I'm new to this forum, and I'm really not familiar with a lot of the technical terms I've read other posters talking about, but I really needed somewhere I could talk about this and have tried posting on the ' music ' sections of the IMDB forums but got few responses - as there seem to be people on this board who know a lot about music and audio, hoped by registering and posting on this forum I might get help from one of you...
I've read about ' the loudness wars ' and I don't know whether or not this is related to what I've noticed, but basically I've just heard this really bad downward slide in the sound quality of any music playing device since approx 2000 . I had two portable Sony and Panasonic CD players during the 90s that both had amazing sound. When the last one stopped working I got another one just weeks later that was as near to the model I had, from the same store for the same price or maybe slightly more expensive - and the sound was just horrific. It was practically unlistenable above a moderate volume. I thought this player must be faulty, but then every subsequent cd player I tried from then on had similarly bad sound. I eventually gave up on cd players and now listen to music on my laptop, but whether using the cd drive, playing music on Windows Media Player, music on YouTube, songs on ITunes - it just ALL has that same horrible, harsh kind of ' warped 'sound. Some letter sounds sound especially bad, eg 's's sound kind of like ' ssss ' or ' shhh' and ' h 's sound like a 'hkhkhk' sound or someone saying the letter while clearing their throat. The thing is, I KNOW that I never heard this kind of bad sound prior to 2000 on cd players or even cassette players I had going all the way back to the early 90s, none of which were expensive.I still can remember listening to music then and what it sounded like as if it were yesterday - I listened through headphones with the volume up loud for hours, did so for years and it just would have been unbearable to do that if it had sounded like it does now. I thought it must be something to do with the way music is made now that produces this kind of sound.All the stuff I've read on the ' loudness wars ' talks about individual records being over-compressed rather than it being the audio players being manufactured badly though - I thought maybe deliberately degrading sound quality on CD players might be some deliberate ploy to force people to use IPods or get music online or something, but I first noticed this in about 2000, before IPods were around. (I've never actually tried an IPod as I've heard nothing but bad things about how they sound. )
I live in the UK and I think most of the posters here are American as I see money written in terms of dollars so I don't know whether British made devices differ from American ones or not - anyway this has been something that has been bugging the hell out of me for years and I'd be SO grateful if someone who knows anything about these things could confirm that it's not just me that's crazy and there's been some knd of general degrading of the sound quality from around the early 2000s or just someone who's noticed anything similar
Welcome to Hydrogenaudio!
There is absolutely no problem with the playback hardware, the problem of the "loudness war" lies in the production (mastering) of CDs. Since the early to mid 1990s some engineers/producers/labels decided to master their CDs much louder, to make the music stand out more when played via radio. Of course nowadays radio play is no longer that important, but still some, if not even more, mastering engineers and producers master their CDs in "loudness war" fashion.
You can read more about the loudness war on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war), but rest assured that CD players are not the culprits. It's not even the CDs, it's simply bad decisions by the people in charge of music recording and CD production.
Distortions or artifacts introduced due to "loudness war" mastering can take several forms:
First and most prominent is dynamic range compression (DRC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression)), which reduces the dynamic range of the recording, which in turn if overused leads to less definition of instruments and a harsh, tiresome sound. Instruments which are most affected in my experience are drums and other percussion sounds, which tend to be drowned in vocals, guitar and bass sound when DRC is overused. Good examples for heavy overuse of DRC are Californication by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Death Magnetic by Metallica, and Noctourniquet by The Mars Volta. Especially the drums are atrocious on those recordings, but also the whole ensemble sounds very muddy and mashed together, and instruments are badly defined. Ironically the CD as a medium is good enough to basically cover the whole (realistically usable) dynamic range of human hearing, but due to DRC some CDs sound even worse than the respective Vinyl releases!
Second in my book comes digital clipping (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipping_(audio)), which can introduce harmonic artifacts into the signal. With PCM, which the CD uses, a signal cannot exceed the level of digital fullscale, so any recorded waveform which would exceed fullscale is just clipped to fullscale. In an audio editor the waveform will look like a horizontal line hitting the top or bottom of the scale. This introduces harmonic artifacts in the frequency spectrum, because of the way a square wave is represented in digital form (check square wave (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_wave)), likely leading to audible distortions across the whole spectrum. Prominent examples are yet again Red Hot Chili Peppers CDs mastered by Vlado Meller and produced by Rick Rubin (everything since Californication). In my opinion digital clipping, in contrast to DRC, which is a mastering choice, is just a sign of bad engineering. There is simply no reason to have the digital signal clip given the dynamic range of the CD.
That's it for now, I hope you can go on from here.
PS: Just a small remark, your post is very hard to read, please try to use more punctuation and structure in the future to make it easier for us to follow your thoughts. Hope you will enjoy your stay here.
Welcome!
Seconded what Kohlrabi says above. This is almost definitely an effect of the Loudness Wars and mastering techniques. In the link s/he referred you to and elsewhere on this forum, you'll read quite a bit about compression, which (if I understand what I've read correctly) is a primary culprit of what you're describing. Fortunately, normalizing your ripped albums via (the more popular) ReplayGain or according to the newer/better EBU-R128 standards, will help to mitigate some of this.
It's unfortunate that so many people have mistaken "louder" for "better", and/or made purchasing decisions on the basis of loudness...those are two of the reasons the loudness wars occurred to begin with.
Even If it's not your favourite genre, but to realize the quality of today's devices give a try to some classical: orchestral, vocal, baroque, some harpsichord (expecially appalling if not well reproduced): you'll see that even the most basical equipments are at least up to what was last decades best. Classical recordings are generally carefully mastered (just avoid oldest live recordings) and not affected by loudness war. I've been listening to classical since early eighties and I'm amazed to see how easy and inexpensive has become to get high quality sources. What make the difference today are speakers (no real improvements in decades) and headphones (great improvements for the price in latest years).
