BitPerfect is behaving again

Winky,

Get shot of BP.

Its outdated.

Use Audrey for for all Hi Res and DSD playback.

Clear everything out and Re- assign all your Macmini sockets. 

Dear Winki,

I don't say that you should not use High Resolution if you want to. Only that I question its value. 

I have avoided getting hi-res releases, and have got all the recordings of music that I would want in a library without having needed to buy any hi-res to fill gaps. 

For music that I do not wish to have access to in the form of a home library, there is radio and I find youtube a remarkably deep mine as well. I don't find that the lower quality that comes from these indirect methods is significant. 

One thing that any replay system must be able to do is seamless performance of gapless track changes. Recordings with track changes during the course of the music are terribly disrupted by any stutter or any lack of continuity for me. 

I would say that the gapless issue is much more significant than the difference between levels of quality, and I have never found that Redbook standard is not good enough to allow me to suspend disbelief in the replay illusion of reality. 

My view is quite simple really. Microphones are placed nearer the performance [but also usually much higher] than any member of the audience at a concert would be in the best seats, or indeed any seats. The result is that there is a certain amount of additional detail captured in recordings that is usually the sounds of players taking breaths, mechanism sounds from instruments, player footfalls and so on. None of these add anything musical to the replay. However with high quality replay at LP or CD standards, these unmusical details are rarely so audible as to be particularly distracting. 

I was recently able to audition a very high cost Naim system playing a live radio recording from 1953 [Beethoven choral Symphony, VPO, Furtwangler on DG], and even that mono recording from more than sixty years ago was revealed as having more annoying and unmusical sounds captured than I'd ever heard from when I owned this very disc played ten years ago on CDS 2, 52, 200, and SBLs. I did not find the extra resolution even available from well made transfer of a radio tape at Redbook standard improved replay to be any advantage over what I had known before. 

In 1926, when HMV introduced electronic recording, Sir Compton MacKenzie, who edited the Gramophone Magazine as well as being a significant literary figure at that time, noted when he reviewed the first batch of electrical recordings [including Elgard's Enigma Variations under Sir Edward's baton] that he thought it certain that the gramophones of the day were no longer able to bring out all the details in the grooves of the records concerned ... This is entirely parallel to what we call resolution today.

Certainly in 1926, there was a great deal that lay ahead in terms of improving replay resolution, and indeed resolution in the records themselves. But even then people were able to fully enjoy the music from an acoustic hand-wound gramophone. 

What is amazing is to listen to say that very recording of Elgar's Enigma Variations in a modern transfer from the master parts. It is clear that even then all the necessary resolution for complete musical engagement is already in the groove!

But there are cases where restorations delve too deeply for frequency extremes, and details, which can lead to rapid fatigue in listening, as the brain tries hard to filter out what would be better not reproduced in the first place.

It is something to consider that music is designed to be listened to from a certain distance according to its style and scale. This distance is the natural filter for unmusical noises off, and so I do maintain that until recordings are routinely done with dummy head microphones at a natural distance, then high resolution replay and recording is a positively bad thing. 

The trouble is that dummy head recordings simply do not work well for epic scaled music as the microphones themselves to not maintain a lucid sense of balance like a human ear. The human ear has the benefit that the brain filters out a good deal of problematic aspects such as multiply reflected sound paths, traffic noise from outside, air-conditioning and so forth.

The close microphone technique used almost since the inception of electrical recording tends to focus clearly on the musical information, whilst bringing the disadvantage of capturing performer created unmusical noises to some degree. But with a suitable level of resolution in recordings and replay, this need not be a problem.

Sorry for such a long post.

I had intended to start this as a thread topic, but this seems quite a good place to discuss the issue.

ATB from George

George,

People like to play Hi Res and quality DSD music.

You can disgust all you like but music replay is moving on fast every day in real time.

Dear Stu,

I agree that things are changing, but the existing recordings are the same as ever. They were mostly made for a lesser degree of replay resolution than is available today even far below the most expensive. The existing recordings are not improved with additional resolution. 

Additional resolution can only be of benefit if a completely different style of recording is evolved. As yet this is not happening.

Indeed it may well be seen that the actual skill and musical quality in recordings has been in decline since [in most cases at least] the advent of stereo back in 1956.

It is a paradox that the increasingly advanced machinery for replay and recordings has only been used for increasingly bad recordings over time. 

This is not to say that there are not good modern recordings, particularly from smaller companies, who still tend to record in long takes of uninterrupted music with a suitable [if by now entirely classical style of microphone technique] and placing musical values above artificial manipulation of the resulting recordings, but this is almost exclusively in the classical music sphere. Notice I do state, "almost" entirely ...

It is another paradox of this that the Redbook standard makes these well made and musical modern recordings sound absolutely top-line, and mostly not improved in hi-res.

I believe that there will continue to be a small cadre of recordings made in hi-res, by audiophile labels like Linn and Naim, but the mainstream from the majors like DG and Sony will continue to use the Redbook standard for classical releases as there is very little demand for anything better from any group beyond audiophiles.

