5 ms·

I know recording live music can get hairy, but yikes! How was 16bits not enough? Were all the preamps set to max? Who records at -12db - -6db? Record at a way l

I know recording live music can get hairy, but yikes! How was 16bits not enough? Were all the preamps set to max? Who records at -12db - -6db? Record at a way lower level and boost at the amp stage?

rectang 5y ago
Imagine you're recording highly dynamic music, like Jazz. Clipping is absolutely never OK. You have to leave tons of headroom, there's no other way. So 16 bits is not enough for live capture — especially when the source is dynamic or the recording conditions are chaotic. The studio I used to work at was one of the first ADAT studios back in the 90s, and they did a lot of rock. One of the ways they got past the limitations of the medium was to compress and limit to tape. You generally don't want to do that unless you have tons of time to set up and get it right (a la Rudy Van Gelder), which was not in most budgets. But it worked well enough and the ADAT recordings out of this studio sounded way better than most. Mercifully storage has gotten cheaper in the decades since and you really shouldn't capture to 16 bits any more.
- m-ee 5y ago
  I had the privilege of visiting the van Gelder studio in high school. I asked him about analog vs digital and surprisingly he said he was all in on digital and spending his days remastering his old work with modern tools.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  How much post-production dynamic range do you really need/want for live jazz recordings? Surely 50 dB would be plenty, and even that would be pretty impractical to listen to except in very quiet environments. Wouldn’t 16 bit digital audio easily give you 50 dB of usable dynamic range and still have like another 50 dB of headroom?
  - rectang 5y ago
    Say that I need a 300x400 image for a webpage. Does it make sense to set my camera to take 300x400 pictures? What happens when we crop and postprocess? If we want the best quality end product, free from low-res artifacting, we need to preserve an excess of resolution all the way through production until the final export. Exactly how headroom much is enough? Enough that artifacts arising from insufficient resolution are not perceivable in the end product.
    - tshaddox 5y ago
      Yes, I understand the reasons to have enough dynamic range and enough headroom. My question is about what specifically is enough.
      - blep-arsh 5y ago
        I think 16-bit quantization noise level is usually lower than the noise of all the analog hardware before the ADC, but 24-bit quantization noise seems to be lower than even the internal noise of audio ADCs so there seems to be no reason to go higher.
  - Taek 5y ago
    You need 8 bits to do 48dB, so if you want your music to have 96dB of dynamic range and you want your editor to be able to slide things around 48dB without perceptible loss of quality, you need to record at 24 bits of depth. If you record at 16 bits of depth you are pretty much automatically forcing your engineer to choose between quality and range when they are normalizing the recording.
    - tshaddox 5y ago
      Listening to music with 96 dB of dynamic range is extreme though, right?
      - rectang 5y ago
        You seem quite determined to leave inadequate margin for error. :( The most important rule of audio recording is "always be ready to roll tape". What the engineer does is of little consequence compared to the talent. Don't ever fuck up a keeper take. Recording with some extra bits means that even if your gain staging was bad, you just get some extra uncorrelated noise, not correlated quantization distortion. As for whether this stuff is perceptible, there are two issues at play. First, differences which are not perceptible during production can result in a perceptible difference in the final product. This is easiest to understand with a visual analogy: if you have inadequate resolution of an image during processing, the end result may be slightly defocused and smeared. Second, as I described elsethread, quantization distortion is a particularly pernicious form of degradation, poisonous in small amounts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KkS4NSv-0M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KkS4NSv-0M It is hard to listen for it during production, so we defend against it by giving ourselves lots and lots of headroom.
        tshaddox 5y ago
        I get it. I’m asking what dynamic range you need for the completed production, and how much additional headroom you need when recording. I don’t think you normally would need 96 dB for the completed production, because that would be very impractical to listen to.
eyelidlessness 5y ago
My understanding is that 24-bit source material (the standard when I was last recording which was several years ago) provides enough dynamic range that you can bring up the desired volume without overly muddying quiet sections with noise, especially when mixing multiple sources where that noise adds up quickly. My own personal experience recording at 16 bits was… “I must play louder and overstate my song’s understatements” because I never could get a 16 bit output that didn’t sound like garbage. Granted I’ve never been more than a novice at recording and I’m certain there’s more I could learn to work with the lower bit rate but… why?
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  Also: this got me wondering about how much the “loudness wars” and “brick wall” music products overlap (in time) with the almost total transition to digital recording. It also got me wondering how much the more gradual digital transition affected musical style and taste. If analog recording captured a much more flexible dynamic range, it’s easy to imagine a lot of other recording artists similarly deciding “fuck it play it louder”. And it’s easy to imagine that culturally influencing louder recording targets generally.
  - rectang 5y ago
    The resolution bottlenecks of early digital as described in this thread are not related to the loudness wars of the aughts. If you were doing big budget recordings back then you were either doing 2" analog or you had enough setup time to set gain levels carefully and "fill up the meters" for your digital recorder. Recording close-mic'd drums to analog tape is actually a useful technique when maxing out levels because analog tape saturation can be aesthetically superior to digital peak limiting for shaving drum peaks — analog tape saturates high frequencies first. It wasn't uncommon to either record basic tracks to analog then transfer to Pro Tools, or even to track to Pro Tools then bounce the drums out to analog tape and back. For the record, there were loudness wars back in the vinyl days, since it was seen as important to have your 45 rpm single "compete" with others in the jukebox. It wasn't something new in the aughts. > If analog recording captured a much more flexible dynamic range It doesn't, especially not in comparison to modern digital. Dynamic range is not a strong point of analog because of tape hiss. The issue with low res digital is that truncation distortion is non-harmonic (not an integer multiple of the input frequency) and so is disproportionately aesthetically damaging even in small quantities — in other words, digital grunge sounds worse than tape hiss.

