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Originally Posted by ARC Tech-109
During the 1980's digital revolution many of the recordings were sweetened and tailored to the medium giving them a very stark and edgy sound ... Some labels were better at the digital mastering than others
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Edgy sound and the loudness wars of the late 1990s early 2000s is not the problem of then new medium and encoding scheme. In fact, just because recording engineers could push digital much farther than analog says enough about new possibilities digital offered.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ARC Tech-109
just because the CD label said DDD that did not make it any better.
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DDD were either as good or better. Cleaner. Editing became simpler. DDD audio cassettes were the best, of course Chrome tape with 120 µs EQ and Dolby helped.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ARC Tech-109
AFM recordings be it VHS Betamax or BetacamSP are all analog mediums that are written along with the video content by the head drum, VHS uses depth multiplexing while Beta is mixed in between the chroma and luma carriers. Running at this recording rate the wow & flutter is on the bottom of the scale, dynamic range is in the mid 90 db's and it doesn't suffer from temporial aliasing when the upper end of the sampling rate is exceeded (22.050khz). There's no quantizitaion error or jitter with the AFM recording and the medium has been used for mastering.
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I agree that 90 dB with flat 20-20K is more than enough, but Red Book is still better. Filters have been constantly improving and if you ask me, they could limit the frequency range at about 15K. Quantization errors of early ladder DACs have been eradicated by the early 1990s with the advent of delta-sigma DACs, and jitter was made a thing of the past with decoupling of mechanical CD transport from the DAC pipeline and by increasing the precision of the clock (jitter below -100 dB is a non-issue methinks).
Digital has three big things going for it:
- Ever increasing data storage capacity of digital media allows increasing bit rate, bit depth, sampling frequency. I don't care for hi-res audio but I can accept the usefulness of hi-res for mastering. But when the final product is done, Red Book is more than enough.
- The hardware and software constantly improves. Early ladder DACs struggled to resolve more than 13 bits. Granted, it was as good or better than LP, and Philips' proposal to use 14 bits made total sense. They had to use two or four DACs and then average between them. And then sigma-delta 1-bit DAC was developed, which singlehandedly improved DAC performance, and it was cheap, reliable and repeatable. No more laser trimming of resistors. Math has taken over (as if it has not played the major role in digital audio before). And math is constantly improving too. On contrary, analog audio and video cannot be pushed any further. Metal tape? Dolby C? Ok, but even a tiniest spec of dust on metal tape causes a pop or a spark, there is no error detection nor error recovery nor error masking.
- Analog audio and video suffers each time a copy is made. Digital does not. You can edit intra-frame digital video with straight cuts only - there is no re-compression, there is no degradation. With color under, after three generations it is barely usable. BetaSP - probably ten generations? IDK. With digital, you can have unlimited number of generations.
There are no redeeming qualities of analog video and audio. Its first generation can be almost as good as digital, but after that it is all downhill.