

24/192 Music Downloads are Very Silly - jensgk
http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

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beat
I'd take it from a different angle - those worried about "fidelity" that don't
play instruments and have never worked on a studio recording simply have no
idea what they're talking about. They latch on to numbers because numbers are
easy to understand, and bigger == better, right?

After engineering/producing a bunch of albums, one thing I can say for sure is
that a good-sounding album is totally fake relative to the actual, natural
sounds of the instruments involved. That's fine, because it _sounds good_. An
accurate recording doesn't sound good. It's too loud or too quiet (often in
the same passage), lacks a sense of space, and lacks impact.

~~~
jensgk
Absolutely. Music is purely a subjective experience, and it is absolutely ok
to prefer a special sound over "fidelity".

This also justifies the "vinyl record" craze, as long as the "fidelity"
argument is not used.

If it sounds good it is good :-)

~~~
beat
Yeah, but that line of reasoning opens up the "You think it's good because
it's just warm distortion" line from the head over heart crowd, and it's often
not at all true. You can spot these people because they'll use THD (total
harmonic distortion) like a meaningful number. THD specs are generated by 1khz
sine waves. It deliberately ignores both dynamics and harmonic content - the
fundamental building blocks of music. It's like measuring how well a car
drives 50mph.

------
retrogradeorbit
RN = Rupert Neve GS = Greg Simmons

Exert from: Audio Technology Magazine's Issue 1, March/ April 1998

GS : Geoff Emerick, the famous British Producer ?

RN : Yes, he started me off on this trail. A 48 input console had been
delivered to George Martin's Air Studios, and Geoff Emerick was very unhappy
about it. It was a new console, made not long after I had sold the Neve
company in 1977. George Martin called me and said, "please come and make Geoff
happy, while he's unhappy we can't do any work".

They'd had engineers from the company there, and so on. The danger is that if
you are not sensitive to people like Geoff Emerick, and you don't respect them
for what they have done, then you are not going to listen to them.
Unfortunately, there was a breed of young engineers in the company ( I hasten
to say this was after I sold it !) who couldn't understand what he was
bitching about. So they went back to the company and just made a report saying
the customer was mad and there wasn't really a problem. Leave it alone, forget
it, the problem will go away. They were acting like used car salesmen. I was
very angry with it. So I went and spent time there, at George Martin's
request, and Geoff finally managed to show me what it was that he could hear,
and then I began to hear it, too.

Now Geoff was The Golden Ears - and he still is - and he was perceiving
something that I wasn't looking for. And it wasn't until I had spent some time
with him, as it were, being lead by him through the sounds, that I began to
pick up what he was listening to. And once I'd heard it, oh yes, then I knew
what he was talking about. We measured it and found that in three out of the
full 48 channels, the output transformers had not been correctly terminated
and were producing a 3dB rise at 54kHz. And so people said, "oh no, he can't
possible hear that". But when we corrected that problem, and it was only one
capacitor that had to be added to each of those three channels, I mean,
Geoff's face just lit up ! Here you have the happiness/ unhappiness mood thing
the Japanese were talking about.

GS : So they had left the same capacitor off each of the three offending
channels, leaving their output transformers unterminated ?

RN : Oh yes. All of the principal parts in my designs are transformer outputs.
There is a huge advantage in the total isolation, which we'll talk about
later. But a transformer has leakage inductance. In a good transformer it's a
very small leakage inductance, but it is there. You have to make sure that it
is damped out, so that when you are adding long lines or any other load to it,
it isn't going to obtrude. So we put an RC network across the transformer
output, which neutralizes the leakage inductance. The RC network, which is
only a resistor and capacitor, was incomplete on three of these transformers
for some reason. We fixed the network, and then there were no problems.

GS : So someone could hear the effect of a 3dB boost at 50kHz. I would imagine
that gave you some food for thought.

RN : That was what Geoff was not happy about, it was upsetting him. So I went
back, sort of scratching my head and thinking, "well, I'm not going to try at
this stage and find out why that's happening, but I know it does happen. So
let's make sure it will never happen again". If Geoff and others could hear
things going on as high as 50kHz, how high could they actually hear ? I did a
bit of development work, and found that I could do new circuitry, with a much
wider bandwidth, relatively easily. So I redesigned all my transformers and
output circuitry, and the general electronics.

GS : Sounds like an important lesson for technicians and equipment designers !

RN : The danger here is that the more qualified you are, the more you 'know'
that something can't be true, so you don't believe it. Or you 'know' a design
can't be done, so you don't try it. Ignorant idiots like me don't know it
can't be done, so we have a go and it works. {Laughs}

