Digital Audio & Compact Disc Review

Is it any different to magazines that reviews DVDs by talking about the aspect ratio and 'extras'?

You've alluded to this before Mark - I'd love you to expand.

Is it in the sense that the saturation characteristics of magnetic tape are as essential to amp'ed geetar sound as the soft overload nature of the vacuum tubes in the amp itself? Or summat else?

You're certainly not alone in this view; I'm just kinda interested what underpins it in your case.

by ear, the CD of metal machine music (which is basically a process-music form of guitar feedback) sounds NOTHING LIKE the version on vinyl

(probably a better analogy is digital colour repro, but i always switch off when the designer of the mag i work at starts talking to the scanning house about it: basically the scan people would only be able to guarantee an accurate scan if they pushed the dpi up SO HIGH that the sun was sucked out of orbit...)

This is pretty much true.

It's not looking good so far...

it's something to do with the minimum "pixel" size of the soundbites, which over-granulates or renders too clumsily gridlike the cloudform of the guitar soundshape (to be more picturesque than technical); young says that if philips hadn't been in such a hurry to bring CDs onto the market, they'd have been able to code the dots much smaller, making reproduction of cloud-forms much more exact by ear

How disappointing - just the ol' not-enough-resolution thing. There was a great post (to which *I* responded, but didn't do the thing justice) from you on an old thread on this topic, where you scampered into areas of pointillism and home reproduction and complementary resonances and whatnot, which I thought was dead interesting and an avenue worth pursuing wrt 'why digital isn't any good for *guitar rock*'. Maybe it was just a paraphrase of Young'n'Albini, I dunno.

Thing is, with the resolution angle, 16-bit/44.1k sampling gets you a pretty fabulous level of achievable fidelity (everything captured below 20kHz, 90dB+ dynamic range) and is, I think, still perfectly fine as a delivery medium. On the *recording* side of things there are issues with using 'only' 16 bits, chiefly to do with available headroom, accumulated truncation errors from gain-shifts and this, coupled with hardware which was barely capable of the advertised bit- depth anyway, probably made for some pretty nasty mid-80s DDD recordings. Factor in the probability that a lot of established engineers were really struggling to use this gear to its best advantage (digital being pretty counterintuitive if you've spent 20 years using analogue) too.

Young's point about 'pixellation' would stand up better if yr classical tonmeisters of the period were screaming blue murder about the abominations of digital too, but I don't think they were. Isn't massed strings/horns/natural reverb tails of hall acoustics 'cloud- form' too? Quantisation noise comes into the picture at very low levels - something that would vex the orchestral bods with their huge dynamic ranges, yes?

Seems to me like the lack of euphonic distortion engendered by 2" tape (or a tube-based analogue desk) being pushed deep into the red is what's missing here, not necessarily some fundamental lack of resolution in digital.

the CD of metal machine music (which is basically a process-music form of guitar feedback) sounds NOTHING LIKE the version on vinyl

*Entirely* different mastering/playback processes. CD version has the potential to be closer replica of master tape than the vinyl LP, but vinyl replay *could be part of the intended repro chain for this piece of art*.

someone - adam skeaping? — explained to me the reason why it's more of a problem for LOUD cloudform (where a lot of the acoustic phenomena are happening IN THE ROOM, rather than in the amp) than eg orchestral cloudform, where the decay of sound once in the air isn't enough to set the partials dancing (jeeps maybe it was glenn branca?) (or phill niblock?) (memory = fukt, i am so OLD michael)

also the balancing payoff of the useable silence in digital recording, compared to noisy old analogue with its bad tail-down-to-nothing?

Using Greenspun search for 'granularity' and 'pixellation' not much fun when there's a bloody great photography forum on LUSENET... Will try again tomorrow...

the reason why it's more of a problem for LOUD cloudform (where a lot of the acoustic phenomena are happening IN THE ROOM, rather than in the amp) than eg orchestral cloudform, where the decay of sound once in the air isn't enough to set the partials dancing

Hmmm, interesting. But once you've got that mad high-SPL soundfield thing going on and presuming you can capture it satisfactorily at the microphone, what role does the transcribing medium then play in the degree of fidelity recorded? What's peculiar about the waveforms running back into the desk that a sampling medium fails where a continuously-varying medium (both supposedly of comparable resolution) succeeds? Aperiodicity?

also the balancing payoff of the useable silence in digital recording, compared to noisy old analogue with its bad tail-down-to- nothing?

But digital-with-dither (i.e. practically all digital recordings since late 80s - it's a fundamental part of the system now) is, ahem, analogous to analogue in its decay characteristics: you can perceive material beneath the noise-floor (if master is >16-bit) and it tails off into a kind of hiss.

I do recall an article/thinkpiece in The Wire (prob after yr tenure as Mr Ed) slating digital as an archival medium (might be available on the web-site); there was some bizarro theorizing in that (and poss some daft wildly-wrong techie stuff).

But now I must go to bed...

Dunno. I don't know what most of the techical terms cited mean either (ok that's kind of a lie). I do know what music sounds like though. A CD does indeed sound something like music. Not enough though. I know what sounds more like music, but don't really care who agrees with me. I can prove it to my own ears at least, without resorting to a single techical term either.

So we can cross him off then.

Sean: I'm really not out to convince anybody. I don't have to 'resort' to technical terms to express what sounds like music to me either. I do have to resort to technical terms to try and grasp the mechanics of what's happening here. You're not alone in thinking digital doesn't quite cut it wrt musical reproduction; not being convinced that it's due to a lack of captured information (and not being convinced that analogue-adherents are just cranks either), I want to better understand what might be going on (psycho)acoustically.

That's what I used - but it's still just Google restricted to greenspun.com. Funnily enough *this* time, the first returned article was me banging on about DVD being crap 18 months ago in ILM.

2)CDs also have a lower level limit, but I cant remeber what it is these days, 20 or 10 Hz, which well better then casette doesnt reach the South Park advertised Brown Note.

Usually advertised as 20Hz, but I'm really not sure where this comes from - whether it's just to tally with the oft-quoted human hearing range (20-20k), or whether there's genuinely sub-sonic filtering going on at the encoding or playback stages. In *theory* you can go as low as you like. Surely someone out there has encoded an 8Hz tone in a WAV file and written it to CD-R? Just need to find some speakers that will play that back...

Found thefrom June 2001.

If you want to strip out other LOSERNET groups, just add "love music" to your site:greenspun.com sear