fas42 Posted January 16, 2020 Share Posted January 16, 2020 Yes, there are no guarantees - the more "clever" the mastering, the harder it will be - I haven't noticed any frequency balance issues with anything I've done; but you have to nail the levels that the compression was set at, in that final peak limiting. Get that even slightly wrong, and you can hear it ... there is a 'sweet' set of parameters which will give a best result, and I largely do a trial and error zeroing in on what they are - go either side of the optimum, and the decompression is worse ... this is something that clever software could deal with - something for the future ... Link to comment
fas42 Posted January 19, 2020 Share Posted January 19, 2020 A Rumours CD was a very early purchase for me, when I started on the digital path. It always works well, even when the rig is well below par - and gets better and better, the more the system is optimised - my wife who didn't know anything of the group was an instant convert; every track's a winner. Tremendous energy, drive, creativity, hooks galore - a "perfect" album ... Link to comment
fas42 Posted January 20, 2020 Share Posted January 20, 2020 Talking about albums where every track's a winner, recently got hold of If your rig is up to handling this well, fabulous stuff! Of course, it has the iconic As a song with energy to burn, I don't think that they come much better than this ... an all time. "favourite " ... Link to comment
fas42 Posted January 20, 2020 Share Posted January 20, 2020 Which of course leads onto the original, This is a massive blast of everything good in gut wrenching, hard driving rock - this is powerhouse music making, at its best ... I can't think of anything obvious that can top this - other than another Robert Palmer track, 😉. sandyk 1 Link to comment
fas42 Posted January 20, 2020 Share Posted January 20, 2020 3 minutes ago, The_K-Man said: !... One of my faves by the Master of Ceremonies himself! That drum solo opener, like bullets outa my speaks! Crank up to ten, if you dare ... No trouble hearing what you're talking about, even though I have no awareness of the track. Probably the best for pure juggernaut driving energy, for me, is Your system should feel it needs to go outside and take a breather, after pounding your room into submission from this one, 🙂 sandyk 1 Link to comment
fas42 Posted January 20, 2020 Share Posted January 20, 2020 Yes, a whole different listening experience ... great album! sandyk 1 Link to comment
fas42 Posted January 20, 2020 Share Posted January 20, 2020 2 hours ago, Ralf11 said: I feel like I'm missing something when I play it on my tiny laptop speakers What "tiny laptop speakers", or an unsorted high end high end rig can't convey is the piledriver impact of these sort of tracks - you know how the typical action movie does layer upon layer of visual "BIG STUFF!", with a pounding soundtrack to convey a relentless quality to what you're seeing? ... That's exactly what you get from correct replay of this sort of music, a roller coaster ride of intensity for the ears - which has nothing to do with great dobs of added replay distortion, and everything to do with the 'power' of the sound making you feel like a cork bobbing up and down on huge waves. "Bullets" were mentioned before - this is like being in a continual earthquake ... Link to comment
fas42 Posted January 20, 2020 Share Posted January 20, 2020 25 minutes ago, sandyk said: This thread is NOT about how great (NOT !) Robert Palmer YouTube videos, OR Shania Twain with low bit rate .aac audio sound through Franks tiny Laptop speakers. Alex, how difficult is it for you to comprehend that when I post a video of some music, that it is an example of a style of music, or mastering, or whatever - and that it's not that the clip sounds fabulous AT THAT PRECISE MOMENT when I check whether it sounds reasonable enough to make a point, hopefully, in a post ... hmmm? sandyk 1 Link to comment
fas42 Posted January 20, 2020 Share Posted January 20, 2020 9 minutes ago, SJK said: Never look back, my friend. Never. Look forward, look beyond, look to the future. The past is in the past, and that’s where it belongs. Be well. Link to comment
fas42 Posted January 20, 2020 Share Posted January 20, 2020 26 minutes ago, sandyk said: It's IRRELEVANT in this particular topic Alex, you seem to forget that this kicked off from a post by @The_K-Man where Rumours was brought onto the scene; the topic is about what digital can do well compared to vinyl, and the clips are of music which could be difficult to capture on vinyl, because of the style of mastering. Link to comment
