On 27 Feb 2006, at 18:11, Maluvia wrote:
Apparently digital fidelity is a non-issue around here.
If you guys really feel that you can produce professional-sounding,
commercial quality CDs with 16-bit sound cards and 'correct'
dithering - be
my guest, and good luck.
Music that originates in the digital domain doesn't even need to be
sampled.
Perhaps there are many here just doing all this for fun or as a
hobby - I
have no idea.
I am guessing that there are not many people on this list recording
acoustic instruments or classical-type music.
I doubt that a recording engineer trying to record a violin, harp or
orchestra, would be happy using a 16-bit sound card.
There are two separate issues here, one being a suitable word length
for recording, the other being a suitable word length for distribution.
For distribution, I would contend that 16 bits is fine (and in fact
that the vast majority of CDs don't come close to using that). After
all by this point in the process we know what the peak value is.....
For recording (where you want 20db of headroom above nominal level to
avoid clipping that once in a lifetime take, and where you don't
really know what the actual peak levels will be, then sure go to 18
or 20 or 24 bit (and accept that the low bits will be essentially
random). This is not because you are likely to have >96db dynamic
range for most instruments but because you don't know ahead of time
where that range starts and stops.
There *is* generational loss in the digital domain, as well as in the
analog domain.
Sorry.
If you think the subtle differences I hear are auditory
hallucination or
self-hypnosis, and you can't hear them yourself - I can't convince you
otherwise - I see no reason to even try.
I don't buy it, sure I buy jitter being a issue at the DAC, but that
is ONLY an issue with conversion to or from analogue, it cannot be an
issue with the storage or with digital transfer between storage
devices where either the data recovery is OK is it is not. If the MD5
hashes match the data is probably identical.....
But there is a big difference between saying that this loss is
negligible
and insignificant, and saying it simply does not exist.
There are some physical laws working against your premise here but
I won't
go into them - I don't want to take this thread OT yet again and
turn it
into a discourse on physics.
If the diff returns nothing then the files are identical, at least as
far as the computer is concerned (or diff has a bug). Sure hard disks
have a specified bit error rate, but it is fairly close to zero, as
the fact that these things work at all can attest.
There are others - professional audio engineers - who also hear
these kind
of differences, but I guess they must all be into metaphysics,
hocus-pocus
and self-delusion as well. (A lot of money in that.)
Here are a few articles that touch on this subject, and say a lot
of what I
have been saying:
http://www.johnvestman.com/digital_myth.htm
http://www.johnvestman.com/digital_myth2.htm
Seems to me to be saying that as long as you actually manage to make
an exact copy of the file, the only issue is jitter going to the
DAC? Checking you have an exact copy is easy, in fact FLAC can store
an MD5 hash right in the file and can check it when uncompressing to
ensure the recreated samples are the same as the original. Failing
that md5sum will do the same thing.
Sure applying DSP to the samples modifies them (Thats what it's there
for!).
Now to be fair, there are a lot of really nasty CD players out
there (often sold for 'audiophile' use, that fail to sufficiently
buffer things to isolate the DAC clock from the raw disk data rate.
You would think that the way to do a CD player in this age of cheap
ram was to have the DAC clocked at as close to a constant rate as can
be managed and then servo the disk read speed to keep a fifo mostly
full. I have seen designs that did it the other way around!
Shipping CDDA as a master has always struck me as being fatally
flawed as the format is just not robust, far better to ship a file
rather then an audio disk. I don't know if there is a standard file
format for describing exactly what pits go where on an audio disk,
but it there isn't there should be....
I was completely serious and sincere about everything I said, but I
can see
that this topic is a non-starter here.
Actually arguing for "generational loss" in a digital system is a non
starter here, because you didn't qualify that statement. Jitter at
the AD and DA clocks is well understood, but is ONLY an issue going
to or from analogue, all the other effects described in that paper
are down to bit errors during copying which can easily be detected,
or DSP doing what it does (with varying quality of results).
I was tryng to bring about a constructive discussion concerning
digital
fidelity and how best to improve it - but it seems like it has
elicited
more of a 'hold-the-fort' response instead.
That's too bad, because I am just interested in making good music
sound as
good as it possibly can, and demonstrating that independently produced
music - with OSS tools to whit - can equal or rival commercially
produced
music with their multi-million (billion?) dollar recording studios and
engineering departments.
Better plugins would help, silly things like lowpass filtering the
control signals in compressors so as to reduce aliasing in the gain
control stage,,,,
The real win however is better rooms, instruments, mikes and TALENT.
Seriously there are recordings that I will quite happily listen to
that have probably less then 50db SNR and are gone by 8Khz, any
modern recording chain can do better then that by a huge amount but
if the talent on either side of the mic doesn't know what to do with
itself then you will not get a result.
The tools (with the possible exception of mikes, speakers and rooms.
have not IMHO been the limiting factor for a long time.
Regards, Dan.
