"Mastered for iTunes"... Really?? What does it mean?

[FMiguelez]

Why yes… after getting Everest cables, I realized that I no longer needed content. No more CDs or DVDs or vinyl or tape or radio… they were all so flawed. I discovered the epitome of the sublime: just listening to the cables alone.

Do you know what I think the saddest thing is, Shoosh?

That all this extreme audiophile business is like an unattainable and elusive impossible dream. No matter how much they spend, or how great they think their systems are, there will ALWAYS be things that "need to be improved".
Once they have spent a fortune on a stereo system and on cables, some bozo comes along and says it's not good enough because now they need cable elevators. Then they buy them. But then another snake-oil seller comes along and he insists that they must mark their CDs with expensive special markers, etc. This goes on ad nauseam.
It just NEVER ever seems to end!

I don't think there are many situations that exemplify the law of diminishing returns better than this. After all, how much better can the music sound after spending tens of thousands of dollars on cables? Even if it were true, how much better would it really sound? 0.0001% better? Certainly nothing that justifies such an expense. Music certainly won't sound 10,000 times better...

It must be so stressful being one of them.

Even WORSE, it seems they are incapable of simply sitting back and relaxing when they listen to music. It seems they are more worried about those evil carpets and curtains distorting their music than by the music itself.
Instead of enjoying, for instance, Shostakovich's 5th symphony and appreciating the masterpiece, they seem to be looking for flaws in the sound! (Yeah, I spent 10-15 minutes checking out some audiophile forum).

I mean, at that point it would make more sense to forget about their systems and simply go to a concert hall and listen to the music live. If they are looking for purity and perfection, it doesn't get any better than that!
And it's certainly much cheaper too

I hope I'm not going too far by calling them delusional... But it sounds like they fit the definition pretty well. They believe in something without any evidence, and apparently, even in spite of the (contradictory) evidence.
I mean, how can they not make themselves believe they are improving the sound after spending tens of thousands of dollars? They better!

[BobK]

I hope I'm not going too far by calling them delusional... But it sounds like they fit the definition pretty well. They believe in something without any evidence, and apparently, even in spite of the (contradictory) evidence.

I don't think you're going too far at all.

Audiophile types think that there are aspects of sound reproduction which haven't yet been described by science, or can't be.

If you haven't already seen it, check out Ethan Winer's 'Audio Myths' video, which draws from an AES workshop a few years ago. The early part has some fun presentations on expectation bias by Poppy Crum and James Johnston, and later Ethan does interesting demos about audibility of artifacts, eq-ing, sound card quality, and more. I enjoy his myth-busting, and learned a thing or two.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYTlN6wjcvQ

I wanna tell those misguided souls who are throwing around tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars at needlessly expensive equipment that they'd get a much better return on their investment if they spent it on music lessons. In a few months of lessons, I'm pretty confident I could enhance their enjoyment of music far more than expensive gadgets.

[Shooshie]

While I agree that the extremes of audiophilia tend to be delusional in nature, don't let that discount genuine audiophile gear, recordings, and the people who enjoy them. Up to about $20,000 you can fill out a system with gear that makes a difference you CAN hear. Cables are not necessarily a part of that gear, though they should be between 12 gauge and 20 gauge, depending on the length of the run. The first time I heard really fine audio, I was hooked. You don't get that kind of audio in a Pioneer system, or Panasonic, or even Harman Kardon. Nor do you get it in Bang & Olafsen, or most of the other show-off gear. Really great amplifiers will make your recordings stand out as you have never heard them, and they will show a lot of recordings to be the flawed specimens they are.

But after a point, more expense simply is not paying for more science. From then on it's just about there being a sucker born every minute, and even normal people like me who get hooked on the great sound of audiophile equipment can go off the deep in and convert to 100% pure Sucker. I'm proud to say that I never bought a Monster Cable, nor did I get any of those slick devices that bring all those high-class adjectives to bear on the quality of your listening experience. I just bought good, solid amps and speakers that really made a difference that you could hear. When they became too expensive to maintain (tubes need replacing… a LOT), I backed up to a nice Harman-Kardon system and said goodbye to that expensive hobby. Still use an old Conrad-Johnson amp for mixing, but only because it's available. In fact, I'm using powered speakers now (Equator Audio Research Q10), so I don't even use that amp very often.

It's sad that so many hucksters moved in and gave the audiophile label a bad rap. It could have seriously upgraded the general listening experience, and maybe it did, but by the mid 1990's, people were backpedaling from the whole realm, having seen too many snake-oil salesmen wielding cables, insulators, and magic wands to purify the air.

Shoosh

[Music4dw]

Funny, I just watched a mastering training video and they had a section on Mastering for iTunes. From the video...

Mastered for iTunes is a program Apple started in 2012 where the iTunes Store accepts higher quality master files which result in higher quality AAC encodes. Files that are submitted at 96kHz/24 bit will be identified as such. It doesn't mean that the engineer did anything special to modify the sound specifically for iTunes it's just indicating a higher quality master was provided for the encoding. All the encoding is performed by Apple to maintain consistency, prevent anyone from gaming the system by hacking the encoder, and to ward off legal problems if someone tries to submit a recording without the associated labels permission.

Later on they go through the tools Apple provides so that if the engineer wants to hear what it will sound like on iTunes they can download the tools and walk through essentially the same process that Apple does and encode the file themselves to hear what it will sound like. So, you could tailor a master for iTunes if you wanted to.

They also walk through some tips on creating a master that will encode well. But again, none of that has anything to do with the "Mastered for iTunes" indicator.