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Is there any music that actually requires 24 bits for replay?

"WARNING: The music on this Compact Disc was originally recorded on analog equipment, prior to modern noise reduction techniques. This Compact Disc preserves, as closely as possible, the sound of the original recording but its high resolution also reveals the limitations in the master tape, including noise and other distortions."

Neil Young, After the Gold Rush. 1970. First CD issue in 1986.
I wasn't far off in my recollection then!
 
You said "Some of the very first CDs ...". By '85/86 CDs were commonplace.
No it was 1984. I didn't look for DDD ratings. I purchased what I wanted and ended up with a couple listed as DDD.

This was one of them. I don't know if this one for sale is a later reissue, but the photo is the same.

MK 37846

If I could I would just grab the CD and look, but all my CDs were lost in a fire while in storage. I do have the rip of it.
 
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No it was 1984. I didn't look for DDD ratings. I purchased what I wanted and ended up with a couple listed as DDD.

...

"Digitally recorded using JVC digital equipment" in 1983. I am not sure if it was published that year in Germany. Was one of the first I got, but that was 1986 for me or so.

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How early? Best in what way? I haven't heard anyone in the recording world with this opinion.

He's talking about the Steve Hoffman forum crowd, I think. They cream over 'target' CDs -- first-generation digital releases of analog pop/rock recordings. This is partly due to the herd mentality there, but also due to the reality that remasters, especially as the 80s turned to the 90s, often employed too much dynamic range compression. (also perhaps noise reduction)

This is a historical shame. Some first generation releases *were* perhaps less than they could be -- perhaps not using low-generation tape sources, for example, or using vinyl production master tapes -- so when the 'remastering' craze started,in the late 80s there really was opportunity to improve them. BUT, unfortunately, with just a short lag, the 'loudness wars' also launched around then, so the window for better-sourced-and-better-mastered remasters wasn't open long. Better-sourced-but-also-stepped-on is what we got too often as time went on.
 
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Early digital recordings were done at various sample rates, I seem to recall that the Mitsubishi recorder sampled at 50kHz, About the only possible reason I can think of why early digital recordings may possibly have sounded worse than later ones is that sample rate conversion to 44.1kHz back in the early 1980s wasn't as precise as now. Some conversion was done analogue by DAC-ADC which even then was audibly transparent. I remember evaluating ADC-DAC pairs in the mid 1990s, so some 10 years later than CD, by putting them in the monitoring chain and blind testing whether it was possible to tell if the ADC-DAC or DAC-ADC were in-line or bypassed. It wasn't.

Of course, Nimbus and other LPs recorded digitally wouldn't have needed sample rate conversion, just DAC into the cutting lathes.

S.
Donald Fagan's The Nightfly and Ry Cooder's Bop til You Drop were very early digital pop recordings. They were and are still considered audiophile quality sound.

Regarding The Nightfly:

The 3M 32-track used 1” digital tape and the 4-track used 1/2” digital tape. They both ran at 45 ips. I guess 3M wanted to sell you lots of tape. The digital audio was recorded at 50kHz 16bits. There were no 16bit converters in 1981, so the 3M system used a 12 bit Burr-Brown converter and 4bits of an 8bit converter as gain-ranging to produce the 16bit results. The “brick wall” analog filters on the 3M machine hand-wound coils and took up most of a circuit board. They sounded good.
 
I had, (now long gone) many articles about early cd and vinyl of the time, going on and on about how limited vinyl was and its dozen issues, that IF SOLVED, would make music more transparent and HI-FI


Yes,it is often forgotten that the digital audio revolution was driven initially by *classical music recording engineers and producers and musicians* who had long chafed at the limitations of analog, vinyl especially.
 
No it was 1984. I didn't look for DDD ratings. I purchased what I wanted and ended up with a couple listed as DDD.

Retroactively in reissue, I guess. In context you implied these were SPARS-labeled "DDD".

This was one of them. I don't know if this one for sale is a later reissue, but the photo is the same.

