What do the "format wars" mean to you in 2020?

All Things Music
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I second the nomination for Roon - but for an entirely different reason. Unlike any other system, Roon unifies the music database with information about music and artists. While it does not provide the feel of a record jacket, it is a wonderful upgrade to liner notes. Once it learns your preferences, it can find individual artists in collaborations you never would have found otherwise. It is truly a music magazine focused on you.

To me, there is no format war. Tidal MQA is excellent, and I can only hear the difference between it and Redbook CD if I am paying attention. I don’t use headphones in my present setup with Vinyl, although I could as the my TEAC dac has headphone output. But the cabinet is fairly far from my listening position with phones, so it means breaking out the long silver cable…

Redbook is perfectly acceptable. I am good with FLAC streaming. I do appreciate hi-res streaming MQA or not when I want critical listening. I find it’s all my mood, and there is no bad (I don’t have any low res MP3, and I’ve been careful with my records for 50 years). It’s all good. Peace reigns.

Except for that guy across the street with the loud leaf blower.

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I fell into the remastered trap myself a few years ago, purchased new versions of albums I already owned in the remastered form, CD is these cases. Have yet to come across a remaster that bested my original. Maybe The Beatles Mono/Stereo Box Set.

The Steve Hoffman has a plethora of threads around this, they get into the weeds on many cd and Vinyl pressings. It makes for an interest read.

It’s a rabbit hole you don’t want to go down.

For the record, I still purchase CDs and rip them into lossless right away, pack the cd up and store it. I tried hi res downloads on the various platforms for purchase, to keep it simple; I wasted way too much money on HD Tracks and prefer my ripped lossless CD version every time. Something is just not right with those tracks…

One thing I do miss about listening to a CD vs using Roon, playing an album from start to finish. With having my collection digitized I am more likely to skip around various albums.

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I realize that for some, the search for the version of a recording that is of the highest sound quality can be a highly enjoyable activity in and of itself, to the point of becoming a hobby. I can relate to that - after all, I love comparing different renditions of classical music pieces, and I recently spent a happy evening figuring out my favorite release of New Order’s “Ceremony” (as a digital download, it’s this FLAC one). But finding the “best” version of an album - even just as a digital release, and without getting into the complexities of vinyl pressings - can also be a highly frustrating and exhausting experience. Beware.

The https://www.stevehoffman.tv/ forum is often useful for finding a good pressing or release. But it can also take a lot of effort to wade through through many pages of impressions, especially for some bands that attract particularly partisan opinions (Led Zep is one of them). If there isn’t a clear consensus, it can be hard work to evaluate the many contradictory, inconsistent opinions. Several times I’ve found myself giving up after spending far too much time searching in vain for a solid recommendation for an old album that I once owned on cassette and that I now want to buy on CD.

I suppose the trick is to find someone who’s an authority, someone like torq, and to then follow that person’s recommendations. The problem here is that an aficionado of the Kinks’s releases might not be of any help with it comes to the Stones’s catalogue. So each album or band’s release becomes its own unique search.

I hesitate to type this but my unreliable, amateur and indolent opinion is that, generally speaking, it’s best to pick up earlier releases of CDs and LPs. Those CDs released before the loudness wars tend to be superior, at least when it comes, of course, to the horrors of compression and brick-walling. Remastered versions should be treated with special caution, although this doesn’t always work as a rule of thumb. My favorite version of The Stooges’s “I Wanna Be Your Dog” is the remastered one released on the Gimme Danger documentary soundtrack (go figure?!). But remasters can be all over the place. The Led Zep Mothership stuff was widely applauded by some while the “crop circles” CD releases of 1990, which were “supervised” by Jimmy Page, are often seen as deeply problematic (the version of “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” on that compilation has the channels reversed, for instance). For Led Zep, I found that the easiest thing to do was to buy all the albums on CDs from the mid- to late-1980s. The rabbit-hole was too deep for me to go down. And they were $5-7 each at my favorite local record store.

