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My USB is in shipping now. How does the sound compare to the remaster redbook CDs?
I assume the whole FLAC catalog will be up on TORRENT any minute now as I have heard there is no DRM on the stick. Can anyone confirm?
thanks,
ken
Follow Ups:
I do not like the cd remasters. But the 24-bit flac is something else entirely. They give me something to justify listening to, in spite of the tipped up response of the remasters compared to the vinyls.The difference is immediately apparent across all budgets, from my $18,000 system all the way down to my $1,000 system. Directly comparing the cd remaster versus the 24-bit flac remaster.
I'm a bit disappointed they were not more gutsy with the release. To advance this technology, they could have announced the Beatles remasters exclusively on USB and hirez optical formats. The Beatles was the last chance for hirez to go mainstream, and they did not capitalize. Just look how the movie industry has capitalized on re-purchasing on hidef. Stop giving consumers a confusing choice, just start phasing out formats and releasing exclusively in the new format. It's easy.
Audio is always getting shut down by the man and poor business decisions.
I am not even a Beatles fan, they came and went before I was born. But I support the technology.
Edits: 12/15/09 12/15/09 12/15/09 12/15/09 12/15/09
"I'm a bit disappointed they were not more gutsy with the release. To advance this technology, they could have announced the Beatles remasters exclusively on USB and hirez optical formats. The Beatles was the last chance for hirez to go mainstream, and they did not capitalize..."
This would make no sense. The Beatles re-masters are just that: Remasters of an incredibly important catalog that was carelessly transferred flat to digital in the 80s, like so many others. They are meant to sound better and do. They are not meant to promote high resolution formats. You have grossly overestimated importance of high-rez. A fairly small sub-segment of audiophiles cares deeply about hi-rez formats. They represent a vanishingly small sub-segment of the market for music. The amount of high-rez available is proportionate, I suspect.
P
I find the remastered stereo CD's to sound "hard", and not at all enjoyable. The original CD's are better to me.
In what ways does the 24-bit version differ from the 16-bit?
Cheers,
Paul.
"In what ways does the 24-bit version differ from the 16-bit?"
See post below. The 24 bit version is 0.2 dB louder. Both versions have the same amount of dynamic range reduction. Apart from that, there are extra bits. :-) What use they are is going to depend on whether or not you are a Beatle's fan (I'm not), how resolving your system is, how quiet your room is and whether these extra bits are real or fake. (TBD)
If you compare the two versions, be sure to equalize the levels, otherwise you won't be able to make a valid quality comparison. A 0.2 dB difference will not be perceived as audibly louder, but will have a different tonal quality. (There is no reason why the levels should differ between the two versions. The cynic in me says this was deliberate so as to fool people without resolving systems into "hearing" a difference.)
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Nevermind...
The interview with the remasterers (link in thread) is fascinating. One important point from the interview, NO limiting used on the mono remasters, but it was used on the stereo remasters (booh!)
Not much does more to turn real music into elevator music than compression/limiting, in my opinion...
Are the mono versions also on the USB stick?
I loaded it into the computer last night. Hope to have a chance to listen on Thursday. Have much to finish up at work before I go on vacation Friday.
They are already uploaded to rapidshare but I will pass and wait for the real thing - 24bit/192kHz..
Do you happen to know if the mono copies are on the USB stick? The remastering interview (url provided in this thread) indicates that the stereo version have limiting, but no limiting on the mono version.
I hate limiting, makes music sound like a TV commercial...
ken
Good grief.
Listen...this is the Beatles...and the quality of these digital versions is the highest quality they have EVER been available in. Enjoy them or move along to some other hobby where you can actually be happy, please.
I pretty much agree. The benefit of 24 bit over 16 bit (assuming both are properly done) is a slight reduction in dither noise. But since the original is tape and has tape hiss that is 10's of dB louder than the dither noise, there need be little difference in sound between 44/16 and 44/24. (If done with a different style of mastering, there could be big differences, but this wouldn't have anything to do with format.)
OTOH, I'm sure the tapes have information above 22,050 Hz, perhaps up to 30 kHz or so. So there is a definite possibility that a 192/24 version would sound better. However, the chances are that this round of remastering didn't produce such a version and if my guess is right, then it would amount to a complete remaster to produce what you are looking for. Dream on!
Generally 24/44.1 gives a greater improvement in sound quality compared to 16/44.1 then 16/96.
Especially in quiet passages such as reverb tails the stepped response of 16bit is clearly audible, not so with 24bit recordings.
" Generally 24/44.1 gives a greater improvement in sound quality compared to 16/44.1 then 16/96."
