Models, CGI and outrageous auctions....

[wado1942]

I think this is getting a bit out of hand. There's nothing wrong with one voicing their opinion.

[Actor]

The Enterprise model from the Star Trek movies sold for something like $250,000 and the Next Generation Enterprise sold for a whopping $500,000! That's half a million dollars for a big old chunk of plastic and wood

Is Michaelangelo's "David" is just a big old chunk of marble?

[Actor]

.....Just because one technology is inherently superior to another in one way or another does not in fact ensure that an application of that technology is superior.......

Here's a link to the earliest known call to a help desk.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRBIVRwvUeE

[MovieStuff]

At least 99% of the people of the world have lives which mean nothing, in which they accomplish nothing, stand for nothing, and focus on imaginary religious delusions. The only thing they manage to accomplish is the same thing slugs accomplish -- biological reproduction.

The other 1% apparently spends his time on this board. Fortunately for the world, he is far too preoccupied with trying to pick a fight with me to engage in biological reproduction, should the unlikely opportunity present itself.

As I have stated before, once Mr. Moron posts on a thread, I will no longer participate, even if it is a thread that I have started.

Roger

[Scotness]

The other 1% apparently spends his time on this board. Fortunately for the world, he is far too preoccupied with trying to pick a fight with me to engage in biological reproduction, should the unlikely opportunity present itself.

:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

[David M. Leugers]

Album covers were great works of art in and of themselves. Great fun and sorely missed. My 52 year old ears have taken a beating from over 30 years
around aircraft engine noise, so I can't be the best judge of sound now. But I can still remember how incredible a brand new LP sounded when played through a good stereo. I don't get the same buzz from any CD. For what it's worth, my wife who has always wanted a CD of the Beatles LP of love songs they put out back in the late 1970's heard me playing that album on the boom box in my garage and thought I had finally found a CD. It was a cassette tape I had made of our LP years ago. She couldn't believe it. How could THAT sound so good? Like with a lot of things, the "proof is in the pudding". If it sounds good, it is good.

I remember when MGM auctioned off the Ruby slippers from "The Wizard of Oz". Some things like that are icons of movie heritage. The sled Rosebud from "Citizen Kane" etc. One of the reasons I love film is that you can hold it in your hands and view it by holding it up to the light. You can see what it is.
Shame we are heading for a virtual world. I just saw a TV add where some guy claimed to be a "virtual athlete" because he was good at playing games on the computer... Christ.

David M. Leugers

[PITIRRE]

Roger, you are right. The so called advances in film technology CGI is nothing less than pure crap. Going back to time I remember watching JURASSIC PARK and the incredible CGI dinosaurs after that you will become bored with the extensive use of CGI effects in movies.

Today when I go to the movies and I see a CGI effects I said to myself "Well there is another computer effect, big deal" I think films are depending too much on the computer and not on the story.

Tecnology are making our history vanishing.

[mattias]

Vinyl is molecular resolution while CD only has 65,536 possible output values. [...] The only problem is noise really.

somebody needs to open their text books on signal theory again. especially the chapter about dynamic range, quantization and noise. hint: they're exactly the same thing. the noise of vinyl is exactly what limits its dynamic range to much less than a cd. what good is this "molecular resolution" of yours if it's not used to produce a signal but just noise?

CD hits a hard brickwall at 19KHz or so.

aliasing

have you guys ever heard of filtering? a properly working cd player doesn't create any aliasing, neither does proper recording equipment, and if there's a brick wall it's at 22.05khz, at which point the filter has already brought the signal level smoothly down to nothing. will 16 bit quantization create aliasing? yes. will 44.1khz sampling create aliasing? yes. can a very simple filter completely remove both? absolutely.

don't get me wrong, i love vinyl. i just hate it when people claim that things have been scientifically proven. either show the proof and let people draw their own conclusions, or make a proper argument yourself. in this case i know for a fact that it *hasn't* been scientifically proven so it makes me even more irritated.

/matt

[wado1942]

I hear that. There's times where the ONLY way to do something is with a computer. But most effects can be done as well as or better than CGI using miniatures and opticals. I've seen matte paintings that look absolutely photorealistic. But CGI always looks weird. It's getting better but at the same time, they're using it more. I'm so sick of movies looking like video games. If I want to see CGI, I'll play my Nintendo. What's worse is digital color grading which makes even real stuff look like CGI. It's sick.

[wado1942]

Mattias, in the short time I've been on this board, I've come to respect you and your broad knowledge/experience. But audio is MY LIFE! I put in far more research into this technology in the last 4 years than most audiophiles do in their lifetime. By using high quality oversampling DACs you can smooth out sine waves. But complex signals like music are FAR more problematic. I recorded a series of signals to tape and to 44.1KHz 24-bit in a completely unrelated experiment. You wouldn't believe the aliasing and intermodulation I got. It's QUITE audible and it's impossible to avoid and in fact voided my original experiment. Now if a transient passes into the system, it's possible that it will be missed alltogether by the ADCs. If you did get some of the transient to the digital domain, the spline fitting used in the oversampling DAC doesn't know how to handle it so all sorts of errors can happen. I've witnessed studies where the output from the DAC looks absolutely NOTHING like the signal that was inputted to the ADC. Pulse waves becomming sine waves, sawtooth waves becomming lazy triangle waves. Square waves with oceans rippling across the top etc. When you mix signals together it gets more shocking. Lost detail is lost detail....period.

