[Scott[_6_]]

On Feb 10, 11:38=A0am, wrote:
On Saturday, February 9, 2013 11:11:25 PM UTC-5, Audio_Empire wrote:
I was reading the monthly column in a well-known audio magazine by an e=
qually well known audio
journalist today and realized that this journalist simply hasn't a clue=
about digital sound and how it
works.

I'm guessin' Fremer. Call it a hunch.

He was discussing a new box-set of stereo LPs of all of the Beatles alb=
ums. It seems that Apple
records mastered these LPs from the 16-bit/44.1 KHz ADC conversions of =
the original analog master
tapes, rather than going back to the original masters themselves. The e=
xcuse given by an Apple
Records spokesperson for why they took this route rather than doing a p=
roper re-mastering from the
edited analog session masters was that Apple didn't want to risk damage=
to the originals.

Probably a wise business decision. The 16/44.1 conversions should be indi=
stinguishable from the analog masters, so why risk the masters? A few ignor=
ant purists will complain, but most buyers will either understand that this=
is a good move, or else won't care. Mostly the latter.

This journalist went on to say that an analog master has an infinite am=
ount of information on it (!)
and as digital gets better, one can always go back and "mine" those mas=
ters for more and more
detail. He went on to say that the moment one digitizes an analog sourc=
e, something is lost that can
never be retrieved from that digitized result.

Definitely Fremer. Instead of measuring jitter to the picosecond, S-pile =
could actually perform the far more useful service of testing and reporting=
on turntables and cartridges, which are certainly popular with its readers=
hip=97and do actually sound different! Instead, they outsource the entire a=
nalog realm to a moron. (And he's as much a moron about analog as digital. =
He sounds like he knows what he's talking about, but he just parrots what t=
he turntable makers tell him.)

bob

I just read Fremer's overview of the box set. So I don't think it was
him. He got the facts right for starters
"Clearly the engineers feel that digitizing analog at high sampling
and bit rates is essentially transparent to the source or they might
not have done it. And once they had the music captured at 192/24 bit
they also felt down-converting it to 44.1/24 wouldn't diminish the
sonic quality." Even I had forgotten the unusual 24/44.1 conversion.
(looks like he accidentally reversed the numbers) I saw no mention of
the word "infinite" anywhere in his article.