.....yeah,the whole site is worth the reading
If you read between the lines you will see where there is not only more potential to screw up digital but more likelyhood as well because of all the "steps" involved each with the potential to go badly.And that is
another dart in the digital dart board on my worlshop wall
Can you get great results or piss poor results from either format (analog or digital) ? Obviously and i have some very well resorded digital discs that are a joy to listen to but still given the choice,a choice that said "one or the other punk,choose " I'm going analog.
Analog loses ZERO being the whole thing instead of a "sample" other than dynamic range and the truth is ;
We do not need a wide dynamic range in the home where the ambient noise field makes the issue moot anyway so while there POTENTIAL is there it wold be a rare disc that acutrally uses the full potential and an even rarer playback system that could reproduce it without self compresssion or clipping while losing the softest passges in the circuit noise.That is fact.
Ever wonder why movies sound so shitty in the theater yet buy the Cd and are much much more enjoyable in the "Home Theater" ?
Dynamics,
Because they want to "tout" the system potential over
common sense they avoid the use of a compressor in the signal chain which means full dynamic range but this "full dynamics" is not the dynamics of nature,of the real or natural sound but the dynamics of the artificially created special effect
meant to both show off and impress.
Thunder,earthquakes,gunshots,automobiles,NOTHING like they sound in the real world but this is the movies and movies are bigger than life so too the Sound FX must be.
Fine.........NOT !
The heart of any movie that is not a rollercoaster ride is the dialog so above all you must be able to HEAR the dialog or the Sonic Spectacle is just so much noise without a story to tie it together,to make it have a point.
So what happens when you fill a large room with humans and you try to play a movie with sounds that go from a whisper to Old Testament disasters ?
You need to bring the "whispers"
UP to a level above the ambient noise field of all the humans breathing,shifting in their seat,scrathing,coughing,whispering,moving,hell LIVING !
May not be very loud but load enough to lose some of the dialog and that will just not do so up goes the volume until the softest passages are easily heard which causes the center where the majority of the sound track lives LOUD and the dynamics of the FX
PAINFULL rather than enjoyable !
when this happens in the home we usually have our trusty remote volume control handy so we ramp up the whispers so we can hear them then when we get rocked back in our seat bang down the loud parts until we come to another section with whispers where we again up the volume.
This is called "gain riding" which is just a manual form of compression because what a true "compressor" does is bring up the soft parts that fall below the "low threshold" and limit the peaks that go above the "high threshold".
Overdone and you end up with what we mostly have in "popular music CDs" where the
actual dynamic range is less even than 90% of the analog discs of the 70's with the reasons being overzealous engineers who relay too much on their "toys" combined with the knowledge that the average consumer system would crap out on the dynamics
anyway with THEM being the ones decrying the state of music and how it sounds like crap rather than us.
so compression has a place and I only WISH that place was also in the movie theater but that will not happen in in era when specs and "look what I can do" hold more import than actual usable performance.
Does analog use compression ? Damn right.Digital ? Damn right,but for entirely different reasons.
Analog is dynamic range limited but so too is digital though the WAY they are limited is totally the polar opposite of the other,
With analog the medium itself is the limiting factor not the noise floor as some say so the "compresssion" is more about being a "peak limiter" than a true compressor which acts on both the soft and the loud.
It is the peaks and either tape saturation or groove width we worry about (can only hold so much signal) so this "animal" must be contained and restrained so it will play nice.Along with this "peak limiting" a thing called "pre-emphasis" and "de-emphasis" is used so this limitng can be minimized.you would know this as the "RIAA curve EQ" in the vinyl medium and the "IEC or NAB curve EQ" in the tape medium.
what they do is boost the high frequency notes and cut the low frequency notes in POWER so any noise on in the highs will in theory be attenuated along with the boost when at the other end the re-equalisatin is used and for the bass side allows more powerful notes to be recorded
without using a limter so you get them back at the other side through your electronics while the storage medium is able to hold the signal.
There may or may not be other "tricks" used to keep the dynamics up and the noise down,Dolby A,B or c for instance,but nothing is taken away.If it was there in the performance it is there in the recording just modified a bit to suit the end use in the home system.
Digital on the other hand DOES toss away signal because from the start it is a
sample not the whole thing.Think taking a bite from an apple compared to eating the whole apple.yes the single bite tasted pretty damn good but sometimes you just want the hole apple and a bite will not cut it !
so we begin with "bits" of a thing instead of the entire thing.Take our bite and be happy.........
These bites of the apple have an amount determined as "bits" and how many times you get to chew these bites the
sample rate of the analog to digital converter.This is the thing that determines just how many bites of the apple we get and just how much of the actual flavor we get.With a low sample rate it is bite and swallow.A high one,how many chews before swallowing.
That we will NEVER get the entire apple (pits and all
)is already established so it comes down to how many bites,err bits,um parts we are allowed to have and once in the mouth how long it is there.
"two cookies I said ! Take three and I break your frikkin' arm ! And eat them fast you little prick we are on a schedule here !"
So the sample rate set the amounts of the performance that is captured then transferred to a playback format.Obviously you want this to be as high as possible because it is what it says-the amount of times in a specific time frame the signal is taken apart and sampled to decide what is and is not kept.
But wait !
Digital does not clip like anlog but runs out of bits so any signal even a FRACTION above "0dB" is just so much square wave ! There IS NO such thing as digital headroom ! you get to "0" and that is it bud ! Brick fkn wall with no where to go !
So we keep our signal to -3dB or -6dB and then hit it with a brick wall of a limiter just in case thatr nasty little music signal even THINKS it can weasle by.So now our "on paper spec" dynamic range is reduced.Reduced on purpose and this is a GOOD thing all things considered yet they never tell you it is a good thing to have reduced dynamic range in a home playback system so they tell the "lie" of "yeah,we are giving you a dynamic range of 120dB jerky.aint we cool ?" when the reality is you are already down below 100dB in reality and that is just the start of the lie.
The other part of the scam is the low level music and
actual dynamic range.Rather than go into excrutiating detail (tough for me anyway,no engineer so limited skills in the explaining of
) let me just say the actual "bitrate" is a very piss poor 10-12 bits (or worse) and that without
adding noise (think about that one.noise is actually added !) to fill in the blank spots beteen the bits would sound like crap !
So we don't haver either the claimed noise floor because the bits run out on the low level signals and we don't have the headroom of real dynamic range claimed so what do we get ?
Better bass because it is more linear and silence between notes because the background noise of digital is "black" instead of "white" but the real world HAS noise and if you sit in silence and just listen you would realise just how heavy the assualt is.
traffic going by,planes overhead,clocks ticking,furnace cycling on and off,AC,human being humans.The world is noisey yet because of the potential for hiss between songs or the occasional pop or tick from recordings not taken care of analog is out,digital in even though from the start you lose more than you gain in actual signal with even the real world noise level and dynamic range closer than you think in real world use.
The only place digital has ANY advantage in the sonic realm is the parts
between the songs where it is dead silent but me ? I listen to the music not the silence between the notes which is not something you even GET in the real world so in itself an un-natural event having (remember-ambient noise field
) zero to do with the performance ;D
At least that is my opinion and i'm sticking to it until I can be persuaded otherwise through l
istenig,not pretty graphs and techno babble
.