Interesting video about dynamics

[radix]

I stumbled across this video by a recording engineer where he talks about dynamics and compression and his experiences with classical music. It's part 3 of 3 about vinyl vs digital, and I've not seen parts 1 or 2, but 3 was pretty good. He also makes available several records of the super-wide dynamic range recordings and the processed masters for vinyl and disc.

 

[JSmith]

A transcript of the video;

Welcome back to this tripartite talk on analog versus digital here we are in part three the final section part one of course was where I chose my 10 iconic turntables of all time and I hear rarely admit that it was a little biased towards my experience of growing up in Great Britain and obviously I'd missed turntables like the jewel like the micro seeking the Empire there's a lot of them but look in the comments it's been a fantastic journey and thank you for everyone who commented in part two what did I do I I took the the turntable that I chose the Riga P10 and I expanded the story of how did the Riga and the team go about developing this technology to get it where it is now here in part three I want to answer the question can analog and in particular vinyl can it ever be better than digital and of course some of my people have already commented one person wrote them no I've just saved you 30 minutes another person said why are you asking such a stupid question analog is always better than digital so as you can see there's a lot of opinions around and I hope in this talk which is going to be broken into five chapters that I can at least address some of them and we can have an interesting discussion and go from there and hopefully some conclusions at the end I'm not going to focus too much on the P10 on this one except I will talk about my experience there and how well how far I thought it got to being better or not with digital but that all comes later I want to start now with with part one with a little just a little overview of um basically what is analog and what is digital now I know most of you will know but I think it's useful to have a little recap uh just to sort of make it clear in everybody's eyes what I'm talking about and what these two terms which are thrown about so much really mean then obviously in in chapter two I'm going to look at the Dynamics and mastering the big illusion I call it and I want to explain what I mean by that that's a very important part when this story between analog versus digital and then in chapter three I'm going to be looking at capturing the reality I mean as I as a recording engineer if I want to go out and capture something so it sounds exactly like it did in the studio how do I do that and how would that be affected or impacted by analog or digital that it's a real life story about Evelyn Graham this is going to come up later on in chapter three and in chapter four I want to come up with what my colleague AJ in London came up with the emotive connection how we are emotionally connected to our equipment whether it be digital or analog and what impact that has on the enjoyment of Music That's in chapter four and in chapter five at the end of this video will be the conclusion as I say Okay so let's get started so what is analog well analog in its purest sense is the making or forming of a wave which is then somehow reproduce in the same way so singing into a horn at the end of the horns a sharp needle it cuts a Groove in wax you play the wax disc back the needle vibrates and the sound comes out of the horn that's pure analog 78 records in the earliest days 1927 I believe was the first electric microphone but that's still analog because the singer sings into the microphone the microphone's cone vibrates it has a little coil of wire inside a magnetic field that generates electricity that flows all the way down in the cycle of the moving the microphone and the human's voice and that is recorded or cut straight to a disc a cutter on a disc and that cuts the groove so that's all analog so an analog can be electronic it's just not digital it's not computerized it's not a series of naughts and ones so that's analog so digital on the other hand is when you get an analog signal because everything starts as analog unless it's pure electronic music of some kind everything starts as analog so what they do in digital is that they slice it down forty four thousand one hundred times a second a second think of a light bulb which we see to be on all the time but it's flashing on and off at 50 times a second depending where you live in the world but we see it as on but the digital recording is slicing at forty four thousand one hundred times per second and each slice grabs 16 bits of information now in the very beginning it used to be 14 bits because the guys just down the road from here in Phillips and Lurgan they really were the world's Advanced DSP engineers and these big mainframe computers where they were doing just this they were playing with converting an analog signal into a series of ones and zeros and they worked out that 44.1 K was the right amount because 44 you needed 40 to be twice 20 000 Hertz because they said okay that's the limit of the record or limit to human hearing so we need to get that so they went to 44. and the 16-bit they later decided was good for the norm now but 16-bit later on appeared to be not enough not for playback for playback it's fine but for the recording Engineers they needed a bit more information and they wanted to go in deeper so 24-bit gave them more width and the 96k gave them more information to apply filters to or whatever they wanted to do to process that signal in very much the same way as a seven and a half inches per second tape running past the tape head gave a lot more information than three and a quarter or whatever it was or now that the students run at 30 inches per second that's a massive amount of information so that when you want to cut out a little error or something like that it's very easy literally for the engineer to slice a piece of magnetic tape out and join it together because the tiniest of error could still be physically this long now I'm exaggerating and simplifying it but that's basically the difference between analog and digital ones and zeros or full