22bit digitally remastered stuff

[Xander]

I have two CDs that are remastered with that 24bit digital hoo-haa, whatever you want to call it...

The discs? :

Ozzy Osbourne - No More Tears
Kansas - The Best Of

Both of these CDs have extremely dry sounding crash cymbals. Which frankly, hurt my damn ears. Can anyone else confirm this on these 22bit remaster thingies, or am I just unlucky? I'm affraid to buy any remastered CDs because of this.

 

[BenG]

Haven't heard those particular discs, and I don't recall ever seeing any discs that say "22 bit", maybe you mean 24bit?

Whatever it is, it could be the fault of the company that did the mastering or the quality of the original recording its self, as there are plenty of fine sounding "remastered" discs that are out there.

One thing you have to remember though is that when they say 20bit or 24bit, they really mean the transfer from tape to digital was done at that length. They have to "dither" it down to 16bits to fit the CD medium eventually. Alot of the remastered discs that use "20bit SBM" use noise shaping that achieves a perceived 20bit resolution across the midrange where the ear is most sensitive. The problem is, noise is sent to the frequency extremes and the perceived resolution is actually less than 16bits at the frequency extremes! That's why alot of these remastered discs sound worse in the treble and lowest bass regions. Compare some of these "SBM" CDs to their SACD versions and you''ll hear what I mean.

 

[Xander]

22? who said 22? Not me.

Well, it all makes sense. I was a bit confused as to how they fit 24bit samples onto a single disc without doing something silly like dithering it. The CDs dont go very low, so in that respect they sound ok.. Something fishy definatly happened to the highs, though. I have other remastered CDs that sound fine. But they dont go on about the 24bit stuff. Sounds like music remastering propaganda to me. If it's transferred over at 24, what difference does it make, if theyre just going to "dither" it back down to 16? The only difference I can think of, is degredation of the original signal from all this dithering and sampling.

 

[Xander]

Actually, I'm not sure how I came out with 22.. I must've been out of my mind, I did it multiple times, too...

Embarrasing..

 

[Dusty Chalk]

Oh, I wouldn't worry too much about it...I saw a box set by some vocal group that said 23-bit remastered...at least 22 bit is possible...maybe they didn't use unsigned int...maybe they used signed bit instead and then didn't count the sign bit...

 

[Xander]

Yeah, they unsigned your long int alright!

I just went and looked at the CD. It DOES say 22bit, SBM.

 

[redshifter]

24 bit, 20 bit, 16 bit refer to the wordlength of the digital sample. 24 bit has 24 numbers in it's wordlength, 16 has 16. the longer the wordlength, the more information the sample has. usually this extra information is the "inaudible" stuff like ultra-high frequencies and "air" and ambience. when they convert a 24 bit recording to 16 bit (for cd or "redbook" standard) they have to chop off the 8 least significant bits from the 24 bit wordlength. without dithering, this leaves the least significant bit of the resulting 16 bit recording with a "raw edge", like an un-smoothed screen font. you can dither or smooth the 16 bit sample using pink or white noise algorithm (for cds mastered from 16 bit recordings), or use an algorithm based on the 8 bits you trimmed off the original 24 bit master. the latter is the better solution, because the dithering is based on real sonic data.

 

[acidtripwow]

I recently purchased a couple of remasters that said 20bit. I don't know if this is a scam to sell more CDs but I did a comparison with the old 16bit CDs and I did not hear any difference. Maybe I need a better CD player. Oh well, I think I'll stick with my 16bit CDs.

 

[chadbang]

I paid 35 dollars for the DAD (a form of dvd audio) 24-bit remastered soundtrack from "Casino Royale" by Classic Records. Had the record, had the CD and I expected so much from this DAD and got so little. They might put up a defense that you need an audio-biased player, but I know my Pioneer dvd puts out decent enough audio to make films sound smashing, but this disc left me flat. Fiddle around, fiddle around....