Comment

John Boehner's Bartender Thought Boehner Was the Devil and Planned to Poison Him

324
BeenHereAwhile1/13/2015 9:50:21 pm PST

re: #249 A Cranky One

The CD-quality standard—which Young and HRA proponents say isn’t sufficient—wasn’t adopted randomly. It’s not a number plucked out of thin air. It’s based on sampling theory and the actual limits of human hearing. To the human ear, audio sampled above 44.1 kHz/16-bit is inaudibly different.

Having been an audiophile for a very long time, be warned that you’ve just opened a can of worms ;)

However, I’ve heard Neil discuss digital and he simply doesn’t have a clue how it works. Neil talked about how digital chopped up the sound, obviously not understanding that the final output is an analog signal which matches the original signal. He thinks (as do some audiophiles) that a higher sampling rate will result in a higher definition sound for consumer audio.

Bottom line as an engineer: a properly done digital to analog conversion using the CD standard provides a wide dynamic range with a frequency range better than most speakers can provide or people can hear. When you need very expensive speakers/headphones to actually hear any difference, is the difference in sound quality worth the cost?

After all, mp3 format actually reduces the signal quality but hasn’t suffered that I can tell ;)

It’s the warmth of vinyl v. the cold digital way of thinking.

Perhaps a holdover from when CDs were first released, and the record companies didn’t want (the expense) to remaster the LP recordings, but directly transfer them onto CDs.

I once asked an studio engineer why he was re-mixing the LP album sound mix onto a two track, (seemed like a lot of high end) and why it didn’t sound (to my ear) as good as the original mix did.

His response, “it will after mastering onto a LP.”