effect on the final result than whether it's played back as a 96 kHz 24 bit file, or compressed down to a 256 kbs AAC (or, around 4 Mbs compared with 0.25 Mbs).
Whilst the data rate is sixteen times as much for the high resolution audio, there is nowhere near 15/16ths of the sound lost - and even on good quality hifi equipment, I'd challenge anyone to successfully pick the difference in a proper blind test.
What's more, there are now things like Mastered for iTunes which gives a lossy AAC the potential to sound better than redbook CD audio as the AAC files are created directly from the high res masters with, among other things, better floating point conversions and a very high quality sample rate conversion (and, yes, I have verified the quality of apple's "bats" sample rate converter in afconvert)
