[Alan S]

"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
...
"Jenn" wrote in message
ups.com
Arny Krueger wrote:
"Jenn" wrote in
message


"sounds better to me" is just a statement of your
prejudices

No doubt. We listen to what we like.

Not if we're professionally engaged in working with
sound. Then, we listen to what me must in order to get
the job done.

I submit that being a professional musician could easily
encounter similar situations.

Of course. I thought that discussion here was about home
hi-fi, however.


and desire to
be perceived as having exceptional hearing.

How you reach that conclusion is a mystery.

The world is full of people who claim they have
exceptional hearing and can hear all sorts of things, or
they say that anybody that has normal ears can easily
hear what they claim to hear.

Then you knock out their one-size-fits-all crutch, which
is sighted evaluation, mismatched levels, and/or
mismatched synch between the alternatives being listened
to. Likely as not, their ears suddenly turn to cloth.

How does this relate to your statement that "'sounds
better to me' is just a statement of your prejudices and
desire to be perceived as having exceptional hearing"?
Sounds to me like the OP simply made a statement of
preference.

Good work Jenn, you just made another out-of-context quote. Here's the
whole enchelada:

"The truth is that for whatever reason, it sounds
better to me if I record at 32/96 and dither down, though the average
listener doesn't usually notice."

Sheeesh. I explained this. I hear a difference, why? I don't know, big deal.
I do know that I hear a difference in music that I record at 32/96 and music
I record at 16/44, and to this day I have had no one explain to me why, and
I have talked with a lot of engineers about it. You would think that if the
music is going to be dithered down to 44.1 kHZ at 16 bit anyway then it
would be just fine to record it at that resolution. So far the best
explanation is that in the dithering process certain frequencies are
averaged because of the need to reduce the sampling rate and this averaging
eliminates noise. To this day, I have never heard a 16/44 recording sound
like a 32/96 recording. It's not as warm. It's not enough to make a
difference for an enjoyable listening experience when listening to digitally
produced music. In short, I hear it, it doesn't bother me. Most of my
friends that visit me when I am in session do not hear the difference. This
in no way makes me superior, where Arny got on that bus, I don't know.

Listening to an excellent performance recorded on 2" tape from a well mixed,
even handed band of good players, in tune, in an acoustically tuned studio
through Genelec 1038B's blows any CD I have ever heard out of the water even
if it is played through the same system. The headroom makes a huge
difference. Because of that, the image that is created from dynamics is much
more accessible, and the overtones that you hear are much more present which
gives the music a warmer tone and bigger feel.

My general observation about the quality of recorded music these days is
that a lot of it suffers from over compression, and processing done through
low dollar digital gear that tries as hard as it can to emulate the effects
of high dollar analog gear. It's a blow and go world these days and music
production has kept up with the pace.

That being said, I am a digital advocate. The convenience and cost of
production has made opportunities for talent to get their material into a
market that has been railroaded by dollar oriented record companies for
years. I am just looking forward to the day when CD's sound better.