MK 37846

If I could I would just grab the CD and look, but all my CDs were lost in a fire while in storage. I do have the rip of it.

That's a Soundstream recording, apparently. (Edit: per post above, it's a Soundstream edit and was recorded on JVC digital--probably a VP-900 ADC/DAC which would not pass muster on ASR with a 0.02% harmonic distortion @ 1kHz published spec) There's a fellow on Discogs who claims there are mastering differences between the original Japan DIDC 50070 issue and the later CBS DADC 50070 Terra Haute plant's reissue.


The Terra Haute facility started production on September 21st, 1984 so if you had one of these it would have been pretty late in the year by the time it reached retail shelves.

There's a considerable amount of noise, perhaps room noise, compared to other recordings of the early digital era (Hogwood, Pinnock, etc.)--at end of the second movement, for example. It sounds like they close miked Marsalis, and listening to it on Sennheiser HD600s reminds me of the two years I sat in front of Ryan Anthony ... I'm sure I suffered some hearing damage, but it sure sounded good!

Happy new year!
 
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L’histoire révisionniste est une garce.

Certains des tout premiers CD étaient des sources numériques. Bon sang, ils faisaient des vinyles à partir du numérique avant l'apparition du CD. Mes tout premiers CD achetés, trois d'entre eux, dont deux étaient des DDD.

They didn't need to.

A cursory survey of the release timeline of DDD classical albums would tell you what you need to know. Stereophile's review was published in early 1983, with a bunch of followups from the much-missed JGH in which he slags the terrible quality of nearly all of the CDs (classical) he and others around him had access to over the next year or so. AAD/ADD was the norm for a long time--I very clearly recall looking high and low for a "pure" DDD recording to feed my Kenwood CD player in 1984.

Telarc had done a few digital recordings early on (I later owned a copy of their first effort: the Holst Suites for Military Band) and in retrospect it was mostly pretty gimmicky (like their notorious "digital cannon" 1812 Overture which once I heard through four(!) Klipschorns driven by a pair of H/K Citation amps in late 1985 or so).



They didn't do it in the early 80s, and they didn't do it with inflation-adjusted $150k digital recorders as "total amateurs".



How early? Best in what way? I haven't heard anyone in the recording world with this opinion.
This was not the opinion of the editorial staff of Le Monde de la musique in France nor of other musical and hifi magazines... the protests came later when the small audiophile manufacturers who provided most of the pages of advertising we are pushing hard around LP and analog sound...

As head of the MDLM record review pages, I had immediate access, in 1983, to all the classic CDs published and their sound quality was, on the contrary, already clearly superior to that of the corresponding LPs regardless of whether the CDs were in DDD or AAD or ADD... And my LP equipment was out of the question: V16 V Shure on short SME tonearm and on Sony tangential turntable. And was it the same for my colleagues and colleagues?

Funny thing, Denon LPs recorded in PCM since 1972-1973 had a great audiophile reputation and were used in hi-fi shows...

Decca is the first major to release a classic digital recording in LP form... New Year's Concert and Mahler's Fourth Symphony by Zubin Metha and Barbara Hendrix (not very very good, a little dry in the treble... like many other analog Decca recordings...)

The first classical EMI recording is a Debussy album conducted by André Previn in London (this is what is written in the cover by the person responsible for this recording): it is of stunning sonic beauty in its naturalness and the great respect for the placement of the orchestra desks in the space... The sound recording was particularly careful and the arrangement of the microphones (few in number) very well placed...

(I was one of those who recorded live FM concerts on magnetic tape and who railed against the LP, its distortions at the end of the side, its background noise, its fragility, its deficient bass, its weeping due to the disk centering problems during pressing...)
 
A doubt about PCM encoding...
In a DAW, for example, if a sum operation determines a level above 1 (> 0dBfs) how is that sample handled?
Can it take on a value like 1.2 as long as in the digital domain of the DAW?
Or bit depth does not allow to represent that number and the sample is limited to +/-1 (digital clipping)?
 
