I am an audio guy for sure, but I have compressed and mastered enough video to understand the process.
Actually there is a huge difference. Just like anything related to audio, there are some well recorded and well master tracks, there is garbage, and everything in between that.
Its the BEATLES for cryin out loud
. Because their fan base is so big, and so widely varied in age, you are definitately going to see a vinyl release for anything they do. Vinyl was the gold when the Beatles were popular. That is how quite a few people heard them as a reference to their sound.
SY made the statement that musicians want compression. Fighting that is akin to telling Picasso not to be so angular IMO.
If I had to make a guess, I'd say that when higher definition downloads are an option and they begin outselling the lower, things will begin flowing in the desired direction.
That is sort of a catch-22, isn't it?
If I had to make a guess, I'd say that when higher definition downloads are an option and they begin outselling the lower, things will begin flowing in the desired direction.
I was thinking of the same release. Do you know of anything done differently to the audio tracks for the DVD vs Bluray? Other than formats, that is?
Actually it is most likely he is working at 24/96khz(most film scores are recorded at that resolution), and downsampled it for the Bluray(and download) at 24/48khz(the industry standard for cinemas and Bluray disc). Film scores are probably the highest resolution source in a movie soundtrack.
I am going to be honest with you about 24/192khz downloads. I don't think they are worth the money, or necessarily any better than 24/96khz tracks. Going from 24/48khz to 24/96khz is a pretty big jump in audio quality even though 24/48khz is quite good on its own. Going from 24/96khz to 24/192khz does not yield twice as much sound quality, it is much, MUCH less than that. Considering very few record and master at the level, it is very likely a 24/192khz mix is an upsample of a 24/96khz or 24/48khz master. Unless your mix is recorded, mixed, and mastered in DXD, then you are going to get anything from a 24/192khz track.
As a lover of Classical and Jazz, HDtracks has been a boon for me as have other high resolution downloading sites.
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The masters for both are usually the same, except one uses a lossy codec(DVD), the other a lossless codec or uncompressed PCM.
I gather you missed my earlier posts about 24/96 being the sweet spot? not just recordings, but a number of dacs themselves have worse performance at 192, so I stick to 24/96 unless i'm showing off =)
I would have thought it was recorded/produced at 24/96 as well, thats what I bought not the 24/192, but look at this crap! so this is either Zimmer, or HDTRACKS which is where I bought it and its available at standard, 24/96 and 24/192, I bet they all look identical and i've seen the same reports of Norah Jones stuff on there.
i'm a fairly new customer of theres, I mess around with logic for kicks, thats been a lot of my experience of native hires due to so much stuff in the capalogue just being upsampled 'remastered', but I gotta tell you this has really turned me off them. the dream theatre hires album is a more faithful and dynamic hires recording...
I like all sorts of music including some Classical, Blues and Jazz, moreso the latter 2 but I certainly dont fall in a pigeon-hole, I just dont like being lied to and its this crap that will stop me buying hires.
I just find that there is a very particular brand of classical and jazz at HDTRACKS plus some obscure Celtic folk and monk honking that I dont care for... I also feel that charge way too much. I prefer the catalogue at XL and i'm always on the look out, but till the charlatans vacate the building.... while this sort of thing exists, with people gushing about the quality it gives engineers and record companies great reasons not to bother releasing the real deal.
You are too generous with Hans. brickwalled at 44.1, not even 48kHz! and this is sold at HDTRACKs as 24/192. now given there is little musical info above there, but this is clearly brickwalled and being synthesis and a soundtrack, you would expect some resonant and spacial content in the VHF, not just noise and nothingness
I would have thought it was recorded/produced at 24/96 as well, thats what I bought not the 24/192, but look at this crap! so this is either Zimmer, or HDTRACKS which is where I bought it and its available at standard, 24/96 and 24/192, I bet they all look identical and i've seen the same reports of Norah Jones stuff on there.
i'm a fairly new customer of theres, I mess around with logic for kicks, thats been a lot of my experience of native hires due to so much stuff in the capalogue just being upsampled 'remastered', but I gotta tell you this has really turned me off them. the dream theatre hires album is a more faithful and dynamic hires recording...
