L5730
Addicted to Fun and Learning
Hi all,
This may or may not have been covered elsewhere but it didn't come up when I searched.
Pre-waffle:
After getting some IEMs a lot of audio nasties have become extremely apparent. The unforgiving nature of such listening equipment means there is no where for 'garbage' to hide and no soft smoothing over. Sure, I notice many different problems on other setups in the home, but the closer and closer the drivers can get to the ear things show up more and more clearly - in my experience. Once the issues are noticed, they also tend to show up in much lesser playback equipment, even the crappy single speaker FM/AM radio in the kitchen!
Waffle:
I've noticed and number of CDs and lossless downloads having multiple adjacent 0 dBFS samples. There used to be 'standards' in place where CD mastering houses (or should I say glass master fabricators?) would reject if 3 or more 0 dBFS samples were found, of course the client could instruct to continue regardless. DACs cannot accurately produce a waveform from this flat-topped theoretical representation, and so are doing something on playback. I wonder how different the results are with different DACs - some DACs have headroom for clipping (or so I read) will they behave differently?
For a quick and really obvious example, take Nickelback's "Silver Side Up" from 2001. There is a nasty quality about the sound that is a product of the clipping distortion (flat-topped waveform). If a DeClip processor is used to 'reconstruct' the waveform, that nasty thin gritty sound disappears and it sounds, in my opinion, how it should do. Now that band and their music is a matter for taste, but the actual audio aberrations are quite apparent.
Turning the file down in the DAW doesn't solve the problem either, as it still has that thin crackle sound. Only reconstructing a waveform with 'real' transients seems to clean it up.
This is a fairly extreme and obvious example, but in the last 2 decades there are numerous examples that show this to a lesser extent. Modern pop is littered with clipped samples and subsequently distorted parts that I feel I need to 'fix' myself to enjoy.
My Question:
Why do many commercial releases (CDs, downloads, anything lossless digital*) contain multiple samples of 0 dBFS?
* vinyl is analogue so will have a reconstructed waveform that differs to the digital counterpart - a DAC stage was involved somewhere, as well as the who vinyl physical mastering and manufacturing process. Lossy digital encoding doesn't really have a bit depth and so the algorithms tend to reconstruct the waveform in a different fashion. Encoding lossy will product something different to the original that the original cannot ever be recovered from. Unfortunately there are also different decoders that do a better or worse job, not necessarily software but hardware implementations do differ in quality for reasons unknown.
Thanks for reading and your thoughts on this.
This may or may not have been covered elsewhere but it didn't come up when I searched.
Pre-waffle:
After getting some IEMs a lot of audio nasties have become extremely apparent. The unforgiving nature of such listening equipment means there is no where for 'garbage' to hide and no soft smoothing over. Sure, I notice many different problems on other setups in the home, but the closer and closer the drivers can get to the ear things show up more and more clearly - in my experience. Once the issues are noticed, they also tend to show up in much lesser playback equipment, even the crappy single speaker FM/AM radio in the kitchen!
Waffle:
I've noticed and number of CDs and lossless downloads having multiple adjacent 0 dBFS samples. There used to be 'standards' in place where CD mastering houses (or should I say glass master fabricators?) would reject if 3 or more 0 dBFS samples were found, of course the client could instruct to continue regardless. DACs cannot accurately produce a waveform from this flat-topped theoretical representation, and so are doing something on playback. I wonder how different the results are with different DACs - some DACs have headroom for clipping (or so I read) will they behave differently?
For a quick and really obvious example, take Nickelback's "Silver Side Up" from 2001. There is a nasty quality about the sound that is a product of the clipping distortion (flat-topped waveform). If a DeClip processor is used to 'reconstruct' the waveform, that nasty thin gritty sound disappears and it sounds, in my opinion, how it should do. Now that band and their music is a matter for taste, but the actual audio aberrations are quite apparent.
Turning the file down in the DAW doesn't solve the problem either, as it still has that thin crackle sound. Only reconstructing a waveform with 'real' transients seems to clean it up.
This is a fairly extreme and obvious example, but in the last 2 decades there are numerous examples that show this to a lesser extent. Modern pop is littered with clipped samples and subsequently distorted parts that I feel I need to 'fix' myself to enjoy.
My Question:
Why do many commercial releases (CDs, downloads, anything lossless digital*) contain multiple samples of 0 dBFS?
* vinyl is analogue so will have a reconstructed waveform that differs to the digital counterpart - a DAC stage was involved somewhere, as well as the who vinyl physical mastering and manufacturing process. Lossy digital encoding doesn't really have a bit depth and so the algorithms tend to reconstruct the waveform in a different fashion. Encoding lossy will product something different to the original that the original cannot ever be recovered from. Unfortunately there are also different decoders that do a better or worse job, not necessarily software but hardware implementations do differ in quality for reasons unknown.
Thanks for reading and your thoughts on this.