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RE: That clears up a lot!


Tony: Thanks for telling me you had posted this and giving me a chance to reply, since I otherwise wouldn't have seen it.

Flattery will get you nowhere. The idea that I, or the tiny, aging and chronically impecunious (or maybe we're just cheap) Boston Audio Society could have any perceptible influence on who issues what recordings... well, it gives me a brief moment of heady pleasure before reality sets in and I remember why I have all but stopped writing about audio.

Those who have read the JAES paper written by me and David Moran may remember that we too thought that the high-bit recordings we heard sounded, as a class, really exceptionally good. Our experiment, however, made a very good case for the theory that the reason for this lies not in the extra bits but in the market niche these recordings occupy.
Your rant against what you call square-wave recordings (i.e. ones in which the dynamic range is very heavily compressed to make the average level higher, which is a common mastering practice) is one I quite agree with, but it too has nothing to do with the number of bits in the recording. Our experiment showed that those awful-sounding things could just as easily have been issued as SACDs -- and conversely that the excellent sounds we heard from our test material could have been issued in 16/44.1 without audible degradation.

Here's how I think it works. SACDs are issued to a tiny niche market that is known to use good to excellent equipment, and to be fanatically devoted to realistic timbres and dynamics. Because the big guys in the record companies don't care at all about such a tiny niche and are financing these SACDs because it's the modern thing and sort of prestigious (and the other companies are doing it), they leave the engineers and producers alone, and the latter just make the stuff sound good on their own studio monitors and good home systems, and send 'em on out there.

And guess what? If a skilled engineer has as his only goal making something sound good enough to show off to his colleagues, you're gonna think it's pretty damn good too.

Now all we need is some more of that attitude, applied to CDs. Some people will object that they can't hear the soft parts in their cars or through their iPods on a noisy street, but I think it would help revive a failing industry.

Unfortunately, as I have already found out through other means, nobody listens to me. -- Brad


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  • RE: That clears up a lot! - EBradMeyer 11/17/0802:15:37 11/17/08 (0)

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