----- Original Message -----
From: "Gwendal Cobert" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "'313 mailing list'" <313@hyperreal.org>
Sent: Tuesday, May 21, 2002 12:23 PM
Subject: RE: [313] Question: Final Scratch
> Just one thing : aren't there some lossless compression formats for audio
> files, as there are for images ?
> Gwendal
The newest audiophile digital audio formats are SACD and (I'm probably wrong
about this) DVD Audio. When researching new DVD players I looked into these
options, and there's a big debate about which is better. z-net covered it
pretty well if I recall. The upshot is that the DVD spec (pushed by Phillips
and Pioneer I think) is 5-channel 24 bit 96 KHz or something obsecenly large
like that, whereas Sony's idea is to duplicate the detail of the *stream* by
using stereo 1 bit 2.1GHz (yes, Gigahertz) encoding. As someone already
mentioned, no digital format is any more of a perfectly faithful
reproduction of airborne sound any more than vinyl is. Either will succeed
or fail in its degree of accuracy. Many vinyl releases are "compressed" a la
mp3 when a record is longer than, say 12 minutes. The groove "shrinks", and
less bandwidth can be captured. CD's are presently 16 bit 44.1 KHz, most DAT
recordings are 16 bit 48 KHz. In practice, what digital lacks in warmth, it
makes up for in detail.
Where this all seems to be going for audiophiles is the multi-channel
reproduction route (or so they hope anyway). This is all a cool idea (the
West Sound Circle CD from a few years back was a cool example in the
electronic realm, encoded in Dolby Surround), but it seems a bit silly if
the recording was originally in stereo. On the other hand, the Miles Davis
recording on the demo SACD that came with my Sony DVD player sounded really
nice. Even through TV speakers you could tell it was a nice space-consuming
recording. Of course, there are virtually no recordings available in these
formats yet, but if they become standards, your CDs will age like your dusty
cassettes and 8-tracks.
The other issue hinted at earlier is that we're all still thinking about
this in terms of "reproduction", which seems a bit of a skewed term these
days, when many tracks are conceived purely digitally, and there's varying
amounts of noise embedded in samples, from the original recording, etc. In
order to "reproduce" a recording in the traditional sense, it assumes you
actually record something, versus encoding a digital audio file for a
digital audio format, which needn't ever be *produced* audibly until after
you get it on the "recording" medium. For instance, Cubase offers up to 32
bit audio support, so you already need to consider a CD as a form of audio
compression. I think this may be why some live PAs sound so unreal and
super-crisp, since we've only heard what can be reproduced of the original
bitrate. Autechre @ DEMF last year is a great example.
The whole analog/digital debate is really interesting but totally overblown.
Vinyl has character, and that will either persuade you or it won't. You can
do all sorts of rediculous stuff on vinyl, like recording video through
fax-type data encoding, where a modem-like device will decode the the data
and reproduce video images. Clearly this has only artistic merit, but it
illustrates the point that no medium is sacred, and the digital/audio
feedback loop has endless permutations depending on where you chose to start
or stop. Just think how rediculous the idea of encoding digital sound onto
analog records seems at face value. If you've ever tried to explain spinning
"techno" on vinyl ("you mean like on a record player???") to someone who is
accustomed to listening to guitars through CDs, you can see where they might
get a bit confused.
For the record, I like vinyl best, and I think Final Scratch will be
convenient when someone else makes something like it that ain't so goddam
pricy. :) I think eventually we'll get lazy enough and computers will be
fast enough that this will be the most sensible *type* of option, although
in its present form there are many issues to be worked out.
Tristan
-------------------
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