fas42 Posted January 20, 2020 Share Posted January 20, 2020 (sigh) ... ... from OP, " Lie: vinyl suffers from heavy dynamic compression — so why do my LPs display vastly better dynamic power/force? " Answer: Both mediums can do "dynamic power/force", but digital will alway win in a head to head, because of intrinsic limitations to how vinyl works; the grooves can only take so much modulation - the recordings above are ones that would pulverise 99.9% of vinyl playback, in terms of "dynamic power/force". Teresa 1 Link to comment
fas42 Posted January 21, 2020 Share Posted January 21, 2020 37 minutes ago, John Dyson said: Vinyl *can* sound more dynamic and warm, but it is more of a matter of 2nd harmonic distortion, bending of vinyl, necessary compression when the cutter might be overwhelmed, at least some subtle rumble, avoiding the dynamics danger zones for typical consumer cartridges, etc. Of course, proper mastering is the most critical and basic factor, and REALLY helps, that is we want DECODED material, not just splatted through a simpler filter to make the sound 'tolerable' like often on CDs. (Typically, vinyl material isn't mastered for a V15type4 or whatever fancy tracking cartridge nowadays, but more like a M75 or very sturdy Stanton cartridge for disk jocky use.) In the edge case where the good tracking cartridge benefitted, then that is a very nice thing for that listener. At one radio station, they purchased M91s instead of sturdy cartridge/needle pairs -- lost at least 1-2 needles per week, on a LIGHT week, sometimes 1 or 2 per day!! "Dynamic and warm" is the nature of the recording itself, before the replay chain does its damage - with digital, if those qualities are lost then it's because the added distortion at the time of the reproduction makes it difficult to hear through to what the recording is actually like. I have rarely heard vinyl adding distortion to make it "more pleasant" - rather, I can usually hear tracking distortion, etc, degrading and blurring the sound. Link to comment
fas42 Posted January 21, 2020 Share Posted January 21, 2020 8 minutes ago, John Dyson said: the biggest mp3 problem that my hearing can detect is temporal resolution. That is the only thing that I have been able to reliably detect the difference on certain music. MP3 isn't great, but not quite as bad as it is made out to be. I prefer opus, but normally only need data compression that everyone is compatible with, so choose mp3. (Opus has slightly better termporal resolution, and works well at lower bitrates, but I don't care about that.) * I do get the feeling that I don't prefer MP3 over proper flac, but that is a 'feeling', not a measurement. John I did some experiments with the LAME encoder, attempting to retain the "last ounce of juice", by playing with every setting available for fine-tuning the operation. And used my instance of the Sharp boombox recently pictured in a post by me - in 'raw' form 😁 - to check the transparency. Was always detectable, changed the feel of certain passages enough to make it obvious - didn't sound 'worse' ... just, different. Link to comment
fas42 Posted January 21, 2020 Share Posted January 21, 2020 41 minutes ago, The_K-Man said: Because their digital counterparts have suffered from artists and labels desire for LOUDNESS over liveliness. You can't have have both, although you can have varying degrees of both, depending on what serves the song/album. Thus, digital formats such as CD are unable to fully showcase their potential for accommodating dynamic material - and ignorant consumers - including audiophiles - blame the format! 🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️ Intelligent mastering can deliver a decent dose of both ... I'm thinking here of Canned Heat; have an album of greatest hits, and an effort done in 2000. The latter is vastly higher in SPLs than the former, but none of the character of the Canned Heat sound has been compromised, in any obvious way. Link to comment
fas42 Posted January 21, 2020 Share Posted January 21, 2020 6 minutes ago, The_K-Man said: DId you encode at minimum 256kbs? Because this old crow for sure cannot hear a difference at or above 192kb mp3, for that matter. 320kbs. Variable rate, constant rate; forcing encoding right out to 20k, and various compromises of that. Always sounded different, using each combination of settings. To make it a fair fight, I burnt the orginal track along with "best decoding" into WAV onto a disk, of all the encodings. So what was being played was always the same format, what varied were the losses in the encoding/decoding, software path. Link to comment