circuit now let's move on to probably the most important part of the conversation Dynamics and mastering and this big illusion that I'm talking about if you go to Wikipedia or any of their forums you'll soon learn that technically an LP vinyl has a bandwidth of about 60 to 70 decibels a dynamic range so the loudest noise and the quietest noise it can capture is supposed to be between 60 and 70 decibels and the CD is 90 decibels you say well that's 20 that's not much 20 decibels is a lot if you don't believe me listen to some music and turn your amplifier up another 20 decibels and you'll soon see how much more that is however if we're on 96 kilohertz 24 bit recording we can get up to probably 120 decibels which is basically the limit of human hearing now please don't start arguing with this you can comment as much as you like but in normal listening the human hears around 90 but of course if you're in a very very quiet location you can hear the tiniest of Whispers And then of course if you're in a hall and somebody's Whispers And then the next second the symphony orchestra blasts out the loudest possible note they could in the end of the Marlin five then yeah you can have 120 decibels but that's you know the extreme but the most important thing in this conversation is why the mixing and mastering Engineers are not delivering us the dynamic range that we think they are if you get yourself your smartphone and you download the Sound pressure level meter now we can send you a link to a typical one in the notes and you set it up it's not very very accurate but it'll give you a good indication and you put it on the sofa or on the coffee table put it down somewhere flat in the quietest room in your house and you will probably find that it's 35 40 45 50 DBS is constantly at even when you can't really hear anything you'll see it's still flicking away at 30 35 DB in this Listening Room is a room within a room it's damped it's it's acoustically you know all treated and we're still getting 35 DB of noise when there's totally silent now this is normal and this is how it is so imagine if you're in your car we can easily be 70 80 decibels 90 decibels at times now if you are a radio station or if you're a Someone putting out music and you want it to be played on the radio the radio stations know that most people listen to music in their cars sometimes at home in the kitchen whatever so there's a lot of background noise and they are assuming you've got a background noise of 70 decibels at least so now you've only got a very narrow bandwidth so there's a lot of people putting out music with a bandwidth of 10 decibels meaning the difference between the loudest note and the quietest note on that recording is 10 decibels and if you put on a rock piece of music on your system and you watch your DB meter you'll see it's not fluctuating much Beyond 10. and I'm exaggerating but generally 10 30 is the absolute Max you're likely to get now we've uploaded um some a recording I did recently for the trio jilu and I've made a little video of that maybe you've seen it on you know what how to make a great recording I mean how do you go about making these kind of recordings and what we've done there is just for you to be able to download and compare is we've uploaded the original 96k 24 bit output from my recording device and the post-production engineer Pierre Nicholas Schmidt has just panned the singer slightly further in and moved the violin slightly to it further in from the right and brought the harp forward just just by a little bit of panning um but he's done no EQ and absolutely no compression at all now so we've uploaded that so if you pay a little fee sorry there's a fee that all goes to the Musicians it doesn't come to us but if you pay a little fee you can download that but you can also download the master file the one that was used for sending off to Etc records for the CD and you can download the lp file and if you download them to your equipment at least you can compare exactly what the mastering for LP compared to the mastering for for CD and for and compressed this and you'll hear a very very big difference and I'll come back to that in a minute so as you can see our Hi-Fi systems even the more modest ones with a small stand Mount loudspeakers should we say and a very simple amplifiers nothing very high fancy most of them I compare like a Volkswagen Golf should we say or Polo and and then some of us have Ferraris okay but they all have a dynamic range and capability Way Beyond the information and music that we are commonly given so it's a bit like our cars are sitting on a in a traffic jam where there's no difference between the Ferrari and and the golf and even when the traffic jam is cleared most of the time there's a limit to the speed limit of like 120 kilometers an hour or 70 miles an hour or whatever so we're not nowhere near driving our vehicles anywhere near to their capability and this is very very true of hi-fi and so I want to come on to that in a minute but I think it's very very important that the you understand that people design the product music and they compress it so it will sound good on a kitchen radio so okay so let's move on to chapter three capturing reality and and I want to talk about uh a musician called Avalyn Graham and I had the privilege of working with her through the organization ybt but I did her first CD recording that she ever made for the label ybt and we said to Evelyn Graham you can either record in a classic recording studio or you can record in a Chateau in the south of Belgium beautiful location but you can sleep there with the team and your colleagues and friends or whatever and you can work there day and night working on your pieces until you feel absolutely ready and then we will just record but what I want from you is to record each piece in one go we're not going to do any post-production trickery we're not going to do editing we're not going to put in correcting false notes we're not going to tweak to make the piano different but we will allow you to travel to all of the piano retailers and distributors in Belgium contact Steinway if you want and choose the piano that you love the most and we'll have that delivered to the castle and we'll have it set up by Steinway