Audio Myths Workshop

[hollowsun]

I can completely accept that it may have been the quality of her CD player, but it wasn't her imagination, and it wasn't at all meaningless. She bought a bunch of CD's and classical CD's are never "overcompressed". They are almost always cleanly recorded with an ear towards maximum fidelity.

And there weren't "100 possible reasons" why she complained about it and ultimately went back to tapes and LP's. She didn't like the sound of her digital system for classical music, period.

Possibly because she was used to - and simply preferred - the sound of her old tapes , cassettes, vinyl, whatever.

My Mrs loves old movies, old black and white things with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra and all that. She likes the old tapes of them she has too. She doesn't like CDs - thinks they are too bright. She is USED to the muffled and muted sounds of those old recordings. Likewise with modern film soundtracks. Muffled and muted 1940's recordings is what she's used to and what she prefers/likes to listen to.

Similarly, some years ago, I gave her mother some old cassette radio thing I had. She had some cassettes and (I dunno) turned the balance control hard left (or right). She doesn't like stereo. But she's is 70-something and was raised on mono wirelesses and gramophones. Stereo is alien to her and sounds 'wrong' (and one could also factor into that the fact that the old wirelesses and gramophones were big valve things with big speakers, not the micro IC things we have now with small, multi-way speakers). She doesn't like stereo and prefers to listen to mono.

Both situations drive me nuts but there is no persuading them!

In other words, people have personal preferences... which can influence their judgement.

Back in the day when digital audio came about, many pros complained it was harsh and unforgiving. Maybe that was true (early convertors were a bit shite) ... or - more significantly - maybe it simply wasn't what they were used to listening to ... so they disliked it and dismissed it and said so and that shit stuck (and maybe continues to).

But I think all that Ethan is trying to say is that for MOST people in MOST applications recording MOST types of music in MOST environments, his advice is simply don't get hung up on the specs because they are - largely - bollocks. MOST gear now will record MOST things pretty well and MOST gear will reproduce that fairly well ... mostly.

Of course, SOME boutique gear will (might) perform better and give better results (and I don't think he is knocking that) but I think all he's saying is don't knock yourself out over it. I think he is suggesting that if you're not happy with your recordings, a £3,000 pre-amp is unlikely to cure that, neither is a 192kHz/24-bit signal path. Room treatment, proper choice of mic and its placement, proper observation of gain structures (not to mention using decent instruments played by good players who have rehearsed playing a good arrangement), etc., will give better results than simply patching a higher spec'd audio I/O or boutique pre-amp/compressor/whatever in a typical home (i.e. bedroom) studio. And I have to agree with that!

And at the end of the day, content is everything and the gear or the specmanship is immaterial!!

Cheers,


Steve

[A.M. Gold]

I take your first point but she was very familiar with the live sound of strings. If what Ethan has said, or strongly implied (as I read it) was true, then she should have heard a fairly strongly faithful representation of live string sound from the CD's but that wasn't what she reported.

Ethan has brought in some older sound cards, like a 10 year old Sound Blaster card, and said there is "nothing wrong with them", but I have to point out we never touched on 18 year old CD players, so it's possible he might blame that anecdote on the CD player and not the woman's ears/brain. However, he has said something to the effect that any soundcard (i.e. converter) that would produce noticeable artifacts or other problem issues that would mar the "pefect" sound of 16/44.1 audio should be considered to be "broken".

[DevonB]

there is no perceptible difference between CD quality audio and a live analog feed.

but where is it saying that there is no difference in the video? I would assume that there IS a difference: the analog one would be colored/saturated in the worst case (or wait, what are you calling live analog feed?)

Ethan said in the Womb thread that there shouldn't be a perceptible difference in the raw source material and a recording made at 16/44.1, that they should, for all intents and purposes, be identical to anyone listening to both. The "live analog feed" is just the source coming from a microphone plugged into a mixer, which hasn't been recorded in any way.

Ethan says they sound identical, and that nothing is lost or distorted in any way by digital recording.

Essentially that is saying that CD quality audio recording is "perfect", that it can't be any better (which nullifies any recording-based need for 96 KHz or even 24 bit audio---he thinks any sense of a need for those is based purely on propaganda and bias as well).

I'm saying that's not right. I have audio to illustrate why I think it's not right (and I wish more people would do that on here... So many of these arguements are terribly pointless without anything to back them up.)

I ripped this directly off the CD I have with a book I own 'Practical Art Of Motion Picture Sound.' It gives 5 different recording examples of gun fire and glass breaking. Each recorder used identicial microphones mounted together from identical perspectives. No audio processing employed on these examples. I intentionally left it as a .wav file ripped with Exact Audio Copy so there would be no commentary about MP3 degredation. The example tells you each bit of media it was recorded to initially.

http://www.devonbrent.com/PracticalArtO ... eSound.wav

Devon

[sinzero]

However, he has said something to the effect that any soundcard (i.e. converter) that would produce noticeable artifacts or other problem issues that would mar the "pefect" sound of 16/44.1 audio should be considered to be "broken".

iirc, when he used the word broken he was responding to someone saying that cards sounded pinched the hotter you recorded. So, he was saying that if you record at -1 dB FS and it sounds pinched, the card is broken.

btw, wtf does pinched mean? never read/heard that one before

[A.M. Gold]

They also went through some back and forth about other measurements and I thought he was saying he saw nothing at all wrong with the budget sound card from ten years ago. He seemed to be saying it should be as good as anything else. I never got the impression he was making any allowances for any noticeable differences between different converters, but maybe I missed something.

