Sound Expert Says Mastered For iTunes Music Doesn’t Sound Closer To CD
by Brent Dirks
February 28, 2012
While Apple recently rolled out Mastered for iTunes to help sound engineers create music with the most fidelity within the constraints of iTunes, a mastering engineer says albums in the section sound no closer to a CD master.
Now, 9to5 Mac reports that Ian Shepherd, in his null testing, found that the mastered music doesn’t sound any different compared to a normal AAC file found on iTunes.
Shepherd posted an in-depth video with his findings. Click here if you can’t see the video.
Most interestingly, the mastering engineer shows that the best way to get music that sounds closest to the CD is purchase a disc and then rip it into iTunes.
In his blog post, Shepherd also talked about what Apple can do to provide real high-quality music:
“In fact, since at the end of the day we’re still getting a lossy encode, it’s my opinion that the advantages of higher bit-depths and sample rates will be completely outweighed by the AAC encoding. If Apple really care about giving us high-quality audio, they should offer lossless formats… but that’s a whole other blog post!”The critique also comes on the heels of a report that Apple is developing a new “adaptive streaming” file format. The system would apparently adjust on the fly dependent on iDevice storage capacity and would possibly be used to upgrade iTunes Match. Do you care about Apple’s efforts, or are you fine with how your iTunes music sounds now?
