[peel] Re: Say it to the rest On behalf of Zomgqashiyo

[Stuart Brooks]

I’ve always thought that the quality of the ripping (eg make sure tape heads and transport are in good condition, use a 3 head deck, adjust azimuth) and of the original source (AM/FM) were of much greater importance. There are quite a few ripped tapes out there that could have done with some azimuth tweaking and that’s something that you can’t fix down the line. And Dolby level mismatch on playback can have some seriously strange results.

If you drop much below 192kbps then the best FM recordings would start to sound a bit more squishy on a good system but I really doubt that any of the tapes we have would really benefit from wav over say a 320kpbs mp3. Once you drop below 128kpbs then audio becomes much more noticeably cardboardy and flat.

There are a few of the oldest Peel shows out there which were output as wav and they sound awful, due to poor tapes/decks, and a well ripped mp3 even at 128kpbs sounds much better.

I have kept lossless flacs of everything I’ve ripped as no doubt one day there will be a Supermooo and we’ll all have Superfast broadband and 10Tb discs.....


From: Mark 
Sent: Wednesday, October 16, 2013 12:36 PM
To: peel@yahoogroups.com 
Subject: [peel] Re: Say it to the rest On behalf of Zomgqashiyo

  

heheh well I'm happy to upload the wav files if someone tells me where to stick it... 

it's an interesting debate, and I've been tempted to up the bitdepth and sampling rate of tapes I archive (mostly public talks etc, not radio) just in case some mythical future noise-reduction/restoration thingmyjig can use the extra bits... but I got that nice old apogee A/D converter (it's limited to 16/48 and under) for next to nothing and it sounds so nice that I tend to use it and be satisfied with that rather than save up for 24/96 gear of similar quality.. I haven't done much comparing of the consumer-level 24/96 gear that I have... doesn't seem worth the extra storage space..

In this case I think it's pretty moot, as there's radio tuning/interference farts and whatnot... but hey...