[LAD] Re: Direct Stream Digital / Pulse Density Modulation musing/questions

[Dominique Michel]

Le Tue, 25 Sep 2007 19:31:52 +0200,
Fons Adriaensen <fons at kokkinizita.net> a écrit :

> On Tue, Sep 25, 2007 at 10:50:48AM -0600, Bearcat M. Sandor wrote:
> 
> > When i went down my local (ok, only) studio to have some LPs transferred to
> > CD the studio owner and i were talking about this very subject.  He told me
> > that one day he bought a new mixer to replace his aging one.  He set it
> > next to his old one and got it ready. The phone rang. He spent the next few
> > hours experimenting with it, and was happy with the differences it made in
> > the sound he was trying to achieve.  However, he had forgotten to turn it
> > on.
> > 
> > I'm sure this isn't the only such story out there. If a person can fool 
> > themselves into believing that such a piece of equipment is even
> > functioning, how much difference can it make?  As a matter of fact, i think
> > he returned the mixer and stuck with his old one.
> 
> A nice variation on this theme occured years ago at an AES conference.
> The speaker wanted to demonstrate that 'digital' sound was crap, by
> using the familiar 'push down the extended arm' test. Test persons 
> listening to analog sound could easily resist, while they lost all
> force when listening to a digital recording.
> 
> What the speaker didn't know was that the PA system used to play the
> tracks was fully digital...
> 
> Years later the same person was promoting DSD against PCM, by the way...
> 
> Ciao,
> 
Haha!

It remain me some test that was done in Switzerland in the sixties (or
something like that) by the national TV. Test persons was listening to 2 sorts
of sounds: normal stereo, and mono with different tone settings on the left and
right channel. Of course, the conclusion was that it was not possible to
determinate for sure if a sound was stereo or mono. It is why we have in
Switzerland only monophonic sound on the TV. Some movies are transmitted with
bicanal sound: it is 2 time mono, one time in one language and one time with the
original language. You can choose the language. Most users are not even aware
of that possibility. lol...

Personally, I don't like it. I prefer very much a good stereo sound in the
original language (with some kind of text if it is a language that I don't
understand) like on the Swedish TV.

For that PCM-DSD stuff. I prefer PCM because we can archive a good sound
quality with a much lower bandwitch. DSD  was fine at the beginning of digital
recording because it was nothing else (for what I know), but for today's
professional audio, DSD is a waste of resources because of the huge needed
bandwitch.

Dominique