and then we will record and that's exactly what she did and she chose a brand new instrument and it's very bright almost metallic sounding but it gives you the ability to hear all the lovely harmonics that are generated by her playing now Evelyn Graham I should say was a childhood Prodigy I mean from the I think her first performance with a symphony orchestra is when she was like six years old and at this stage in her career she just finished doing her Masters in in a university in Germany Music Academy in Germany and she was really at her Peak it was fantastic because she was just full with this music and she plays on her CD everything from sharper and Bach and a little bit of list and absolutely wonderful CD now she didn't want to record the bark but we heard her playing and while she was warming up we loved it so much we said oh please please record the bark because we like it so much it's so unusual how she plays it it's very very beautiful and she was studying a little bit of jazz at the time and we think there's a little bit of influence there so anyway I'm not I must go back to the recording the important thing on this on this recording is the uh we call it the Balmoral recordings because that was the name of the Chateau in in Belgium is if we were recording it analog I would have to say to her right play me your loudest passage and play me your quietest passage and I would want to make sure that it fitted nicely within the bandwidth of analog and then I'd have to say to oh Evelyn that's too loud don't make your loud your triple 40 is quite so loud or I'd have to pull the faders back which is what they used to doing in the old days and they do that in live recordings you know if a live concert hall from somewhere in Vienna they will pull it back for the big crescendos sometimes or just compress so we set up the microphones in such a way that when she played the absolute loudest she could physically Play We Still weren't peaking and it meant that we didn't have any limiters switched on or any digital compression whatsoever but we did choose microphones that could cope with very high dynamic range in fact percussion designed mostly for percussion instruments and they worked brilliantly in this situation and because you've got to remember that a piano is actually a percussion instrument there's a hammer hitting a string and whether Avalon is just using her little finger gently touching with the slightest touch a string so you could barely hear it or whether she's whacking down all 10 fingers with all the strength in her arms and believe you me there is strength there whereas you playing these massive chords there's a huge dynamic range easily 120 DB so what we did was we captured that obviously in a 24-bit stereo and very kindly she's allowed us to let you download for free a piece of her first track on the CD which is Chopin's a sketzo number two in B flat minor Opus 32 I believe um yep 31 sorry so the it's such a fantastically dynamically wide range it will give you an idea and of course if you pay a fee which will go to her and the ybt organization of course but for the musicians um all of it will go there you can then download the complete recording mastered uncompressed but of course there's lots of uncompressed recordings available if you want them I just thought you might find that interesting so in that recording we managed to capture something now with the gilu recording and I've just made another video about how I made the Gili recording which is harp soprano and violin when the soprano Maria is singing she can sing extraordinarily loud and obviously the Vu meters are going right over but we don't let them go into a peak and we don't let them have to have the limiters so again we've uploaded onto the website full 96 20 96k 24 bit Master recording straight out of the back of the of the device just panned left and right and then we've got the CD and we've got the lp as I said earlier so this way you can really compare the differences and see how far your systems go and that is that recording of Evelyn really wouldn't have been possible in the old days on analog and even if it was by the time that it's played on the radio and her CDs regularly played on Belgian Radio classical music radio stations they compress it so hard that they can put it right down to like 12 DB which is you know really really narrow so that when you're listening to music in your car it sounds fine now chapter four the emotive connection analog versus digital now when we're looking at Analog and we're looking at vinyl in particular it reminds me very much of me visiting my auntie Monaco when I was a a young boy used to go to her house in southeast London and a beautiful house and when I arrived in the afternoon she would say Holly would you like some tea which of course I would and she would then select her favorite teapot she would put it bring it down from a high shelf and then she would start to warm it up and prepare the tea and choose the tea and put it on the trolley with some cake and some biscuits and wheel it into the little afternoon tea room she had it's fantastic little house she had there and we sit down and before I'd even drunk it this whole ceremony that she had gone through meant that that tea when I finally tasted it was just so delicious and that whole experience and I think playing LPS is a bit like that because you kind of you come in and you choose out of all your LP collections you pull one out of its sleeve and then you take it out of sleeve and then you put it on the turntable and then you wipe it with a cloth and you turn the amplifier on and you put the needle in the groove and you go and sit down there's a whole process which means that you're more alert you're more focused on listening to the music in question and I think that has a big impact on how we listen on the other hand imagine you've been out walking and it's very very cold and it's been raining and you're soaking away and you've just been out too long and you're near a friend's house and you see their door and you kind of knock on the door and you're soaking wet and cold and shivering and they say come in come in and they take you into their kitchen nice warm kitchen and they immediately hand you a mug of tea woof that