On 2013-05-01, Fons Adriaensen wrote:
While I do agree in principle, the 'quality' you appreciate may have more to do with the content or production than with the storage medium.
Now that we went off-topic already, I'll have to remind y'all about DSD/SACD. Personally I think it has this precise kind of a "problem": everybody thinks it's great -- and it is! Except that it's for the wrong reasons: as a format it's ill-thought out and downright nasty for the signal processing engineer, but because you can make it good enough and it attracts the bestest of the bestest in the production crowd, as an audiophile product, everybody thinks it's just dandy. Despite the fact that everybody would be better, cheaper and more rainbow colored for everybody if people just went along with PCM, the bestest included.
Whenever I listen to one of my old Beatles or Doors LPs, either the real thing or from hard disk, I'm amazed by the sound. Compared to that 99% of what's produced today just *sounds* like crap, even when ignoring the complete lack of musical inspiration.
Yes. The personal recording revolution wasn't all good: precious few understand serious audio quality anymore, after having been subjected to the onslaught of impressive but mediocre output.
BTW, some parts of that are actually measurable. Say, put a bunch of teenagers in a room and tell them to tell apart THD levels differing by less than 1% point. Not gonna happen. Even engineers fail a simple test like that rather often nowadays, while the research literature suggests at some point people could hear downto something like .2% THD absolute.
-- Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - de...@iki.fi, http://decoy.iki.fi/front +358-50-5756111, 025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2 _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
