 
|
Audio Asylum Thread Printer Get a view of an entire thread on one page |
For Sale Ads |
|
|
Audio Asylum Thread Printer Get a view of an entire thread on one page |
For Sale Ads |
76.16.76.21
In Reply to: RE: Now you're running on premium! posted by clarkjohnsen on June 06, 2008 at 08:00:12
Hi Clark
Perfect sound forever, this is good for you, we are the government and we are here to help you, vote for me because I am always right and I never lie. Brought to you by the George L Tirebite’r for President campaign “Change, who cares what direction”
I try not to be involved with “marketing” which to me seems to have become partly a euphemism for “saying what ever is needed to get the money” except to recognize it.
In home audio, not being a life safety issue and not being easy to quantify, that “lying to you” approach has been used for some time with minimal legal hassles (except for the “peak power “ days of marketing insanity)
If it were shorting the weight of something (which is easily quantified) or measuring Watts then it is easier to say, BS .
AS for the question “What makes the CD sound inferior?”
I would ask a filter question or two.
Have you ever heard a CD that sounded horrid?
Have you ever heard a CD that sounded bad.
Have you ever heard one that sounded just OK?
Have you ever heard one that sounded decent?
Have you ever heard one that sounded pretty good ?
Have you ever heard one that sounded very good?
Have you ever heard even a second of anything on a CD that sounded amazingly good?
At each level you say “yes”, one is also saying that for the layers above, the limiting thing is not the storage medium but what was put on it.
So, I can’t answer “why a CD sounds bad” compared to a record, I could cite what the boundaries or limitations are but that isn’t sound.
What I have to go on is recording and playing back the original recordings that I experienced first hand and having an idea about how Tape vs 16/44 vs 24/96 stacks up when used that way.
This is pretty far from comparing a commercial CD and a commercial record I admit but is directly related to what the recording mediums can do.
I mentioned I fool around recording still and for me “stereo” has been my grail so to speak, same with speakers I guess.
I would like to e-mail you a sample of a “digital recording” in CD format, and have you listen to it with good headphones first and then your system. I would be curious what you thought of the sound. I think these will go on the web site when ever they are done messing with it.
I have a friend John who’s family is in an Irish folk music organization. On his son’s birthday, he had a small BBQ and a group of the kids from the heritage center put on a very informal musical performance. I asked John if I could drag the experimental microphone thing over and record and he said sure.
Understand, I set the mic array up and hit record period, there is noise from the people eating and talking but, for me that makes it like it really was.
Anyway, I’ll send you a snip return e-mail if you e-mail me. DanleylabsNOSPAM@comcast.net
Remove no spam
Best,
Tom Danley
Follow Ups:
"Have you ever heard even a second of anything on a CD that sounded amazingly good?"
I've heard seconds on end. Minutes. An hour or two even, and off very different discs. But here's the trick.
It had nothing to do with filters or the various commercial realizations based upon shared erroneous assumptions or even the recordings themselves, horrid as some may be.
One device and one alone (in my experience) transforms the CD into quality sound, the Memory Player from Nova Physics. The review linked below says it well for me, but every other review so far agrees. The experience, to repeat, is transformative.
While I have achieved a certain reputation as an opponent of CD sound, that was CD sound then , not now. You must read a column I wrote some years ago called "The Numbers Game". It begins:
In a way really it was a blessing that early digital sound sucked. Without that impetus the enormous progress in audio during the past two decades might never have happened—or would have occurred more slowly. For out of that bleak, despairing era of expansionist digital hegemony, when any mitigation of its frozen-in-amber numerics seemed an impossibility, several realizations emerged that might otherwise have eluded us: The fine art of playback; the resurrected glory of the LP; the fallibility of audio "professionals" and academics; and our own susceptibility to delivered opinion.
http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue8/diaries.htm
On the second topic: "I would like to e-mail you a sample of a 'digital recording' in CD format, and have you listen to it with good headphones first and then your system. I would be curious what you thought of the sound." Unfortunately (for the experiment) I abhor headphones and have no means to record a download. Other than that... I enjoy the play.
clark
Hi Clark
You are a fine writer I see, good enough to do that professionally.
Often I feel like the “bulldozer chasing a butterfly” when I write, unsure if what I mean will make it through the arrangement of words that came to mind.
As a professional, it appears you have a “posture” that you write to and that makes sense.
I am struck that you wouldn’t be able to audition a digital source and never use headphones however.
To be clear, I’m not who you write for, I don’t care about what the industry believes, if I ever buy hifi gear it is used, most of my life I have built or repaired / resurrected the electronics and built many of the speakers I have had. I work in audio and have most of my life but I am not the hifi market.
As an inventor I have had to follow a different path, one where you frequently compare things side by side. Doing this, one finds that “technical reality” is a changing landscape one must accommodate the latest information, the thought that “nothing has changed” since the early CD days seems sort of like a “flat earth” or fundamentalist position.
Given that you write for a living, I’m not sure if it would be beneficial for you to get a clearer grasp or not.
If you want an eye opening experience try the following and “make it real compared to what”
Get a decent but not high end digital recorder. I can personally recommend a Korg D1200 MKII, much of what I have been recording to develop the microphone I am working on was using my daughters Korg , a decent “MI” grade recorder.
Get a good instrumentation microphone, I use M-30’s and pre’s but others of similar performance will do (these are omni directional) and to keep things simple, only record in mono, one mic to start (as there is no ideal stereo technique).
http://www.earthworksaudio.com/25.html
DO NOT use conventional recording microphones “known to sound good”, it is critical to use one like this, an omni with a very wide flat bandwidth and no coloration (IE: an instrumentation microphone).
Now, get the hang of what proper max levels are (well below zero dB) just record things around your house, environmental sounds are sometimes better than music as they tend to be more dynamic not to be non-harmonic in structure and so, shows up both odd and even harmonic crud better. Play back at home in mono so not to bring “stereo mic technique” into it.
If you have a way to record any kind of live performance, so much the better.
What you will undoubtedly find (if you do this experiment) that you can make vastly more real sounding recordings than you ever find commercially.
Sure they will only be of things around the house or outside or what ever you manage to capture, but you will be impressed how real some of them are.
Given the fact that the recording is then burnt to a CD and the effect stays, pretty much says the limitation is not the format it self.
Your probably thinking yeah but what does he listen through pa speakers.
Occasionally hifi people get to hear our “pa speakers” (hifi for a crowd )
http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/hug/messages/13/134216.html
http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/hug/messages/13/134237.html
As a concession to practical monitoring, get a good pair of closed headphones, I find the Senheiser HD280’s to be faithful enough.
It’s too bad you can’t listen to CD files, I have an uncompressed recording of some fireworks from two years ago from my backyard (about a half mile away from fireworks). This has a peak level 70 odd dB above the lowest signals and a peak to average ratio of about 40 dB.
There is NO WAY one could have captured this spectrum or dynamic range with analogue tape and no way it could have been transferred to a record and rarely can a playback system using speakers reproduce it all.
Fireworks and other noises at.
http://www.danleysoundlabs.com/technical%20downloads.html
Best,
Tom Danley
Get a good instrumentation mic, try recording with a modern recorder and then draw a conclusion.
| FAQ |
Post a Message! |
Forgot Password? |
|
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
Top of Page ]
[ Contact Us ]
[ Support/Wish List ]
[ Copyright © 2025, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]