Ultimately, there’s just so much variability and inconsistency in the quality of releases, and this inconsistency often defies logic: some of the remastered Rudy Van Gelder versions of Blue Note albums have been lauded as significant improvements over the originals. Others, though, have come in for a lot of criticism. How is this possible?!

[Edit: sorry, I missed your post @Roark while I was typing up mine]

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All good! You did a far better job at explaining what I was trying to get at. We clearly went down the same rabbit hole and turned back around before it was too late

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26

Great topic. I grew up with vinyl, then came cassette and 8–track, but mostly radio … I gradually got into CDs, but while the volume grew I still kept buying LPs. Years and years go by, technologies change. I now seem to have stockpiles of music in various formats, which I listen to in different ways. CDs, for the most part, have become what I listen to in the car (altho I need to replace the player). I still buy them but mostly just box sets that are very specialized. There are hundreds of CD-Rs, in addition to 300 or so in original packaging. That’s all-in-all less than 5% of my listening. Vinyl is kind of an obsession, and I spent a lot this year on audiophile vinyl, record shop hauis, eBay/Discogs snags, etc. That’s still only about another 20%. Normally, I travel a lot, so I keep a laptop loaded with files (a lot of downloads from Bandcamp, and older stuff). That would be about 10%. The other 60-75% is streaming Qobuz. I don’t use Roon, but have an app that matches my Bel Canto Black Ex amp, that I run off an iPad. Or if I’m using headphones in the back, I just use the Qobuz app on the desktop with an outboard amp/dac, Didn’t expect to love streaming so much but it’s actually made a radical change for me and exploded my listening (really, a return to old habits, also encouraged by splurging on nice equipment). At this point, I expect the CD collection will probably be gathering more dust (cool stuff gets ripped to a drive).But the listening is always evolving and changing.

I tried MQA and Tidal but the super hi-rez options with Qobuz make the format seem beside the point. (I’m thinking it probably makes music sound better off the phone).

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The lawnmowes aren’t so bad here but I’m thinking I need a new refrigerator since the motor in the current one rattles so much. Is that a hi-fi upgrade?

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28

The quality of vinyl is better now than it was 40 years ago. It took a long time to get a decent copy of the Wall by Pink Floyd. All my recent acquisitions on vinyl have been excellent.

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I’m really surprised by this reality. You’d think the music industry as a whole would want to clean this up a bit. I’m sure there’d be additional revenue to be gained for labels and artists as a whole if there was a bit more… consistency applied. Where’s the Kelly Blue Book for albums editions across different mastering, hah!

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Well in regards to re-masters you have so many different labs doing their thing on the album and sometimes it works and sometimes it fails. . A good read.

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31

To reply to the original post, I suspect that format can have as much to do with the comfort of the familiar, if not nostalgia, as it does with practical considerations like accessibility and sound quality. Much as I love CDs and vinyl and now listen to music using a computer (playing local files and streaming), I still have a fondness for other audio formats.

I’m of the walkman generation, which makes for a long-standing love of portable players and a sentimental attachment to cassettes. Cassettes were there for me at precisely that moment, around 13 years of age, when I fell in love with music. Cassettes with a walkman were great: you could borrow them from friends, you could copy them, you could make and share mixtapes, and, best of all, you could lie in bed late at night when you were supposed to be asleep and blast yourself to your heart’s content and no one would come and yell at you for making such a racket. Any number of family trips were all the better for tuning out the parents, listening to music there on the back seat, and watching the world go by. I’ve held on to a couple of dozen cassettes from my childhood for sentimental reasons. I don’t listen to them, of course. They sound godawful. And the latest fad for cassettes is preposterous.

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But the childhood experience of cassettes has in some ways spilled over into adult life. I graduated up to a portable minidisc player after college - I was living in Japan at the time, and minidisc players were all the rage there (this having been before the advent of mp3 players). It was a great format for combining vastly superior CD-level sound quality with the portability and versatility of cassettes (such as being able to re-record over the same discs). I still have a couple of minidisc players and dozens of the discs, including wonderful mixtapes made by friends that introduced me to entirely new worlds of music. I also moved on to mp3 players and their successors. Because of grad school, I couldn’t afford an iPod until the fifth one came out, and it’s still a device I cherish for allowing me to take much of my music with me where ever I went (and this was when I was traveling a great deal and living in many different countries).