Also, you say:
I listened through headphones with the volume up loud for hours, did so for years
Which unfortunately is not a good practice to preserve one's ears and I guess you're not in your teens, so maybe it would be also worth paying a visit to an audiologist to have your hearing measured.
Moreover, here are some parameters than can adversely (audibly) affect sound quality:
- Headphones / IEMs with too much bass that drowns out a good chunk of mid-frequencies, or with pronounced sibilance (that affects the "sss" sound that you described). I've experienced both.
- Bad combination of music that's been mastered really loud, and some inadequate digital sound processing that results in huge clipping; for instance, an iPod Classic with the "R&B" EQ preset that boosts low frequencies by about 6dB instead of attenuating the other frequency bands. The result is absolutely awful, I've experienced this as well. A workaround is to apply negative gain to the source material, e.g. with replaygain and software that lets you apply replaygain album gain to your files instead of just storing replaygain tags (mp3gain, aacgain, foobar2000, caudec, and perhaps others).
- Perhaps less frequently, bad impedance mismatch (high output impedance and low impedance headphones) with headphones that have a non-flat impedance curve. The playback device, in some combinations of circumstances, can "sabotage" the headphones, if you will, making them sound more or less different than what they're supposed to. That sort of interference can range from mostly inaudible, to audibly crippled.
That said, the number one problem affecting sound quality is indeed the way an album was recorded, mixed and mastered. A good recording will sound good on almost anything. High-end gear that measures extremely well won't be able to make a bad recording sound good.
I've read the Wikipedia article and the links from that to other sites that talk about the Loudness Wars - I found a site that had audio samples of what it described as badly over-compressed albums giving a before and after sample of the original album and the re-mastered version with compression . The way the music sounded on the latter was pretty much what I'm describing - as I've said, the music I hear on my laptop all sounds like that, but the ' after ' sample just sounded much, much worse - the thing is, on the cd players I've heard since the 2000s, everything sounds like that on them .
I know you've all said it's nothing to do with the cd playing technology and all the sites talk about this as if it's just something that affects individual recordings . To be honest, I don't really understand people talk about individual albums being badly mastered or otherwise as I've never heard any difference in the way each album sounds - on the cd players that I 'd describe as having great sound, every CD sounded great on them, the ones I'd describe as ' bad ' everything sounded similarly warped and harsh.
I'm aware as I read my first post and this one that it probably sounds to anyone reading this as if it's my imagination or something and as you can tell I have no technical insight into the way music's recorded - I have no hearing problems, can hear everything fine - in real life or when watching/listening to movies/music or whatever.
I was kind of relieved when I first stumbled on something talking about The Loudness Wars as I thought I'd finally found an answer as to why music sounded so terrible than it did several years ago, but again everyone reiterates this is nothing to do with the actual music playing equipment. The thing is, I know the cd /cassette players and headphones I was listening to were cheap in the 90s based on how much disposable money I had then and yet more expensive players or headphones I've tried in the last 10 years sound much worse
Thanks for the replies and links anyway
This may be a stupid question, but did you listen to the same CDs now and 20 years ago? CDs from the 80s usually have a lot more dynamic range than CDs from the last decade. "The Whole Story" from Kate Bush sounds just as good now on my current gear (if not better) than it did on my parents' stereo in the 80s.
Could the OP's reported problem with newer players be related to EU's volume limiting, perhaps in conjunction with ill-matched headphones?
Funnily enough, Kate Bush is one of my favourite artists - I did have The Whole Story on CD and again, when listening to it after first buying it in 2000 on my then cd player it sounded fantastic though I think I'd lost or given the album away for some reason come the time that cd player stopped working.Coincidentally, the very first album I remember buying right after I'd got the first of what I'd describe as the bad cd players was Never For Ever which I'm pretty sure wasn't a remastered ' one in 2000 or 2001. And this was the first album I played where the sound was just horrible. I remember the song ' Babooshka ' playing at the start and it was just unbearable above a moderate volume , kind of all harsh 'shh ' and ' kkk ' sounds. I've had many of the same albums since the late '90s - the exact same CDs , including several from the 80s by singers like Madonna, for example - and I couldn't bear to listen to them anymore on any of the cd players after about 2001 they sounded so inferior.
Another thing I've noticed is when watching DVDs the sound , including music used during the movie sounds OK - but if I try to play any CD on the same DVD player, it sounds bad - and the same with sites like ITunes or YouTube - video clips, interviews, tv shows, movies, the sound seems ok, but listening to a song sounds terrible.
I've tried afew different kinds of headphones, both in-ear and over-ear, but this doesn't make any difference.
I live in the UK and I think most of the posters here are American
No Lots of UK and Europe and ... as well as USA.
Unless you can do a side by side comparison, it could be your memory playing tricks on you.
That said, I remember my first and second MiniDisc players in the mid 1990s having very nice headphones and built-in headphone EQ (i.e. the "bass boost" which also boosted the treble) which made for a very nice sound. Nothing to do with MD itself, or "clever/better" electronics - just very carefully designed and matched. Whereas the default headphones with most portable equipment then, and especially now, are designed to be thrown away and replaced with something far better. The range of headphones/in-ear devices available now is very large so finding something you like can be daunting, but some are really amazing. The EQs on players (if you want to use EQ - and for outdoor headphone listening I typically do, even though I'd never touch EQ when listening with speakers at home) vary dramatically in their usefulness and flexibility.
A Sansa Clip(+) or an iPod or various other portable music players are pretty much faultless in terms of sound quality (for what they're made for). Headphones / earphones (like speakers) can be a matter of taste - but difficult to try before you buy.
Cheers,
David.
Unless you can do a side by side comparison, it could be your memory playing tricks on you.
This and/or the placebo effect. Without intending to be dismissive, I suspect we would have had many previous posts about this trend before if it were really present and as pronounced as duncan1979 is suggesting. If anything, I would
imagine quality is generally better today, as I see Nessuno has already said.
