DCC Archive Workstation Comment For Steve

Ok, so here's what I did:

- loaded This Boy into ProTools and made the edit
- did a "mix" of this edit
- loaded both the edit and the original mix into a new PT session
- inverted the original mix and played them back in mono

Result? ZERO output, indicating that the two files were identical (up to the edit, anyway).

Yes, doing adjustments like EQ and level on workstations may harden up the sound, but I don't believe simple edits are a problem. And they shouldn't be - you're only moving bits around in time, not changing the bits themselves..

 

Luke, I realize this is for Steve Hoffman but i'm going to jump in here.

Everytime you make a change to a 16-bit file you increase the bit word-length. If you save the file back to 16-bit the software has to chop off the extra data thereby casing you to lose sonic information. If the software uses dither, and i'm certain Pro Tools does, it's a little better because instead of quantinization noise we now have dither noise. So it's just not a case of moving bits around. You ARE losing sound. It may or may not be noticable.

Sure, you can do small, simple edits without a noticable loss but the losses are still there. It's all math.

Now, where's the thread that sparked this thread?

[ October 02, 2001: Message edited by: Grant T. ]

 

Well, I still don't see why there would be *any* changes to the bits - you're not changing the values at all, you're simply moving where those values are in the file. Just like with regular editing. If you cut a piece of tape wth scissors, you're removing some information, but you're (obviously) not even touching the information that's left...

 

Luke,

I see your point about not affecting the data before or after the edit point but digital information is a very tricky beast. I've done a lot of recording, editing, mangling, etc. in the digital domain and the "character" of the tone does change with even the slightest edits. Try some off your experiments with a pink noise tone. It changes sometimes very slightly. I think Steve's philosophy with creating a digital master makes a lot of sense and the end result shows it. He seems to keep as little signal routing as possible before reaching the final step of going to his digital master. I've always noticed how the character of an analog source changes when it is digitized. In the past when I used to do all of my music on an analog 4-track (and spent tons of time listening to every aspect of the work in progress) I definately noticed the change when bumping the info to DAT. It's difficult to explain what the change was but I'll try. The overall tone of the music usually became a little leaner and a bit colder (not in a negative way but just different). I especially noticed this with acoustic guitars, the strings lost some of their width. I sometimes made some EQ adjustments to work with the percieved changes. All the digital workstations (IMO) have different sonic signitures because of the specific software dependant algorithms they each use. I think Steve wants to keep the master tape source as pure as possible keeping out as many digital thumbprints as possible. Whatever he's doing is working great. Also, as annoying as some poor edits can be, sometimes they are just the historical reality of a given piece. As sick as it sounds, I actually miss the guitar drop out in "Day Tripper". I'm used to it and to me it sounds strange for not being there in the new version. I always appreciate the flaws in a finished work from the past being left alone (not corrected by future cooks) because it shows what the artists were able to achieve at the time and also over-look. Anyway, it's only my opinion. I'm glad to be back in NY. We had a great time in Montreal (beautiful city).

All the best,

Todd

 

Luke, it's actually true, however insignificant the changes are. What's more, you might find that things in the digital domain get out of hand, as far as the 16-bit data stream you think isn't changing.

I'll stand behind what Steve said, although I'll try and not ruin yer fun: "Anything that's not the master tape is...not the master tape."

I myself have had many glorious results in taking clicks out of Cds, or whatever using Cool Edit. When you have a perfect master tape, use the right pipeline, and use less electric hassles in the chain, you only need one thing. Steve's persistance, involvement and keen knowledge. I could never compete in a million years, and very, very few people could. I'm just hoping more people in the feild realize it more and more.


-Sckott

 

Well, I don't think anyone is suggesting Steve do his mastering directly to a workstation. No, keep things the way they are now, then if edits need to be done, dump the final (already digital) signal on the workstation...

 

Well, the next question is "why?" To simplify things, I just edited out 2/3 of your post to reply to it. Obviously the information before and after the edit wasn't affected. Why should it be the case for digital audio? It would seem to me that *any* changes in the audio (other than the edit itself) would be the result of *very* poor coding...

 

Luke,

When you manipulate anything in the wav, and I mean ANYTHING - you increase the bit word length and how the information digitally gets re-written when you save the file though dithering generally. I also should add that whatever you do to change a "little thing" some dithering happens to the rest around it, usually. Cool Edit does this admittedly, and it shows how it does.

