Return to high fidelity

[blueskies]

Article deleted due to misinformation.

[soulster]

That article is so full of technical misinformation it isn't funny!

[blueskies]

That article is so full of technical misinformation it isn't funny!

I agree with that. It lost me on some of that stuff. But, I thought there were people here who did understand such things and maybe would enjoy it.

[soulster]

I agree with that. It lost me on some of that stuff. But, I thought there were people here who did understand such things and maybe would enjoy it.

Yeah, and have even more people runnin' around misinformed about how digital works.

[blueskies]

Yeah, and have even more people runnin' around misinformed about how digital works.

Excuse me. Guess you're the expert here. Obviously, this is out of my league.

[chidrummer]

I'd have to agree with soulster, the article is all over the place. blueskies, check out the comments section under the article to get some idea of our objections.

[ms_m]

Blue-skies I now wish I would have spoken up before you deleted the article. I don't know squat about the technical aspects of it all but I did find the article interesting for the simple fact that someone seems to be attempting to correct a technological "defect" if you will, with more technology. That has a certain serendipity feel to it and I found that intriguing. I got the sense that improving the quality of digital media was the goal and I find that a worthy endeavor. Is it possible??? I don't have a clue but making an effort to try makes sense. So although the tech side of the article may have been inaccurate the essence of the article was a worthy read imo. Bottom line.....I enjoyed it and I wish I had said so earlier.

[blueskies]

Ms. M....thank you for your support. The response the article received I thought I had 'offended' people and made a mistake posting it. After I read this "Yeah, and have even more people runnin' around misinformed about how digital works" I thought I perhaps should delete it. I'm pretty un-techy, so couldn't defend what I had posted. Glad you enjoyed the article and thank you again.

[ms_m]

No problem Blueskies, I really did enjoy it. It might help if you re-post. Chi pointed out there were things in the comment section that would probably help to explain some of the techie stuff [[and mis-information) that some people might find interesting. Personally I could care less but many people do enjoy that sort of thing so it's all good....LOL... But the overall theme of improving technology with more technology [[which is what I got from it) made me smile so I was cool with it.

[blueskies]

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/mus...3#.TzBIGIGwdJp

Well Ms M.....I believe this was the article. If not..........I'm in trouble again!

[ms_m]

It's the same article but believe it's a different link...oops....LOL

Blueskies, don't sweat it. You posted an article in good faith thinking it would be of interest. You were not trying to be controversial or misleading. You were honest in saying the techie stuff went over your head.

Nothing wrong with what you did and I hope this does't discourage you from participating here.

Some will comment, some will not....don't take it personally...not even if they disagree or dislike what you post. It's simply the nature of forums and internet blogging.

BTW...someone said something very similar to me when I first came here [[Aug 2005) His name was Chi Drummer...the man responsible for unleashing me on SDF. hahahahaha [[sorry for busting you Chi....)

[tamla617]

is this the home of another cancel thread now?can we take on the lease?

[blueskies]

It's the same article but believe it's a different link...oops....LOL

Blueskies, don't sweat it. You posted an article in good faith thinking it would be of interest. You were not trying to be controversial or misleading. You were honest in saying the techie stuff went over your head.

Nothing wrong with what you did and I hope this does't discourage you from participating here.

Some will comment, some will not....don't take it personally...not even if they disagree or dislike what you post. It's simply the nature of forums and internet blogging.

BTW...someone said something very similar to me when I first came here [[Aug 2005) His name was Chi Drummer...the man responsible for unleashing me on SDF. hahahahaha [[sorry for busting you Chi....)

Ms M....I try and sometimes I truly miss the boat. Oh well. You made some excellent points. I did post it in good faith not realizing there was misinformation in the article. An honest mistake. And yep, I'm about as techy as my Rottweiler. Loved the story about Chi Drummer unleashing you on SDF....I had a good laugh! Thanks

[ms_m]

LOL...glad you feel better Blueskies...now Chi on the other hand may get a few tomatoes thrown his way but he can handle it....LOL...take care

[soulster]

Here's the article: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/st...ity/52963362/1

Blueskies, no one here was offended! Not at all!

1) The technology is there today for making fantastic recordings. But, that technology has been there since the 50s! There were awesome-sounding recordings back then, particularly jazz recordings. Why? It's because the engineers didn't do much to them. They weren't multitrack recordings, so there wasn't a bunch of tape hiss buildup. And, you lose sound quality when you start blending a bunch of tracks together. That's why we heard the sound quality of recordings go down starting in the late 60s.

2) The technology is there right now for making great recordings. However, the engineers are using that technology to squash the life out of recordings, even at the tracking stage. These multitrack recordings cannot even be mixed later on for better sound because the hyper-compression and limiting is built-in to the tracks. And that is at the high-resolution level! We haven't even gotten it down to the mass-consumer media yet!