fas42 Posted January 21, 2020 Share Posted January 21, 2020 15 minutes ago, The_K-Man said: Your comment brings to mind this, buggle gum pop for sure, but in my opionion relatively crankable, for a modern hit!... Yep ... a discovery for me was this recent album, another "every track's a winner!" effort ... sandyk 1 Link to comment
fas42 Posted January 21, 2020 Share Posted January 21, 2020 22 minutes ago, sandyk said: NONE of Frank's YouTube videos have anything to do with the subject of this thread. Frank loves to post his favourite YouTube videos in almost every thread that he participates in. They have zero relevance in this thread. We are talking about Vinyl vs. Digital,which is not intended to include terrible sounding YouTube videos with their very low Bit Rate .aac audio. IF he was able to post some Videos with LPCM audio (16/48) that we were able to compare with the Vinyl or RBCD or High Res. LPCM recordings , then that may be a different matter. Favourite? They just happen to be a convenient reference to some audio, which I could refer to by just using the name of the piece, or a straight image. YT combines a picture, with an ability to instantly demo it - if you want a high quality version of such, there are plenty of options ... you could, of course, refrain from clicking the play button ... 😝. The_K-Man 1 Link to comment
fas42 Posted January 21, 2020 Share Posted January 21, 2020 Alex, why are taking it all so seriously - it's only a hobby, for nearly everyone; or at least that's the theory ... the world won't end if a post you don't like personally happens on the scene ... as they used to say, "Hang loose, mannn ..." Link to comment
fas42 Posted January 21, 2020 Share Posted January 21, 2020 Tried the Second Hand News track, and there are issues - cymbal crashes are not right, so far. Link to comment
fas42 Posted January 21, 2020 Share Posted January 21, 2020 On 1/17/2020 at 8:13 AM, The_K-Man said: Once mastering engineers found out, by mid-'90s or so, that they didn't have to preserve every single peak from the recording sessions, and this schitt... started happening on newer releases(think: Oasis 'WHAT'S THE STORY') - heavy peak-limiting combined with DRC - all bets were off. And they haven't looked back since! Oasis never did anything for for me, but I was curious, and downloaded the "What's the Story" track - dear me, 🙄. Can anything be done to rescue this, hmmm? ... Looked up what the producer had done, which implied it was a fairly straightforward compression. So played with some expansion settings ... my goodness!! There's some real music in there, after all ... . About 75% there, I'll try some fine tuning to see how close I can get to hearing proper instruments, a proper band playing. Link to comment
fas42 Posted January 22, 2020 Share Posted January 22, 2020 1 hour ago, The_K-Man said: You might be used to more commercial-style stuff where the volume can be set between 10-20 out of 100, and paint still peels from the walls and the windows shatter. One of the various markers that one gets when replay SQ reaches a competent standard is that it always "sounds good", whether whisper quiet or running at the maximum SPLs that the system can operate at while still maintaining its integrity. The trouble with highly compressed recordings is that this subjective sense of the presentation breaks down - the average sound levels are now so high that your hearing system is overloaded very easily; you are exhausted after hearing just one track, say. Reducing the volume only partially solves the problem; the sense of aggression in the sound can be overwhelming - only a rig in absolutely optimum status could possibly allow one to listen to this material in complete comfort. Link to comment
fas42 Posted January 22, 2020 Share Posted January 22, 2020 54 minutes ago, Confused said: Except, of course, a scenario when the maximum SPL the system can comfortably operate at whilst maintaining its integrity would make the listener suffer hearing loss. IME the max SPLs roughly match what living to live music is like - say, some classical piano sonatas ... I've found that often I'm searching for more gain, because the average intensity doesn't match a live experience; the particular recording is well down in its overall recording level. Again, this is not what I experience with over-compressed material - if max setting is 100, I might want no more than 50 to be OK with the listening. Link to comment
fas42 Posted January 23, 2020 Share Posted January 23, 2020 Yes, no longer smally in public awareness. Link to comment
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