Brent Hutto
100+ Head-Fier
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- Aug 19, 2005
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I know that with video being digitized from movies on film it can sometimes be tougher or require more bit rate to properly capture grainy and/or dirty old prints than a fine-grained, pristine modern print. Does any of that apply to old audio recordings?
I'm thinking of some of the CD's I have of old jazz recordings from the late 50's/early 60's where the fidelity is quite good but there's a certain amount of tape hiss even on the remastered CD and certain analog (tape) artifacts that we were all used to hearing routinely back in the day. Most of this stuff was mono but they remastered it into stereo. Or it's sometimes not remastered but just fake stereo.
So for me a modern jazz ensemble recording at something like 256k or 320k AAC is indistinguishable from a WAV file (I've done plenty of ABX tests to find out). Would there be any reason to think a cleaned-up, remastered, stereo-ized version of a noisy old tape master would cause less fidelity at those bit rates?
I will say in ripping some of this stuff to ALAC it seems to (losslessly) compress a bit more than similar modern recordings. So I think the answer is no, it is not harder to compress.
I'm thinking of some of the CD's I have of old jazz recordings from the late 50's/early 60's where the fidelity is quite good but there's a certain amount of tape hiss even on the remastered CD and certain analog (tape) artifacts that we were all used to hearing routinely back in the day. Most of this stuff was mono but they remastered it into stereo. Or it's sometimes not remastered but just fake stereo.
So for me a modern jazz ensemble recording at something like 256k or 320k AAC is indistinguishable from a WAV file (I've done plenty of ABX tests to find out). Would there be any reason to think a cleaned-up, remastered, stereo-ized version of a noisy old tape master would cause less fidelity at those bit rates?
I will say in ripping some of this stuff to ALAC it seems to (losslessly) compress a bit more than similar modern recordings. So I think the answer is no, it is not harder to compress.