That's what I said in post #63
No offense, Jack. Your comment was so brief that this concept needed a bit more air time.
Lee
Hi res again?
- Thread starter Phelonious Ponk
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No offense, Jack. Your comment was so brief that this concept needed a bit more air time.
Lee
None taken my friend
Let me give this a whack.
I can see where Micro and Mike are coming from. I use chamber music too. There's something about it that Tim probably missed. That would be that Micro, Mike and myself are analog listeners. What's that got to do with making the reproduction of the event easier? Speaking for myself, nothing about the big black discs themselves but rather their clothes. In the back of many LPs you will actually see photos of the event. Some go as far as laying out the seating arrangements in charts. In those photos, if you know what you're looking at and what you're looking for you can get an excellent idea of what the producers and engineers were shooting for. You hardly see this with Jazz or any other genre. If you get shots in studio at all, they are tight shots of the artists and not wide shots of the ensembles.
For example, I think we can all tell off the bat even with simple systems what are close mic'ed multitrack and what are minimally mic'ed. The more astute can tell how closely something is mic'ed and pretty much how much of the reverb or delay was processed in afterwards. Looking at the angles, if you know what type of mic it is and it's pattern, you also get an idea of the intended listening perspective. Having the pictures in hand allows us to tweak as closely with some, but not total, degree of certainty.
The question is why is there a debate about what was real and what's encoded in the LP, Tape or Digital Formats? What really happened WAS encoded and the signal IS the representation of the event. The debate should be about how it is DECODED. That would make for an interesting discussion in it's own right because here we leave the electrical realm where Tim likes to say.......all bets are off.
Let me give this a whack.
I can see where Micro and Mike are coming from. I use chamber music too. There's something about it that Tim probably missed. That would be that Micro, Mike and myself are analog listeners. What's that got to do with making the reproduction of the event easier? Speaking for myself, nothing about the big black discs themselves but rather their clothes. In the back of many LPs you will actually see photos of the event. Some go as far as laying out the seating arrangements in charts. In those photos, if you know what you're looking at and what you're looking for you can get an excellent idea of what the producers and engineers were shooting for. You hardly see this with Jazz or any other genre. If you get shots in studio at all, they are tight shots of the artists and not wide shots of the ensembles.
For example, I think we can all tell off the bat even with simple systems what are close mic'ed multitrack and what are minimally mic'ed. The more astute can tell how closely something is mic'ed and pretty much how much of the reverb or delay was processed in afterwards. Looking at the angles, if you know what type of mic it is and it's pattern, you also get an idea of the intended listening perspective. Having the pictures in hand allows us to tweak as closely with some, but not total, degree of certainty.
The question is why is there a debate about what was real and what's encoded in the LP, Tape or Digital Formats? What really happened WAS encoded and the signal IS the representation of the event. The debate should be about how it is DECODED. That would make for an interesting discussion in it's own right because here we leave the electrical realm where Tim likes to say.......all bets are off.
We started out there, when we were talking about large orchestral pieces with their big dynamic swings, but somewhere, around the time I called Mike Myles (sorry), we got into playing technique, and the idea that a classical pianist is more demanding of a playback system. I agreed up to that point. That's where I went off in the wrong direction.
Tim
Mike,
If we are thinking of the same recordings it is a Deutsche Grammophon box. Tim will forgive me for the off topic
you are correct, it's a DG. i was posting from work and could not recall exactly and took a guess.
i got them mixed up with a couple other frequent friends, the Quartetto Italiano box sets of Beethoven and Mozart String Quartets on Phillips. maybe my most frequently played String Quartets. highly recommended (not that i'm any sort of expert.....i'm just getting into this type of music seriously).
Frantz,
your comment;
you need to hear the same recording of a piano on CD compared to vinyl on a turntable which gets the timeing correct with correct speed. Piano demands perfect speed or the 'sustains' will warble. your ears are particularly sensitive to this. belt driven turntables struggle to deal with this on more revealing recordings.
try Nojima Plays Listz on Reference Recordings. i have the CD (which i like, alot), Lp and master tape. when you visit we will play these and you then tell me about how the CD gets it all. it does not. which is not to say that the CD is not perfectly enjoyable.
there are many other examples. piano separates the men from the boys.
your comment;
you need to hear the same recording of a piano on CD compared to vinyl on a turntable which gets the timeing correct with correct speed. Piano demands perfect speed or the 'sustains' will warble. your ears are particularly sensitive to this. belt driven turntables struggle to deal with this on more revealing recordings.
try Nojima Plays Listz on Reference Recordings. i have the CD (which i like, alot), Lp and master tape. when you visit we will play these and you then tell me about how the CD gets it all. it does not. which is not to say that the CD is not perfectly enjoyable.
there are many other examples. piano separates the men from the boys.
