[geeks] Working Music vs Thinking Music

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Mon, Jun 24, 2002 at 09:40:30PM -0400, dave at cca.org wrote:

> You get into murky water here though, since cutting the master
> for vinyl is a very tricky process, it was done by professionals
> with incredibly good ears for subtleties. CDs are cut by companies
> that think there's nothing to it more than "cp audio-file /dev/cd".
> Lots of horrible mistakes are made in CD production that aren't inherent
> to the technology.

That could be it.  I'm not too involved with professional recording.
 
> True. More bits will give you better dynamic range. But the question
> is how much dynamic range can the human ear pick up? How many bits
> do you actually need? 
> 
> If you can - generate an audio CD with a sequence of sine waves, 1 bit
> high, 2 bits high, 3 bits high, etc. See which ones you can hear,
> and if you can hear the difference, etc. (This might also show off
> limitations or bad design in the DACs.)

I'll have to whip out a program to play such sounds for testing one of
these days.  I'm not sure I have anything handy that would generate

directly to the sound card.

> As an aside - it is good to record and do studio work at higher
> resolution than the final product, to avoid roundoff errors. So
> 24 bits in the studio makes sense.

That is always the case.  I'd like to see a 32bit fp pipeline
introduced (a growing mount of stuff uses that internally).

What I wish I could afford is a nice tape deck. Say 2" reel-reel
24track.  Then you can worry about all this stuff as a second pass
after recording.

Although, now that I'm thinking about it, there would have to be a way
to build a compressor tied to an AD so that the AD would never clip no
matter what you threw at it (within reason)...  I wonder what it would
take to design such an AD box...
 
> Ah yes - a few thousand dollars will get you a really nice sounding
> system. That's sane. When I say "audiophile" I'm thinking of the
> $100,000 and up systems.

I didn't know people spent that much enless there were doing custom
construction home theatre's (you know, have a room built with all the
theatre amenities).

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd