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For All the Hi Rez Nay Sayers and Misinformed..watch this

83.170.97.21

Posted on March 28, 2014 at 20:05:07
Sprezza Tura
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Posts: 4585
Location: New York City
Joined: August 24, 2012
Here is a podcast on Home Theater Geeks with one of the most knowledgeable recording engineers in the business, Allen Sides from Ocean Way Studio.

Covers:

-The different sampling rates, and why 44.1 is NOT as good as 192 Khz

-DSD

-The lack of controls and audible differences between what happens in the recording studio and the final product

-Provenance has ALWAYS been a problem..even with analog...when without the artist's or engineer's knowledge, multi generation, non approved masters used for production.

-Pono

+ More

 

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Start at the 8 minute mark, posted on March 28, 2014 at 21:58:17
Metralla
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Skip the first 8 minutes.


Regards,
Geoff

 

barking mad, posted on March 28, 2014 at 22:38:58
mbnx01
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This guy is a lunatic. 'I have never made a copy of a cd that didn't sound worse'.

Right.



'A lie is halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on'. -Mark Twain

 

RE: barking mad, posted on March 29, 2014 at 02:56:19
Erdo
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Actually he is not. He is a remarkable audio engineer who has achieved great things in his profession.

He has a lot of experience and talks about them honestly and shares a lot of worthwhile knowledge from a lot of different audio (recording) points of view in this interview.

His mixing of the Joni Mitchell album, about 15 years ago, did produce a great opportunity in the early days of SA-CD development to demonstrate the quality of the DSD record playback system. And specially also the quality of 5.1 surround for music. I was there, when Philips and Sony demonstrated the recording playback DSD system to promote this for SA-CD to recording professionals in LA, and it supported my own experiences recording classical music, that SA-CD with surround sound has a great advantage sonically over anything else in the consumer audio world. It has put SA-CD in a special place all these years, and only now there are serious consumer alternatives that are coming close in quality.

The problems with CD pressings and getting different quality cd’s did (does?) exist, but in my view mainly have to do with jitter and the sensitivity of different cd players to this jitter problem. The bits do not change, so I do also think that you can copy a cd (or better a digital file) and get exactly the same result. The part of the system producing the CD(r) hardcopy and the players affected by reading/jitter issues are the things that could have a degrading effect on the sound.

He has many other great things to say about audio and being a very sensitive dedicated professional engineer, I would trust his subjective judgement on many of his stories. Very often he can substantiate them with a technical explanation.

He is an important and (hopefully) influential contributor to the audio industry.

 

RE: barking mad, posted on March 29, 2014 at 08:26:21
Sprezza Tura
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+1.

Frank Sinatra was VERY particular about his engineers and producers. He NEVER worked with "lunatics".

Some of the best sounding records every were cut at Ocean Way.

 

RE: barking mad, posted on March 29, 2014 at 08:28:17
Sprezza Tura
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He was referring to CD deck to Cd deck and he is correct, especially the older ones. He was NOT referring to ripping a copy to a hard drive.

 

RE: barking mad, posted on March 29, 2014 at 09:25:25
mbnx01
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I was with him right up till he started talking about how he can't make a digital copy of a file without being able to hear the difference.

At that point he became like one of those people who think the Queen of England is a lizard from Alpha Centauri. The internet is full of those people.


'A lie is halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on'. -Mark Twain

 

Fascinating, posted on March 29, 2014 at 10:30:37
layman
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Location: Washington, D.C.
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I think that pressed SACDS (given adequate mastering and authoring) sound incredibly close to live music, so its really interesting to hear a sound engineer say that the 1st generation DSD master files sounds even closer to the live feed.

I would love to get my hands on some DSD studio masters to hear what he is talking about.

Moreover, I really appreciate what he says about sound reproduction, speakers and dispersion as his experience in these matters mirrors my own. I too am not a fan of speakers that "beam" sound or change their dispersion pattern with frequency.

Those speakers behind him (that are flat to 16 Hz) must sound amazing!

 

How is it possible work with digital files, posted on March 29, 2014 at 10:56:45
oldmkvi
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without copying them?

