Things were done in dedicated silicon back then rather than anything general purpose. Didn't have the overhead to do anything resembling general purpose back then at a reasonable cost. General purpose computers were still a few years away. Still curious why they picked 16-bit rather than something else like 14 or 18 or 17. 8, 16, 24, 32 are all very convenient numbers for computer processing. Much more convenient than other numbers like 14. Back then they very much knew how to do multibit DSD style processing. Back then some of the early CD players were 1 or 2 bit sigma-delta designs operating at less than 16-bits rather than full 16-bit PCM ladder based designs. They knew how to do sigma-delta and DSD style converters back then. And they could do those style of converters at any bit depth they chose. They could have standardized on 14-bit just as easily as they standardized on 16-bit. Why 16-bit? 16-bit is a very convenient number for computers and silicon. Was that the reason?
Lets not get too hung up on bits and htz's..Even after all these years 16/44.1 is still rarely (if ever) a limited factor in sound quality.A brilliant recording will sound brilliant on that format.A great recording will sound great on that format.etc.etc..Any improvement via a higher rez such as 24/196 is very subtle and totally irrelevant in 99% of recordings with are already less than perfect in some way due to engineering/production/recording/mastering techniques.
I listen to my Telarc DDD recordings from that era and I don't agree. I am not pleased that I was conned in to buying so may Telarc classical DDD recording back then. Only now that I have better gear and better ears do I realize how bad and flat they sound. Those recordings were a waste of money. And I was a poor college student buying them. What a fool I was. Damn those recordings are bad. And they were expensive.
Exactly. The cons have been plenty all over the place for decades. Half-speed mastering was a big one. But, it was new. Hope springs eternal.
Can guarantee the poor sound is not because of 16/44.1 but through poor digital transfer and mastering at the time.
So many thousands of dollars wasted on that crap. I wish I had bought AAD classical recordings back then instead of DDD Telarc. I was sold on the superiority of digital back then but didn't have the experienced ears or gear to allow me to hear that I was being conned.
Telarc are pure digital and mastered using the highest quality digital equipment at the time. Highly praised by the audio press.
The editor of the article clearly states that the enigneer Nicols completely misunderstood digital audio! There are no stairsteps, to beginn with. If audio is digitized, it is just a sequenz of numbers. There is nothing like a waveform in digital. If digitized audio is converted to analogue, we get a waveform. Which is completely free of any stairsteps. So, Nichols' premise is jaust completely wrong. This article proves only one thing. Sound engineers can create great sound recordings or masterings, without knowing anything about how the technology works. There's another article on Sound on Sound, along with audio examples, that explains the sampling rate, resolution, and the digital stairstep myths. Digital Problems, Practical Solutions | It's a good introduction to digital audio. Best regards
Except your understanding of digital is essentially assuming infinite bit depth. Which would mean no possibility of quantitization error. Once you start having finite bits and the resulting quantitization error then the pure theory for digital audio no longer applies. Things start to get messy at that point. Part of that mess is quantitization error. Have fun. Pure theory only takes you so far. Once you have to implement and can't have infinite bit depth then theory and reality collide.
Just, keep on reading! Digital Problems, Practical Solutions | Here also your quantization error is described. And why it does not lead to "stairsteps". Stairsteps simply are not there. Best regards
Yes. Combined with the reality that pure digital recording back then was just not that good. Telarc recordings had lots of snappy dynamics and low noise floor. Unfortunately those recordings also had very flat soundstage and very poor imaging and a lack of realistic natural sound. There is more to recording an orchestra than making sure that the percussion is snappy and dynamic.
No-one is claiming infinite bit depth and infinite resolution. You can't have infinite precision, you can't have perfect accuracy. That is a physical law, a property of this universe that no technology can overcome, and no-one is claiming otherwhise. Digital and analogue are merely different technological approaches, but both suffer from finite precision. They are not different in principle, and none is inherently superior. Quantization noise is, well, noise. White noise to be precise. It is the digital equivalent to tape hiss. You can't avoid either.
It makes perfect sense to people with ears and who know what to listen for. Those old Telarc recordings just aren't very good recordings of orchestras. A few of them are OK. On the whole, not very good.
I don't doubt your judgment of those recordings (which I don't know or care about). If you say they are somehow flawed I have no reason to disbelieve you. (Such judgements are to an extent a matter of taste, but let's leave that aside). I reject your explanation that their low quality is due to digital audio. It makes no sense to say so. You have no way of knowing what happened in the studio, and your preference for AAD recordings even refutes your own explanation. Because they too have gone through A/D conversion at some stage, which apparently did not harm them in any way. Therefore, using A/D conversion right at the start of the chain can't do any harm either. Of course if a specific production is bad, no recording technology can rectify that, and it's not its job anyway. The job of a recording device is to faithfully reproduce what is handed down to it. And if that is a bad production, its job is to sound exactly like that bad production. DDD will do that just fine.
So you seem to be blaming DDD in general.Or at least early digital techniques and equipment.Rather than the 16/44.1 in general? I have hundreds of superb sounding CD's .Lots of them DDD's..I also have hundreds of poor sounding CD's.My argument is that its not the sample and htz rate than is a factor in these great and poor sounding recordings..Yes many prefer the sound of AAD or ADD because of the sound signature that analogue tape can have on the sound being recorded and transferred..Ie.A slight roll-off of higher frequencies and a slight bloom/softening of the lower-mid's.
20 bit A/D and D/A wasn't available. The audio had to also be stored on 3/4" U-Matic video cassettes, on Sony PCM 1600, 1610, and 1630 PCM processors. The discs were preferred to stay the size they were. Could you have done it any better in 1982?, I don't think you could have. They have similar sized discs with better than you want, it's called a SACD. Remember, when the RedBook CD was standardized, that your PC likely had 15 megabytes at best for a hard drive, if you had one at all. Most were 10 Megabytes, you were dealing with a 8086 CPU running around 2 MHz, you had 640K of RAM at best. DAW stations were limited toys at best. Digital technology in that era was still primitive.
I am a EE so I can follow the theoretical discussions here just fine, but admit that many of you know far more about audio than I do. Yet you may be missing an important consideration in CD evolution. 1984 CD MSRP: $18.99 2017 CD retail price <$10 That is what I call progress!
