DamnYankee wrote on Sun, 12 March 2006 13:27 |
garretg wrote on Sun, 12 March 2006 04:06 |
So I guess my point is that you can't say that DVD looks bad just because it's digital. It looks bad because it's digital and it's horribly overcompressed.
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Digital will never be able duplicate analog due to its bit/byte limitation - it defies the law of physics. Digital will never be able to dedicate enough bits/bytes to exactly duplicate the saturation, tint/shade of hue of a color that your eye sees in the real world. Digital can only approximate because of bit/byte limitation. Digital pictures appear "sharper" because the bit/byte limitations can't duplicate the detail of natural smoothness...and it never will.
In the case of your CD 128kpbs sound quality, that's the bare minimum of bit/bytes that gets the digital format to sound acceptable. But even if you increased the bit/byte level by 1,000x, it still will not accurately reflect what your ear truly hears on magnetic tape - or in real life.
One more thing: Digital creates odd-order distortion and phase angle destruction - and our brains are programmed for even-order distortion: Analog.
Now, magnetic tape doesn't reproduce sound exactly as we heard it the first time either, but it's light years ahead of where digital is. Digital is a huge step backwards in sound and video reproduction, but as Tom Scholz says, digital is cheap, it's easily manipulable, and it adds to corporate bottom line.
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from drewdaniels.com
"SOME TECHNICAL BACKGROUND ON THE DIGITAL VS. ANALOG DEBATE
There in fact is more ?information? in a high quality 30 inch per second analog tape recording than in a typical modern CD-quality digital recording, there is also more useless information?the stuff we know as noise?quite a can of worms whenever arguing the merits of analog versus digital.
Humans hear with their ears ? which are, strictly speaking, digital in nature,2 ?and with the brain, and to some degree depending on volume level and frequency, the whole body. Psychoacousticians call the human hearing system the ?ear-brain,? and this description must be kept in mind whenever thinking about or offering argument about recorded audio. At very low frequencies, sound is increasingly felt with the skin and skeleton. At very high frequencies, hearing is increasingly ?sensed? with the tiny hairs called cilia on the face and ears, which are visible in bright back light.
Some of the extra information contained in analog tape recordings or analog direct to disc recordings, specifically, frequencies above the range of typical human hearing and loudspeaker reproduction capabilities, may be useful to the ear brain in the process of hearing music, but extra information that is not part of the original musical sound sources may in fact not be at all useful?it may be only noise, tape hiss, tape over-modulation, record groove or tape modulation distortion or tape surface scrape, or a host of other non-linearities that really have nothing to do with the recorded music. Extreme low frequencies, below the range of musical instruments but still within the range of human hearing, are almost completely lost in analog tape recording due to the fact that the signal wave lengths are so much longer than the physical width of the tape head itself. This latter limitation is absent in digital recording, which captures frequencies as low as the analog input circuits allow?usually somewhere in the range of one to two hertz.
When digital CDs were introduced in 1984, there was much talk about how the ?warmth? of analog recordings seemed lost. That same observation is no longer significant today. The reason is simple; we have grown accustomed to the sound of the audio which we have at hand?that which we hear every day. Before 1984, when we knew only the hiss of the tape and the crackle of the LP, it was disconcerting to hear clean, pure audio. We simply were not used to it.
Classical music recording engineers of course, were immediately enamored of the clean sound, having heard lots of clean audio through headphones from live microphones, which were never processed or fed through blinking boxes that squeezed, squashed and manipulated the original signals. However, human males have enormous difficulty integrating the experience and knowledge of others?particularly competitors?with their own knowledge, and so the experience and observations of classical music recording engineers was lost on the majority of non classical recording engineers.
In actual fact, virtually all of the high end stereophiles (and by that I'm talking about the super tweaks who spend as much as a quarter of a million dollars on a stereo system), who had spent a significant amount of time at concerts listening to live acoustic music, immediately embraced digital recording and then the CD. Only listeners whose primary exposure to music was LP recordings and cassettes were ever among the group who found fault with the sound of CDs.
When the first CD re-releases of some popular LPs first appeared, there was a brief time lag before mastering labs figured out that the extensive EQ and processing exceptions made to compensate for the mechanical transfer functions of vinyl records and phono cartridges was not needed for CD mastering, but that abated as quickly as a year after the introduction of the CD to the mass market and has not been an issue since then."
Says it for me.