TOS #8 does apply here, regardless of the logistical difficulty that would be involved in satisfying it. I wouldn’t be so quick to invoke it if other people were reporting the same phenomenon. At a minimum, we would need more useful descriptions than “warped and harsh”. Some recordings of supposedly good and bad devices for other users to assess would be the basic point from which we could evaluate this in an evidence-based way.
Unless you can do a side by side comparison, it could be your memory playing tricks on you.
I was afraid that's how it'd sound -there's no hard, factual way I can prove what I'm saying but - I've always had quite an obsessive, personality and tend to focus on things if I see/hear something wrong with anything be it a crease in a book cover, a stain on an otherwise clean DVD cover - and what I'm talking about is just so noticeable, I know I would have heard it if it had been there in my old CD players. I know the 90s sounds a long time ago now, but I became a teenager in 1992, those are years that remain vivid to anybody, and I still remember the sights/sounds as though it were yesterday
I was listening to the cd player with good sound which I'd had for about 18 months just weeks before getting the first one with bad sound so at least that one definitely wasn't memory playing tricks on me
This and/or the placebo effect. Without intending to be dismissive, I suspect we would have had many previous posts about this trend before if it were really present and as pronounced as duncan1979 is suggesting.
.
That's something that occurred to me too - I thought ' it can't just be me that has incredibly bad luck in cd players ' . I suppose if you weren't listening through headphones or in a more casual way, maybe you wouldn't notice it, but I've always listened to music through headphones , in a quite an intense, focused way. I'm sure I read something when I was reading up about The Loudness Wars that suggested music was made more in recent years to sound better in more ' social ' places like clubs, or as background noise - could this explain it sounding worse if you were listening through headphones?
TOS #8 does apply here, regardless of the logistical difficulty that would be involved in satisfying it. I wouldn’t be so quick to invoke it if other people were reporting the same phenomenon. At a minimum, we would need more useful descriptions than “warped and harsh”. Some recordings of supposedly good and bad devices for other users to assess would be the basic point from which we could evaluate this in an evidence-based way
.
I don't know what TOS#8 refers to. There's no way I can present factual evidence of what I'm describing, unfortunately. I realize how vague what I'm saying must sound though so appreciate the responses anyway.
TOS#8 stands for Terms of Service, 8th rule. Which I assume you had to accept when you registered. Terms of Service is the 2nd link, on the blue bar at the top.
That said. I believe assumptions and guesses should be allowed as long as they are labeled as such. And TOS#8 should refer to "claims". But I'm new here, so maybe someone can clear that out.
Sometimes hypothesis can grow to theories, but they all start as guesses.
You agreed to follow TOS #8 (and all other TOS) when you registered at this site. I have a hard time believing that what you report in your personal listening (worse sounds currently) is a widespread issue. Notwithstanding the loudness issue discussed earlier, I don't notice what you notice, and I've been listening seriously to music for over 40 years.
If modern CD players were doing anything other than faithfully reproducing what is on the disc, this would not require listening tests to prove it. It would be easily measurable.
I didn't see anything in the original post to indicate whether these different CD players were being tested with different headphones or amp & speakers. If the problem is in the playback chain outside of the player, it makes sense that changing the CD player isn't going to help.
Some recordings of supposedly good and bad devices for other users to assess would be the basic point from which we could evaluate this in an evidence-based way.
Duncan1979, can you do that? You just need a sound card (or some USB device) with a line-in.
Also, you might have developped over time a high sensitivity to sibilance, though that sounds unlikely if you say that the changes occurred quickly.
duncan1979, you wrote long posts in which maybe everything has already been explained, but could you please summarize again in a few straight lines your experience and the trials you made? Of course, before claiming a decline in quality of a narrow class of devices you have to rule out all possible side problems.
Say: you bought a new CD player, nothing else changed in your system (do you changed interconnectig cables?) and you started perceiving bad sound.
You exchanged some (how many) new players in this same system and still perceive that corruption.
You tried different discs, both new and old.
You tried both headphones and speakers. (Do you tried different headphones?)
You perceive (or don't perceive) the same corruption listening from other sources (downloaded files, streaming etc...) or listening to other people's sound systems? (you couldn't compare at home experience or wearing headphones with completely different listening scenarios, like watching a movie or just listening to people).
Etc...
How do you propose he do this and also adhere to TOS #8?
It's not like your asking grants him an exception.
How do you propose he do this and also adhere to TOS #8?
It's not like your asking grants him an exception.
Of course it doesn't: TOS#8 still applies, if he couldn't fully comply (and I don't se how he possibly can), this confines his experience in perceiving differences to the unscientific anecdotic here we usually don't deal with. Sorry if maybe I made this as an a priori assumption too clear in my mind to write it down!
I asked just out of curiosity, to see if we could find a simple explanation for a phenomenon he's the only one person in the word to report. For example: if it comes out he uses the same amplifier since nineties, well, I started perceiving similar symptoms in my own system some time ago and solved them with a contact cleaner spray can!
He can tell us what equipment was used to play what content, but the comments/anecdotes about sound quality are to be checked at the door if they aren't backed by results from double-blind tests.
While double blind tests are the ultimate metric here, ABXing playback equipment requires decent recording gear and some setting up / volume matching / etc…
That might not be needed if we could find an obvious culprit if the OP described in detail what he played and with what equipment. If anything, that would be a good start, IMO.
I do agree in principle. My citation of TOS #8 was due to the alternative possibility that there is no culprit. Seeing as the reports are purely subjective, no one else has ever reported this phenomenon here AFAIK, and one would expect quality to have increased if anything, Occam’s Razor suggests expectation bias/the placebo effect above all else. It should go without saying that this is not an insult or a question of anyone’s reasoning abilities: various studies attest to how powerful these processes can be.
