Rogue Keeper on 19/8/2008 at 15:57

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You should be clubbing more, mang. :D

io organic industrialism on 19/8/2008 at 17:32

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Yep, pretty much the reason why vinyl sounds subjectively better than digital is that there is no upper limit to the frequency response of the recording. Whereas with digital recordings, the frequency range equals half of the sample rate... Therefore, the highest frequency that can be reproduced with 44.1khz samplerate is 22050hz. 96khz recording could reproduce 48000hz sounds.. I read somewhere that vinyl holds frequencies upwards of 180000hz... Something ridiculous like that that no speakers could ever produce or that noone would ever need
Although the generally defined range of human hearing is 20hz-20000hz, no one but bats could hear the infinitely high frequencies being produced by a vinyl record... But as someone said above, the higher frequencies can be "felt" by humans (I suppose). Or at least perceived slightly.

Dithering is neat though, they use it to take higher bitrate recordings, convert them down to a lower bitrate, but make the lower bitrate output sound better than if it was recorded at the lower bitrate. It has to do with rounding off the last bits of data into an average... More info here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dithering#Digital_audio)



No. This analogy makes NO sense at all. :p I don't think a direct comparison can be drawn, and any attempt to would be a foolish waste of time :joke:

io organic industrialism on 19/8/2008 at 20:59

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These were actually made and marketed a while back. They are simply called "DVD-audio". Best buy used to have quite a selection of them. I've always wanted to get one to experience the high quality digital goodness, but now you can't find them anywhere :( The market went the other way, the way of portability and compression. Can't say I blame it. I love my ipod nano. But I was interested in where dvd-audio or super audio cd's could take us. Maybe one day there will be a higher quality format but the way things are looking, it could be a while. Mp3's have been strong for about 10 years now and show no sign of letting up.

As an aside, on a dvd-audio disc, I don't think they all the storage space for one uber-high-quality stereo rendering. I think there are generally several options: 5.1 surround sound, and a Stereo recording ...

Beware of a shoddy and probably inaccurate calculation below:
Since I have no interest in 5.1 sound, I would only listen to the Stereo version. But it almost certainly uses less data on the disc. So if a DVD is 4.5 gigs, and there are a total of "7 channels" (5.1 for dolby and 2 for stereo) on the disc, 4.5 / 7 = .64
.64 * 2 = Roughly 1.28 gigabytes of storage space for the 2 channel audio on there... Which is about 50% more capacity than a standard audio CD.

So does dvd-audio sound 50% better?

If I ever get one, I'll check it out. I actually do have one sitting on my desk right now that I found on the curb in front of someone's house during bulky item pickup, it is a "Lexus dvd-audio sampler"... Apparently some Lexii come with dvd players and surround sound setups. But I figure that is optimized for the 5.1 setup so I doubt it has any more fidelity than a regular CD... Just more channels. Thus I haven't listened to it yet

Shoddy shoddy calculations :joke:

Bjossi on 20/8/2008 at 19:26

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@Io organic industrialism: I wish I could try a music DVD as well. :erg: I bet the quality would be incredible with capable hardware to deliver it to the ears.

I made my own calculations, by the way. We are assuming this is not an audio DVD but a DVD that contains recorded data. So the only factor here is storage capacity. (I'm not sure if audio DVDs have limits to audio playback...)

Anyway, I put in some "exotic" numbers to see what DVDs can store.
2 channels
192 kHz sampling rate
32-bit resolution

2 * 192000 * 32 = 12,288,000 bits
Now we have the bitrate of such recording, how many bits of data are played each second. 12,288,000 / 8 / 1024^2 equals 1.465 MB/s (!)

I think the typical DVD can store 4.9 GBs of data, which is 5018 MBs.
5018 / 1.465 will give us maximum number of seconds of audio data a DVD can keep with the above mentioned recording "specs": Around 3425.3 seconds, that is 57 minutes.

If the above has no errors, a 4.9 GB DVD can store 57 minutes of 32-bit stereo audio sampled at 192 kHz. In comparison audio CDs are 16-bit 44.1 kHz.

Not too shabby. :p