Mastering Rant:I could care less bout your Lavery converters

[Foliage]

My old 4-track recordings have an amazingly high sample rate and they sound greeaa..okayish.. kinda bad to be honest. But I have a feeling this Pono thing is really going to take off, just like Google Glass and 3-d TV!

[MoreSpaceEcho]

I'm looking at 192 in a similar manner as vinyl.

It's a small market now but it's an actual market meaning people are willing to pay for it rather than steal it or stream it.

true. hdtracks accepts lower sample rates though, right? i'm sure i've seen 96 or even 44.1 stuff up there.

[tjcasey1]

I get 24 bits - I can hear the difference.

But I don't even bother buying the 192 stuff on HDTracks. My Oppo 105 can play them, but 96 is already way more than what I need.

[dfuruta]

I'm looking at 192 in a similar manner as vinyl.

It's a small market now but it's an actual market meaning people are willing to pay for it rather than steal it or stream it.

I believe this.

Not arguing with you, but it's weird to me; with vinyl there's the charm and nostalgia of the object, but digital files all smell (and, most of them, sound) the same...

[Injured Ear]

Roscoe,
Are you working ITB with 192 or mainly using your DAW as a tape deck?

Just curious from a workflow point of view.

Thanks,
Greg

[roscoenyc]

Roscoe,
Are you working ITB with 192 or mainly using your DAW as a tape deck?

Just curious from a workflow point of view.

Thanks,
Greg

I've got some projects that are all 192 and staying ITB. Those are mostly solo instrumental recordings.
More that get tracked to 96/24 but mixed hybrid through console and outboard to analog 1/2" or 1/4" then usually flown back in at either 96 or 192 for mastering.

[I'm Painting Again]

here's a little about the issue and there are some files you can download to do tests with your own system..

http://productionadvice.co.uk/high-samp ... und-worse/

[knobtwirler]

And yet the world was bowled over by 16-bit 44.1kHz when CDs first came out in the 80s. Such amazing clarity and detail! It's like the performers are right in the room with you! Really? Listeners can be persuaded to believe all sorts of things.

[GooberNumber9]

And yet the world was bowled over by 16-bit 44.1kHz when CDs first came out in the 80s. Such amazing clarity and detail! It's like the performers are right in the room with you! Really? Listeners can be persuaded to believe all sorts of things.

This was actually a huge change in audio and medium quality available to consumers. I remember this time vividly.

Before CDs, you had cassette tapes and vinyl. Cassettes are amazingly noisy things with a surprisingly small dynamic range when compared to CDs. They could be fairly fragile also. Any strong magnet or dirty playback equipment could ruin a tape. And they were very inconvenient if you want to skip a song or only hear your favorite song on an album (there was no such thing as "shuffle" at this time). Plus you had to either flip them over or ride out the dead space at the end on a player that auto-reversed.

Vinyl sounds better than tape (at least IMHO), but is much more inconvenient except for track selection. You have to have a turntable, which is a relatively large device (compared to a walkman, for sure). You have to keep your needles in good condition, your records clean, your turntable level and running at the right speed, etc., and even then you can't completely eliminate crackle, wow, and flutter. Get even a minor scratch on your record and it's pretty much trash. Even without a scratch, problems with the tone arm can easily cause track skipping and all kinds of annoying problems.

When my dad got his first CD player I fell in love instantly. This is a medium that is much more resilient than tape or vinyl, (almost) never skips, no pops, no crackle, no wow, no flutter, NO FLIPPING OVER (doesn't sound like a big deal but wow was that one of the best things), extended running time, and the sound was clearly miles better than anything else even to the layest of lay people. CDs were portable, unlike records. You can almost instantly jump to any track on a CD with perfect seeking, unlike tapes and without the careful arm dropping needed on records. You can shuffle a CD - which seems like a gimmick but if you never had it before and then you try it you can notice a lot of interesting things about the play order on an album.

Maybe the sound quality, particularly the dynamic range, is not much of a concern to pop music fans (personally I love all kinds of music and still would rather listen to almost anything on CD over tape or vinyl). For fans of genres besides rock and pop, the CD was a no-brainer just for sound quality alone. Even people with the worst ears in the world loved the convenience, usability, and portability of it. Plus they were aggressively priced and so popular that albums were very affordable for about 15 years there in what was really a golden age for recorded music.

