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

[Dr Mango]

I get rather hacked off when people start bleating about lossless formats, as if it's going to make ANY difference to the sonic quality of aged recordings often made on cheap tapes and ripped years later on a different tape deck often without azimuth correction.

On a personal note, I'm not prepared to wait around for an hour at a time while a massive wav / flac file is uploaded to whatever file server is called into use. My time is more important, as is my bandwidth.

DM





On Wednesday, 16 October 2013, 12:59, Stuart Brooks <stuartb@...> wrote:
 
  
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...