WHY 96 k?????

[Robert U]

The DVD audio standard is not set yet. The only player that I've found on the market being able to play 96 k is a Denon player, but for what use? There are no recordes yet!

Even ordinary DVD movies are 44.1 k. It'll take twice the amount of DPS power and we will be back on square one....whats the fuzz????

-Robert

[Zeus]

I read in a audio magazine (of course I can't remember which magazine and what issue...) that the mastering engineer will often simply cut everything above 20k to avoid problems with consumer dvd-players.

So I'm asking the same, why 96k??? Using twice the hard disk space and DSP, for frequencies we don't hear anyway and finally all that will anyway be filtered in the mastering process!!! And what studios have mics, pres and monitors that reproduce up to 48k? And what kind of a consumer would have such loudspeakers? Is it going to matter a fly's sh*t worth if something is recorded and mixed in 96k and then aired out on FM radio or the MTV????

Snap out of it!!! 96k is a desparate marketing trick by audio companies who have ran out of original ideas.

I am in no way against bettering the quality of audio production but I feel it's not an issue of using higher and higher sampling rates in digital systems...

Z

[ryland b]

there is a thousand post topic on that subject on musicplayer.com:
http://www.musicplayer.com/ubb/Forum3/HTML/000822.html

If you feel the need to discuss it anymore after reading all those posts...then...well..

images/icons/rolleyes.gif

-rb

[Zep Dude]

I know a veteran engineer who was around for the first 8 track machines. All the engineers where wondering, "What are we going to do with all those tracks?" 96k at the moment may be more of a marketing ploy than anything else, espcially with the lower quality converters, but in the right hands it offers the potential for increased fidelity. The only thing I have against it is that it may dim the light on an even more promising technology -DSD.

[PeeTee]

At 24/48, PT doesn't sound as good as our Studer 827. At 24/96, it'll be very close. We could then transfer hi-res to the Ampex 102 and send that to the mastering house.

How many respondents here have listened to 24/96 recordings?

[J Harry]

96k is a big improvement in many ways

It sounds better (record a drum kit at 96k you'll never want to look back)

Crossfades are smoother sounding

Stereo Imaging is way better

[F Umminger]

If you take the time to learn the technical issues you will find that DSD is less, not more, promising. Lip****z gave a good presentation on that at last year's AES.

In a nutshell, one bit does not allow enough dynamic range to dither properly without distortion; adding a trangular dither signal causes clipping. Furthermore one-bit ADC's are no longer state of the art and once one has to convert from a multibit ADC to a one-bit format then one loses all of the purported benefits of DSD.

From an economic point of view, none of the common dsp chips or CPUs are designed for efficient one-bit processing and the audio industry is not large enough to support cheap custom chips.

The mathematical theory of signal processing at one-bit is almost entirely undeveloped. To do even the simplest processing one would currently have to convert to a multi-bit format, process, and then convert back. Even Sony admitted that they do their processing at 8 bits. Again, this negates the purported benefits.

I have yet to meet a dsp engineer who thinks that DSD makes sense as anything other than a delivery format, where it provides the benefit of potentially cheaper DA conversion at the expense of forever locking one to one-bit converter technology.

[ August 17, 2001: Message edited by: F Umminger ]