"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
. ..
"Keith G" wrote in message

"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
. ..
"Keith G" wrote in message
news
Almost within touching distance of where I'm sitting,
there are two CD racks full of the sort stuff I like to
(and do) play. It is though they do not exist - I
*never* think to play them! I just looked, there is
even a 'boxed set' called 'Smooth Classics FM, do not
disturb' and it hasn't been - it's still sealed in a
cellophane wrapper!!

If somehow a set of CD's like 'Smooth Classics FM' was
in my house, it would probably stay in the wrapper - on
the grounds that I don't have time to listen to boring
music. Wouldn't matter what format - boring music is
boring music no matter what the format.



Boring?

http://www.apah69.dsl.pipex.com/show/smoothclassics.JPG

??

Yeah, a collection of overplayed warhorses is boring.



I believe the US version had a few tracks by The Osmonds on it....

"Keith G" wrote in message

"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
. ..
"Keith G" wrote in message

"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
. ..
"Keith G" wrote in message
news
Almost within touching distance of where I'm sitting,
there are two CD racks full of the sort stuff I like
to (and do) play. It is though they do not exist - I
*never* think to play them! I just looked, there is
even a 'boxed set' called 'Smooth Classics FM, do not
disturb' and it hasn't been - it's still sealed in a
cellophane wrapper!!

If somehow a set of CD's like 'Smooth Classics FM' was
in my house, it would probably stay in the wrapper - on
the grounds that I don't have time to listen to boring
music. Wouldn't matter what format - boring music is
boring music no matter what the format.



Boring?

http://www.apah69.dsl.pipex.com/show/smoothclassics.JPG

??

Yeah, a collection of overplayed warhorses is boring.

I believe the US version had a few tracks by The Osmonds
on it....

Say no more.

There really is such a thing as too much information, you know! ;-)

"Keith G" wrote in message
news

Me too, but what puzzles me is that instead of *demanding* that people
concede 'CD is better' for any particular reason (??) none of the digital
bigots ever seem to want to know why anyone might *prefer* to play vinyl?
(Outside this ng, in the real world, plenty of people do it seems....??)

Almost within touching distance of where I'm sitting, there are two CD
racks full of the sort stuff I like to (and do) play. It is though they do
not exist - I *never* think to play them! I just looked, there is even a
'boxed set' called 'Smooth Classics FM, do not disturb' and it hasn't
been - it's still sealed in a cellophane wrapper!!

http://www.apah69.dsl.pipex.com/show/cellophane.jpg

It must have been there some years now and one of the *few* things I like
on Carsick FM is the 'Smooth Classics at Seven' prog..!!??

In fact, I suspect over half of them have never been played even once
since they were bought - why is that...??

(I think it's a 'natural selection' based on a genuine preference that has
bugger-all to do with technical differences!)

I grew up in the 80's, so I'm of the Walkman generation. The first thing I
did to any album (record or CD) was to transfer it to cassette tape so I
could take it with me in my Walkman clone and in my car. It's awfully hard
to play an LP in a car. So portability became an issue early on with me
even if it did result in some loss of quality. Besides, there is so much
outside noise in a car or when "walking" that it didn't matter anyway.

Today, it's a hell of a lot easier to buy a CD, rip it and send it to my
NetMD or convert it into an MP3 for portability than it is to record an LP
on the PC and then send that to my NetMD or MP3 player.

Beyond that, while snap, crackle, and pop might be o.k. as a cereal, I
really don't want to hear it in my music. It's also *far* more annoying to
me than analog audio tape hiss, which I don't really like in my music
either. Getting away from tape hiss is why I use MD and MP3 for portable
music.

Jeff
--
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a
little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor
safety"
- B. Franklin, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1919)

"Jeff Findley" wrote in
message

I grew up in the 80's, so I'm of the Walkman generation. The first thing I
did to any album (record or CD) was to
transfer it to cassette tape so I could take it with me
in my Walkman clone and in my car. It's awfully hard to
play an LP in a car. So portability became an issue
early on with me even if it did result in some loss of
quality. Besides, there is so much outside noise in a
car or when "walking" that it didn't matter anyway.

Today, it's a hell of a lot easier to buy a CD, rip it
and send it to my NetMD or convert it into an MP3 for
portability than it is to record an LP on the PC and then
send that to my NetMD or MP3 player.

Beyond that, while snap, crackle, and pop might be o.k.
as a cereal, I really don't want to hear it in my music.

If snap crackel and pop were all that the LP format did to music it would be
bad enough, but it isn't.

I don't know how people can mention High Fidelity and LP in the same breath,
given how good our mainstream media formats can be.

It's also *far* more annoying to me than analog audio
tape hiss, which I don't really like in my music either.

Well Dolby and metal tape did a lot for the hiss thing with cassette tape,
but there are a host of other audible artifacts. In the days of cassette
walkmen, I used a Sony WM3 and metal tape.

Getting away from tape hiss is why I use MD and MP3 for
portable music.

Either done right can sonically outperform cassette tape and LP, quite
easily.

