[vorbis] 24/96 ?

[Craig Dickson]

Wilson wrote:

> Out of 350 or so CDs, I have maybe 5 that sound truly excellent.

Which, at least for your listening, pretty well makes the point that the
CD format itself isn't the problem (or you'd have NONE that really
sounded great).

> I hope DVD-Audio makes the flaws in the others so obvious that the
> recording studios are forced to improve their techniques.

It's not the recordings so much as the CD mastering. And mastering has
been improving. There's been quite a flood over the last few years
(since about 1995?) of record companies remastering and re-releasing CDs
that were mastered poorly years ago. Of course, their motivation is to
get you to pay for the same music again, but I don't really mind in this
case because they didn't _intentionally_ do a bad job the first time;
the technology wasn't as mature as it is now, and engineers didn't have
enough experience with digital mastering. And sometimes it was just poor
decisions guided by the early hype about CDs having no noise, which led
to cases where noisy analog tapes had all their hiss filtered out, along
with all the music in the hissy frequencies, resulting in
muffled-sounding, lifeless CDs. Or ill-advised "noise reduction" schemes
such as NoNoise were used, which reduced hiss but also damaged the
clarity of the music. At this point, most record companies seem to
understand that the quality of the music is more important than getting
rid of every last trace of noise, and bad mastering isn't much of an
issue these days, at least not at the major labels.

In pop music, the worst problem now is the fad of compressing the
dynamic range to death to make the average volume higher. This is a
recording/mixing issue rather than one of mastering, but it's being done
on purpose by producers and engineers who think (perhaps based on real
facts about record sales, perhaps not) that their record will do better
if it's louder than everything else on the radio. Of course, if you're
going to optimize your recording for FM radio, then you're wasting the
potential of CDs.

Craig

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