Entertainment For Lively Minds
T Bone is very very WRONG
Now I have nothing against T Bone Burnett's skills as producer/arranger/guitarist, and a lot of what he says in this month's Word is impossible to disagree with, but... (and you saw that coming)
...All that stuff about 'as we walk down the street we're hearing up to 60-80,000' is a load of guff, and Mr.B should know better. Only children and dogs can hear over 20,000 cycles, most adult humans can hear nothing above 16,000 or so. (I know a lot of 'pro' stuff is recording at 96khz or even double that, but that's for other reasons...)
What Mr.B should be going on about instead is DYNAMIC RANGE. The 16bit range of 'loudness' of a CD equated to only 96dB (65,536 discrete steps), where 24bit has a range of 144dB (16,777,216 steps), which is 256 times better. (DVD-A uses 24bit I think, HDCD is 20bit)
So if this is what T Bone is on about, then he's right, otherwise he is barking up the wrong tree.
(Suggested reading: 'Mastering Audio' by Bob Katz)
- More from Andrew Cotterill.
- Login or register to post comments
-
No argument from me.
I haven't a scooby.
shouldn't the editor
have picked up on this gaffe? such shoddiness. probably filling in an expenses claim at the time. scuba diving in the maldives maybe. how much do we pay him anyway? *rings Daily Telegraph*
Glad I'm not the only one
I thought that too (got a background in radio). nicely put.
Ah but
There is a legitimate argument to be had among audiophiles (and there is), that the frequencies outside the human hearing range can still have an effect on the those we do. Voodoo science maybe, but people do say that sampling at 96Khz does make a difference. You may disagree, but T Bone is not out on an audio limb necessarily with that theory.However, i doubt very much that The Word posse are about to get into the arcane arguments of hifi when most people are listening to lofi mp3s.
I thought that was rubbish too
But in the interest of balance, I liked the bit about maximising tone and reducing attack by getting the musicians play softly.
I've been misquoted!
They used my post on the letters page this month - except they improved it, it's not quite as bad as the original. They actually added a joke, too.