Home Hi-Rez Highway

New high resolution SACD releases, players and technology.

RE: Perhaps you should be using Carver amplifiers...

Tony: It’s good to hear from you directly; you’ve been quoted, at least indirectly, many times before here.

The point you make about Clark’s obvious love of music is important to everything anyone here does. It certainly was the driving force behind Moran’s and my doing these experiments in the first place. Most of the comments on this board still seem to come from people who haven’t read the paper, but…

We did find that the high-bit recordings we listened to sounded quite wonderful, far better than the CDs we are all used to. Our experiment was designed to find out one thing: Is this because of the extra bits? Our answer, provisional as all negative results must be in this kind of test, was No. All but one or two of these productions could have been released on CD and would have sounded just as good.

So why did they sound better? I think the most likely answer is that the niche market for high-bit recordings comprises people like the ones who post here, who are fanatical about sound quality and value naturalness, impact, and a kind of gut feeling of truthfulness in their recordings. Most engineers, though they take a lot of undeserved flak in audiophile publications, know what it takes to get this kind of sound, and they prefer it. They just can’t get permission to issue it, for commercial reasons.

For high-bit productions the usual rules seem to be waived. RCA, looking for high-bit remastering of the old Reiner BSO sessions, turned the original three-track session tapes over to Soundmirror. Newton & Co. had sources that were much cleaner than the ones used for mass tape duplication, let alone LP mastering, and the resulting SACDs sound like it. What instructions did the people at RCA give as they turned over these treasures? None at all – just make it sound good. There is absolutely no compression on those things, but of course you need good equipment and a quiet room to appreciate them.

The same holds for modern recordings. The producers let the engineers tweak things until they sound really great on the studio monitors, and guess what? On a high-end home system, they do too.

Higher-bit recording is useful throughout the production process, but it isn’t needed for the final product. So if your love of music drives you to try to make record companies issue better-sounding recordings, don’t focus on the high-bit consumer format; badger them into trusting that you really want the unaltered master. On SACDs and HD-DVDs, that’s what you’re getting. – EBM



This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
  Kimber Kable  


Follow Ups Full Thread
Follow Ups
  • RE: Perhaps you should be using Carver amplifiers... - EBradMeyer 05/21/0815:30:27 05/21/08 (0)

FAQ

Post a Message!

Forgot Password?
Moniker (Username):
Password (Optional):
  Remember my Moniker & Password  (What's this?)    Eat Me
E-Mail (Optional):
Subject:
Message:   (Posts are subject to Content Rules)
Optional Link URL:
Optional Link Title:
Optional Image URL:
Upload Image:
E-mail Replies:  Automagically notify you when someone responds.