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My experiences with hi-res are a little different from what has so far been expressed. For well mastered recordings where the same mastering is used for CD and higher-res digital, I can virtually always tell the difference fairly easily and prefer the higher-res format. This is true even for some 24/44.1 recordings such as Keith Jarrett's "Jasmine" and the 2009 Beatles remasters, and even more so for SACD or 24/96 PCM sources (even analog originals).
I don't have an LP front-end currently, but have quite a few needle drops from new LP's played on fairly high-end equipment (usually retail price in the 5 figures for just the phono sections) with high-end consumer A>D convertors. I can only rarely tell the difference between these 24/96 needle drops and the CD's of identical mastering except where record noise or mistracking are present.
I don't have an LP front-end currently, but have quite a few needle drops from new LP's played on fairly high-end equipment (usually retail price in the 5 figures for just the phono sections) with high-end consumer A>D convertors. I can only rarely tell the difference between these 24/96 needle drops and the CD's of identical mastering except where record noise or mistracking are present.
Bingo! Do you also have the Bethoven Violino Sonatas (Decca) LPs - Perlman/Ashkenasy?
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those are the ones. i don't recall that i have those Decca's, but i'll add it to my 'list'. thanks.
There is one LP of string chamber music that I play even more often than the Quartetto Italiano boxes - the Brahms Sextets played by the Amadeus Quartet.
But here I have to make a confession - although I prefer the LP by a wide margin, I often listen to the CD version I also own ...
Just in case you are thinking vinyl addicted audiophiles only listen to string music, I add one of the more treasured of my LP boxes - although less known than the popular Carmina Burana, Trionfo di Afrodite is also a masterpiece.
I would like to listen to any of these recordings in HiRez.
But here I have to make a confession - although I prefer the LP by a wide margin, I often listen to the CD version I also own ...
Just in case you are thinking vinyl addicted audiophiles only listen to string music, I add one of the more treasured of my LP boxes - although less known than the popular Carmina Burana, Trionfo di Afrodite is also a masterpiece.
I would like to listen to any of these recordings in HiRez.
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Some are saying that CD gets piano very right. I cannot agree as one who records lots of piano. In my experience only hirez digital gets the piano right. No doubt that KOJ at Reference and others do a nice job and I like the Nojima CDs but 16/44 is just not resolving enough to really capture the complex tones of the piano. It has also taken me since 1990 when I started working on recordings to feel like I can mic the piano. It's very difficult even in spaces where you record over and over.
Anyway, just my $0.02. I have a lot of issues with 16/44.1. It's just not that good a format for the sound quality we want to have.
Anyway, just my $0.02. I have a lot of issues with 16/44.1. It's just not that good a format for the sound quality we want to have.
Best thing about this thread so far....I'm currently listening to Beethoven's String Quartet No. 16 in F. It is lovely. Thanks for that.
Tim
Tim
Tim ,
As you are a jazz lover, I would love to hear about your opinion about these Shostakovitch Quartets.
There is an interesting spoken introduction to the music of these quartets (even slightly referring to concepts that some audiophiles praise a lot such as "Public being there" , "Atmosphere of the hall" and "silence" by cellist David Finckel of the Emerson Quartet at
http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=6160527&m=91808934
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Looking at the dither white paper, it appears that the added noise reduces the noise floor to about -42dB (-48dB for Apogee's implementation). This should be plenty of headroom for a real recording. According to the DR database the most violent dynamic swing they've measured is 34dB. So, I think we're clear that the benefits of bitrate are limited to dynamic range and low noise floor. Does anyone have similarly detailed papers comparing sample rates?
A great orchestral work, well recorded:
Wiener Philharmoniker/Constantin Silvestri - The Love for Three Oranges
A great orchestral work, well recorded:
Wiener Philharmoniker/Constantin Silvestri - The Love for Three Oranges
Oh no. It's almost never that simple. Someone always gets a much bigger soundstage, or much greater inner detail, or_____________ from anything and everything audiophile. Just wait...
Besides, you just defined the benefits as noise floor and dynamic range in a paragraph that rendered the dynamic range audibly irrelevant. That won't do. That won't do at all.Tim
No, the benefits of higher bit rates when associated with higher sampling rates as they always are, at playback time, not while mastering, etc, is that you're making life easier for the electronics at that point. It's no more and no less than that ...
Frank
Thanks for the input, but I think I'll go with the experts and their specific statements. My assertion that, "the benefits of bitrate are limited to dynamic range and low noise floor," are a distillation of their more comprehensive output.
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