Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site

Dear Romy,

A.  Recordings of different quality are worthwhile.  Let's take three examples:

1) A stereo recording that you feel is as good as it gets.
2) A mono recording of a beautiful piece of music that is well played.
3) A stereo recording of a beautiful piece of music that is well played but where the soundstage is imperfect.

B.  I do not see Redbook conversion issues at my end because the conversion would be Redbook CD digital data input; K-Stereo digital processing; K-Stereo digital data output; hard disk recorder storage; Redbook CD production.  No dac or adc involved, just purely working in the digital domain.

C.  I would use an Alesis MasterLink hard disk recorder as the source for the digital data.  It supports sample rates of 44.1kHz, 48kHx, 88.2kHz and 96kHz.  It supports word lengths of 16-bit, 20-bit and 24-bit.  BUT my preference would be to receive recordings that you are intimately familiar with and in Redbook format because Redbook is the lowest common denominator for everyone.  That way, anyone can download the source tracks and processed tracks and listen to them and compare the results to form their own views, on their own playback systems, presuming of course that you would post them on goodsoundclub.com.  Note that I am not really in the mastering world but I have the necessary equipment for private study and hobby recording and hobby mastering using some equipment which is as good as the professionals use so the results should be appropriate.  The project should enable you to form your own judgement using material that you know intimately and I think this is very important.  I already know the results for my own music collection, and it is obvious that I think it is beneficial because the K-Stereo machine is a permanent part of my playback system.  However, we have perhaps some different tastes in music so it might be more helpful for my music collection than yours.  Also, we have different playback systems and listening rooms.

D.  Amount of ambience recovery can be selected and also the type of ambience recovery to the extent that WIDE or SMALL is one , DEEP or not is two, AMBIENCE HP/LP FILTERS is three, AMBIENCE BELL is four, INPUT LEVELS (mid and side) is four, DITHER is five, etc.

E.  The amplitude of spatial modification is, in my opinion, correct and detectable whether at -10dB and -50dB.

F.  One of the interesting tests would be whether the results of using the digital volume feature carry some of the penalties that many believe are produced by digital volume controls.  Another interesting test would be how compound processing of the digital data ten times using the same settings affects the results.  I will think about the K-Stereo settings and PM you to see whether we can come up with a set that are informative.  In the meantime, select your three tracks.

This really is old technology, since Bob Katz had been using the methods that he built into the K-Stereo machine perhaps ten years prior to building the machine and the machine was released in 2001.  So that makes the technology perhaps 15 or 16 years old.

Regards, Peter Foster.

Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site