Professional Preferences
I’m writing a book on high-end audio. It occurred to me that the existing books that I’ve read on the topic miss half the story. There’s plenty of information on the output side of the equation but almost nothing on the input side…the recording process itself. It’s as if the audio engineer’s comment, “we’ll fix it in the mix” has been co-opted by the audiophile community and become, we’ll fix it on playback”!
Read any online high-end audio website, equipment marketing brochure or stereophile magazine and you’ll find writers saying how just this cable or that speaker or processor can restore or transform the sound of any recording to sheer sonic bliss. The fact is that all of the components and accessories ever imagined, designed and manufactured have only the raw material that is provided by whatever source distribution format in play. And the sound quality of the source is determined and locked in long before you ever get a hold of it. That’s the input side of the recording process. That’s the job of the recording engineer, producer and musicians to establish and deliver.
I watched an online video of a seminar from last year’s Rocky Mountain Audio Fest about High Resolution Audio. The first thing out of the moderator’s mouth was that everyone on the panel agreed that analog tape is the ultimate recording format…so you know can imagine much useful information was delivered to the audience about “high-resolution audio”. I managed to watch/listen to the entire program. It was complete spin about DSD.
However one of the panelists, a recording engineer and studio owner like me, said that while PCM-based audio studios (using programs like Pro Tools) are struggling for business, those that have adopted DSD technology are doing much better. Nothing could be farther from the truth. There are some studios that have added DSD capability to their equipment/format offerings (for those clients that have drnk the cool aid) but I can think of only one studio that is completely DSD based…and that’s one run by the guy that sells the 100 or so systems that Sony gave him after they abandoned the format 6 years ago.
Sonic Solutions, an early provider of PCM mastering systems and Digital Audio Workstations entered into a partnership with Sony to provide DSD capabilities within its environment. Someone inside the organization at the time told me that they had to refund millions of dollars because the system had no commercial potential. The professional customers rejected it.
Rather than look at how many engineers or studios have DSD capability, perhaps it would be more instructive to look at how many companies are supplying DSD workstations. I’m aware of only two…Sonoma and Pyramix. Sure, there are a few manufacturers adding DSD playback to their DACs to make their products more appealing to the audiophile crowd but finding a studio capable of handling your project in native DSD is slim pickings.
The professional audio community has not embraced DSD…actually you’d be surprised how many engineers don’t even know about it. It’s not taught in recording schools (although I do teach the theory behind it and make my students aware of it). It’s not found in the studios associated with public and private audio engineering programs.
You will find a few location recordists and studios using DSD. Their approach to producing records is very different than the mainstream recording industry. In fact, even the person that pointed out the growing interest in DSD among professionals doesn’t use it to record new productions. It’s reserved for the final transfer from multitrack analog tape. This is the only appropriate use for DSD in my opinion. And if recording to analog tape is the sound that sound that she prefers, so be it.
Look at a hundred studio websites and you’ll find 100 studios equipped with Avid Pro Tools. Even my own facility has a $20K Pro Tools system that I had to purchase for my film mixing clients. I’ve never used it for capturing HD-Audio because it was limited to 24-bit internal processing…which is a compromise that I wasn’t willing to make.
Professional audio people are not moving away from PCM to DSD. They ARE embracing ever-higher quality sound…but that means 192 kHz/24-bit PCM, better clocks and better ADCs.
If you get a DSD product and you like it…there’s a very good chance that it was at one time or another a PCM file. That’s a fact.
