[Czilla9000]

Arg! Is SACD or DVD-A needed or not?

 

[fewtch]

Quote:

Originally posted by tigre I haven't used WinAmp for a while, so I might be completely wrong on this ... IIRC Winamp truncates to 16 bit on every processing step (e.g. DSP) - and I'm not sure if it is capable of 24bit output at all. So this might be the reason for the differences you've heard.

My input and output plugin configurations with WinAMP v2.91 (for listening to these .WAV files):

Note -- no DSP is being performed, I don't use any DSP plugins at all.

 

[Wodgy]

Quote:

Originally posted by Czilla9000 Arg! Is SACD or DVD-A needed or not?

I think everyone on both sides of the "is Redbook good enough" issue would agree that either format would be nice to have. With Redbook there's almost no room for engineering error -- the area of the spectrum where the information density is thinnest (the highs) is also the region closest to the stopband of whatever filters you're using, hence the most sensitive to ripple, jitter, etc. All the major tricks in DAC design (oversampling, asynchronous upsampling, etc.) are attempts to work around this problem. Both SACD and DVD-A make the engineer's life so much easier because there's more room for error while still ending up with something that sounds good.

But are SACD or DVD-A necessary? I doubt anyone will ever resolve this. It's like the battle of tubes versus solid state, or bipolar transistors versus FETs.

 

[Czilla9000]

Wodgy, wouldn't 16/48 be fine then? 48 kHz leaves you more breathing room.

 

[Glassman]

there is no reason for going to 48kHz from 44.1kHz.. I mean the step is so small..

I think it's now clear that 16/44 is not the limiting factor as a storing media, but there's a need to record and edit everything in the highest resolution format before putting on CD.. then one should upsample it to move the Fc far away from 20kHz and exactly THIS is the chance to make better sounding DACs - place slow rolloff analog and digital low pass filters..

and 24/96 doesn't resolve problems with idiots behing mixing tables

if they were given 24bits it does not mean the will not use the last few bits for all the music just like now on CDs.. the only advantage is that they probably couldn't mess up the low pass filtering/resampling to 16/44

but again, it's not the format that is wrong

 

[Douglas256]

I agree with most of what you say; except that the people mixing and mastering are idiots. While it is true that most everything released today is compressed into the last couple dBs, I suspect it is the client that is saying: ``When I play the CD you mixed up for me today in the car, I couldn't hear the quite passages . . . make it sound more like what is on the radio.'' Moreover, every sound engineer is told to listen to his mix on every source he can find and optimize it so it sounds good on everything -- the problem, is that what sounds great on a boom-box doesn't sound great on a multi-thousand dollar audiophile system and vise-versa.

So, like everything, change doesn't start with the sound engineer, it starts by chaging the want of the average Joe. While we are a large enough niche to have companies like Chesky make CDs with wider dynamic ranges for us, we will never be large enough for major labels to produce "audiophile" versions of all their CDs (besides, then everyone would want it and complain it doesn't sound good on the $99 boom-box they got at Walmart).

 

[Douglas256]

As an example, my friend recently told me how System of the Down purposely over-compressed their songs for the distortion it would cause. You can see from the waveform of their most popular song, Sugar, that almost the entire song is at the red line (0 dbFS). When you look at the histogram, at least 96% of the song is in the top 10 dbFS.

 

[Glassman]

this is worse than I thought it to be.. all that you said, sad but true

I don't care about Britney Spears, but it happen sometimes that I like some more popular artist and I want to enjoy him/her in decent quality - but I have no option

 

[Douglas256]

You and me both. While I like classical and jazz, it's the moderately popular alternative rock that I'm drawn to. What bugs the heck out of me, is when you find an artist you like and their first one or two CDs sound great . . . but, once they make it big, their CDs sound like everyone elses -- compressed as all get out. ``Look Wally, it sound like the radio, but it's on CD. What will they think of next!" Oh well, so is the way of the world.