Edwird
Posts: 3558
Joined: 5/2/2016 Status: offline
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: DesideriScuri quote:
ORIGINAL: Edwird Yes, analog is smooth and continuous, digital is all chopped up ... and that's how it sounds! Just kidding. But your description reminded me of all the shout's everybody's had about it on pro audio forums. Funny stuff. Even funnier in the hi-fi forums. And yes, I still have a turntable and a cassette deck and a R/R tape machine. Right, and a DVD/CD thingy around here somewhere ... You just have to increase the sampling to get a better digital representation of an analog signal. For purists, it's not going to ever be perfect, but for the rest of us jabrones, it's "good enough." lol The analogy is perfect, too, since a heat map isn't going to have 1000 shades of red and 1000 shades of blue (max number of shades possible having a shade for each 0.1% of the vote tally). There will always be some sort of differentiation from the truth simply because of rounding. No matter how great your sampling rate is, a digitized signal will not be an exact copy of the original analog. You're talking to an ex pro audio guy, here, so no need to explain ... but, the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem says you only need double the frequency (an octave above) the area of interest to allow for the anti-aliasing filter, which is in effect before sampling occurs. In the original 44kHz CD format this involves a quite steep filter, which bumped right into the human audio rage, or just barely above it (22kHz vs. 20kHz). But the reason why much of the early CD re-masters sounded so awful is that everybody was used to pushing things into the red a bit (guilty!), which is OK for analog but an absolute no-no for digital. I didn't do any re-masters myself, not much studio at all, mostly a live mixer, but that's how we all operated, in any case.The experienced studio guys were experts at judicious use of tape saturation as a natural and ear-friendly compressor, but now that's gone! There are all kinds of work-arounds, such as using a compressor before print, actually just like the old days for much of pop/rock/R&B etc. music, but pushing the tape as a sonically artistic function is not available anymore. Digital sound processing compressors were quite harsh, too. But in the early days, the studios said 'we must do everything digital!', and so it was. Not sure how it's done nowadays, being as that my overly sensitive ears can hardly stand to listen to it anymore, and not being in touch with the biz for 8 years, etc., but much of what was (or maybe still is) heard on the radio or on a CD or DVD of contemporary music was sung/played into a tube condensor microphone (especially the 'big names'), sometimes an outboard tube mic preamp, and sometimes a tube ('valve,' for you Brits out there) compressor/equalizer, all before getting to the Pro Tools work station. And the mastering houses have a line-up of tube and SS analog processors, but most of them no digital processors. But the main reason I listen more to analog is because that's the majority of my collection. Through modern tube electronics. Ha ha. Most of my listening nowadays is at live performance, in any case, not a whole lot at home.
< Message edited by Edwird -- 11/19/2016 11:38:40 AM >
|