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Considering a Move to Vinyl

It adds an air of reality when playing the Raindrop prelude, Water music or Die Moldeau (the Danube). Wet Wet Wet sounded saturated though.
 
Are you sure they were talking about sample rate and not number of bits per sample?

I did not mention the sampling rate, I referred to the bit-rate, i.e. 24bits instead of 16bits, but in most instances higher bit rate is coupled with higher sampling rates, e.g. 96kHz or 192kHz instead of 44.1kHz or 48kHz. The comment was made in an article I read but I have also been told by an Arcam engineer that an increase from 16bits to 24bit makes more difference than doubling the sampling rate from 48kHz to 96kHz.

The example I gave about the high quality of LSO recordings was not related to the higher bit-rate comment as their recordings & mastering are done in DSD before the conversion to PCM on the final silver disc. The pure audio blu-ray ones I have bought are 24bit 192kHz but within the price you also get a hybrid CD/SACD & to my ears they all sound just as good.
 
I did not mention the sampling rate, I referred to the bit-rate, i.e. 24bits instead of 16bits

Thanks for the clarification. My confusion was because "rate" usually implies a time-dependent entity (sample rate), and the number of bits in a sample is usually referred to as "bit length".

In your original comment, you stated "high-bit rate mastering which they claim is more important than a high bit rate end-product", which is true if we are talking about or number of bits per sample and not rates. When recording and processing, it is useful to have more than 16 bits (on recording, 24 bits are normally used, in processing the intermediate calculations might be done with much higher number of bits, and often in floating point format). When recording, 24 bits give more headroom and margin in case levels aren't perfect, and in processing you minimize rounding errors.

When the processing is done, the material can be normalized to an optimal level, and no more than 16 bits are needed. I have checked out thousands of recordings, and I have not, so far, come across a single commercial recording that uses a range that exceeds 16 bits, so the least significant bits in a 24-bit recording, as distributed, is purely noise.
 
You can still find some bargains in charity shops. I picked up an opera box set for nothing a few months ago - they were literally giving the classical box sets away!
 
You can still find some bargains in charity shops. I picked up an opera box set for nothing a few months ago - they were literally giving the classical box sets away!

Classical, M.O.R. and boxed sets are and have always been plentiful and cheap as chips. Brilliant if you're buying but unfortunately not good news if you have fairly large classical collections.

The last batch I bought, a couple of weeks ago from a local charity shop, were in virtually mint condition and play (after cleaning) faultlessly. Very cheap indeed; one notch above giving them away.:)
 
Thanks for the clarification. My confusion was because "rate" usually implies a time-dependent entity (sample rate), and the number of bits in a sample is usually referred to as "bit length".

Sorry about that, please forgive my mistake but I am only a humble music fan with no training on the technical side of things, but with a modicum of common sense. If I understand the rest of your post correctly you are broadly confirming the point I was trying to make albeit badly phrased.
 
Sorry about that, please forgive my mistake but I am only a humble music fan with no training on the technical side of things, but with a modicum of common sense. If I understand the rest of your post correctly you are broadly confirming the point I was trying to make albeit badly phrased.

No prob - only correcting terminology for the sake of clarity. What I am saying is that 24 bit is useful when recording but not needed when storing or reproducing.
 
Even Ebay can be good for classical LPs. Last week I got Brahms' German Requiem with Karajan at the wheel on beautiful mint condition tulip labelled DGG German pressings from 1968 for a tenner including postage. Magic!
 


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