[geeks] Working Music vs Thinking Music

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Sun, Jun 23, 2002 at 08:14:40PM -0400, dave at cca.org wrote:

> >I think it is a mistake to limit ones self to what one can easily be
> >identified.  What about the way that high and low frequencies affect
> >the room that affect you?  What about the way the "unhearable"
> >frequencies resonate on your body?
> 
> Bullshit. If you don't think it's bullshit, then it's easily,
> scientificly, proven. The audiophiles have never been able to
> do that. Go for it.
> 
> >But, my biggest beef is the bit depth of the samples more than the
> >sampling frequency.  In particular, I wish for either different
> >encoding, or significantly more bits (24 may be enough).
> 
> I don't believe you can hear the artifacts of 16bit 44K audio.
> Why do you think you can? Have you compared 24bit & 16bit,
> with all the other equipment remaining the same?

OK, perhaps I'm just buying some peoples story, but I know that I have
a number of classical records that despite a small amount of fuzz
sound better than any of the classical CDs I have.  The record player
was good, but it wasn't extremely expensive or anything, neither was
any other part of the stereo I was doing the comparison on.  But,
then, I was unable to find the same performance recorded on both
mediums, but I was at least comparing the same musical pieces from the
same company (dutch gramaphone).

I haven't bothered trying to compare any rock I like on both vinyl and
CD. And I never listen to those classical records because they are too
much hassle.

But from the physics perspective of how we were told sound worked, it
made sense that increasing the bit depth would help for classical
music were due to some parts being very loud, all the quite passages
are limited to only 4 bits worth of precision.  Or something like
that.  I'm not taking the time to pull up a bunch of classical CDs to
see if that ratio actually works out that way, although it would be
interesting to.

> >Well, since the sound is mainly about how fast they are moving...  And
> >speed is analog.
> 
> Um - this is outside of my field, but I do not believe the soundwave
> generated by a speaker is based on variations in electron speed.
> Are you sure about that?

Not really.  My understanding of electronics at that level was purely
from the getting through Pysics 2 point of view, not from audio.

But come to think of it, the signal generates we were using were just
varying the voltage, and the frequency was the speed of the voltage
change, not the speed of electrons, so I was probably quite wrong there
 
> >I think that is one of the best ways to test some gear.  Otherwise how
> >will you know if you really like it?  But really, it probably should
> >be more than one album.
> 
> If you're saying "I like this", sure. If you're saying something 
> has "better frequency range" etc., etc., than another piece
> of equipment, then drag out the test equipment and prove it.

Oh well, I didn't know you meant that specifically.  If you are going
to say one has more frequency range than the other, you need to use
testing gear.

But only in studio gear does an absolute measure of correctness
matter.  For home and car stuff all that matters is how good it sounds
for the music you are likely to play.

> And of course, at the high end, it simply *can't* be about the audio
> any more. When people are spending more on their stereo to listen
> to classical music than it would cost to hire a string quartet to
> play in their living room once a week, something is wrong.

I don't pay enough attention to the high end to really know.  But I
must say, I was extremely impressed with the sounds coming from one
friends multi-thousand dollar home stereo compared to what comes from
most peoples multi $100 stereos.  That was some sweet sounding gear.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd