[FullRangeMan]

Neil Young is angry with the current music market, he strongly criticized the new way to make and distribute digital music today.
He complaint that MP3s feature only 5 percent of the data from an original master file, which obviously is a major problem.
http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1677694/sundance-film-festival-neil-young.jhtml
Would Neil Young love Vinyl??

[FullRangeMan]

Seems to me Neil Young are unaware of the SACD good sound quality. Since there is no one SACD release from him.

[WGH]

Neil: "It's all about the bottom and the beat driving everything..."

I'll have to agree with Neil there. My new neighbors musical taste are as narrow as a knife edge with one monotonous bass beat, it is hard to tell if they have more than three songs that they put on repeat.

Neil: "Where are our geniuses? What happened?"

I'm guessing it skipped a generation or two. (present company excepted of course)

Wayne

[Pez]

All our generations genius' are working on wall street writing algorithms that will make the rich richer.

Would Neil Young love Vinyl??

My entire Neil Young SACD rips to 24-176 collection says otherwise. 

[ted_b]

All our generations genius' are working on wall street writing algorithms that will make the rich richer.

My entire Neil Young SACD rips to 24-176 collection says otherwise. 

Jason,
Although Neil is a big hirez advocate he never did SACD.  DVD (24/96), DVD-A (24/192) and now BluRay (archives in 24/192) but no SACD.

[Pez]

Haha, shucks that's what I meant.

[Don_S]

I think the wording of the thread title is not accurate at all.  Neil is actually promoting hi-rez digital with his newest releases.  It is MP3s he is against. I totally agree on that one.  I am not sure where he stands on the middle level digital recordings.

[Phil A]

At least he is one artist who cares what his stuff sounds like.  I wish there were more who pushed hi-rez.

[FullRangeMan]

I would like to thanks Neil Young for he let clear MP3 and other formats alike, are crap.
I never see a musician or a pro-audio major going to public saying a important and obvious statemaent like it.
Thanks for it Mr.Young.

[Rclark]

 Yeah too bad it's Neil Young and not Eminem. Might as well be nobody. He's been at this for years, promoting hirez, this isn't new.

[FullRangeMan]

Yeah too bad it's Neil Young and not Eminem. Might as well be nobody. He's been at this for years, promoting hirez, this isn't new.

Or the silly Lady Gaga which had 18M fellows on Twitter.

[Rclark]

exactly. I'd take her any day. Anyone who can get the numbers up. Nobody cares what grandpa thinks.

[drjjpdc]

Randy,
The thing is they are totally different. Lady Gaga is pop. NY has been one of the leaders in Rock from the 70's and he writes lyrics that you can actually read.

John

[JerryM]

Neil is a rock legend. He's such a rock legend that Lynyrd Skynyrd made a song telling him to get bent. I'm pretty sure he knows what masters sound like, and he's saying what we buy sounds like 5%. That sucks. 

I hope other artists jump in and demand a change, too.

[Rclark]

Hey dont get me wrong, if I had a choice of what to listen to, Young all day. Actually Gaga's video for "disco stick" on repeat wins, but anyway, Eminem (who I am not a fan of, despite being a hip hop fan) has 51,000,000 likes on his Facebook page. He speaks, and all those people will read it. I promise that you get people like him on the wagon and things will happen faster. Like I said, with Neil Young, might as well be nobody.

[nathanm]

Sorry but Neil's completely full of it on this one.  If his claim of "95% missing data" was true nobody would listen to MP3s at all.  Yes of course high rez\uncompressed is better, but his point is lost with such absurd hyperbole.  It's a credit to the programmers to be able to reduce the file size so much and still maintain sound quality.

To dismiss the thousands of factors governing sound quality and only focusing on the storage format is ridiculous.  "Worse than a 78"?  Give me a break.  He's making a subjective point about his feelings, I know that, but it's just too silly to take seriously.

[*Scotty*]

Depending on the bit rate chosen for the Mp3 file he may be right by the numbers. CD Redbook standard bit rate is 1411.2kbits/sec., a Mp3 can be as high as 320kbits/sec or as low 32kbits/sec.
128kbits/sec is considered "fair" sound quality and is probably judged by many to be a good compromise file size with acceptable sound.
Simple division of 1411.2kbits/sec by 128kbits/sec = 11.025 or less than 1/10th the data of the original.
Mp3 is not for ME!
Scotty

[pehare]

c'mon neil....i like neil as well as anyone but just today i got his latest live release "the treasure" on redbook (hdcd even) & it sounds like it was recorded on a 70's era handheld cassette recorder w/a handheld microphone.  i like the material but the recording is atrocious. 

[Rclark]

And then when you compare the bit/sec rate of 32bit audio to that same 128kb, what he says starts to sound about right.

 Even when I was using just PC speakers and bare bones dvd player or computer (seems so long ago now), even on that low-mid fi gear, to me, the mp3 version sounded flat and gross. Like watered down diet coke, versus.. a  fresh coke on ice. No life.

[Lyndon]

Rclark said:

the mp3 version sounded flat and gross. Like watered down diet coke, versus.. a  fresh coke on ice. No life.

So on tube gear would that be a fresh coke, with vanilla syrup, cane sugar, on ice?

I love Neil, but I have to agree with pehare, his new one, "The Treasure" leaves something to be desired in the SQ.  Neil was in Salt Lake/Park City at the alternative festival to Sundance, called Slamdance, to promote his new concert film, which is the feedback/noise side of Neil's music.  Very loud, and hard to listen to for long.  His "Live at Massey Hall" which he released about 5 years ago was very good for song content and sound quality.