[peel] Is it sad...?

[Stuart Brooks]

well who started it 
I just think that if you don’t get the source right, extracting the maximum from the tape during ripping with clean discrete heads, accurate speed and azimuth, and ideally calibrated Dolby playback (preferably off when recorded), then you’re not going to get that information back by encoding as wav. The quality of the tape recording and extraction thereof is by far the biggest factor in the resulting end quality of the show on the Mooo (unless as I said you go stupidly low with the bitrates). And sometimes the information was never on the tape due to poor quality recording equipment and tapes (You should hear some of the examples in the archive!) I’ve lost count of the number of tracks that I’ve ripped and the Spotify version of the track sounds much better than that listening to the old show tape direct.
I would never choose to make mp3s out of the few CDs or many records I have as the dynamic range, transients and sparkle will be lost, but when you’re dealing with a marginal hifi medium recording from already compressed interference ridden radio show recordings, and stored for 30 years, then for 99.9% of the tapes there is no discernible benefit to sharing as wav. (Though I do retain all of the Audacity files so could do so as a special request ) 

Anyway you’re absolutely right it is the music that matters and in our case it is the context within the Peel show, if we want a pristine copy of the actual tracks we know where to buy the source music. I’ve done that a lot since listening to these old shows!

Did you ever try data recovery on your disk?

All the best
Stuart



From: ukbongo@... 
Sent: Saturday, February 01, 2014 9:00 PM
To: peel@yahoogroups.com 
Subject: Re: [peel] Is it sad...?

  
Weeeellllll, I will try not to go overly pedantic on this but I feel the sucking, sinking sand pull of old arguments dragging me down :) So I won't go on about this...except to say (you see? I couldn't quite resist), there's a lot of complete tosh spouted on that linked, referenced discussion. I assume that many of the postees are using relatively poor reference systems to use as a basis for their aural conclusions.  
On a level playing field (and I suspect that the guys on that forum were referencing and comparing material that has not enjoyed similar recording sources, recording equipment, recording conditions, etc) tape is far better than MP3 and can easily spank CD if recorded with quality equipment (contentious, maybe, but I wonder how many people have tried to do this using quality tape transports?) 
MP3 basically disables sound - this is a scientific fact, it's not opinion, there are plenty of graphs to offer as evidence - and is now totally outmoded as a sound carrier and is not designed for modern broadband carriers and TB-quality storage systems. 
Let me quickly add that It's ideal when you are limited to an online storage budget so please don't take these comments as a criticism of MOO, far from it. I value MOO as a saviour for Peel fans and genuflect in its general direction. 
FLAC is far better but even that, as a Lossless format, compresses WAV. I can easily tell the difference between FLAC and WAV on decent HiFi equipment while any MP3 is a bit of joke, to be frank. 
I an ideal world, MOO would offer 24bit/384kHz digital files as the current digital format that even approaches pure analogue but I'm getting silly here, I know. So forget i said it 
Bottom line, nothing beats analogue as a format, I'm afraid (ignoring the quality of the original source signal, for a second). I take your point, AM is a poor carrier, any sort of DAB is also poor. Clear, maybe, but a poor carrier of detailed information. FM is far better (not perfect, better, with a decent aerial)  in terms of detail, than DAB and its devil spawn offspring.
Basically, the second you convert any analogue to any sort of digital file, you degrade it. Analogue, while filtered to an extent, giving a warming feel, has a limitless capacity in terms of holding information. 
Chuck a Metal cassette tape in a Nakamichi, give it enough signal and the results will even challenge (but will not exceed, I grant you) a top flight reel-to-reel tape deck. 
OK, I'll stop there, I don't want to enter into a long, tedious argument about this and, look, if you are happy with your MP3 rips then that's the main thing. When it comes down to it, your ears and your equipment are the final arbitars when it comes down to the music that you enjoy and that's the whole point of music, isn't it? Enjoying it, no matter how we do that.

Paul
Paul

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