TerryS wrote: > It may be like the 'chicken and egg' thing. The recording engineers may > be slow to try to achieve extraordinary dynamic range in the recordings > until more people have shown the desire to purchase the higher > resolution products. Again, a guess on my part.
The irony is that recording engineers have been pretty constantly *reducing* dynamic range of their recordings, as most listeners prefer a compressed dynamic range. > If I 'settle' for 16/44k, then at what point in my pursuit of perfection > does my source material become the limiting factor in my reproduction > chain. The source material (rather than the number of bits) is already the limiting factor. > The link I referenced makes a pretty good case that the current state of > the art is not yet sufficient to reproduce the full dynamic range the > human ear is capable of hearing. Still work to be done, and 16 bits > falls short. Not sure I agree, see arnyk's comments about the effects of dithering. > But I fully understand the argument that 16 bits is good enough given > the limitations many others have cited (environmental noise, limits to > the maximum allowable volume, equipment limitations, and even personal > preferences). I don't necessarily agree. These are not hard limits, > just current state of the art. They can be pushed further. But a think to remember is that if I have access to the original recording, I can tell you, unequivocally, if the source material "fits" in a given number of bits without compression or limiting, or not. The recording engineer can measure the noise floor, and determine what the highest peak is in the material, and thus knows how many bits are required. No guesswork needed. As I wrote, so far I haven't come across source material that pushes the 16-bit limit once the gain has been normalized. "To try to judge the real from the false will always be hard. In this fast-growing art of 'high fidelity' the quackery will bear a solid gilt edge that will fool many people" - Paul W Klipsch, 1953 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Julf's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=42050 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=105717 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
