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 [log in to unmask]