Critic's Corner

Discuss a review. Provide constructive feedback. Talk to the industry.

Use this form to submit comments directly to the Asylum moderators for this forum. We're particularly interested in truly outstanding posts that might be added to our FAQs.
You may also use this form to provide feedback or to call attention to messages that may be in violation of our content rules.

You must login to use this feature.

Inmate Login

By default, logging in will set a session cookie that disappears when you close your browser. Clicking on the 'Remember my Moniker & Password' below will cause a permanent 'Login Cookie' to be set.

Moniker/Username: The Name that you picked or by default, your email. Forgot Moniker?	Examples "Rapper", "Bob W", "joe@aol.com".
Password:	Forgot Password?
	Remember my Moniker & Password ( What's this?)

If you don't have an Asylum Account, you can create one by clicking Here.

Our privacy policy can be reviewed by clicking Here.

Inmate Comments

From:
Your Email:
Subject:

Message Comments

Original Message

RE: Many reasons...I'm sure, 192/24

Posted by Jim Austin on October 30, 2016 at 09:11:08:
>>Why on earth would any music company upsample red book asynchronously to 24 192 to archive? There are actually much better technical reasons to archive in DSD or DXD.<<

Agreed--who's doing that? Did I mis-write? All I intended to say was that Warner is reportedly digitizing its analog tapes to 192/24. One could have hoped for DXD or DSD, but 192/24 is fine.

This does raise an interesting question, though, one I didn't ask. Stuart and I talked a lot about "white-gloving" those early digital files in those obsolete, proprietary 16-bit formats; "white-gloving" is his phrase for the careful, custom work much of that music requires. But we talked about this in the context of conversion to MQA; we didn't discuss how one might archive those recordings and what format should be used.

>>The marketing phrase 'master quality' that I first encountered in Linn downloads has no real meaning as it depends on the native recording rates and bit depths.<<

It's true it has no technical, quantitative meaning--is that what you mean? As I've written more than once, those numbers have little directly to do with sound quality; it's easy to make a bad high-res recording. Within a certain technology--PCM say--bit depth and sampling frequency may put an upper limit on resolution (one aspect of good recorded sound), but how often is that upper limit ever approached? This appears to be a frequent point of confusion: people confuse file resolution with musical resolution.

As to the meaning of "master quality", it just depends how cynical you are. I think people cling to numbers because they're reliable, quantitative, more comfortable than relying on people and their work--like how well a recording is engineered, or whether the head of a company has good intentions. "Master quality" only means something--as I said to Bob Stuart in that interview (in a slightly different way)--if the people who sign off on it are serious and committed. (He agreed.)

"Master quality" is either an aspiration, or a marketing slogan, or both. How cynical are you?

>>Archiving valuable analog recordings is a subject in itself and should not in any way be linked to MQA.<<

The point here I think is just that the MQA process appears to be accelerating the pace of digitizing analog tapes. I don't think anyone is talking about MQA as an appropriate archival format. The MQA folks have said all along--since that earliest JAES paper--that the MQA idea is based on a clear separation of archival/storage and transmission formats. MQA is the latter.