I like all sorts of music including some Classical, Blues and Jazz, moreso the latter 2 but I certainly dont fall in a pigeon-hole, I just dont like being lied to and its this crap that will stop me buying hires.
I just find that there is a very particular brand of classical and jazz at HDTRACKS plus some obscure Celtic folk and monk honking that I dont care for... I also feel that charge way too much. I prefer the catalogue at XL and i'm always on the look out, but till the charlatans vacate the building.... while this sort of thing exists, with people gushing about the quality it gives engineers and record companies great reasons not to bother releasing the real deal.
You are too generous with Hans. brickwalled at 44.1, not even 48kHz! and this is sold at HDTRACKs as 24/192. now given there is little musical info above there, but this is clearly brickwalled and being synthesis and a soundtrack, you would expect some resonant and spacial content in the VHF, not just noise and nothingness
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yup, its '[FONT=Arial,Helvetica]Imagine the Fire' from 'the dark knight return[FONT=Arial,Helvetica]s' its a whole 7 minute track and its supposed to be 24/192. first [FONT=Arial,Helvetica]pic is simply standard [FONT=Arial,Helvetica]waveform, second is spectral content.
[FONT=Arial,Helvetica]you can see down the bottom is elepsed time and vertical scale is frequency[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial,Helvetica]the annoying thing is its not a bad soundtrack, but theyve totally gone to town with hard limiting, a waste at normal res, but hires? Han[FONT=Arial,Helvetica]s has legendary audio kit, made a massively parallel networked computer to handle the huge polyphony he needs for multichannel highly layered soundtracks, so it has the potential to be gobsmacking.
the rack this c[FONT=Arial,Helvetica]omes from. sorry for hires, already cut these right down, but for an audiophile pretty [FONT=Arial,Helvetica]drool-worthy[/FONT] anyway. looks like sci-fi
on the right...his DAC haha
[/FONT] [/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT] [/FONT]
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What is that all about?
Or perhaps I should say, that is what it is all about.
IMO, this has nothing to do with what people can hear, or the enjoyment to be derived from music.
The danger is that the enjoyment to be derived from music be lost in this endless niggling about quality at the limits of perception, other than that people who do focus on the enjoyment to be derived from music (millions and millions of them), long ago, when storage space was an issue, decided that that they'd rather have more music than more quality. That's why MP3s were so widely adopted. To argue so adamantly for 'higher quality' is to totally miss the point. Of music.
So by all means, protest the loudness wars and the loss of the appreciation of dynamic range in music, but please, this is the real issue. I appreciate that it's much easier to ask for 24/96 than to ask for the exercise of good taste, but if you persist in pursuing an essentially meaningless technical specification, then we're never going to get back to a situation where music is recognised as having loud bits and quiet bits.
have you even read the thread? 24/96 is NOT meaningless, for reasons stated here by many, I mention I stick to 24/96, throw in a joke, you seize on it and go on a rant?
how often do you think I have someone sitting here with me I can arch my back, give a quick little swagger and point at the resolution on my monitor? haha.
the dac does 4 x 32/384, i'll never use that and its not why I built it, its a consequence of building it how I want it and I still have old tunes I cant get again on the mac at 112kbs that I let play sometimes.
do you realize the pointless task you put forward? yes YOU? yeah like those people appreciate all the 15000 albums they can fit on their ipod? like they give a crap about music in general, its become a completely transient thing, these people often cant focus on a conversation because they are surrounded by beeps and messages, you expect them to care about quality music, an....alb_um... is that how you say it?
some do, we are just trying to get heard and secure delivery in an alternate format that they mostly have access to already, but popular culture is a lost cause, its been on rinse/repeat for decades and lives between snippets. to try and force a viewpoint on them , something that they possibly can nolonger discern since their stereos are all smiley faced, their headphones are compressed over wifi or ibuds and they listen at home through the TV or computer speakers.
delusion...
I listen to my headphones with some pretty awful recordings when travelling or walking or whatever, sorry but you expose yourself and i'll thank you not to talk of someone (ME) who you clearly know zilch about.