My preference would ideally be properly conducted ABXing by duncan1979. However, I also suggested that he provide files for other users to investigate; other replies to this thread have correctly noted that these should be accompanied by details of how they were created. A combined approach would be for users with CD players from various points in history to record level-matched samples, anonymise them, and seek blind feedback from duncan1979.
As greynol indicated, until evidence is proferred in a way such as these, such reports are of no more use than if I were to claim the sky has been getting greener as I get older.
Occam’s Razor suggests expectation bias/the placebo effect above all else
I respectfully disagree. Having spent a lot of time on Head-Fi, I have participated to many threads that reported significant differences in "sound quality". In many (most?) of those threads, it turned out that the user had forgotten about some key parameter, like a DSP they had forgotten was ON, or some misconfiguration.
It is that possibility that I would try to investigate, before conducting a somewhat complicated ABX session that might actually show that there are clear differences; a positive result wouldn't say anything about what could possibly be at fault for said differences.
I would agree about the possibility of confounding effects in the setups, had the OP not specifically invoked a “a downward slide in the sound quality of any music playing device since approx 2000” in quality and a “general degrading of the sound quality from around the 2000s”. These suggest a systematic bias towards perceiving newer devices as better. How likely is it that each successive, newer device the OP has tried has had progressively more confounding elements, somehow creating audible degradation whose character is ill-defined, elsewhere in the signal path? Maybe my reasoning is wrong, but in this case, I’d assume an expectation bias that newer devices will sound worse is leading to that perception by duncan1979, rather than a coincidental decrease in the quality of his setup.
Another thing that we should consider is that perhaps his hearing is declining with age in some way. I don’t intend to cast aspersions on anyone’s physiology, so this might not have anything to do with the reports, but it is a possibility.
That might not be needed if we could find an obvious culprit if the OP described in detail what he played and with what equipment. If anything, that would be a good start, IMO.
Agreed, though the rule governing the communication of unsubstantiated claims about sound quality will be enforced.
I can think of situations where you might need to describe sound quality to diagnose broken hardware (a blown tweeter might make something sound dark or muffled), but I don't think this is what's happening here. Until I feel otherwise, I will enforce TOS8 as it is written.
duncan1979, you wrote long posts in which maybe everything has already been explained, but could you please summarize again in a few straight lines your experience and the trials you made? Of course, before claiming a decline in quality of a narrow class of devices you have to rule out all possible side problems.
Say: you bought a new CD player, nothing else changed in your system (do you changed interconnectig cables?) and you started perceiving bad sound.
You exchanged some (how many) new players in this same system and still perceive that corruption.
You tried different discs, both new and old.
You tried both headphones and speakers. (Do you tried different headphones?)
You perceive (or don't perceive) the same corruption listening from other sources (downloaded files, streaming etc...) or listening to other people's sound systems? (you couldn't compare at home experience or wearing headphones with completely different listening scenarios, like watching a movie or just listening to people).
Etc...
Listened to music via cassette players/radio from the early '90s till 1997 - cassette players/radios and headphones I used would have been cheap , never heard anything wrong with the music
In 1997, was given first portable CD player, a Sony Discman - remember it having amazing sound - also still used my old Sony cassette player/radio till 2000
In 1999, got a Panasonic portable CD player - can't remember exactly how the Sony Discman stopped working, think it just wouldn't play discs properly but it sounded fine when it would play - was also impressed with how good the sound on this CD player was( listened to both these players using headphones provided with them, the Panasonic cost about £ 50, the Sony was a gift but I wouldn't imagine it would have cost much more )
Approx late 2000, Panasonic CD player stopped working properly - again, I remember this being in terms of not playing the discs or skipping rather than the actual sound being bad -
Got another portable CD player in late 2000- also Panasonic,which was when I first heard what I'd describe as the ' bad ' sound - this was just weeks after I'd been listening to my ' good ' CD player - I played albums I'd previously played, everything just sounded bad - it was unlistenable above a moderate volume - the first disc I played on it was one I'd just bought, I remember - this was also about £ 50, using the headphones supplied with it
I didn't have much money back then as I was unemployed so had to kind of make do with player I currently had until could afford a better one - the next few years I tried several different CD players mainly portable ones, and one larger Sony CD player /radio player, all of which had the ' bad ' sound. As I couldn't really do much else, I just kind of put up with the sound, but I was confused as to why they all sounded like this. The prices of each would have between £50 and£120
Got my first PC in 2005 and since then mainly listened to music on sites like YouTube, Amazon and ITunes or played CDs in the CD drive- as I've said, the ' bad ' sound I'd heard on all the CD players was here too but didn't see any point continuing to try and find a CD player with good sound when I could just use the PC, where the sound quality was the same.
Have tried several different headphones also but this made no difference
No longer have the old CD/cassette players from the 90s so am unable to compare them
I guess I should have read the Terms more clearly when I registered - I came across this site and thought it worth posting my problem but I should've known I couldn't really expect anybody to be able to help without providing hard evidence
Some recordings of supposedly good and bad devices for other users to assess would be the basic point from which we could evaluate this in an evidence-based way.
Duncan1979, can you do that? You just need a sound card (or some USB device) with a line-in.
Also, you might have developped over time a high sensitivity to sibilance, though that sounds unlikely if you say that the changes occurred quickly.
No longer have any players I had from the 90s
I initially thought after reading about sibilance, this was maybe what I was hearing, but I'm sure I read that this is something that just affects the ' s ' sound - other letters too have that kind of distorted sound - ' h's for example
How about some informative facts like . . . .
" I have physically interacted with many audiophiles living in my city . . . I have played various test CDs through many other systems, vintage and new . . . I have a friend who sells vintage hi-fi and he is a member of the <my city> audio club and on Saturdays most of the senior members gather at his shop and have communal listening experiences and swap notes about audiophile topics such as 'Declining sound quality of CD players from 90s to present' . . . and after months of listening to my test CDs through many exquisite systems of various vintages in perfect listening environments and swapping notes with experts, my opinion is . . . "
Do you have any informative facts?
