Blades Posted January 25, 2019 Share Posted January 25, 2019 Pwalpal, I went through that npr thing a while back and I think I got about 66% which I suppose is good. I actually ended up there after a video from Rick Beato on the topic using his friend as the young, perfect pitch hearing music major. She got 66%. I felt good matching that, but in all honesty I could only discern the difference when hearing them right after each other. If I heard them 10 minutes apart there is no way I could do anything other than guess. It's not exactly the same measure as this thread but similar I think at the end of it. I use 24/44.1 here. I am happy with the results and as mentioned above, my room, my equipment and my talent at playing, mixing, and mastering will fail me before the differences in these settings will. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Leadfoot Posted January 25, 2019 Share Posted January 25, 2019 For me, it's not even necessarily for the benefit of those that may notice the difference. I work hard to make my songs the best that I can make them. I record at 24/96 because I want them to represent my efforts as accurately as I possibly can. I want them to sound as good as I'm able to for MY benefit, more than anyone else's. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John K Posted January 25, 2019 Share Posted January 25, 2019 Too friggin drunk to read all the hard core advice here, so sorry if this is already covered. My opinion lay below layman, so may not be worth a hill of compost in the bigger, more informed picture. Maybe depends on what the target of the end product is. If you are translating to another system with thousand dollar monitors that need every nuance of a 192/24 or floating 32bit representation, then you got to go with the big guns. Some claim that 24 bit depth can record trails of faint reverbs or the like that merit the argument to record at higher bit rates.. Reference the depth of the noise floor. Twice, three or way more better than what the ancient rock and roll masters had struggling with an Ampex tape machine. 56 db s/n ratio was all they had, but they did magic. If the target is a CD boombox, you are stuck with the 44.1k/16 bit protocol. Everything you have oversampled is lost. Noise floor comes up to 16 bit obscuring the silent subtleties. All connect the dots points on the digital timeline are thrown out down sampling to 44.1 k. Anything oversampled to get pristine quality has to be degraded to make the CD. Anything undersampled has to be bloated up to an empty space with no added data. This why in my ignorance, since my target is eventually a CD, record at 44.1k and 16 bit depth, just do it the way it ultimately has to be restructured to make the CD and not having to worry about artifacts in the conversion. Something I found. My old PCI Delta 1010-LT allows recording at 22.5 k or whatever close. Gets beyond a curse of pristine digital unforgiveness and seems to throw in a bit of old analog goodness. My opinion, if you are going to publish a CD, do 44.1 k and 16 bit depth. All else upper and lower is lost until they update the CD standard, and you are at the mercy of the integrity of whatever you have chosen to up sample or downsample your final mix. My two cents. John 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
craigb Posted January 25, 2019 Share Posted January 25, 2019 Here's my two cents (possibly more, possibly less!). 1) Personally, I did a test on a $4,000 stereo system (15 years ago) and "I" couldn't tell the difference between a 192 kbps .mp3 and anything higher so I've imported my huge collection of music (about 350,000 songs currently) into my computer at that resolution to save disk space. 2) That said, I also have done PhD work into brain functioning and other woo-woo experimental areas and there's some strong evidence that we can experience frequencies far beyond the typical 20-20,000 Hz that we can hear. Frequencies as high as 100 kHz appear to be absorbed by our bodies allowing for expanded abilities like accelerated learning (I happen to have a device called an Echofone that was originally used in experiments with dolphins as well as a Flanigan Neurophone which utilizes bone conduction to experience higher frequencies and can actually allow deaf people to hear). 3) CD's record at 44.1k, however many sound processors (especially the earlier ones) end up rounding any math applied to incoming signals which reduces the overall sampling rate into the 30's (e.g., 32k). This accounts for the lo-fi sound of many synths from the 80's. This is why I used to (and will again when I have another studio) record at 96k and then reduce to 44.1k at the very end of the process. Now, any rounding will happen above 44.1k so the end result sounds full. