Question about 44.1 sample libraries and 48 KHz DP sessions

[Phil O]

FM, why not put together a little test and listen to the results. Do it both ways and see which you like better. If you can't tell the difference then it doesn't matter. If you can tell the difference, but you can't decide which is best, then it doesn't matter. But, if you can tell the difference and you clearly have a winner, then problem solved.

Also, I think you mentioned high CPU usage in your original post. It might be worth testing that as well.

Phil

[mhschmieder]

Sony chose the current format based on livable compromises that could also result in the company head's favorite recording of Beethoven's 9th Symphony being able to fit on just one disc.

How's that for arbitrary?

[Shooshie]

Sony chose the current format based on livable compromises that could also result in the company head's favorite recording of Beethoven's 9th Symphony being able to fit on just one disc.

How's that for arbitrary?

Well, as individual pieces go, Beethoven's 9th is near the upper end of length if we're talking about things you'd hear at a typical concert. I found myself making categorical provisions as I wrote the sentence, which was originally going to be much shorter, because there are always those kinds of things that go on for 3 days, though I doubt they sell many uncut CDs of such events. I mean, Beethoven's 9th covers the majority of things you'd expect to hear without having to get up and change the disk. In fact, you always had to flip the LP about half-way through. That was one of the first "talked-about" features of a CD: you can listen to a whole symphony without having to flip it over! Well, talked about among the kinds of people I tend to hang out with.

Shooshie

[bayswater]

There are more credible explanations. 44.1 is nicely compatible with both PAL and NSTC, clears th Nyquist hurdle, and leaves enough room to allow for low cost low pass filters. No doubt the capacity of a CD, and hence things like its size and density took into account a plan to start copying millions of existing recordings to the format.

[Shooshie]

There are more credible explanations. 44.1 is nicely compatible with both PAL and NSTC, clears th Nyquist hurdle, and leaves enough room to allow for low cost low pass filters. No doubt the capacity of a CD, and hence things like its size and density took into account a plan to start copying millions of existing recordings to the format.

Hey! What could be more credible than the Beethoven story? Come to think of it, I actually remember that story from the time, so it probably either was true or was deliberately "leaked" as a marketing tactic.

But, let's not forget that even a lowly 44.1K / 16 bit CD was pretty much at the throughput threshold of the digital electronics of the era. Just multiplying numbers on a TI calculator involved a wait that was unacceptable for playing back CDs without interruption. That's why I wish they could have done a two-level entry, with a faster format coming out maybe a decade later, while maintaining compatibility with the previous format, sort of like Firewire or USB.

Shoosh

[bayswater]

The early CD players had some pretty great laser technology for the time, but the used simple circuits to decode a CD that had been around for a long time in telecom. Little or no digital processing was involved.

[Shooshie]

The early CD players had some pretty great laser technology for the time, but they used simple circuits to decode a CD that had been around for a long time in telecom. Little or no digital processing was involved.

Well, it's probably important at this point to note the difference between "optical disk" and "Compact Disc." There were a lot of optical recording technologies. The earliest one goes back to the 1800s. I don't remember exactly how it was done, but I think it involved smoke and photographic plates. There's a recording floating around on the internet somewhere of an early attempt at that. You can make it out; it can be used to extract a sound, but it's not great. Still, I think it preceded Edison's wax cylinders.

But if we fast-forward to optical disks, the early ones were analog, using some kind of pulse modulation. The Laserdisc is an example of that. It was a video format. I think the first audio disks were based on that technology, and were developed in the early to mid 1970s.

It was Philips who latched onto the idea of using digital processing and creating a small[er] disk format. Sony joined forces with them, and they created a committee to develop the pioneering standards that such a disk would have to achieve to be commercially viable while "improving" the level of audio recording and playback. I don't know for sure that Sony and Philips were acting together on that committee, or independently, but the "Compact Disc" was a Philips patent, developed from scratch as a digital format. This was all happening in the late 1970s, and I think the first CDs became available in 1983. Possibly 82; I don't remember exactly now.

Wait... I remember when The Nightfly was released on CD. That was late 82. I just remember thinking that the world of audio had been transformed and perfected, and that album was the milestone. I only knew of one person who had the gear to play it; and he had a studio. Some of us heard it there for the first time, and it was probably 10 years later that I actually acquired a copy (and a player).

But I had been recording digitally (as a musician, not an engineer) even in early 1981. I played on some albums by RCA/TEL-ARC as a musician in the Dallas Symphony in 1981. The mobil unit that did the recording included what looked like tons of equipment. The recorders themselves (at least, what I was TOLD were the recorders) were in multiple cabinets the size of a washing machine. I have no idea exactly what was inside those cabinets. It was all still like magic to us, then. Our albums were released on LP (DDA). It was a few years later that I saw them in stores on CD, finally DDD at last, and I still ran across them in the mid-1990s.

