Newsgroups: bit.listserv.allmusic
Date:         Fri, 18 Dec 1992 13:06:56 EST
From:         Ken Koester <MAINT2@ERS.BITNET>
Subject:      Digital vs., etc.

Date:         Fri, 18 Dec 1992 05:14:02 GMT
From:         Jeff Beer <ujwb@UXA.ECN.BGU.EDU>

>The audiophile folks tend to be analog proponents, saying it is more
>musical.  However, whenever they talk about music, I get the impression
>their knowledge of music is suspect.  For one thing, they tend to like
>records that have good engineering over good musical performances.  The
>classic audiophile record is the soundtrack to Casino Royale.  Casino
>Royale might be good film music, but it is hardly the type of thing to
>get excited about on a musical point of view.

The audiophiles  also tend to shy away from little niceties like double-blind
listening tests (-:  The last time I read about a d-b test of CD players,
the audiophiles in the sample couldn't reliably tell the difference between
the cheap and the expensive players until they got to the $1500 models, ie,
an entire magnitude of cost difference.  I trust my own ears, thank you very
much, and I strongly advise the rest of you to do the same, if you aren't
already.  Even if they lead you to the wrong conclusion (-:

>I heard over in rec.music.classical a tale from someone who was
>recording a pianist.  After they were done, just for the hell of it,
>they recorded him on a short piece using a Synclavier at a sample rate
>of 100K.  They played it back at 100K.  He said the sound was so real
>that he thought it was the piano.  So we were screwed when they picked
>the 44K sampling rate of the CD.  It would have made the CD only
>slightly bigger.

Maybe yes, maybe no--I *already* have CDs that make pianos sound like pianos.
At any rate, the standards were picked in, what?, '82 or so?  I think it
would have made for a considerably bigger disk at that stage.

>I think to sum up, being digital is no guarantee that it will sound
>good.  It is an art... to make them sound good, and you have to do
>different things, sometimes by hook and crook, and the final sound
>is going to be different than good analog.  The good digital sounds
>very good.  The good analog sounds very good.  But I think the average
>digital is way better than the average analog.

Agreed.  The first CDs didn't always sound so hot--the engineers kept trying
to use the tricks they used for analog & the tricks screwed up the sound.
Proof that any medium can pass trash, if you want it.

Date:         Fri, 18 Dec 1992 10:28:00 EDT
From:         Another message from Rosemary! <RWARREN@TOPAZ.CONCORDIA.CA>
>supply is sitting in Jackson Square.  why so many records?  i'll tell you why:
>THEY SOUND BETTER.  Tapes are either muddy or TOO LOUD.  and i once had an
>acquaintance who was terribly proud of her corrupt-disk player (she even bough
>_Bad_ on CD to impress me!) but i didn't have the heart to tell her how brassy
>the music sounded and how DEAD it was between tracks -- like the machine had
>died!  michael sounded so hollow and artificial (saves the flames, please!)
>compared to the record sitting at home.  corrupt disks are too perfect --
>save them for CD-Rom, where their 600
>megs of storage makes sense!  give me static!  give me skips!  skips give
>CHARACTER to the music! (yes some of my second-hand records skip -- not badly)

That's the way real music sounds when it hasn't been massaged to death in some
analog studio in order to overcome the inherent limitations of the medium (-:
If anything is corrupt, it's the analog record--contains info that wasn't in
the performance to begin with.  As for skips--that's just data loss.  If
Michael had wanted you *not* to hear part of the song, he wouldn't have
recorded that bit, now would he?  (-:  Anyways, you can have *all* the skips
on my vinyl *anytime* you want them!

>do we still call them that?  cdn-made vinyl records went to dodo-land) earn a
>higher profit on those rainbow doo-hickeys than on chromium dioxide or those
>nice black things i blow my paycheques on.  (to me those long boxes are pretty
>stoooopid)

No argument there.  But why stop?  Why not just listen *only* to live music &
stop those nasty ol' record companies from ripping all of us off?  (-:
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