Ed, I also have no idea how you came to that conclusion about bandwidth and dynamic range. Actually I can guess the latter but not the former, which is an order of magnitude past humanity's youngest, most sensitive ears. Also confusing is you argue the case of the media that is further from your idealistic case.
Your story about the development of vinyl also reads quite revisionist, too. Makes for a nice story, but ignores the entire technical pursuit and kludges required to make it work. Vinyl/grammophone certainly lacked the measurements of today, but was largely driven by what could reasonably be manufactured.
In any case, if you want to argue that the value of vinyl is in it's 20 khz to 24 khz bandwidth, then be my guest. Who's out there to appreciate it, I don't know. Given the best practices of CD audio and vinyl, it looks to me like you can fit the entire data space of the latter into the former.
None of which is to say either media isn't valuable in it's own right. It's just stupid to hear certain members make further fools of themselves by insulting other members for their "deafness", "stagnancy", and "close mindedness" when it's clear that the offending members have a rigid ideology and are just demanding everyone fall into line with their thinking. I'd hope you realize the hypocrisy thereof.
Your story about the development of vinyl also reads quite revisionist, too. Makes for a nice story, but ignores the entire technical pursuit and kludges required to make it work. Vinyl/grammophone certainly lacked the measurements of today, but was largely driven by what could reasonably be manufactured.
In any case, if you want to argue that the value of vinyl is in it's 20 khz to 24 khz bandwidth, then be my guest. Who's out there to appreciate it, I don't know. Given the best practices of CD audio and vinyl, it looks to me like you can fit the entire data space of the latter into the former.
None of which is to say either media isn't valuable in it's own right. It's just stupid to hear certain members make further fools of themselves by insulting other members for their "deafness", "stagnancy", and "close mindedness" when it's clear that the offending members have a rigid ideology and are just demanding everyone fall into line with their thinking. I'd hope you realize the hypocrisy thereof.
You do research on things like detecting minimum hearing threshold, hearing damage levels etc. Done first in the 30s and 40s and reconfirmed in the 80s until today.
If you want cites on dynamic range try something simplified like:
Sensitivity of Human Ear
How many bits do you need to encode 10e13? (Answer 22 bits) The audio range is actually a bit larger than this as at some midrange frequencies we can hear below 0dB (add 1 more bit) and at low frequencies we are less sensitive so we need to add 8 more for equal sensitivity, however as that might induce hearing damage 3 is adequate.
( Fletcher–Munson curves - Wikipedia )
As to frequency response Manfred Schroeder and Rupert Neve both have written a bit on phase sensitivity and equivalent bandwidth.
These are very basic bits of perceptual research, long known and not controversial.
Scott do you know of any A/D converters that can do 23 bits and capture up to 20,000 hertz with less that 5 degrees of phase error?
Derfy,
There are lots of errors in vinyl reproduction, they just aren't the ones that are perceived as well as scrapping your fingers on a chalk board. Of course you may be too young to have ever actually heard that.
The last set of standards for not just eq were the results of lots of committees with actual experiments and experience. Even with that there were lots of "trade secrets" as to how to get the best sounding records. If you care to do a spectrum analysis of the vinyl recordings of say a violin and compare that to a real one you will see some non standard frequency tweaks, such as a mid bass boost and a weird HF rolloff. These were done I assume by ear to make the reproduction more musical.
The most telling bit about recording history is in the tale of studio monitors. For years the monitors were made as flat as possible when being measures with an instrumentation grade 1" microphone. A capsule that large is influenced by wavelength boosts at high frequencies. As a result most old studio monitors actually rolled off the high frequency response!
When home loudspeakers were made they were voiced to give pleasant sound and thus actually had a compensating high frequency boost. Those that were based on measurements were dull sounding. As a result recordings that were actually produced with a flat frequency response were perceived as harsh by many with popular loudspeakers.
When monitor loudspeaker manufacturers found the error they could not just correct it as the customers were used to the older incorrect models. So the correction was added slowly to allow the user base to adjust.
The other elephant in the room is that in a live concert the level is usually above the reproduced at home level so the perceived tonal balance shifts. This would have been "corrected" in many vinyl mastering suites.
Or as Rocky and Bullwinkle would have put it, "What you hear ain't always true."
There are lots of errors in vinyl reproduction, they just aren't the ones that are perceived as well as scrapping your fingers on a chalk board. Of course you may be too young to have ever actually heard that.
The last set of standards for not just eq were the results of lots of committees with actual experiments and experience. Even with that there were lots of "trade secrets" as to how to get the best sounding records. If you care to do a spectrum analysis of the vinyl recordings of say a violin and compare that to a real one you will see some non standard frequency tweaks, such as a mid bass boost and a weird HF rolloff. These were done I assume by ear to make the reproduction more musical.
The most telling bit about recording history is in the tale of studio monitors. For years the monitors were made as flat as possible when being measures with an instrumentation grade 1" microphone. A capsule that large is influenced by wavelength boosts at high frequencies. As a result most old studio monitors actually rolled off the high frequency response!
When home loudspeakers were made they were voiced to give pleasant sound and thus actually had a compensating high frequency boost. Those that were based on measurements were dull sounding. As a result recordings that were actually produced with a flat frequency response were perceived as harsh by many with popular loudspeakers.