Anyway, the commercial CD as we know it was all digital in recording, mastering, and playback. At the time this stuff was getting off the ground, digital computers were very slow. I'd have to do a lot of research to back this up with solid facts, but I really don't think that a CD using 24-bit/96K audio format would have been possible, and certainly not commercially feasible at the time. As for the Beethoven story, I do remember it from the time, but it's always had the ring of urban mythology. (and yet it could have been one of the engineers' "personal yardstick")

I felt like all this was happening "somewhere else" at the time. We musicians kept hearing about this new technology, and we knew all the details, but I never actually held a CD until about 1985. We knew that LPs were being recorded digitally, and even mastered digitally, but a full DDD Compact Disc was kind of a mythological beast for a long, long time. The development of the CD roughly paralleled the development of Apple Computer, from the Apple 1 to the Macintosh, to put into context the processing speeds available when the CD formats were being discussed back in the mid-1970s.

Well, sorry to go all anecdotal on a topic so thoroughly documented, and surely just a Wikipedia lookup away to get the actual story. But I did want to differentiate between the old analog optical disks and the Compact Disc™. CDs are strictly digital. It may not have been the mitigating factor, but computer speed certainly was one of the factors in their committee's recommendations in choosing an audio format for the CD.

[Shooshie]

Interesting pre-Edison audio recordings:
Phonautogram:
http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/scott.php

Story:
http://www.livescience.com/24317-earlie ... rding.html

The phonautogram probably doesn't qualify as the first optical recording, yet it was stored in an optical format. It's just that it wasn't intended to be played back, but was meant to be a way of "seeing" sound.

Shoosh

[musicman691]

The development of the CD roughly paralleled the development of Apple Computer, from the Apple 1 to the Macintosh, to put into context the processing speeds available when the CD formats were being discussed back in the mid-1970s.

Speaking of Apple 1 did any of you see the recent news story where a lady was cleaning out some boxes of old stuff her late husband had and took it to a recycler. One of the boxes had an original Apple 1 in it. She left no way for the people to get in touch with her and the recycler is looking to get a hold of her because he sold the machine to a private collector for $200000!

I remember seeing an Apple 1 at a computer show in Atlantic City in 1977. The two Steves were there with their baby.

As to computers and music there were the Philadelphia Computer Music Festivals, the first of which was run concurrent with the Philly computer show which had moved there from Atlantic City. Among the 'performers' was an RCA Cosmac system and an S100 bus based system. See this:
http://www.swapmeetdave.com/PhilaMusic/Recording.htm

[mikehalloran]

The Furtwangler Beethoven 9 recording for determining CD length is true. I recently came upon the Sony/Phillips press releases from the early '80s.

I was a beta tester for CDs in 1981. There was this Chabrier test recording that was so shrill and brittle as to be painful to hear. Except for the lack of pops and crackles, I was not impressed. I didn't buy another player nor a commercial CD until 'Best of Steely Dan' came out. I thought that 'Brothers in Arms' was the album that made the CD a listenable product.

Whether true or not, the first publicly released digital multitrack album was by Ry Cooder if you believed the contemporary PR. It was done on a big 3M washer sized machine. The runnin gag was that these machines were quite temperamental and that each of the 'M's stood for Maintenance.

For years, there was an Apple 1 on display at the local Fry's in Sunnyvale where I live. The reason that these are so scarce is that Apple gave you full credit towards the price of an Apple II if you turned it in. It later went to the computer museum in Mountain View, next to Google, when that was built.

I

[monkey man]

... Sorry about that (the about meant with a Canadian accent).

Aah... you meant, "aboot", 'Nandito. Gotcha.

... ¿Remember the blue dress?

Yes. It was blue!

Also, worrying too much about these little things can be a waste of time and energy. That effort is better put to make actual music

OTOH, I've proved that one can lose decades whilst futzing around, sweatin' details.

Hang on... oh.

Yup. I noticed the forum has been a bit hot as of late, Nicky... Bananas might work better for you than eggshells when walking in the MOTUNation heat, though,

Strappin' some skins on as we speak, 'Nando. Great minds think alike mate... or so I'm told.

[Armageddon]

I (foolishly) always assumed that the SRC took place at the soft synth/sampler plugin level and not inside the DAW itself. In other words, when you have a DP MIDI project loaded with VIs at 44.1 kHz and you switch the sample rate up, DP reloads the VIs at the proper sample rate, rather than keep everything as is and taking care of it after the VIs' outputs. This is further bolstered by the fact that sample players like Kontakt and PLAY have selectable output sample rates/bit-depths in standalone mode, independent of the sample rate and bit-depth of whatever library you're using inside of them, so they're certainly capable of doing these conversions internally without needing a DAW to perform them. There's also stuff like MusicLab's Real VIs, which render their own libraries at whatever multiple sample rates you select beforehand -- having done this a few times, I'm not sure they actually load up the higher sample rate versions in plugin mode (it only loads up the 44.1 kHz version in standalone mode), no matter what your project sample rate is. Another assumption: the sample rate of whatever sound library I'm using is only indicative of the library's quality, not what kind of noise or distortion to expect when using higher sample rates in my DAW's project.

I always record at 88.2 kHz/32-bit float (soon to be 96 kHz, just to be PONO-friendly), and I only hear the difference in sound quality when I record and mix anything at 44.1 kHz. I think you definitely lose something by recording VIs at 44.1 kHz, even if the sample library is only 44.1 kHz.