OmahaAudio Posted February 13, 2014 Report Share Posted February 13, 2014 http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/hometech/new-audio-format-has-purists-singing-praises-20140212-32gfu.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Angelo Waldron Posted February 13, 2014 Report Share Posted February 13, 2014 BS Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LarryF Posted February 13, 2014 Report Share Posted February 13, 2014 BS But BS with impeccable purity. "Tin Ears" Fisher Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jim Feeley Posted February 13, 2014 Report Share Posted February 13, 2014 So these are Blu-ray discs holding Blu-ray format audio but without pictures? Not a terrible idea, but not world changing I guess. This is a marketing program, not a technology initiative, right? Two more negative takes from last year: Editorial: High Fidelity Pure Audio starting a noble but losing battle http://www.engadget.com/2013/07/04/high-fidelity-pure-audio/ Déjà vu: Yet another high-resolution audio 'format' The Universal Music Group has released a slate of High Fidelity Pure Audio Blu-ray discs. Does anyone care? http://news.cnet.com/8301-13645_3-57592849-47/deja-vu-yet-another-high-resolution-audio-format/ Not that I put tons of weight in those opinions. And I'm not totally opposed to such discs as long as they aren't too expensive. So this could be cool. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Constantin Posted February 13, 2014 Report Share Posted February 13, 2014 I think we should be celebrating hi-fi audio. Why not? It's better than ever more compressing Mp3 files. I'm not sure if the BluRay is the best carrier, though. It seems more like everything is moving into the internet. I recently came across an online music shop in Germany (I think), which only sells high quality recordings as downloads. They listen to every single recording they sell and make sure it meets their standards. 96k/24 bit is their minimum. That could be the future, I think. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jim Feeley Posted February 13, 2014 Report Share Posted February 13, 2014 There's also Neil Young's Pono format, which I think is some 24/192 thing. Very little info here: http://mypono.com/about/ More info available through the google. I guess something will eventually replace MP3. But I think back to when I was a kid and the stereo store guy used some Mannheim Steamroller album to show off some speakers. I was working in recording studios those days and was (of course) an audio and music snob. But that demo stands out as a moment where I relearned that performance is so much more important than fidelity. Plus, I was trying to make it as a musician and couldn't afford those speakers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jay Rose Posted February 13, 2014 Report Share Posted February 13, 2014 From the article: Pure Audio's product manager for Universal Music in London, Josh Phillips, says my ears are not playing tricks. ''Blu-ray audio benefits from a wider bandwidth than we have on SACD and, of course, there is no competition with CD. There is more than 10 times the musical information possible for every note of music.'' [Emphasis added]. Well, 8 more bits depth and twice the sample rate would give you at least 10 times more data. On the disc. The question is, how much data was there in the master. And Phillips (not related to Philips?) says more information is possible, not that it's actually being supplied. An ordinary CD samples a piece of music about 44,100 times a second. Each of these tiny audio samples, done at 16 bits of resolution, gives a range of 65,536 possible values for the music. On Blu-ray, however, the sampling is usually done at 96,600 times a second, at 24-bit resolution. [Emph also added] Again, he's careful to not say that this much data is in his format... In fact, A single Blu-ray disc can hold the data equivalent of a score or more standard CDs. Ahh… so they told the reporter it'll handle ~20 times normal CD data at 16/44! Bottom line: If they're shipping 20 CDs on a single BluRay disc, and they're CDs I'd have bought otherwise, and they're not asking 20x the price (or roughly $200) for the BluRay… well then, it's a good deal for convenience, other than the loss of convenience that I can't play it on most of my players. But no particular improvement in sound quality. And if you read the weasels in the article, they don't really promise an improvement in sound quality. And come to think of it, what kind of audio converters (or even jitter performance) are you going to get out of a $70 BluRay video deck? --- Hey, if you want to release a new hi-D format, why not use standard disc formats WITH PREDICTIVE DELTA encoding? Very little computational overhead on playback... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
syncsound Posted February 16, 2014 Report Share Posted February 16, 2014 There actually could be some value for multi-channel recordings. I have the soundtrack for "The Social Network" on a BD-Audio disc (different than the format mentioned, but probably similar specs). It includes the 5.1 44.1k/24bit PCM mix done for the film as well as 44.1k/24 bit 2 channel mix down. It sounds fantastic , since it's essentially a clone of the masters. My own, entirely subjective take is that higher sampling rates don't buy you anything, but if you have the bandwidth (storage) to deliver 24 bits, why not? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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