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In Reply to: RE: lets put this in a bit of perspective :) posted by Penguin on June 12, 2012 at 09:09:33
There is absolutely no reason why recordings of acoustic music should have any compression whatsoever. Any decent system should be able to deal with this The biggest problem isn't with the recordings, its with the culture of compressed music and multi-tasking. People should listen to orchestral music with 100 percent of their attention. I used to turn off my refrigerator so as to lower the room noise level.
Fifty years ago I used to wish that the idiot engineers and producers who occasionally compressed recordings would be murdered. Now I see that there are many "music lovers" who are in need of the same treatment.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Follow Ups:
not advocating for compression, just stating the realities of recordings, room acoustics, and real dynamic range of music. 70 to 80 db is pretty much all you get on playback, even if your hi res digital chain has a stated S.N of 120 db. Any wider range will make you reach for the volume control to either compensate for room noise or distortion. It would also be interesting to get some real dynamic range numbers for various pieces as they are performed in real environments. Having a very wide dynamic range available to the recording engineer is a good thing, make it possible to make the recording sound as realistic as possible. Pretty certain almost nothing has that wide a dynamic range :). As a practical matter the peaks should be as close to the max signal level as possible thus allowing the quietest passages to be well above the noise flow of the system, and give the quiet passages the maximum possible resolution. Compression is a non linear function therefore is a form of distortion.
dee
;-D
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
quote by Kurt Vonnegut
Reading this thread I do not think that anybody is asking for compressed music. I think that they just find BIS SACD's to be at level that are a little low. I never heard anybody complaining about "Living Stereo" SACD's even if they are probably compressed. The fact is that BIS seems to be the only label that is controversial. I also do not find BIS SACD's to be more dynamic than the other labels. In my opinion they sound less dynamic.
The "Living Stereo" recordings should not be used as a reference to discuss dynamic range. They are great recordings, to be sure, but they show the technical limitations of the era.
The classic RCA "Living Stereo" recordings were made on magnetic tape. Because of limited dynamic range in this pre-Dolby period most of these recordings had fortissimo passages at high levels, which caused the tape to dynamically compress these peaks. In extreme cases, there is tape saturation distortion. This is obvious in the Reiner Mahler 4, for example, where tape distortion is present in every format of this recording that I have, starting with pre-recorded tape and LP. (I don't have the SACD.)
IMO, it is inappropriate to use any analog tape sourced recordings from this era as a benchmark for natural dynamic range. What you hear is not what the musicians played unless you are also hearing a lot of tape hiss, indicating that the engineer preferred noise over distortion and compression. When I was in college I worked at a radio station and used to record Boston Symphony concerts over leased lines live from Symphony Hall and Sanders Theater. The tapes we made (using Ampex full track 601 and 350 recorders) were never equivalent to the live microphone feed because of noise, distortion and dynamic compression. Today, one can achieve a high level of transparency with digital recordings, e.g. with DSD128.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
I do not worry about technicalities; I just enjoy what sounds right to me.
And Yes I do have a preference for vintage performances and sound.
Lots of "Living stereo" sounds more exiting to my ears, even with all the warts.
It is like audio gear specs! do they give you an idea of how it will sound?
From my experience; no.
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