Record Industry crashes, dies

[SPACERACE]

it's how sample rate and bit depth work. vertical is bit depth, which determines amplitude (and which is what i guess the original intent of the graph was to demonstrate differences of,) and horizontal is sample rate, or how many times it samples it per second. it other words, it works perfectly with the typical visual representation of a sound wave. it's just plotting a line on a grid, and the finer the grid (i.e. the higher the sample rate and bit depth,) the closer it'll be to the original.

at, say, 22.05khz, there are two plot points, a straight line, representing what is still an infinitely detailed waveform, and while we can't very well hear that specific frequency, that's when subharmonics come in and fuck shit up.

[SPACERACE]

BASICALLY, the thing on the right wants to look like the line on the left, but it's just a pretender.




ya'll may have philosophy, sex and all the grand topics on lock, i have audio. motherfuckers.

[Andrew_TSKS]

i'm gonna quote something that's rather pretentiously written in second-person, for which i apologize. it's from wil s. hylton's "the master of everything (and nothing at all)", an article about beck that ran in esquire in 2002. i ask you guys to ignore the second-person pretentiousness and try to just think about the point that's being made in this excerpt. i read this a few years ago and it really affected my thinking about relative perfection of music recordings.

You do not have a fancy stereo, and you do not use the stereo that you have. You play your Al Green and your Rolling Stones albums not on vinyl but on your Mac laptop, trickling through small plastic speakers. You are not concerned with high-fidelity sound. You are, in fact, unconcerned with it. This lack of concern is deliberate and thought-out. It is the result of a petit epiphany you experienced while waiting for a stage to be set a few years ago. The construction workers on the job were jamming to a small, shabby radio with shitty speakers, and you noticed that they did not mind or even notice the crackle and fuzz. Something crystallized for you in that. You realized that sound quality is a luxury that rarely surfaces in real life. You realized that in real life, music usually arrives through a filter of ambient noise. Maybe a faucet is running. Maybe you're in the car, or on a busy street. Maybe the music is droning through the walls of your neighbor's apartment. It doesn't matter what kind of interference you get--just that there will be interference most of the time, something between your ears and the speakers to annul the precision of the recording.

i think what mackro said at one point about the kind of quality downgrade you get in downloading an mp3 from a file sharing site is perfectly true, but i accept that going in. personally, i don't think being able to hear something in its most superior form is all that important. it's nice, yes, but i'll listen to music in crappy quality or through a crappy player or both if the alternative is not listening to music at all. getting hung up on differences in quality, once you get above a certain threshold (and honestly, maybe even below that threshold) is largely not worth doing, if you ask me.

[SPACERACE]

i'm not saying i'll refuse to listen to something because it doesn't sound perfect. my car's stereo sounds like cockroaches farting and i don't mind it at all. but for the one system that i really listen to all my music on, and what i can consider to be a reference, i want something accurate.

that quoted thing is whatever. you can listen however you want for whatever silly philosophical reason you can dream of. i'm just saying i want to hear what the fools heard when they recorded it, because i trust that they made it sound as they did with care and love, and i don't care to bring in some bullshit about ambient and/or extraneous noise being sacred. it's separate from the recording and thus i don't care.

and you probably don't get all hung up beyond that threshold because this is not your hobby.

[Good Intentions]

BASICALLY, the thing on the right wants to look like the line on the left, but it's just a pretender.




ya'll may have philosophy, sex and all the grand topics on lock, i have audio. motherfuckers.

alex has made a pretty secure invasion into your territory, but you don't seem to have appreciated the effect thereof.

[C of heartbreak]

See those pictures are misleading, though. CD-quality audio has a sample rate of 44,000 samples/second. The graph would have to be zoomed down to the millisecond range for you to start to see the blockiness. I will give you that analog signals are more accurate at higher frequencies, but at a high enough sample rate a digital signal is indistinguishable from an analog one. I've got math to back me up here. The only difference is that digital signals cut off the inaudible frequencies above around 20kHz.

