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http://store.intrada.com/s.nl/sc.13/category.60330/.f
"The sessions were recorded digitally back in 1989 and all the mixing and editing stayed in that domain. Modern high-resolution sampling standards such as 24bits and 96kHz were, of course, not yet available. For this current new presentation, we transferred everything into the higher resolutions and performed all of the editorial and mastering work in the hi-res format" (Douglass Fake).
The original 16-bit / 48 kHz recording was transfered to 24-bit / 96 kHz which didn't exist at the time, then the mastering was done from the 24-bit transfer.
There's nothing difficult to understand.
A 24-bit download will better sell than a 16-bit download, that's the main reason for the 24-bit transfer.
You can transfer anything to 24-bit, even vinyls, but that doesn't change the original source.
Yay! Thanks for finding this, didn’t even think to look in “Doug’s Corner”. That’s very clear.
Definitely happy with the CD - it sounds great.
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Posted: |
May 7, 2021 - 12:58 AM
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By: |
Graham Watt
(Member)
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All those comments about ISLANDS IN THE STREAM have ignited my brain cells into memory mode, and so this is my story, a story I have told here before, which means it must be true.
Summer of 1986 I spent a few days in San Fran, and the hostel (a little boarding house run by a Chinese woman) was but a short walk from Vallejo Street, and so one morning I dropped in to the Intrada shop, when it was a shop. There behind the counter was Doug Fake, listening as if in a trance to ISLANDS IN THE STREAM. I asked him when he was gonna get some Gil Mellé released, but he simply waved a hand, lost in the beauty of what I realise now was his newborn baby. He kept putting on the first track, and when the guitar part came on he would say, "Isn't this fabulous? Just buy it!" Unfortunately I was backpacking and the LP would not have survived the journey. Thus endeth my true fable.
Then back on Planet Earth I bought the LP in Glasgow (if that's on Earth), and I found it slightly lacking. That is until, many hundreds of years later, I purchased the FSM CD, which is one of my favourite releases of theirs, and of any Goldsmith score. I think Master Ken McGoon is in synchronicity with me once more on this matter.
But this is the RIO CONCHOS thread, and I am thus obliged and obligated to mention that I do not have any of the releases except the re-recording. I think it's great, perhaps in my top five JG westerns, although I think I remember remembering that all the good stuff is kind of bunched up in the first half, and there are some long, tedious passages towards the end just when things should have been kicking into top gear. I still think however that the best track is "The Artist Who Did Not Want To Paint", possibly my favourite JG piece of all time, certainly as a sustained listen over its twelve minutes.
And thus endeth my breakfast.
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Great story Graham...and quite possibly true.
And thanks for mentioning that Police LP.
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This is the kind of tech complication or confusion that will lead to more people stopping buying and simply streaming their music, as further formats (bewildering to most people), seem to arrive at an ever increasing pace.
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Most people are already using streaming and never actually buying anything but subscriptions.
Yes, most people see no need to "buy" music, they subscribe to a service, and if I started out listening to music nowadays, I might agree with them, especially if most of the music you hear is more "mainstream".
Fortunately, there are not a lot of tech complications buying and listening to downloads. I mean, you need a device that can play the music (just as you need a CD player to play music) and that's it. Lossless or high-res downloads usually come in ALAC/FLAC format, sometimes WAV. All streamers I know play any of these formats effortlessly, and lossless and high-res files can easily be converted into any format you wish without losing any sound quality.
The tech stuff we're discussing here at times (with 16bit/24 bit, upsampling, etc.) is for most users most of the time completely irrelevant. RIO CONCHOS has always been a good sounding recording and I see no reason why it should not continue to be a good sounding recording.
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True, but 'we transferred everything into the higher resolutions' is a ridiculous sentence.
No argument there, especially in light of the blurbs from the liner notes that "Jurassic T. Park" shared above (emphases added by me):
"Intrada is happy to bring a number of its earlier releases into the digital marketplace with brand new, completely re-edited and remastered presentations in 24bit digital audio (96kHz or 44.1kHz depending on the native sampling rate) prepared from the first generation original source elements. ..."
We already know that the sampling rate for Rio Conchos wasn't 96 kHz, so this statement is in conflict with the characteristics of the "hi-res" files that they'll be offering.
Agreed. And I missed that in Nono's post, the sentence about Rio Conchos being in 48kHz WASN'T actually quoted from Doug's post, but was Nono's assumption.
So far the only relevant info we have directly from Doug's Corner is:
"The sessions were recorded digitally back in 1989 and all the mixing and editing stayed in that domain. Modern high-resolution sampling standards such as 24bits and 96kHz were, of course, not yet available. For this current new presentation, we transferred everything into the higher resolutions and performed all of the editorial and mastering work in the hi-res format, enabling a modest degree of improvement in the lower end of the recording and a more significant enhancement of the dynamic levels themselves. This is the version to own, whether on the limited availability CD or in the hi-res digital format, where it will continue to live on."
At this point it's definitely safe to assume Rio Conchos was recorded in 16bit and NOT recorded in 24bit (so no fun 2x speed DAT tape tricks...) and I emphasize that, though nitpicky, because we don't yet have a definitive quote saying what it WAS recorded in, only what it WASN'T recorded in.
