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In Reply to: RE: It depends on the DAC posted by b.l.zeebub on March 31, 2014 at 04:46:45:
"If the OS does make a major difference you should be able to easily tell if something was recorded using SADiE (Windows) or Logic (MacOS)."
Not necessarily so. Here's why.
Capturing analog signals in digital form is fundamentally different from converting a digital stream back to analog. The reason is the information flow from the ADC to the computer is strictly one way. There is no information flow needed from the converter to the workstation and there could be an isolation barrier that allowed signals to flow in only one way to the workstation. (Some of the optical interfaces have this property.) Assuming that there is physical separation from the analog preamps and ADC and power isolation (as could be done by battery power or other means) then there is no way the computer can affect the analog circuitry and the converter, which fully determines the bits that are sent to the work station and recorded on storage.
Going the other way, the situation is different. Information must flow from the digital domain to the analog domain, namely the bits in the computer have to somehow make it to the DAC so they can be converted into analog. Since these bits are in reality an analog waveform, unwanted information is passed on this connection in addition to the desired stream of 0's and 1's. There is an "ideal" waveform that is a function of the 0's and 1's in the file that is being played back, but in addition to this there are timing variations and amplitude variations and (depending on the physical signalling) there may be other signal paths in which unwanted information (noise) can make it from the computer to the DAC (example: common mode noise). It is difficult to isolate the desired bits from the unwanted noise and doing so well requires a high level of engineering skill across multiple disciplines.
One way to remove the digital noise of the workstation from the playback equation is to capture the digital output of the workstation in a file. At that point the workstation can be powered down or playback moved a continent away from the source of digital noise. You may hear differences between the different workstations and operating systems, but only when playing back on them, not when playing back the recordings made on them on a different system.
Here are two exceptions.
Many recordings are processed through multiple levels of analog to digital conversion. For example mic pre to ADC to file, file to DAC to analog mixer, analog mixer to ADC to file, file to DAC to analog mastering chain, analog mastering chain to ADC to final file. In this case, it may be possible to hear differences as a function of the workstations that are running DACs in the production chain. However, the best recordings are going to be made without unnecessary conversions and these are the gold standard for audiophile recordings. These recordings are either made with one microphone per channel or passed through an analog mixing desk prior to the initial analog to digital conversion. As a result, none of the effects you mention will be operative.
If the workstations are used to do anything more than straight capture and "razor blade" edits then any digital signal processing will affect the results. Here the issue is not the underlying operating system but the specific digital plugins that are used and the settings the engineer has chosen. Again, this is a sub-optimal case when it comes to recording quality, since the need for this processing has already shown that something was less than ideal in the original recording. (This is the norm for non-acoustic music, but with the better record labels it is the exception for classical music.)
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
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- RE: It depends on the DAC - Tony Lauck 09:15:02 03/31/14 (0)
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