This is true and I will add that radio stations compression is by 95% adjusted according the potentials of the PLL synthesizer which they use to modulate.
With so many brands and models available regarding transmitters, there is not a chance to be any similarities or better said and acoustical standard regarding how much compression is going to be in use.
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I wonder if that is just a coincidence. I suspect the loudness wars, like any other kind, was driven partly by money. Advertisements cover many costs for a radio station and the first radio station that can offer 'louder clearer' adverts to it's customers wins an advantage. Same thing on TV (which I gave up 15 years ago and the adverts were partly responsible for my decision).
Digital post-production and mastering allowed for digital domain compression that could vary with the waveform. Much easier to compress everything now and have the computer adjust as the FR and SQ changes.
This issue with ''the mastering is at fault"" wrt SQ did not occur for DECADES from the Valve->Solid State transition of the late 50's and early 60's.
Since this excuse has been offered for going on 35 years when digital sources are compared to original vinyl masters, it seems very obvious that there is a severe flaw in the digital mastering chain that an analogue mastering chain did not have with either reel to reel tape, vinyl LP, in either a tube or solid state recording and mastering chain.
35 years of the same excuse? No - digital is flawed wrt the original analogue.
How else to explain that original vinyl pressings are compared to current state of the art remasters to see how the remaster compares? If that was/is the standard, why ruin the repro chain with digital? Why the constant comparisons of various digital and CD remasters to the 1st run vinyl that fail or just barely exceed the vinyl?
This issue with ''the mastering is at fault"" wrt SQ did not occur for DECADES from the Valve->Solid State transition of the late 50's and early 60's.
Since this excuse has been offered for going on 35 years when digital sources are compared to original vinyl masters, it seems very obvious that there is a severe flaw in the digital mastering chain that an analogue mastering chain did not have with either reel to reel tape, vinyl LP, in either a tube or solid state recording and mastering chain.
35 years of the same excuse? No - digital is flawed wrt the original analogue.
How else to explain that original vinyl pressings are compared to current state of the art remasters to see how the remaster compares? If that was/is the standard, why ruin the repro chain with digital? Why the constant comparisons of various digital and CD remasters to the 1st run vinyl that fail or just barely exceed the vinyl?
Go back and read some of the trade magazines from the late 70s when digital hit the recording studios. Back then the most pros felt that digital tape offered a master or mixdown closer to the original analog session tapes (closer that going to an analog master). It was preferred over the faults of analog. And many thought digital advantages were wasted on the inferior vinyl format, anyway. Go figure!
What was the comparison with bit depth and media?
Cassette is equivalent to 6 bits of encoded information, vinyl is 9 bits, R2R at 15 ips is 13 bits, and CD is 16 bits.
IIRC, it was distortion + noise that was the limiting factor. I don't think that it is the media that is the problem. Personally, I think people just like good sounding distortion.
Cassette is equivalent to 6 bits of encoded information, vinyl is 9 bits, R2R at 15 ips is 13 bits, and CD is 16 bits.
IIRC, it was distortion + noise that was the limiting factor. I don't think that it is the media that is the problem. Personally, I think people just like good sounding distortion.
Not too much wrong with the format (although J.R.Stuart has a new paper out at the AES with some limitations of RBCD as a format), everything's wrong with the implementations, in particular the DACs. For decades now we've been subjected to inferior-sounding S-D chips, simply because they measure fine in THD+N and SNR.
Not sure I understand the question.
Most of the early digital was 16 bit. Sampling rates ran from 44.1K to 50K (3M used 50K) IIRC. From reading some of the old stuff, most producers and engineers were pleased with the great S/N ratio and flat frequency response. Much better than mixing down or mastering to analog tape. "Lossless", we might call it today. I haven't read any comments about bad or harsh sound.
Radio stations have always used their own compression and they don't actually like to use tunes that suffer from Loudness War Syndrome since the compression they use is quite specific for the medium and these are already so compressed that the Radio Stations can not apply their own anymore.
The Lord-Alge brothers are largely responsible for the Loudness Wars.
They almost exclusively use banks of analogue compressors and between them have pushed up the market price of certain valve compressors into stratospheric heights.
By now they've lent their name to a suit of digital plug-ins but they just emulate different analogue compressors so digital itself and its new possibilities has next to nothing to do with it.
