No by archive recordings I mean 1930's mono, which are transcribed from gramophone recordings. I would not have been able to listen to these pre-Hugo as the distortion and noise would have been too bad. But since Hugo, you can actually enjoy them as they sound like real instruments playing, but with poor eq and distortion and noise over the top of the sound of a real instrument. Before they would just sound distorted and noisy and not real.
Decca hit their prime from about 1960 to 1967 - and after 1967 they started recording with Dolby. After 1967 the recordings are fine, but sound nowhere near as real as before; for example kettle drums are just one big loose heavy bass thump; there is none of the character or timbre of a real kettle drum, which you get with the earlier recordings. But of course you get master tape noise, but I do not care about that.
The second benefit is the Decca box sets are currently not re-mastered, and this I think is a huge benefit. Modern ADC's are good in terms of distortion and noise, but the chip designers have forgotten their basic digital sampling theory in that they allow unacceptable levels of aliasing as they all use cheap half-band filters. This means that large amounts of aliasing occurs. The usual argument is the aliasing is from 18 to 22.05 kHz, and so it's inaudible - but it certainly is not inaudible, as the aliasing degrades the timing of transients accuracy. Earlier ADC's used passive components, and although these degraded transparency, I suspect they had much better aliasing performance.
Of course some of the magic is down to simplicity of both mic technique and simple tuned electronics, but it's not all down to that . Mercury Living Presence current box sets do not sound anywhere near as good as Decca, and these recordings are simple too. But they have been re-mastered, and the older CD versions sound much better.
It goes without saying that the Davina project (my ADC) will have none of the above shortcomings; absolutely no aliasing, and a very simple connection from Mic to the ADC to maximize transparency.
Rob
Hello again Rob.
Interesting to hear that Davina will solve the most common and annoying shortcomings of digital.
When will it be ready?
And will it be reasonably portable? And not terribly expensive?
Have you already made test recordings with it?
After getting more than a bit addicted even to low res binaural via the BBC Proms I would love to hear how realistic live acoustic music in binaural might sound via Davina.
Your first version will only be two channels won't it?
Sounds ideal to put it to work with binaural imho.
I would try to talk someone like Jared or Morten or Robert at BIS into setting up a parallel binaural Davina based dummyhead at some of their upcoming large scale recording sessions.
I am currently trying to convince Jared that binaural is THE still untapped market for classical for the future. And he has released several on one of his download sites so far with hopefully more to come.
But nothing major yet.
But now with the BBC doing over 20 Proms this year in binaural it looks promising, HEADFI is coming of age it seems.
The old beloved DECCAs?
Well,as far as many of the DECCAs and I haste to add, lots of other simply mic'd 60s and 70s recordings go, I am lucky to have a bit over 8 shelf metres of LPs in my collection so digital aliasing jitter and such is only really a problem with my digital collection.
My take on Dolby?
Yes it did put a bit of a blurring soft filter over things didn't it?
Robert von Bahr of BIS once claimed that the best recording he had ever made was one he did with very simple miking and a Revox B 77 tape recorder long ago.And he did not ever use Dolby while still recording in analogue as far as I know.
My knowledge of digital theory is VERY limited indeed.
So rest assured I won't try to pick a fight with you over things I know next to nothing about. But maybe you could clarify some other possible misunderstandings on my side though?
I know only that Jared Sacks still records most of his things at DSD 64 natively and still stands pretty firmly behind it in a conversation I had with him recently. But I know he used a Weiss converter for converting his native DSD files to hi res pcm. And he told me he used the Weiss conversion tool in order to avoid aliasing problems.
One of my own first DACs was a Weiss that I connected via firewire to my MBP and I also remember that they claimed aliasing as a major problem with hi res digital. And they used firewire over usb because it was according to them not only in those days much faster, but also less jitter sensitive than usb.
I know you are not exactly "beating the big "Dolby" drum" for DSD. But you obviously include it up to DSD 512 natively in HUGO 2.
Jared's answer regarding aliasing has lead me to think, maybe wrongly again, that aliasing is mainly a problem with pcm and hi res pcm in particular?
What would you say?
Cheers Christer and thanks again for your informative posts.