I know recording live music can get hairy, but yikes! How was 16bits not enough? Were all the preamps set to max? Who records at -12db - -6db? Record at a way lower level and boost at the amp stage?

rectang 5y ago

Imagine you're recording highly dynamic music, like Jazz. Clipping is absolutely never OK. You have to leave tons of headroom, there's no other way. So 16 bits is not enough for live capture — especially when the source is dynamic or the recording conditions are chaotic. The studio I used to work at was one of the first ADAT studios back in the 90s, and they did a lot of rock. One of the ways they got past the limitations of the medium was to compress and limit to tape. You generally don't want to do that unless you have tons of time to set up and get it right (a la Rudy Van Gelder), which was not in most budgets. But it worked well enough and the ADAT recordings out of this studio sounded way better than most. Mercifully storage has gotten cheaper in the decades since and you really shouldn't capture to 16 bits any more.

m-ee 5y ago
I had the privilege of visiting the van Gelder studio in high school. I asked him about analog vs digital and surprisingly he said he was all in on digital and spending his days remastering his old work with modern tools.
tshaddox 5y ago
How much post-production dynamic range do you really need/want for live jazz recordings? Surely 50 dB would be plenty, and even that would be pretty impractical to listen to except in very quiet environments. Wouldn’t 16 bit digital audio easily give you 50 dB of usable dynamic range and still have like another 50 dB of headroom?
- rectang 5y ago
  Say that I need a 300x400 image for a webpage. Does it make sense to set my camera to take 300x400 pictures? What happens when we crop and postprocess? If we want the best quality end product, free from low-res artifacting, we need to preserve an excess of resolution all the way through production until the final export. Exactly how headroom much is enough? Enough that artifacts arising from insufficient resolution are not perceivable in the end product.
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    Yes, I understand the reasons to have enough dynamic range and enough headroom. My question is about what specifically is enough.
    - blep-arsh 5y ago
      I think 16-bit quantization noise level is usually lower than the noise of all the analog hardware before the ADC, but 24-bit quantization noise seems to be lower than even the internal noise of audio ADCs so there seems to be no reason to go higher.
- Taek 5y ago
  You need 8 bits to do 48dB, so if you want your music to have 96dB of dynamic range and you want your editor to be able to slide things around 48dB without perceptible loss of quality, you need to record at 24 bits of depth. If you record at 16 bits of depth you are pretty much automatically forcing your engineer to choose between quality and range when they are normalizing the recording.
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    Listening to music with 96 dB of dynamic range is extreme though, right?
    - rectang 5y ago
      You seem quite determined to leave inadequate margin for error. :( The most important rule of audio recording is "always be ready to roll tape". What the engineer does is of little consequence compared to the talent. Don't ever fuck up a keeper take. Recording with some extra bits means that even if your gain staging was bad, you just get some extra uncorrelated noise, not correlated quantization distortion. As for whether this stuff is perceptible, there are two issues at play. First, differences which are not perceptible during production can result in a perceptible difference in the final product. This is easiest to understand with a visual analogy: if you have inadequate resolution of an image during processing, the end result may be slightly defocused and smeared. Second, as I described elsethread, quantization distortion is a particularly pernicious form of degradation, poisonous in small amounts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KkS4NSv-0M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KkS4NSv-0M It is hard to listen for it during production, so we defend against it by giving ourselves lots and lots of headroom.
      - tshaddox 5y ago
        I get it. I’m asking what dynamic range you need for the completed production, and how much additional headroom you need when recording. I don’t think you normally would need 96 dB for the completed production, because that would be very impractical to listen to.

eyelidlessness 5y ago

My understanding is that 24-bit source material (the standard when I was last recording which was several years ago) provides enough dynamic range that you can bring up the desired volume without overly muddying quiet sections with noise, especially when mixing multiple sources where that noise adds up quickly. My own personal experience recording at 16 bits was… “I must play louder and overstate my song’s understatements” because I never could get a 16 bit output that didn’t sound like garbage. Granted I’ve never been more than a novice at recording and I’m certain there’s more I could learn to work with the lower bit rate but… why?

eyelidlessness 5y ago
Also: this got me wondering about how much the “loudness wars” and “brick wall” music products overlap (in time) with the almost total transition to digital recording. It also got me wondering how much the more gradual digital transition affected musical style and taste. If analog recording captured a much more flexible dynamic range, it’s easy to imagine a lot of other recording artists similarly deciding “fuck it play it louder”. And it’s easy to imagine that culturally influencing louder recording targets generally.
- rectang 5y ago
  The resolution bottlenecks of early digital as described in this thread are not related to the loudness wars of the aughts. If you were doing big budget recordings back then you were either doing 2" analog or you had enough setup time to set gain levels carefully and "fill up the meters" for your digital recorder. Recording close-mic'd drums to analog tape is actually a useful technique when maxing out levels because analog tape saturation can be aesthetically superior to digital peak limiting for shaving drum peaks — analog tape saturates high frequencies first. It wasn't uncommon to either record basic tracks to analog then transfer to Pro Tools, or even to track to Pro Tools then bounce the drums out to analog tape and back. For the record, there were loudness wars back in the vinyl days, since it was seen as important to have your 45 rpm single "compete" with others in the jukebox. It wasn't something new in the aughts. > If analog recording captured a much more flexible dynamic range It doesn't, especially not in comparison to modern digital. Dynamic range is not a strong point of analog because of tape hiss. The issue with low res digital is that truncation distortion is non-harmonic (not an integer multiple of the input frequency) and so is disproportionately aesthetically damaging even in small quantities — in other words, digital grunge sounds worse than tape hiss.