That has certainly not been my experience. There is relatively little difference between 16/96 and 24/96 if noise shaping has been used. If aggressive noise shaping is used it is possible to go even lower and not hear any extra noise, perhaps even 12/96 (which can have lower noise in the audible band than 24/44.1 if the bits are properly "mapped"). I have downsampled many dozen tape recordings to 44/16 format and the largest reduction in sound quality is invariably associated with the reduction in sampling rate. Seldom is any difference heard when reducing down to 16 bits. (Note that I am using all 16 bits, and if the 24 bit material was at a low level then it has been increased as necessary.)
"Especially in quiet passages such as reverb tails the stepped response of 16bit is clearly audible, not so with 24bit recordings."
This will be true if a 24 bit recording is truncated to 16 bits without adding dither. It will not be the case if proper dither is used for the reduction. It is possible to hear down below -110 dB with a properly dithered 16 bit signal. If you doubt this then get audio editing software, some high quality 24 bit material, and do the comparisons yourself. The reverb tails disappear into the background noise. If you use tones instead of music they will be clear and undistorted right down to the point where you can no longer tell if they are present due to the background noise. (Be careful if you turn up your volume control when doing these experiments. Be sure and turn it back down before playing normal recordings, or you may blow something up.)
At worst, the cost of 16 bit material is a slight increase in background noise, which will only be audible on very quiet recordings played back at high volumes in a quiet room. On the other hand, 44.1 kHz material can not properly represent the transient response and full bandwidth of live music and will be inferior to a higher sampling rate with any instruments that have appreciable high frequency output. This is the case even for older people (like myself) who don't hear much about 15 kHz.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
It depends on the replay system. The better it is, the more difference there is.
I totally agree with your real world assessment of bit-depth vs sampling rate in digital audio, Tony. I've always said that the immediacy of music ("it sounds real") is better captured by a higher sampling rate. When comparing 16-bit to 24-bit at the same sampling rate, one needs a very High End system to tell the difference. The benefit of a higher sampling rate, however, is apparent on a lesser system. Of course, proper care needs to be taken in all aspects of the audio chain.
No dithering involved anywhere, had been recorded from live sound in either 16bit or 24bit and replayed in its native bit rate.
Btw 12bit recordings are practically un-useable and that has nothing to do with noise issues.
Early samplers used 12bit technology and they sound really horrible (although sometimes that 'crunchyness' just what's needed for artistic reasons) .
You are babbling. There is no "native" bit rate for the Beatles recordings. They were made on analog tape. As to your practically unusable 12 bit recordings, how do you account for good sound off of SACDs, which use only 1 bit?
Why do I get the impression that you don't know what you are talking about?
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
I was not talking about the Beatles recordings as I am not a fan.
I was talking about recording in a studio from scratch.
With 24 bit there are ca. 2.5 million discrete steps available, 16 bit has ca. 65000 while 12 bit has 4096. Can you see how resolution will be lost regardless of noise?
1bit systems use pulse code modulation with a substantially higher sample frequency (I think Sony uses around 2 megahertz), different thing altogether.
"I was not talking about the Beatles recordings as I am not a fan. I was talking about recording in a studio from scratch."
I'm not a fan, either, but that was what the thread has been about.
No dispute on the use of 24 bits for studio usage. Nothing should be done in 16 bits anymore except for the final conversion to CD quality. Even MP3s sound better when made from 24 bit files, if the encoder supports this option.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
1 bit is not pcm.
"1 bit is not pcm."
PCM with some word length and DSD represent an analog signal with the same mathematical formulation. (Discrete time sampled data, samples quantized to a finite number of discrete values. With n bit PCM, there are 2^n discrete values. For n=1 there are two values, +1 and -1. DSD is just 1 bit PCM.) There are known tradeoffs between bit depth and sample rate and this is how modern converters are built. If you are hung up on mechanism rather than on function then you won't see the common framework into which the various formats fit.
The commonality in the formats can easily be seen with minimalist DACs for these formats: for example a traditional NOS DAC with minimal filtering and a DSD DAC made with a flip flop with minimal filtering. When a NOS DAC is playing low level PCM material the same components are working as with the minimalist DSD DAC, albeit at a lower sample rate. Were you to clock a NOS DAC at 2.8 MHz then you could use it as a DSD DAC. You would take the DSD signal and treat each bit as +1 or -1, and then sign extend it to get the necessary input to the NOS DAC.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
"1 bit is not pcm."
Nope, it's pulse density modulation. R.
If you have a low level (below 1/2 LSB) analog signal that is recorded with a PCM ADC then that signal will be lost (without dither) or it will be encoded as pulse density (with dither). In other words, properly implemented PCM uses pulse density as one of its encoding mechanisms, and as the signal level gets lower this mechanism becomes more and more important. In a 1 bit system all signals are low level, so pulse density is paramount. This is consistent with my observation that DSD is a special case of the more general PCM model.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
I'd agree with b.l. on some points. Using dCS converters in both directions I really like the improvement in my recordings going from 44.1/16 to 44.1/24 and I would take that over 88.2 or 96/16.