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John K Posted January 25, 2019 Share Posted January 25, 2019 Thanks Craig. Can understand lessening artifacts by downsampling from a higher resolution to get the CD out. Still don't understand why if the CD is a target, why not just do 44.1/16 and do away with any struggle trying to minimize artifacts in an extra conversion process that has to happen carved in stone. My understanding is that any advantage is dumped in the down conversion, and the conversion itself adds garbage even if possibly too subliminal for us to hear depending on what we used to convert with. Somebody set me straight so I can make sense of this. John Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Anderwald Posted January 25, 2019 Share Posted January 25, 2019 8 hours ago, John K said: Still don't understand why if the CD is a target, why not just do 44.1/16 and do away with any struggle trying to minimize artifacts in an extra conversion process that has to happen carved in stone. When done right, there aren't any artifacts due to conversion that wouldn't be much worse when working in 44.1 kHz and 16 bits all through the rendering pipeline. The hard part about sampling rate conversion is finding the best sounding low-pass filter for the material (which is solved very simply by using one of the popular sample rate conversion algorithms like SoX , or Audacity, or r8brain, or any other good one as can be found on http://src.infinitewave.ca/). Converting from 24 bit to 16 bit has no artifacts either. You either simply truncate numbers which raises the noise floor (which in 16 bit resolution can result e.g. in audible distortion of long reverb tails at high listening levels), or you use dithering to utilize the statistic distribution of signals below the 16 bit noise floor, which adds a tiny bit of noise, but that noise contains audible information thus lowering the noise floor even further. Just like gradients are dithered in digital imaging to avoid banding with hard edges in gradients. 8 hours ago, John K said: My understanding is that any advantage is dumped in the down conversion, and the conversion itself adds garbage even if possibly too subliminal for us to hear depending on what we used to convert with. Not all advantage is being dumped, and the conversion doesn't add garbage. Unless you consider dithering garbage, in which case you just leave it off without losing anything that would have been there in the first place. People used to compare this to saying "It doesn't make sense to shoot a movie on 35mm film stock, when the movie is going to be released straight to VHS." So, you're trying to keep the production quality as high as you can, as long as you can from the beginning of the production process in order to end up with the best possible end product. This way you capture the most information at data acquisition and lose the least of it during the steps further down the line. Best, Michael 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Øyvind Skald Posted January 25, 2019 Author Share Posted January 25, 2019 (edited) But you have some new CD formats. SACD SACD (Super Audio Compact Disc) is a high-resolution audio disc format developed by Sony and Philips (who also developed the CD). Utilizing the Direct Stream Digital (DSD) file format, SACD provides for more accurate sound reproduction than the Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) used in the current CD format. While the standard CD format is tied to 44.1 kHz sampling rate, SACD samples at 2.8224 MHz. Also, with a storage capacity of 4.7 gigabytes per disk (as much as a DVD), SACD can accommodate separate stereo and six-channel mixes of 100 minutes each. The SACD format also has the capability to display photo and text information, such as liner notes, but this feature is not incorporated into most discs. CD players cannot play SACDs, but SACD players are backward compatible with conventional CDs, and some SACD disks are dual-layer discs with PCM content that can be played on standard CD players. In other words, the same disk can hold both a CD version and SACD version of recorded content. That means that you can invest in dual-format SACD's to play on your current CD player and then access the SACD content on the same disc later on an SACD-compatible player. It must be noted that not all SACD discs have a standard CD layer - which means you have to check the disc label to see if a specific SACD disc can also play on a standard CD player. In addition, there are some higher-end DVD, Blu-ray, and Ultra HD Disc players can also play SACDs. SACD's can come in either 2-channel or multi-channel versions. In cases with an SACD also has a CD version on the disc, the CD will always be 2-channels, but the SACD layer may be either a 2 or multi-channel version. One additional thing to point out is that the DSD file format coding used in SACDs is also now being used as one of the available formats used for Hi-Res audio downloads. This offers music listeners enhanced quality in a non-physical audio disc format. https://www.lifewire.com/all-about-the-cd-hdcd-and-sacd-audio-disc-formats-1846866 And Wikis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Audio_CD Edited January 25, 2019 by ØSkald Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
craigb Posted January 25, 2019 Share Posted January 25, 2019 Ah... I miss the 80's sometimes... I wonder how many people really even know what they're missing now? They just play stuff through the speaker on their phone or PC and think it's good enough. *Bleh!* I had a wealthy friend in San Diego that had these super expensive old-style speakers (i.e., not the active grid kind). They must have been four feet tall and more than two feet across! Cost him tens of thousands of dollars even back then... 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wibbles Posted January 25, 2019 Share Posted January 25, 2019 I miss the 80s too ... I was 30 plus years younger for a start. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Øyvind Skald Posted January 25, 2019 Author Share Posted January 25, 2019 (edited) 3 hours ago, pwalpwal said: i had a sacd/dvd surround setup for a while - only one person can sit in the sweet spot Well i did open the Dream Theater alubum in Vegas Pro. It did open. But i got just stereo sound out of my studio PC. I dont know why. And Sound Forge does not open the audio as more than stereo tracks. Strange ringt. So i thought. Bothering you more with this or just put on a happy picure? Well here we go... Edited January 25, 2019 by ØSkald Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John K Posted January 26, 2019 Share Posted January 26, 2019 Guys, Thanks for the advice and counsel. Have to study to understand it all so I can get back with questions with any intelligent content and not waste your time. Have used r8brain as a converter when conversion needed, based on the older data posted on this link. Most know about this but for those who do not: http://src.infinitewave.ca/ Things have gotten better over the years. Still cannot understand the argument that for CD purposes only, sampling at anywhere other than 44.1/16 provides any advantage since the finer data and resolutions have to be thrown out anyway to degrade to the standard, even if there were no consideration for aliasing artifacts. Interesting Oskald's comment that the CD resolution is undergoing evolution to a more advanced standard. Will try to get a handle on this with a little help from my friends. Hope all are warm and dry. John Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Blades Posted January 26, 2019 Share Posted January 26, 2019 John, at 24bit you have a lot more headroom to be able to record at lower levels and then process to get to the higher levels without getting the "never-pleasant" digital clipping. At 16bit recording, you have to be a lot more careful not to clip. Then there just isn't as much information in the system to get your effects to "work on". Yes, you still have to boil that all down to 16bit when done to get it on a CD, but there is a lot that can happen between the time it gets recorded and the time it gets dithered out to 16bit. Think about it this way: Why not just eat a handful of flour, a handful of sugar, some cooked eggs, a bit of vanilla and some chocolate chips instead of mixing it all together, baking it and having cookies? I mean, the end result is that you just eat all of the ingredients, so why not just cut to the chase and eat them rather than doing a bunch of stuff to them first. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John K Posted January 26, 2019 Share Posted January 26, 2019 Thank you Blades The fog slowly starting to lift. John Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Øyvind Skald Posted January 26, 2019 Author Share Posted January 26, 2019 (edited) Another verry imorptant point is that digital sound do not handle hot signals as analog do. Even digital effects handle signals at -15dB better than hot signals at -3dB. They sound just not right with hoter signal. And 16 bits makes the noise floor rise up to where we dont want it to be with -20 to -15 dB signals. Its all about right levels from input to the mix. But of course, its not a rule. Do beak it if you want that "sound". Edited January 26, 2019 by ØSkald Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Øyvind Skald Posted January 26, 2019 Author Share Posted January 26, 2019 This guy explain the gain staging so much better than me: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
synkrotron Posted January 26, 2019 Share Posted January 26, 2019 On 1/24/2019 at 4:56 PM, Wibbles said: I already have, thanks. Great stuff. And I am eternally grateful Mr Wibbles 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
synkrotron Posted January 26, 2019 Share Posted January 26, 2019 On 1/24/2019 at 5:07 PM, ØSkald said: I dont know if you have any Inspiration from Christopher Franke, but I can hear something there. Well, Christophe Frank was a third part of Tangerine Dream back when I first ventured into that sort of stuff. I try hard to emulate that but the reality is that my stuff is my own ? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
synkrotron Posted January 26, 2019 Share Posted January 26, 2019 On 1/25/2019 at 3:53 AM, John K said: My opinion, if you are going to publish a CD, do 44.1 k and 16 bit depth. All else upper and lower is lost until they update the CD standard, and you are at the mercy of the integrity of whatever you have chosen to up sample or downsample your final mix. I gave up on thinking about physical releases quite a while ago. Can't remember the last time I burned a CD with my own stuff on it, probably early 2K. I upload all my stuff to Bandcamp as 24 bit wav and it is up to the downloader as to whether they download the WAV file or the 320kbps MP3 file. Bandcamp does the conversion to all the other file types, I just upload the WAV. Also, when I download stuff from Bandcamp I download 320kbps MP3 files because my hearing is fecked and lossless file types are lost on me. Regarding gain staging:- I don't worry so much about that any more, since moving to 24bit. The "noise floor" is so low, apparently, using 24bit that you can record much lower signals that what you would have done using 16bit. For 16bit recordings, gain staging, and faffing with that level to get it as hot as possible without clipping was quite important. So, that's why I would never, ever record in 16bit again. cheers andy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
synkrotron Posted January 26, 2019 Share Posted January 26, 2019 An interesting video, albeit for REAPER:- And one about Gain Staging, which, for me, was quite an eye opener:- 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
synkrotron Posted January 26, 2019 Share Posted January 26, 2019 Another interesting video by Dan Worrall:- Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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