No longer have any players I had from the 90s
I do and I can tell you that I cannot distinguish their audio from those in my PC.
I can tell you that I also have a Panasonic portable with an anti-skip mode that seems to employ lossy data compression. I'm not claiming that this mode changes the sound quality, though it very well may be ABX-able for some. I've also seen portables with dynamic range compression which gives an audible volume boost at the very least.
So akin to what skamp was getting at, sure there may be obvious (or not) differences due to DSP. If we're going to compare CD player DACs, however then we need evidence. If we're going to compare exactness in digital extraction (the data that hits the DAC) we also need evidence.
How about some informative facts like . . . .
You mean anecdotes that aren't useful in furthering a discussion on a science-based forum. No thanks.
So your finding, as from your first post you only seem to ask for reasons to a fact you've taken for granted, is that between 1999 and 2000 something has happened to CD players that corrupts the sound quality in a very precise and recognizable way. According to you, there's no way to listen in hi-fi since 2000... could it be sort of a millennium bug?!?!? (Ok, just kidding... )
Now it seems to me rather clear that it's a case of expectation bias, an effect you seem, by the by, to indulge:
(I've never actually tried an IPod as I've heard nothing but bad things about how they sound. )
Apart from more elitist audiophile circles, there's a general consensus that nowadays personal digital players have reached a very good sound quality, absolutely undistinguishable from desktop players. This is also on par with my personal experience amongst many others, so one might ask where you've heard all those bad things.
Maybe that first 2000 player was actually a defective unit and since then you developed this bias, it's also possible that a sound card from early 2000s had a less than perfect headphone output especially if you turn it up, but rest assured that nothing so catastrophic has happened in gear industry at the dawn of the millennium. If something has changed, it was for the best, and more gradually too.
Have tried several different headphones also but this made no difference
That's almost unbelievable, unless they were all very bad headphones, or the source was very bad.
The point is, different headphones
do sound different, and the better ones are
much better than the worst. If you think they all sound the same, then you're either trying the wrong headphones, using the wrong source (CD player or CDs!), or it's your ears (which is possible, but unlikely - you'd have noticed problems in everyday life).
Different CDs players / DAPs (ignoring DSP / bass boost) rarely sound noticeably different. It's known that the headphone output stage can sound different on various units, especially with headphones that put the amplifier under stress, or headphones (mostly IEMs) that are extremely sensitive. EDIT: but that can't explain your general dissatisfaction with sound quality. I just mentioned it because it's about the only example of non-intentional
audible differences that you can find on half-decent audio players. (The ones that cost £15 from Tesco are
not half decent - they are just crap and have almost every audible fault you can imagine.)
You need to focus on finding out why you, almost uniquely, hear that nothing has sounded good since the year 2000. It's probably your choice of equipment. I doubt you need to spend that much more money - you probably just need to choose more wisely. My Sennheiser HD580s plugged into my Sansa clip, playing an audiophile recording, amaze anyone that I play them to. Even today, people don't believe that mp3s played on a tiny portable player can sound that good.
Cheers,
David.
Now it seems to me rather clear that it's a case of expectation bias, an effect you seem, by the by, to indulge:
(I've never actually tried an IPod as I've heard nothing but bad things about how they sound. )
Apart from more elitist audiophile circles, there's a general consensus that nowadays personal digital players have reached a very good sound quality, absolutely undistinguishable from desktop players. This is also on par with my personal experience amongst many others, so one might ask where you've heard all those bad things.
Yes, if “I’ve heard” in the sense of listening to music is invalid without double-blind listening tests, “I’ve heard” vague anecdotes from some undefined source is even less useful. Lots of people say lots of things. So? This site is here to collect phenomena that have been tested, not collections of claims accepted without any challenge.
As for the specific allegation about the iPod, if anything, it’s regarded as one of the highest-quality DAPs around AFAIK, and some people (http://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/ipod-touch-5g/audio-quality.htm) even go as far as to say things like “the iPod Touch 5G is a better audio source than most DACs will be when connected to a computer or CD transport.” I haven’t tested this claim myself, but its very existence goes to show you that people can say widely contrasting things about the same subjects. Consider the standards of evidence applied by someone before you rush to accept anything they say on faith. Ken Rockwell ran a lot of repeatable tests based upon objective measurements: what about the people who told you all those bad things about iPods? I have very little time for Apple nowadays, but I don’t doubt they’re competent enough to source perfectly adequate circuitry for audio, which can be bought almost literally for pennies nowadays anyway.
No doubt the same applies to most manufacturers of even entry-level CD players.
I'm not sure we know what's causing the "problem" yet, but...
I will enforce TOS8 as it is written.
...and as it is written, ABXing headphones is beyond almost anyone's ability, so we don't demand that. (That's my interpretation - is it yours?).
Cheers,
David.
Until it can be demonstrated that this is a real phenomenon on par with what is objectively deducible with speakers/headphones, David; I do not feel compelled to grant such an exception. I am not speaking on behalf of the staff.
You may now refer to TOS 2, 5 and 7 as I am not interested in derailing the discussion any further by playing devil's advocate. There are other discussions about TOS8 enforcement. You may take it up there or start a new discussion.
That's almost unbelievable, unless they were all very bad headphones, or the source was very bad.
The point is, different headphones do sound different, and the better ones are much better than the worst. If you think they all sound the same, then you're either trying the wrong headphones, using the wrong source (CD player or CDs!), or it's your ears (which is possible, but unlikely - you'd have noticed problems in everyday life).
Er, as I understand it, he meant that no headphones fixed the kind of distortion that he's hearing. Not that all the headphones that he tried sounded exactly the same. If there is audible distortion in the source (or the output), it is expected that all headphones will reproduce it.
If there is audible distortion in the source (or the output), it is expected that all headphones will reproduce it.
Due to different frequency responses and/or bad impedance matching I would expect that some headphones might mask deficiencies, while others could reveal them. OTOH that means that perceived differences can occur due to the aforementioned attributes, too, and might not be result of a technical flaw earlier in the playback chain.
