[ProAudio] Lossless audio on YouTube

[Jim Brown]

On 4/23/2021 1:02 PM, Scott Dorsey via ProAudio wrote:
> 1. The average viewer really doesn't care about sound quality.
> 
> 2. Video people on the whole care and know less about sound quality
>     even than the average listener.

Sure. And much of what's on youtube is uploaded by amateurs. Data 
compression is the LEAST of the problems with much of what I hear. I'm 
thrilled if the distortion and/or dynamics processing isn't excessive, 
the musical balance is decent, and the spectral balance is within range 
of what I can EQ with the small mixer I recently added to my primary 
computer listening system to get it where I can stand to listen to it.

I mostly listen to either speech (news, interviews) or acoustic jazz, 
some old, some relatively contemporary. The channel EQ has LF and HF 
shelving and a 2.5 kHz filter. The shelving tends to correct for the 
recording/mastering engineer's monitoring system, as well as how well 
(or how poorly) he miked/mixed bass and drums. The mid-range filter has 
made a few terribly muddy vintage vocals listenable.

I recently bought a Sonny Rollins 2-CD set on the Resonance label that 
consisted of a studio session and several live dates from multiple 
sources. There seems to have been no one listening to the transfers or 
the mastering -- every session sounded VERY different. It's like they 
made a straight transfer and loaded up the CD masters with no effort to 
EQ out the differences. And the differences were NOT subtle -- the first 
CD starts with the studio set, which sounded great, but the live stuff 
was a mess. It would have taken much more than my limited EQ to make it 
listenable! And this is a label that brags about their quality.

Jim Brown