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Looper's Delight
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I'm coming to this rather late, having not had the disposable time to keep up with the digests the last couple of days. but I have posted on this before, & some of you may remember..... this isn't a digital vs analog(ue) debate- I can go on about that for days, & repeat my theories of audio fingerprinting & spectral responses & so on. no, this is about the highest frequency that humans can perceive. I knew I had it somewhere, & I found it again just three days ago- an article from a 1993 issue of audio-media, in which no less an "authority" than rupert neve himself describes, anecdotally, some blind tests he performed. he was prompted to do this after discovering that no less a person than geoff emerick had detected a fault on several neve-built mixing-desk channels, of which the only symptom was a 3dB lift at 30kHz. this was either at AIR or at abbey road, I forget. what neve did was to play sine & square to his listeners, at 9kHz & up, & have them tell him if they could hear a difference between the two sounds. I can scan the article if anyone wants to get into it more than that. but so- can they hear the first partial at 27kHz? he reckons some of them did. for one, I remain sceptical. (skeptikal?). there's no way (at least not from this article) to eliminate shortcomings in the test environment or equipment. I can do the same test at home & still not be sure that what I'm hearing is 27kHz & not some phantom sideband. should I use headphones or a speaker? how good is my amp? is something resonating in the room or the headset & producing an undertone? but here's the thing: I know (as an engineer working amongst bean-counters) that the guys at phillips & sony went with 44.1/16 for as many reasons of economy as of science &/or musical fidelity, & based on the unwritten understanding that most people can't really hear much above 15kHz on a good day, that most meaningful audio contains little of interest out beyond 18kHz, & that what is out there isn't worth worrying what shape waveform it is. we're talking percentages here, the same ones that have since brought us atrac & MP3. the big noise at sony back then (norio ohga) was adamant that the sony/phillips engineers fit 63 minutes of 16-bit audio onto the damn discs so he could listen to an unexpurgated (& recorded by his mate karajan) rendering of famous beethoven's famous ninth symphony. (name the movie? but I digress....), & the limits of the technology /then available/ dictated the rest. [source- "sony- the private life", john nathan, harper-collins-business, 1999] in fact the technical challenge of recording digital audio goes back a good deal further than that, to the earliest attempts using PCM & professional VCR machines. it ought to be intuitively obvious to anyone of a mildly technical bent that, faced with such a challenge, the engineers are going to do the very least they can get away with in order to make the damn thing work reliably. in 1975, this was 44.1k sampling at 16-bit. now that the buggers want to sell us the technology all over again, & the task is made easier with custom VLSI & cheap storage, we are told that only 192/24 is really good enough. those of us lucky enough to have our own studer analogue tape decks at home knew this all along, of course. :-) duncan. CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE This e-mail (and any attached files) is confidential and protected by copyright (and other intellectual property rights). If you are not the intended recipient please e-mail the sender and then delete the email and any attached files immediately. Any further use or dissemination is prohibited. While MTV Networks Europe has taken steps to ensure that this email and any attachments are virus free, it is your responsibility to ensure that this message and any attachments are virus free and do not affect your systems / data. Communicating by email is not 100% secure and carries risks such as delay, data corruption, non-delivery, wrongful interception and unauthorised amendment. If you communicate with us by e-mail, you acknowledge and assume these risks, and you agree to take appropriate measures to minimise these risks when e-mailing us. MTV Networks International, MTV Networks UK & Ireland, Greenhouse, Nickelodeon Viacom Consumer Products, VBSi, Viacom Brand Solutions International and Comedy Central are all trading names of MTV Networks Europe. MTV Networks Europe is a partnership between MTV Networks Europe Inc. and Viacom Networks Europe Inc. Address for service in Great Britain is UK House, 180 Oxford Street, London W1D 1DS, UK.