From Kent Williams Sent Wed, Feb 17th 1999, 07:26
From Kent Williams Sent Wed, Feb 17th 1999, 07:26
On Tue, 16 Feb 1999, Che wrote: > At 12:13 PM 2/15/99 -0500, Aaron S Michelson wrote: > > >As for IDM? 16bit/44.1kHz is fine. [ summary -- how dynamic range improvements would be good. ] > And > maybe IDM makers could get away from compressing the shit out of their mixes. Nah. People will always do that. COMPRESSED SIGNALS SOUND LOUD AND LOUD IS BETTER! > At 06:52 PM 2/15/99 -0500, Marc 3 Poirier wrote: > > >Aw jeez, this is totally bogus. 16-bit 44.1 kHz is the most bare-ass, > >hardly passing standard for digital audio. Okay, maybe not totally because > >the 16-bit part is pretty good, but the 44.1 kHz part is atrocious. Golden ear types sat around in the late seventies trying to come up with what an audiophile standard for digital audio would entail, and they came up with 44.1khz. There were sound reasons for this -- in the realm of science, no one would make the singularly loony statement that "you can actually hear what you can't hear." Which is the crux of that whole audiophile argument, stated plainly. I'd like to see some rigorous blind tests with a large number of people to see who can actually hear the difference between 24/96 and 16/44. Knowing how variable these things are, I'd guess that only a relatively small percentage of people could really hear the difference, and that a significant percentage of people would actually think they prefer 16/44. > Even if you can't hear those frequencies, it doesn't mean that you can't > perceive useful information in those frequencies. Err, either you can hear things or you can't hear things. If a signal has frequencies above your range of hearing, the only the only thing you might hear of the high frequency signal is some distortion of audible signals caused by the high frequency signals. This distortion is most definitely in the audible range. But who's to say that it's even pleasant or desirable? > Some spatial information > seems to be encoded in the ultrasonic range, which is why, as Irene has > noted on this list earlier, vinyl records tend to sound more "open" > (unwilling to concede anything to vinyl, I must add that 3D sound encoders > can fake the spatial effects in a 44.1kHz signal). Not to pick a fight or anything (moi?) but this doesn't follow from what you said above about ultrasonic signals encoding spatiality. Vinyl doesn't sound more 'open' -- for one thing you can't get cartridges that reproduce frequencies much higher than the top CD frequencies. For another thing, the inevitable crosstalk between the channels in a stereo groove is enough to swamp any spatial detail you might perceive as "openness." Vinyl records may sound better to some people's ears precisely because there are subjectively pleasing things about the distortions that medium introduces. But mastering for vinyl is an art a lot like sausage making. It sounds good in the end, but a vinyl mastering engineer is going to further compress, EQ, and generally mess your precious signal around in order to get a good signal into the vinyl. > > I'm w/ Kent here - my friends laugh at my listening setup, but I'd rather > spend the money on music, not speakers. Great music seems to come through > loud & clear no matter what. > The biggest improvement in my enjoyment of music was going from LP's to CDs. I bought only vinyl records up until about 1983 when we could actually afford a CD player and I used to really be distracted by scratches, surface noise, skips, etc. I especially used to be annoyed by the crusty sound that the last song on a side would get, because of having less linear groove per second. Don't get me wrong -- I love vinyl records. They still sound good after all these years so long as they aren't seriously abused. But there's a lot of complete BS that goes around when people talk about audio -- especially audiophiles. Anyone who'd willingly spend more than $15 on an RCA cable is a fool.