Posts by Pristine Audio 86 publicly visible posts • joined 31 May 2012
When Concorde flew overhead you knew it was Concorde - certainly by the 1990s it was much, much louder than anything else in the sky as it descended over SE London on its way to Heathrow. It was a regular sight when I lived there and sounded like a real monster. Nothing else came close.
Now I live in rural France. Occasionally French air force jets have flown over at supersonic speeds. You know they're supersonic because the impact on the house, while it's never broken windows, feels like an oil tanker must have crashed into the living room at speed. It's truly terrifying.
A few years back I was involved as a studio engineer in the broadcast of a David Bowie session on Radio One live from BBC Maida Vale. The main engineer that night was my colleague, the legendary Mike Robinson. He'd spent all day getting the sound just right and didn't want to have it screwed up by the notorious "Optimod" radio processors then in use to make everything LOUD. So he called the then controller of Radio One and told him Bowie had refused to play unless the BBC switched out all processing and compression and the listeners got to hear the real thing.
This was of course bullshit. Bowie was standing next to me, chain-smoking Marlboros and listening to the soundcheck. But it worked... :-)
I'm guessing the Sabrina Setlur track isn't to Andrew's taste then.
Listening to the two I am inclined to agree with the court. It's just a 2 second drum/rhythm loop which in itself is hardly massively original. It sits deep in the mix and isn't a major component of the song. It's a far cry from the way The Verve's poached strings featured in Bittersweet Symphony.
A line certainly needs to be drawn somewhere. But perhaps it takes a little more musical insight than the article here offers (beyond slagging off the 1997 track) to work out where that might be.
"The proper way to verify the sound output would be to do an ABX test between the master and the LP, and between the master and a CD / FLAC / WAV. If you can tell the difference its because the audio has been distorted or otherwise failed to capture frequency in the master. And that's BAD, not good."
And it won't sound the same, I can assure you. I have vinyl records that I've mastered digitally. I have tape masters that I didn't master but for which I also have the vinyl. They never sound like the master. Don't need to ABX them to listen for subtle differences, it's pretty clear...
As much as I liked my Note 3 I couldn't go back to it from an S6 Edge+, despite missing the Micro-SD card (and to a lesser extent the battery). I would imagine you'd find the same with bells on if you switched to an S7.
As for covers, I've always loved the Samsung S covers - the window works well when taking/rejecting calls and the instant on with the S6 when paired with the watch I'm wearing means no fingerprint/log in when I open the case but a "secure" phone if my arm isn't within Bluetooth range.
I caught a TGV out of Paris last week. Having the SNCF app I'd previously installed on my Android phone pop up on my LG watch and tell me which platform to head to in advance of arrival at the somewhat disorientating station (it had also been nagging me to get a move on some time before) proved remarkably useful.
>In the UK, music copyright expires after 50 years - so anything before 1964 is now "free" unless reprotected. Over the next few years all the classic recordings of the 1960's and 1970's become free of copyright unless someone recreates the copyright
Incorrect. It's being gradually ramped up to 70 years. Everything from 1963 onwards remains in copyright until 2034 thanks to hard lobbying by the music industry of the EU. Funnily enough that keeps everything recorded by The Beatles in copyright with the exception of their first single.
Expect to see a push to extend copyright to 90 years in the early 2030s...
This would raise revenue considerably because you could make licenses available world-wide, safe in the knowledge that overseas viewers would actually be paying for the BBC and not just freeloading it.
No you couldn't, because the programmes shown on the BBC are licensed and sold on a per-territory basis. The BBC couldn't sell general access outside the UK - just as you can't legitimately buy a UK Sky card outside the country or get the UK's iPlayer service (there's something else for international subscribers that shows old programmes).
Of course there are well-known hoops some people jump through in order to get decoder cards, usually to watch Sky Sports, but "officially" it doesn't happen.
Vinyl has one MASSIVE advantage - it is a direct measurement of the sound being reproduced.
It's an approximation, an analogue copy representing an electrical signal in the limited resolution of a piece of plastic. That's why it has limited dynamic range, roughly equivalent to 12-13 bit digital and various forms of harmonic distortion appear both above and below the frequencies being reproduced.
A photocopy is an analogue copy - look at a fourth or fifth generation photocopy, or listen to a tape to tape to tape to tape copy, then consider the record manufacturing process of analogue copies of master tapes -> disc master -> father copy -> mother copy -> stampers -> vinyl. At each stage there will inevitably be some deterioration in the reproduction, albeit much less than the two examples given here. That's what happens in the analogue world as you progress from one generation to the next.
Vinyl may offer "a direct measurement of the sound being reproduced" but it's a flawed one, and what is digital audio if not a "measurement of the sound being reproduced"?
Get a Samsung S-View cover. Replaces the back with a leather-type cover that opens like a book (turning the screen on as it does), looks smart, and protects the phone. I don't particularly care for the plastic backs on Samsung phones, but I've not used one since I got mine. Brilliant idea!
