As a tango DJ, I have made it my goal to always play the best possible songs for the audience.. Point! This is the general path that DJs follow. Specifically for tango music, which is much more delicate than ordinary house or salsa music. Tango people generally deal with music from between 1920 and the late 1950s. This music is typically mono, limited in frequency spectrum, and full of unfavorable acoustic artifacts. It is a real challenge for us to play this at a reasonable quality that does not tire the ears of our dancers. Tango music from this EDO (Epoca de Oro) is therefore typically intensively remastered, i.e., digitally reconstructed. Normally, we wouldn’t want to play this music with a smiley face equalizer curve and a monster bass. We need to rely on our equipment to produce a flatter frequency response curve. All of this is a real challenge for DJs, and we all do our best to implement it with technically limited semi-professional equipment.
So why open a new discussion about quality? The discussion begins with several articles describing the need to use audiophile equipment and techniques for a true tango sound.. Audiophile means optimizing the listening experience by using only the best possible equipment throughout the entire chain of signal transmission and conversion between electrical and acoustic signals.. Today, an entire industry has been built around this philosophy, and in general, I agree with it.. It makes a lot of sense to use good speakers and high-quality equipment in your living room to maximize sound quality.. This is a mixture of science and art, and I am truly impressed and envious when I hear such highly tuned equipment.
The idea is now to transfer this philosophy to the milonga.. Some DJ friends therefore promote the use of lossless audio files and complain about the poor quality of the speakers at the milonga venues.. In this case, I would like to elaborate on this topic in more detail.
Typically, DJs obtain their material from remastered CDs, so generally the only influence here is the choice of labels with varying degrees of success in this process.. We need to know that recording technology changed drastically between the recording techniques of the 1930s and 1950s. Music labels try to restore the musical quality of the original master discs (if they have not been destroyed) and deliver high-quality sound for listening and dancing.. So there isn’t much we can do at this link in the transmission chain.
The point is, a (digital) DJ typically transfers these recordings into a compressed file to store them in their track library. With today’s terabyte storage prices, compression isn’t a major issue anymore. We need to understand that computers typically compress the digital signal into a specific format (using a special algorithm that takes into account the psychoacoustic perception of our ears). This type of music compression (the most common being MP3) is widely used by consumers and DJs. Technically, this format reduces the quality because data from the original is lost. A good indicator here is the bitrate, which shows how much data has been removed from the original. Generally, the higher the bitrate, the better the quality. The best quality is ensured by using a so-called lossless compression format (like FLAC). Many people with ‘golden ears’ tell us they can clearly distinguish between compressed and lossless audio. As a scientist, I believe in statistics, so I took the so-called ABX test.[1,2]This test was conducted to statistically verify the quality of the comparison between two files. I used my professional monitor speakers to compare a modern recording of Fabio Hager’s Sexteto ‘Dramatico’ (from his 2012 CD Retorno) between lossless and various MP3 bitrates. My (slightly worn) ears were indeed able to distinguish between 96 kbps and lossless, but I couldn’t hear any difference when the bitrate was above 128 kbps. This is also what many people on the internet are describing. So, let’s take a deep breath.
The second problem with the audiophile philosophy is the quality of the audio chain and the speaker systems. I understand the importance of good speaker systems and am perfectly happy with good monitor speakers when I’m listening to my tango music at home. The crucial point is: as DJs, we don’t usually concern ourselves with a small living room (and questions about where to place the armchair for the optimal listening experience), but we have to fill a venue for 50+ people with sound. That’s a completely different task than optimally filling a small living room with sound.
Admittedly, the active speaker systems (1000-watt satellites and a 1400-watt subwoofer) that I use aren’t compatible with the expectations of an audiophile hi-fi enthusiast. The point is, they’re designed for a completely different purpose. The same applies to the audio chain. If you want to listen to Mahler’s Fifth Symphony in your living room, you wouldn’t use a professional mixer, and I certainly wouldn’t use my event sound system for that.
For this reason, I don’t feel like a bad DJ if I use my semi-professional equipment and not FLAC audio files. FLAC files are of good quality and have adequate compression, but they have limited compatibility with semi-professional DJ software (such as iTunes and Traktor). Therefore, I still encode my audio files at a high bitrate of 320 kB/s and try to recode older songs that I encoded at 125 kB/s many years ago [3]. I trust my audio equipment because it can be used in different locations and I can adapt it to the acoustic needs of venues.. It is generally recommended to offer the best possible sound, but we must also consider that we should do this with a reasonable investment of equipment and money.. Personally, I believe that the best way to begin with this approach is not to immediately buy expensive equipment, but to think about your actual situation and how you can improve it.. If you really need to buy equipment, get help from a professional and buy good, modular equipment that is tailored to the requirements of your venue.
Here too, it all depends on how you use your equipment. Boosting the bass with a subwoofer or turning up the treble are mistakes made by DJs and not a systematic problem with the equipment.
-Richard
Sources
1 http://lifehacker.com/5903625/mp3-or-lossless-see-if-you-can-hear-the-difference-with-this-test
2 http://techland.time.com/2012/03/02/can-you-hear-the-difference-between-lossless-and-lossy-audio/
3 http://www.digitaldjtips.com/2011/02/dj-music-files-formats/