 

RE: How is it possible work with digital files, posted on March 29, 2014 at 11:04:04
layman
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Location: Washington, D.C.
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Good question.

I assume that the sound engineer was saying that the process of authoring and pressing discs from the master file results in sonic degradation.

I assume that digital copies of the studio master file itself retain more of the fidelity of the original.

 

RE: How is it possible work with digital files, posted on March 29, 2014 at 11:15:53
oldmkvi
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Posts: 10574
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Also Interesting!
Some say that getting the optical pickup out of the playback
chain is good.
The new Sony Z1 is a File Player, but can only play copies that are transferred from the Computer.
Reviews are pretty good on it.

 

RE: barking mad, posted on March 29, 2014 at 12:45:11
ted_b
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Hearing Allen demo his own master tape of one of his great recordings, like Count Basie's 88 Basie Street, on his larger HT2's or HT1's at CES over the past few years was a real blow-back-your-hair treat. Absolutely no distortion at killer live levels. I seek his stuff out every show.

I spent some time talking with him at this year's CES and we moaned and groaned about most peoples' average music experience: Sirius/XM quality (mono, compressed, etc) and Mp3...just as he does here on the podcast.

I was at Gus's Sony room last year when Allen heard his Joni Mitchell Both Sides Now DSD multichannel playback for the first time in many many years. He was almost in tears. It was a very cool experience.

I admire Allen, with his incredible resume, to come out and say that there are some things we just can't measure (or yet to explain)....cuz Lord knows, he's a measuring monster.

I have the privilege of hearing the true raw DSD pre-edits of Channel Classics DSF recordings (as I work with NativeDSD) and will say that they are indeed a slightly better rendition that that which later gets put out for sale (download or SACD). Not that the final product is chopped liver, but a first gen of DSD (more analog than digital, frankly) is indeed a jewel. Go figure.

 

This asylum is full of the "barking mad"., posted on March 29, 2014 at 13:12:36
Tony Lauck
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"This guy is a lunatic. 'I have never made a copy of a cd that didn't sound worse'."

A top rate recording engineer is going to be "barking mad". They won't be successful unless they have exceptional hearing and have trained themselves to instantly recognize subtle defects in equipment or recordings. Second rate engineers lack this competence and will simply refuse to hear defects that are "impossible". The same can be said of audiophiles. Those who believe that "bits are just bits", "all amplifiers sound the same", etc.,are unlikely to assemble and adjust playbsck systems that are first rate.

There is a reason why this place is called an Audio Asylum.


Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar

 

RE: This asylum is full of the "barking mad"., posted on March 30, 2014 at 09:04:16
Sprezza Tura
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You hit it on the head.

I will trust someone who has heard some of the great performers of our time point blank, unamplified and un-miced and compared to the same on the very best recording gear available over any pseudo expert on these boards.

 

RE: barking mad, posted on March 30, 2014 at 09:04:45
Sprezza Tura
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Location: New York City
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Thanks for posting..

Great read.

 

RE: barking mad, posted on March 31, 2014 at 06:53:28
Fitzcaraldo215
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But, Ted, don't you also agree that SACD's ripped to a hard drive sound better than the shiny plastic version? Everyone I know who has heard the difference thinks so. Not by a lot, but by a noticeable amount in A -B comparisons.

The issue is the plastic medium, though it has served us well for many years, just is not quite as stable in real time playback - servo mechanisms, transmission issues, etc. The bits are all there, but the timing might be subtly messed up during playback. That's essentially Erdo's jitter thing.

I am quite confident that it can be conclusively proven that in a digital copy, regardless of the media involved, bits is bits - by the bit, by the word or by the sector. It is not the copy. The only issues are timing effects in real time playback for different media and, of course, in subjective perceptions, based on imagined notions of digital bits suffering "degradation" in successive copies, analog-style. They just don't.

