I was rewatching the last volume of the "Yoshinaga-san chi no Gargoyle" DVD. Hey, Momo-chan is voiced by Fujita Saki! I remember really liking that voice when I first heard it, but didn't know anything about her. I got to know her a little better when she was the personality of Dot-i radio. I even sent her a postcard (^_^);; But, that's not the point of this article.
The ending credit for the bonus video is accompanied by a song, sung by Saitou Chiwa. While listening to it, I thought, this song is impressive! It's fun and exciting to listen to. Wait a minute? I thought I bought all the "Yoshinaga-san chi no Gargoyle CDs." Don't I already have this song on a CD? And indeed, I do. I didn't think the song was this fun before.
So, I stopped the DVD and played the CD version instead. It's dull, dead, and lifeless! And so starts my quest to provide a real example to all my readers. I ripped the DVD version, which is in 48kHz Linear PCM format, to compare with the CD version.
First, we have the waveform of the original CD data. For those who don't know how sound works, 1.0 is maximum amplitude (0dB) and ~0.707 is -3dB from there. For an amplifier, 3dB difference means 2x power. However, for a human hearing, it takes 10dB difference to perceive 2x difference in loudness. That means, it takes 10x more amplifier power to make someone perceive two times louder version of the sound. You'll notice that the waveform is very dense. It's hard to see anything less than around -5 or -6dB once it starts going. What you're seeing is actually what you get. The song has average of less than 6dB dynamic range except in the very beginning. I hope you're starting to see the problem.
Because the DVD version was not normalized to the peak points, I've re-normalized the CD version to -3dB point to bring it closer to the DVD version. This does not really change the sound much. I just wanted the CD version and DVD version to complete at a similar maximum loudness point. Note that there is really nothing wrong with normalizing to the peaks. I suppose really crappy DAC might not like that, but I can't imagine that being a problem these days.
This is the DVD version. You'll see a lot of pointy lines sticking out everywhere. Those are most likely drum beats. Now, ask yourself this. How much louder, in real life, do you think a bass drum beat is, compared to, say, someone's normal voice? Twice? Four times? Ten times? I'm sure it's a lot more than 2x, but just for an argument's sake, let's say it's just twice as loud. That's still 10dB difference we're talking about! Do you see any bars sticking out to indicate that in the CD version of the waveforms? Nope! Don't you think that's just odd? Strictly speaking, even this DVD version isn't that good, but it's still much better than the CD version and certainly good enough to be used to demonstrate the difference.
Here is the CD version from AVCA-22826 (cut off in the middle), normalized to -3dB point and compressed using lame with following options: "--noreplaygain -q 2 -V 5"
CD version (normalized to -3dB point)And here is the DVD version. It's actually the whole thing (short version). I probably shouldn't be putting this up in whole, but I think it's worth it. It's downsampled to 44.1kHz to avoid even the slightest possibility of clueless people claiming that it sounds better just because it has 48kHz sampling rate. Other than the resampling, the same lame options were used to generate the MP3 file.
DVD version (resampled to 44.1kHz)First, download the files and listen for yourself. Sorry about the slow download. I only have 512kbps upload bandwidth. In fact, I'm probably doing myself a huge disfavor by putting this up. I also can't promise I'll keep these files available forever, especially if it takes up too much of my bandwidth. So, please download just once, and be patient.
If you listen to them, and still don't think the DVD version is many orders of magnitude better, what can I say? You're either musically impaired, your equipment is worse than a five dollar PC speaker you can pick up at Fry's, or both. (That was as nice as I could put it.)
So now what? Take EVERY CHANCE you get to tell more people. If you ever meet a music producer, tell them! You meet an artist? Tell them! Tell them you won't buy their stuff unless this madness stops. I stopped buying Okui Masami CDs and Mizuki Nana CDs already. In absolute terms, almost all the CDs I got are terrible and I shouldn't be buying them, but you got to draw a line somewhere.
Here's an interesting note about Suara's 2nd album, Yumeji. At her homepage, there's a form you can fill out to ask her questions. Apparently, someone asked about the SACD. Suara-chan passed that question to one of her staff, who answered in a vague way to indicate that the market for the CD and the SACD are different. At least that's what I gathered after reading it. It's as if the CD version is mastered to compete in the main market (if there is such a thing) and SACD version is mastered for a completely different niche market. As far as I can tell, the mastering engineer did his or her best(?) to not go overboard with dynamic range compression even on the CD version. If you see my listing for that CD (KICA-1400), you'll see that I gave it 4-star rating. It's actually not too bad, but that's just a relative statement. I decided to order the SACD version after reading the staff comment because, if the only way I can get a reasonable quality music is to pay a few bucks to Sony, I will do just that, even though I really don't like Sony corporation.
I believe that Suara-chan has good audio engineers backing her up. It's unfortunate they have to compromise the sound quality on the CD for reasons I can't fathom. It's most certainly not a technical limitation of CD's 44.1kHz 16-bit format. Hell, I can make a 22kHz 12-bit wave sound better than most CDs I got!
Then again, most people out there eat at MacDonald's everyday as if that's the normal thing to do. What a messed up world we live in. I'm such a small minority, I probably don't even show up in any kind of statistics. And I'm damn proud of it. Where are you in the big picture?
By the way, here's a little secret (not really a secret once you read this, I guess). My audio quality rating isn't out of 5. It was never meant to be out of 5. It just looks that way because I don't put more bars there. If my wish comes true, you'll see the stars (or rather asterisks) go past 5 in the SACD version of Yumeji listing. I certainly hope so.