Home Propeller Head Plaza

Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics.

[ Follow Ups ] Thread: [ Display  All  Email ] [ Propeller Head Plaza ]
[ Alert Moderator ]

Re: Why did early titles have such a problem supplying sufficient gain? [nt]

My guess is the human factor - the technology was such that mastering engineers knew that saturating in the digital domain would be really bad, so they were conservative on the levels when doing so. The digital limit would be based on the highest peak on the whole album so they would set the levels of the signal to encode very conservatively.

The problem was they had one shot at it - manipulating the data after is useless in this respect as you have already lost the info on the ADC transformation. Many of my discs form the original days of CD seem to have peak levels around 60%.

Nowadays, you use higher sample rate and bit depth for mastering, so when you dither down to 16/44.1, the entire data set is already available _before_ making the 16/44.1 master so software can ensure the 16/44.1 master peaks at 100% (99.7 seems to be common in modern discs) although from the paper on intersample peaking it should probably be lower since a lot of playback devices don't handle the fact that the analog peak can be higher than the digital one.

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
  Signature Sound   [ Signature Sound Lounge ]

Follow Ups Full Thread
Follow Ups
  • Re: Why did early titles have such a problem supplying sufficient gain? [nt] - macaque 10:02:26 11/27/05 (0)
You can not post to an archived thread.

[ Top Top of Page ] [ Contact Us ] [ Support/Wish List ] [ Copyright © 2024, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]
[ General ] [ Speakers ] [ Tubes ] [ Vinyl ] [ Digital ] [ Hi-Rez ] [ Video Asylum ] [ Cables ] [ Tweaks/DIY ] [ Music ] [ Films ]