A suggestion :was: From Hawkwind

[Paul Mather]

On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 05:27:30AM +0000, chris at HAWKLORD.UKLINUX.NET wrote:

=> I get the impression they will all be soundboard recordings from the
=> current tour.
[[...]]
=> Small aside:-
=>  I don't like CD I never have liked CD.  I've had a DVD for 2 years.
=> In my life I have bought exactly as many music DVD as I have commercial
=> CD.  I have 6 music DVD (last of big spenders!!!) I like vynal cause it
=> sounds good.  My ears ain't great, but DVD is OK.   CD sucks.

[[ Various technical-sounding mumbo jumbo pseudo-science deleted. ]]

=> The audio CD is going to die soon.  Already there is an unofficial DVD
=> standard used (only???) for classical music that is 96k audio and gives
=> 1 frame of video (ie a title) for each track (anyone with details of
=> standard please contact me).

The great thing about DVD standards is that there are so many from
which to choose! :-)  That would be one strike against Hawkwind using
it.  At least with audio CD they know they're selling something that
will play on everyone's little-silver-platter players.  (Recall the
confusing "will this play on my player?" thread that attended the Huw
PAL DVD release.)

As for "the audio CD is going to die soon" (file under "death of
Usenet" and other related prognostications:), that may be true
ultimately, but CDs will still be playable for some time to come.  New
format vendors have learned that a "clean break" does not wow the
customers as much as a good transition.  So, witness the huge crop of
DVD players that will also play CD and CD-RW.  (I think there's some
special logo/designation and marketing slogan to indicate this.)

So, even if CD players died off virtually overnight, CDs themselves
would still be a safe bet as far as a transport medium goes, because
they'd still be playable (unlike the reverse).

=> So Hawkwind fans could be used as guinea pigs to try out different ways
=> of marketing music.

As someone has pointed out, it'll be hard enough for Hawkwind to get
500 people sign up for something safe and conventional like CD.
Throwing DVD---with all its format madness---into the mix is not a
good business decision from their perspective.  The existing proposal
is risky enough.

=> If it turns out production costs of limited edition dvd is about the
=> same as for cd then why not give us 96k multichannel dreamscape void to
=> hallucinate in?

Why 96 KHz?  (Was it because of that de facto pseudo-standard you
mentioned?)  Why not 192 KHz?  Why not increase the bit depth to
24-bit whilst you're at it?  Why stop at 5 channels?

More importantly, why do any of that?  I'm serious.

I have two related observations that you appear to have overlooked:

1) Source matters!
2) You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

As you said way back in the beginning, these are likely soundboard
recordings.  I don't know exactly how Colin is doing these, but I'm
assuming that during the sound check he finds a mix he likes (in terms
of balance and dynamics), and then this mix is recorded to DAT during
the show, i.e., as 48 KHz 16-bit stereo.

Anything you do after that is smoke and mirrors.

Okay, so you resample it to 96 KHz.  Have you increased the sound
quality?  No, and in fact, you might actually degrade it depending
upon how you do the resampling.

So you decide to invent some new channels to do some kind of stereo ->
surround sound conversion.  Will this sound better?  Again, it's
doubtful; the best surround sound mixes are done from the ground up
using multi-track masters.  Sure, a "surround sound" mix will sound
"different", but not necessarily better (and likely worse).
(Importantly, a good surround sound mix takes effort, and more effort
means more expense.)

In other words, if you want true audio quality, you need to work for
it at all stages.

I'm not suggesting for a moment that these CDs will sound bad.  (On
the contrary, I think Colin does good work!)  But I *am* countering
the notion that by releasing these as regular CDs that the quality
will be sub-par compared to releasing them as DVDs.  That is just a
fallacy.

As with lots of things in the digital realm, there is a lot of
marketing hype with which men in suits have worked hard to
indoctrinate the public.  One predominant meme is "bigger numbers is
better."  We see this a lot in computing, where the "faster CPU clock
speed means a faster system" marketing slogan became a touchstone.
(Unfortunately, life is not as simple as that, if you are talking
about overall system speed, i.e., realised performance.)  In digital
audio is appears that "higher sample rates are better" is the mantra
(followed closely by "bigger bit-depths are better.")

This can be true, but it is not necessarily true.  This is
*especially* pertinent for consumer-grade mass market equipment, which
may not use, shall we say, the finest quality components.  (Have you
ever considered what is the *real* resolution of a DAC?)

If you are worried about the sound quality of your audio, you should
actually be more worried about the quality of the analogue components
of your system (and that includes the analogue stages in your DVD
player).  A cheap DVD player is likely to be just that: a great
potential with a lousy realisation.  A good CD player will beat it
hands down *every time*.

(BTW, there is a DVD-Audio standard (DVD-A), but the mastering software
is not commonplace, like for other DVD applications, and is somewhat
expensive.  It is also targeted at studio-quality sourced projects.)

The only sense, IMHO, in doing DVD releases right now is to release
videos.  If you want a bit of multimedia content (pictures, lyrics,
and a bit of digital video), you can even bung that onto a regular CD
by making a mixed-mode CD.  (Granted, it's not nearly the capacity,
but for simple things like info and pictures it works remarkably
well.)

Cheers,

Paul.

obFullDisclosure: I don't own a DVD-capable playback device, so would
definitely not be interested in Collector's Club releases in that
format at this point in time.

e-mail: paul at gromit.dlib.vt.edu

"Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production
 deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."
        --- Frank Vincent Zappa