[George Graves]

On Sat, 11 Aug 2007 08:58:42 -0700, Steven Sullivan wrote
(in article ):

George Graves wrote:
On Thu, 9 Aug 2007 19:02:30 -0700, Steven Sullivan wrote
(in article ):

George Graves wrote:
On Wed, 8 Aug 2007 19:51:38 -0700, Steven Sullivan wrote
(in article ):

George Graves wrote:
On Tue, 7 Aug 2007 16:13:45 -0700, Steven Sullivan wrote
Not necessarily a mystery. It could just be you enjoy the distortion
that
LP
adds to
recordings.

Yes, but whatever the case, the best LPs can sound more like my
recollection
of real music and elicit more of an emotional connection with the music
than
does CD.

Speaking of emotional connection..did you grow up in the LP era, perhaps?

Yep, sure did. Tube era too. Of course, today's tube circuitry is much
better
than the stuff I grew up with, but I still appreciate the warmth and
realism
of a tube amp's midrange and top.

said 'warmth and realism' is likely due to distortion.

So? The aim of High-Fidelity is to make the music sound REAL in one's
listen
room. If it takes certain kinds of distortion to achieve that illusion,
then
I'm all for it.

And if analog recording/LP mastering signal chains were only expected to
be
high-fidelity up
to 15 kHz, as you suggest, why would the sample rate of CD, which offers
hi-fi frequency
response all the way to 20 kHz, be considered 'lacking' in any way by
comparison?

I didn't say that they were, and I didn't mean to give the impression
that
the above was what I meant. All I said is that some research done in 30's
40's and 50's indicated that supersonic performance affected people's
perceptions of music.

Cites? I've don't recall seen such research cited in the few papers I've
read
on human hearing beyond 20 kHz.

I'm merely postulating possible reasons why CD sounds
so dead compared to LP and SACD here,

To some. Certainly not to me.

You mean that you have not listened critically to good CDs of a classical
symphony orchestra and noticed the lack of low-level detail and truncated
ambience? Boy, I sure have.

Boy, the people who record and produce classical music sure must be one the
wrong track, then. They're the ones who most fervently embraced digital
recording and
production in the first place,seeing it as a godsend from the inherent
distortions of analog. And that recording community continues to favor
digital.

Working stiffs do what suits tell them to do. Digital is how things are
recorded these days. Whatever artifacts and shortcomings that 16/44.1 PCM
recordings are subject to are irrelevant to the record company's bottom line
which is selling recordings in the most-used format. If the suits thought
that MP3 classical recordings were the wave of the future, they'd record in
in that benighted format. Luckily, the Sony group (Sony, Columbia, RCA,
Deutsche Harmoia Mundi, Arte Nova) Telarc, and many independent recording
companies are fairly committed to SACD. That's what I buy these days.

If you are hearing 'truncated ambience' and a lack of low-level detail,
then you must be listening to very badly dithered recordings. Because
certainly anything 'better' in those areas that you can hear on an LP, can be

captured on digitally, just by piping the analog output of the preamp, to
a decent digital recorder.

Actually, its a well known fact that analog can capture ambience that's well
below the noise floor of the recording. PCM cannot. And dithering is merely
the random manipulation of the two or three LSBs added in the CD mastering
stage (not during recording) in order to either "round down" a re-sampling of
a higher bit-rate master (say, 20 or 24-bits) or to help eliminate
quantization error (and the distortion which accompanies it) at the low end
of the CD's dynamic range. It's not going to help retrieve hall ambience that
wasn't captured correctly in the first place. I must admit that today's 20 or
24 bit recordings (or, especially, DSD recordings) are much better at
low-level ambience retrieval than CDs were, say, 10 -15 years ago.

I am not an expert in human hearing, I
just know that LP (and SACD) provide me with more musical pleasure than
do
16-bit/44.1 KHz CDs. I'd love to know why - and no, it's not my
imagination.

As you say, LP is subject to lots of distortions that are absent in CD,
but
at it's best, LP's distortions seem to be more consonant (to me) with the
sound of the real thing and that's where my interest in hi-fi has always
been.

Have you ever transferred an LP or SACD to 16/44.1 and done a comparison?

Yep, CD anyway. NOT SACD. It "loses" something.

It shouldn't. Ever done the comparisons blind?

Double blind even.

I also have LPs and CDs of
master tapes that I recorded (from Century Records). I have AB'd them
against
the master tape and while both sound different from the master tape, the LP
always sounds more like the original live performance than either the CD or
the master tape. I know it's distortion, but it's very euphonic distortion
and I like it.

It's rather hard to compare a master tape, much less the
LP or Cd made from it, to the original performance, in any fair way.

Actually, it's impossible. The original performance is gone when it's over.

[George Graves]

On Sat, 11 Aug 2007 08:59:43 -0700, Serge Auckland wrote
(in article ):

"George Graves" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 9 Aug 2007 19:02:30 -0700, Steven Sullivan wrote
(in article ):

snipped
Cites? I've don't recall seen such research cited in the few papers I've
read
on human hearing beyond 20 kHz.

I'm merely postulating possible reasons why CD sounds
so dead compared to LP and SACD here,

To some. Certainly not to me.

You mean that you have not listened critically to good CDs of a classical
symphony orchestra and noticed the lack of low-level detail and truncated
ambience? Boy, I sure have.

This is very surprising as low-level detail and ambiance are usually below
surface noise on an LP whilst clearly audible on a CD. Reverberation tails
go into silence on CD whereas they go into noise on LP.

It's a well-known fact that ambience can be heard on an analog recording that
well below the noise floor. BTW, do you understand the quantization error and
distortion that dwells down in the area of the two least significant bits in
a PCM recording? They have to actually introduce noise in an effort to keep
these bits moving to mask that error.

CD sounds dead compared to LPs as CD doesn't have the high harmonic
distortion of LP (even the best cartridges have 1-3% distortion)

That's true.

CD doesn't
have the reflective vinyl coloration due to audio feedback into the replay
system, and the internal reflections of the stylus motion. CD doesn't have
the background noise due to the ultimately granular nature of the Vinyl
itself, and CD doesn't have the comforting impulsive noise of the LP.

Yep!

Wow and flutter, rumble and frequency response anomalies, especially in the
extreme bass and treble also make LP "special" although these should be
sufficiently low in proper vinyl replay equipment not to be an issue.

And these are areas where digital is clearly better. lack of wow and flutter
alone is almost worth the price of admission.

Nevertheless, it is a credit to the inventors and developers of vinyl
replay, and to our willingness to suspend disbelief that LPs are capable of
as much pleasure as they clearly are.

I certainly don't understand why LP (at it's very best) sounds so palpably
real compared to CD. I have one of those 'Classic Records' LP reissues of
Antal Dorati and the Minneapolis Orchestra performing Stravinsky's "Firebird"
ballet (originally on Mercury "Living Presence" records). The three LPs are
pressed on one side only, cut at 45 RPM (instead of 33.3) on 200 gram virgin
vinyl. It takes the three discs to replicate what was originally on one 33.3
RPM. 2-sided LP. I also have the same performance on Mercury CD (mastered by
Wilma Cozert Fine, the record's original producer). The Classic Records LP is
the most startlingly REAL commercial recording I've ever heard. Drop the
Stylus and become pulled immediately pulled into the music. It's really
eerie. The CD OTOH, while OK, is bland and lackluster by comparison, with
none of the you-are-there palpability that the LP experience delivers. I've
changed more than a few digi-philes minds with that little demonstration!

[Arny Krueger]

"George Graves" wrote in message


Actually, its a well known fact that analog can capture
ambience that's well below the noise floor of the
recording. PCM cannot.

That is absolutely and positively incorrect.

It is possible to encode and decode signals below the noise floor of the
recording equally well for PCM or analog recordings, provided the noise
floor is the same. Given that the media-related noise floor of CD's is well
below that of any uncompressed analog master tape and any LP, the advantage
goes to the CD.

And dithering is merely the random
manipulation of the two or three LSBs added in the CD
mastering stage (not during recording) in order to either
"round down" a re-sampling of a higher bit-rate master
(say, 20 or 24-bits) or to help eliminate quantization
error (and the distortion which accompanies it) at the
low end of the CD's dynamic range.

This absolutely and positively incorrect.

Dither is applied at the point that the analog signal is initially converted
to digital, which is well before mixdown, and therefore even further ahead
of mastering.

When dither is applied, exactly which bits are affected depends on the data
being dithered. The idea that only a few LSBs are affected would be based on
ignorance of how digital arithmetic works. In fact adding a LSB to certain
existing data will cause a goodly number of carries, resulting in even
occasionally the MSB being changed.

Dither has nothing to do with "rounding down".

Quantization error is not restricted to the low end of a digital signal's
dynamic range.

[Marc Foster]

In article , George Graves
wrote:

Actually, its a well known fact that analog can capture ambience that's well
below the noise floor of the recording. PCM cannot. And dithering is merely
the random manipulation of the two or three LSBs added in the CD mastering
stage (not during recording) in order to either "round down" a re-sampling of
a higher bit-rate master (say, 20 or 24-bits) or to help eliminate
quantization error (and the distortion which accompanies it) at the low end
of the CD's dynamic range. It's not going to help retrieve hall ambience that
wasn't captured correctly in the first place.

Not to confuse you with the facts, but just about everything in this
paragraph is either wrong or misleading. To start at the top, a
correctly dithered recording can, in fact, encode information below the
noise floor. This is not to mention that the noise floor of a 16 bit
recording will be probably 15-20 dB below that of an LP. (This is a
conservative estimate if you give the LP 65 dB of dynamic range and the
CD 85 dB. The LP is probably less and the CD can be more.) Secondly,
you apparently don't understand dither at all. Dither is a noise
content of 1/2 (or more) LSB added to the signal before it is converted
to digital. No one competent would use 3 LSB of dither. (With modern
systems it is even frequency shaped to place the energy in parts of the
spectrum where it is least noticeable. So the noise floor in the
critical parts of the spectrum is actually less than 1/2 LSB.) It
doesn't "help eliminate quantization error." It ensures that the
quantization error (which can't be eliminated) is not correlated to
either the signal or the quantization rate. In simple terms, it turns
the quantization error from a signal related interference into a random
noise floor.

A well recorded and mastered CD can have more real hall ambience than
even the very best LP and more than even the quietest room will allow
you to hear. The defects in the LP recording and playback can generate
artifacts (acoustic feed back among other things) that may sound like
ambience. If you like it fine but don't try to justify it with
technically incorrect hand waving.

Marc Foster

[George Graves]

On Sat, 11 Aug 2007 11:40:22 -0700, codifus wrote
(in article ):

On Aug 10, 6:31 pm, George Graves wrote:
On Thu, 9 Aug 2007 19:02:30 -0700, Steven Sullivan wrote
(in article ):
........
Yep, CD anyway. NOT SACD. It "loses" something. I also have LPs and CDs of
master tapes that I recorded (from Century Records). I have AB'd them
against
the master tape and while both sound different from the master tape, the LP
always sounds more like the original live performance than either the CD or
the master tape. I know it's distortion, but it's very euphonic distortion
and I like it.
.......