People claim that they can hear the difference inaudible frequencies make, but while I don't know much about the subject I'm going to call BS there. I'd say the sound difference is mainly due to ways different formats play back the audio.

Reese IS right on that mp3 is a far inferior format, however that inferiority comes from the fact that the information is compressed and has nothing to do with digital sample rate.

All that said, I personally prefer the sound of vinyl.

[jebreject]

People claim that they can hear the difference inaudible frequencies make, but while I don't know much about the subject I'm going to call BS there. I'd say the sound difference is mainly due to ways different formats play back the audio.

I would wager that one actually feels this difference far more than hears it.

[diesel_powered]

FWIW, one of my recording friends used to cite research that supported this point. Apparently one reacts differently to digital audio vs. analog audio in a subtle psychoacoustic fashion. (And if anyone can actually produce articles on this, I'd be very interested to read them.)

[jebreject]

below the lights to thread

[justinh]

Though perhaps unquantifiable, I would wager that vinyl has a pretty distinct sound.  I would usually describe this in abstract adjectives like "rounded", "smooth", etc. 

I mean, is there any quantifiable difference between a tube amp and a solid state?  It's the same difference in sound there. 

[SPACERACE]

that's what i'm talking about when i mentioned subharmonic frequencies. music is not a collection of pure tones. when you strum a guitar, you're making all sorts of insane harmonic frequencies that we can't quite hear directly, but that do affect all of the other frequencies, and that create more subharmonics, etc., which is why it's sort of silly to cap everything we hear at 22k and say it's the be-all and end-all.

alex has made a pretty secure invasion into your territory, but you don't seem to have appreciated the effect thereof.

no, i really don't. she seemed to say "well, what if you think a format with less detailed audio information is better?" to which i say, "you're wrong." sure, it's cultural that i think a more accurate sound is better sound: it's because that's been audio's definition of "better" since recording techniques have been developed. that i listen to music is also culturally influenced. i live in a culture, i'm ok with this.

[SPACERACE]

Though perhaps unquantifiable, I would wager that vinyl has a pretty distinct sound.  I would usually describe this in abstract adjectives like "rounded", "smooth", etc.

you totally just quantified it. compared to a digital waveform, analog's are round and smooth.

gary, jeb is right on in talking about feeling higher frequencies rather than directly hearing them, and again, they produce subharmonics. nyquist is useful, but it doesn't have the power to define audibility. the ear doesn't hear math, it hears weird things, and presents them according to even weirder criteria like atmospheric pressure, temperature, temperment, stress level, so when you take into account the brain between them and what it can discern from subtle cues, nyquist kinda goes out the window.

[alex]

no, i really don't. she seemed to say "well, what if you think a format with less detailed audio information is better?" to which i say, "you're wrong." sure, it's cultural that i think a more accurate sound is better sound: it's because that's been audio's definition of "better" since recording techniques have been developed. that i listen to music is also culturally influenced. i live in a culture, i'm ok with this.

I'm okay with that too. My main point was about something else, namely about the logic of technological development you (seem to) subscribe to - that there's a self-evident logic of what sounds or works better and that the success of any particular technology depends on how well that technology lives up to that logic. I'm saying that it's a far more complex process than that. I get the impression that that's not the kind of discussion you want to be having here, and that's fine, but I'd appreciate it if you could cut back on the tone of "it's just because I care about audio and the rest of you don't", because, well, that's a little silly.

[SPACERACE]

i'll have the conversation, it's just flying in the face of the only form of progress i know of. what would be a better goal for new audio recording technologies than more accurately reproducing what was recorded? and really i'm wondering how, in this context alone, it's any more complex than that.

[Good Intentions]

Because people only tend to talk from one cultural context at a time, the fact that the meaning of words differ from one context to the other doesn't make any immidiate impact. So if you say 'better' it will make sense to most anyone who hears you. But because the standards do change from culture to culture it makes it very hard, some say impossible, to say that one thing is inherently better than another, like you were doing.