First, suggest a thorough check of his system settings to make sure there isn't some DSP in play or he isn't overloading his headphones. Then, suggest the OP get a thorough hearing exam for possible tinnitus-like syndrome. All that eliminated, he should try playing some CDs with little digital compression -- say, a classical/opera CD from the 1990s -- to see if the effect is still 'heard'. If so, it would suggest some sort of bias is in play. Because the idea that all CDPs since ~2000 are faulty is plainly wrong.
All that eliminated, he should try playing some CDs with little digital compression -- say, a classical/opera CD from the 1990s -- to see if the effect is still 'heard'.
Or,
The Whole Story by Kate Bush, as he owns it, and I have a copy from the 80s to compare. For reference, metaflac calculated a Replaygain album gain of +2.06dB and an album peak of 0.87792969, and a Dynamic Range Meter (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=68945&st=25&p=835662&#entry835662) score of DR13. The first thing duncan1979 should check, is if he gets identical or similar values with his own rip of the album, to make sure that he isn't listening to a hot remaster these days.
I'd be SO grateful if someone who knows anything about these things could confirm that it's not just me that's crazy and there's been some knd of general degrading of the sound quality from around the early 2000s or just someone who's noticed anything similar
Well I think the consensus is that it isn't due to the evolution of playback hardware. Hopefully you haven't rejected it and stopped reading the discussion.
duncan1979, you wrote long posts in which maybe everything has already been explained, but could you please summarize again in a few straight lines your experience and the trials you made? Of course, before claiming a decline in quality of a narrow class of devices you have to rule out all possible side problems.
Say: you bought a new CD player, nothing else changed in your system (do you changed interconnectig cables?) and you started perceiving bad sound.
You exchanged some (how many) new players in this same system and still perceive that corruption.
You tried different discs, both new and old.
You tried both headphones and speakers. (Do you tried different headphones?)
You perceive (or don't perceive) the same corruption listening from other sources (downloaded files, streaming etc...) or listening to other people's sound systems? (you couldn't compare at home experience or wearing headphones with completely different listening scenarios, like watching a movie or just listening to people).
Etc...
Listened to music via cassette players/radio from the early '90s till 1997 - cassette players/radios and headphones I used would have been cheap , never heard anything wrong with the music
In 1997, was given first portable CD player, a Sony Discman - remember it having amazing sound - also still used my old Sony cassette player/radio till 2000
In 1999, got a Panasonic portable CD player - can't remember exactly how the Sony Discman stopped working, think it just wouldn't play discs properly but it sounded fine when it would play - was also impressed with how good the sound on this CD player was( listened to both these players using headphones provided with them, the Panasonic cost about £ 50, the Sony was a gift but I wouldn't imagine it would have cost much more )
Approx late 2000, Panasonic CD player stopped working properly - again, I remember this being in terms of not playing the discs or skipping rather than the actual sound being bad -
Got another portable CD player in late 2000- also Panasonic,which was when I first heard what I'd describe as the ' bad ' sound - this was just weeks after I'd been listening to my ' good ' CD player - I played albums I'd previously played, everything just sounded bad - it was unlistenable above a moderate volume - the first disc I played on it was one I'd just bought, I remember - this was also about £ 50, using the headphones supplied with it
I didn't have much money back then as I was unemployed so had to kind of make do with player I currently had until could afford a better one - the next few years I tried several different CD players mainly portable ones, and one larger Sony CD player /radio player, all of which had the ' bad ' sound. As I couldn't really do much else, I just kind of put up with the sound, but I was confused as to why they all sounded like this. The prices of each would have between £50 and£120
Got my first PC in 2005 and since then mainly listened to music on sites like YouTube, Amazon and ITunes or played CDs in the CD drive- as I've said, the ' bad ' sound I'd heard on all the CD players was here too but didn't see any point continuing to try and find a CD player with good sound when I could just use the PC, where the sound quality was the same.
Have tried several different headphones also but this made no difference
No longer have the old CD/cassette players from the 90s so am unable to compare them
I guess I should have read the Terms more clearly when I registered - I came across this site and thought it worth posting my problem but I should've known I couldn't really expect anybody to be able to help without providing hard evidence
This thread is over two years old but I have to make Duncan see this - You are right, I hear the same thing. In the mid 1990s Sony went downmarket, they targeted the masses and not those with refined audio senses. The sound quality of their products went down; for me the last good year for Sony CD portables was year 1995, after that year came darkness. There is nothing wrong with your hearing, a Sony player from let's say 2005 is plain unbearable to listen to.
It was very nice of you to necro a thread for your first post just to explicitly violate TOS#8
also:
Joined: 16-November 13
It was very nice of you to necro a thread for your first post just to explicitly violate TOS#8
How did I violate the rule ?
- From paragraph 8 from the book of law of objective judging :
"
All members that put forth a statement concerning subjective sound quality, must -- to the best of their ability -- provide objective support for their claims. "
I have no axe to grind against Sony Corp. and no personal relations with and feelings towards any of Sony's CD players. I only report what I hear. On top of it Duncan concurs with me in this matter, so it is 2 out of 2, if anyone hears different please step out and contradict what we both hear. As a testimony of my objectivity I submit my statement that I am not prone to believe in hype and propaganda of any kind, in the fields of technology or outside of it. To prove it, giving an example, I say that a tendentious hate propaganda has made Hitler a synonym for evil, I say that he was no worse than Churchill or Roosevelt, I am even forced say that Churchill was more evil because that is an objective fact.
I have not been paid for what I say in this matter and I do not work for any of Sony's competitors. To prove that I own these Sony CD players would require a signed affidavit and testimony from an officer of law and this costs money. Perhaps some hydrogenaudio member who has got a lot of money and who is interested in this matter could help to pay for the expenses required to submit proper proofs ?