I think you probably know that 1 bit PCM would bear little resemblance to the source (unless you listen to white noise) and that DSD is not comparable in that respect to PCM.
I hear it too.
If you want low level resolution with a small number of bits per sample there are two things that you must do: (1) increase the sampling rate, and (2) use noise shaping of the dither and of the quantization errors. If you do this correctly then you can trade off bit depth and sample rate. If your converters don't do noise shaping then you would need to run the converters at 24/96 and then noise shape down to 16/96 using software such as made by Weiss and iZotope. DSD is nothing more than 1 bit PCM at a high sample rate. Anyone who believes otherwise has been brainwashed by Sony marketing.
If you are digitizing analog material and playing it back with expensive converters, why would you possibly want to use 44/16 or 44/24 as your storage format? Have you figured out how much disk space you can purchase for just 10% of the cost of your DCS gear? Digitizing any analog signals at 44.1 kHz makes absolutely no sense today, unless it is being done for release on the obsolete RBCD format.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the 24 bit Beatles release has been "dumbed down" so that the same recordings can be sold again in a few years at a proper sample rate.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Not so, 24 bit dacs behave much better on 24 bit data and a good one may give 19 bit. Look at the s/n of 16 bit v 24 bit in an appropriate Stereophile review.
My 24 bit 44.1k Linn files do sound better.
My comments were directed to reissues of analog mastered recordings, where the tape hiss is much louder than 16 bit dither noise and hence the dither noise won't affect the final noise floor significantly. They do not apply to the Linn 44.1/24 recordings, which were made digitally and which have a lower noise floor than analog master tapes.
From the reports that I've heard, the 44/16 stereo Beatles material has been subjected to a fair amount of compression/limiting/clipping, as per the current fad in pop music mastering. If the 44/24 versions escaped this butchering, then it could be much better. Someone who has both versions might take an audio editor and calculate the peak and RMS values for several tracks in the 44/16 and 44/24 versions, which would quickly resolve this issue.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Tony,
With your help I've done just that. I have both the 16 bit remasters and the 24 bit Apple USB versions of Abbey Road and Let It Be. Today I used Sound Forge 10A and analyzed 2 songs from Abbey Road: Come Together and I Want You (She's So Heavy). As we've already chatted (your words below), it is clear that:
(1) any limiting or compression on the two versions is essentially the same;
(2) there is an insignificant gain boost on the 24 bit version compared with the 16 bit version (about 0.2 dB). This accounts for the difference in the peak values (plus and minus) and the RMS values for both channels.I plan on trying some things like null tests once the gain issues (within about .005db) are eliminated.
It's funny cuz before analyzing them I like the 24 bit, not necessarily for the gain but because it seems more balanced and more detailed. It's subtle; however I'll certainly accept that the gain differences are the reason..once I try it with a true level playing field.
Edits: 12/16/09 12/16/09
Beatles- Come Together, Abbey Road (16 and 24 bit versions)
Top one is stats, 16 bit on left, 24 bit on right
then 24 bit waveform (middle pic), then 16 bit one (bottom pic).
Edits: 12/16/09
The 24 bit flies are a little more detailed than the 16 bit. Otherwise, pretty similar sounding.
and I'm waiting to hear what people find with regard to compression etc. with these versions (along with visible waveform proof). For me, the CD's are not good, which is a great shame given that I bought a handful of them on faith without listening to one first. I won't be fooled twice by the marketeers.
Cheers,
Paul.
Explanation of how the remastering was done:
I believe you have the set. Stereo or mono? How does it sound?
The stereo set sounds better than the earlier CD releases. I like the mono a little better. Neither are audiophile standard quality, but they are fun to listen to. I like the old EMI LPs best.
A friend is bringing over the 24 bit stuff when he gets it. We'll see how it sounds.
As I suspected, only the transfer (and a few minutes of noise reduction) was done digitally. The bulk of the remastering was done in analog. So it would have to be redone to produce a hi-res remastered version (unless they also ran a 192 kHz converter on the output of the analog mastering chain).
Of course having the straight 192 kHz tape transfers may come in handy in the future if the original tapes have deteriorated.
Why is that?
Lack of adoption of the digital domain generally at that level in the industry?
Lack of digital remastering tools the personnel would have access to/confidence in?
Preference of the remastering personnel based on personal knowledge/experience base?
Something else?
They converted to 24 192. tooka a year of listening/editing.
With the release of the RB remasters in 2009, does that pretty much kill the hope of MCH SACD (or DVDA) releases of the Beatles catalogue? How good are these remastered discs?
I want to like them, but I don't unfortunately.
Cheers,
Paul.
The mono discs are outstanding. The stereo discs are very good.
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