A doubt about PCM encoding...
In a DAW, for example, if a sum operation determines a level above 1 (> 0dBfs) how is that sample handled?
Can it take on a value like 1.2 as long as in the digital domain of the DAW?
Or bit depth does not allow to represent that number and the sample is limited to +/-1 (digital clipping)?
A DAW will normally be using floating point maths. So it can represent any value it likes internally. It will normally tell the operator when the signal exceeds the 0dbFS range, allowing them to reduce the overall level of the music, or compress it, or do whatever is needed to prevent the clipping.

Worst case it will have to clip when rendering back to PCM.
 
A DAW will normally be using floating point maths. So it can represent any value it likes internally. It will normally tell the operator when the signal exceeds the 0dbFS range, allowing them to reduce the overall level of the music, or compress it, or do whatever is needed to prevent the clipping.

Worst case it will have to clip when rendering back to PCM.
So if in the DAW for example I sum left and right channel entering a plugin (convolver), is the latter able to perform the calculations even above the value 1?
I speak from a purely theoretical point of view, obviously before sending the data to the audio driver the signal will be properly limited.
 
So if in the DAW for example I sum left and right channel entering a plugin (convolver), is the latter able to perform the calculations even above the value 1?
I speak from a purely theoretical point of view, obviously before sending the data to the audio driver the signal will be properly limited.
Yes, most of today DAW and audio players have floating point internal data path.. but a plugin or whatever internally also must operate on floating point values. Some may offer a floating point interface but internally they work on integers.
 
"WARNING: The music on this Compact Disc was originally recorded on analog equipment, prior to modern noise reduction techniques. This Compact Disc preserves, as closely as possible, the sound of the original recording but its high resolution also reveals the limitations in the master tape, including noise and other distortions."

Neil Young, After the Gold Rush. 1970. First CD issue in 1986.
The Niel Young who still says digital destroys music?
 
A doubt about PCM encoding...
In a DAW, for example, if a sum operation determines a level above 1 (> 0dBfs) how is that sample handled?
Can it take on a value like 1.2 as long as in the digital domain of the DAW?
Or bit depth does not allow to represent that number and the sample is limited to +/-1 (digital clipping)?
The DAW will show a clip and you reduce levels. If your mixing 2 signals you always have to watch the level, dosnt matter if its analog or digital, thats mixing.
 
A doubt about PCM encoding...
In a DAW, for example, if a sum operation determines a level above 1 (> 0dBfs) how is that sample handled?

That's what level meters and eyes are for.
 
is the latter able to perform the calculations even above the value 1?
Yes, look up how floating point numbers work (32- or 64- bit) and you'll see that representing 1.1 or even 1,001 is no problem. I think for the past 20 years or so, virtually all audio production software has used at least 32-bit floating point and most of them are on 64-bit for many years now.

Reducing levels below 0 dBFS has to be done at the output one way or another, but there is no problem working with larger signals internally.
 
The Niel Young who still says digital destroys music?
Neil Young who came up with Pono, Neil Young who cops to having tinnitus. But give the dude credit, he's also the Neil Young of the Bridge School Benefit concerts.
 
I still remember when I got the original CD (released in 1986 I think) of the soundtrack for Star Trek The Motion Picture, which is a full digital recording, only the soundtrack album, the music as it's heard on the movie was tracked and mixed down to analogue tape using Telefunken 's TelCom Noise Reduction.
The full digital soundtrack album recording sounds very dinamic with plenty of Deep bass, but It also sounds unnatural and synthetic. Strings on tracks like The Enterprise sound horrendous.
When this soundtrack was re-released as a 3 CD set back in 2012, It features the original soundtrack recording remixed from 1st gen analogue multitrack tapes, to 192/24 using ProTools, and downsampled to 44.1/16 for CD release. This remix sounds great.
It also features the full digital soundtrack album remastered, and It sounds as unnatural and synthetic as the original CD.
 
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