I wonder if you could detail just how you recorded your CD from
analog. What type of soundcard, computer, phono pre-amp connected to
the turntable etc. Did you use the soundcards highest sample rate,
like 96 Khz, then sample down and use dither to make the final 44.1/16
CD? What format were you saving the file in? Things like that.

I didn't use a computer I have a TASCAM CDRW-700P connected to my stereo
system. And the Century records/CD was mastered and pressed by Century
Recording.

I beleive that, just like analog and digital audio, digital audio
workstations need the right combination of hardware and software to
produce great results.

I wouldn't doubt it.

[Serge Auckland]

"George Graves" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 11 Aug 2007 08:59:43 -0700, Serge Auckland wrote
(in article ):

"George Graves" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 9 Aug 2007 19:02:30 -0700, Steven Sullivan wrote
(in article ):

snipped
Cites? I've don't recall seen such research cited in the few papers
I've
read
on human hearing beyond 20 kHz.

I'm merely postulating possible reasons why CD sounds
so dead compared to LP and SACD here,

To some. Certainly not to me.

You mean that you have not listened critically to good CDs of a
classical
symphony orchestra and noticed the lack of low-level detail and
truncated
ambience? Boy, I sure have.

This is very surprising as low-level detail and ambiance are usually
below
surface noise on an LP whilst clearly audible on a CD. Reverberation
tails
go into silence on CD whereas they go into noise on LP.

It's a well-known fact that ambience can be heard on an analog recording
that
well below the noise floor. BTW, do you understand the quantization error
and
distortion that dwells down in the area of the two least significant bits
in
a PCM recording? They have to actually introduce noise in an effort to
keep
these bits moving to mask that error.

Yes, but when that noise floor is only some 40dB down on operating level,
and no more than 60dB at best on peak level, it is at least 30dB worse than
digital is capable of. As to quantisation errors etc on digital, they are at
least 30dB lower than the noise floor of vinyl, and well below the threshold
of audibility when masked by programme material. Digital distortions of all
sorts, even 16/44.1, are comfortably below thresholds of audibility that CD
*can* claim to be "pure, perfect sound", now that A-D & D-A converters are
of a suitably high standard. The fact that many people don't like the sound
only means that they prefer the distortions of vinyl, it sounds more "real".
It isn't objectively better in any way at all but only subjectively, and
then only to some.

S.

--
http://audiopages.googlepages.com

[George Graves]

On Sat, 11 Aug 2007 14:48:08 -0700, Marc Foster wrote
(in article ):

In article , George Graves
wrote:

Actually, its a well known fact that analog can capture ambience that's
well
below the noise floor of the recording. PCM cannot. And dithering is merely
the random manipulation of the two or three LSBs added in the CD mastering
stage (not during recording) in order to either "round down" a re-sampling
of
a higher bit-rate master (say, 20 or 24-bits) or to help eliminate
quantization error (and the distortion which accompanies it) at the low end
of the CD's dynamic range. It's not going to help retrieve hall ambience
that
wasn't captured correctly in the first place.

Not to confuse you with the facts, but just about everything in this
paragraph is either wrong or misleading. To start at the top, a
correctly dithered recording can, in fact, encode information below the
noise floor. This is not to mention that the noise floor of a 16 bit
recording will be probably 15-20 dB below that of an LP. (This is a
conservative estimate if you give the LP 65 dB of dynamic range and the
CD 85 dB. The LP is probably less and the CD can be more.) Secondly,
you apparently don't understand dither at all. Dither is a noise
content of 1/2 (or more) LSB added to the signal before it is converted
to digital. No one competent would use 3 LSB of dither. (With modern
systems it is even frequency shaped to place the energy in parts of the
spectrum where it is least noticeable. So the noise floor in the
critical parts of the spectrum is actually less than 1/2 LSB.) It
doesn't "help eliminate quantization error." It ensures that the
quantization error (which can't be eliminated) is not correlated to
either the signal or the quantization rate. In simple terms, it turns
the quantization error from a signal related interference into a random
noise floor.

A well recorded and mastered CD can have more real hall ambience than
even the very best LP and more than even the quietest room will allow
you to hear.

Then where does that ambience go? It certainly never reaches the listener's
ears. While we're at it, why don't CDs, with all that channel separation,
image very well? They should give dynamite spot-on imaging but they don't. I
have made simultaneous analog and digital recordings of large symphony
orchestras and the 1/2-track 15 ips analog tape masters allow one to close
one's eyes and pick-out each-and-every instrument across the stage both
left-to-right and front-to-back. Play the CD made from the same mike feed,
and everything is vague. Soundstage has shrunk, image specificity is gone.
There is less sense of the space that the instruments occupy. (I use an X-Y
pair of Sony C-37Ps in cardioid pattern mounted on a stereo "Tee" bar
mounted about 15 ft in front of the orchestra (behind the conductor) about 10
ft above stage level) - no other microphone arrangement (except perhaps MS
and true coincident ) gives a as good a soundstage.)

[Randy Yates]

George Graves writes:

On Sat, 11 Aug 2007 08:59:43 -0700, Serge Auckland wrote
(in article ):

"George Graves" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 9 Aug 2007 19:02:30 -0700, Steven Sullivan wrote
(in article ):

snipped
Cites? I've don't recall seen such research cited in the few papers I've
read
on human hearing beyond 20 kHz.

I'm merely postulating possible reasons why CD sounds
so dead compared to LP and SACD here,

To some. Certainly not to me.

You mean that you have not listened critically to good CDs of a classical
symphony orchestra and noticed the lack of low-level detail and truncated
ambience? Boy, I sure have.

This is very surprising as low-level detail and ambiance are usually below
surface noise on an LP whilst clearly audible on a CD. Reverberation tails
go into silence on CD whereas they go into noise on LP.

It's a well-known fact that ambience can be heard on an analog recording that
well below the noise floor. BTW, do you understand the quantization error and
distortion that dwells down in the area of the two least significant bits in
a PCM recording? They have to actually introduce noise in an effort to keep
these bits moving to mask that error.

gasp in horror

George, George, George. You're speaking out of ignorance.

Did you know that once that "noise" (by the way, it's called "dither")
is introduced, the process of linear quantization is equivalent to
adding benign, low-level, wideband noise to the original unquantized
input signal? So, which would you rather have: a signal riding in
impulsive, colored noise at ~-70 dB (an LP, and a damn good one at
that), or flat, wideband noise at -90 dB (a CD)?

Oh, and there are no distortions (noise being distinct from
distortion) in theory in linear quantization. And even in practice,
with one-bit delta sigma converters, distortions that were present in
multi-bit converter like differential and integral nonlinearity are
gone.

Study the topic for a few decades and then we can discuss it
intelligently. At this point, you should be asking questions and
learning rather than making incorrect assertions.
--
% Randy Yates % "The dreamer, the unwoken fool -
%% Fuquay-Varina, NC % in dreams, no pain will kiss the brow..."
%%% 919-577-9882 %
%%%% % 'Eldorado Overture', *Eldorado*, ELO
http://home.earthlink.net/~yatescr

[Randy Yates]

George Graves writes:
[...]
Then where does that ambience go? It certainly never reaches the listener's
ears.

Your opinion. Myself and many others do not share it.

I was a child of the 60s/70s. I graduated from high school in 1976.
I grew up on vinyl. After getting my first engineering job out of college,
I had acquired some reasonably serious vinyl equipment - including quite a few
Mobility Fidelity Sound Labs' Half-Speed masters (what wonderful creations
those were indeed). I was the type that would deionize and clean the record
and stylus everytime I played it.

In 1981, that system was stolen. I went without until 1983, at which time
I purchased a CD player and decided to "go digital." To my ears, the CD
was the best thing that had ever happened to music. It sounded like you
were playing the original master tape right in your own home. There wasn't,
and still isn't, any comparison to vinyl - CD beat it hands down in several
respects.

So I really don't know what you're referring to.

While we're at it, why don't CDs, with all that channel separation,
image very well? They should give dynamite spot-on imaging but they don't. I
have made simultaneous analog and digital recordings of large symphony
orchestras and the 1/2-track 15 ips analog tape masters allow one to close
one's eyes and pick-out each-and-every instrument across the stage both
left-to-right and front-to-back. Play the CD made from the same mike feed,
and everything is vague. Soundstage has shrunk, image specificity is gone.
There is less sense of the space that the instruments occupy. (I use an X-Y
pair of Sony C-37Ps in cardioid pattern mounted on a stereo "Tee" bar
mounted about 15 ft in front of the orchestra (behind the conductor) about 10
ft above stage level) - no other microphone arrangement (except perhaps MS
and true coincident ) gives a as good a soundstage.)

Some of what you are referring to *could* be real and *could* be due
to improper phase responses being introduced somewhere in the digital
mastering process. If so, that would be a problem in the mastering
process and not in the media per se.

There are other "digital errors" that could also come up depending on
how the digital processing is performed from start to finish. For
example, improperly-designed digital filters can introduce noise,
limit cycles, saturation, graininess, etc. Dithering and nosie shaping
could also be abused in the mastering process. So you may have a point
here, but again it's not an issue with the media.
--
% Randy Yates % "The dreamer, the unwoken fool -
%% Fuquay-Varina, NC % in dreams, no pain will kiss the brow..."
%%% 919-577-9882 %
%%%% % 'Eldorado Overture', *Eldorado*, ELO
http://home.earthlink.net/~yatescr

[[email protected]]

On Aug 11, 3:43 pm, George Graves wrote:
Actually, its a well known fact that analog can capture
ambience that's well below the noise floor of the recording.
PCM cannot.

Actually, it is also a well known fact that PCM can do exactly
teh same thing. You, however, now having strayed into making
specific technical declarations, do not know what you are talking
about.

And dithering is merely the random manipulation of the two
or three LSBs added in the CD mastering stage (not during
recording) in order to either "round down" a re-sampling of
a higher bit-rate master (say, 20 or 24-bits) or to help
eliminate quantization error (and the distortion which
accompanies it) at the low end of the CD's dynamic range.

George, you were on reasonably safe ground when you
spoke in terms of what you liked and didn't like. You should
have stayed on that territory, because you have now wandered
into a realm, one of making specific testable technical assertions,
where you are, indeed, quite absolutely and provably wrong.

First, dither is NOT "merely the random manipulation of the
two or three LSBs." It is the addition of a random signal of
a very specific statistical set of properties.

Second, dither is NOT "added in the CD mastering stage
(not during recording)." It is added at EVERY stage where
requantization occurs, and that most assuredly also is done
in the original recoding step. There does not exist anywhere
a digital audio recording system that does NOT dither BEFORE
the first quantization process in the A/D converter. For you
to declare so points to an appalling gap in your knowledge
of the most fundamental principles behind digital audio.

