It seems there was a bit of confusion on my last post regarding lossless digital formats, so here’s a clarification. Lossless is not an end to itself, nor is it an especially high standard. Lossless just means, typically, identical to the CD version. Honestly, that’s just kind of a baseline. But lossless is not synonymous with high fidelity.

There was a letter to the editor in a recent issue of Stereophile of someone who claimed that uncompressed WAV files were the way to go, Apple Lossless is a “joke,” the letter-writer claimed. Just in case you were wondering, uncompressed WAV files are crap. Well, not crap, but they’re only CD quality. That’s it and nothing more. Compressed lossless formats are mathematically identical to WAV files — it’s the same shit — so of course you’re just better off using one of the lossless codecs. You can spot a nut when he starts talking about wave files.

The important thing though is not the format of the music, but the emotional connection one feels to that music. Does listening to a certain album send shivers down your spine? That’s always an exciting feeling, and a sign, to me, of some intense emotional impact. When I watch U2 Live At Red Rocks back from ‘83 or ‘85, I get that feeling. Certain records in my collection have that kind of impact. It’s definitely not across the board.

But here’s the thing. Most CDs don’t have that kind of emotional impact. I can count on one hand the number of CDs in my collection that affect me emotionally at that primal kind of level. Something about CDs in general kind of kills that energy — it kills the air of the recording.

Vinyl on the other hand tends to keep that air — and if the emotional content of the recording is strong, it will be recorded and transmitted. So part of the love of vinyl is about the process — playing records is physically satisfying — it’s a ritual. But maybe you’ve found the other part of vinyl just as exciting — that emotional thrill that comes from a record that touches you.

So the point isn’t that lossless is some great thing: it’s just CD quality. But people have been missing the deep emotional connection to the music that comes from a more natural method of encoding. Possibly hi-res digital formats may keep that emotional air, but the cheaper and more direct route is to go vinyl. I call it emotional air, because it seems to me that vinyl recordings tend to breathe more. CDs to my ear sound concise.

John Atkinson, the longtime editor of Stereophile magazine, wrote an interesting piece comparing MP3 vs AAC vs FLAC vs CD. John is known for providing spectral analysis to the equipment that gets reviewed in the pages of the magazine, which shows the coloration given to the sound coming from a specific piece of equipment. In that vein, he takes a look at how the encoding of CD sound into MP3, AAC, and FLAC compares.

He can quickly assert that FLAC, Apple Lossless, and Windows Media Lossless are all mathematically and sonically identical to the original recording on the CD. The simple point of the article is that lossy formats such as MP3 and AAC have problems with the reproduction of the music. The noise floor is much higher, and there are various sweeps of noise that wasn’t there before.

If you look at the graphs on the second page of the article, you’ll see though, that of the lossy formats, the best of breed is 320 Kbps AAC. I wrote last month that I couldn’t hear the difference between 320 Kbps AAC files and the CD, and John Atkinson basically agrees.

So the best formats to use are the lossless ones, in case you were wondering, but if space is an issue, then use 320 Kbps AAC. MP3 comes from the MPEG-1 codec and AAC comes from the MPEG-4 codec, so the takeaway lesson is avoid MP3 if possible, even 320 Kbps MP3. It simply doesn’t compare.

Of course, you could also buy a turntable, and forget the digital jargon.

A few years ago there were links flying around about the last page on the Internet. It’s kind of a joke, see, since it’s not really a linear thing, and usually said page would have some admonition to turn off your computer and go for a walk.

While there isn’t an end to the Internet, there is a beginning, and I stumbled upon it quite by accident tonight. I had heard about this some years ago but had never looked into it. Anyway, I came across the website for the Internet’s root servers at www.root-servers.org.

By a certain quirk of technology there are only 13 root servers that form the foundation of the internet. That page is a fascinating look into the pieces that hold the whole thing together. It has the physical locations, organizations and IP addresses of each of the named servers. They’re all over the world, and these days most of them are outside of the United States. There’s a bit of a workaround on the 13 servers that allows for multiple machines to act as one of the root servers. Such that, a couple of the servers have over 40 international locations where they are housed. But you can see the strong American flavor to the backbone — several root servers are run by the U.S. military, which is not surprising given the Internet’s history at DARPA.

Wikipedia has an entry about the root servers that has some more details about them. They also have a brief entry on distributed denial of service attacks on root nameservers. No one has ever been successful in attacking all of the root severs, but I think I must have heard about them after the 2002 attack mentioned in the Wikipedia article that brought nine of the 13 down. It’s kind of a strange thing to think that something as distributed and international as the Internet comes down to a few powerful servers running at its core. This huge thing suddenly seems very vulnerable. After a second attack in 2007 that lasted five hours, this chilling statement was issued, according to Wikipedia:

If the United States found itself under a major cyberattack aimed at undermining the nation’s critical information infrastructure, the Department of Defense is prepared, based on the authority of the president, to launch a cyber counterattack or an actual bombing of an attack source.

Technical note: I found it of some interest that not all of the root servers are listed as being IPv6 capable at this time. Kind of surprising given that the IPv4 address space could be exhausted within two years.