L-ROX1972 t1_iu51xaa wrote on October 28, 2022 at 4:33 PM

Reply to comment by hvperRL in Honest question, did we hit peak headphone a while back? by Yammy_Lyfe

>We have been at the point where actual mixing and mastering tracks is the bottleneck

Thank you. This is what I came here to say.

I’ve been Mastering Audio for over 20 years and I’m honestly quite a bit disheartened by how poor the quality of current releases are today - and it’s only gotten worse.

In the last 20 years, I have seen a lot of seasoned Mastering Engineers leave the business. It is rare to see people sending out their albums to get mastered by a professional who only does Mastering; these days (in most popular genres) it’s quite typical for a release to be recorded/mixed/mastered by the same engineer and the results are typically underwhelming.

The current economic situation hasn’t helped either. Most pros who are still around today have had to raise their rates, and this has lead some to use “online mastering” (AI) for their tracks. A lot of times, the results are passable, but it’s not nearly the same thing as when you’re working with a human who might give you some feedback on things to tweak on your mixes, helping you to get the most out of a mix prior to mastering.

ImpossibleResource68 t1_iu54ful wrote on October 28, 2022 at 4:50 PM

Do you think apple and spotifys quest for all lossless audio will change this?

L-ROX1972 t1_iu56boj wrote on October 28, 2022 at 5:02 PM

Nope, not at all; I see them (major record labels & distributors) continuing to push for proprietary file types and digital snakeoil (upsampling).

The quest for having the best-sounding albums is non-existent (simply because that would cost more and take more time to accomplish).

Nadeoki t1_iu6omfm wrote on October 28, 2022 at 11:28 PM

Deezer, tidal and qobuz already exist for that. Yet they use 16/44.1 and some releases are compressed for the Loudness war's sake.

Spotify is also definitely not moving to Lossless anytime soon.
They have no reason to, most people who use it, do so for the Algorithm and the ease of access. Those that care about the quality aspect have already switched or use something besides it for actual playback. That being said, I hope they consider at least flac 24/48 at some point in the future.

If Deezer can optimize their recommendations and add a bigger catalogue, they might be more competitive and therefore force Spotify to up their game.

ImpossibleResource68 t1_iu6pjn6 wrote on October 28, 2022 at 11:36 PM

I think apple is pushing Spotify with their lossless for free. From what I’ve ready Spotify are having licensing issues with it at the moment and that’s the only thing holding it up. The announced it 2 years ago now.

Nadeoki t1_iu6t6xn wrote on October 29, 2022 at 12:06 AM

Flac is an open source project with no licensing fees or royalties so either you mean it just costs more to get Tracks in flac from Production Companies or they're having trouble acquiring the Storage Facilities needed to store the significant increase in size of their 90+ million track library. Not all of which even exist in flac.