At the other end of the spectrum, there is absolutely no evidence that mainstream pop music recording is improving in any way. Very much the reverse. 

But I'll refer you to the first line of my reply to Winki.

"I don't say that you should not use High Resolution if you want to. Only that I question its value."

Now I appreciate that this is a view-point and not a universal truth or fact. If people want to use hi-res there is nothing that I might say that should stop them continuing. But there is every reason why on a hifi Forum that such a point should be discussed!

It would be a dull sort of shop if we all agreed on the topic! After all no Pearl was made without a piece of grit!

ATB from George

I think George argument are good, I likely agreed and I woul add an example. In "m science" old books are better (concise and clear) then new ones. In the recent decades the laws of physics are not changed. But long time ago books are wrote by great scientists without time and money constraints. Books where wrote for left knowledge and interpretation on that. Likes past recording are often the summa of interpretation made by greatest players, often rarely, as was in mind to sell the best one. Nowadays books are wrote often recycling past contributions generally for selling it and made profit. Often in science books and papers you read pages on a concept of few words.

Also music evolve rapidly in this approach and in this case in classical records we get a trend to sell hi-resolution recordings that sometimes (often?) are not so good to be the new reference.

I like to listen hi-definition music, I bought ESL because of midrange clarity in which details are more revealed by good modern records, in this maybe I'm different from George that listening in mono (or so) for reasons I understand.

I would conclude that in classical music a more equilibrate use of the powerful hi-resolution recording technique is really needed, because details became too relevand against correct music performance which often is dynamically compressed. In my opinion this is the reason why there are so many formats around and technics still experiments on which ones could be the perfect ones, if any. 

A time ago the limit was the technique, today is the capability of human operators (recorders and musicians) to find out with outstanding instruments the magic records. But again nowadays they are pushed to sell over to record.

Apologise if my concepts are not well wrote in a proper English.

I'm totally off-topic and I beg pardon for that but I woul be more than happy to read your comments, even from someone don't listen mainly Classic records like me.

Have all an happy 2015!

Maurizio

Yes indeed Wat. The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades.

Clever bastards (there ain't half been some) have apparently proved that's it's the imperfection in music (real instruments and vocals) which gives us the emotive connection and engagement.

John.

The weakest link in the replay chain is the mastering pre-processing added distortion to produce a 'finished' product. The things done here do finsh-off a lot of the musical capabilities otherwise available.

It is irrelevant if High bit-rate or Bit-depth is used when the mastering process introduces poor mixing, EQ non-linear compression, unnecessary re-sampling...etc. It does not have to, but there is a lazy contempt for the musical Art and proud over-confidence in high-technology poorly implemented with 'good enough' audio techniques - this is where it is all thrown away IMO.

A Red-book standard CD of an old recording done with an open-reel Tape Machine with discrete components (no Op-Amps) and sensible earthing and supplies similarly mixed with an old pre-Op-Amp mixing desk with skilled people that did not have technology crutches to make them lazey, sound far far musically alive and better than a modern High-Definition recording that made its way through 'good enough' equipment with compression to 'fix' any incompetence - to me.

Then there is 'in-between' these two extremes - still possible but very rare - as I believe they must exist, but have yet to hear done personally.

Bit-perfect captures of incompetent Audio Engineering - and sometimes reasonably competent or even some Artistic ability to hear what they are doing when mastering happens, so there is hope I think.

DB. 

There's the rub DB. Digital music, whatever format, is so damn variable. It can be very, very good, as with the early Barry Diament Led Zep CDs and bloody awful. One recent disappointment was Robert Plant's recent album. There are a number of great acoustic instruments being played and it would have been a half decent album if it had been mastered more sympathetically. As it is it sounds dull and flat. 

But you would have to teach the system to make the rhythms resilient and stylish [which means variably displaced in time from the metronomic], teach it to play tempo rubato, to play graces [embelishments like trills and appoggiaturas and so forth - books have been written about stylish playing of the graces]  so as to bring out expressiveness. And what of balancing the variously combined musical lines.

Though I appreciate that quite o lot of pop music is already largely manufactured on drum machines and computer synthesisers, and the singers edited, compressed and auto-tuned to get something that is recognisably approaching the status of music, the results seem to suggest that such a method would work very badly for classical music or Jazz for two specific styles of music.

But it is a nice idea, and Mozart wrote a piece of music for mechanical player organ for example, but did not continue down that path!

At least with an organ the balances are built into the instrument though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kA2ZXSG0wR0

The above is played on a computer, and this below is played on an ancient mechanical organ.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJVisln4ghM

Better than either is a performance with a real human being playing

ATB from George

I would you not misunderstood, but music is a human language and is used to not only for listener pleasure but also for players (humans) to improve themselves against a very complex exercise. In classical music this is more complex, even more in coordinated ensemble.

Apart the technical points alredy commented and on which I generally agree, this human music needs more "soul" into the tech recording session. Not forget that often the best hi-resolution music we enjoy are the re-mastered from the past, recorded sometimes in full analog...