Again, you need to be careful what you read on the internet. That article should really be called: “DSD vs PCM, myth vs nonsense I’ve just made up”. It contains almost no truth at all, even the basic history is false, so is the 1 photograph and so are most of the stated facts. Some of it should be obvious, such as wax cylinders effectively being the highest fidelity and every development since being a further reduction in quality. Most of it though wouldn’t be obvious unless you had a reasonable knowledge/understanding of the basic facts.
Yep, it’s not intuitive if you think in terms of the “analogue” concept, which of course pretty much everyone does, and it’s this fact that’s exploited by marketing BS. An analogy might help:
Let’s say we have a perfect circle and we want to store and reproduce it. If we measure that circle using 2 points, store those 2 points and then reproduce it by joining them together again, say with a printer, we’d actually get a straight line, not a circle. If we used 3 points, the result would be more circle like but it still wouldn’t be a circle, it would be a triangle. 4 points would give us a square, 5 a pentagon and so on. As each additional point gets us closer to a circle it’s therefore simple logic that the more points the better, although we could never quite reproduce a perfect circle because we would need an infinite number of points. This is the “analogue concept”. The “digital concept” would be based on the fact that we can easily define all circles with a fairly simple mathematical equation. So, we program our printer to ONLY print perfect circles and then all we need to measure and store our original circle is 2 points, because anything the printer prints which bisects these 2 points must be a perfect circle identical to our original. More than 2 points makes no difference, we’re going to get the exact same result whether we use two or a million points. This is obviously a gross over simplification and to translate it to digital audio you have to understand or just accept some mathematical axioms. For example, those discovered/proven by Fourier 200 years ago, which show that all sound waves are made of combinations of sine waves (so perfect sine waves instead of perfect circles) and those discovered/proven by Shannon in 1948. This acceptance is made easier by the fact that after all this time, some mathematician would have made a huge name for him/herself by disproving it but more tellingly, so much of our modern world relies on these mathematical axioms that it simply wouldn’t exist if they were wrong. For example, the modern world would be quite different if someone had proved that one plus one does not equal two.
This is a big subject area that spans many decades, much technology and subjective decisions, both of which have evolved significantly over that period. So it’s easier to respond to specific questions than explain all about mixing and mastering.
If we take the term “mixing” literally, then classical music contains a lot of it. An orchestra for example is typically recorded with at least 20 mics and possibly as many as 50 or more, all of which have to be mixed together (and balanced and “panned”/positioned relative to each other) to form our 2 channels of Stereo, so that’s a lot of mixing. Even a solo, unaccompanied piano would typically use at least 3 mics and often more. However, the term “mixing” doesn’t only include mixing the sources (mic outputs) together, it also includes the application of “effects”, such as EQ, reverb, compression and many dozens of others. In classical music we tend to only use those first 3 and typically quite subtly compared to all the “popular” music genres.
Mastering is the process of taking the final mix produced in the recording studio and applying effects to make it sound good during reproduction on consumer systems, rather than only in the studio/s in which it was created. In general, classical music is processed less during mastering than popular genres. Unfortunately, the use of the term “re-mastering” can be a bit misleading because releases that have actually been remixed and remastered are sometimes just called “remasters”.
G