Thats because they hadnt yet heard how voidish it sounds buddy..... (Cold,no warmth)Pano said:
It sounds like crap!! (I try very hard to avoid any record/cassette that has any mention of digital on it,i hate that crap <<>> I GET RECORDS FOR ANALOG QUALITY,NOT DIGITAL! -- Otherwise I may as well get a CD which I do not want!!) Most records I have are from the early 80s and before...... (I find after 1983 or so it gets harder to find 100% analog on records and its sad .. RECORDS ARE AN ANALOG PLATFORM!!)
Now I think if some of these ppl who started letting thier producers compromise thier albums DIGITALLY in the late 70s and on could have them RE-DONE IN ANALOG,im sure they would!!
Bryan Adams 4th album RECKLESS I believe was digitally compromised..... Doesnt sound very good @ all....... I know for a fact the 3rd album (Cuts like a knife) was indeed digitally mixed... Bryans 1st and 2nd albums sound INSANLEY GOOD!! (100% analog)
Long live Analogue!!!!!
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You spotted the correlation but not the cause. Vinyl and tape (even more so) along with zero feed back (ie pre-op amp) microphone preamps do not have a defined bit depth. In particular on overload. Hamm claimed 20db or more overload margin on tubes vs op-amps.
What this means is that any op-amp (or worse digital) recording has the noise floor RAISED by 20 to 30db compared to tube & tape. And every time you mix two tracks you lose a bit.
The difference between analog noise and digital noise (from the last bit) is that we can hear under the analog noise (I'm trying to find a publically available reference) where as digital dies at the dither.
See Olson 2013 for a reasonably simple explanation with references
This is still presuming you can do DAC properly - something which is still a problem (hence the excitement about DSD - which is mostly old wine in a new (patent pending) bottle)
Hamm, R. O. (1973). Tubes Versus Transistors-is there an Audible Difference. Journal of the audio engineering society, 21(4), 267-273
Olson, L (2013) Mountains and Fog: the Sound of Digital Converters, Part 1
Positive Feedback 65
You don't even need the papers. It's trivially easy to demonstrate it for yourself. And if you are hesitant to play with sound editing software, Werner Ogiers did it for you in his oft-linked-to dither article. Likewise, look at the hundreds of measurements showing exactly this which Stereophile has posted over the years.
Homepage of Alexey Lukin
has theory on practical implementation, example curves, musings, some 8 & 12 bit dither example .wav
and there are apparently new dynamic noise shaping dither coders - using lossy codec masking theory to give ridiculous numbers - at least when there is music to hide the noise shaped dither in the masking curves of
has theory on practical implementation, example curves, musings, some 8 & 12 bit dither example .wav
and there are apparently new dynamic noise shaping dither coders - using lossy codec masking theory to give ridiculous numbers - at least when there is music to hide the noise shaped dither in the masking curves of
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I disagree that the format is solid (sample rate to low, high end hash artifacts, listening fatigue, and so on...) and if implementations are still making the sound inferior to analogue 35 years on, that is damning evidence that the format is flawed in comparison.
This should have been worked out DECADES ago and since it has not, it is reasonable to conclude that going to digital was at best premature and at worst a massive mistake.
I am one of those where vinyl rips are superior to any digital remaster of same - I have made countless comparisons and it's instantly obvious to my ears and the ears of many others. That is why we rip old vinyl after it has been cleaned and played on a high quality system.
I don't expect to convince you, I am not going to A/B for you to prove this to anyone in any way, shape, or form.
My suggestion to everyone is listen. If you don't agree, fine. I will gladly buy your old vinyl from you for pennies as you think it archaic and worthless.
I wish it were true. I just went through the nightmare of setting up processing for a popular music station. Today's production is so vile and dense - one current hit mixes in record surface noise - that any additional processing pulls up underlying garbage. Without additional processing however live jock voices can't cut through the mix on voice overs. Stations with a wide span of music eras also have to contend with mixes between new, well recorded songs and the back-to-back-diodes processing common today. The broadcast processor manufacturers respond to the challenge with innovations like 31-band final limiters. And of course it's a MAD market scenario in which if your competitor tosses aside fidelity for loudness you have no choice other than to react.
The irony of the article is two-fold. Not only does the hosting site make available a huge selection of 24/96 uncompressed live recordings, generally tromping the fidelity of recordings available in the past, 'mainstream' commentary seems to expend no small effort attacking the practice as frou-frou.
I don't really listen to FM above 92MHz anymore, that seems to take care of all the stations running their Orbans (or whatever compressors they're using nowadays) with the knobs at 11...
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