What is noise floor?

Well in theory this makes a bit of sense, but the difference in the noise specs between hi-res and standard 16 bit is not much. There are major distinctions (in my opinion) but not necessarily in terms of hum and noise floor. Both of those formats have enough dynamic range to clearly reveal the noise I'm talking about.

In fact, I heard the noise clearly on 15ips tape copies, and that's precisely why I made them and took them home. I could hear much more at home than in the studio, which I'm sure is surprising to many. I used to make these transfers from all of my studios to hear what they had before I started working with them, and then again to judge the results.

That said, I am a huge fan of hi-res recordings and often hear considerably more detail and depth than with CD's, but that's another matter.

 

You can easily recognise a dumb question by the extensive will of depressed people convincingly trying to answer it.

 

Doug Sclar so no matter what we can never get away with the noise floor, no matter if it is in the room the artist is, home or aftet the remastering is done, to cd, hi-re, vinyl or whatever.

 

Ok i see, thanks for the info, if i understand right, the console put noise to the music signal, and thats it?

 

To some degree I'd agree. The way to avoid hum completely is to have batteries running all the gear and of course that's not practical. That said, I made a series of live recordings back in the 70s using battery mixers and there is no hum to hear at all. Of course there are other noises, but no hum to speak of.

Yes, all the hum in the console or related gear can surely make it to the final product and often does.

On some recordings there is so much low frequency noise that it really needs to be filtered out. I'm not necessarily talking about hum either. AC, mic pops, bumping in to mic stands, and lots of these are unnoticed sounds. It's really up to the mastering engineer to catch these if present.

 

How do engineers filter that?

Thank you very much

Ps. So there is not only noise floor but other noise, if you seat in a close silence room, is it noise there too?

Ps2 it would be interesting to know which albums you remastered whit batteries, so i maybe can buy and try

 

I doubt many albums were recorded or mastered with battery powered gear. In a pro facility the noise should be so low as to not be anything an end user will notice, but it will still be present to some small degree.

The recordings I made with battery mixers were done as an amateur. Those mixers were extremely quiet, but had very limited facilities. That meant no pan pots, no equalization, no processing and very minimal electronics. You had to be clever to get a stereo mix, but that's all I knew at the time. I wasn't necessarily trying to get such a quiet setup. It was all I could afford. I had no idea at the time how good the sound quality of those mixers was.

And yes, there is noise in virtually all rooms, so if you record in a room with noise you will pick it up. That said, it's usually not a problem in a well designed studio depending on how loud the music is in that room. If you're recording chamber music, or other music that can be very quiet at times, room noise can be noticeable in some cases.

I've been in rooms that were so quiet that you could hear your body making noise which is very spooky.

As for how engineers filter the non musical sub sonic information, it's simple with the use of hi-pass filters or equalizers.

 

Here in sweden i go sometimes to remote woods and i can tell you is so quiet, that is in fact scary

 

I've been on a quest of noise floor reduction as of late. Your statement pretty much says it all. However, I have had pretty good results.

 

My wife is great at creating environmental noise. Friday nights, for me, are for cranking the stereo and listening to music. My wife decided Fridays were for laundry and the washer and dryer are directly below my listening room. This is an on going battle.... Then there is my wife blasting her music at 98db in an adjacent room, or blasting the tv etc...I still love her though and wouldn't have it any other way.

 

Your neighbours hate fridays.

 

My neighbors can't hear us. We don't live in an apartment or on top of each other.

 

Part of my problem is due to the fact that my system is very three dimensional.

If all the music came from a plane between the speakers, it would be easy to tell the origin of a sound coming from someplace else. Quite often when I hear something coming from a weird location, it's actually on the recording.

Btw, the same type of thing happens when watching TV. I still remember NYPD Blue which I believe was the first show with 5.1 audio. I would watch it alone, but kept getting freaked out thinking somebody else was here. It was always TV surround sound fooling me with distant doors closing, people typing, and other natural sounds like that. It was actually pretty darn cool, but sometimes a bit spooky too.