B&W Music Club
There has always been a debate between audiophiles regarding downloadable music. Part of the camp claims that downloaded music will never sound as good as music purchased on a CD. Regardless, you can't deny the convenience of buying music online. Famed loudspeaker manufacture Bowers & Wilkins hopes to change the quality of downloadable music with the launch of the B&W Music Club.
The B&W Music Club is a subscription based service which provides its members with an exclusive album every month in Apple Lossless Compression. The idea is simple, record the album in one of the most advanced recording studio around and distribute it in a lossless format so that you can hear the music as it was intended.
A yearly subscription will run you around $67 which is about $5.50 an album which isn't bad considering the quality you'll be getting. And while we lacked the reference equipment to appreciate the work that went into making the recording, just the thought of having a file that wasn't compressed made is sound better.
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
legacydevice said 11:00AM on 6-27-2008
Yes, compression does terrible things to audio. Compressed audio REALLY needs to go away. However, the fact that Apple and Microsoft both have their own lossless codec is not a step in the right direction; there's not a damn thing wrong with FLAC. I have a Zune, and do use WMA Lossless for the majority of my music, but using that for the Zune, and using FLAC in Ableton Live is a pain in the ass.
Yes, I'm well aware of dbpoweramp... that's not the point.
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BlackAle said 10:10PM on 6-27-2008
what nonsense, ever heard of transparancy, most lossless codecs can achieve it.
BlackAle said 10:12PM on 6-27-2008
duh, i mean most LOSSY codecs can achieve it.
FLAC is great and all that, but isn't better than an mp3 encoded for transparency in terms of sound quality.
Sensai said 2:41PM on 6-27-2008
I've only recently become an audiophile, and the difference is crystal clear when you listen to music in some decent headphones or over speakers.
The problem is, it takes up too much god damn space. I know, I know: you can't fix that and it's worth it. But I have upwards of 12000 songs...all of that in FLAC would be a LOT more space consuming than .mp3 files at 320 kbps...
Which, if we're being honest, is what I'm aiming to get most of my music as. I don't feel cheap about having an .mp3 file, and at the same time, I don't feel cheap about not getting a higher quality format.
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thniels said 5:49PM on 7-05-2008
MP3 transparency is an ideal compression sought for yet hardly objectively achievable. If you find a particular encoding to be transparent; then that is excellent. It doesn't, however, mean that it is transparent to everyone.
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