mlsstl;578491 Wrote: > Having done a fair amount of analog recording with open reel over the > years, I can assure you that if you have an open reel with 65 or even > 70 dB of S/N, when you have a quiet passage 50 dB down, you're still in > a spot where the recorded info still has only 15 or 20 dB of S/N to work > with and the noise floor inserts itself into the music. That in itself > represents a loss of "resolution". > > Lost is this discussion is that quiet passages in music were meant by > the composer and/or artist to be quiet. Therefore they are more subject > to extraneous noise. It is meant that you have to strain or "work" to > hear them versus turning up the volume and expecting them to sound > identical to the loud passages. > > I find most of the "defects" in CD recordings were the result of > intentional recording and mixing choices made by the artist, engineer > or producer. I have any number of CDs that are absolutely wonderful in > their dynamic range and presentation of quiet passages. If one CD can > get that right, then it's not the format, and I have many. Yes I agree with most of what you say (almost anything recorded by Hyperion sounds great for example). I also note that Gramophone reviewers (who are plainly not neophiles) took to CD more enthusiastically than Hi Fi reviewers. I cannot imagine wanting regularly to listen to the slow movement of a piano sonata on record (especially not an old one.) Nevertheless the fact that CD can sound great does not mean that it can't be bettered. Also I think that there probably is something instructive to be learned from the fact that an awful lot of picky people still seem to think there is something in analog that Cd missed.
I think though that the concepts of analog noise floor, dynamic range, quantisation noise and resolution need unpicking. Digital basically wins in practical terms in terms of hearing quiet sounds because its overall snr and dynamic range can easily be made greater than that of eg a record player. [But analog tapes manage to capture even if not immediately reproduce sounds below the noise floor. The notes to the later editions of Solti's Ring cycle disclose that once modern noise reduction system were applied to the old analog masters, they found all kinds of things they didn't know were there.] A digital system simply can't reproduce any sound below its quantisation noise and that quantisation noise appears throughout the amplitude range. In a digital system then the smallest value which can be given is (I think) equal to the smallest incremental value of amplitude. An analog system it seems to me may still make a very finely textured range of sounds above a noisy background. I think it is very confusing and probably inaccurate to measure the noise floor of an analog system relative to max, convert that into bits and then treat that figure as being the equivalent bit depth of the analog system for all purposes. (I think that this is because in the analog system the smallest value which can be given is not also the smallest incremental value-ie dynamic range does not equal precision. I do hope this is correct] -- adamdea ------------------------------------------------------------------------ adamdea's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=37603 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=82050 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