3) Media: some labels and artists are now selling high-resolution copies of albums. Right now, it's limited to artists selling them on their websites, and HD tracks: https://www.hdtracks.com/ The consumer can bypass the CD and the mp3. and even the vinyl album, and get exactly what the artist intended us to hear without the limitations of physical or lossy formats. The downside of this is that vary, very little has been issued so far. For Motown, that only means Stevie Wonder, and Wonder's classic recordings do not sound very good.

4) All vintage recordings before 1979 were all-analog and released on vinyl. To cut vinyl, the cutting engineer worked from what is called a production master. That tape was often EQ'ed, with maybe a bit of limiting and-or compression applied to the inner tracks. In the 80s, the first song, or the first minute or two of the first song had the volume boosted to make it stand out to radio programmers. It's in some of your records. Take a listen! Those compromises were made to keep the needle from jumping out of the grooves. the biggest alteration from the master tape sound was that the bass was slashed. Have you ever put on a CD reissue of your favorite album and wondered why it has more bass than you remember? That's because that bass was cut off the record you came to know. One example I know this forum would know about is Diana Ross's "diana" album from 1980. There is one mastering that has all the bass of the master tape, and that is the one mastered by Kevin Reeves. All the rest of the CDs either were made from the LP cutting master or had the bass slashed or compressed, probably as per instructions on the tape box. Seems most people can't handle all that bass on the mixes, so all other CDs have the reduced bass. That's what most people know. The same issue came up when the Beatles remasters were released over two years ago. Many people complained about the extra bass on many albums and songs, but the improved digital A/D converters were responsible for that. Ever get a CD reissue and find the treble is different? One or the other was tweaked as well.

What I was getting at here is that the vinyl records have better sound because not much was done to the sound of the tapes. Depending on what your vinyl playback is like, and despite the small compromises that are made by the cutting process, you are pretty much getting closer to the tapes.

5) The CD. We all know it's not perfect. Many things have been done to make them sound passable. in relation to the tape source. Ignoring the hyper-compression and limiting that is added to most CDs today, the problem with the CD is it's bit-depth. 16-bits is just not enough bits to capture all of the sound of the music. For that you need 20-bits. For reasons unknown to me, the industry did not stop at 20-bits and went past 22-bits to 24-bits. Most recordings made today are made at 24-bits to capture the full-resolution. However, to get that recording on a CD, or even an mp3, it must be reduced to 16-bits! And, it's not easy to just take it there because when you discard bits, you get digital distortion. Digital distortion sounds bad, so one way to smooth over the damage is to use dither, which is low-level analog noise that is added to the music. Having that noise added to the music makes it sound better. But, it also changes the sound! To get around that, they devised a way to move that noise around so it isn't so distracting. That's called "noise-shaping", and that has come in dozens of flavors over the years. You have no doubt seen some of them advertised on your CD liner notes or stickers. But, after all that effort, the sound still isn't equal to the original because 16-bits just can't deliver. HDCD helps, but it requires a CD player or software with a decoder to bring out the high-quality sound. Most people don't have it or bother, so they get slightly worse sound. The vinyl sounds better, doesn't it? The hi-res files sound even better than the vinyl!

6) mp3 and AAC: To get the files small enough to quickly stream or download over the internet, and to get a lot of music on your little iPod, you have to literally throw away bits of sound. This is what most people are used to now. The sound has even less dimension than the CD! There's no space or depth that was present in the original tape, or even on the original vinyl. And, to make it worse, it has artifacts that become more apparent when the song fades or is at low levels.

OK, i've went on about the formats, but what about the article? Well, the vinyl guys have been saying forever that vinyl is "better" because digital chops up the sound while analog is smooth and continuous. Well, that may be technically true, but they are trying to make you think digital is bad because of how it works. Despite what some nut-job may be telling you, no one can hear digital sound in samples. Why? The D/A converter smooths the sound back to what it was before the digital encoding. Most of us realize that CD is no match for the vinyl LP with all things being equal, but they never seem to be able to tell you why, and their explaination of being able to hear the samples is wrong!

Here's the rub: the more bits there are to represent the sound, the smoother the sound. This takes us back to the 16-bit vs. 24-bits mentioned above. The more bits you have to represent the sound, the better the converter in your CD player or outboard converter can recreate that original sound. And, since 16-bits just can't do the job adequately, the CD is generally inferior.

