This is of course true, what David says.
Audio people are as they are--
they tend to think a lot more about audio than they
listen to actual music--
but musicians(eg David) know that the highest frequencies
have essentially sod all (since this is UK based list intellectually,
I use the Brit vulgarism here) to do with music as music.
For literal realism--of course one needs them because they
are there in reality. But for music
as it means something as music
not really so much.
Moreover the top octave frequencies are ALWAYS WRONG. There is no
stereo mechanism (and not really a surround one either) to get
the highs to be as they are in reality when they are recorded
and played back. They always
detach themselves somewhat from their sources and become a sort of
blurring out of texture rather than the texture being firmly attached to
its precise source--this is especially true for recordings of large
ensembles where the higher frequencies sound like a layer of high
frequency noise laid on like jam on a piece of toast.
Digital is good because first of all it is really
reliable on pitch and second one can do things
with it--DSP can do stuff that one could not
do with analogue processing.
But otherwise, analogue works fine.
The real problem with cassettes was how
they were duplicated. Plus the fact that
the players (and recorders) were highly unpredictable
as to exact speed.
(I have a deck with adjustable speed for that reason--
otherwise things tend to be shifted in pitch in oddball
ways. It is typical of the audio industry that until
digital audio came along, which is pitch perfect by
nature, the industry treated pitch with complete
contempt--off centered records, cassette decks with
any old speed, not to mention speed stability problems.
etc. Sometimes one can feel that the audio industry
ends up with music strictly by accident!)
Robert
On Wed, 1 May 2013, David Pickett wrote:
At 16:47 01-05-13, Sampo Syreeni wrote:
On 2013-05-01, David Pickett wrote:
So, analog still rules!
Please die horribly. ;)
You say that, but I have recently been transferring old cassettes to hard
drive and, given that they have a limited bandwidth of about 15kHz, the noise
is not intrusive and I have been amazed at the quality -- a quality that mp3
files do not approach.
If, as some people do, you actually want to enjoy the music, you can do so
with the cassettes that I transferred.
David
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