I still think 16-bit 44.1kHz sampling sounds great, compared with any analog format. I can't really hear a difference between 48 kHz and 96 kHz but I've gotten old faster than my ears have trained up so I take it for granted that it's there. 24 bits is a big help in recording and mixing, but if you master a 24 bit mix to 16 bits I can't really hear the difference... okay maybe in reverb tails sometimes but I have a hard time enjoying music I am listening to critically.

Pretty much totally off topic but I had to give a shout-out to the CD, without which I almost certainly would not be into music or audio at all.

[roscoenyc]

There are so many variables.

I was talking with a musician over the weekend that was saying how much better vinyl is. My question was "better than what"?

After much back and forth he was comparing the sound of his $800 hot rodded turntable with a 20 year old CD player that was $100 back when he bought it.

So much is left out of these discussions and comparisons. Important specifics.

I did find a great guy to do the projects that I needed done at 192.

But here's the bigger point.
To all the people saying that 192 doesn't matter or that vinyl is a fetish there's one thing that hi-res and vinyl share.

The listeners who get 192 and vinyl pay for their music.

They buy it.

When they buy it they support the bands, the labels the songwriters, the studios the gear companies and on and on.
I'm very happy to make records for those people 'cause those people keep us all going.

[ott0bot]

There are so many variables....

But here's the bigger point.
To all the people saying that 192 doesn't matter or that vinyl is a fetish there's one thing that hi-res and vinyl share.

The listeners who get 192 and vinyl pay for their music.

They buy it.

When they buy it they support the bands, the labels the songwriters, the studios the gear companies and on and on.
I'm very happy to make records for those people 'cause those people keep us all going.

This is a great point. Supporting any medium that people actually buy is the best thing we can do for a client.

Hi res files may be gimicky to some degree, as are cassettes, but hi-fi is the new nostalgia, so I'll play along. I upgraded to an Apollo from an outdated 003r so I could accommodate these requests and for audio for film, which also are asking for higher res files more increasingly. Maybe 90% of what I do is just for small release cd/cassette/digital, but why would I not want something I recorded to end up on a Pono playing thought some b&w towers in a treated room?

[vvv]

Then there's mini-discs, SACD ...

Wait, did we forget 8-tracks? Hey, they were good in my '74 Pinto!

I recall audiophile friends having reel-to-reels where they duped their vinyl, or even bought that tape format first.

I used to laugh at a college buddy who played his vinyl only once to cassette-tape it to listen to forever after.

To use one of the most annoying platitudes ever, it's all good.

[getreel]

I love me some 192 MP3's. Way better than 128 or 96. But if you use Beats phones you don't really even need dubly anymore.

This quote just made my day! I don't have anything that goes to 192, oh wait, yes I do. I just don't use it.

[magneticfidelity]

I am personally always happy to receive mixes in 192/24 and I highly recommend using the highest sample rate possible when anybody asks.

I would also happily work from DSD files at 5.6 MHz and I am even happier to not have to deal with anything digital at all and work directly from tape. I also happily work from cassette tapes, if that's what my clients want to send me. My purpose of existence as a mastering engineer is to receive an artistic vision and use all my technical and scientific knowledge to make the most out of it on any consumer format it is destined to end up in. My job is to do this with the highest amount of technical accuracy, which when working in the digital domain is afforded when using the highest possible sample rate. This is not only about the frequency response and the nyquist frequency of the sampling theroem.

There is a lot more to it.

I guess it is quite possible to not hear any difference between 192/24 and 44/24. There is many reasons, why this could happen. One could be that your monitoring system is not good enough, another reason could be that your room is not good enough, it could also be hearing loss due to age, some kind of problem elsewhere in the sound system, a bad recording/bad mix, and more that I can't think of right now...

While I understand that the majority of the people who will listen to the results of my work will do so in the car on the way to work, on a portable media player while walking their dog or in other situation, where it really doesn't matter what the sample rate of the project was, it is my duty to also cater for audiophiles and knowledgeable engineers, who will appreciate the difference. Especially during digital signal processing operations, 192 kHz sampling rate should be the absolute minimum industry standard nowadays, regardless of what the destination format would be. I can't wait for DXD to become widely implemented! 192kHz is nothing new, it has been around since the 80's, and it is about time it becomes adopted by professionals, for the sake of evolution.

[roscoenyc]

bravo!