Gold Ultradiscs: Shiny Discs with Shiny Sound....or overpriced scam?

are they not 16 bit 44.1kHz sample freq. audio?

are they re-masters?

hmm..

Er.

Some are, but most are 24 or 32-bit masterings, and the gold layer that the tracks are burned into supposedly gives you a clearer "reflection" than aluminum.

huh?
yeah well they may have been "remastered" at 24bit but if you want to put it on CD you have to downsample it to 16bit 44.1kHz. /

sounds like a load of bullshit to me. - if CD players had trouble reading "aluminim" suckers you'd think they would have changed the spec when they first came out./

sounds like a load of bullshit to me. - if CD players had trouble reading "aluminim" suckers you'd think they would have changed the spec when they first came out./
Nope. The metal that the disc is made from isn't important to the Redbook Standard. Just that it's shiny and the metal can be etched smoothly with the diamond stylus (or burned with a laser); I can see how the malleability of Gold could hold a (microscopically) more accurate/elaborate of diamond stylus scratches...but I suspect the "laser light reflects back a purer, more readible signal off of Gold" to be either adcopy or wishful thinking.

Where do you get this stuff from, Lord C? The audio CD standard is 16/44.1k, if these are something else (and there isn't a delivery music format in the world which is 32-bit resolution) then they're not CDs. What are they?

Just that it's shiny and the metal can be etched smoothly with the diamond stylus (or burned with a laser);

Surely prerecorded CDs are *stamped*, not cut with a diamond stylus? The glass master from which the stamper is made is etched with a laser.

Surely prerecorded CDs are *stamped*, not cut with a diamond stylus?
Nowadays, yes.
The glass master from which the stamper is made is etched with a laser.
Exactly. I didn't see how malleability came into it. The "reflection" rebop sounded vaguely plausible though to me...Whats your opinion of the refelctivity issue, Michael Jones?

All that a better reflection could ever hope to do is reduce read errors.
Again...whats your Op-Ed, Michael Jones?

and #2, Lord Cuss, you should know better than to expect a dynamic soundstage from a live Marley show, man.

Eno's box sets that came out in the mid 90's were 24 bit masters. But I don't think that the actual CD was in 24 bits. The master tapes were converted to 24 bit, then converted down to 16 on the CD. I think the idea is that the first stage of digital transfer contained more information, and then the down-sampling to 16 would sound smoother....I think. I'm not really certain. The box sets are gold and the cds do sound a hundred times better than the standard CD issues but I think it was because of the mastering.

The use of recording, mixing and mastering in 24 bit (or higher) makes a lot of sense because every modification of the signal decreases its resolution - mix two 16 bit tracks 50/50 together and you'll end up with effectively 15 bit resolution. You can dither the whole thing up to 16 bit again, but you *are* losing information there. For the final result, downsampling to 16 bit (ie, max 96 dB dynamic range) also makes sense because very few people are going to play their music at higher levels than 116 dB (= 96 dB + 20 dB noisefloor) and still care about maximum quality - at those levels you should care about damaging your hearing.

Better reflective properties are always good, but bear in mind it's already rather unlikely for a unscratched CD to produce even one read error that can't be corrected by the C1 and C2 ECC. If you have a CD player or CDROM drive with a C2 error counter, you can see quite quickly that on new unscratched CDs only a few dozen errors slip through the C1 ECC, and usually they're all corrected by the C2 layer.

Siegbran beat me to it: yes, it may reduce read errors, but, no, that's not terribly crucial thanks to error correction. And, no, lots of error correction does not equal error concealment or interpolation (that's a last resort beyond error correction) nor does it somehow force the CD player to work harder - the process is intrinsic and never off (I may be being needlessly pre-emptive there, but they are examples of questions that tend to come flying back whenever anyone mentions error correction).

But perhaps the gold layer lasts longer.

But it is possible to store more bits on an audio CD, because what Sony has done with SACD is very clever: SACD encodes four more bits *in* the 16 bit signal which can be decoded using a special algorithm, while the 16 bit signal is still valid CD-DA and sounds good on non-SACD equipment.

I think you mean 'HDCD' for 'SACD' and 'Pacific Microsonics' for 'Sony'. HDCD is the proprietary process by which 20-bit audio is unpacked by a decoder upon receipt of a flag in the data.

SACD is quite different - rather representing the analogue waveform as a sequence of absolute integer values, it represents it as a series of relative increments or decrements at a much higher rate. SACD is 1-bit/2.8MHz. The discs themselves are DVDs with a different data structure. I'm sure the arguments about the merits of the format still rage on Usenet.

The use of recording, mixing and mastering in 24 bit (or higher) makes a lot of sense because every modification of the signal decreases its resolution - mix two 16 bit tracks 50/50 together and you'll end up with effectively 15 bit resolution.

Quite so; most digital mixers (whether hardware or virtual) offer 56- or 64-bit internal resolution thesedays, so less chance of truncation errors accumulating anywhere near the audible level with 24-bit source material.

The use of 24-bit for remastering old analogue tapes would be a little bit harder to justify theoretically if it only involved a digital dub of the first-gen tape, but as there's often various shades of digital-domain buggering about with these remastering programmes, may as well catch that 70dB dynamic range in a 120dB bucket to begin with.

Yes, that is the idea, and this technically justifies the claims that those gold discs are of "higher quality": not the audio is better, the discs themselves are better.

Sony have been very crafty in their marketing of this product - very determinedly aimed at audiophiles to begin with, and with *no* early hybrid discs at all from Sony-affiliated labels and no multi-channel material. I've still yet to hear an SACD disc.

I note another trend in the last couple of years is to release double-sided music DVDs: on one side you've got a 5.1 Dolby Digital surround version and perhaps a stereo mixdown which can be played on any DVD player, on the other a stereo or multi-channel hi-res PCM version (24/192k) that can be played on a DVD-Audio player.

I've got the Mode DVD of Morton Feldman's String Quartet #2 - no moving visuals (just a static carpet pattern and a clickable menu), but six hours of continuous 24/48k stereo audio.

Coming soon: a DVD on Mego of MP3 files. Running time: over three days.