I've said many times before that the recording industry lives by making all
of its good decisions over and over again.  Why sell someone a recording
once, when with proper husbanding of resources, you can do it over and over
and over again?

The current great green hope of the recording industry is 96/24.  96kHz
frequency response combined with 24 bit sampling.  As outlined before,
the great advantage of this format is that it is very expensive to work
with.  It gives the industry about a five year lead over the home recording
market, and all of those small producers out there.  If the public buys it.

The first step to getting the public to buy it is to produce recordings
which get the public to identify "good" with "96/24".  Today's New York
Times is the first salvo in this process:

(The article refered to is at:
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/artleisure/bmg-digital-cds.html and is
entitled "New Music for Old Sound" the author is Lawerence B.  Johnson).

He praises to the skies the details of a the Leinsdorf Concerto for
Orchestra that has just been remastered.  He assures people that 96/24
is the reason for the details.

Don't believe it.  The simple truth is that most CDs are poorly mastered.
In most pop products, one will hardly notice the fuzziness, indeed a
certain amount of schlocky production value is part of the aesthetic.  But
it is entirely possible to get the details that people are talking about in
96/24 from standard 22 bit technology at normal frequency response.  What
is being done differently is bringing out details in the mix, or effects
processing to bring them out of a track.  It is amazing what one can do
with the judicious application of sweepable mid range and graphic
equalisation.  Want a high flute? Brighten the top.  Want a rumble? Open up
the bottom.  Close them down again so that people don't hear tinnyness or
muddiness when the effect passes.  In the age of digital automation, one
can have knobs moved virtually, more precisely and faster than the human
hand could manage.

Now, for this viewpoint remastering is a good idea.  It has been for
over a decade.  The difference between the Gold edition of "Dark Side of
the Moon", carefully remastered for digital, and the standard CD shows
*exactly* the same placement, clarity and sonic quality improvements.
The secret isn't in the bits, it is in sweating out the details with human
ears.

This is not to say that 96/24 does not offer incremental sound improvement.
For some very high end systems there is noticeable improvement for the
technology by itself.  Not as much as one might think, because a great deal
of the expense of audiophile equipment consists of making up for the
limitations of source.

- - -

Where goes it from here? The obvious thing to do is test the waters -
market pieces which will show the most improvement from careful remastering
and careful attention to detail.  In a way this will be a boon for
listeners, the rep selected will not be more of the standard, but pieces
which show off the difference, from sources that show off the difference.
The selection of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in its own hall from a time
when its recording was under superb stewardship is a wonderful place to
start.

But don't think its the technology that is doing the job, or get the
record companies to make you believe that soon you will have to rebuy your
collection with little "9624" stickers on it.  The new versions will be as
good as the source and the time spent mixing and mastering.  It might be a
good idea for people interested to start learning the engineers by name...

Stirling S Newberry
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