>Exactly. That was the point I tried to convey by saying that we should be
>comparing recordings at the maximum media capacity rather than those whose
>quality has been compromised for economic considerations.
>
>Wojtek
But you are listening to CD as good as it can be. It is at it's maximum capacity. Using the photograph analogy imagine you are looking at the original image. Zero pixelation as it were. Like a live performance. The original recording is on DAT, it is 24/96 the image equivalent of very fine grained film, say 25 speed. For the sake of this discussion we will say it is the equivalent of a digital 1600 dpi image. I know it's not but that doesn't matter for the analogy. The DVD-A is also 24/96 but the CD is 16/44. It is like an image that is more pixelated, say 800 dpi. It is as good as it can be within the limitations of that format. I suspect you are thinking that in the case of the 800 dpi image you could simply take that parameter and apply it to half the original photo at a time and then splice them together to get an image as good as the original photo. This would roughly translate to playing the CD twice as fast to compensate for the lower amount of data per second of music. Unfortunately there is more to it than that. The codex for CD does not allow for greater than a 16bit sapling rate while DVD-A is 24bit. This is basically a function of time which is something that doesn't carry over to the still image analogy. If you change this you change it into something else other than a CD. That is what DVD-A does. It applies the same technology as a CD but redefines its parameters. That is why they look the same and why CD's will play on a DVD-A player. They are far more similar than dissimilar. The range difference from 44.1khz to 96khz is generally thought not to be audible but there is some contention on how much inaudible noise effects our listening. Similar to deciding on what part of the light spectrum you photograph. Think of it this way. Old 78's recorded in monaural sound are not as good as stereo LP's of the last 20 years even though they are both vinyl recordings. CD is to the old 78 was DVD-A is to a new stereo LP. That old 78 was as good as it could be but obviously not as good as vinyl could be. The same is true of CD's. They are as good as they can be but not as good as digital disk music can be. All recordings are not of equal quality however. By using the exact same master DAT to "burn" both the DVD-A and the CD this variable was eliminated in the "party game" I played with friends. If they were different concerts or one were a PCM recording and the other DSD then you couldn't correct for that in my opinion.
John Thornton
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