Whats's that Movies and Music? Isn't this what the Cloud was made for? I for One love XBMC (Movies), and Google Music... For umm Music streaming.
You're assuming the cloud is everywhere and permanently available. It may be to you but it certainly isn't out here in the sticks where I live in rural France. Or when I'm on a plane. Or if I visit another country and don't want horrendous roaming costs. That's why I stuck a 128GB SD RAM card into my Note 3 and filled it with good music. Google Music is fine for what it is, but it's not comprehensive WRT my musical tastes and sometimes you can find yourself wrestling with it to get it to play what you want. Movies on a phone screen? Not at my age with my eyesight, even on a Note 3! But music, absolutely, yes.
No way would I buy a phone without a memory slot. The more the merrier.
>“We have an engineer in the (PHL) lab who says that while maybe you can’t see the difference initially, you can feel the difference. I used to scold him for that, saying that’s not an argument, but sure enough after a little while of viewing this stuff when I go back to a Full HD panel the first thing I notice is the pixel grid in the display, and it bothers me.”
Sounds suspiciously like the kind of crap you hear from certain elements in the hi-fi industry about 24-bit audio vs. 16-bit audio...
>And what exactly is Amazon contributing for its 30%??? Nothing to assist in the creative (or marketing) process, I suspect...
A vast global market for the product, coupled with delivery infrastructure, reading software and products, and a retailing environment that works brilliantly well.
Of course there's no reason why Hachette (and others) couldn't do the same thing, but having just visited their website I saw nothing to suggest I could buy a book from them directly, electronically or otherwise. Why is this?
The frequency response of the multitrack tapes on which Neil Young's early recordings would have been made wouldn't be much different to that of a CD, whilst the dynamic range would be considerably lower. The masters likewise. As the author says, there's unlikely to be anything much of musical value above 20kHz on the masters, even if anyone could actually hear it.
I my experience of checking out high quality modern digital 96Khz and 192kHz classical recordings from the likes of Linn, what you're mainly getting is silence and the upper harmonics of electronic interference. Musically speaking only the occasional cymbal (and very little else) does much beyond about 22kHz.
When the first vinyl records were released they were heavy so as to seem familiar to the shellac discs they replaced. The thickness of the vinyl has no real bearing on sound quality - there are a hundred and one other ways in which this was and is compromised as a master tape makes its way to a vinyl master. Cramming more and more onto a side is the biggest culprit here.
But the modern fetish for 45rpm heavy virgin vinyl is more about extracting cash from mugs. I've heard significantly better sound quality from regular mint 80s pressings than from the modern allegedly audiophile equivalent. And both are beaten hands down in just about every way (apart from added distortion, rumble, wow and flutter, dynamic range limitation etc.) by any halfway competent digital reproduction.
Decca started issuing FFRR recordings in 1945 and LPs in 1950, so your albums aren't "early". In fact most Decca vinyl pressings in the early days were pretty grim and sounded much better in their Ace Of Clubs budget reissues at the end of the 50s and thereafter.
Personally, given the choice between mint 50s vinyl and mint 70s or 80s vinyl of the same recording I'd go for the 80s unless there was a very good reason not to.
(This all refers to classical music releases, BTW)
I have a Rega Planar 78 (based on the Planar 2) which runs at one speed and one speed only: 78rpm. But it's also set up with 78rpm stylii which are designed to fit shellace grooves that are around 4 times wider than vinyl microgrooves, and would sound pretty grim on this release - if any of the narrower ones could actually track the groove.
I suspect the reason, beyond total gimmick, for the higher speeds "under the label" is due to huge treble drop-off at the centre thanks to the much reduced linear velocity of the grooves that close to the hole. Given the way regular LPs suffer end-of-side distortion, those faster centre grooves must sound abysmal. I'm guessing they're not expecting many people to actually bother setting systems up to play them.
One final thing that demands correction: a completely mint shellac 78 is very shiny. When I see a 78 with a matte finish I give it a very wide berth as it's clearly completely shagged from being played to death, usually with a very heavy steel needle.
>The only exception to that rule seem to be kids who're just old enough to write "ipod" on their wish lists...
My son got a mid-range Samsung phone for his 13th birthday and I stuck a spare 32GB SD card in it. I haven't seen his old 4th generation iPod Nano for a long time...
>All that Neil needs to do is to persuade music download sites and app stores to supply uncompressed audio.
Try Qobuz.com - they sell non-lossy downloads in a multitude of formats (compressed and uncompressed, CD quality and higher) and have a streaming service that lets you choose between 320kbps MP3 and CD-quality FLAC. They've been around here in France for a while - they launched in the UK last December, apparently.
I'd say the Guardian's headline is rather less ridiculous than the present article suggests:
>Conservative party deletes archive of speeches from internet
>Decade's worth of records is erased, including PM's speech praising internet for making more information available
Come on, Andrew, the Tories can fight their own battles. You don't need to win the next election for them...
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