No, the master (or “master tape” in somewhat archaic terms) is what the label, studio, or artist considers the finished product. It is used to produce distribution copies and is retained for archival purposes. Many digital masters intended partly or even primarily for CD distribution are 24 bit 48 kHz before conversion to 16 bit 44.1 kHz.
James_I
(The truth is out there but not necessarily here)
248
So what? Are you instructing posters to go back to flaming myth believing audiophiles? People aren’t free to just converse?
When you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail.
3 Likes
AceRimmer
(Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast!)
249
No, I am “suggesting” members slow down and think before posting before matters become heated or out of hand.
Where you drew your stated implication from I have no idea!
James_I
(The truth is out there but not necessarily here)
250
I can finally respond!
In effect, I took your statement that the if the thread had a point, it was lost, to be a kind of “instruction” to get back to the point.
Either way, I didn’t see that there was any heated conversation, and IMHO it wasn’t really necessary or appropriate to issue the warning or put the thread on slow mode.
We’re adults…mostly senior citizens or very close…and while I agree posters act like children sometimes and moderation can be needed, in this case it felt a bit too heavy handed. The regular posters on this forum represent a significant value to Roon - matter of fact we’ve been the primary means of user support for the last few years – and I think should be treated with respect and not preemptive moderation.
Let’s take a chapter out of the US Constitution: if there is no compelling need for censorship, don’t censor.
4 Likes
AceRimmer
(Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast!)
251
Appreciate your viewpoint, obviously mine was different.
And just to be pedantic I never said it was heated, I said before it became heated.
As the vast majority of these threads do indeed become heated and spiral out of control.
That’s why slomo is used as an alternative to just closing them down in an effort to keep order.
Actually I did not notice I had selected 4 hours!
That I will change.
I agree with this. Preemptive moderation should have no place here. If there has been no egregious breach of forum etiquette yet, moderators should stay in the background. If at all, a friendly reminder to not let a topic get out of control should suffice. And snide remarks as in ‘if there ever was any point to this thread’ are completely uncalled for. This is offending to the OP and contributes nothing to the moderation effort.
4 Likes
James_I
(The truth is out there but not necessarily here)
261
Well, I will preemptively say that I didn’t want to create a firestorm for Ace and that he’s been a positive forum member himself. I think the message was sent. Thanks for understanding Ace and lets get back to debating bit depths.
I don’t think you would. Those are proprietary, so you’d have to know whether they were taken with a Nikon (NEF) or Canon (CRW/CR2) or Sony (ARW) etc. to know which software to use to decode. Even if some OSs can now decode some of those (e.g. Windows can display NEF), they can change the format at any time. (DSD can also be considered a raw format; it’s not so raw anymore because Sony and Philips tried to milk it.)
It’s ok to prefer lossless over lossy (e.g. JPEG), but that’s not the point. And TIFF and PNG are not original bits anymore, since 2/3 of the pixels are interpolated from the Bayer pattern in the raw bits.
So you’re telling me I can’t crop pictures. The simple fact that there is post-processing makes this idea of “give me the original bits” dubios at best.
I know what raws are. I shoot in DNG and have tools to develop (DNG or PEF, please!), and raw development software is dime a dozen anyway.
Sufficiently close (and assuming the sensor actually uses the Bayer pattern, of course).
Assuming that in this analogy your are the artist and the recording engineer, cropping is just one part of the mastering process. Now, once it is lens corrected, color adjusted, cropped, and whatever else the artist does to it (which generally does not happen in JPEG), give me these bits, all of them and not a tiny little JPEG. If I want to downsample, I’ll do it myself. But if I want to send it to my Prograf to print a wall-sized copy, that ain’t gonna look good with an 12MP JPEG.
(I shoot DNG also, but that doesn’t mean anything for any non-photographer.)
Pictures you can zoom and bring into view. Ultrasonics, you can’t. The analogy was flawed from the beginning - my bad. But if I were a pro photographer, I woudn’t tell my customers what format I shoot in and what resolution. And if I were a sound engineer, I probably wouldn’t tell artists what resolution I record in. And if I owned a label, I would definitely only release red book. And if I were a chef, I wouldn’t boast about the brand of pots and pans I used. You get the idea.
Right. And Jpeg means anything only because browsers will display them by default… But people who know shoot in raw even if for most people and most purposes developing in-camera is perfectly fine.
Most analogies are. But now that we are not just playing from a CD to an amp, but applying DRC etc. etc. Having a higher resolution source could make for a better result, and filtering is easier, too.