I mean, in philosophy/sociology of science, there's a big controversy because many of the main ways we have of answering "what is science?" have no way of explaining scientific progress. Not just being unable to say that one thing records more cleanly than another, like you say alex is guiding us towards, but not being able to say why having brain surgery and full-spectrum antibiotics is better than praying to spirits for healing. It might seem silly to you, but if you spend some time in the field (and it's alex's field) you'll see the problem, and why what you were claiming was insufficient, or at best sloppy.

[SPACERACE]

then what is the standard for this in your culture?

[Good Intentions]

My culture that is closely related to yours? The requirement is that things sound lifelike. The only reason vinyl passed away was because CDs are more convenient, also the record industry's concentrated efforts to make vinyl a dead medium.

Of course, alex not only gave you counterexamples to your view, she referenced it as well.

[C of heartbreak]

gary, jeb is right on in talking about feeling higher frequencies rather than directly hearing them, and again, they produce subharmonics. nyquist is useful, but it doesn't have the power to define audibility. the ear doesn't hear math, it hears weird things, and presents them according to even weirder criteria like atmospheric pressure, temperature, temperment, stress level, so when you take into account the brain between them and what it can discern from subtle cues, nyquist kinda goes out the window.

Oh, the ear totally hears math. Once you throw in all those variable it becomes pretty complicated, but it's still math.

The highest instruments have a peak frequency of about 4kHz. This means the subharmonics that go out to 22kHz and above will have a (I don't want to say insignificantly but I may as well) low amplitude. On the other side, vinyl has a low frequency floor due to turntable rumble, so you lose low frequencies that you might not have lost in a CD. And it's theoretically possible to use a sampling rate high enough to render the high cut-off definitely insignificant. In fact there's a digital format that goes as high as 2 million kHz that does just that.

But I'd say a lot of that is moot. You mentioned a lot of other variables. Most of those will be present and affect the sound whether you listen to an analog or a digital recording. And I'm saying those things influence the way you hear the music far more than inaudible vibrations that are included in the recording.

[SPACERACE]

4k is only the highest base frequency, and the rest of the sounds created are absolutely not insignificant but are where the actual character of the sound comes from. instruments do not create pure tones, and those 'insignificant' extras are what make it that way. and while you're right that vinyl has a noise floor that isn't there in CDs, with good power, a good needle, and a good record, it's negligible, and you overestimate what it wipes out.

i'm assuming you also mean DSD. sample rate comparisons there aren't really very accurate, because it doesn't have one in the same sense as PCM, using data density relative to compression and rarefaction. it's roughly equivalent to 2ghz, though.

[C of heartbreak]

And with a high enough sample rate, the information losses from analog to digital are negligible.

Though I'd say that your enjoyment of a recording, even from a sound quality standpoint, has little to do with the information capacity of the medium. But then we get into what alex is saying.

[SPACERACE]

all i gots to say i guess is that there are dudes who will arrange amber crystals on top of their equipment in peculiar patterns and put stickers on shit and write on photos with a $400 pen and put it in the freezer (i shit you not) so it's a very wide spectrum of insanity and this is only towards the middle. realistically, yeah, not too many people care, but hey, we have a firm definition of progress so damn the torpedoes.

i don't really agree with your second point but that's totally subjective.

[Ah_Pook]

you guys

[SPACERACE]

shut up

[Ah_Pook]

no you shut up

nyaaa

[jebreject]

But I'd say a lot of that is moot. You mentioned a lot of other variables. Most of those will be present and affect the sound whether you listen to an analog or a digital recording. And I'm saying those things influence the way you hear the music far more than inaudible vibrations that are included in the recording.

But inaudible vibrations can harmonize with audible ones, which absolutely does color the sound in a tangible way.  Which is one of the reason that analog (with a much larger dynamic range) will sound different than digital. So even if you argue that the inaudible vibrations can't be felt (which, I think, they can) they are not negligible in the least.

And anyway, I think if we're talking about this stuff, the methods of listening AREN'T especially important. Some people prefer one thing or the other, some people (most people) could care less--it's when we look at the recording, the documenting, that's where it becomes important for us to think about all this.