From Kent Williams Sent Tue, Feb 16th 1999, 16:07
From Kent Williams Sent Tue, Feb 16th 1999, 16:07
I can't believe how spoiled people are by CD Audio that they feel like they need 24bit, 96khz audio. I was 25 before I bought my first CD player and CDs. Some of the people on this mailing list were born after the introduction of the CD! Sure, it's nice to have that headroom both in frequency and dynamics, but that's a technical thing having to do with music production, not with listening pleasure. Some of the transcendent musical moments of my life came from hearing music on an Blaupunkt AM radio in a VW Bug, or listening to a GE compact stereo with a white plastic tone arm. Even now, when I have decent professional near field monitors and a good amplifier, I think good enough is good enough. Would a 24/96 CD walkman sound any better? More to the point, would 24/96 sound better when played on a 3000watt PA through a DJ mixer? I think all this high resolution stuff has more to do with the economics of making gear than any actual requirements of listeners. Every few years, when the latest hi fi gewgaw has gone from expensive luxury to ubiquitous commodity, they have to come up with something new to soak more money from the market. Maybe you can play a 24/96 super-CD on a $700 DVD player, but the truth is you'd need a $5000 24-bit digital to analogue convertor to hear any noticable difference in sound. It's even more absurd when you consider the lengths people go to to actually reduce audio resolution when they're recording. They run their microphones through cheap guitar stomp boxes, bounce to analogue tape, compress, eq, re-compress, re-eq etc. It's ridiculous to think that it takes 24bit/96khz to reproduce the sound of a $50 stomp box abusing the signal from a microphone. kent williams -- xxxx@xxxxxx.xxx