Why most recordings sound like crap....

[Da5id4Vz]

please examples for crap and noncrap

Deutche Gramaphone=Noncrap

[Da5id4Vz]

Oh, Steve dithering, ouch. You might as well have said pre-emphasis to me. Sorry but its an old sore spot.

But being able to record at or below -96 dB doesn’t really make it a good idea, does it? Without a good set of masking tones in front of them, we can find ourselves straining to listen to stuff with dynamic ranges represented by only a couple of the LSB. Grainy to say the least.

[Steve Eddy]

Originally posted by Da5id4Vz
Oh, Steve dithering, ouch. You might as well have said pre-emphasis to me. Sorry but its an old sore spot.

But being able to record at or below -96 dB doesn’t really make it a good idea, does it? Without a good set of masking tones in front of them, we can find ourselves straining to listen to stuff with dynamic ranges represented by only a couple of the LSB. Grainy to say the least.

Without a good set of masking tones in front of them? In front of them what?

And why would it be any granier than listening to low level information buried in the noise of an analog system?

se

[grataku]

I don't know how vinyl fans can claim the that more signal is extracted from the vinyl when what ends up in the power amp is the result of a low noise electromechanical transducer, coupled to a glorified tone control and a 40 to 60 dB gainstage.
Vinyl is all about the fascination with equipment and tweaking. Many people end up comparing a 5k analog system with a $1000 CD player full of opams, jittery clocks, digital connections with mismatched impedance etc etc etc. On the surface, CD looks deceivingly simple, you pop in the disk and go. Manifacturers have bent over backwards to convince the masses that indeed it is so. I am convinced that in terms of raw figures the CD is a superior system but the intricacies of the digital combined with the analog world are far beyond the grasp of most, certainly of mine. As a result, the CD system is not properly optimized and the end result suffers, though not very much.

Da5id4Vz
I don't know if I agree with the statement:
Deutche Gramaphone=Noncrap I always found quite the opposite actually. The fact is that through the years they've had the monopoly on the world's greatest performers so the choice has been between getting the good music or the well recorded music. Fortunately that has been changing considerably in the past 10 years.

[Confusitron]

Originally posted by Jocko Homo
One day, my buddy managed to go for a ride with this guy in his old pickup truck......a '48 or some such vintage......with a tube radio in it. They listened to the radio while they talked. (Probably to some old redneck oldies station, what else can you play on a radio that old anyway?)

"Hear that? You hear that? That is what music is supposed to sound like to me. That is what I grew up with. All the radios sounded that way. The ones in your house, your car, your truck, the corner store. They all sounded that way. That is what I want my stuff to sound like. You can keep all this new stuff. I don't like it."

So he was basically asking for tube-warmth? I can't say I know anything about speakers and recording but that's what it sounds like he was asking for.

[Steve Eddy]

Originally posted by grataku
Vinyl is all about the fascination with equipment and tweaking.

Not at all. Certainly there are some who are into vinyl as much for the ritualistic aspects as anything else, but for the most part, it's about the enjoyment of music.

Why should objectively perfect reproduction be considered the only valid means to enjoy reproduced music? I find this notion rather odd particularly seeing as virtually everything which leads up to the reproduction side is based on subjectivity, from the making of the instrument, to the performance, to the recording and mastering.

So why should the end user be left out of the equation? Why can't they add their own subjective "spice" to the mix to achieve an end result which gives them more pleasure? If more objectively perfect reproduction of dozens of others' subjective preferences is what gives one the most pleasure, fine. But why should there be any sort of impugning of those whose subjective preferences may be different?

As long as someone is enjoying the result, why should anyone be anything other than happy for them?

se

[AKSA]

Audio is like wine.

People talk red but drink white; they talk low distortion, but want tube warmth, that 'organic' sound.

It's a question of miseducation and adoration of the measurement magi.........

I hold the AES responsible for this debacle.

Cheers,

Hugh

[Steve Eddy]

Originally posted by AKSA
Audio is like wine.

People talk red but drink white; they talk low distortion, but want tube warmth, that 'organic' sound.

Hehehe. Right. I like the second entry under "Accuracy" in Gordon Holt's "The Audio Glossary":

<i>The ultimate objective of an ideal sound system, which everyone claims to want but nobody likes when he has it.</i>

It's a question of miseducation and adoration of the measurement magi.........

Yes. Specs are more tangible and easier to deal with and sort out and compare. So there's a certain comfort and security in the numbers.

I hold the AES responsible for this debacle.

Hmmmm. Can't say I'd agree with that.

I think it's more just human nature. The more we can quantify something, the more comfortable we tend to feel about it. We seem much less comfortable with intangibles. For example, we're uncomfortable with an intangible universe, so we invent gods in our likeness and the likenesses of those things we are familiar with in order to comfort us.

In a similar vein, I think in audiophilia, we tend to go after that which we can justify via some tangible quantification. And it's not limited to the more common "specs" such as THD and such. Audiophilia is primarily driven by numbers, whether it's the number of nines in the purity of the conductors to the dielectric constant of the material that insulates them.

It's fundamentally no different than the spec wars of the 70s. Just a different set of specs.

se

[mrfeedback]

Hi Jocko, I sympathise with you too.
Just a little story to 'splain to you....

I have heard a couple of Top-40 mixdowns committing to two-track master from 16 track tape.
The 16 into 2 track mixdown sounded excellent, the DAT 2 track sounded alarmingly diminished, and the CDR copy sounded even more diminished.
The DAT copy was acceptable though, and still much better than most recordings.

As my engineer friend put the DAT copy into a padded post bag, he commented "We send it off to Sony mastering studios in Sydney now, and then they will ****** it up, and that is what you'll hear on the radio".
Sure enough the Top-40 release version sounds compressed and a bit harsh, but hey that's what sells.
So the final arbiter in what we hear of Top-40 releases is the "Finalising" studio, and that is where the final sound is created (rooted), despite the best efforts of the recording/mixdown engineer.

Isn't there a line in a The Jam song about "what the public wants, the public gets".
Other comments I have heard "You guys sound live just like on the record" - IOW you guys sound live just as bad as on the record.

Eric.

[mrfeedback]

To my ears, although good phono is pleasant enough, very good CDP eats it every time.
Digital playback can be extremely good if done correctly, and 16bits is good enough.

Eric.