From Che Sent Wed, Feb 17th 1999, 01:28
From Che Sent Wed, Feb 17th 1999, 01:28
At 12:13 PM 2/15/99 -0500, Aaron S Michelson wrote: >As for IDM? 16bit/44.1kHz is fine. Given that the equipment it's made on tends to be 16bit/44.1kHz, I agree. But since most new equipment has 20-22 bits of resolution (the 23rd & 24th bits are below the thermal noise of a resistor, so the last 2 bits are known as "marketing bits" in the parlance of the industry, they're there mainly because computers prefer bits in multiples of 8), and more bits=more dynamics, I think the music would benefit, ambient music especially. And maybe IDM makers could get away from compressing the shit out of their mixes. 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. It >doesn't have to do with whether you call the music you're playing >"classical," it has to do with whether it has treble in it, & most music I >listen to, of all different sorts, does have treble. Once you start >getting into the highest audible frequencies, 44.1 kHz representations of >them sound like shit, harsh & grating shit. Once you get to 22.05 kHz, >this is what any waveform is going to be from a 44.1 kHz audio recording: >\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ >That's it. Absolutely no detail at all. It gets better the lower you go >from there, but that's why it sounds so bad. Like detail is going to matter after it's been smeared by MP3 encoding. Talk about sounding bad... But I digress. Digital waveforms are always filtered with a brickwall (high cutoff slope) filter somewhere below the Nyquist frequency, which is 1/2 the sampling freqency. CD filters start at 20kHz, which means that by 22.05kHz the slope of the filter should be below hearing levels. It also means that the square wave which represents a 20kHz wave on the filter input is a sine wave on the filter output. At 10:26 AM 2/15/99 -0600, cl wrote: >i am not versed in the science of sound, but can >humans hear over 20 khz? I can. Ultrasonic sensors drive me nuts. But most people's hearing rolls off around 15kHz (Do your ears ring when you leave a show, get out of your car, or turn off your walkman? You've just lost some of your high frequency hearing!). Even if you can't hear those frequencies, it doesn't mean that you can't perceive useful information in those frequencies. 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). Acoustic music would benefit the most from higher frequencied recordings, but you might notice a difference in IDM recorded on newer equipment. It's hard to say. At 10:07 AM 2/16/99 -0600, ChairCrusher wrote: >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'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. >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. Yup. >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. AFX fans take note! ;) Che