Author Topic: [Golden Ring] Johnny Douglas -- Sound Music Album 403  (Read 3271 times)

likedeeler

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[Golden Ring] Johnny Douglas -- Sound Music Album 403
« on: June 26, 2023, 12:06:41 AM »
Here's something to shock our WAV fetishists: a lossy album in the WAV format!

(Note: DO NOT transcode this to a lossless codec. Or, more precisely: do not transcode this to ANY other codec.)

Musicwise it's a serving of forgettable schmaltz/kitsch, but I couldn't resist posting this because of the curious encoding. It's called ADPCM (Adaptive Differential PCM), a lossy codec developed for speech transmission that is part of Microsoft's WAV file format specification. These are true WAV files, just not encoded with the usual plain PCM.

The alleged bitrate is 355 kbit/s, although, at first, this doesn't seem to compute as the sampling rate is red book and there are only 4 bits per sample. But taking two channels into account, doubling the bits to 8 indeed yields about 355 kbit/s (44,100 x 8 = 352,800).

Sound quality is tolerable. ADPCM has no psychoacoustic aspect, as far as I know. Thus it's not the quality one could expect of MP3, Vorbis, AAC or the like with the same bitrate.

>> (drain) /u/oth4REyQ

Enjoy!
« Last Edit: June 28, 2023, 05:38:31 PM by likedeeler »

kpmhill

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Re: [Golden Ring] Johnny Douglas -- Sound Music Album 403
« Reply #1 on: June 28, 2023, 03:42:42 AM »
I appreciate getting WAV files (full bandwidth, that is) for preserving the acoustic artifacts introduced by lossy encoding. Full WAV files give you 100% of the original lossy experience, exactly as it was created. Even better- 24/96 files for every last lossy detail…

likedeeler

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Re: [Golden Ring] Johnny Douglas -- Sound Music Album 403
« Reply #2 on: June 28, 2023, 10:20:08 AM »
... WAV files give you 100% of the original lossy [sic!] experience, exactly as it was created. ...

I have probably not explained the issue sufficiently: "WAV" is not an audio encoding (or codec). It is a container for encoded audio data. It is therefore incorrect to say that "WAV files give you 100% of the original lossy lossless [that's what you mean, I think] experience".

Compare the situation to a Word file containing image data. These images can have a lossless encoding (BMP or PNG, for example) or they can have a lossy encoding (GIF or JPG, for example). You can put images with all of these encodings into a Word file.

If you have a Word file with images you will not then say "Word files give you the 100% original lossless image experience", will you? Because it would be silly, and untrue. Word files are agnostic regarding the encoding of images they contain, just as WAV files are agnostic regarding the encoding of the audio data they contain. Their contents may be lossless or they may be lossy. Note that I am speaking of "true" WAV files here, not of "fake" ones containing MP3 data that were transcoded to plain PCM.

WAV files may feature sound in a variety of encodings. Plain PCM (by "plain" I mean PCM with at least 16 bits per sample and a sampling rate of at least 44.1 kHz, the red-book CD standard) is the lossless variant, but there are many other -- lossy -- encodings to be found inside a WAV file: MP3, GSM, ADPCM, CELP, 8-bit-8-kHz PCM and so on. See Wikipedia's article on WAV.

The widespread belief in the superiority of WAV files is a superstition the tenacity of which is remarkable. What you actually mean when you say "WAV" is plain PCM. But plain PCM is wasteful and should therefore be compressed to save storage space, in a similar way ZIP or RAR files do it. If you unzip a ZIP file you are going to get the original uncompressed data back, bit by bit. Same thing with ALAC, APE, FLAC etc: if you "unzip" (decompress) them you'll have the original uncompressed PCM data.** That which you choose to imprecisely call "WAV".

I posted this rip of the SMA 403 to illustrate the fallacy of WAV worship as "the" lossless audio file format. The files of this rip contain lossy audio data, and directly (encoded with ADPCM), not as a transcoding. ADPCM -- a lossy audio codec -- is part of the WAV file format specification.

Does that make it clear?

_____

** This is actually what your audio player does when it plays a FLAC (ALAC, APE etc) file: it decompresses the audio data contained in the file (using the appropriate FLAC, ALAC, APE codec algorithms) to PCM.*** The PCM data is then sent to the DAC which transforms it to an electric current that goes into the amplifier. The amp increases the strength of the current to a level that is able to drive the speakers, which lets you hear the sound.

To be more precise: this is what happens with any digital audio file, regardless of whether it's lossless or lossy. Only the algorithms differ, and the acoustic properties of the result. Which is of course also influenced by other factors, such as the quality of the DAC, the amplifier, the speakers etc.
« Last Edit: August 01, 2023, 02:33:29 AM by likedeeler »

nidostar

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Re: [Golden Ring] Johnny Douglas -- Sound Music Album 403
« Reply #3 on: June 28, 2023, 11:03:13 AM »
Thank you likedeeler for such a clear explanation. I have been struggling for years, yes years, to understand the meaning of a particular file format being a "container" though usually in respect of video files. Your word processor analogy makes it all so much clearer.

stackjackson

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Re: [Golden Ring] Johnny Douglas -- Sound Music Album 403
« Reply #4 on: June 28, 2023, 01:06:01 PM »
:wink:
| Stack |

KPMFan1000

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Re: [Golden Ring] Johnny Douglas -- Sound Music Album 403
« Reply #5 on: June 28, 2023, 02:17:05 PM »
Thank you.
LibraryGuy78

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Re: [Golden Ring] Johnny Douglas -- Sound Music Album 403
« Reply #6 on: June 28, 2023, 08:27:13 PM »
Thanks !

kpmhill

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Re: [Golden Ring] Johnny Douglas -- Sound Music Album 403
« Reply #7 on: June 29, 2023, 08:12:20 AM »
Does that make it clear?

That was a joke. I thought that "100% of the original lossy experience" would make it clear.

I've complained commented many times about WAV superstition at LMT.

likedeeler

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Re: [Golden Ring] Johnny Douglas -- Sound Music Album 403
« Reply #8 on: June 29, 2023, 09:35:44 AM »
... That was a joke. ...

Ahh! I think I get it now. My memory ...

Cheers for providing me the opportunity to give an explanation I'm quite satisfied with. Not sure whether it will finally convince the fetishists. But one can always hope.
« Last Edit: June 29, 2023, 09:38:14 AM by likedeeler »