[A.M. Gold]

btw, wtf does pinched mean? never read/heard that one before

I don't know, but it related to The Comte thinking digital sound was far from infallible below the point of obvious distortion.

Mixerman and Slipperman wisely stayed out of that thread, or never saw it, but I know for a fact that the only digital recording setup Mixerman can deal with is the RADAR, and that he hates the sound of recording to ProTools.

Slipperman has implied in some of his rants that everything about digital audio sucks, but I never heard him make a distinction between pure digital recording and other aspects of digital (ITB) processing and mixing, so he may have been referring to the latter.

[sinzero]

I'm saying that's not right. I have audio to illustrate why I think it's not right (and I wish more people would do that on here... So many of these arguements are terribly pointless without anything to back them up.)

I ripped this directly off the CD I have with a book I own 'Practical Art Of Motion Picture Sound.' ...

you are misunderstanding the point

what you should do is this... get a friend in your studio and put on a master tape you have lying around. record that digitally and leave both up. now have your friend switch back and forth (i.e., blind test) between playing the tape and the digital recording of that tape to see if you can consistently identify which is which

this essentially is the challenge test made in the womb thread

[A.M. Gold]

I think a better test would be to switch back and forth between a live monitor feed from a good analog mixing board and a monitor sound that has been passed through A/D/A conversion. I think the best way to test digital sound is to have the fullest frequency range possible and tape tends not to be as good as live in that respect.

[sinzero]

They also went through some back and forth about other measurements and I thought he was saying he saw nothing at all wrong with the budget sound card from ten years ago. He seemed to be saying it should be as good as anything else. I never got the impression he was making any allowances for any noticeable differences between different converters, but maybe I missed something.

well, sort of. Remember the pics he put up. They showed the cheap one performed worse than the mid-level one. But, as he repeatedly said elsewhere in the thread, the noise/artifacts/whatever was all too far down (-80?) for anyone to hear in a recording

[sinzero]

I think a better test would be to switch back and forth between a live monitor feed from a good analog mixing board and a monitor sound that has been passed through A/D/A conversion. I think the best way to test digital sound is to have the fullest frequency range possible and tape tends not to be as good as live in that respect.

that's just it, it doesn't matter cuz the idea is to test the fidelity of digital recording.

in the scenario I described, if one can't tell the difference between the master tape and the digital recording of that tape then high fidelity of digital is shown

[A.M. Gold]

well, sort of. Remember the pics he put up. They showed the cheap one performed worse than the mid-level one. But, as he repeatedly said elsewhere in the thread, the noise/artifacts/whatever was all too far down (-80?) for anyone to hear in a recording

Well, that's my point, though. A consistent theme of his has been "problems are too minuscule to perceive" so that's essentially the same as saying they don't exist when it comes to people complaining about sound quality.

[A.M. Gold]

that's just it, it doesn't matter cuz the idea is to test the fidelity of digital recording.

in the scenario I described, if one can't tell the difference between the master tape and the digital recording of that tape then high fidelity of digital is shown

I still think it's better to test on a live sound. Ethan's attitude is that there shouldn't be any kind of audio that digital can't capture with extreme fidelity so I would personally want to test it with a very full frequency range to really test what it is capable of, which is why tape wouldn't be my first choice as a raw sound. I suppose it wouldn't hurt to have tape in there too as part of the test, though.

[sinzero]

Well, that's my point, though. A consistent theme of his has been "problems are too minuscule to perceive" so that's essentially the same as saying they don't exist when it comes to people complaining about sound quality.

let's see if I understand you correctly...

so people are saying they can hear noise in a recording that's exists below -80dB?

[sinzero]

I still think it's better to test on a live sound. Ethan's attitude is that there shouldn't be any kind of audio that digital can't capture with extreme fidelity so I would personally want to test it with a very full frequency range to really test what it is capable of, which is why tape wouldn't be my first choice as a raw sound. I suppose it wouldn't hurt to have tape in there too as part of the test, though.

that's one of the things I find interesting. Isn't tape what people are arguing is best?

again iirc, weedywet's main point was that tape is best fidelity-wise

[A.M. Gold]

Weedy said tape was best fidelity wise, but there's no reason to test digital against another recording medium if you can test it against live sound. Introducing another recording medium just throws in another layer of removal from the original source. I don't think WW was saying that tape was so good that it lost nothing when compared to the live sound, just that digital was worse.

As far as hearing stuff at -80 db, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that I think they are chasing their tails in looking at measurements like that. Whatever is making digital sound problematic must be because of something else, or because of some complex combination of factors. My attitude is that when someone looks at an approach like Ethan's, his case looks solid, which is why I think he must not be looking in the right places, or there is some bigger picture he is missing. I'm not an electrical or acoustic engineer, though, so I can't make any technical argument for what that might be.