While vinyl can sound fantastic, you need really great gear [[expensive) to play it back. Vinyl has a bunch of distortions of it's own. There's surface noise, clicks and pops, inner-groove distortion, turntable rumble, mistracking. tracking force, and rotation and speed stability, all affect how your vinyl sound turns out. And, let's not forget your phono pre-amp! How accurate is it? What about your cartridge? Stylus? Cables? It takes a lot to get good vinyl sound if you can ignore all the noise inherent in the medium and playback. Do you like tweaking your anti-skate, tracking force, dialing in the VTF, the overhang, got your protractor handy? How do you clean your records? How's that stock mat on the table working for ya? Are you getting vibration? Do you take off the dustcover? How about your electrical ground/mains?

If you have the time and money, and patience for vinyl playback, CD will be superior over all that. But, most people just don't. They are stuck with mp3 or CD for now. Those sound great when you consider all the mess you have to go through to get good vinyl sound. There's good sound in those grooves, but you have to extract it.

I am making a pitch for hi-resolution, or lossless files that the industry has said it will start offering to the masses this year. But, what are they waiting for? They will never get rid of all illegal files on the internet. they will never stop copying. They only have to gain.

Yeah I wrote all that!

[blueskies]

Yeow....impressive writing and very informative....even I 'got it'. Many thanks for posting this, Soulster.

[144man]

is this the home of another cancel thread now?can we take on the lease?

Be careful what you wish for, Tamla...we'd probably get evicted as squatters...we don't want another Dale Farm situation.

[tamla617]

i dont know?
make a fortune,film a stupid wedding with horse traders. drive a mercedes instead of paying taxes.
turn all the females in the family into unschooled full time human production facilities,all dressed in panther pink whats wrong with that?!!

[chidrummer]

Somebody arrest those two. Meanwhile....

We ain't mad at 'cha, blueskies. Shoot, that's what the forum is here for. A place to be agreeably disagreeable

I even disagree with soulster that vinyl sounds better than CD's because for that to be true [[as he admitted) one needs to take extraordinary care with the record and have some fairly expensive equipment to reproduce the sound. The vast majority of people don't do this. In fact, I'd be willing to bet the vast majority of people have never heard true audiophile quality sound, period.

That said, soulster is correct that the solution to the current problem already exist. It's as simple as the consumer returning to preferring quality of sound over storage. Your iPod could hold 100 HD quality tunes instead 1000 crappy compressed ones. But, it's the buying public that would have to start demanding more of it. Grab a quality pair of headphones and just listen to the samples on https://www.hdtracks.com/ . We could have a lot more of that if people would just buy it in droves.

[soulster]

A 192kHz/24-bit recording will give you three times the musical information of the CD, and a 96kHz file will give twice the information. Look where all of that is in relation to the lowly mp3 or AAC file!


The only complaint I have with HD tracks is that the only popular soul they have is Stevie Wonder, Sam Cooke, and Staple Singers. That is because not enough R&B music fans know about, care, or are willing to buy hi-rez music. Get with it! I hope to see some Earth Wind & Fire hi-rez.

I even disagree with soulster that vinyl sounds better than CD's because for that to be true [[as he admitted) one needs to take extraordinary care with the record and have some fairly expensive equipment to reproduce the sound. The vast majority of people don't do this. In fact, I'd be willing to bet the vast majority of people have never heard true audiophile quality sound, period.

The trick is to know what to listen for. You really don't have to have a mega-buck system to hear the differences. What you get with the CD is that the soundstage is narrowed. There is less depth, or space. The music sounds more pinched or congested. The music sounds less relaxed and smooth, less real. You see, i've already explained that 16-bits is just not enough to retain all the sound of the original source. Not only that, the frequency response cuts off at 22,000kHz and drops off below usually 20 Hz. You say that humans can't hear that high or low? Perhaps not, but those frequencies affect the ones that you do hear. You say that most musical material tops out at 15 or 16,000kHz, and the bass is slashed on vinyl? Again, what you hear on vinyl is the extended frequency response of the playback components from the speakers to the cartridge. Everything beyond the is audible affects the sound you do year.

That said, soulster is correct that the solution to the current problem already exist. It's as simple as the consumer returning to preferring quality of sound over storage. Your iPod could hold 100 HD quality tunes instead 1000 crappy compressed ones. But, it's the buying public that would have to start demanding more of it. Grab a quality pair of headphones and just listen to the samples on https://www.hdtracks.com/ . We could have a lot more of that if people would just buy it in droves.[/QUOTE]

Well, most of the public doesn't know about, have, or cannot afford quality headphones. I don't even believe in headphones for critical listening for many reasons. It's easier to hear the differences with loudspeakers. I use Sony pro studio headphones for some detail work when I master, but that's it. But, you see, my computer is integrated into my stereo system.

[chidrummer]

Dude, I've got my MDR-7506 at the ready!

But one doesn't need headphone of that quality to hear the difference. Just pick CD that on hdtracks list, listen to it and then listen to the hd track on the same system. I can't imagine anyone NOT hearing the difference. Your graphic says it all, but there's no substitute for a person's own ears.