That formative childhood experience, though, is still going strong. I recently picked up a nice Sony DAP to pair with my Campfire Andromeda 2020, and it’s funny to have, once again, a device with the Walkman logo on it after all these years.

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Wow, yes! Hence my indulgences of late (well, isolation with the pandemic means a LOT more time at home … like, honestly, most of the year I would be gone somewhere). Been picking up a tons of reissues based off original analog tapes, sounds fab and the wax is very clean (if not as consistent as Japanese pressings, really close).

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Cassettes got me through! When I was too broke to have a stereo, I had a boombox. Thrived on mixtapes and the like. This is how I listened to music through my mid-20s. I think I finally got a decent turntable and a modest hi-fi (200$ NAD 3020 and some Advent bookshelf speakers … man, that was the sh*t!). Although, I also tended to be out hearing bands every night that I could. (Also, making tapes for girls as a romantic – or potentially romantic – gesture).

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What a great story, thanks for sharing! I was born in 1968 so I JUST about missed cassettes. I had them, remember buying them, but it was really when CD’s hit that I really went all in on music. I think you hit a key issue, which is the age you’re at when music hits you. I vaguely remember reading some scientific research into this, suggesting there may be a sort of “age window” of pre-teen/teen years that are especially impactful for music becoming a powerful, visceral thing for us.

In fact, one of my most indelible music experiences is I remember watching Prince’s Purple Rain at the mall movie theater (remember those?), and heading straight to the mall music store (remember those too?) to buy… yup, the CD. Love that memory.

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35

Being a hopelessly literal guy I’ll say that I think we’re not really having a format war now.

The format wars were for which company would dominate a single format - VHS or Beta.

Now we have multiple formats that coexist and fill different needs. I don’t think any companies are competing to win the “portable vinyl” format. Instead there are a number of digital formats that for the most part are supported everywhere.

Once things moved to software the barrier to entry is so small that new formats can come along and be supported quickly.

Ok, now I have that monkey off my back.

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36

I started with tapes in the 80s, and when CDs came along, I continued buying tapes because they were cheaper, and then bought the CD later if I really liked a particular album. Then I realized that I was buying a lot of duplicates and stopped buying tapes.

I now have a collection of thousands of CDs stored away, which I I converted to lossy AAC on iTunes over the last decade or so, and am now repeating that exercise converting them to FLAC. My preference for new music purchases is digital files because I don’t care about the packaging. To be honest, I can’t tell the difference in quality between 24-192 and 24-96 so if I wanted hi-def, I would go for 24-96 to save space on my hard drive. And similar to my tape vs CD buying, I tend to only buy hi-def for older albums that I already know I love, otherwise all my purchases of new music are are 16-44 FLAC. I only buy CDs if I can get a used one for cheaper than a download, or if I’m looking for a particular version.

The differences between original and remastered versions is fascinating to me, and as @Tchoupitoulas said, I often wade through pages of arguments on https://www.stevehoffman.tv/ to see what other people think. I also use http://dr.loudness-war.info/ to look up if different versions have the same mastering or not. Some DR zealots say that the recording with a higher dynamic range is automatically better than a remastered version with a lower DR, and that is often true, but I’ve also found cases where the remaster may be sourced from a better master tape, or where the original tapes are so bad that a bit of compression and other tinkering is the only way to make them sound decent (Slade is a good example of that, where IMO the original vinyl and older CDs sound terrible to me, whereas the “brickwalled” latest remasters have at least attempted to extract something that sounds good). The only way to find out is to listen for yourself, especially because my definition of “good” may sound terrible to you. I’m lucky enough that I’m in a library network where I can order a particular CD from a library 50 miles away and they will deliver it to my library a couple of days later, so I can quite easily get a bunch of different versions of the same CD and compare them.