Third, dither does NOT "help eliminate quantization error
(and the distortion which accompanies it." In fact, even
the simplest dither, 1/2 LSB TPD, eliminates it completely.

Fourth, dither does NOT eliminate quantization error "at
the low end of the CD's dynamic range." It elimiates it
over the entire dynamic range of the system. Entirely and
completely.

It's not going to help retrieve hall ambience that
wasn't captured correctly in the first place.

Fifth, there is no need to "retrieve the hall ambience that
wasn't captured correctly in the first place," because your
assumption that dither was not used at the original
recording is just plain wrong.

You may or may not like one recording technology vs
another. You have every right to do so for whatever personal
reasons you want.

But your attempt to justify that preference with these technical
assertions do nothing to bolster your position because they
demonstrate an appalling lack of understanding of the
technology you hold forth on.

[[email protected]]

On Aug 11, 3:45 pm, George Graves wrote:
It's a well-known fact that ambience can be heard on
an analog recording that well below the noise floor.

And it an equally well known fact that the ambience can
be heard well below the noise floor in digital recordings
as well, for precisely the same reason: because the ear
acts as a bandpass filter/integrator, providing the ability
to discern signals some 20 dB below a broadband noise floor.

BTW, do you understand the quantization error and
distortion that dwells down in the area of the two least
significant bits in a PCM recording?

Well, it is statements like this that clearly demonstrate that you
DO NOT understand quantization error. Please stick to areas
that you DO understand: it will better aid in your argument.

They have to actually introduce noise in an effort to keep
these bits moving to mask that error.

False, wrong, incorrect. The introduction of dither DOES NOT
MASK the quantization error, it ELIMINATES it.

If you choose to hold forth on technical matters it would
greatly help your credibility to actually read and understand
the subject at hand.

I certainly don't understand why LP (at it's very best) sounds
so palpably real compared to CD.

To YOU, that is.

What you REALLY don't understand are the fundamental
operating principles behind digital audio, as clearly evidenced
by your technical assertions here.

[Harry Lavo]

"George Graves" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 11 Aug 2007 11:40:22 -0700, codifus wrote
(in article ):

On Aug 10, 6:31 pm, George Graves wrote:
On Thu, 9 Aug 2007 19:02:30 -0700, Steven Sullivan wrote
(in article ):
........
Yep, CD anyway. NOT SACD. It "loses" something. I also have LPs and CDs
of
master tapes that I recorded (from Century Records). I have AB'd them
against
the master tape and while both sound different from the master tape, the
LP
always sounds more like the original live performance than either the CD
or
the master tape. I know it's distortion, but it's very euphonic
distortion
and I like it.
.......

I wonder if you could detail just how you recorded your CD from
analog. What type of soundcard, computer, phono pre-amp connected to
the turntable etc. Did you use the soundcards highest sample rate,
like 96 Khz, then sample down and use dither to make the final 44.1/16
CD? What format were you saving the file in? Things like that.

I didn't use a computer I have a TASCAM CDRW-700P connected to my stereo
system. And the Century records/CD was mastered and pressed by Century
Recording.

Bravo. Clean and simple.


I beleive that, just like analog and digital audio, digital audio
workstations need the right combination of hardware and software to
produce great results.

I wouldn't doubt it.

I've built and use such a workstation. It requires both good components
and good knowledge to do it right. But why bother when what you want is a
copy of your record on your CD, with as good as possible electronics in
between.

I do the same thing.

Or couldn't you tell? :-)

[Arny Krueger]

"George Graves" wrote in message


Then where does that ambience go?

If it is part of a recording, then it goes onto the CD and also comes off of
it. The CD format is far more capable of recording and reproducing low level
ambience than typical listening rooms, recording studios and concert halls.
This is because the dynamic range of all those places is far less than that
of the CD format.

It certainly never reaches the listener's ears.

What you're probably saying George is that if someone has as many false
beliefs about digital as you just posted, they might psych themselves out of
hearing ambience that is actually there. Or, perhaps what you perceive as
being ambience is one or more of the well-known audible artifacts of the LP
recording process, like pre and post echo.

While we're at it, why don't
CDs, with all that channel separation, image very well?

Depends what you call imaging, George. It is easy to show that the CD format
need not audibly change the imaging cues in any real-world recording. Again
its possible that you are misinterpreting one or more of the well-known
artifacts of the LP format as superior imaging.

They should give dynamite spot-on imaging but they don't.

Liek I said George, it is easy to take an analog recording or a so-called
high resolution recording of a live performance and sample it 44/16, and
show that their is no audible degradation at all.

I have made simultaneous analog and digital recordings of
large symphony orchestras and the 1/2-track 15 ips analog
tape masters allow one to close one's eyes and pick-out
each-and-every instrument across the stage both
left-to-right and front-to-back.

That's interesting because typically, you can't really hear imaging like
that in the concert hall, even if you sit in the front row, which I do from
time to time.

Play the CD made from
the same mike feed, and everything is vague.

Must be a sighted evaluation where listener prejudices are part of the
evaluation.

Soundstage has shrunk, image specificity is gone.

I've personally done experiements like this and so have many others. Of
course one *secret* is to control listener biases.

When you listed out all of those misapprehensions about digital George, you
made you prejudices quite obvious.

There is less
sense of the space that the instruments occupy. (I use an
X-Y pair of Sony C-37Ps in cardioid pattern mounted on a
stereo "Tee" bar mounted about 15 ft in front of the
orchestra (behind the conductor) about 10 ft above stage
level) - no other microphone arrangement (except perhaps
MS and true coincident ) gives a as good a soundstage.)

It is well known that Sony C37s are not exceptional microphones. Very few
professional recordists still use them. The most similar mic in Sony's
current product line is the C38, which is SS not tubed.

[Arny Krueger]

"George Graves" wrote in message


I certainly don't understand why LP (at it's very best)
sounds so palpably real compared to CD.

That is only true for a tiny fraction of all music lovers.

There's plenty of evidence that this is more of a perception based on
preferences for the audibly corrupt LP sound than any kind of extra special
accuracy. Sentimentality could be part of this preference.

[George Graves]

On Sat, 11 Aug 2007 18:12:25 -0700, Serge Auckland wrote
(in article ):

"George Graves" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 11 Aug 2007 08:59:43 -0700, Serge Auckland wrote
(in article ):

"George Graves" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 9 Aug 2007 19:02:30 -0700, Steven Sullivan wrote
(in article ):

snipped
Cites? I've don't recall seen such research cited in the few papers
I've
read
on human hearing beyond 20 kHz.

I'm merely postulating possible reasons why CD sounds
so dead compared to LP and SACD here,

To some. Certainly not to me.

You mean that you have not listened critically to good CDs of a
classical
symphony orchestra and noticed the lack of low-level detail and
truncated
ambience? Boy, I sure have.

This is very surprising as low-level detail and ambiance are usually
below
surface noise on an LP whilst clearly audible on a CD. Reverberation
tails
go into silence on CD whereas they go into noise on LP.

It's a well-known fact that ambience can be heard on an analog recording
that
well below the noise floor. BTW, do you understand the quantization error
and
distortion that dwells down in the area of the two least significant bits
in
a PCM recording? They have to actually introduce noise in an effort to
keep
these bits moving to mask that error.

Yes, but when that noise floor is only some 40dB down on operating level,
and no more than 60dB at best on peak level, it is at least 30dB worse than
digital is capable of. As to quantisation errors etc on digital, they are at
least 30dB lower than the noise floor of vinyl, and well below the threshold
of audibility when masked by programme material. Digital distortions of all
sorts, even 16/44.1, are comfortably below thresholds of audibility that CD
*can* claim to be "pure, perfect sound", now that A-D & D-A converters are
of a suitably high standard. The fact that many people don't like the sound
only means that they prefer the distortions of vinyl, it sounds more "real".
It isn't objectively better in any way at all but only subjectively, and
then only to some.

S.

Fair enough, but Hi-Fi isn't really about "perfect reproduction", that's an
impossible goal (a laudable goal and a point of reference, but an impossible
goal). It's about the next best thing which seems to me to be bringing the
emotional impact of the actual musical performance home by recreating the
live sound field as closely as possible. If that can be accomplished by being
technically perfect, then I'm all for technical perfection. Many here might
be able to show that 16/44.1 PCM is theoretically technically perfect, but
the fact that it doesn't bring home (to more than a few people) either the
intellectual or the emotional connection with the music that music lovers say
they want from their stereo systems, tells me that there is still something
about it (CD) that's not quite right. To blindly assume that today's
technology is perfect by ignoring those dissenting voices and yelling
"crackpot" at anyone who disagrees with that opinion, is, in my humble
opinion, anyway, no way to advance any technology. I see that attitude a lot
and I also encounter a similar attitude with regard to MP3 where people
defend that lossy compression scheme as being a high-fidelity sound source
"indistinguishable from CD and therefore perfect because CD is perfect".
Well MP3 is NOT indistinguishable from the CD source and more importantly CD
is NOT a perfect storage medium. If it were, it would involve the listener
more like real music involves the listener, and to an awful lot of people, me
included, it doesn't.

[Serge Auckland]

"George Graves" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 11 Aug 2007 18:12:25 -0700, Serge Auckland wrote
(in article ):

"George Graves" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 11 Aug 2007 08:59:43 -0700, Serge Auckland wrote
(in article ):

"George Graves" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 9 Aug 2007 19:02:30 -0700, Steven Sullivan wrote
(in article ):

snipped
Cites? I've don't recall seen such research cited in the few papers
I've
read
on human hearing beyond 20 kHz.

I'm merely postulating possible reasons why CD sounds
so dead compared to LP and SACD here,

To some. Certainly not to me.

You mean that you have not listened critically to good CDs of a
classical
symphony orchestra and noticed the lack of low-level detail and
truncated
ambience? Boy, I sure have.

This is very surprising as low-level detail and ambiance are usually
below
surface noise on an LP whilst clearly audible on a CD. Reverberation
tails
go into silence on CD whereas they go into noise on LP.

It's a well-known fact that ambience can be heard on an analog recording
that
well below the noise floor. BTW, do you understand the quantization
error
and
distortion that dwells down in the area of the two least significant
bits
in
a PCM recording? They have to actually introduce noise in an effort to
keep
these bits moving to mask that error.

Yes, but when that noise floor is only some 40dB down on operating level,
and no more than 60dB at best on peak level, it is at least 30dB worse
than
digital is capable of. As to quantisation errors etc on digital, they are
at
least 30dB lower than the noise floor of vinyl, and well below the
threshold
of audibility when masked by programme material. Digital distortions of
all
sorts, even 16/44.1, are comfortably below thresholds of audibility that
CD
*can* claim to be "pure, perfect sound", now that A-D & D-A converters
are
of a suitably high standard. The fact that many people don't like the
sound
only means that they prefer the distortions of vinyl, it sounds more
"real".
It isn't objectively better in any way at all but only subjectively, and
then only to some.

S.

