This is a thread to gather a few posts from a few other threads, and continue discussion on a dedicated thread. Mainly about data gleaned from rips of DVD-A and 'laserdrops' of SACD releases. I've primarily done them for stereo tracks. What I find is that 'high rez' two-channel masterings are hardly 'safe' from loudness wars-style mastering (much compression/limiting), though rarely if ever do I find the massive clipping found on some modern CDs.
reference posts:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....st&p=587371 (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?s=&showtopic=65814&view=findpost&p=587371)
(and subsequent posts on that thread)
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....st&p=553441 (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?s=&showtopic=61928&view=findpost&p=553441)
(and subsequent posts on that thread)
and on another forum
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1009384 (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1009384)
Do you have any samples from the recent MVI discs - I'm thinking of Rush's Snakes and Arrows release on the MVI, which contains a 5.1 mix and a 2 channel 24 bit stereo mix? I'm at work, can't download and rip anything now, but would be curious to see the result in terms of waveform.
The cd of Snakes and Arrows sounds terribly smashed and slightly distorted in some spots.
IIRC, there was another curious effect on the DVD-A of Fragile - compared to Gaswirt, some of the drum hits were peaking notably higher relative to the rest of the instruments, and yet the drums are much more compressed on the DVD-A. One could go both ways on that, and say that either the amount of outright compression is higher on the DVD-A, or that the limiting itself is not that strong, and so it might be arguably more dynamic.
Still, neither situation really bodes well as a format that labels actually use for higher quality mastering than on CD.
Has anybody taken a peek at SACD transcriptions? I'm more than a little skeptical that they would be any better at avoiding hard limiting.
It seems that there is a compelling reason not to perform hard limiting when mastering for SACD:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....st&p=516353 (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?s=&showtopic=57491&view=findpost&p=516353)
So they just attenuate the clipped masters like on vinyl. Problem solved.
I'm also quite disappointed with many of the DVD-A releases I own. Exceptions are the two studio albums from Blue Man Group and the releases by Steven Wilson and his projects after he has taken over the production in 2007. In Absentia for example is extremely bad. The stereo track is equally compressed as the CD version and the 5.1 version sounds like crap. I found out that the center channel needs to be inverted to keep the channels from causing cancellations. But that still only helps little.
IIRC, there was another curious effect on the DVD-A of Fragile - compared to Gaswirt, some of the drum hits were peaking notably higher relative to the rest of the instruments, and yet the drums are much more compressed on the DVD-A. One could go both ways on that, and say that either the amount of outright compression is higher on the DVD-A, or that the limiting itself is not that strong, and so it might be arguably more dynamic.
Not sure I'm hearing this...can you give the timepoint of an example?
Btw, I think it was you who asked to see a run-up on '5% for Nothing". Here is it :
Gastwirt CD rip
(http://www.m-ideas.com/sullivan/audition/5Percent_Gastwirt.PNG)
DVD-A stereo rip (96kHz/24 bits)
(http://www.m-ideas.com/sullivan/audition/5Percent_DVDA.PNG)
Mobile Fidelity CD rip
(http://www.m-ideas.com/sullivan/audition/5Percent_Mofi.PNG)
Not bad in any case. Phase inversion between the Gastwirt and the others? Crest factor is about 1 dB greater in the Gastwirt compared to the others. No clipping anywhere I can discern in any of them, using WaveRepair's clip detector. I'd probably depend more on EQ difference to ABX these, if I could....so for EQ difference , here's analysis using Audition frequency scanning (Hanning/8192 FFT size), copied to Excel. No attempt was made to level match or align the files before scanning. In each case the entire track was scanned.
EQ diff between DVD-A & Gastwirt reference
(http://www.m-ideas.com/sullivan/audition/5Percent_diff_DVDA.PNG)
EQ diff between Mofi and Gastwirt
(http://www.m-ideas.com/sullivan/audition/5Percent_diff_Mofi.PNG)
Do you have any samples from the recent MVI discs - I'm thinking of Rush's Snakes and Arrows release on the MVI, which contains a 5.1 mix and a 2 channel 24 bit stereo mix? I'm at work, can't download and rip anything now, but would be curious to see the result in terms of waveform.
The cd of Snakes and Arrows sounds terribly smashed and slightly distorted in some spots.
I just bought the MVI copy of Snakes and Arrows yesterday, can you believe it? I still haven't listened to the album yet, so I am jumping the gun with this.
Is the stereo LPCM track on the MVI disc mastered better than the CD? I need to rip the album to FLAC, so please help me decide which version to stick with - the LPCM or the Redbook version.