> Raimund wrote----
> Interestingly, even the 32 bit floating point format can potentially cause
> trouble in algorithms that require accumulating many small numbers into a
> much larger sum.
>
> Regards,
> Raimund
>
>
> A paper about 1 bit processing read recently had some points that dovetail
> quite nicely with that thought Raimund.
> http://www.sonicstudio.com/pdf/papers/1bitOverview.pdf
>
> It seems to me that the whole digital degradation that we see is due to major
> corps trying to complicate their coding so their exclusivity on product and
> universality and standards can be manipulated to suit their marketing
> strategies. If one bit digital had become the norm, then it would be quite
> simple to trace the inadequacy by pointing to sampling rates alone. Our ears
> don't fail us, i think that what fails us in all this is a slow progressive
> war with digital manipulation. Might be an over-simplification and maybe
> these corps had sound reasoning, but I cannot tell you the amount of wasted
> money from gear that I gave bought from FireWire to so called High MiniDisc
> technology and all are muddled by not being universally compatible. It is a
> real downer for me to record something only to find it such a huge pain the
> ass to contain and convert all these large files. Maybe at some point in the
> future, there become a saturation point, where some universality starts
> happening purely by the nature of digits and demand, but at present I feel
> like a caveman at my laptop starting a audio fire by rubbing two sticks.
>
> Regards,
>
> Mark
The lesson is to avoid proprietary formats if at all possible. Even Avid (Pro
Tools) has stopped supporting the SDII format that they (as Digidesign)
created.
One-bit recording has no quality advantage over standard PCM, just different
problems. It was promoted by Sony as an advance so people who bought into their
hype would have to buy all-Sony editing systems.
Universality is here: everybody agrees on the .wav file as standard.
I don't think FireWire was a waste of money, it continues to work great. Of
course it's being superseded by something better. The fun in digital media is
that things tend to get better and cheaper at the same time.
-Dan
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