Fair enough, but Hi-Fi isn't really about "perfect reproduction", that's
an
impossible goal (a laudable goal and a point of reference, but an
impossible
goal). It's about the next best thing which seems to me to be bringing
the
emotional impact of the actual musical performance home by recreating the
live sound field as closely as possible. If that can be accomplished by
being
technically perfect, then I'm all for technical perfection. Many here
might
be able to show that 16/44.1 PCM is theoretically technically perfect, but
the fact that it doesn't bring home (to more than a few people) either the
intellectual or the emotional connection with the music that music lovers
say
they want from their stereo systems, tells me that there is still
something
about it (CD) that's not quite right. To blindly assume that today's
technology is perfect by ignoring those dissenting voices and yelling
"crackpot" at anyone who disagrees with that opinion, is, in my humble
opinion, anyway, no way to advance any technology. I see that attitude a
lot
and I also encounter a similar attitude with regard to MP3 where people
defend that lossy compression scheme as being a high-fidelity sound source
"indistinguishable from CD and therefore perfect because CD is perfect".
Well MP3 is NOT indistinguishable from the CD source and more importantly
CD
is NOT a perfect storage medium. If it were, it would involve the listener
more like real music involves the listener, and to an awful lot of people,
me
included, it doesn't.

George, what you are saying above is that you (and of course many others)
prefer something that gives you the emotional reaction you want, even though
it is demonstrably flawed technically. It is like saying you prefer film to
digital video or vice-versa, or an impressionist painting to a photograph.
16/44.1 has been repeatedly shown to be an audibly "perfect" medium, in that
what goes in comes out, to limits which are very much below audibility
thresholds. Even the much-maligned MP3 can produce audibly transparent
results at high bit rates, say 320kbps, hence providing 4:1 data reduction
with no reduction in perceived quality.

Your earlier comments about digital imaging show a lack of understanding of
how phantom images form. Digital (unless of course done very badly) has
negligeable phase shift, a flat frequency response and negligeable
cross-talk. Consequently, the clues which create phantom images will be
exactly the same coming out of a CD player as went into the digitising
process. If your analogue system images better, this is entirely in your
mind. You should also realise that just about every recording made in the
past few years has been created digitally, using some sort of DAW for
recording and editing, even if the final result was a vinyl record.
Consequently, there can't be anything intrinsically wrong with digital
recording. Finally, if you create a CDR from a vinyl album it will sound the
same as the vinyl, if you cut an LP from a CD it most definitely will not.

S.

--
http://audiopages.googlepages.com

[[email protected]]

On Aug 12, 11:43 am, George Graves wrote:
Many here might be able to show that 16/44.1 PCM is
theoretically technically perfect,

No one has ever made such a claim, and for you to raise the
point that "many here might be able to show [it]" is simply
constructing a straw man argument.

However, by the same token, YOUR claims regarding
dithering, YOUR claims regarding what's audible below
the noise floor, YOUR claims about masking quantization
error and the rest are, in fact, simply wrong out of the box.

To blindly assume that today's technology is perfect by
ignoring those dissenting voices and yelling "crackpot"
at anyone who disagrees with that opinion, is, in my
humble opinion, anyway, no way to advance any
technology.

George, you made very explicit technical assertions,
assertions which are quite objectively testable, in your
attempt to bolster your personal opinion, to wit:

"analog can capture ambience that's well below the
noise floor of the recording. PCM cannot."

"They have to actually introduce noise in an effort to
keep these bits moving to mask that error"

These, George, are not "dissenting voices." They
are statements of gross, provably wrong technical
error. These are declarations that were LONG ago
put to bed. See, for example, Blesser, "Digitization
of Audio: A Comprehensive Examination of Theory,
Implementation and CUrrent Practice," J. Audio Eng.
Soc, 1978 or Vanderkooy and Lip****z, Resolution
Below the Least Significant Bit in Digital Audio
Systems with DIther," J. Audio Eng. Soc. 1984.

Further, your claims, for example:

"dithering is merely the random manipulation of
the two or three LSBs added in the CD mastering
stage (not during recording).

Are simply made out of ignorance of the most basic
and fundamental principles and practices of digital
recording.

I see that attitude a lot
and I also encounter a similar attitude with regard to MP3 where people
defend that lossy compression scheme as being a high-fidelity sound source
"indistinguishable from CD and therefore perfect because CD is perfect".

Straw man argument, George.

You were doing fine when you simply said you didn't like
it.

You stepped in it big time when you started making tecnnical
claims in an arena you knew VERY little about.

[George Graves]

On Sun, 12 Aug 2007 08:36:50 -0700, Randy Yates wrote
(in article ):

George Graves writes:
[...]
Then where does that ambience go? It certainly never reaches the listener's
ears.

Your opinion. Myself and many others do not share it.

I was a child of the 60s/70s. I graduated from high school in 1976.
I grew up on vinyl. After getting my first engineering job out of college,
I had acquired some reasonably serious vinyl equipment - including quite a
few
Mobility Fidelity Sound Labs' Half-Speed masters (what wonderful creations
those were indeed). I was the type that would deionize and clean the record
and stylus everytime I played it.

In 1981, that system was stolen. I went without until 1983, at which time
I purchased a CD player and decided to "go digital." To my ears, the CD
was the best thing that had ever happened to music. It sounded like you
were playing the original master tape right in your own home. There wasn't,
and still isn't, any comparison to vinyl - CD beat it hands down in several
respects.

So I really don't know what you're referring to.

While we're at it, why don't CDs, with all that channel separation,
image very well? They should give dynamite spot-on imaging but they don't.
I
have made simultaneous analog and digital recordings of large symphony
orchestras and the 1/2-track 15 ips analog tape masters allow one to close
one's eyes and pick-out each-and-every instrument across the stage both
left-to-right and front-to-back. Play the CD made from the same mike feed,
and everything is vague. Soundstage has shrunk, image specificity is gone.
There is less sense of the space that the instruments occupy. (I use an X-Y
pair of Sony C-37Ps in cardioid pattern mounted on a stereo "Tee" bar
mounted about 15 ft in front of the orchestra (behind the conductor) about
10
ft above stage level) - no other microphone arrangement (except perhaps MS
and true coincident ) gives a as good a soundstage.)

Some of what you are referring to *could* be real and *could* be due
to improper phase responses being introduced somewhere in the digital
mastering process. If so, that would be a problem in the mastering
process and not in the media per se.

There are other "digital errors" that could also come up depending on
how the digital processing is performed from start to finish. For
example, improperly-designed digital filters can introduce noise,
limit cycles, saturation, graininess, etc. Dithering and nosie shaping
could also be abused in the mastering process. So you may have a point
here, but again it's not an issue with the media.


Since ALL CDs seem to exhibit this lack of imaging and reduced sound-stage on
any player, I'd have to disagree. The recordings that I have made have been
made several ways: Direct to CD from the microphone feed, direct to DAT and
then to CD and to analog tape and then to CD and recently, direct to Hi-MD
Mini-Disc (16-bit/44.1 linear PCM to 1 Gigabyte Hi-MD Discs and then to CD.
All with the same results. Not as good imaging as my half-track 15ips Otari
MX5050 produces from the same equipment. Commercial CDs exhibit the exact,
same phenomenon. Recordings that should image well, do not. carefully
recorded with only two mikes on the orchestra from Telarcs, Sony's EMI etc.
all exhibit vague imaging.

[Cheapskate]

In article , George Graves
wrote:

So? The aim of High-Fidelity is to make the music sound REAL in one's listen
room. If it takes certain kinds of distortion to achieve that illusion, then
I'm all for it.

If it takes certain distortions to make you happy, it's not
High-Fidelity by definition. Fidelity: 'the degree of exactness with
which something is copied or reproduced.'

[George Graves]

On Sun, 12 Aug 2007 08:41:44 -0700, Arny Krueger wrote
(in article ):

"George Graves" wrote in message


Then where does that ambience go?

If it is part of a recording, then it goes onto the CD and also comes off of
it. The CD format is far more capable of recording and reproducing low level
ambience than typical listening rooms, recording studios and concert halls.
This is because the dynamic range of all those places is far less than that
of the CD format.

It certainly never reaches the listener's ears.

What you're probably saying George is that if someone has as many false
beliefs about digital as you just posted, they might psych themselves out of
hearing ambience that is actually there. Or, perhaps what you perceive as
being ambience is one or more of the well-known audible artifacts of the LP
recording process, like pre and post echo.

While we're at it, why don't
CDs, with all that channel separation, image very well?

Depends what you call imaging, George. It is easy to show that the CD format
need not audibly change the imaging cues in any real-world recording. Again
its possible that you are misinterpreting one or more of the well-known
artifacts of the LP format as superior imaging.

They should give dynamite spot-on imaging but they don't.

Liek I said George, it is easy to take an analog recording or a so-called
high resolution recording of a live performance and sample it 44/16, and
show that their is no audible degradation at all.

I have made simultaneous analog and digital recordings of
large symphony orchestras and the 1/2-track 15 ips analog
tape masters allow one to close one's eyes and pick-out
each-and-every instrument across the stage both
left-to-right and front-to-back.

That's interesting because typically, you can't really hear imaging like
that in the concert hall, even if you sit in the front row, which I do from
time to time.

You think not? This explains much, Arny.

Play the CD made from
the same mike feed, and everything is vague.

Must be a sighted evaluation where listener prejudices are part of the
evaluation.

Must be. Couldn't be anything else. You ought to hear the sound-field
collapse when the playback is switched from analog tape to CD (or DAT for
that matter).

Soundstage has shrunk, image specificity is gone.

I've personally done experiements like this and so have many others. Of
course one *secret* is to control listener biases.

Riiiiigggghhhhtttttt.

When you listed out all of those misapprehensions about digital George, you
made you prejudices quite obvious.

I don't like digital and I've made no bones about it. There used to be a
T-shirt that would show-up at audio fairs and AES conventions and places like
that which, in my estimation, sums up what 16/44.1 PCM does to music rather
well: "Digital finishes what the transistor started" and below that is a
picture of a series of broken musical notes. My "predjudice" as you call it
is actually a "postjudice" formed from decades of recording and listening to
both the best in analog and the best in digital.

There is less
sense of the space that the instruments occupy. (I use an
X-Y pair of Sony C-37Ps in cardioid pattern mounted on a
stereo "Tee" bar mounted about 15 ft in front of the
orchestra (behind the conductor) about 10 ft above stage
level) - no other microphone arrangement (except perhaps
MS and true coincident ) gives a as good a soundstage.)

It is well known that Sony C37s are not exceptional microphones. Very few
professional recordists still use them. The most similar mic in Sony's
current product line is the C38, which is SS not tubed.

Again, this speaks volumes. C-37As are tubed but C-37Ps, while the same
capsule design, ARE solid state. They have FETs in them instead of tubes.
But what does the microphone have to do with the fact that analog tape images
gorgeously from the mikes and CDs do not? Are you inferring that the
microphones KNOW when they are recording to CD and conspire among themselves
to somehow ruin the imaging? Otherwise your comment is a non-sequitur.