Jeff

"Rob" wrote in
message


OK. I'm *fairly* sure I can hear a difference between
LP-CD recordings and LP-original. Not absolutely sure mind, no rigorous
test, just mild and recreational observation. Then I'm told there can't
be any difference.

No, you've been told that there shouldn't be a difference, and that others
have achieved that result.

The reasoning, I gather, is based on
something called "Virtual Reality" methodology, which
involves double-blind testing amongst other things.

You'ev got that wrong, as well. This time you're so far out in left field
that maybe you should just start over, or forget it all.

On Tue, 07 Nov 2006 14:00:06 +0000, Serge Auckland
wrote:

Don Pearce wrote:
On Tue, 07 Nov 2006 12:12:27 +0000, Serge Auckland
wrote:

Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
Glenn Richards wrote:
Arny Krueger wrote:
Back in the 1980s when people used to buy the LP and the CD of the
same album, play them both and compare the results, they weren't
really comparing the two media. Instead, they were comparing the
(generally quite separate) mastering decisions--EQ, limiting,
etc.--behind the two products, plus the particular characteristics of
their LP and CD playback equipment.
So what that posting is basically saying is that CD is capable of far
better quality sound than vinyl, but due to sloppy mastering (loudness
wars anyone?) vinyl generally sounds better? Because it hasn't been
compressed to within an inch of its life?
You can't generalise. Indeed in my experience this isn't the case - but
then I stopped buying LPs when I got my first CD player. This 'loudness
wars' thingie with CD mastering is relatively recent and mainly applies to
some pop releases.

(Bit of a vinyl fan myself actually...)
But then there are the inherent problems with vinyl which no mastering can
get round. So you're not starting from an even playing field.

Sadly, the loudness stupidity isn't just limited to pop releases. Over
the weekend, I was making some measurements, and decided to leave my
bitstream analyser connected whilst listening to music. I was astounded
at how many of my CDs regularly clip. Amy Winehouse "Frank" lights the
0dBFS light on almost every beat, Diana Krall Love Scenes clips often
per song, as does Norah Jones. My early CDs like Dire Straits keep a
good 3dB headroom, whilst Chesky's Valerie Joyce had 6dB headroom. I
finally disconnected the analyser before even more of my CDs upset me.

I just don't understand why these sorts of CDs need to be mastered into
clipping. I can understand a CD being normalised to 0dBFS, but that
would mean one hit at 0dBFS once per CD, or at worse once per track, if
tracks are mastered individually. There's just no excuse for it.

However, try as I might, I can't hear the clipping in the Diana Krall
and Norah Jones, even sighted, knowing when it takes place. The Amy
Winehouse is , however, very obvious.

S.



Do remember that lighting the top bit light does not necessarily imply
clipping - it is just another value, and if the signal isn't trying to
go beyond that, it hasn't clipped.

Pop recordings use heavy compression, and when this is done in the
digital domain it is quite possible to have sufficient control to peak
to the same value every time. There is no reason not to normalize the
result up to max level.

Still sounds like ****, of course.

d


Don, I agree that hitting 0dBFS doesn't necessarily mean clipping, but
displaying the waveform on a 'scope looks awfully like clipping to me,
on more than one CD. I estimate from extending the slopes of the
waveform before and after clipping that it can go some 2-3dB into
clipping.

My main complaint is not that's it's done on pop recordings, but that
it's done on jazz or other less loudness-concious material where I feel
it's completely unnecessary to compress, digitally or otherwise. It
didn't seem to be done in the eighties before digital signal processors
became available, (analogue compression was obviously used, but the
converted digital signal still had some headroom left) it just seems to
me that as they have the tools, they feel the need to use them even
where it is not needed.

Grumpy old man mode off.

S.

If you have a whole succession of 0dBFS in a row, then yes, you can be
sure you are in digital clipping. If it is happening in a transient,
it won't do much to the sound, but if it is during a note, with each
successive peak clipped, you are deep in alias artifact territory, and
that is a horror.

d

--
Pearce Consulting
http://www.pearce.uk.com

"Jim Lesurf" wrote in message


As an experiment, I made up a 'test CD' a while ago to
try on some friends and colleagues. This consists of a
set of tracks of various types of music where the
original peaks well below 0dB, and versions I
deliberately clipped. Apart from the clipped sections the
two versions of each example are sample-by-sample the
same.

It has been interesting to see how hard/easy people have
found identifying the clipped version to be. :-)

Depending on the music, it can be hard or easy.

This seems to agree with something I discovered 20+ years
ago. When I designed the Armstrong 730/732 amps I fitted
a clipping indicator. It turned out to be quite difficult
to hear the clipping in many cases - although admitted
this is at levels well over 200Wpc so I am not sure what
the speakers (or ears!) were doing in some cases at these
levels in a normal UK domestic situation. 8-]

Case in point is the clipping indicator on QSC power amps. It starts
visibly illuminating at clipping that amounts to something like 0.02% THD.
Again depending it can be found to be flashing quite a bit, and yet the
sound may not be all that bad-sounding.

