On Tue, 2004-05-04 at 16:19, Malcolm Baldridge wrote: > I've followed this thread with some amateur interest, as I am not and have > never even pretended to be an audio professional. I will say this > however... I think there are a couple of levels of discrimination involved > with this "louder is better" thing, which is a bit similar to the similiarly > greatly annoying trend of television manufacturers' rising colour temperatures. > > There's the immediate impression... "OOOH! Louder! I can "hear everything" > better" or whatever it really is. And then there's the "Wait a moment, > where are the dynamics? A piccolo doesn't really sound like it has a 200HP > air compressor hose attached to it." Let's not even venture into the > shark-filled waters of how you're reducing effective detail by "raising the > floor" to such a degree, or the clearly obvious clipping and distortion > you're causing. > > Incidentally, the "additional harmonics" argument is a little weak given the > fact that the digital audio chain is not perfect, not by a longshot. For > one thing, anything above 22KHz is aliasing noise and should be filtered out > by your decoding sections. For another, you have ZERO TOLERANCE for power > levels beyond +/- 32767. Zero. That nearly 90 degree shape in the > truncated waveforms means you've overlayed ~ 22Khz crap onto your 100-8Khz > sound. That's NOISE, and what's worse it's at nearly maximum signal level too. > > Even as an amateur audio consumer, I find FM radio annoyingly companded. > It's like listened to a used car commercial. To get that kind of audio out > of a CD would be completely unacceptable. Alas, I am not a fan of rock > music so perhaps I'm just out of touch with its sonic priorities. > > I have a friend who is a recording pro (who invariably sniggers and laughs > at my commentary on audio matters) and his remarks on alot of this "digital > misery" goes like the following.... > > "I am a firm believer in this studio philosophy: if you can't hear it, it > doesn't exist. Ignore what the machine shows you and LISTEN. That goes for > VU meters as well as digital waveform displays." > > "Recording engineers need to LISTEN again instead of LOOKING." > > "Values above the threshold are spat out at 32767. Ergo, you have a > shitty sounding square wave brought on by a system with zero headroom." > > "On tape, zero was an absolute reference which could be measured exactly. > You then decided how far above zero to allow your recording. If you > liked the result, you went with it. And tape being what it is, it is > very forgiving and will naturally compress hot signals." > > "In digital, zero means NOTHING. It means 'don't go past here because this > is how we built our system, and if you do you're in square wave land.'" > > "This is a problem. A generation of engineers is growing up with no basic > tracking skills because of this. They keep using their eyes instead of their > ears." > > "The engineers who design this shit are even more guilty of that." > > [Incidentally, he is a die-hard "Old School" (not host-based) Pro Tools > Snob, though you might be tempted think he's some analogue dinosaur.] > > Back to Malcolm here. There's NOTHING that says digital audio devices can't > have headroom, but it means calibrating your levels to avoid peaking above > -3dB or whatever the headroom you want to reserve. There's the human > "greed" instinct of course which resents this sacrificing of come > resolution. [in a digital sample, this is about 1/2 the values!] > > It's this very greed which allowed The Dark Lord to ensnare the Kings of Men > with The Nine to start with. You can be sure the Witch King of Angmar liked > maximum squeeze on his mastering projects. Look what it got him in the end. > > I think the best compromise of this is to provide dbx companders in a button > on consumer CD players, so that CD audio can be mastered properly with full > dynamics and unclipped sounds. This way, when Joe Jughead wants his > compressed and clipped noise, it's just a button away. Incidentally, I wish > I can say I claimed credit for this foul idea, but some college students > beat me to that. > > Even The Dark Lord's mastering engineers didn't believe in clipped > waveforms, they preferred Quality, WOW! A great way of saying....In the words of our dear departed Frank Zappa, "Shutup and play yer gitar"! Without dissecting verse and paragraph here, technology was SUPPOSED to make the archiving of the "art" easier? Now I luv being a part time geek as much as the next pocket protected guy but people....c'mon now, lets put down our heavy black rimmed glasses on the desk for a moment and ponder this statement from a movie... " We worked SO hard to figure out if we could, we never stopped to think about if we should". I luv what Linux is doing and I luv music for musics sake. I like to be able to basically "click" a button and record, click another to play it back. As a group of technologically oriented people, it is expected that these finer, albeit seemingly subjective items be dissected here on this list. All I'm trying to say is as a musician, and with a luv of music in my heart and soul, don't forget why we are here! Recording sine waves is NOT my idea of fun...recording music is!! How about yoo? All meant with the sincerest respect. R~ > > =MB=