But while we're on the subject, I also have a pair of AKG C-451s and a pair
of Chinese-made U-47 knockoffs (bought 'em 20 years ago and they're
excellent, really.) and I have access to a nice pair of Neumann U-87s. In my
estimation the C-37p is superior to the U-87 for overall orchestral recording
and for piano. I mostly used the C-451s to cover chorus and the Chinese
U-47s, I used for vocal soloists, but to be honest, I haven't done any
"serious" recording with any of this equipment for years. I still make
recordings of local jazz ensembles using my Mini-Disc Hi-MD recorder
(16bit/44.1KHz Linear PCM on 1 Gigabyte Mini-Discs) and my trusty Sony
ECM-929LT MS Stereo microphone. That's about the extent of the trouble I'm
willing to go through these days to record. The Mini-Disc recorder goes in
one pocket, the microphone and folding tripod, the other! I get nice clean
recordings. Nothing spectacular because of the small diaphragm size on the
929 the bass is limited, but the recordings have an "airey-ness" about them
that's nice and they image as well as can be expected from PCM.

[Arny Krueger]

"George Graves" wrote in message


Many here might be able to show that 16/44.1
PCM is theoretically technically perfect,

Not possible. It has well-known theoretical flaws. The most important thing
is that they are far less than any commercial analog record/playback systen,
and by a lot.

but the fact
that it doesn't bring home (to more than a few people)
either the intellectual or the emotional connection with
the music that music lovers say they want from their
stereo systems,

This is an effect that is well known to go away if you bother to do a proper
listening test. Let's follow the logic:

(1) Take a bunch of listeners who thoroughly believe that the CD format does
not provide
either the intellectual or the emotional connection with the music that the
LP and/or analog tape provide.

(2) Eliminate their foreknowlege of what they are listening to during the
listening test, except in the most general way.

(3) Watch the listeners uniformly fail to be able to use the purported
intellectual or the emotional connection with the music that the LP and/or
analog tape allegedly provides, to reliably detect the difference.

ells me that there is still something
about it (CD) that's not quite right.

This belief combined with the hopelessly flawed recitation of purely
imaginary "flaws" in digital speaks to a writer who has a lot of prejudices.

To blindly assume
that today's technology is perfect by ignoring those
dissenting voices and yelling "crackpot" at anyone who
disagrees with that opinion, is, in my humble opinion,
anyway, no way to advance any technology.

I agree, but nobody here is blindly assuming any such thing. The relevant
facts are easy to collect, and this has been done many times. The results
are consistently obtained. 44/16 digital is indistinguishable from the
proverbial straight wire when reproducing music or speech in any kind of
reasonable listening test that addresses listener bias.

[George Graves]

On Sun, 12 Aug 2007 10:15:52 -0700, Serge Auckland wrote
(in article ):

"George Graves" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 11 Aug 2007 18:12:25 -0700, Serge Auckland wrote
(in article ):

"George Graves" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 11 Aug 2007 08:59:43 -0700, Serge Auckland wrote
(in article ):

"George Graves" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 9 Aug 2007 19:02:30 -0700, Steven Sullivan wrote
(in article ):

snipped
Cites? I've don't recall seen such research cited in the few papers
I've
read
on human hearing beyond 20 kHz.

I'm merely postulating possible reasons why CD sounds
so dead compared to LP and SACD here,

To some. Certainly not to me.

You mean that you have not listened critically to good CDs of a
classical
symphony orchestra and noticed the lack of low-level detail and
truncated
ambience? Boy, I sure have.

This is very surprising as low-level detail and ambiance are usually
below
surface noise on an LP whilst clearly audible on a CD. Reverberation
tails
go into silence on CD whereas they go into noise on LP.

It's a well-known fact that ambience can be heard on an analog recording
that
well below the noise floor. BTW, do you understand the quantization
error
and
distortion that dwells down in the area of the two least significant
bits
in
a PCM recording? They have to actually introduce noise in an effort to
keep
these bits moving to mask that error.

Yes, but when that noise floor is only some 40dB down on operating level,
and no more than 60dB at best on peak level, it is at least 30dB worse
than
digital is capable of. As to quantisation errors etc on digital, they are
at
least 30dB lower than the noise floor of vinyl, and well below the
threshold
of audibility when masked by programme material. Digital distortions of
all
sorts, even 16/44.1, are comfortably below thresholds of audibility that
CD
*can* claim to be "pure, perfect sound", now that A-D & D-A converters
are
of a suitably high standard. The fact that many people don't like the
sound
only means that they prefer the distortions of vinyl, it sounds more
"real".
It isn't objectively better in any way at all but only subjectively, and
then only to some.

S.

Fair enough, but Hi-Fi isn't really about "perfect reproduction", that's
an
impossible goal (a laudable goal and a point of reference, but an
impossible
goal). It's about the next best thing which seems to me to be bringing
the
emotional impact of the actual musical performance home by recreating the
live sound field as closely as possible. If that can be accomplished by
being
technically perfect, then I'm all for technical perfection. Many here
might
be able to show that 16/44.1 PCM is theoretically technically perfect, but
the fact that it doesn't bring home (to more than a few people) either the
intellectual or the emotional connection with the music that music lovers
say
they want from their stereo systems, tells me that there is still
something
about it (CD) that's not quite right. To blindly assume that today's
technology is perfect by ignoring those dissenting voices and yelling
"crackpot" at anyone who disagrees with that opinion, is, in my humble
opinion, anyway, no way to advance any technology. I see that attitude a
lot
and I also encounter a similar attitude with regard to MP3 where people
defend that lossy compression scheme as being a high-fidelity sound source
"indistinguishable from CD and therefore perfect because CD is perfect".
Well MP3 is NOT indistinguishable from the CD source and more importantly
CD
is NOT a perfect storage medium. If it were, it would involve the listener
more like real music involves the listener, and to an awful lot of people,
me
included, it doesn't.

George, what you are saying above is that you (and of course many others)
prefer something that gives you the emotional reaction you want, even though
it is demonstrably flawed technically. It is like saying you prefer film to
digital video or vice-versa, or an impressionist painting to a photograph.
16/44.1 has been repeatedly shown to be an audibly "perfect" medium, in that
what goes in comes out, to limits which are very much below audibility
thresholds. Even the much-maligned MP3 can produce audibly transparent
results at high bit rates, say 320kbps, hence providing 4:1 data reduction
with no reduction in perceived quality.

Your earlier comments about digital imaging show a lack of understanding of
how phantom images form. Digital (unless of course done very badly) has
negligeable phase shift, a flat frequency response and negligeable
cross-talk. Consequently, the clues which create phantom images will be
exactly the same coming out of a CD player as went into the digitising
process. If your analogue system images better, this is entirely in your
mind. You should also realise that just about every recording made in the
past few years has been created digitally, using some sort of DAW for
recording and editing, even if the final result was a vinyl record.
Consequently, there can't be anything intrinsically wrong with digital
recording. Finally, if you create a CDR from a vinyl album it will sound the
same as the vinyl, if you cut an LP from a CD it most definitely will not.

S.



First of all, few of my LPs are made from digital masters and frankly, those
that were (like a couple of Telarcs that I own) were mastered from early
Soundstream recordings, and frankly (except for the prodigious bass - an
early Telarc "trademark") they don't sound very good. Neither do CDs made
from vinyl. They do NOT sound exactly like the LP to me. In short, the
emperor has no clothes and there are still a few of us that see (hear?) that.

It's been a long time since I thought about the digital process, and yes, I
misspoke about dithering because frankly, I haven't read much about it and
was relying on memory from 20 years ago and I should have refreshed my facts
before relying on memory but laziness, you know...

When I was learning about PCM, dithering, apparently, wasn't being used much
and I paid little attention to it. OTOH, I do remember all about Nyquist,
sampling rate, Reed-Solomon error correction, successive approximation, etc.
I still think I know how to design a D/A converter using a differential
amplifier and an SA register. Things change and I obviously haven't kept up
(because, since I really don't care for the result, the methodology doesn't
interest me that much) My bad and I apologize for that.

[George Graves]

On Sun, 12 Aug 2007 08:35:20 -0700, Randy Yates wrote
(in article ):

George Graves writes:

On Sat, 11 Aug 2007 08:59:43 -0700, Serge Auckland wrote
(in article ):

"George Graves" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 9 Aug 2007 19:02:30 -0700, Steven Sullivan wrote
(in article ):

snipped
Cites? I've don't recall seen such research cited in the few papers I've
read
on human hearing beyond 20 kHz.

I'm merely postulating possible reasons why CD sounds
so dead compared to LP and SACD here,

To some. Certainly not to me.

You mean that you have not listened critically to good CDs of a classical
symphony orchestra and noticed the lack of low-level detail and truncated
ambience? Boy, I sure have.

This is very surprising as low-level detail and ambiance are usually below
surface noise on an LP whilst clearly audible on a CD. Reverberation tails
go into silence on CD whereas they go into noise on LP.

It's a well-known fact that ambience can be heard on an analog recording
that
well below the noise floor. BTW, do you understand the quantization error
and
distortion that dwells down in the area of the two least significant bits
in
a PCM recording? They have to actually introduce noise in an effort to keep
these bits moving to mask that error.

gasp in horror

George, George, George. You're speaking out of ignorance.

Did you know that once that "noise" (by the way, it's called "dither")
is introduced, the process of linear quantization is equivalent to
adding benign, low-level, wideband noise to the original unquantized
input signal? So, which would you rather have: a signal riding in
impulsive, colored noise at ~-70 dB (an LP, and a damn good one at
that), or flat, wideband noise at -90 dB (a CD)?

I want whichever sounds the most like live music. CD fails that test in my
estimation.

Oh, and there are no distortions (noise being distinct from
distortion) in theory in linear quantization. And even in practice,
with one-bit delta sigma converters, distortions that were present in
multi-bit converter like differential and integral nonlinearity are
gone.

Theoretically you are correct. In practise, I'm not so sure. I've heard 3-bit
quantization of voice and it's terribly distorted. Maybe you can explain why
a 16-bit system quantizing a low-level signal that only utilizes the 3 least
significant bits would be any less distorted.

Study the topic for a few decades and then we can discuss it
intelligently. At this point, you should be asking questions and
learning rather than making incorrect assertions.

Like I said in another thread. I know all about Nyquist sampling theory,
Reed-Solomon error correction and interpolation, and I'm reasonably sure that
I still remember how to design a workable D/A converter using a differential
amplifier, a successive approximation register and a hand full of resistors.
The fact that I only had a hazy recollection of how dither works (and didn't
check my facts before I posted) is out of laziness and is my bad. I apologize
for that.

