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RE: Curious... Why 24/48?

You mentioned LPs, not 78's, so I commented on LPs. You mentioned 50 years, so this means LPs from (approx) 1950-1965. There were high quality mono recordings from the early 1950's and high quality stereo recordings from the late 50's through 1965. This period was a golden age in stereo recording. Generally speaking, sound quality went down for some period later, at least for classical recordings. I blame this situation on the use of Dolby A compression, multiple microphone multiple track recording with subsequent mixdown, the use of early solid state amplification instead of tubes, and somewhat later the use of early digital recording technology. At the time these new methods were introduced they were billed as "advances" but that was not true as these technologies were far from being perfected. In many cases it is likely that a needle drop to hi-res digital will preserve these classic recordings better than a remastering from available tapes. Unfortunately, there are many potential problems with long term storage on analog magnetic tape, including self-erasure, print-through, sticky-shed and general deterioration of the media.

There are some record labels today that are using advanced recording technologies and producing sound that equals or exceeds the golden era recordings. Unfortunately, many of today's current classical artists aren't recording on these labels. In the early 1960's off the air FM broadcasts of live symphony concerts produced excellent results, as contrasted to today's execrable compressed garbage available today (at least in the US).

With respect to sound quality, older classical recordings are at least the equal, if not better, than more recent recordings and deserve being archived in the highest available resolution. We are fortunate that vinyl is a better long term storage medium than analog magnetic tape and that available LP playback technology has improved over the years.






Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar


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  • RE: Curious... Why 24/48? - Tony Lauck 03/7/1513:13:28 03/7/15 (0)

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