Do remember that lighting the top bit light does not
necessarily imply clipping - it is just another value,
and if the signal isn't trying to go beyond that, it
hasn't clipped.

Pop recordings use heavy compression, and when this is
done in the digital domain it is quite possible to have
sufficient control to peak to the same value every time.
There is no reason not to normalize the result up to max
level.

Many converters, espcially the cheap ones, won't convert cleanly right up to
FS. Keeping peaks 0.5-1 dB below FS will help ensure clean performance with
cheaper equipment.

Alas, my recent experience confirms that a number of CDs
have successions of samples well within 0.05dB or so of
the peak values allowed on CD-A. Level compression seems
much more common, but flat-top clipping seems far from
rare.

Agreed.

As you say, this seems utterly insane when many
rock/pop CDs squash the sound into a range of about 10dB
- on a medium that should be able to offer a range over a
million times greater!

There are two sorts of logical reasons to clip music. One is that it
constitutes an EFX. It's pretty well known that distorted music often sounds
louder than music that is cleanly reproduced. The other is the fact that
music with limited dynamic range can be more suitable when listening to
music is not the most important thing that the listener is doing.

Here in Ohio wrote:
On Tue, 7 Nov 2006 08:38:21 -0500, "Arny Krueger"
wrote:


is less than that of wide dynamic range music. Thing is that even the LP
format didn't need hypercompression.

Unless you are Todd Rundgren. He seemed to be doing everything he
could to make a lousy medium even worse. :-)

The reason that so much music is hypercompressed today is because people no
longer predominately listen to music as their sole activity. Music is more
likely than ever to be listened to while the listener is doing something
else that is more important to them. Therefore, dynamic range is a detriment
to many listener's use of music.


I don't think the record companies have thought it out that well.

We can also look at radio as an example of something that people often
listen to in the background. Radio is compressed (for transmitter
efficiency if nothing else), but it isn't always hypercompressed.

No, not always, but here in the UK and in France, stations compress to
eliminate any dynamic range. As I mentioned before, there was a well
known station Chief Engineer who bragged his processor was so wound up
he got less than 1dB dynamic range. His station of course sounded as you
would expect, but he was happy.

What I have read is that this is an extension of the "I want it to be
loud and stand out" thing that some of the record companies execs
push. They think that boosting the average volume level will sell more
records than actually allowing for fidelity would. (Or something like
that. Some of the record company people I met in the past were just
nuts. There was one guy that looked for new talent in my area that
liked being paid in one dollar bills. He said he just liked to spread
them out and lay on them.)

The articles on this do mention that the average level is almost at
the max level for CD. If they were simply compressing it for
background use, they wouldn't have to push the level so high.

That's what makes it so incomprehensible. With the 20dB or less dynamic
range of many pop CDs, and a theoretical 96dB dynamic range of the CD
medium, you would think they could find 20 dB's space in that without
having to exceed 0dBFS. What's a volume control for......

S.

On Tue, 7 Nov 2006 10:38:17 -0000, "Keith G"
wrote:

Me too, but what puzzles me is that instead of *demanding* that people
concede 'CD is better' for any particular reason (??) none of the digital
bigots ever seem to want to know why anyone might *prefer* to play vinyl?

There's a very good reason why people collect LP records. They are
very inexpensive, usually about two bucks apiece, and there's a wide
variety of music on LP that isn't available on CD. Those are valid
reasons to prefer vinyl over CD.

When it comes to sound quality, both CD and LP are capable of
reproducing high fidelity sound. Whether or not they actually do
that depends on the mastering and manufacturing.

The CD format is definitely more convenient for storage and handling
than LPs.

See ya
Steve

--
Rare 78 rpm recordings on CD! http://www.vintageip.com/records/
Building a museum and archive of animation! http://www.animationarchive.org/
The Quest for the BEST HOTDOG in Los Angeles! http://www.hotdogspot.com/
Rediscovering great stuff from the past! http://www.vintagetips.com/

"Stephen Worth" wrote in message

On Tue, 7 Nov 2006 10:38:17 -0000, "Keith G"
wrote:

Me too, but what puzzles me is that instead of
*demanding* that people concede 'CD is better' for any
particular reason (??) none of the digital bigots ever
seem to want to know why anyone might *prefer* to play
vinyl?

There's a very good reason why people collect LP records.
They are very inexpensive, usually about two bucks
apiece, and there's a wide variety of music on LP that
isn't available on CD. Those are valid reasons to prefer
vinyl over CD.

When it comes to sound quality, both CD and LP are
capable of reproducing high fidelity sound.

I seriously question whether the low level of performance of the LP format
can be called "High Fidelity" in 2006.

Whether or
not they actually do that depends on the mastering and
manufacturing.

No, the LP format has serious basic flaws that have never been resolved.

The CD format is definitely more convenient for storage
and handling than LPs.

The CD format has more than an order of magnitude less noise and distortion
the LP format. The LP format has audible noise and distortion. The CD
format does not.