[George Graves]

On Sun, 12 Aug 2007 08:40:15 -0700, Harry Lavo wrote
(in article ):

"George Graves" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 11 Aug 2007 11:40:22 -0700, codifus wrote
(in article ):

On Aug 10, 6:31 pm, George Graves wrote:
On Thu, 9 Aug 2007 19:02:30 -0700, Steven Sullivan wrote
(in article ):
........
Yep, CD anyway. NOT SACD. It "loses" something. I also have LPs and CDs
of
master tapes that I recorded (from Century Records). I have AB'd them
against
the master tape and while both sound different from the master tape, the
LP
always sounds more like the original live performance than either the CD
or
the master tape. I know it's distortion, but it's very euphonic
distortion
and I like it.
.......

I wonder if you could detail just how you recorded your CD from
analog. What type of soundcard, computer, phono pre-amp connected to
the turntable etc. Did you use the soundcards highest sample rate,
like 96 Khz, then sample down and use dither to make the final 44.1/16
CD? What format were you saving the file in? Things like that.

I didn't use a computer I have a TASCAM CDRW-700P connected to my stereo
system. And the Century records/CD was mastered and pressed by Century
Recording.

Bravo. Clean and simple.


I beleive that, just like analog and digital audio, digital audio
workstations need the right combination of hardware and software to
produce great results.

I wouldn't doubt it.

I've built and use such a workstation. It requires both good components
and good knowledge to do it right. But why bother when what you want is a
copy of your record on your CD, with as good as possible electronics in
between.

I do the same thing.

Or couldn't you tell? :-)


Now, don't get me wrong. I use a computer just like everyone else to COPY CDs
bit-for-bit (because computers can do do it at multiples of the actual
playback speed) and, in fact, I have two DVD/RW drives for just that purpose.
Now, before you start pointing fingers and accusing me of piracy, inderstand
that I only copy out-of-print CDs (for my own use) and CDs of my own
recordings for distribution to the ensemble that I have recorded and other
interested parties.

But I have found that PCs can be an awfully hostile environment for capturing
audio. As long as the music is in the digital mode, computers don't do any
harm but unless your computer is very carefully designed for the task,
plugging an analog source into a sound card can be tricky.

[Cheapskate]

In article , George Graves
wrote:

Fair enough, but Hi-Fi isn't really about "perfect reproduction", that's an
impossible goal (a laudable goal and a point of reference, but an impossible
goal). It's about the next best thing which seems to me to be bringing the
emotional impact of the actual musical performance home by recreating the
live sound field as closely as possible.

If that can be accomplished by being
technically perfect, then I'm all for technical perfection. Many here might
be able to show that 16/44.1 PCM is theoretically technically perfect, but
the fact that it doesn't bring home (to more than a few people) either the
intellectual or the emotional connection with the music that music lovers say
they want from their stereo systems, tells me that there is still something
about it (CD) that's not quite right.

Have you even the vaguest inkling of how many people in the world there
are who enjoy an intellectual emotional connection with the music they
play on their CD or other digital format based systems? You arrogantly
claim this number is no more than a few. You claim your assertion to
be 'fact.'

Where are those music lovers absolutely bereft of any connection to the
music they listen to, pining for an emotional response to the music
which they are just not experiencing? Their number must, logically,
be legion.

Show them to us, point them out, enlighten us.

Turntables and vinyl still exist. Why do we not see a vast sea of
dissatisfied humanity jostling for admission to the few places where
such arcana can still be purchased?

When the CD was first introduced, CD players and CDs were very much in
the minority relative to LPs and turntables. Why didn't everyone who
bought a CD player and some CDs abandon the format in disgust upon
listening, and apologetically sidle across their living room floor to
their beloved turntable and LP collection and lovingly stroke them
begging for forgiveness?

Why did they instead, swiftly place an ad in the buy-and-sell for their
turntable et. al., hoping some sucker - I mean appreciative connoisseur
- would take it off their hands for a good price before the market was
flooded with people trying to do likewise?

To blindly assume that today's
technology is perfect by ignoring those dissenting voice and yelling
"crackpot" at anyone who disagrees with that opinion, is, in my humble
opinion, anyway, no way to advance any technology. I see that attitude a lot
and I also encounter a similar attitude with regard to MP3 where people
defend that lossy compression scheme as being a high-fidelity sound source
"indistinguishable from CD and therefore perfect because CD is perfect".

Lossy MP3, AAC and the other forms of compression, may not be
'perfection', but they are 'goodenoughtion'. I have performed tests
that satisfy me that I can not tell the difference between compressed
music files and the CD from which they were derived, if the bit rate is
high enough. So for me personally, that counts as indistinguishable.
I do not claim that someone somewhere might not have far better hearing
than myself and be able to hear a difference so 'goodenoughtion' is
unlikely to be an absolute, but rather a personal value.

Well MP3 is NOT indistinguishable from the CD source

There is just no accounting for taste, is there? Discerning,
discriminating people are so hard to find these days, I mean look at
those horrid iPod thingies. Millions, upon millions of the wretched
things have been sold to all those young people. They must obviously
all have atrocious and defective hearing... What's that?...They are
younger therefore they have better hearing?... well they just have no
taste then! What's, that?...all those rave DJs and dance music fiends
assiduously seek out vinyl and sing it's praises?... Well then they,
they...

and more importantly CD
is NOT a perfect storage medium. If it were, it would involve the listener
more like real music involves the listener, and to an awful lot of people, me
included, it doesn't.

I would put it to you that a much, much, awfully lot greater,
absolutely humungous, number of people do find listening to CDs
involving. Far more than the relatively tiny - 'awful lot of people'
including yourself - that you refer to.

[Randy Yates]

George Graves writes:
[...]
Since ALL CDs seem to exhibit this lack of imaging and reduced sound-stage on
any player, I'd have to disagree.

Don't you find it a bit odd that 25 years of experience in digital
audio by mastering, electronic design, and research engineers have not
noticed this purported flaw?

Who would have us believe: you, or literally tens of thousands of
other people who are or have been specialists in the field?

These are extraordinary claims, and I don't think you should expect
anyone to believe them until you can reliably distinuguish CD outputs
from these other sources via blind testing.
--
% Randy Yates % "My Shangri-la has gone away, fading like
%% Fuquay-Varina, NC % the Beatles on 'Hey Jude'"
%%% 919-577-9882 %
%%%% % 'Shangri-La', *A New World Record*, ELO
http://home.earthlink.net/~yatescr

[George Graves]

On Sun, 12 Aug 2007 14:10:35 -0700, Arny Krueger wrote
(in article ):

"George Graves" wrote in message


Many here might be able to show that 16/44.1
PCM is theoretically technically perfect,

Not possible. It has well-known theoretical flaws. The most important thing
is that they are far less than any commercial analog record/playback systen,
and by a lot.

but the fact
that it doesn't bring home (to more than a few people)
either the intellectual or the emotional connection with
the music that music lovers say they want from their
stereo systems,

This is an effect that is well known to go away if you bother to do a proper
listening test. Let's follow the logic:

(1) Take a bunch of listeners who thoroughly believe that the CD format does
not provide
either the intellectual or the emotional connection with the music that the
LP and/or analog tape provide.

(2) Eliminate their foreknowlege of what they are listening to during the
listening test, except in the most general way.

(3) Watch the listeners uniformly fail to be able to use the purported
intellectual or the emotional connection with the music that the LP and/or
analog tape allegedly provides, to reliably detect the difference.

ells me that there is still something
about it (CD) that's not quite right.

This belief combined with the hopelessly flawed recitation of purely
imaginary "flaws" in digital speaks to a writer who has a lot of prejudices.

To blindly assume
that today's technology is perfect by ignoring those
dissenting voices and yelling "crackpot" at anyone who
disagrees with that opinion, is, in my humble opinion,
anyway, no way to advance any technology.

I agree, but nobody here is blindly assuming any such thing. The relevant
facts are easy to collect, and this has been done many times. The results
are consistently obtained. 44/16 digital is indistinguishable from the
proverbial straight wire when reproducing music or speech in any kind of
reasonable listening test that addresses listener bias.


The kind of test you describe is (almost) impossible and certainly
impractical. First of all, nobody can listen to an LP and not know its an LP
whether they've been told or not or whether they can see the apparatus or
not. Clicks and pops, vinyl rush on the lead-in grooves, etc. will give the
game away every time (of course, you could fake those sounds somehow and mix
them in with the CD, but who has facilities to do that?). If you use analog
tape, you'll have the tape hiss to give the game away. And while this is
easier to fake by mixing a little low-level white noise with the CD playback,
few have the facilities to do THAT either. And I have been in sessions (done
them myself, in fact) where a CD made from a record and that record were
A/B'd double blindly. I can always tell the CD of the record from the record
itself even though the same equipment was used to master the CD and listen to
the same record as the one which was mastered.

[ScottW]

"Cheapskate" wrote in message
...
In article , George Graves
wrote:

So? The aim of High-Fidelity is to make the music sound REAL in one's listen
room. If it takes certain kinds of distortion to achieve that illusion, then
I'm all for it.

If it takes certain distortions to make you happy, it's not
High-Fidelity by definition. Fidelity: 'the degree of exactness with
which something is copied or reproduced.'

I suggest that this definition depends very much upon
what exactly, is being "reproduced".

If what is attempted to be reproduced is the illusion
of being in the presence of a live musical event, then
I think the use of ultralow distortion equipment has not
been well demonstrated as being critical to the
objective of the reproduction.

Hence the debates between parametric SOTA
reproduction vs lesser parametric performers
but still very successful alternatives.

I suspect some day that the science of psychoacoustics
will yield an envelope of system characteristics for optimum
illusion...and I'll bet it will contain some significant
non-linearities. The GedLee system here seems
to be an early attempt in this area.

http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=12465

ScottW

[George Graves]

On Sun, 12 Aug 2007 14:07:49 -0700, Cheapskate wrote
(in article ):

In article , George Graves
wrote:

So? The aim of High-Fidelity is to make the music sound REAL in one's
listen
room. If it takes certain kinds of distortion to achieve that illusion,
then
I'm all for it.

If it takes certain distortions to make you happy, it's not
High-Fidelity by definition. Fidelity: 'the degree of exactness with
which something is copied or reproduced.'

You conveniently failed to quote where I said that even though perfect
reproduction is the GOAL, its an impossible one and that being the case, the
next best thing - all that we can currently aspire to - is make the music
sound as real as possible in our systems. And in the case of modern
technology, sounding "real" and "a perfect straight-wire" from microphone to
speaker aren't really the same thing.

[[email protected]]

On Aug 12, 8:12 pm, George Graves wrote:
I've heard 3-bit quantization of voice and it's terribly
distorted.

Then you were listening to a 3-bit UNdithered quantization.
A properly dithered quantization would simply sound noisy.
And you would be able to CLEALRY hear signals well
below the resolution of the least significant bit.

Maybe you can explain why a 16-bit system quantizing
a low-level signal that only utilizes the 3 least
significant bits would be any less distorted.

Actually, maybe YOU can explain why you insist on
propogating your incorrect views based on your
erroneous claim that dithering does not happen
during the A/D process.

