They missed their chance to do it right with Blu-Ray audio
Beatles Remastered
Every UK album released by The Beatles is being released in a The Beatles [Box Set, Original Recordings Remastered]
There is a lot of excitement and hype but they missed the chance for this collector. We are getting cleaned up and remastered CDs but they are still CDs which means sampling and CD sound.
The Remastered version could be Blu-Ray audio with no loss of sound in compression. Neil Young Archives: Volume One [Blu-ray]
That might not matter to people who listen to MP3s which are over-sampled but CDs are 40-year-old technology and sound like it.
It will introduce a new generation to the best sounding Beatles they have heard unless they get their parents or grandparents record albums out. Come over to my place because I have all the UK releases and most of the American ones on vinyl. When I listen to the CDs they make my ears hurt with the edgy grainy sound.
Vinyl LPs are analog and the sound on them is what is recorded with minor change. To fit the same sound on a CD, engineers developed a lossy, meaning you lose some music content, that tricked the ear into thinking it was music not sampled music.
CDs have more music content than MP3s; however, if you only listen to music on a car radio or iPod you won’t know the difference.
Real analog music sounds open. You can distinguish the instruments and it has more punch and reality.
Newer formats like SACD have failed to take hold with the consumer as people want portable music. I got the Bob Dylan – Limited Edition Catalog Box Set
The proliferation of Blu-Ray players in home theatres makes Blu-Ray audio, a non lossy digital format, possible and potentially profitable for music manufacturers.
If they can sell movies on Blu-Ray with Blu-Ray audio, why not music?
John White
I got the remastered set of Beatles CDs and they will NOT play on my Sony Blu-Ray player. If your main CD player is a Blu-Ray, be warned the CDs won’t work on it. I think it’s because each CD has some sort of video file included and the Sony can’t read it or see the music files. I installed the latest firmware upgrade and called Sony tech support and they told me to call back in three months to see if they had a fix. I can’t believe Apple put these CDs out without testing them on Blu-ray players.
Rob
I agree that the Beatles box sets should have been available on DVD & Bluray – the sound quality is superior. But . . . you say that CD audio is sampled which means ‘CD sound’. This is true. What you don’t mention is that blu ray audio is also sampled, albeit at a higher rate. The Neil Young blu ray box that you mention contains audio sampled at 96khz instead of the CDs 44.1. The bit depth is 24 instead of the CDs 16.
You also mention compression. Linear PCM is the method of encoding for audio CDs. It is uncompressed. Linear PCM encoding is also used on blu ray discs. What you gain, as with the Neil Young box, is increased bit depth and sampling rate. Thus the higher quality of sound.
Do you have the original EMI Pepper album in mono? On a nice system, that would be pure nirvana.
Stephen Pate
Thanks for the comment. Almost all of my EMI LPs are stereo even the first two.
So many formats, so little time. CDs are 16 bit data at 44.1 kHz. Some people say that’s all we hear.
My hearing isn’t what it was decades ago but I can hear better sound, higher bit rates like 24 bit.
You’re right that blu-ray offers more although we aren’t getting it yet. Dolby True-HD has a max of 18 Mbits/sec and DTS-HD 24 Mbits/sec. Compare that with 126 kbits to 256 kbits for iTunes downloads. You can’t listen to that music on good speakers. It sounds awful but great on those earbuds with the compression Apple employs.