@joshd96320 378762 wrote:
thank you for clearing up noanme, awesome infos as usual
np – gonna be finishing that sound systems how to eventually (up to my neck atm though as we’re moving house, but it will get done eventually…:wink:)
cheeseweasel;378572 wrote:
Incidentally this is something that is often done by the mastering engineer – it was necessary to mono the bass when pressing music to vinyl, as loud, out-of-phase low frequency signals can cause the needle to jump out of the groove (the difference between the L and R signals (i.e. all stereo information) is represented by the vertical movement of the stylus)
Not sure about the needle jumping the groove thing – looking at the vertical movement as carrying the L-R difference information and the lateral as carrying the L-R sum info is more a helpful way of looking at it than a totally accurate physical description of what happens. The physical reality is a good deal more complex, and I’ve never heard of an engineer compensating for that reason – many mastering engineers do center pan bass elements, but I’d always understood it to be a simple convention of arranging a stereo field (bass has spherical dispersion, so placing it dead center makes sense – the percussion is often in the same place so the bass and percussion reinforce each other, and vocals are likewise set center unless there is more than one singer). Obviously it varies from recording to recording, and much of the black art of mastering is in the intuitive appreciation of where an individual instrument will sound best, but it would surprise me to find a mastering engineer using a blunt instrument like mono’ing the entire bass frequency…
Having said that, vinyl has it’s share of problems when it comes to audio quality as much as any other format – the stereo signal representation being one of the more serious ones, along with the usually poor set up of most turntables (because most people can’t be bothered to RTFM).
I think for me the only reason that I prefer vinyl to mp3 and whatnot is down to the fact that the distortions produced from a piece of vinyl are of a generally more pleasing character to the ones produced by CD/digital formats – Vinyl tends to produce more even order harmonic distortion (which is why people often describe the sound as richer) whereas digital distortion tends to be inharmonic and much harsher sounding – on CD’s it makes them sound slightly clinical and over crisp, but on something like an MP3 it makes noise that is like nails on a blackboard to me (the current fashion for schranz has much the same effect – the over compressed digitally saturated sound they insist on makes me want to bite something for the most part – when it gets played on our rig I usually spend most of the tunes thinking there is something seriously wrong with the rig, only to get to it and realise it’s cos the DJ is a deaf fecker)… I suppose on the bright side it means I don’t notice if they’re using mp3’s at any point :annoyed:
So in answer to the original question I’m pretty anal about quality – which includes playback equipment as much as source audio – good headphones/speakers/amps etc are vital as is decent lossless (and preferably high sample rate/bit depth) source. I do actually use mp3’s, but only for listening to recorded voice – playing them on any kind of decent audio kit just makes the faults stand out for any kind of music…. Higher bitrate doesn’t really do it with mp3’s – better to just go for a decent encoding algorithm if you’re going to use lossy compression, like ogg…
