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MikeEnRegalia View Drop Down
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Points: 21149 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 06 2008 at 10:03
Originally posted by oliverstoned oliverstoned wrote:

Originally posted by MikeEnRegalia MikeEnRegalia wrote:

Don't take me too serious here ... I currently don't have the time to brush up on my knowledge in this domain.


But nobody does!
You see, things are a little more complex than it seems.


Some people just can't be taken seriously ... Wink

BTW: At least *I* try to increase my knowledge. Smile
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Points: 1239 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 06 2008 at 10:18
And we're off! Again.
I think the bottom line here is that it's horses for courses. I like vinyl and analogue, so does Oliver, Mike's a digi fiend. I find digital flat and hard, he champions its accuracy.
The correlation here I suppose is as simple as whether you like a smooth, warm sounding system or something that delivers anlaytical detail and crispness. Personally I want it all - warmth and a tangible midband but with crispness treble and tight bass but I guess I veer towards the warm side of the spectrum. Others prize that "hi-fi" sound of forensic detail (which I find comes at the expense of musicality).
In the end it doesn't matter one whit.
Both formats have their strengths. If you get something that makes your ears tingle when you slap on a CD or a record then voila - happiness. And that's it.
None of us are ever going to agree on this eternal circular debate so best to probably leave it.

I still say vinyl rule though ;-)
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Points: 21149 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 06 2008 at 10:39
^ I agree ... almost. I do like vinyl. And although I think that digital is superior in many ways, it doesn't mean that there can't be a vinyl disc which sounds superior than many digital recordings. It all depends on what the engineers make of the medium. For example, there are many audiophiles which prefer to listen to classical music on CD and/or SACD/DVD-Audio. I don't think it has much to do with the actual music, but with the fact that classical music is rarely played "competitively" on the radio, and thus has been spared from the loudness war. 

Edited by MikeEnRegalia - June 06 2008 at 10:39
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Points: 37575 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 06 2008 at 11:39
Originally posted by MikeEnRegalia MikeEnRegalia wrote:

^ where does that 22.1kHz signal come from ... why should it be "automatically" present in the digital signal? Or in other words: When/How is it added to the signal?
My mistake  - it's 22.05kHz ... (Excel rounded down to 1dp and I missed it Embarrassed)
 
When a signal is sampled at 44.1kHz the bit-rate is present in the resulting data as fs/2 [a bit-rate 44.1kHz is one sample every 22.676µS - two samples are needed to reconstitute a signal (Nyquist) so the resultant is 22.05kHz].
 
This is regardless of the original sampling frequency  - keeping the bit-depth and bit-rate high during recording process shifts this quantisation frequency out of the audio-band preventing it from affecting the recorded/mixed data, but it appears once the data is downsampled to 44.1kHz to encode onto the CD - what comes off the CD is still limited to 16bits @44.1kHz and contains all the inherent artifacts of that (low) sampling rate.
 
Therefore this is not an effect of the sampling ADCs or the reconstituting DACs, but is an inherent trait of the encoded data.
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Points: 37575 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 06 2008 at 11:46
Originally posted by MikeEnRegalia MikeEnRegalia wrote:

^ I agree ... almost. I do like vinyl. And although I think that digital is superior in many ways, it doesn't mean that there can't be a vinyl disc which sounds superior than many digital recordings. It all depends on what the engineers make of the medium. For example, there are many audiophiles which prefer to listen to classical music on CD and/or SACD/DVD-Audio. I don't think it has much to do with the actual music, but with the fact that classical music is rarely played "competitively" on the radio, and thus has been spared from the loudness war. 
^ I agree too Big%20smile Both systems have their pros and cons and I enjoy both. Nothing can beat the dynamic range of digital data once the mastering 'engineers' actually let us experience it.
 
I am a mixed-signal test engineer by profession so I tend to over-analyse things for a living Wink
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Points: 21149 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 06 2008 at 11:53
^^ sorry, I still don't quite understand. But is this all really important today? I mean, even cheap computer sound cards do the digital/analog conversion correctly. I looked at the wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(signal_processing)#Audio_sampling

Consider the following statement:

"One advantage of higher sampling rates is that they can relax the low-pass filter design requirements for ADCs and DACs, but with modern oversampling sigma-delta converters this advantage is less important"

Doesn't this mean that whatever happens during sampling, in the end a low pass filter eliminates this high frequency noise which could affect the original signal?


Edited by MikeEnRegalia - June 06 2008 at 11:53
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Points: 21149 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 06 2008 at 11:55
Originally posted by darqDean darqDean wrote:

Originally posted by MikeEnRegalia MikeEnRegalia wrote:

^ I agree ... almost. I do like vinyl. And although I think that digital is superior in many ways, it doesn't mean that there can't be a vinyl disc which sounds superior than many digital recordings. It all depends on what the engineers make of the medium. For example, there are many audiophiles which prefer to listen to classical music on CD and/or SACD/DVD-Audio. I don't think it has much to do with the actual music, but with the fact that classical music is rarely played "competitively" on the radio, and thus has been spared from the loudness war. 
^ I agree too Big%20smile Both systems have their pros and cons and I enjoy both. Nothing can beat the dynamic range of digital data once the mastering 'engineers' actually let us experience it.
 
I am a mixed-signal test engineer by profession so I tend to over-analyse things for a living Wink


I did a bit of research, but I couldn't find any database which you can use to find out which recordings suffer from extreme compression and which don't ... that's too bad. Such a database would be quite interesting ... maybe I'll even add a tag to my website which indicates the "audiophility". Wink
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Points: 37575 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 06 2008 at 11:58
^ just add an "Album Gain" field to your database and voilą!
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Points: 21149 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 06 2008 at 12:13
^ Yes, that's what I meant. But I'm still trying to figure out how the Album Gain figure calculated by ReplayGain relates to the figures usually mentioned in articles. ReplayGain calculates the difference between the album gain and a mysterious "reference" (either 83dB or 89dB - sources vary), while articles usually specify the difference between the album gain and 0dB (full scale). Am I right in assuming that "full scale" means 96dB?


Edited by MikeEnRegalia - June 06 2008 at 12:35
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Points: 37575 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 06 2008 at 13:02
Originally posted by MikeEnRegalia MikeEnRegalia wrote:

^ Yes, that's what I meant. But I'm still trying to figure out how the Album Gain figure calculated by ReplayGain relates to the figures usually mentioned in articles. ReplayGain calculates the difference between the album gain and a mysterious "reference" (either 83dB or 89dB - sources vary), while articles usually specify the difference between the album gain and 0dB (full scale). Am I right in assuming that "full scale" means 96dB?
Good question. Confused
 
The dynamic range of a Cd is 96.33dB - usually we reference everything negatively with respect to FS (ie 0dB), so the ideal minimum noise-floor for a 16-bit ADC is expressed as -94.56dBFS
 
Looking at the maths for Replay Gain they calculate the reference level as being -20dBFS of Pink Noise to produce 83dB(SPL) output in a listening environment (whatever that meansConfused), which equates to 0dB on a studio mixing desk... which is a pile of nonsense - 83dB(SPL) is dependant upon amplifier power and speaker efficiency and has nothing to do with what comes off a CD.
 
So a quick answer is No.
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