"
Acceptable means of support are double blind listening tests (ABX or ABC/HR) demonstrating that the member can discern a difference perceptually, together with a test sample to allow others to reproduce their findings."
This is kind of impossible to do. I have eight, different, of those CD players and I know each of them by their their sound signatures. I know which one plays when I hear them - this fact negates the requirement of not knowing which player is playing. It is kind of comical, I am not supposed to know which player I am listening to but I do know which one it is before I am allowed to know. How do I get around this fatal problem ?
Getting test samples might be difficult for others, who would go through the hassle of acquiring some dozen different Cd players from different years of manufacture ? If Hydrogen Audio could put together an investigative team and send it to Toronto where I live then I can bring all the equipment and others could hear what two of us hear.
I only report what I hear.
Do it somewhere else. Maybe you do hear a difference between pre- and post-2005 CD players, and maybe some do have an audible sonic signature, and maybe you prefer the sound of one over another. Or maybe you are just imagining some or all of these things, demonstrating expectation bias, and would be completely unable to differentiate better than a roll of the dice if you did some double-blind, level-matched testing. How do we know which one it is?
This is simply not a forum for making unsubstantiated claims of this sort. No one cares who concurs with you, and according to the rules, it is
your responsibility to prove that you can hear a difference, not for us to prove that we can't.
Proof does not require a team of engineers and expensive equipment. An ordinary TOSlink cable going from the player's optical out to a cheap USB soundcard's mini-SPDIF input will be sufficient to get exactly what PCM audio data the player sends to its DAC for analog output. You could compare these captures and find out if the players are reading and producing output from the same PCM audio stream. They probably are the same, so if you're hearing these differences when the player is connected digitally, then you know it's all in your head. If the player is connected via its analog outs then
maybe the DAC is producing audible noise, but your imagination is still an option. Analog output should be easy enough to capture, same as ripping vinyl, and you can then do level-matched ABX tests with the recordings in foobar2000, or maybe upload them so we can compare/analyze, ourselves.
This thread is over two years old but I have to make Duncan see this - You are right, I hear the same thing. In the mid 1990s Sony went downmarket, they targeted the masses and not those with refined audio senses. The sound quality of their products went down; for me the last good year for Sony CD portables was year 1995, after that year came darkness. There is nothing wrong with your hearing, a Sony player from let's say 2005 is plain unbearable to listen to.
I´m sorry to chime in... but this simply isn´t true. I have reviewed countless portable players by Sony and other companies for my blog using sighted and double-blind methods (I don´t advertise the latter as it puts off the audience) and I´ve found time and time again that older CD players, stationary or portable, do one thing only:
colouring the sound. Reason: playback laced with (often measurable) ill effects caused by shoddy/old-fashioned/budget-related engineering. This goes for their line-out (less so) and their headphone out (which most of the time are plain awful).
Just take the 1988 Sony D-20: heavy thing (weight = good sound, yes?... No.), robust built quality, beautiful sounding over its line-out. But the reality is this: it sounds nothing like the original (-> the music it plays). So you´re just listening to a personal preference of yours, not the original, unaltered sound.
And it´s easy to come by these assumptions. For 15 years I thought that my first CD player (a portable Technics SL-XP 300) was a wonderful thing, sounding lovely, causing me to believe that everything I owned after it sounded awful. Bought it again in 2010 only to find out that I had been gravely mistaken. It´s really not a good player. Headphone out sucks, line-out colours the sound (still haven´t found the reason; measures ok). If you use one of these old players, you won´t listen to the CDs as they were intended to be listened to, you´re just hearing some euphonic colourization added to the actual sound of the medium.
The gadgets that are closest to the original sound are newer budget players for DVD / BluRay or recent DAPs like the Sansa Clip+ or the FiiO X3 (using its line-out). In fact, even many of the portable MD players I own, sound more neutral than the portable CD players (and MD uses an ancient lossy compression inferior to present-day AAC or MP3!).
BTW, the guy starting this thread mentioned the album 'Never Forever' by Kate Bush. The harsh sound he observed is on the CD itself. The album just sounds bad. His older CD players hid this sub-optimal sound, the newer players stayed closer to the truth.
Re: my last post, I overlooked the fact that it was about portable players, so my comments about testing them should be adjusted, as the players surely don't have digital output. Nevertheless, I think it's safe to assume the data is read from CD correctly and that any objective differences are in the analog stage. These must be measurable. The analog output can still be recorded, and you can do an RMAA test (http://rightmark.org/) as well. I keep meaning to do this on my CD players. I think I hear a difference in one of them (the oldest one, natch), so I want to see if that's really true and what the reason may be.
This thread is over two years old but I have to make Duncan see this - You are right, I hear the same thing. In the mid 1990s Sony went downmarket, they targeted the masses and not those with refined audio senses. The sound quality of their products went down; for me the last good year for Sony CD portables was year 1995, after that year came darkness. There is nothing wrong with your hearing, a Sony player from let's say 2005 is plain unbearable to listen to.
I´m sorry to chime in... but this simply isn´t true. I have reviewed countless portable players by Sony and other companies for my blog using sighted and double-blind methods (I don´t advertise the latter as it puts off the audience) and I´ve found time and time again that older CD players, stationary or portable, do one thing only: colouring the sound. Reason: playback laced with (often measurable) ill effects caused by shoddy/old-fashioned/budget-related engineering. This goes for their line-out (less so) and their headphone out (which most of the time are plain awful).
Just take the 1988 Sony D-20: heavy thing (weight = good sound, yes?... No.), robust built quality, beautiful sounding over its line-out. But the reality is this: it sounds nothing like the original (-> the music it plays). So you´re just listening to a personal preference of yours, not the original, unaltered sound.