And that crap about a signal to noise ratio being the same as the dynamic range is pure bollocks. It's well documented that people can hear detail 20-30dB below the noise floor. If that wasn't the case then 1/4" tape would sound like 10-bit digital and it clearly doesn't. Most people can hear the difference between 16-bit and 20-bit digital. But almost all recorded material has a S/N ratio of around 60dB. In all my years as a mastering engineer, I've never had a recording with more than a nominal 65dB S/N ratio, most of which is from the recording room itself and yet you can hear the most subtle details in them. Granted I work primarily in rock groups and most of the S/N ratios are more like 56dB due to the instrument amps. But if S/N ratio was the same as dynamic range, there'd be no need to record at greater than 12-bit. Now digital CANNOT resolve detail lower than its noise floor. Actually, digital has no noise in the true sense but the quantization creates a distortion that SOUNDS like noise because it's constant throughout the dynamic range. Of course by ADDING noise (called dither) you can extend the dynamic range of digital to maybe 10dB greater than without the noise. That's a fun experiment to try BTW, record a tone at -48dB 8-bit, then record the same tone again with dither and hear the sound become so much clearer.

Digital filtering will remove tones above the nyquist limit and in theory SHOULD prevent aliasing. But there's jitter and there's intermodulation with the sample rate which creates aliasing that can't be fixed. Most of the sample rate convertors I've used cut off around 20KHz. I've used sharper filters that get closer to 22Khz but who cares because it causes really nasty artefacts. I like more gradual filters, as do the general public who can't hear above 15KHz anyway. Sorry for the novel. I'm not trying to start an analogue vs digital debate but I'm just trying to show that S/N ratio and dynamic range are related but not the same.

[reflex]

It's a scientifically proven fact that good vinyl is more accurate than a CD

What many people don't realize is that vinyl requires considerable compromising from a recording standpoint - as an example, you can't pan bass-heavy sounds to the extremes of the soundstage because it causes skips if you have a well-tuned tone arm and stylus. In fact, you have to be extremely timid with your EQ in general.Vinyl also degrades rapidly with repeated plays - as much as 2KHz of the high end is lost after the first playing alone. The damage is less severe with high-end equipment, but it's still very real.

I have heard some absolutely fantastic modern CDs, and blanket statements like "vinyl is better" are dangerous. The truth is that vinyl sounds different, and some people prefer it. But don't confuse musical harmonic distortion, "warm" EQ, and drastically altered compression (like it or not, the reduced dynamic range forces a different mindset while mastering) with technical superiority.

I recorded a series of signals to tape and to 44.1KHz 24-bit in a completely unrelated experiment. You wouldn't believe the aliasing and intermodulation I got. It's QUITE audible and it's impossible to avoid and in fact voided my original experiment.

The problems are with your gear. Be very careful if you're attempting to run a soundcard within a PC - it can be an incredibly "noisy" environment from an RF perspective. My Apogee Rosetta outboard gear absolutely sings at 24bit/192KHz, but it took me many years to wean myself from the wonders of tape saturation and all my old analog habits.

[wado1942]

I know what you're saying. Yes vinyl IS limited just like any other medium and it does wear fast. But it's still higher res than CD.
Beyond that, my equipment, while not top notch is FAR better than most people's. Any problem I have because of this equipment will be compounded on sombody else's system. At any rate, I've looked to other sources which confirmed the results I was getting so the problem lies in PCM, not my equipment.

[audadvnc]

Wado, vinyl is fine, but I've heard plenty of crappy, noisy lp's in my time. I've also mastered a mess of 96khz 24-bit projects to 16 bit, 44.1, dithered final product which sound just fine - perhaps not as good as the original microphone inputs, but what LP had that kind of range, either?

I have a friend that makes bleeding edge audiophile amplifiers. He has the best speakers, the best turntable, the whole nine yards. He listens to LP's almost exclusively. But most these records were cut from masters made in digital studios. You can't escape digital, it's in every reverb, every special effects box, every editing computer. And yet the world still revolves in its orbit, and our ears haven't fallen off yet.

If you get good musicians, well rehearsed, with decent gear and a capable engineer you can make a great recording - it's that simple.

[wado1942]

Hey I've heard great recordings done to 4-track cassette. The performers and engineers are EVERYTHING! I mean, put a modern recordist on the kind of equipment they had in th 50s and it'll probably sound like crap. But "Time Out" by Brubeck sounds fantastic even today though it was recording on considerably more primitive equipment.
BTW, my studio has the capabitlity of recording 100% analogue OR 100% digital all the way through the mastering stage. I think it's important to have the choices at every step. I usually track analogue and mix to digital, mastering both in analogue and digital domains simultaneously. I even built a reverb plate so I can do signal processing in the analogue domain.
Now have you heard DSD? It's like a veil has been lifted off of the recording.