Well, I was going to skip the rest of this thread for the most part, but I do have some quibbles with what you wrote and some of your paraphrasing simply misquoted me entirely. I know that was your point, but Brad, while you are free to disagree with me on anything and I love the conversation, and it's of course always possible that I could be more clear or even outright wrong, it is a little lame of you to twist my words around to something that I never said in order to make a point. Who does that?
For instance, I wrote:
"Basically, tape is an analog, so it literally writes an analog waveform of what it records (vinyl does that also in the grooves). The more "real estate" you give that analog to write to, the better sounding it is (there are exceptions)."
I did not write:
"The more size you have for an analog medium-- the wider the tape tracks or the wider the spacing of the grooves on an analog disc-- the better the sound"
I would not have been able to write anything about the wider the spacing of the grooves on an analog disc because I don't even know if that's true sitting here right now. You later say that, "A wider tape track allows better performance chiefly in one area, and that's signal-to-noise ratio."
When is "better signal to noise ratio" not considered better sound? You are really quibbling with me over that? I mean, I guess I could have been more technically accurate, but still... I'll say that "better signal to noise ratio" does in fact equal "better sound" anytime. Also, bear in mind that I said "there are exceptions", namely, a lot of people feel that you can get tighter bass sounds at 15ips rather than 30.
I also did not write this:
"Cassettes reproduce up to 15kHz, and that's terribly inadequate"
I wrote:
"I'm finding it a little hard to get accurate figures for the frequency range of cassettes, like I say. The figure of 15k seems to be accepted:
Compact cassettes may have a response extending up to 15 kHz at full (0 dB) recording level.
I seem to be reading that cassettes also only start hearing bass frequencies around 50k."
I wasn't talking about what a cassette reproduces ("plays back") but rather the frequency response that a cassette can
capture ("write to"). I view a recording medium that cannot capture the "full range" of sounds that an instrument to be able to play or microphones to be able to record to be inadequate, especially in the face of digital competition that can capture the full range, and is cheaper, and provides better editing and everything else on top of it.
And for the record, I am still not 100% on the recordable frequency ranges that cassettes can capture, which is why I said so.
Regardless I am confident that cassette tape cannot capture the full range of sound that digital audio can capture. You and others might disagree with me on the importance of sound above 15k, and that's fine. I happen to think it's important to capture that, I think there is useable sound there (more than "air"), you might disagree, like I say.
Still I see no reason to accept a medium that allows for anything other than recording the full 20-20k. There are microphones that shunt off immediately at 15k, to be sure. But there are plenty that go all the way up to 20k and I want the medium I record to to be able to put down everything that any microphone I put in front of a sound source can capture. Why would I not?
You also quote me as saying that CD quality was never good, which I'll hold to. We can disagree with whether or not it was ever very good, you might think so. But regarding it as being obsolete, well, the 16 bit nature of "CD quality" has long been surpassed by 24 bit, which is better in every way I can think of. I probably also don't need to remind you that the CD as a format has been seeing plunging sales for quite some time now, I haven't double checked
these figures but assuming they are correct, CD sales went from 943 million at the peak in 2000 or so, to less than 99 million less than a decade later. That's a tenth... that's a huge drop.
I don't have figures to tell me what CD player sales are, I'll imagine they have also fallen. There is no Apple computer currently made that has a CD or DVD player built into it, Dell is following suit, and I'll suggest that in five more years pretty much almost all computers one can buy will not have a CD/DVD drive built into them.
So yes, the CD is obsolete. It has been long surpassed in performance and is a fading medium that will not be well known in twenty years.
You go on to disagree with an admittedly simple graphic I put up:
"This isn't how digital audio works. It's a misleading graphic, and has led to untold levels of misunderstanding. It's not anyone's fault... it's just a bad 'internet narrative' that's facile and oversimplified. The Nyquist filter I was discussing above makes the stair-steps go away.
It seems counterintuitive, but it's true-- there are no "stair-steps" or "slices of time" in the output of a digital audio device. The complete, analog waveform is reconstructed from the sampling data, in all of its perfectly-smooth, continuous, analog glory. The samples are not the signal. The samples are data points that allow the complete analog waveform to be "drawn" in a fashion that's at least theoretically-identical to what it was on input. "
Brad, I wasn't talking about
output. My words, right before I put that image up, were, "I see no reason not to capture everything that the instrument creates. Why not? Disk space doesn't cost much these days." Right? I'm talking about recording here.
That
article wasn't talking about output, it was talking about how sampling works for recording, right?
Did you read the article, it was linked there? Or did you just look at the graphic?
Because the article says, "Multi track
recorders vary between 16/44.1 and 24/96. When you buy one you have to decide which way to go and get it right the first time."
So yeah, that graphic shows a very simple picture of a sine wave being sampled. That's not inaccurate, is it? Digital might
output an analog (or at least something our ears will accept as an analog), but it does not record ("sample") an analog. Two different concepts.
What is in between two samples of audio at 44.1k? Nothing. It wasn't recorded. All your computer knows is what the two samples themselves were. And that's inherently not an analog, and that's what the graphic was showing.
It wasn't saying anything about digital output.
Back in those days, everyone knew that if you were talking about Destiny's Child, you were talking about Beyonce, LaTavia, LeToya, and Larry.