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Anyone want to try and explain what compressed/loudified music sounds like, what specifically does a victim of the loudness war sound like? I am suspicious that this is simply a conscious decision on the band's part for an extra "warm" sound. I'm not experienced enough to tell though honestly (and I don't have any other good gear to try it out on).
The frequency ranges are compressed to fit into the limited resolution of a standard CD, so as a result the music sounds not as full or expansive as something like original vinyl, SACD, DVD-A. There are several pieces to the puzzle -- the music has to be recorded properly to retain the frequency ranges, and it has to be mastered and mixed properly, it has to be reproduced onto a high resolution format like vinyl, SACD, DVD-A, and the final piece is your gear (need decent headphones, an amp, etc.).
That's a good one... Yeah...
Please read legitimate, accurate information on the storage of audio before you spew any more misinformation. The CD format is not limiting the sound as concerns human hearing in virtually ANY way. Besides only offering two channels.
The music you listen to is recorded as a combination of sine waves, which results in one waveform that represents the music.
A record puts that through the RIAA equalization curve and then puts the resulting waveform onto vinyl. The subject of pressing vinyl is very complicated (and I don't know that much about it myself), but understand that it is not a perfect process and as the masters are cut, copies pressed or cut, and as the needle tracks the sound, there are errors being introduced - distortion and noise, but of an intrinsically different character than digital audio (and larger in magnitude compared to Redbook 16 bit, 44.1 kHz digital audio, although being analog the limits are physical rather than a function of the ADC/DAC chain).
Digital audio instead takes that waveform and, well, digitizes it. In 16 bit, 44.1 kHz audio like that of CDs, each second has 44,100 samples taken of that waveform, and each sample has 16 bits - 65,536 quantization levels that can be used to represent the level of the signal. Basically, in a decent analog to digital conversion, the amplitude (volume) of the input waveform is set to the right level so all those bits are used, and there's no clipping (going over the maximum level of quantization).
The error in digital is from quantization - when an analog signal that is infinitely variable has to be represented by discrete numbers - those bits I was talking about. 16 bit audio has 65,536 quantization levels, and 24 bit audio has 16,777,216 levels. That's a lot more, right? Yes, it is. What that means is that the error between the input analog waveform and the amplitude the digitization can represent it as is reduced.
That error, however, only shows up as noise. In fact, 65,636 quantization levels is already enough to reduce the noise from quantization errors to a tiny amount that is only rarely audible in near-silent passages (the quantization error is relatively large in comparison to the signal level) when listening in a very quiet room. Tape hiss and other noise in the recordings further reduces the audibility of quantization error. As far as I am aware of, no one has ever been able to tell them apart in any sort of blind testing at normal listening levels.
The sample rate - going from 44.1 kHz to 96 kHz to 192 kHz does primarily one thing: Raise the maximum frequency level that may be recorded/played back. Nyquist's (and Shannon's, and so on's) theorem states the following:
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If a function
x(
t) contains no frequencies higher than
B hertz, it is completely determined by giving its ordinates at a series of points spaced 1/(2
B) seconds apart.
In other words, a given sampling frequency will allow all frequencies up to half of the sampling rate to be recorded. Thus, 44.1 kHz allows everything up to 22 kHz - already higher than essentially anyone can hear. Higher sampling rates of course give higher frequency ceilings - but the audibility of those frequencies is questionable at best, and the amount of musical content at such frequencies is essentially zero. There has been research showing that humans can perceive ultrasonic frequencies to some extent, but the relevance to musical applications is pretty much nonexistent.
Give a listen here to see what you can hear: http://www.audiocheck.net/audiotests_frequencycheckhigh.php
