Re: Same tired transformer thread was Re: speaker selection switch

Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 07:07:25 -0400
Newsgroups: rec.audio.pro
Size: 2,018 bytes

"Chris Hornbeck" <email-address-deleted> wrote in message
news:email-address-deleted
> On Wed, 16 Jul 2003 08:51:37 -0400, "Arny Krueger" <email-address-deleted>
> wrote:
>
>> A critical observation that became apparent to me the more I
>> listened to legacy recordings, particularly those from the first
>> half of the 20th century. It seems to me that much popular music
>> from that era was voiced to be as reproducible as possible with the
>> limited technology at hand.
> And, as Scott Dorsey among others has been at pains to point
> out lately, just the opposite seems more the case nowdays. For
> popular music *as currently conceived* red book CD is
> overkill and its capacity largely wasted.
It is true that the dynamic range of 16/44 is being wasted in terms of
silent passages, but to some degree it always has been, given that room tone
always seems to be about 20 dB or more above the 16 bit noise floor.
Current recording hypercompression techniques are clearly exploiting the
large signal dynamic range and power bandwidth that 16/44 has, and that
analog formats like LP and cassette don't have. So in an odd sort of way,
some of the unique capabilities of digital are being exploited.
> For "high fidelity" recordings of real events, there is
> still a huge technological bottleneck, but storage media/
> format has never really been the small part of the neck.
I think that the LP format is limited enough that it is often a serious
technical bottleneck for both small and large musical signals. 15 ips
half-track on fairly modern tape seemed to be a nice match for the dynamic
range of most unprocessed music.
I agree that way too much modern music is ugly to listen to critically. But
I don't think it was ever intended to be listened to critically. It does
satisfy the perceived needs of most intended listeners, and like it or not
that is one thing that music must do. There's enough music of all kinds
around that we don't have to listen to music we don't like.