I happen to enjoy the technical side of the hobby, so what? doesnt mean i'm listening to bits on the bus, what a moronic and offensive statement
how often do you think I have someone sitting here with me I can arch my back, give a quick little swagger and point at the resolution on my monitor? haha.
the dac does 4 x 32/384, i'll never use that and its not why I built it, its a consequence of building it how I want it and I still have old tunes I cant get again on the mac at 112kbs that I let play sometimes.
do you realize the pointless task you put forward? yes YOU? yeah like those people appreciate all the 15000 albums they can fit on their ipod? like they give a crap about music in general, its become a completely transient thing, these people often cant focus on a conversation because they are surrounded by beeps and messages, you expect them to care about quality music, an....alb_um... is that how you say it?
some do, we are just trying to get heard and secure delivery in an alternate format that they mostly have access to already, but popular culture is a lost cause, its been on rinse/repeat for decades and lives between snippets. to try and force a viewpoint on them , something that they possibly can nolonger discern since their stereos are all smiley faced, their headphones are compressed over wifi or ibuds and they listen at home through the TV or computer speakers.
delusion...
I listen to my headphones with some pretty awful recordings when travelling or walking or whatever, sorry but you expose yourself and i'll thank you not to talk of someone (ME) who you clearly know zilch about.
I happen to enjoy the technical side of the hobby, so what? doesnt mean i'm listening to bits on the bus, what a moronic and offensive statement
On the other side of the coin, attached is the Spectrum Analysis for the 24/192 track "Maria" from Barry Diament's Soundkeeper Recording of "Americas"
Some of the tracks on this album have actual musical content past 54kHz.
Barry Diament is the Mastering Engineere/Recording Engineer behind famous recordings such as "Linda Ronstadt-What's New", "The Eagles-Hotel California " and many others.Soundkeeper Recordings also has a format comparison page for downloading samples at different resolutions.
These days Barry records using no mixing, no compression and only 2 stereo microphones.
SandyK
Some of the tracks on this album have actual musical content past 54kHz.
Barry Diament is the Mastering Engineere/Recording Engineer behind famous recordings such as "Linda Ronstadt-What's New", "The Eagles-Hotel California " and many others.Soundkeeper Recordings also has a format comparison page for downloading samples at different resolutions.
These days Barry records using no mixing, no compression and only 2 stereo microphones.
SandyK
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So, get people to buy the high res classical in the hope they will give us more main stream stuff! I cant see that one happening.
I would love for this to happen, can you imagine if loads of people starting to take their CD's back to the shop for a refund, oh why....because the recording sounds sh1t!! I wounder how long it would take them to pay attention then!
What patronizing sites like HDTracks has gotten me is "hi-res" versions of lousy recordings. All the hoo-hah about questionable "improvements" in bit depth (is your listening room quiet to 0 dBA and do you have kilowatt amplifiers and cast-iron eardrums?) and sample rate are red herrings- the recordings themselves are overly compressed, badly multimiked, noise gated, run through effects boxes, and EQed. And the "classic" recordings they push have the additional virtue of being ripped from badly deteriorated 2nd (at best) generation tape.
"I would love for this to happen, can you imagine if loads of people starting to take their CD's back to the shop for a refund, oh why....because the recording sounds sh1t!! I wounder how long it would take them to pay attention then!"
32 years of CD and it's still sounds "sh1t!!" to you? It's obvious to me that you listening to the wrong genre. Don't give much credit to major record companies and they engineers.
I have plenty of excellent CD's ,both jazz and classical, but if you in to listening of "good" recordings of some Marshall stage amps, good luck to you.
By the way the major music distribution formats in the last 50 years are, gramophone records (of different kind), the Philips cassette, the CD and now MP3. No way to turn the wheel back and we should be happy that CD's are still around.
32 years of CD and it's still sounds "sh1t!!" to you? It's obvious to me that you listening to the wrong genre. Don't give much credit to major record companies and they engineers.
I have plenty of excellent CD's ,both jazz and classical, but if you in to listening of "good" recordings of some Marshall stage amps, good luck to you.
By the way the major music distribution formats in the last 50 years are, gramophone records (of different kind), the Philips cassette, the CD and now MP3. No way to turn the wheel back and we should be happy that CD's are still around.
Hmm. The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
I don't mean to single you out for particular attention though qusp, you're just unfortunate enough to have attracted my attention.
What you (most of the people posting here) need to appreciate is that where judgements like this are concerned, millions and millions of people cannot be wrong. To dismiss them as 'not giving a crap about music in general' is not just condescending, it's blinkered. Do you imagine they're running around with those little white things in their ears because it's the fashion? It's beyond credibility even for a conspiracy theorist.
You like to imagine yourselves as a members of an elite minority.
It's true that you are part of a minority, but not part of an elite.
You are part of a minority with perverted sensibilities, who are in danger of substituting appreciation of music for appreciation of something else.
The fact is that it is some ineffable quality of music that can be communicated from producer to consumer despite failings in the reproductive system that is its essence. To focus too obsessively on the quality of reproduction is to risk missing this sublime experience. The experience that can still leave me entranced by some old Judith Durham track played over a supermarket tannoy. No-one could conceive that this is 'HD' reproduction, but it can still reduce me to tears, and no improvement in the reproduction can substantially increase the pleasure. Any room for improvement is strictly trivial.
She had a voice like a bell. I don't even need a player, I can play it in my head.
There's a new world somewhere
They call the promised land
And I'll be there someday
If you will hold my hand
I still need you there beside me
No matter what I do
For I know I'll never find another you
If you can't conjure up some piece of music in your head and feel the tears welling up in your eyes, you have lost your way.
Music contains what makes us... us.
You can say that it's trite. That it appeals to the lowest common denominator, but if you lose touch with that lowest common denominator, then you're no longer one of us, you're one of them.
There will be many other nights like this,
And I'll be standing here with someone new,
There will be other songs to sing, another fall, another spring,
But there will never be another you.
There will be other lips that I may kiss,
But they won't thrill me like yours used to do,
Yes, I may dream a million dreams,
But how can they come true,
If there will never ever be another you.
OTOH... in one of my home recordings (24/96, no compression), one of my favorite singer/songwriters played an amazingly sad song; it would still be evocative and wonderfully sad with a conventional recording, but there was an extra emotional "kick" from hearing one of the audience members softly sob during that quiet moment between the fade of the last chord and the beginning of the applause.
THAT is the sort of thing that's been lost with modern recording and mastering. And all the hi res petitions in the world won't get that for us. It's not bits, it's not bandwidth, it's great musicians recorded respectfully and without layers of sonic mascara.
Actually they can and have been, many many times. For example: picture the scene, its 1933 in Germany and a new Chancellor has been appointed..........
I'd guess a fairly large percentage of people with iPods got one because someone else had one. Doubt many said 'what i need now is a physically small, high capacity music player'
Why are those who know what they like and are willing to spend their hard earned money to obtain it and complain when its not available any less worthy than the lowest common denominator who wouldn't know to ask?
When in fact, the lowest common denominator wouldn't be able to listen to music on little white ear buds if the elite minority hadn't brought the price down by purchasing them in the first place!! (And that goes all the way back to classical performances 400+ years ago)
I'm with SY on this. It starts way before the final product. It needs to be recorded properly
Oh, and as far as this is concerned, yes I have read the whole thread. IMO, the usefulness of 24/96 for distribution purposes is not demonstrated.
If you think different, what I suggest is that you take your flag over to Hydrogen Audio, run it up the pole and see of you can get anybody to salute it.
@SY
Let's just be clear. Could you master a 16/44k1 distribution copy where such a detail remains audible?
Actually there is more than classical music out there. I have purchased some rock, Gospel, and some alternative synthesizer music.
I don't think you can return a CD because you don't like the quality of the recording. The problem is, we have had bad recordings come out since forever. Don't think because a recording comes out on vinyl, that it will be automatically great. I have quite a few albums on vinyl that were just plain horrible. To add - there are probably more good to great recordings out there than bad to unlistenable ones.
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