But given this info, Doug's previously shared quote "This is the version to own, whether on the limited availability CD or in the hi-res digital format, where it will continue to live on" makes even more sense given that this CD probably does sound better than the previous CD release BUT because of its original source elements can't really exceed CD quality.
So IMO, the CD really is probably equivalent to the digital download (more than if it had originally been recorded in 24bit) and the digital download is just Intrada's way of keeping their beloved pet project alive and accessible for years to come.
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Agreed. And I missed that in Nono's post, the sentence about Rio Conchos being in 48kHz WASN'T actually quoted from Doug's post, but was Nono's assumption.
So IMO, the CD really is probably equivalent to the digital download (more than if it had originally been recorded in 24bit) and the digital download is just Intrada's way of keeping their beloved pet project alive and accessible for years to come.
It could have been directly recorded at 44.1 kHz, but that wouldn't qualify it as Hi-Res.
And I have no doubt that the source is Hi-Res, even if it's just a 16-bit / 48 kHz digital source.
Yeah, obviously we're really stretching things here by pulling quotes from all over the place and trying to make sense of it.
While the album notes do give the description:
"Intrada is happy to bring... remastered presentations in 24bit digital audio (96kHz or 44.1kHz depending on the native sampling rate)"
I suppose it's possible that Rio Conchos could have been originally recorded at 48kHz and the above quote is just missing that as an option.
But if we take that quote at face value, it's not necessarily out of the realm of possibility that Rio Conchos could have been recorded at 16bit 44.1kHz.
For one thing, in those days of digital recording, that WAS state of the art at the time given that earlier digital recording under the EIAJ standard in the late 70s was 14bit. The Sony PCM-F1, while slightly earlier than Rio Conchos, was I believe the first 16bit recorder at the time, though at 44.056 kHz.
At the same time, things moved really quickly - there was the ProDigi format and the Mitsubishi X-86 which was 20bit at 44.1kHz or 48kHz, but I think that was just after Rio Conchos recording date, possibly even into the early 90s.
Maybe that's the penultimate question for your Q/A Yavar, if they remember the equipment they used for the re-recording!
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Calling on THX99 to weigh in here but it's possible they might have engineered the remaster using oversampling or truncation, kind of like in the older days when they'd use Analog / Digital converters to oversample 14bit to 16bit.
So it's still possible to get a little more quality out of that and regardless, it probably just makes sense to maintain files in 24bit as the modern working standard rather than hanging on to a mixed catalog of 16bit and 24bit.
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Posted: |
May 8, 2021 - 6:45 AM
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By: |
thx99
(Member)
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Calling on THX99 to weigh in here but it's possible they might have engineered the remaster using oversampling or truncation, kind of like in the older days when they'd use Analog / Digital converters to oversample 14bit to 16bit.
It's what upscaling 16-bit / 44.1 or 48 kHz to 24-bit / 96 kHz is, it adds 8-bit of nothing and artificially increases the sample rate.
Yes, you're locked into the dynamic range and noise floor of your original quantization (e.g., 16-bit) and the bandwidth of the original sampling (e.g., 22.05 kHz bandwidth for 44.1 kHz sampling), even if you come out analog and re-digitize at 24-bit/96 kHz.
And if a recording is 16-bit / 48 kHz, it's Hi-Res and can be sold as Hi-Res. I've seen some at Qobuz.
I don't look at 48 kHz as being "hi-res" but I guess by definition (i.e., anything above CD quantization and/or sampling rate), it is.
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I don't look at 48 kHz as being "hi-res" but I guess by definition (i.e., anything above CD quantization and/or sampling rate), it is.
Exactly, anything above 16bit/44.1khz is referred to as "high-res".
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So I'm probably conflating anecdotal benefits that people have described with upsampling.
I wonder then if the increase to 24bit is just a future-technology insurance policy, much like digitizing analog VHS tapes so they are easier to edit with non-linear digital editing systems. Or like how recent Apple OSes have dropped support for 32-bit applications.
I haven't kept up with hardware and/or software support of 16bit audio but perhaps eventually it will become harder to find gear to work with it?
Like I'm not even sure how modern editing software would handle anything from the old Mitsubishi X-80 which recorded in 16-bit at 50.4 kHz.
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"The recording was done with state-of-the-art digital equipment and Botnick performed all mixing, editing and mastering steps in the digital domain."
"Intrada is happy to bring a number of its earlier releases into the digital marketplace with brand new, completely re-edited and remastered presentations in 24bit digital audio (96kHz or 44.1kHz depending on the native sampling rate) prepared from the first generation original source elements.
If these elements were originally recorded in analog formats, we have transferred the source tapes into hi-res digital audio and created all-new masters.
When they were recorded in digital formats to begin with, we have kept all phases of each presentation from the initial transfers through mixing, editing and mastering in hi-res 24bit digital audio."
This is just saying that, whatever production elements exist, it gets transferred to "digital" (note without accompanying specification), and they do an all-digital production. It tells us no more than we already knew.
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