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Original Message
LA Weekly:Master archiiving. No mention of MQA
Posted by Isaak J. Garvey on November 24, 2016 at 15:47:45:
Happy Turkey Day!
Truly excellent article....a must read.
...no mention of MQA...what so ever.
"Capitol's chief archivist, Jack Arenas, selects the tapes that McEowen will be working on each day; lately his queue has included masters from The Beatles, Nat King Cole, Sinatra and Dean Martin. McEowen takes those tapes over to the Gogerty Building, which neighbors the Capitol Building. Once there, he puts the tape on a Studer, a Swiss-made tape machine known for its reliability and for being very gentle on tapes. McEowen uses test tones on the tape to align machine and tape correctly and maximize fidelity.
The Studer is hooked up to a desktop computer running Pro Tools. McEowen plays a tune through, noting the peaks, and adjusts his analog-to-digital converter, a hugely important line in the digital-conversion chain. The hi-res digital copies are extremely detailed, 192 kHz/24-bit, meaning the sound is sampled 192,000 times per second. (Commercial CDs, by comparison, sample at a rate of 44.1 kHz/16-bit.)"
And..
"As mediums change, people make attempts to improve upon the original," Was explains. "Over the years it shifts - not through any kind of evil-spirited moves, people just reinterpret things. But the question becomes: If you have a classic piece of music that everyone has known and loved for years, should you editorialize it at all, even if technology allows you the opportunity to do so? And in our case, we decided you shouldn't. You should stick with the thing that everyone was excited about when they released the record. Even if it's got some artifacts that might go against the precepts of high fidelity. Sometimes distortion is desirable; sometimes distortion has a character that is inseparable from the music."
Amen.
The clincher...Bob Ludwig says 80% of the albums he gets paid to remaster arrive as DSD files,which are incompatible with MQA.
MQA=DOA