Like I said in another thread. I know all about
Nyquist sampling theory,

Your assertions, in fact, say you do not.

Reed-Solomon error correction and interpolation,

How is that at all relevant What does Reed-Solomon
error correction have to do with interpolation (hint: nothing)

and I'm reasonably sure that
I still remember how to design a workable D/A
converter using a differential amplifier, a successive
approximation register and a hand full of resistors.

And you have CLEARELY demonstrated you have no
idea what you're talking about: D/A converters DO NOT
use successive approximation registers.

The fact that I only had a hazy recollection of how
dither works

You don't have a hazy recollection of how dither works,
you have the WRONG idea of how it works.

(and didn't check my facts before I posted) is out
of laziness

Actually, I would be willing to bet that you were cock sure
of your facts before you posted.

And your two statements above, to wite:

"I've heard 3-bit quantization of voice and it's terribly
distorted."

and

"Maybe you can explain why a 16-bit system quantizing
a low-level signal that only utilizes the 3 least significant
bits would be any less distorted."

Show quite cleqrly that even if your recollection of how
dither works was hazy, what you were recalling was, in
fact, wrong.

and is my bad. I apologize for that.

Yet you still insist on your wrong model of how it all works,
and basing most the "technical" underpinings of your
position on models that are just out-and-out wrong.

[bob]

On Aug 12, 8:18 pm, George Graves wrote:

The kind of test you describe is (almost) impossible and certainly
impractical.

But it's been done:

http://snipurl.com/1pho7

bob

[Steven Sullivan]

Arny Krueger wrote:
"George Graves" wrote in message


Then where does that ambience go?

If it is part of a recording, then it goes onto the CD and also comes off of
it. The CD format is far more capable of recording and reproducing low level
ambience than typical listening rooms, recording studios and concert halls.
This is because the dynamic range of all those places is far less than that
of the CD format.

Maybe George is referring to the crosstalk and phase-related
'ambience' that's one of the euphonic colorations of vinyl playback?

I use something vaguely related to that when I apply Dolby Pro Logic
II to two-channel recordings. I like the resulting 'ambience' enhancement
provided by the synthetized surround channels.
I don't kid myself that it's a more faithful rendition of the original
'event', though...after all, it can
enhance 'ambience' on tracks that were entirely studio-bound.

___
-S
"As human beings, we understand the world through simile, analogy,
metaphor, narrative and, sometimes, claymation." - B. Mason

[George Graves]

On Sun, 12 Aug 2007 17:17:56 -0700, Randy Yates wrote
(in article ):

George Graves writes:
[...]
Since ALL CDs seem to exhibit this lack of imaging and reduced sound-stage
on
any player, I'd have to disagree.

Don't you find it a bit odd that 25 years of experience in digital
audio by mastering, electronic design, and research engineers have not
noticed this purported flaw?

Not at all. Because many experienced listeners HAVE noticed it. Here's the
bottom line. Recording and distributing music performances is a BUSINESS. CD
is lucrative and 99% of the market doesn't care about the things we have been
dicussing because most have never even heard live, un-amplified music or
don't care about the differences or the shortcomings of any particular
medium. Remember, the business will go where the dollars are. In the ten or
so years before CD, the music industry was perfectly content to change their
business from vinyl to analog cassette and you know bad those were! The CD
was a godsend. The little silver discs caught on big-time with the public for
a variety of mostly practical reasons - most having little or nothing to do
with ultimate sound quality. They were cheap to make and could be sold for a
premium. Of course the industry went for them. Who cared that less than one
percent of the buying public noticed that the emperor had no clothes? They
aren't important to the business. It wouldn't surprise me to see the industry
announce, in the next few years, a total stop to the production of CDs in
favor of direct internet sales of all music (MP3 at 128 or 192 KB/s, of
course. Low bit rates equal smaller files)). It's cheaper for the music
companies because they don't have to manufacture or ship anything. And again,
99% of all listeners won't notice or care. Most of the world listens to pop
music. What would they know or care about soundstage, distortion or
artifacts? Only audiophiles care about those things and there are fewer of us
every year (as this forum aptly proves).

As to mastering engineers and design engineers, they have to make a living.
What they honestly believe and what they do everyday to please their clients
may not be the same thing at all. I personally know a number of "famous"
recording engineers and mastering engineers and I find most (but not all)
agree with me on a personal level. You'd be surprised at what one "household
name" (in the audio community, anyway) mastering specialist told me about his
opinions of CD. I can't tell you his name because I don't have his
permission. But his words were harsh. He listens only to SACD at home, now.

Who would have us believe: you, or literally tens of thousands of
other people who are or have been specialists in the field?

I'm not asking anyone to believe me about anything. I have stated what I have
found to be true, and if you don't believe me, then you can stand over there
with the rest of the 99% :-

It makes no difference to me. I don't even take exception to nor hold a
grudge against you because we don't see eye-to-eye on this (or any issue).

These are extraordinary claims, and I don't think you should expect
anyone to believe them until you can reliably distinuguish CD outputs
from these other sources via blind testing.

As I said before, I'm not asking anyone to believe me. Find these things out
for yourself. Don't take my word or anybody's word, for that matter.

[Randy Yates]

George Graves writes:
[...]
Theoretically you are correct. In practise, I'm not so sure. I've heard 3-bit
quantization of voice and it's terribly distorted. Maybe you can explain why
a 16-bit system quantizing a low-level signal that only utilizes the 3 least
significant bits would be any less distorted.

Do you mean noisy? Noise and distortion are two different things.

Assuming you mean noisy, then of course 3 bits sounds noisy, just
like recording a signal at 70 dB below full-scale on your Otari
is going to sound noisy on playback as well. Representing a signal
at X dB below full-scale results in an X-dB decrease in SNR,
whether the representation is digital or analog.

Why is this relevent?

Study the topic for a few decades and then we can discuss it
intelligently. At this point, you should be asking questions and
learning rather than making incorrect assertions.

Like I said in another thread. I know all about Nyquist sampling theory,
Reed-Solomon error correction and interpolation, and I'm reasonably sure that
I still remember how to design a workable D/A converter using a differential
amplifier, a successive approximation register and a hand full of resistors.
The fact that I only had a hazy recollection of how dither works (and didn't
check my facts before I posted) is out of laziness and is my bad. I apologize
for that.

You make my point for me. Successive-approximation is a technique used in
A/D converters, not D/A converters.

I believe you may know a little about these topics, but I don't think
you have an engineering-level understanding. In case I'm wrong,
here are a few questions to test you:

0. What is the definition of a linear quantizer?

1. What is the maximum bandwidth of the ouptut of a linear quantizer
operating at Fs samples/second in the most general case?

2. Is there a relationship between sample rate and total quantization noise
power? If so, what is it?

3. Can oversampling without noise-shaping be used to increase the
resolution of a linear quantizer?

4. What is the difference between oversampling and interpolation? Does
interpolation increase the resolution of a signal?

5. Reed-Solomon error correction operates in an arithmetic system.
Name this arithmetic system and provide four of its properties.

--RY

--
% Randy Yates % "She tells me that she likes me very much,
%% Fuquay-Varina, NC % but when I try to touch, she makes it
%%% 919-577-9882 % all too clear."
%%%% % 'Yours Truly, 2095', *Time*, ELO
http://home.earthlink.net/~yatescr

[bob]

On Aug 12, 8:19 pm, "ScottW" wrote:
"Cheapskate" wrote in message

If it takes certain distortions to make you happy, it's not
High-Fidelity by definition. Fidelity: 'the degree of exactness with
which something is copied or reproduced.'

I suggest that this definition depends very much upon
what exactly, is being "reproduced".

Well, we need to acknowledge that this argument very much involves
people talking past each other. From the playback-equipment point of
view, fidelity means fidelity to what's on the disk.That's where CD
beats the pants off vinyl. You can back that up and say that a CD will
sound closer to the final master tape than vinyl--and can be made
closer to the original recording, if one chooses to master it that
way.

That's not what George Graves is talking about. What he means by
fidelity is, "Closest to what I think the original performance sounded
like." Take that statement apart, and you can see several huge fudge
factors ("think"/"sounded like" to whom?/"sounded like" where in the
room?/and was the recording mastered to sound like that?) that swamp
everything else in the recording/mastering/playback chain.

Personally, I think the whole "realism" fetish is misguided. People
who say, "This sounds more real," invariably mean, "I like this sound
better." Nothing more. But that's another argument.

If what is attempted to be reproduced is the illusion
of being in the presence of a live musical event, then
I think the use of ultralow distortion equipment has not
been well demonstrated as being critical to the
objective of the reproduction.

Hence the debates between parametric SOTA
reproduction vs lesser parametric performers
but still very successful alternatives.

I suspect some day that the science of psychoacoustics
will yield an envelope of system characteristics for optimum
illusion...and I'll bet it will contain some significant
non-linearities. The GedLee system here seems
to be an early attempt in this area.

http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=12465

Possibly, but let's not forget the work of Floyd Toole and Sean Olive
at NRC/Harman on loudspeakers, which found a strong correlation
between low distortion and listener preferences.

bob

[George Graves]

On Sun, 12 Aug 2007 17:17:10 -0700, Cheapskate wrote
(in article ):

In article , George Graves
wrote:

Fair enough, but Hi-Fi isn't really about "perfect reproduction", that's an
impossible goal (a laudable goal and a point of reference, but an
impossible
goal). It's about the next best thing which seems to me to be bringing the
emotional impact of the actual musical performance home by recreating the
live sound field as closely as possible.

If that can be accomplished by being
technically perfect, then I'm all for technical perfection. Many here might
be able to show that 16/44.1 PCM is theoretically technically perfect, but
the fact that it doesn't bring home (to more than a few people) either the
intellectual or the emotional connection with the music that music lovers
say
they want from their stereo systems, tells me that there is still something
about it (CD) that's not quite right.

Have you even the vaguest inkling of how many people in the world there
are who enjoy an intellectual emotional connection with the music they
play on their CD or other digital format based systems? You arrogantly
claim this number is no more than a few. You claim your assertion to
be 'fact.'

You misunderstand me. And upon rereading what I wrote, I see why. When I said
"PCM is theoretically technically perfect, but the fact that it doesn't bring
home (to more than a few people) either the intellectual or the emotional
connection with the music..." what I was saying is that "more than a few
people" find CD unsatisfying in this regard. I can well understand why you
thought I was saying that ONLY a few people find CD satisfying. My
parenthetical comment was hastily added and poorly worded. I'm sure that the
huge majority of the population of this planet find CD to be perfectly fine.

Where are those music lovers absolutely bereft of any connection to the
music they listen to, pining for an emotional response to the music
which they are just not experiencing? Their number must, logically,
be legion.

Show them to us, point them out, enlighten us.

Turntables and vinyl still exist. Why do we not see a vast sea of
dissatisfied humanity jostling for admission to the few places where
such arcana can still be purchased?

