[lbo-talk] Re: Say BYE BYE to VINYL!

John Thornton jthorn65 at sbcglobal.net
Tue Feb 1 16:28:21 PST 2005



>My understanding of digital recording or music, or pictures, is that quality
>depends pretty much on an arbitrary decision that balances the amount of
>information (i.e. file size) and the quality of sound or image. If a
>decision is made to lower the amount information, e.g. to cram more stuff on
>a single disk or a memory card, the quality will invariable suffer. My
>understand of the CD and DVD format is that CD has much lower capacity to
>hold information in is thus more prone for decisions sacrificing quality for
>volume .
>
>So what you were observing were probably differences due an executive
>decision to use one CD disk at the expense of slightly lower sound quality
>instead of two to have better sound quality.
>
>Evidently, you did not control for that variable. To do so, you would have
>to compare two media that uses highest possible in each medium quality.
>
>Wojtek

There is zero evidence for this. Both DVD-A and CD use PCM 96/24 to record the master DAT. Neither uses DSD so it is impossible to say that the mastering and mixing was done with a preference to one format over another. In addition to using lossless compression methods, DVD-A also provides more complexity of sound by increasing the sampling rate and the frequency range beyond what is possible for the space limitations of CD's. DVD-Audio is 24-bit, with a sampling rate of 96kHz; it is in a sense "uncompressed" from the original. In comparison standard audio CD is 16-bit, with a sampling rate of 44.1kHz. If you were talking about comparing SA-CD to either format I would agree that the use of DSD recording would effect the editing to express a preference for one format over the other.

John Thornton

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