I'm probably the only one with this opinion...but I sure miss the old days of tube amps that weren't able to be highly accurate. They would roll-off the on the high end, distort a bit all over, and gave a very warm and relaxing feel to the albums I played obsessively. Now I've owned high-end tube and solid-state gear, and the music hasn't sounded good for decades. Combine that with the very limited bits provided by CDs, preventing any possibility of good playback, and music has been completely destroyed. Old timers like me are dying off, and most of the people who remember good music will be dead. Kind of makes me sad.
>Combine that with the very limited bits provided by CDs, preventing any possibility of good playback
16 bits gives you 96dB SNR (and subjectively more with dithering), which is plenty at non-deafening listening volumes. It's more than even the highest quality vinyl ever had. High bit depth is mostly useful so you've got some headroom during editing.
16 bits give you 96 dB SNR only if your signal is one-bit. In a quiet room with decent headphones set to comfortable level I can easily hear one-bit flips in otherwise silent WAV file.
Not a problem for popular music that's consistently loud, but a real problem for classical music with wide dynamic range.
That is absurd. Anybody who has read about the history of CD bit depth would know just how absurd that is. And I even personally investigated CD accuracy in burning using an electron microscope to understand how the laser burning process worked on the plastic media. It was absurdly inaccurate. All these claims about how great digital is are just crazy - claims made by people who are relying on old data about hearing accuracy and a religious faith in technology. Anybody who has actually designed instruments using the known laws of physics understands the incredible limitations - and those limitations apply to both characterizing hearing as well as reproducing sound digitally.
>I even personally investigated CD accuracy in burning using an electron microscope to understand how the laser burning process worked on the plastic media. It was absurdly inaccurate.
I can believe that, but the standard was designed to tolerate high bit error rates. 25% of the bits are redundant, as part of a error correction code:
Your statement that CDs have a very limited number of bits is false by every known objective measure (compared to any prior consumer analog medium). CDs afford a bit depth of 16, while tape provides at most 6, and vinyl at most 12. See this great video by signal engineers for more info: https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml
I suspect this is a classic case of "you think you want X, but what you actually want is your youth."
Yeah, my brother worked in a fairly antiquated recording studio about 10 years ago, and they had 24-bit 96kHz ADCs right next to the microphones, with digital lines carrying the sound data to be recorded onto a computer. All sound processing was performed in this format, with the final mix then being down-sampled to CD format.
This is like when people complain that FM always sounds so much better than the newfangled digital radio, without realising that the station signal was transferred to the transmission stations in digital form, often at lower bit-rate than the newfangled digital radio.
People like the nice familiar sound of low quality audio. Lots of audio equipment deliberately adulterates the sound to "make it sound better".
Not defending the bit depths in parent comment, but the tape a professional recording is made on and a cassette tape (which I assume parent meant by "tape") are a lot different, right?
In any case, I've heard some great sound from Type II and Type IV cassette tapes in the past. The worst part was that tapes I made myself from CD sounded way better than a store-bought cassette of the same album. That's when I learned they really cheaped out on those cassettes (brown-colored Type I tapes)
Doesn't running faster and having that extra width have the effect of giving more physical space on the tape to the changes in magnetization? And therefore wider frequency range or more stable differences in amplitude?
Sort of like how SP (2 hour) on a VHS tape looks much better than LP (4 hour) or ELP (6 hour).
It does, but plenty of albums have been recorded on 4 track machines to 1/4" tape.
The real difference in quality is probably mostly in having a machine that's properly setup and calibrated, with a good transport to minimize flutter, etc.
The 6 bits worth of SNR (36dB) for tape does sound implausibly low, even for consumer grade compact cassettes. And professional 1/2" reel-to-reel could do substantially better, although still worse than CD quality.
You can get tube preamps that are supposedly good, which might give you the distortion you crave even when paired with a low-distortion Class-D power amplifier.
CDs are still 1000x better than records with all their hiss and distortion in my humble opinion.
Not saying you're one of these people, but I think lots of old-timers who complain about the quality of CD's or anything digital don't really understand how they work - Even though the bits are "limited", they do not actually output a staircase as shown in the explanations, the signal is interpolated between samples by analog filtering on the output. So it's actually outputting a smooth line that goes through the sample points.
Also lots of stuff is available in 96k and above FLAC now if the limited bits are a problem. I get any music I care about in that quality but it's often because the mastering is better on those releases than the actual quality of the reproduction.
Sometimes there's a SACD, Bluray or DVDA release if there's no hi-res digital download available.
Anecdotally I'm happy if I can get anything at 48k 24bit or more.
It's really the loudness war that has ruined music. That's the only thing about records that I consider better than digital - because of the limitations of the medium, they can't brickwall compress everything or the needle will physically jump off the record.
Genuine question: what was so good about music before that is missing in your opinion now?
Also, do you enjoy digital re-releases of records you previously enjoyed as much as before? Why or why not?