When monitor loudspeaker manufacturers found the error they could not just correct it as the customers were used to the older incorrect models. So the correction was added slowly to allow the user base to adjust.
The other elephant in the room is that in a live concert the level is usually above the reproduced at home level so the perceived tonal balance shifts. This would have been "corrected" in many vinyl mastering suites.
Or as Rocky and Bullwinkle would have put it, "What you hear ain't always true."
That is a dynamic range of 141 dB and there well may be microphones that can, but I'll actually defer to Scott on the dynamic range of condenser microphones. A dynamic microphone would have the noise level of a 50-150 ohm resistor and maximum amplitude limited by spacing which would affect efficiency. So that would be limited by electronics noise.
As to frequency upper limit you can certainly construct a microphone to do that at the expense of low frequency response.
Yes there have been microphones with dual elements and crossovers!
But the issue has been it isn't currently possible to make a record reproduce system that can always fool a human. The transducers certainly are part of the problem, but the electronics are not yet blameless.
Got it, no quote.
Otherwise, what a pile of. Are you aware of any human able to identify a Sousa band 80dB (14 bit) down from a music track?
Really? even in the lower registers where the sampling rate is many many time nyquist? I think the piano comes out more realistically on digital than analog sources. I mean realistically, not audiophile - like in live performance which I suspect most audiophiles eschew.
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Bill Waslo quotes closer to -50 dB / -60 dB. Just to be thorough, but does point to the problem being even less an issue.
John Curl's Blowtorch preamplifier part II
Ed -- that's all well and good, but how does affect the respective merits of a present-day recording chain, which seems the point of the present discussion.
Waly
I gave you a nice basic review cite. You might want to read it.
Now you are confusing masking with dynamic range. Even adding in critical bands and making effects, of course all that appears to be unknown to you.
As speedy gets right the perception system is adaptive. Trying to fool it with a one size fits all is going to be difficult. MP3 was actually a step in the right direction looking at how things are perceived and then providing that information. The failing of MP3 is the design goal was to minimize data for voice communications, not reproduce all forms of music at the highest levels of perceptual accuracy.
Now if you want cites try the Benchmark Papers in Acoustics series. It is pretty complete on bringing one up to speed on the history and basics. Otherwise start with Lord Rayleigh,go on to L Kinsler and then Leo Beranek.
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Derfy
The vinyl method was tweaked not just in the standards, the recording studio but also in the very specialized magic cutting room. These were all done by ear. Then there is the great filter of time. A bad recording was usually limited in distribution and most copies have probably been discarded. The good stuff got larger sales and reissued. It was also matched errors in recording to corrections in playback.
So the sampling of vinyl currently available including the new stuff is biased data.
Now should we talk about how many current releases are made in studios that have capabilities that in the old days would have been considered science fiction. Is there a microphone input on a console today that does not have tone controls, compression, pre and post processor sends? Now they can of course be bypassed, but how often does that happen? From the studio mix it gets to final form virtually unchanged.
Way more product, way more mastering facilities but are there way more masters if the recording arts? (Probably number wise yes, percentage wise no.)
Simply put no audio chain is perfect either by measurement or perception. We are trying to reproduce a time varying three dimension effect in fewer dimensions and with limited but growing knowledge of the perception process.
So it is quite valid to have personal preferences. Of course part of the process is summed up in the old adage any loudspeaker you build yourself will sound good to you no matter how bad it is.
Just to taunt you a bit more the guys here actually buy vinyl and listen to it. It really does sound good. Now is it the music selection or some unknown magic perception issue?
The vinyl method was tweaked not just in the standards, the recording studio but also in the very specialized magic cutting room. These were all done by ear. Then there is the great filter of time. A bad recording was usually limited in distribution and most copies have probably been discarded. The good stuff got larger sales and reissued. It was also matched errors in recording to corrections in playback.
So the sampling of vinyl currently available including the new stuff is biased data.
Now should we talk about how many current releases are made in studios that have capabilities that in the old days would have been considered science fiction. Is there a microphone input on a console today that does not have tone controls, compression, pre and post processor sends? Now they can of course be bypassed, but how often does that happen? From the studio mix it gets to final form virtually unchanged.
Way more product, way more mastering facilities but are there way more masters if the recording arts? (Probably number wise yes, percentage wise no.)
Simply put no audio chain is perfect either by measurement or perception. We are trying to reproduce a time varying three dimension effect in fewer dimensions and with limited but growing knowledge of the perception process.
So it is quite valid to have personal preferences. Of course part of the process is summed up in the old adage any loudspeaker you build yourself will sound good to you no matter how bad it is.
Just to taunt you a bit more the guys here actually buy vinyl and listen to it. It really does sound good. Now is it the music selection or some unknown magic perception issue?
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Nor could you ever, certainly not with 2 channels free field. Ed I still find you abuse the concept of masking. I have 44/16 CD's that were experiments in totally uncompressed recording and they are unlistenable, if the loud parts are reproduced at even a remotely comfortable level the quiet parts are virtually inaudible.
Yes you can hear a pin drop at an empty Symphony Hall in Boston but not while even a chamber orchestra is playing.
Riding the gain to keep everything comfortable, you know, compression (it was always there and has to be). Yes Ed you can get close to the 140dB range but why bother, simply setting a system up to be safe at the highest level guarantees the lowest several decades are inaudible.
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