Seidhepriest
500+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Aug 16, 2007
- Posts
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- 21
Well now.
Electronic music *requires* high sampling rates and high processing bit depth to sound natural. That is something anyone who's done any serious mixing in 24/32-bit will tell, also anyone who's heard a live synthesiser play and then the same performance played as a recording.
With even the best windowing-mode resampling algorithms, downsampling to CD frequency always makes a mix sound flatter, and lose much of its vividness during quantising to 16-bit (dithering only helps so much). Whichever theories and whatnot thrown in, there's the truth, and it's obvious that theories have to be designed based on current reality as well as the other way around (theories have to be capable of describing how a new creation will operate), but trying to "hammer" reality around a theory is a tad Inquisition-style, isn't it?
Gnome, that "18 KHz" limit is quite a lie. Here the hearing limit is 23.5 KHz (with the gear that's here, anyway). Sony lowpasses every consumer audio device at 18 KHz. Have you heard how compressed their gear sounds? Entire instrument parts, like tubular bells, synthesised pads, subtle strings, get blurred in the mix. They're barely audible. Compressing bandwidth may reduce the noise floor (which is what Sony is obviously trying to do), but it also removes clarity. Not very much point to it nowadays anyway, with really low noise floors at over 100 dB for professional recording equipment. CDA, by the way, is only 96 dB.
What's more, something people ignore completely, and just one of CDA problems, is the artificial clipping that happens to anything beyond 22050 Hz which distorts the CDA sound. There's actually a lot of sounds that go over 22 KHz (chromatic percussion, like hihats on a drumkit, usually does 30 KHz), in a CDA-frequency recording they're artificially cut, introducing "sawtooth" to the wave.
That many recent rock recordings have been maximised/compressed into the sky is also simple proof that with current recording and mastering equipment the CDA bandwidth isn't enough. Nevermind windowing lowpass filters - they're typically used to get rid of the CDA sampling aliasing which occurs as described above - out of not enough sensitivity. Also to remove noise by signal compression, but an artificially quiet recording is, of course, far worse than a more naturally sounding recording with noise.
Regardless, it's pretty much unclear what is the point of "defending" and imposing fanatism. There's a difference between blind reasoning and a discussion based on perceived reality, which often any reasoner theories bypass.
Electronic music *requires* high sampling rates and high processing bit depth to sound natural. That is something anyone who's done any serious mixing in 24/32-bit will tell, also anyone who's heard a live synthesiser play and then the same performance played as a recording.
With even the best windowing-mode resampling algorithms, downsampling to CD frequency always makes a mix sound flatter, and lose much of its vividness during quantising to 16-bit (dithering only helps so much). Whichever theories and whatnot thrown in, there's the truth, and it's obvious that theories have to be designed based on current reality as well as the other way around (theories have to be capable of describing how a new creation will operate), but trying to "hammer" reality around a theory is a tad Inquisition-style, isn't it?
Gnome, that "18 KHz" limit is quite a lie. Here the hearing limit is 23.5 KHz (with the gear that's here, anyway). Sony lowpasses every consumer audio device at 18 KHz. Have you heard how compressed their gear sounds? Entire instrument parts, like tubular bells, synthesised pads, subtle strings, get blurred in the mix. They're barely audible. Compressing bandwidth may reduce the noise floor (which is what Sony is obviously trying to do), but it also removes clarity. Not very much point to it nowadays anyway, with really low noise floors at over 100 dB for professional recording equipment. CDA, by the way, is only 96 dB.
What's more, something people ignore completely, and just one of CDA problems, is the artificial clipping that happens to anything beyond 22050 Hz which distorts the CDA sound. There's actually a lot of sounds that go over 22 KHz (chromatic percussion, like hihats on a drumkit, usually does 30 KHz), in a CDA-frequency recording they're artificially cut, introducing "sawtooth" to the wave.
That many recent rock recordings have been maximised/compressed into the sky is also simple proof that with current recording and mastering equipment the CDA bandwidth isn't enough. Nevermind windowing lowpass filters - they're typically used to get rid of the CDA sampling aliasing which occurs as described above - out of not enough sensitivity. Also to remove noise by signal compression, but an artificially quiet recording is, of course, far worse than a more naturally sounding recording with noise.
Regardless, it's pretty much unclear what is the point of "defending" and imposing fanatism. There's a difference between blind reasoning and a discussion based on perceived reality, which often any reasoner theories bypass.