heywood on 9/12/2009 at 03:27
Quote Posted by Martin Karne
Of course, what I mean is what is the point on capturing useless sounds that are not even on a level that can be heard.
Up to 90KHz can be captured on a digital media DVD Audio, and well some people claim only noise comes out of SACD on higher frequencies enough to be measured as such on spectral analysis.
Even if people claim to hear sounds down to 8Hz is more likely to be a superior harmonic than anything else, as well at the other end of the spectrum, anything higher than 25KHz most likely is heard as inferior harmonics.
Martin,
I think the main benefit of the higher sampling rates of DVD-Audio and SACD is that you don't have a steep reconstruction filter right at the edge of the audio band. Back when the CD format was established, audio engineers were pretty naive about the effects of brick wall filters. So they've spent the last 3 decades diddling with alternative filter designs trying to do the least harm within the limits of CD's 44.1 KHz sampling rate.
I agree with you that you don't need to record or reproduce anything higher than 25KHz. I might even say 20KHz. But it does seem to help if the anti-aliasing and reconstruction filters are out of that range.
Quote Posted by Aja
I have a lo-cut switch and I don't really find it necessary unless listening at unneighbourly volumes. That base hum of the turntable disappears under all but the quietest music (in which case the surface noise of the needle usually still drowns it out).
The lo-cut is also useful to prevent low frequency acoustic feedback at high volumes. You know, you crank the volume, the bass shakes the turntable, the cartridge picks up the vibration, and the stereo amplifies it back through the speakers, etc.
Martin Karne on 9/12/2009 at 14:50
Yes brick wall filters and they're out of that range falling between 384-768KHz In the SACD there is "sound" up to 100KHz with a 2.8MHz of bitstream sampling. (digital attenuation occurs for anything higher than 100KHz).
Yet these products exist (dvd audio-sacd) because some bone head claims to "hear it" in vynil and tapes, and that older media cannot reproduce anything that high. Not even 30KHz.
heywood on 10/12/2009 at 02:52
Lots of people prefer vinyl, but only the nuts think it's because they can hear ultrasonics on vinyl that are missing on CD. The more reasoned vinyl fans I know tend to prefer the smoothness or 'liquidity" or the supposedly bigger spatial perspective. They complain about a hardness or "etched" quality to CD playback.
I suspect a lot of that is due to the reconstruction filter requirements of CD. If you want the full frequency response out to 20 KHz, you need a brick wall filter. And if there's any recorded signal content out there it will make the reconstruction filter ring. I think that is the source of the hardness because I've had several CD players now with different filter settings and the slow roll-off option always sounds smoother than the fast roll-off brick wall option, at the expense of muting the top octave a bit. And the people who prefer vinyl also seem to like non-oversampling, filterless DACs, which have no reconstruction filter to ring but as a consequence they roll-off the top octave quite a bit and pollute the audio band will low level aliasing products.
Personally, I'll take hi-res digital (e.g. DVD-Audio or SACD) over CD or vinyl. That's what sounds the best to me. But I welcome the resurgence and trendiness of vinyl, because hopefully it will put more attention on recording quality. IMHO, the biggest problem with the music industry today is not the technology, but the recording, mixing, and mastering engineers who compress and equalize the crap out of everything.
Martin Karne on 10/12/2009 at 07:55
But of course softer dynamics are not in the digital domain, every level change is a brutal +6 or -6dB.
I like DVD audio for multi channel music, and I content with digital remastering for CDs, you know those CD players that are supposed to add extra resolution and transform magically any 16bit CD in to a 24bit data stream with some weird codecs and make it sound more open and transparent. (if is even possible to fill those zeroes from bits 17 through 24)
As for Sony and SACD, no thanks, keep it.
And yes there are some sound engineers nowadays that only care for how loud can it sound your new disc? I have measured up to -6dB of RMS in a CD, too much compression.
:nono:
Aja on 10/12/2009 at 08:12
I bought a $300 Marantz CD player last year, and apart from having a nice headphone amp and a large display, it does absolutely nothing that my old Pioneer dvd player couldn't (okay it has a pitch control, but that's cheesy). There's no audible improvement as far as I can tell, though I suppose I never actually hooked them up side by side (I hate A/B comparisons, especially when the differences are practically negligible). I'd kinda hoped that maybe the new hardware would be able to read through some of my old CDs which seem to have oxidized in small places (my DVD-ROM drive can read over these flaws) but nope, didn't help at all.
heywood on 12/12/2009 at 15:31
I have a Pioneer DV-59AVi. It's a universal player. It has CD upsampling options called "Hi-Bit" and "Legato Pro". The latter has 4 different filter options. I can hear differences with and without CD upsampling and when changing filter options, but they are very subtle. Nothing like the differences between CD and SACD or DVD-A. DVD-A in particular sounds very good on this machine, even in stereo. Too bad it never caught on.
Kuuso on 12/12/2009 at 16:41
Quote Posted by Martin Karne
And yes there are some sound engineers nowadays that only care for how loud can it sound your new disc? I have measured up to -6dB of RMS in a CD, too much compression.
:nono:
I would say this is more to do with labels and their executives demanding loudness, since the mastering phase is usually at the hands of the label instead of the artist.
