CD format abandoned in 2012?

Snow Dog wrote: Dean wrote: s ".wav" files, are not the best possible fidelity. How so?

".wav" files are generally raw waveforms ripped from a CD, where the encoding is 16-bits at 44.1KHz sample rate (Red Book standard). In the recording studio they use 20 or 24-bits at 96KHz or 192KHz which are "better" fidelity - some artists release albums for download at this standard as ".flac" file (eg Steven Wilson).

stonebeard wrote: Dean wrote: stonebeard wrote: 2) if I'm going to own music, I'm going to own it in it's best possible fidelity. That's just the way it is. And that is how it should be, but bear in mind that CD, and thus ".wav" files, are not the best possible fidelity. I suppose that's correct, but very little past 44.1 KHz is going to be noticeable, while it gets much more noticeable below that.

Dean wrote:   However the 16-bits is a possible limitation if the music you are listening to has a naturally high dynamic range with prolonged quiet passages that will affect fidelity across the audio spectrum.

Other than the political fallout this will cause record companies - which will be more significant than the prospect of vinyl, tape, or non-Bluray video items disappearing - what concerns me is general catalog;  you'd think with a download format, access to unusual, rare, old or overseas recordings would improve but I fear the opposite could happen.   One of the great things about the CD revolution was the eventual uncovering and re-releasing of so many wonderful things [e.g. Prog] that may have been lost or neglected forever.   Will that be the case with non-phys?   I wonder, and worry.

You'd think

Henry Plainview wrote: Atavachron wrote: Will that be the case with non-phys?   I wonder, and worry. Unless the musician has a stick up their ass and blocks it, I would imagine that more things would be rereleased digitally than on CD because there's almost no costs involved in making something available digitally.

Accountability is going to be a huge headache - many artists struggle to get real sales figures (and thus roylaties) out of record companies when there is a physical product to count, I imagine the task is many times harder for downloads (there have already been cases reported of artists not being paid for downloads).

well hold on to your CDs people, they may be little treasures someday 

Dean wrote: Padraic wrote: Dean wrote: I'm not convinced one way or the other about higher sampling rates and find 44.1KHz to be acceptable to me. For telemetry and instrumentation I wouldn't use Nyquist, but would want at least ten samples per cycle of the highest frequency I was trying to encode - which for audio would require sampling rates in excess of 200KHz - this would preserve the waveshape and phase of the ultrasonic components. Whoa.  In my line of work I have never, ever required such a high oversampling ratio. In the past I have seen this ratio used on airframe stress telemetry, and recently I have tried testing the encoders used for sampling seismic data which employed well above Nyquist sampling rates (then the signals involved were <<0.1Hz)

You can certainly afford to be generous in those frequency regimes - but imagine the 10x requirement for signals with bandwidths of several hundred MHz. 

Atavachron wrote: well hold on to your CDs people, they may be little treasures someday

I'm certainly holding on to them not because they may turn into a mini-gold-mine but because they already are my treasure.

Padraic wrote: You can certainly afford to be generous in those frequency regimes - but imagine the 10x requirement for signals with bandwidths of several hundred MHz.

It is certainly affected by what it is you are looking for. It could be stated that in seismic data (for example) 10x oversampling of the fundamental is merely Nyquist sampling of the highest component of interest on that fundamental, but I've never seen it spec'd that way. I don't believe that in audio 192KHz sampling is looking for components between 22.05KHz and 96KHz in the analog signal (for example).