Approved Cameras

Re:Approved Cameras by eyelidlessness on Saturday January 08, 2022 @09:04PM (#29859084)

My understanding is that 24-bit source material (the standard when I was last recording which was several years ago) provides enough dynamic range that you can bring up the desired volume without overly muddying quiet sections with noise, especially when mixing multiple sources where that noise adds up quickly. My own personal experience recording at 16 bits was… “I must play louder and overstate my song’s understatements” because I never could get a 16 bit output that didn’t sound like garbage. Granted I’ve never been more than a novice at recording and I’m certain there’s more I could learn to work with the lower bit rate but… why?

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Re:Approved Cameras by eyelidlessness on Saturday January 08, 2022 @09:10PM (#29859141)

Also: this got me wondering about how much the “loudness wars” and “brick wall” music products overlap (in time) with the almost total transition to digital recording. It also got me wondering how much the more gradual digital transition affected musical style and taste. If analog recording captured a much more flexible dynamic range, it’s easy to imagine a lot of other recording artists similarly deciding “fuck it play it louder”. And it’s easy to imagine that culturally influencing louder recording targets generally.

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Re:Approved Cameras by rectang on Saturday January 08, 2022 @09:54PM (#29859489)

The resolution bottlenecks of early digital as described in this thread are not related to the loudness wars of the aughts. If you were doing big budget recordings back then you were either doing 2" analog or you had enough setup time to set gain levels carefully and "fill up the meters" for your digital recorder.

Recording close-mic'd drums to analog tape is actually a useful technique when maxing out levels because analog tape saturation can be aesthetically superior to digital peak limiting for shaving drum peaks — analog tape saturates high frequencies first. It wasn't uncommon to either record basic tracks to analog then transfer to Pro Tools, or even to track to Pro Tools then bounce the drums out to analog tape and back.

For the record, there were loudness wars back in the vinyl days, since it was seen as important to have your 45 rpm single "compete" with others in the jukebox. It wasn't something new in the aughts.

> If analog recording captured a much more flexible dynamic range

It doesn't, especially not in comparison to modern digital. Dynamic range is not a strong point of analog because of tape hiss.

The issue with low res digital is that truncation distortion is non-harmonic (not an integer multiple of the input frequency) and so is disproportionately aesthetically damaging even in small quantities — in other words, digital grunge sounds worse than tape hiss.

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Re:Approved Cameras by ZiiS on Sunday January 09, 2022 @04:08AM (#29861671)

It is trivial for modern hardware to work at 24bit. 16bit hardware is probably old, overly value engineered, or deliberatly operating below its capacity. These are all more plausable reasons for it to sound bad.

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