And it´s easy to come by these assumptions. For 15 years I thought that my first CD player (a portable Technics SL-XP 300) was a wonderful thing, sounding lovely, causing me to believe that everything I owned after it sounded awful. Bought it again in 2010 only to find out that I had been gravely mistaken. It´s really not a good player. Headphone out sucks, line-out colours the sound (still haven´t found the reason; measures ok). If you use one of these old players, you won´t listen to the CDs as they were intended to be listened to, you´re just hearing some euphonic colourization added to the actual sound of the medium.
The gadgets that are closest to the original sound are newer budget players for DVD / BluRay or recent DAPs like the Sansa Clip+ or the FiiO X3 (using its line-out). In fact, even many of the portable MD players I own, sound more neutral than the portable CD players (and MD uses an ancient lossy compression inferior to present-day AAC or MP3!).
BTW, the guy starting this thread mentioned the album 'Never Forever' by Kate Bush. The harsh sound he observed is on the CD itself. The album just sounds bad. His older CD players hid this sub-optimal sound, the newer players stayed closer to the truth.
There's an awful lot of claims about CDP sound in this post. That raises several questions:
When you conclude that a CDP 'colors the sound' this is because it either 1) was different in a DBT or 2) measures significantly different?
How do you know what the 'original sound' is?
In a CDP that is 'beautiful sounding' due to coloration, what happens when you play a recording whose original sound is already 'beautiful'? Does it become more beautiful?
There's an awful lot of claims about CDP sound in this post. That raises several questions:
When you conclude that a CDP 'colors the sound' this is because it either 1) was different in a DBT or 2) measures significantly different?
DBT.
I started with sighted tests. But roughly 1 1/2 years ago I found them to be increasingly unreliable (to be precise: I found my hearing unreliable) so I added DBTs (via foobar). In case of older reviews, I repeated listening tests using DBTs for some gadgets, prompting me to change some reviews.
Measurements have been unreliable too. I have several players that measure very well using RMAA, their sound however says something else. Which means a) I´m doing something wrong or b) I´m not measuring enough (-> go beyond RMAA). For that reason, I consider my 'measurements' nothing more than fancy pictures without any real informational value.
How do you know what the 'original sound' is?
The method is this (have always been doing it like this for my blog):
1. grabbing 'reference' tracks of my choice to the harddrive
2. burning them to CD alongside test signals (RMAA, jitter, 1 kHz sines for level adjustment, etc.)
3. playing that CD with the player to be reviewed
4. recording the output of the player with my soundcard in 192 kHz (I want to have a look at aliasing rejection)
5. level matching recorded tracks to the reference tracks on the HDD & resampling to match the sampling frequency of the reference
(5a. sample precise editing in order for them to all start and end at the same point was added later for DBTs to work)
6. listening test using headphones
I can easily alter the method for MD or DAPs. In the first case, I digitally record the tracks on the HDD to an MD (using a stationary deck). That MD is then played back, its output recorded digitally to the HDD, creating new 'reference' files (I have to consider compression errors caused by the ancient ATRAC encoder). These files are then used as references for MD reviews. For DAPs, I just copy my initial reference files to the DAP to be reviewed.
The weak link might be the soundcard used for recording their output, the Xonar Essence STX. I might listen to some small coloration caused by the Xonar. So far however, I haven´t found any flaw.
In a CDP that is 'beautiful sounding' due to coloration, what happens when you play a recording whose original sound is already 'beautiful'? Does it become more beautiful?
I reject the irony. To answer your question: No.
I know this is coming late, but the quality of CD players has been decreasing, well domestic players, audiophile players have been getting better and better.
The reason is very simple, in the early 21st century it became cheaper to make DVD mechanisms over CD mechanisms, as a result most domestic CD players are actually DVD players with the video replay function disabled. Unfortunately DVD players, although capable of playing CDs, are not particularly good at it. This was slightly remedied with the addition of a CD laser which helped with the bit loss problem (an issue for ROM drives as most Software still came on CD), but did not solve the audio issue. I suspect this is due to timing issues (Jitter), DVDs are read at a different speed to CDs and this introduces a huge amount of Jitter. You can't measure Jitter through bit by bit comparisons, because the data stream is identical (solving the ROM issue, but not the audio issue), as the problem is entirely in the timing domain.
Interestingly you don't see this issue if you play CDs on a computer because the CD is read into memory and then played from memory, eliminating the timing issues.
Audiophile CD players solved this problem in 2 ways, some manufacturers chose to go with DVD drives, but buffer the data and re-clock it, others built their own CD drives.
http://www.hifichoice.co.uk/news/article/cyrus-cd-xt-signature--pound;1750/20464
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jitter
audiophiles have been getting dumber and dumber.
The reason is very simple
Yes.
I suspect they've become more emboldened here too, with Greynol et al being more scarce.
What an absolute steaming heap of complete and utter bullshit.
Doesn't it hurt to be this apocalyptically wrong about literally
everything?
Occam’s Razor suggests expectation bias/the placebo effect above all else
I respectfully disagree. Having spent a lot of time on Head-Fi,
There's your problem mate.
The things I've seen more of is some players fading in the first hundred or so milliseconds of given track with no way to turn it off.
Or shutting off the audio when null samples (digital silence) are playing for more than some predetermined amount of time by the manufacturer to try to hide a device's rather poorly designed and often noisy output. No option to turn if off or disable it.
Or players that can play MP3 discs but do not let you listen to redbook audio tracks should you decide you want to listen to a PC game's soundtrack (lacking a simple setting or switch).
What I've basically seen more of is pointless features that cannot disabled. No online reviewer on any site like Amazon ever points out this when looking at a product to buy. But there's plenty of audiophile nonsense to go around. It's more like this product sounds great or this product sounds really bad. Or this product failed after a couple months and is total garbage when how they're taking care of it should be called into question.
The guy registered to post that. Troll if ever I saw one.
I suspect this is due to timing issues (Jitter), DVDs are read at a different speed to CDs and this introduces a huge amount of Jitter.
Suspecting arbitrary things with no actual understanding of how stuff works seems to be more and more en vogue these days.