Even more so, owning the recording in original resolution might give one a sense of satisfaction – it won’t get any better than this, even if in practical terms no one could actually hear the difference. What’s wrong with that?
I would like to know how it could make for a better result to include something we can’t hear. I’m a bit surprised to hear “maybe there’s something we don’t know” kind of arguments from you to be honest. And filtering can’t be easier when it requires more processing power. The impulse response of a filter that is to be applied to a band-limited signal can of course itself be limited to the same band, so it can be sampled at the same rate as the signal.
By that token, a higher resolution might just get better still - and offer an even higher satisfaction. That of course requires newer, more expensive DACs, more powerful servers etc. Now what’s wrong with that?
Bill_Janssen
(Wigwam wool socks now on asymmetrical isolation feet!)
267
Back to how audiophile myths are born…
Really, the whole audiophile “hobby” with carefully displayed super-duper-premium boxes is a myth. Why have a gleaming rack of gear, just to play a digital stream you are controlling from your phone? The answer, again, has historical roots. And they’re kind of sad and/or disreputable, mainly based on the louche lifestyles promoted by various “men’s magazines” in the 1960’s. Crude messaging to say, “hi-fi will get you laid,” or “this is how people with exciting lives live” or “If you were smart, you’d know enough to have this”. There’s a reason these hi-fi shows overwhelmingly attract older men – they remember the myth. There’s a reason women see this overwhelmingly as not worth their time – they were never part of the myth.
Sure, the rack of gear had some purpose, back when the sources were turntables and reel-to-reel tape decks, even CD players that required manual loading. But now it’s metastasized into a kind of sad nostalgic memorial to fantasies of a never-never world.
After you process it, something might be brought to audibility, and you have more headroom to process things. Not that it would make much audible difference, if any, but still.
Wouldn’t it be easier to have a nice smooth slow filter at, say, 25-30KHz (because no, of course you do not need to reproduce any content at 96KHz!) and keep 0-20 completely flat?\
Nope, because it is not the original, it’s just artificial upsampling which one could just as well do at home if they are so inclined.
If you are just upsampling (at least e.g. NativeDSD is nice enough to tell that their higher than the original rate tracks were just ran through HQPlayer…) – it is useless, so a pure waste of resources. If you give people something that is objectively better (by some definition of “better” being closer to the original) – what IS wrong with that?
So it’s the “we don’t really know for sure” argument again. Red book accommodates the full audible spectrum and has a dynamic range well above 120dB. You have to really abuse DSP to bring artifacts into audibility, and I could argue that you can do that with any format.
A low pass filter that has 0dB at 20kHz and -120dB at 22.05kHz is totally feasible these days.
I wasn’t referring to up-sampling, I was saying labels can easily record at higher and higher resolutions and make that a differentiator. It’s a resolution war.
-192dB dynamic range is objectively better than -144dB, and -384dB is better still, but it’s still a nonsensical war. Everything is wrong with that.
Saying that we do know everything there is to know isn’t very scientific either. And it is pretty easy to construct at least an artificial example where even a reasonable DSP will bring something into audibility. Not so much in frequency but at least in amplitude. Barely, most likely though.
How many manufacturers are actually dong it and doing it right?
They could… Although it seems they’ve settled on either 'reasonable" DSD (inasmuch as it is reasonable at all) or DXD, it’s the sellers. Who do it because audiophiles will buy anything with a right story.
You don’t watch HD videos as a matter of principle, too?
Yes, in practice, for most people (and especially golden-eared audiophiles who haven’t heard anything above 10KHz in decades) nothing better than a 320Kbps MP3 is necessary. But why do you keep insisting that if you do not consider something important (even if not for purely sound quality reasons) it should not be important to anyone? Why can’t one enjoy playing lossless music with objectively “better” 192dB dynamic range (even if it would kill you, or at least make you deaf, if used to full extent) on equipment that is demonstrably transparent (or, for that matter, has euphonic distortion up the wazoo)? It’s music which isn’t exactly a rational exercise, nobody needs it.
Once again, audio and video are fundamentally different. You can see the pixels if you move close enough to the screen. As a matter of fact, higher video resolutions are not about cramming more pixels in the same space (which you won’t be able to see anyway), it’s about larger screens and/or sitting closer to them, so you get a wider viewing angle and thus a more immersive experience. But even with video, there is a certain resolution (not very hard to compute) beyond which any increase is useless.