tea is so delicious but the process is completely different and that's for me very much like streaming you've got this idea in your head oh yeah rikudo I remember yay's first album that was digitally recorded and you go straight to your iPad you've got dunk dong dunk and the next second it's playing wow but the great thing about streaming is that when that track's finished or whenever you've had enough you will see underneath you know other people when they listen to this track Like This or have you heard this and so streaming can be like a journey you start in one place and you end up somewhere completely different in completely unknown territory in a way that before only radio could do you listen to the radio and you didn't know what they were going to play next and I think that's the great thing about streaming and that can be a very emotional thing too but of course the quality of streaming is is very high quality because in the old days when we only had vinyl I mean when CDs didn't exist when digital wasn't existing I used to hate the crackles and the the noise and the dust and the dirt and if someone had scratched my records it was just an irritation but now I kind of accept that as kind of being normal which is a little bit unusual really so I really believe that these two processes do influence the way we listen to music of course also um the wonderful thing about vinyl is that when you put that diamond in the groove it's kind of like a mini Miracle like how is it possible you get such an amazing Sound by that tiny little mechanical device there's a mystery to it and that mystery isn't there when you for me anyway when I'm thinking about oh the ones and the zeros that doesn't do it for me even though I know logically that technically this should sound better and at least it doesn't make a lot of noise so I think we have these two elements that keep coming back so how do I conclude this little talk I think for me I need to ask the question what started this Trilogy of videos what started well what started it was the fact that I needed a turntable for my Listening Room here in Belgium and I was kind of shocked just how good it sounded and the amazing thing was at the same time I was recording my own LP jilu for the thing which is what I've been talking about earlier but more importantly a big aisle of LPS arrived in the post about a year ago maybe longer from a guy called Mike Valentine in the UK and he is a company called chasing the dragon and he specializes in making recordings which are directly cut so he rents air studios in London fills it with a big Orchestra a jazz Orchestra or artist or whatever he's recording at the time and instead of going to Magnetic Tape or analog of digital recording devices the output from the mixing desk goes straight to the cutter on the disc so when you're listening to this LP for example this Ella Fitzgerald from from performed by Claire teal great singer with the Sid Lawrence Orchestra when you listen to this the record itself the groove in here is directly cut from the back of that microphone or the microphones straight to This Groove so when you physically put it on your turntable and there's a track called I get a kick out of you when you put it on and you put that needle in that Groove the little bump in that Groove that needle goes over reads that little bump that physical bum that was put there in the cutter and it plays it back and it would just blew me away because I didn't expect it because obviously that little voltage that's generated in that cartridge by the tiniest movement of the coil in the magnetic field is Amplified from the amplifier and he goes straight to the back of our Drive cones of course we don't have any crossovers we don't have any filters or anything in between it's just directly to the back of the drive cone so our Drive cones are like those microphones in reverse and when the drummer does in a couple of places on that track he goes and it's a little trick they used to do in the 40s when there were dance bands just to keep everybody awake and give them a kick literally the drummer would hit the kick drum and also the the Toms at the same time in such a tight way that it really when you're listening to it in our listening it already hits you in in the neck in the throat in the chest and you you feel this thing and I'd never heard that or experienced that in all the digital recordings I've ever heard heard but it goes beyond there I mean there's a recording he's got here of Vivaldi and Venice which is not digitally direct cut funnily enough but the way he's recorded it I don't know how to describe it it's so beautiful it sounds so real and Charming it's wonderful so I suggest that you look up uh this chasing the dragon records because they are amazing I've got a great selection but there's also a lot of labels out there doing direct Cuts now and I want to spend the next few months discovering them and finding them and listening and enjoying their music and I think that's really really important so to summarize I would just like to say you know Enjoy your music it doesn't matter if your passions for digital go digital I mean I need both I can't just have one um and that's really really important for me that the the tea ceremony of the record player that's one thing but I do need most of the time my CDs and my streaming because I've got an entire library at my fingertips I want to listen to a Beethoven string quartet I go into a crobus or whoever and I've got like eight or nine different versions of the same piece which is incredible but it doesn't matter for me whether you're listening on a 1950s dance set on an 800 Euro secondhand system that you inherit half inherited from your parents or whether you're listening to a 20 000 Euro system or even a 2 million euro system a big monster from the 2020s that doesn't matter to me what matters to me is whether you're enjoying the experience whether it satisfies you and when it does enjoy it keep it and look after it because I think it's the privilege of living on this planet at this time in history that we can hear and experience recordings that took place decades earlier as if they are there in the room with us and isn't that amazing so until the next time Enjoy your music bye

