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The op wrote "certain stereo panning tricks" not "panning" causes skipping. Panning has been around on vinyl for ages but it doesn't mean you do it the same on a CD master as you do on a vinyl master.

Eno turned Coldplay from kinda moody into much better!

The app review says little about what it does however. Is it like the KAOSOLATOR with a screen and more that 4 bars of memory?

http://emusician.com/elecinstruments/emusic_korgko_kaossilator/

Actually yes, for the internal processing, which has nothing to do whether you use the 64 bit or 32 bit version of the app. I used to be confused by this too. So even if you use Reaper32, your 24 bit signal from the DAC get upsampled internally to 64 bit audio. Read this article. for more insight.

http://emusician.com/tutorials/max_headroom/

But keep in mind this has NOTHING to do with using a 64 bit app on a 64 bit CPU. What a 64 app does is give more power, the ability do do more without taxing the CPU. More plugins, or running whatever plugins you do have at less CPU use.

Any person who is not tone deaf can tell the difference between solid state distortion and tube distortion. Please don't compare the basic principles of rock guitar with overpriced audiophile folly.

Much of the overpriced is going away along with tube microphonics, gassy tubes, high voltage resistors, capacitors and high power consumption. With Digital Signal Processing DSP is rapidly providing 24 bit 40KHZ or higher modeling of the classic sounds without the problems and high cost. The overdrive curve of tubes can easly be modeled in a DSP.

http://emusician.com/dsp/studio_devil_virtual_guitar_amp/
http://www.analog.com/processors/tigersharc/overview/customerstories/fractalAudio/fractalAudioIndex.html
http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/FM15DSP/

Digital audio sucks. It doesn't sound real, and the quality is worse than vinyl.

This argument is one of many in the supposedly "pro" audio segment that sounds pretty plausible. Others include such ideas that all file compression degrades audio, expensive audiophile cabling sounds better than normal electrical wire, and hardware sounds better than software. Unsurprisingly, many of these arguments are put forth by vendors selling this equipment. And unfortunately for those who have invested a lot of money in high-end audio equipment, these arguments (and others like them), have been debunked numerous times.

When people say vinyl and tube amps have better sound quality, it's usually because (a) they believe these "experts", (b) nostalgia, or (c) they think that it sounds more "real" because there's physical mechanics working (the needle, etc).

All three of these are pretty bad reasons for claiming a technical superiority, especially if you have no background in fields that deal scientifically with audio. Have you conducted double-blind listening tests between CD/vinyl and tube/transistor setups? This is basically the only way to get a metric on "quality", although there are some pitfalls. Some people can pick out noise present in vinyl, or can hear specific artifacts introduced when using lossy compression (MP3, Vorbis, etc), so their bias is evident in the testing. But for personal preference, it works very well.

About CD recordings: in the 80s, the CD was a completely new recording medium. Many people who mixed records had worked with vinyl for a long time, and they knew how to make it sound really good. Moving to CD, it was quite a bit different. Many of the tricks and techniques they used when working with vinyl no longer had the same effect. This is unfortunate, since CD re-releases in the early CD days sounded like ass compared to the buttery-goodness of an expertly engineered LP (this is what I've heard. I haven't experienced it first-hand). This is why you see debates and recommendations on audio sites between people who compare different CD mixes, comparing it to the LP/other recordings. (or perhaps live, who knows).

BUT! If you like the way tube amps and records sound, go with it. I like the cracks and hiss of recordings sometimes, and I'm not being sarcastic. One of the reasons I think people like LPs is that you can tell they are recordings, not like CDs that are mixed to sound slick and "perfect". But please try to lay off on the technical angle, unless you've done some testing (and published it somewhere so everyone can see).

PS: I mostly agree with you about digital music sales. The RIAA-blessed and DRM-wrapped files are really worthless. But there are sites out there that sell lossless (FLAC, etc) files that aren't encumbered. You just won't be able to get the new Britney Spears single.

• MusicBrainz
• MoodLogic
• QuickNamer
• MusicMagic Mixer
• UltraTagger
• FixTunes
• Tag&Rename

honestly the best reason I can find to use the 888 is that it supports pro-tools.

According to this website
"A number of lossless audio-data packing schemes have been developed, but only a few have made it to the market. Merging Technologies' Lossless Realtime Coding (LRC) has been fully readied for license to provide compression and decompression programs for Mac, PC, and common digital signal processing (DSP) chips."