Here you just answered your own question. Turntables and vinyl not only still
exist, the market flourishes. I can buy many more fine turntables, arms and
cartridges at any price point from several hundred dollars to $25,000 or more
than I could during vinyl's "heyday". The only thing that has disappeared
after 23 years of CD is the cheap, mass market turntable because the masses
find CD better suited to their needs.

When the CD was first introduced, CD players and CDs were very much in
the minority relative to LPs and turntables. Why didn't everyone who
bought a CD player and some CDs abandon the format in disgust upon
listening, and apologetically sidle across their living room floor to
their beloved turntable and LP collection and lovingly stroke them
begging for forgiveness?

Because they didn't care? Or found the practicality of the CD more than
compensatory for any sonic drawbacks (that most wouldn't notice anyway) that
CD might bring to the table?

Why did they instead, swiftly place an ad in the buy-and-sell for their
turntable et. al., hoping some sucker - I mean appreciative connoisseur
- would take it off their hands for a good price before the market was
flooded with people trying to do likewise?

I can't keep repeating the same answer over and over again. The average music
buyer DOESN'T CARE about sound. But they do care when their favorite record
gets scratched or so noisy that they can't listen to it any more. The
practical side of CD; it's convenient size, the fact that it doesn't
deteriorate with every play, the fact that with minimal care they won't get
scratched or noisy are far more important to the average consumer than are
any shortcomings of the CD that someone like me might find annoying.

To blindly assume that today's
technology is perfect by ignoring those dissenting voice and yelling
"crackpot" at anyone who disagrees with that opinion, is, in my humble
opinion, anyway, no way to advance any technology. I see that attitude a
lot
and I also encounter a similar attitude with regard to MP3 where people
defend that lossy compression scheme as being a high-fidelity sound source
"indistinguishable from CD and therefore perfect because CD is perfect".

Lossy MP3, AAC and the other forms of compression, may not be
'perfection', but they are 'goodenoughtion'.

Again you answer your own questions. Good enough for the masses sells
consumer goods, but there are always that portion of the populace to whom
"good enough" will never be good enough. They seek holy grails. It's called
passion for one's avocations.

I have performed tests
that satisfy me that I can not tell the difference between compressed
music files and the CD from which they were derived, if the bit rate is
high enough. So for me personally, that counts as indistinguishable.

Then you're lucky and fall into the mainstream where choices are much easier
and usually much cheaper.

I do not claim that someone somewhere might not have far better hearing
than myself and be able to hear a difference so 'goodenoughtion' is
unlikely to be an absolute, but rather a personal value.

Good for you.


Well MP3 is NOT indistinguishable from the CD source

There is just no accounting for taste, is there? Discerning,
discriminating people are so hard to find these days, I mean look at
those horrid iPod thingies. Millions, upon millions of the wretched
things have been sold to all those young people. They must obviously
all have atrocious and defective hearing... What's that?...They are
younger therefore they have better hearing?... well they just have no
taste then! What's, that?...all those rave DJs and dance music fiends
assiduously seek out vinyl and sing it's praises?... Well then they,
they...

I have an iPod. I use it all the time. Of course, I rip my music using ALC
instead of MP3, and the files are somewhat bigger as a result, but I find the
sound indistinguishable from the original CD because lossless compression IS
lossless and SHOULD have no artifacts.

and more importantly CD
is NOT a perfect storage medium. If it were, it would involve the listener
more like real music involves the listener, and to an awful lot of people,
me
included, it doesn't.

I would put it to you that a much, much, awfully lot greater,
absolutely humungous, number of people do find listening to CDs
involving. Far more than the relatively tiny - 'awful lot of people'
including yourself - that you refer to.

I think you'll find that its a fairly big percentage of a shrinking avocation
- Audio/Hi-Fi. As for the masses, let them make decisions based upon their
perception of what's important to them in music reproduction and I will make
my decisions based upon what my "educated" ears tell me. They are two
different things, and that's the bottom line. I think that someone needs to
explain to you that quantity (or popularity) rarely equals quality. If it
did, then one could expect to get a better meal at McDonalds than one can get
at The Four Seasons in NYC (hint: one can't).

[Randy Yates]

George Graves writes:
[...]
The recordings that I have made have been
made several ways: Direct to CD from the microphone feed, [...]

You had to use an A/D converter, at a minimum. Which converter
did you use?
--
% Randy Yates % "How's life on earth?
%% Fuquay-Varina, NC % ... What is it worth?"
%%% 919-577-9882 % 'Mission (A World Record)',
%%%% % *A New World Record*, ELO
http://home.earthlink.net/~yatescr

[Arny Krueger]

"George Graves" wrote in message

On Sun, 12 Aug 2007 10:15:52 -0700, Serge Auckland wrote
(in article ):

"George Graves" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 11 Aug 2007 18:12:25 -0700, Serge Auckland wrote
(in article ):

"George Graves" wrote in
message ...
On Sat, 11 Aug 2007 08:59:43 -0700, Serge Auckland
wrote (in article ):

CD is NOT a perfect storage medium.

It isn't and it doesn't have to be.

If it were, it would
involve the listener more like real music involves the
listener,

The CD format involves most people more like real music than the LP format.
Support for this is the fact that the general music-loving public has
abandoned the LP format in droves, to the point where the LP went from
almost 100% of the market for recorded music to less than 1%. Also note that
the barely 1% of the market that the LP has recently held was highly
dependent on the dance music market and a destructive process call
"scratching". IOW, it was irrelevant to music listening as we know it.
Scratching is disappearing because it has been replaced by digital
processing. The LP market segment has dropped significantly further in
recent days for this reason.

and to an awful lot of people, me included, it doesn't.

Less than 1% of the market for prerecorded music, and slipping no longer
constitutes "an awful lot of people".

George, what you are saying above is that you (and of
course many others) prefer something that gives you the
emotional reaction you want, even though it is
demonstrably flawed technically.

Note that liking art as manifested in a flawed medium is a person's right,
and it is a right that is exercised very frequently.

A person who says that all charcoal drawings are more realistic and detailed
than high quality modern photographs would not be taken seriously.

OTOH, a person who finds a certain charcoal drawing of a person captures
their idea of the essence of that person in a way that is more meaningful to
them, is a completely understandable situation. Maybe a bit sentimental or
romantic, but we are now in the world of emotion and fond memories, and
everybody understands that this is not a technological judgement or a
scientific fact. Your posts have confused the worlds of emotion and
scientific fact.

16/44.1 has been
repeatedly shown to be an audibly "perfect" medium, in
that what goes in comes out, to limits which are very
much below audibility thresholds.

Agreed. If agree that the emotional efect of a recording is dependent on how
well it duplicates the actual origional sound, then we are forced to abandon
the LP format, except as an archival medium.

Even the
much-maligned MP3 can produce audibly transparent
results at high bit rates, say 320kbps, hence providing
4:1 data reduction with no reduction in perceived
quality.

So it seems. I find that most people won't notice that a CD was cut from a
192 Kb MP3 as opposed to a 44/16 or higher .wav file.

First of all, few of my LPs are made from digital masters
and frankly, those that were (like a couple of Telarcs
that I own) were mastered from early Soundstream
recordings, and frankly (except for the prodigious bass -
an early Telarc "trademark") they don't sound very good.

A minority opinion, even among LP lovers. In the days when the LP was all we
had, Telarc LPs were usually prized by the majority of music lovers who
heard them.

Neither do CDs made from vinyl. They do NOT sound exactly
like the LP to me.

Avoidance of bias controls noted.

In short, the emperor has no clothes
and there are still a few of us that see (hear?) that.

The right word choice was in fact, see. The use of the word hear is properly
written here, as being highly questionable. Actually, there's no question at
all. The LP format is a far more audibly flawed medium than the CD.

It's been a long time since I thought about the digital
process, and yes, I misspoke about dithering because
frankly, I haven't read much about it and was relying on
memory from 20 years ago and I should have refreshed my
facts before relying on memory but laziness, you know...

No, what I see is a true statement of someone's state of mind which was
based on misapprehensions.

When I was learning about PCM, dithering, apparently,
wasn't being used much and I paid little attention to it.

I don't know when that could have been, as dithering is about as old if not
older thandigital encoding of analog signals itself.

Dithering was even explored in the early days of quality audio as a means to
manage sonic defects caused by crossover in class B tubed power amps, for
example. BTW, it works, but at a cost in dynamic range.

[Arny Krueger]

"George Graves" wrote in message


On Sun, 12 Aug 2007 14:10:35 -0700, Arny Krueger wrote
(in article ):

I agree, but nobody here is blindly assuming any such
thing. The relevant facts are easy to collect, and this
has been done many times. The results are consistently
obtained. 44/16 digital is indistinguishable from the
proverbial straight wire when reproducing music or
speech in any kind of reasonable listening test that
addresses listener bias.

The kind of test you describe is (almost) impossible and
certainly impractical.

That's news to me.

First of all, nobody can listen to
an LP and not know its an LP whether they've been told or
not or whether they can see the apparatus or not. Clicks
and pops, vinyl rush on the lead-in grooves, etc. will
give the game away every time (of course, you could fake
those sounds somehow and mix them in with the CD, but who
has facilities to do that?).

You've missed the point. The key part of a test like this is the fact that
any real-world audio signal regardless of source can be digitized and
converted back to analog in real time with negligable delays. You then
compare the source to the version of it that has been digitized and
converted back to analog. Nobody can reliably hear a difference.

LP sources have been used this way, and yes we found that all the artifacts
of the LP format are captured by 44/16 in a way that is indistinguishable
from the origional. This is a tougher test than it may seem since some of
the artifacts of the LP format are impulses, which many misinformed people
think is a weakness of the 44/16 format.

If you use analog tape,
you'll have the tape hiss to give the game away. And
while this is easier to fake by mixing a little low-level
white noise with the CD playback, few have the facilities
to do THAT either.

Same basic argument, except that some of the tests we did used 15 ips
half-track masters which are really quite free of tape hiss if done well
using modern equipment and media.

The last form of test that has been done involved live musicians and even
wide-band microphones and loudspeakers.

And I have been in sessions (done them
myself, in fact) where a CD made from a record and that
record were A/B'd double blindly. I can always tell the
CD of the record from the record itself even though the
same equipment was used to master the CD and listen to
the same record as the one which was mastered.

The problem here is a matter of synchronizing the LP and and CD and keeping
them synchronized. Then there is the problem that the LP continues to
degrade as it is played again and again. We were able to overcome both
problems.

[Arny Krueger]

"George Graves" wrote in message


But I have found that PCs can be an awfully hostile
environment for capturing audio.

That's another myth that is based on misapprehensions.

The first part of the myth is the idea that any mixed-signal audio device
such as a high quality stand-alone ADC or DAC isn't a hostile environment
for audio. They all are, because they have all those fast rise-time square
waves running around in them.

The second part of the myth is the idea that the situation can't be managed.
In fact some of the quietest audio hardware around is packaged as PCI cards
that can be installed in any modern computer with PCI slots. Example: The
LynxTWO audio interfaces.