JSmith

 

[Beave]

I'm pre-biased: I"m gonna have a hard time taking seriously anything he says considering the speakers I see in the picture.

 

[MacClintock]

If the original recording has vinyl as a master, just create a digital version of it with an ADC, it will sound the same. Nothing magically with vinyl.

 

[radix]

If the original recording has vinyl as a master, just create a digital version of it with an ADC, it will sound the same. Nothing magically with vinyl.

His point is that vinyl is limited to about 60 dB dynamic range. And many recordings are compressed down to only 10 or 15 or 30 dB to make them listenable in noisy environment. But digital recordings can capture 90 or 100 and avoid using any limiters or compressors on the microphones.

 

[MacClintock]

His point is that vinyl is limited to about 60 dB dynamic range. And many recordings are compressed down to only 10 or 15 or 30 dB to make them listenable in noisy environment. But digital recordings can capture 90 or 100 and avoid using any limiters or compressors on the microphones.

Ok, then there is no controversal or new point. But at the time point the video started, he talked about the vinyl as a master recording as if it were anything digital couldn't reproduce.

 

[Blumlein 88]

I'm pre-biased: I"m gonna have a hard time taking seriously anything he says considering the speakers I see in the picture.

You should see the video, where everything is wired up with Nordost cabling.

The guy in the video is founder of Pearl acoustics which is who makes the speakers you are seeing.

Here are a few vids recording cello and sometimes piano. Looks like mainly a dummy head with a pair of omnis further back sometimes in a Jecklin Disk configuration. Nice warm sounding recordings. Wish he had one of his orchestra recordings.

CHASING THE DRAGON AUDIOPHILE RECORDINGS

chasingthedragon.co.uk

 

[radix]

I find that he usually seems to be saying reasonable things without audio myths, but he talks like an audiophile at times. He has a video on speaker wire for his speakers and it takes him about 20 minutes to say "we use an 80 strand OFC cable with a banana plug" as their reference cable.

 

[Beave]

You should see the video, where everything is wired up with Nordost cabling.

The guy in the video is founder of Pearl acoustics which is who makes the speakers you are seeing.

Here are a few vids recording cello and sometimes piano. Looks like mainly a dummy head with a pair of omnis further back sometimes in a Jecklin Disk configuration. Nice warm sounding recordings. Wish he had one of his orchestra recordings.

CHASING THE DRAGON AUDIOPHILE RECORDINGS

chasingthedragon.co.uk

Ah, thanks for that info. I thought he looked familiar - and so did the speakers. I didn't put two and two together.

I see there are other threads here on ASR about him and his speakers. Does he have any technical background or is he more a businessman/enthusiast turned recording engineer and speaker designer?

 

[Keith_W]

I ignored all his videos where he talks about gear. I was interested in his videos about music, he actually provides very good commentary.