 

RE: barking mad, posted on March 31, 2014 at 10:59:27
ted_b
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Fitz,
I think the first, and main, reason that ripped DSD (i.e file-based playback) is better than listening to the same via SACD disc is...er...the player. An SACD player, in 90+% of the installations, is a jack-of-all-trades universal player with very little of its price-point (limited to begin with)invested in the analog stage and power supplies that follow what is usually a run of the mill SABRE DAC chip. Yes, the newer Oppos do better, and someone out there prolly owns a freaking Ayre $10k player....but by and large the DSD playback systems of the first 30 years of that format were limited (except maybe the flagship monsters created back at the inception). Now we have dedicated DSD-capable DACs, external power supplies, experienced design considerations (multibit designs, modern FPGA designs, proprietary one bit chips, even chipless analog filtering designs). Kind of the same argument as cd player vs dedicated 16/44 DAC playback.

Bit is bits, yes...but it ain't just bits. Obviously.

 

RE: barking mad, posted on March 31, 2014 at 12:07:13
Fitzcaraldo215
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Ted - you are right, of course. But, I was not even referring to DAC differences, which can be substantial. So, even on a decent Oppo, USB playback of a rip from a thumb or hard drive sounds slightly better in our humble opinion than does playing the same SACD disk. DACs and everything else in the playback chain are identical. Other players might exhibit even less of this phenomenon, small though it might be in the first place via Oppo.

But, again, I have every reason to believe that the bits are identical, as they would also be for downloads of the same recording. This points to the electro-mechanical player mechanism for the plastic disk introducing subtle timing errors, aka jitter, in pulling those bits off of the disk, thereby affecting the d to a. However, it is insignificant enough not to lose any sleep over.

 

What Software do you use, posted on March 31, 2014 at 13:12:28
oldmkvi
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to rip an SACD to a hard drive?
I'm thinking of getting the Sony Z1 File Player.
It would be awesome to load my SACDs as Files too, not just DSD Downloads.

 

RE: What Software do you use, posted on March 31, 2014 at 13:41:39
ted_b
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Custom hacked early model PS3. It's the only solution unless you own a Sonoma.

 

Thank you! nt, posted on March 31, 2014 at 13:58:20
oldmkvi
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/

 

RE: Thank you! nt, posted on March 31, 2014 at 22:14:34
ted_b
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PM me for the guide, etc.

 

RE: barking mad, posted on April 1, 2014 at 13:37:06
Bruce B
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The DSD files downloaded are the same exact files as the Edit Master.

The only differences you are hearing come from the DAC or player.

 

RE: barking mad, posted on April 1, 2014 at 17:13:01
ted_b
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Bruce,
? I think you are responding to a different post. I already made the exact same comment earlier down below about edit masters (it's all about the player vs DAC). In this post I was commenting on how much I like Jared's session tapes before they get channel rebalanced, edited in DXD, etc..not anything you did. The mch channel balances may be different, etc. There are a host of things. I like the raw "demos". They are not the edit masters, Bruce. I know what the process is...I am part of it.
Ted

 

RE: barking mad, posted on April 2, 2014 at 14:36:03
Tony Lauck
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"In this post I was commenting on how much I like Jared's session tapes before they get channel rebalanced, edited in DXD, etc."

The one example I heard, I agree with you. The original session tapes had better sound, but all things considered, the released version had better musical balance and I preferred it. Also, it's been my experience that it is generally not a wise move to argue with singers regarding the level their contribution appears in the final mix. :-)

Part of the problem is that the extra stage of production necessarily damages the purity of the signal path. With DSD at the very least it will include an extra stage of delta-sigma modulation, a.k.a. noise shaping. Even in PCM which has better generation properties than DSD, there can be problems when format conversions add multiple stages of noise-shaping, even though it only affects low order bits.


Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar

 

RE: For All the Hi Rez Nay Sayers and Misinformed..watch this, posted on April 3, 2014 at 10:16:06
Fitzcaraldo215
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Best and most informed response to this is at:

 

RE: For All the Hi Rez Nay Sayers and Misinformed..watch this, posted on April 4, 2014 at 21:30:39
c1ferrari
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Thanks for posting the link...very informative.

Vbr,
Sam

 

RE: For All the Hi Rez Nay Sayers and Misinformed..watch this, posted on April 4, 2014 at 21:35:38
Sprezza Tura
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Location: New York City
Joined: August 24, 2012
You are welcome.

 

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