CD remastering (was Preservation of Correspondence - And Media)

On 07/02/07, woodelf <bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca> wrote: I don't think the sampling rate of CD's is too low. Early A/D converters may have cut out a bit too early, but for the last decade or so, with oversampling A/Ds the 3dB cutoff has crept very close to Nyquist. And noone here (western industrialized culture)- except a very select few - will have any significant perception of sounds exceeding 18kHz. Either you'll be in an age group (above X years) where you hearing naturally degrades or (below X years) where you will have had sufficient exposure to damage the high-frequency hair cells due to environmental noise or good old Rock'n'Roll. A few years ago, I asked a sound engineer (classical music, Martha de Francisco at McGill) about the early CDs and why so many people thought it was too "dry" or "clinical": her claim was that the noise floor of the medium is too low. In effect - just as it says on some AAD CDs these days - the CD will expose flaws in the master tape. (The particular problem is/was ambience: on modern recordings more microphones are added, far away from the performers; this adds late reverb that with LPs would fall below the noise level) I don't think any LP has frequency content above 20kHz that is not near-gaussian noise created by physical imperfections in the LP material. Sorry this is way off-topic and is almost guaranteed to incite an audiophile flamewar... :-) Joe.