Don't be sad about it, because for the most part, digital help to some sound has helped mankind. I admit whole-heartedly there's lots of improvement to be had (Take a look at Ruby Tuesday (stereo) and find the click in the 1st part! Easilly rectified).

Editing and working digitally, if you want to get down to detail, the dithering it has to do really changes the positions of the digital information, but most people with even bat-like hearing can't tell the difference

Digital audio can be just the same wild kingdom analogue can be, just different animals working different ways.

People doing 20-24 bit transfers rely on the 16-bit limitation, dithering, trunkated data, and what it does to the sound (ie what they expect from D/A conversion too - eek!). There are some big differences! You can try it at home as I'm sure Protools must be as robust or even more so than Cool Edit.

[ October 02, 2001: Message edited by: Sckott ]

 

Here's some interesting words. You might get a chuckle or two:

(Quoted from a newsgroup post)

"Audio recording is one place where it's becoming increasingly difficult to
say whether noise is a force for good or evil. The vinyl phonograph record
is noisy. Ticks, pops, scratches, and hiss all intrude. However, a very
soft musical passage can still be discerned, even when its sound is
quieter than all of that unwanted noise. Compact disks, on the other hand,
are silent. Most CDs are recorded digitally; music becomes binary digits,
long strings of zeros and ones. In the quietest sections, the sound level
fades until there is no more digital information, and it cuts off. For
just that reason--the arbitrary cutoff of sound--stereo snobs have for
years argued that the CD is harsh and unrealistic.

Now, engineers are finding that by adding noise, they can improve CD
sound. It's called dither, a low-level noise, about the volume of one
digital bit (the smallest significant amount of recordable digital
information), which is mixed into the sound being recorded. The addition
of dither noise pushes low-level sound signals above the one-bit
threshold, allowing a CD to capture what before would have been distorted
or lost altogether. Ken Pohlmann, a digital expert at the University of
Miami School of Music, says a CD recorded without dither captures a
95-decibel range from loudest to softest. With dithering, the range
becomes 120 decibels. "

 

But even dither buildup is destructive. It is best to only do this once.

Luke, go to http://www.digido.com/ditheressay.html

Bob Katz gives a very good explaination of why all of this is. I also wish someone would tell me where to look for the thread that started this.

 

Grant, if anything, the article you gave (which I've read before) seems to indicate what I've been saying - that the only differences occur in the extremely small area surrounding the edit itself:

"Once you've verified your workstation is bit-transparent, then proceed with editing, with the goal of maintaining the integrity of your 16-bit audio. Do not change gain (changing gain deteriorates sound by forcing truncation of extra wordlengths in a 16-bit workstation). Do not normalize (normalization is just changing gain). Do not equalize. Do not fade in or fade out. Just edit. By the way, every edit in a 16-bit workstation involves a gain change during the crossfade (mix) from one segment to another, which creates long wordlengths during the calculation period (usually a brief couple of milliseconds). You probably won't notice the brief deterioration if you keep your edits short."

Is there something I'm missing here? If you do *nothing* but edit, the overall audio shouldn't be affected *at all*. Like I said, this *seemed* to be the case with the editing I did - playing back the edited track next to the unedited track (with one inverted) revealed *no* output (which is what should happen).

 

Luke,
this is the old "bits is bits" argument. Stereophile investigated this many years ago finding that digital masters they sent out for pressing came back (as a CD - this was in the days before CDRs) sounding different from the 16 bit master, even though in a bit for bit comparison, they were EXACTLY the same. The explanation given relates to the altered timing of the sampling - increasing the variation in the time axis (ie samples not being taken at exactly the same "time slice")It is termed jitter.

 

Luke, we're being anal about it!

 

Luke, you're falling into the theoretical vs real world stuff. Theoretically you can make your digital edit and not effect the rest of the file. The real world doesn't work that way and folks here much more knowledgeable than me are giving you examples of why that is (truncation, dithering). But even if you don't buy it from us, believe your ears. Have you actually listened to the two files on a reference-class system and found them to be audibly identical? If not you might defer to Steve's experience. He seemed to think the edit would mess things up. "In a battle between theory and the real world, the real world always wins."

 

See my very first post in this thread. Playing the inverted and non-inverted files (one being the edit) back to back revealed *no* signal. If ProTools really was affecting the sound, you should be able to hear the differences between the two files...