One of the things I love about digital files is that it enables you to EQ and edit them, and that’s become a hobby of mine. For instance, I’ve always been annoyed by the moaning section in Whole Lotta Love, so I seamlessly edited that out in Audacity. I know, blasphemy! :hear_no_evil: :see_no_evil: But for the most part, I tinker with the EQ. I like to do it that way so that I’m listening to the same version on my iPod Touch, in the car, on my desk set up etc.

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37

(great topic!)

Like many here, I got into music early in the format wars: when I bought my first albums there was only vinyl; later came 8 tracks (awful), cassettes (not bad), and CDs (awful at first). By the mid-'80s I had ~1,200 LPs and many CDs and had many opportunities to compare them (vinyl won everytime).

Where I am now is both a novel/good place, and a sad place. The novel & good to me is ~250 GB of CDs & CD compilations ripped to the hard drive, along with a sprinkling of hi-rez files purchased for download. Digital is light years ahead of where it was in the '80s: in particular, multibit & NOS DACs have pulled digital audio to a very high level of fidelity to music IRL. Add in the joys of headphone audio, and life is pretty good.

The sad part is that I now have 2 large collections of physical media (~1,200 LPs; ~1,500 CDs) that I will have to get rid of, one way or another. I would gladly set up a system for vinyl again, but there is nowhere in this house to do so…

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I miss my IRL player. Yes the Bifrost 2 and eStat Hive’s are nice but damn it’s been since last fall that I did the IRL thing. Damn Covid-19.

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Damn right. I can’t bear all these months w/o live music.

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40

I too arrived on the hifi scene around the time when the LP was king (78’s still readily available though) and most audiophiles (my first boss included, I blame him for costing me thousands over the years!) also had a reel to reel for serious listening. My first and many subsequent systems were all based around a record deck, damn it’s all we had! As soon as CD came along I grabbed it eagerly, I ‘thought’ it sounded better, probably did compared to my old record deck setup?

I’ve never been tempted to return to vinyl, I remember the setup hassle, did I ever get the tracking right, doubt it! It’s a flawed format from day one, the media wears out every time you play it, dust gets in the grooves (grooves for goodness sake!) and clicks and pops - no sir, not me…

But I miss it soooo much!

What I miss is the occasion, the physical media, the album sleeve, even the smell. A cheap plastic CD case does not do justice to that feeling, no way. I miss leaving your latest couple of albums on the coffee table, just to remind you to play them tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. How often do I play a new find on Qobuz? Once usually, it then just gets lost in a great swathe of cover art in my library.

I use Roon also, and it’s a terrific system for cataloguing digital media and saving your streaming ‘likes’ somewhere where they stand a better chance of not getting lost. It’s also great for suggestions and links to other work by associated artists - it’s the best there is right now. But I still miss a room full of shelves of LP’s in date order… what a way to relive the past! A physical way, touch smell and all. Mine are all gone, lost over countless moves and divorces (not countless divorces!).

Analogue is the real deal, digital still doesn’t cut it, you have only got to listen to a one off master tape on a reconditioned Revox B77 and everything falls into place. But seriously, tape is horrendously expensive now, tens of thousands of pounds for a deck!

You know what I think, I think what’s needed is a whole new format, what you reckon? An LP sized platter, with analogue information on it, in a lovely gatefold sleeve. Playable on a record deck type apparatus, no wear, laser based digital tracking - goodness me how hard could that be? They managed it with laser disc?

Problem is laser disc spins a bit quick for a platter based system, it would end up in your lap as soon as you pressed play! :joy:

Anyway thanks for starting the discussion - very interesting! :+1::blush:

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Nicely written. Tape - 15 IPS for audiophile quality, lots of tape. And didn’t real masters go even faster? Yes vinyl is fussy. Today you can get a lot of digital help setting tracking, and in some cases, the controls have actually gotten better. We never had record-washing systems (that cost as much as an entry-level turntable or more. Throw money at it, and you will never have to listen to that annoying pop 3 or 4 times in succession as Yer Blues starts on the White Album.

Welcome to the community of posters.

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