this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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Sometimes they mess up. Actually only ever noticed it once and that was years ago CD vs. ogg vorbis at full quality level, this track. Youtube version is even worse, it seems (from memory): The guitars kicking in around 30 seconds should be harsh and noisy as fuck like nothing you've ever heard, they're merely distorted on youtube.
Then lossy codecs are a bad idea for archival reasons as you can't recode them without incurring additive losses -- each codec has a different psychoacoustic model, each deletes different stuff. Thus, FLAC definitely has a place.
Killer samples do happen, sure but vorbis at Q9? I'm highly dubious. That track in particular just sounds badly recorded to begin with. If you have that same version in FLAC i would be interested to see some ABX test results or test it myself.
For archival purposes, though, I agree FLAC is the way to go.
Back in 2004, when the album released, the encoder was barely past version 1.0. Though after 20 years I could misremember "full quality" as "whatever people said wouldn't degrade quality".
Heresy. Next thing you're going to tell me is that Sunn O))) should move the mics away from the amps so the sound is cleaner. Granted, though, Sunn O))) does that live, blackmail live is quite different because they can't layer a gazillion tracks for the mix. But yes the deliberateness of just how much noise is in those guitars doesn't get conveyed after getting mangled by ten year old youtube compression.
Lol, I'm not saying that brickwalling the mix to achieve a certain effect isn't a thing, but at the extreme levels of compression and clipping apparent on that track, it's unlikely that a FLAC would sound even remotely different. Apparently the band agreed - in 2020 they issued a remaster which seems noticeably less crushed:
Incidentally, I saw Sunn O))) live once. I can still feel my bowels shake.