noisefloor.org

It seems I've chosen one of the most difficult types of music to accurately and noiselessly capture. I'm old enough to remember when CDs premiered as a new medium. Many of us had our ears opened when we heard our first high quality CD.

The first thing I noticed was how far down the noise floor was. Prior to CDs, our best (and only) media for music reproduction were vinyl LPs and magnetic tape. At the time, many audiophiles thought that vinyl was superior to nearly all forms of magnetic tape available to consumers.

In the 1980's, a form of noise reduction called CX hit the scene. CX works by encoding a compressed audio signal to the medium. The softest parts of the program are kept at a higher level (above the noise floor) than they would be without CX. That is, the dynamic range of the music is compressed. When the program is played back, the compression is 'undone' by a separate box called an expander. What that does is to effectively lower the volume of the quietest parts of the recorded program compared to the loudest parts. The end result is that the noise of the medium (a vinyl LP, let's say) is rendered much quieter than it would be without CX, and the dynamic range of the source program is essentially retained. The noise is reduced, and the music program is presented unchanged.

Being fascinated with this concept, I bought and built a CX decoder kit. (I still have it, and it still works.) I can confess that it works as advertised. It wasn't flawless, but it worked. During silent passages between cuts on an LP, there was no noise to speak of. This was my first taste of a reproduction method that produced what we today have come to accept as standard. CX didn't do at all well in the market. CDs soon came out, and CX became unheard of outside of the LaserDisk.

With the CD being so new, most audiophiles welcomed it as superior to all that had come before, at least as far as what consumers could lay their hands on. I knew some people in the 80s that thought the high end of CDs was all wrong. "Too harsh" or something like that, they'd say. I thought they were crazy at the time. But now, I am not so sure!

Today, the CD has most certainly come of age. In fact, a CD with a capacity of 800 megabytes ( an hour or so) and an audio encoding of 16 bit depth is considered barely adequate. The industry knows this and has left the CD behind - most people don't know that DVDs have an audio word length of 24 bits.

Which brings me to my thought for today. Over and over again, I have lamented that so many recordings I've made suffer horribly when mastered to 16 bit CD when the program gets extremely quiet. What happens in that case, is that due to the extremely low audio levels, very few of the available 16 bits get used to quantify the signal. What I heard was an Aliased signal. There's nothing musical at all about an aliased signal. I'd rather hear vinyl groove noise with a quiet program than aliased signals. So I always try to make sure that whatever I am recording is modulated as high as possible. Then I have to worry about clipping! There's no way to win on either end; There just isn't enough room for the whole program at 16 bits.

If I was recording pop or rock, This wouldn't be any issue at all. But for me (and for you, too!) it is a serious issue. There is no more dynamic program material commonly recorded than sacred and classical music in churches or music halls. The recording engineer is faced with a program that at times can be as loud as any rock concert (if you don't believe me, then you've never been to a hymn sing with 500 lusty singers and a blisteringly loud pipe organ) Then at times, perhaps at the same event I must record a single person singing at very little more than a whisper from 100 feet away. The temptation to crank up the gain is powerful, but has to be avoided if some dynamic context is to be retained.

As a producer of audio media for my clients, I cannot wait for the 16 bit CD to go away. If you have some attachment to the CD as it is today, may I please suggest that there is something better waiting for you. In the mean time, I am going to suggest to my clients audio DVDs in place of the standard CD of their event.

Have you heard the saying, "Life is what happens to you when you're making other plans"? I think that's what's happened to me in the last year since I last posted here. I used to work for Adelphia (news), which, poor choices made by management aside, was the best job I've ever had. I was a senior network engineer covering Ohio and parts of four surrounding states. I was both challenged and productive. My superiors were bright, honest and fair, and my peers always supportive. This was a very happy combination, professionally. We built and managed a remarkable network serving millions of people. For a few years in my life, I was happy. However, the people whom all we employees relied on did some very bad things, and were ultimately convicted of fraud and conspiracy and sentenced to prison in 2005. It seems they will finally go to prison, as they continue to fight the sentence, even today believing that they did no wrong. Myself, I think that taking over two billion dollars and then trying to hide that fact (how do you hide that much? how do you even spend that much?) and even after being convicted and sentenced to prison, still think you didn't do anything wrong, can only be a result of greed and ego on an unimaginable scale. It's not at all a pleasant thing to think about, for me.

The resulting bankruptcy resulted in tens of thousands of families living in real uncertainty as we all waited for the courts to decide what the fate of Adelphia would be. Adelphia was mostly sold to Time-Warner and Comcast. Some people were let go, but many were kept. I ended up at a desk job in Columbus, in optical transport. This is where I am now, and it consumes all my time.

Yes, I miss working for Adelphia, but now I have new challenges. Some of those challenges are: how to keep my pipe organ in good shape (impossible), finish the restoration of the Estey Style-T reed organ I have been working on for a year, and most importantly, how to keep up what I love most, music and recording.

Unfortunately for my dear reader, keeping this blog up-to-date (upgrades included!) has been pretty much dead last on my list. So that's why there's been nothing here for nearly the last year.

However, I do have a new toy. I have a Fostex FR-2. I bought it a few weeks ago. I was recording a hymn sing with over 300 strong singers. I was recording using the Marantz PMD-660. The AT4050/cm5 microphones did so well (bless them) that they completely overloaded the mic pre-amps in the PMD660. What a shame! That was pretty much an unforgivable sin for the PMD660. As much as it pains me to part with hard-earned savings, I plunked down a few bucks on an FR-2. Don't get me wrong, the PMD660 is extremely worthwhile for certain applications, and I will continue using it. It is small, light and very useful.

Aside from having far superior mic pre-amps, the FR-2 has the ability to record at up to 192kHz and at 24 bit quantization. The benefits of recording at 24 bits were never so clear to me as they were after I made my first field recording with it. So, yes, I have a sound sample for you. It was recorded at 44.1kHz, at 24 bits. I normalized the whole file and then dithered it to 16 bits. There was nothing else done to the wave file. I wish it was longer, but I want only to demonstrate the FR-2, not give away the lovely anthem performed by my client.

FR2-sample.ogg, vorbis encoded, 664kB, 0:34

I don't believe I've ever mentioned this here before: I'd like to offer my recording services to you. No matter who you are, I believe I am prepared to produce for you you the finest recordings possible. I record choirs, accompanied and unaccompanied, and pipe organs exclusively. I rarely do anything else. I believe that, as a musician, I bring a unique sensitivity to the demands that music of that type present to the recording engineer. If you want to hear more of my work, or have a discussion, I encourage you to please email me at andrew "at" noisefloor.org. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to record for you. If you send me mail, be patient. I do want to hear from you, but may not be able to reply immediately.

Thanks for listening!