Not only are you wrong, about realtime lossless encoding, you can even get a DSP built in to do it instead of relying on the CPU to provide the horsepower. Nice try, but losseless just means that Every Single Bit comes back the same. just like a zip or rar or tgz. Some methods may indeed anylize the whole file to obtain maximum compression, but lossless is doable realtime.

For added hours of enjoyment.... The Art of the Creative Short Circuit

In the Januaray edition of Electronic Musician:

No, the preamp doesn't "reverse" the procedure. The distortion caused by the equalization itself cannot be perfectly reversed - you're lucky if the preamp even comes close. Assuming you had a perfect preamp whose level adjustments perfectly matched those performed for the vinyl master, you'd still be looking at a slew of phase issues caused by all of that equalization and de-equalization.

And the RIAA equalization isn't the only thing being done to the signal prior to mastering. Forget loud, low bass pans from one channel to another (I think a Madonna CD sported one of these fairly recently) - the bass has to be mixed to mono in order to avoid having consumers' needles jumping out of their grooves.

Problems with getting vinyl to handle stereo bass are so severe, legendary Atlantic records megaproducer Arif Mardin began mixing kick drums and bass in mono back during the 1960's, a trick that's been used for vinyl mastering ever since.

Agreed. RME makes arguably some of the best hardware around AND has good Linux support.

There was an interesting article in electronic musician a few years ago about music production on Linux (June 1999; unfortunately no longer available in the on-line archives at emusician.) The article had a key point: the idea of Linux-based music production is exciting but the market for music hard/software is relatively small and most companies are struggling to break even on Win/Mac. Jim Rippie of Cakewalk supposedly had this to say: "...Getting information about the number of people using an OS that can be freely downloaded is a slippery proposition, making it difficult to create a proper business case for porting to Linux". This point I imagine isn't exclusive to music production software.

But you never know what some intreped hacker might dream up... Someone was able to reverse-engineer ASIO drivers for SoundBlaster cards after all.

Even really "good" speakers cannot compensate for the limits of your soundcard.

The _highest_ frequency that a soundcard can produce is one-half of it's maximum sampling rate output. For must of us, that implies (44,100 * 1/2) = 22.05 kHz, which is not far outside the "average" upper limit of human hearing (20 kHz).

If you paid alot for your soundcard, you may be able to produce 24 kHz sounds (which, most likely, your speakers can't reproduce, your amplifier can't amplify, and you couldn't hear anyway).

I dont think there are any commercial speakers with a frequency response beyond 22kHz (yet), and most dont get past 20. Several companies are working on small piezoelectrics that will, at which point we will need better $oundcards and new $tereo $ystems.

The following article may be informative in this respect: Humans can't distinguish anything higher than 20 kHz, but...

-alec
Composer of "Music for 16 DogWhistles" (which uses a motif from Cage's 4'33")

In the last article on this, I put a link to my old Electronic Musician article about Linux MIDI + sound, but it was really late in the lifespan of the Slashdot article, so I'm pretty sure most readers missed it. It lives on my site because EM's site managed to munge the archives for 06/99, when it was published.

I'm posting it again, along with a link to Electronic Musician magazine itself, because they're a great magazine, and had the forethought to commission an article on Linux music support over a year ago. Check them out, and check out the article.
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I wrote an article for Electronic Musician magazine that was published in the 06/99 dead-tree issue, titled "The Penguin's Song," about the state of music hardware and software support for Linux as of Spring of last year.

Unfortunately, the 06/99 issue seems to be the only one that's not archived on EM's very kludgy website. I've pestered the parent company, Intertec, a couple of times about this, and they keep alleging they're going to fix it.

The article's aimed at musicians looking at Linux, not at Linux geeks looking to music, so the focus might seem a bit strange to some of the Slashdot crowd, but I'm really rather proud of it.

Unfortunately, if you'd like to see the final version of this article, you'll either have to buy the back issue or pester EM's parent company to get the 06/99 issue into the archives. Or maybe I'll post the draft version if Intertec's too clueless to post the final one.

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I wrote an article for Electronic Musician magazine that was published in the 06/99 issue, titled "The Penguin's Song," about the state of music hardware and software support for Linux as of Spring of last year.

Unfortunately, the 06/99 issue seems to be the only one that's not archived on their very kludgy website. I've pestered the parent company, Intertec, a couple of times about this, and they keep alleging they're going to fix it.

The article's not completely about MIDI support on Linux, since it also touches on hardware and audio support, but sort of topical to this question. Unfortunately, if you'd like to see the final version of this article, you'll either have to buy the back issue or pester EM's parent company to get the 06/99 issue into the archives.


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