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Why 24-bit/192kHz music files make no sense - and may be bad for you!
40hz:
If the speakers were "crazy expensive" as well they may have played a large part in the increase in music quality.
-Innuendo (March 11, 2012, 12:11 PM)
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They would. As long as the cartridge was up to what the speakers could deliver. Best speakers in the world won't sound much better that standard quality ones if the cartridge is middle of the road spec-wise. The ultra-delicate and expensive "floating magnet" designs commanded a premium - and were well worth it IMHO. Best way to waste an investment in expensive speakers was to plug a turntable with a cheap ceramic cartridge into the tuner. Whereas upgrading the turntable almost always resulted in a nicer sounding system. Usually that's what made you realize you needed better speakers.
Poor quality in = poor quality out. Even before the advent of digital that was true. ;D
That's the challenge of creating a good audio system. You can't isolate any single element in a signal chain and ignore all the others. They're all heavily dependent on each other. That's why half the time you went out to buy a new component - you came home with most of an entirely new stereo system.
Boy did the audio shops (remember those?) love that! 8)
superboyac:
40, your digital vs. analog analogy (never realized how close those two words were...who's the latin expert here? what's the relation?) is actually very clear. There is a discreteness in digital music that removes whatever it is that I call the soulfulness of real life. It's really not noticeable unless you A/B really high end stuff...but I sometimes wonder what the conditioning has done to my ears. I do enjoy listening to a record once in a while, but it's probably just the nostalgia more so than anything technical.
superboyac:
I personally think LPs sound better because what you're hearing is the actual music and not a digital resynthesis of it. I think there are subliminal qualities and cues in analog music reproduction (that certain 'breathiness' or 'air' as it's been called) that make LPs sound more natural to our ears. I don't really know how to describe it other than to say when you first cue an LP, just before the music starts you can hear "the room." That empty but not totally silent "space" that the music starts playing in a second or so later. That ambient space is something digital recordings don't have. Digital is pristine. Almost too pure at times. (Which is why some noise often gets added to a digital mix just to remove some of that "too clean" quality.)
The other thing that I think makes a big difference is the mastering. With analog multitrack tape, there was always some slight "bleed" between the tracks. Nothing can be totally isolated on an analog master tape. Digital, on the other hand, totally isolates each track. I don't know if everybody hears it this way, but to me CDs have this odd effect of making each track sound like it's in a separate "layer." Almost like there's separate "planes" that each of the tracks are on. And they're "stacked." You don't get a normal sense of 3D in the audio space. On some level you have to connect the dots and create it yourself.
If analog's soundspace can be imagined as a cube, digital (again to my ears) sounds more like stacked 2D layers.
Something like this:
(see attachment in previous post)
I don't know if it makes any sense the way I'm describing it, but to me it's almost like you're missing that continuous Z-axis with digital. I'm aware of discreet layers in the Z-axis of the sound when I pay attention to it. It doesn't "mush together" like an analog recording does. And like sound does in the real world.
And I think that on a largely subconscious level, a part of your brain detects it and thinks there's something wrong until you learn to ignore it. Much like you learn to ignore parallax when you wear glasses. You learn to look through them rather than focus on the front or back of the lens surface.
I think you teach your brain to do something similar when listening to digital music playback.
Hope some of this makes sense. I have a hard time trying to communicate something as subjective as this. :)
-40hz (March 11, 2012, 01:18 AM)
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Actually, I think you described it rather well!
It's a weird thing. The discrete-ness of digital...it does remove some gray area stuff. Like pulse width modulator...it can approximate functionally well enough, but it's not true continuity. And while we may not be aware of whatever is "missing", I can't shake the feeling that I can "feel" it.
IainB:
There is a discreteness in digital music that removes whatever it is that I call the soulfulness of real life. It's really not noticeable unless you A/B really high end stuff...but I sometimes wonder what the conditioning has done to my ears. I do enjoy listening to a record once in a while, but it's probably just the nostalgia more so than anything technical.
-superboyac (March 11, 2012, 07:57 PM)
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It's a weird thing. The discrete-ness of digital...it does remove some gray area stuff. Like pulse width modulator...it can approximate functionally well enough, but it's not true continuity. And while we may not be aware of whatever is "missing", I can't shake the feeling that I can "feel" it.
-superboyac (March 11, 2012, 08:59 PM)
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I think the term for this is "ambience":
1. the mood, character, quality, tone, atmosphere, etc., particularly of an environment or milieu: The restaurant had a delightful ambiance.
2. that which surrounds or encompasses; environment.
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When I had near-perfect hearing, I could easily detect the difference in ambience between (say) attending a BBC recording session of a choral work, and hearing that recording played back in analogue either on FM stereo or a vinyl LP record in stereo. The LP usually had some recording or playback noise from the medium used as well (which I never got on a digital CD recording.)
I also could hear the difference in real sound quality between cassette tape playback and 8-track cartridge playback. The former was rubbish, and the latter was usually superb.
For real sound quality I also preferred stereo FM playback to vinyl LP, but since the LPs were ubiquitous and could be played at will, I ended up mostly listening to LPs.
Similarly, with CDs, there was a definite and detectable difference between attending a BBC recording session of a choral work, and hearing that recording played back via CD, and I attributed that to a lack of the ambience that was there. A good example would be where the organ notes climb downstairs into the bass realms during parts of Brahms' Deutsches Requiem. If you were there, then you could actually feel your body resonating with the bass tones from those huge organ-pipes - vibrating in your skull and your body generally. I'm unsure whether it is possible to ever capture the full effect of the lowest and highest musical registers in any kind of recording, even now - except (arguably) vinyl LPs.
To capture the ambience best, I suspect you probably need something like a binaural recording, but even that probably has limitations.
40hz:
I think the term for this is "ambience":
1. the mood, character, quality, tone, atmosphere, etc., particularly of an environment or milieu: The restaurant had a delightful ambiance.
2. that which surrounds or encompasses; environment.
-IainB (March 12, 2012, 04:58 AM)
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Thank you IainB! :Thmbsup: :Thmbsup: That was the word I was looking for. (And which is funny, because I alluded to it in my earlier ramble - even though I didn't pick up on it!):
I don't really know how to describe it other than to say when you first cue an LP, just before the music starts you can hear "the room." That empty but not totally silent "space" that the music starts playing in a second or so later. That ambient space is something digital recordings don't have.
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Sad when general memory loss also starts affecting your ability to recall vocabulary. ;D
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