Pro's Prefer CD Mastering at 1X...and can hear the difference.

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I think the biggest problem is when the disk is burned at one speed and then the duplicator reads it at another. Cetainly this could cause read errors and degradation in sound. If the bit is a 1 and it's read as a 0, "it ain't what was recorded."

Everyone has their own theories. I prefer burning at 2x. Personal preference.

As for that article (www.getsigned.com/jvest22.html), I don't think the burn rate or "moving parts in the machines" had much to do with the resulting "harshness" that he described. There wasn't enough detail in the article - did the guy dither and transfer digitally? What 1680 recording mode did he use?.. It could be that it was multiple passes through A/D converters (the 1680's A/Ds aren't the best in the world!), and other digital alterations.

He did make some valid points, but I liked the article at digido.com (for it's in depth analysis) more .
 
has noone hear heard of Stephen Paul????...

Been away from the old bbs forever, but am shocked at all the responses on here referring to Stephen Paul as "this guy"... I grant that his posts were a more than a bit of a rant (which i found rather humorous), but think he pretty clearly stated that in tests conducted at his studio, 1x beat out any faster speeds, period. This coming from a guy who has for years made, what was it, like 1.5 grand for tearing the guts out of neumann mikes and modifying them so that the worlds best recording studios could have a u87 "modified by stephen paul". as well as the rest of his experience which he only alludes to in the post. ... i don't know the guy, but if he says he's tested it, well, his reputation kindof precedes him in the pro audio industry. my 2cents
cheers from istanbul
neadam
 
And Even More Sad

Stephen Paul himself has visited the Dragon Cave twice before...

I'm slowly starting to get to know him a little more and more each time I talk to him but I've ALWAYS have known his name ever since I started getting interested in this thing called recording.
 
Nope, I have never heard of Stephen Paul. And even if he knows loads of stuff and has lots of experience, his ears can not be trusted unless it is in a double blind situation. That goes for *everyone*, even Stephen Paul.

Anyway, my original point was that the original post was bogus. Digital data does NOT degrade when copied, unless there is an error in the copying process. Thats it.
If a certain speed introduces more errors than another speed, then it would sound worse, sure. If thats the case, your equipment is faulty.
 
Faulty Equipment

Well if engineers such as George Massenburg and the likes and countless other professional engineers around the world trust Stephen Paul's, Tony Merrill's, and others at Stephen Paul Audio's "ears" over the past few decades for modifing microphones... Then why not trust Stephen's, Tony's, and SPA's "ears" on this?

Stephen told me people don't realize how many hours go into his posts. Do you actually think he'd waste his time on posting something he hasn't checked, double-checked, and triple-checked all of his resources, tests, and experiments?

It's not as if he didn't explain it... But I quickly admit I don't understand it either. I said I would ask him to explain the reasons to me again next time I talk to him on the phone so that I might actually understand it; I've yet to talk to him since then.

"Digital data does NOT degrade when copied, unless there is an error in the copying process. Thats it."

So I guess that tells you there are errors in the copying process when you copy faster than 1X.

"If thats the case, your equipment is faulty."

And computers are NEVER faulty...

HA!!! Hehe. That's the point.
 
or at least one other thing which i understand from his post, andd from others, would fall to the amount of error checking material included in a burned cd. We all know (don't we) that the reason an audio cd can go longer than a data cd (74 minutes vs. the 65 minutes we would expect from a 650mb cd) is because of the less error checking/ prevention bits needed for audio. i.e. Data cd's need lots of error checking to prevent that excel file from showing you have $5 million in the bank, as opposed to $5000. While audio cd's, as i understand it, require much less, because if they encounter an unreadable error (very common on a cd) they simply skip, i believe approximately 1/74th of a secondd of audio. inaudible to us, but nonetheless there. If, from the excess speed on a faster than 1x burn, there are many more of these unreadable errors, you're losing more and more and more of those 1/74th seconds, and hence, losing audible audio quality. Now i don't have the XY graphs to back this up like stephen does, just using a theoretical logical argument with a few facts i've pickedd up along the way, but it's at least one explanation. :) And i've got to agree with RE on this one too. While i am always one who will trust my ears over the hearsay found on a bbs, there are some people that have simply earned the trust and admiration of an entire INDUSTRY!!!! It's kinddof like saying.... "Yeah, well that Sam Walton thought he knew what he was doing... but My new business model of giving away everything free, and making money from addvertisers, is going to blow all his businesses away!!!" well, good luck (and watch out for market corrections:) happy burning, nathan
 
RE, if you didn't understand the gist of the Stephen Paul thread, then you have no grounds for pushing the idea that he's probably right. I know from his thread he's got a lot to say, and I know from you he's famous in the world of re-worked microphones, but those two things don't mean he's necessarily right on the issue of how fast to copy your CDs. Nothing's been proved. Hearsay from a famous guy is still hearsay until it's proved. I'm not saying he's wrong. I'm saying that nothing I read in this thread proved to me that he's right.

Here's a link to a bit of software that might help sort this out:

https://homerecording.com/bbs/showthread.php?threadid=15819
 
AAAaaa...

"...if you didn't understand the gist of the Stephen Paul thread, then you have no grounds for pushing the idea that he's probably right."

No Grounds?

This IS a DISCUSSION group about recording, correct?

AND it's STILL following the original topic, correct?

BESIDES that, well it's EXACTLY like neadam said:

"...there are some people that have simply earned the trust and admiration of an entire INDUSTRY!!!!"

"Nothing's been proved."

But it has. AGAIN, he HAS explained-it... BUT, it's over MY head.
 
who cares what the pros do? I could kick Steven Paul's ass in pool.

xoxoxo
 
I do not trust Stephen Pauls ears unless it is in a double-blind situation, because nobodys ears can be trusted unless it is in a double-blind situation. It is as easy as that.

If there are errors in the duplication process, that is easily verifyable. You just rip the written CD to a WAV file and compare that with the original wav file byte by byte. No sweat.

And if there are errors in the duplication process, those errors would have a minimum with different speeds depending on what equipmnet you have. There is therefore no way you can say "1x is better" because it then depends on the equipment.

Nobodys magic can be trusted. Not even Stephen Pauls, and least of all mine.
 
Okay... I guess it's time I said a few things to all you 'geniuses' out there...

First of all, I guess I'd better keep this short as I can, as I certainly am aghast at the concept that the few posts here and to rec.audio.pro which were, as someone here so delicately put it, loooooong, and therefore without interest or merit, and boring, and fatuous, rather than an attempt to honor those who responded to me by trying to give a thorough and complete explanation for something, rather than a flippant two sentence answer. (I get PAID for writing long, boring unhumorous things, you know.)

You know, when I first visited this group the experience was so pleasant that I told Weston that I wished I could come back more often as compared to the self-styled 'genius-gurus' at RAP, this place was really a nice change... How sad to see it seems to have become another bunch (with a few exceptions) of ignorant misleading self-styled gurus who should really a) Take the wax out of their ears, b) STOP reading idiotic spec sheets that tell you nothing, c) get a job doing family counseling so that compared to your advice the people in bad marriages start to listen to each other, and d) at the risk of seeming like an egotistical jerk, (which I try not to be, but I'm sure I am from time to time) if you don't know who I am, you SURE as hell don't know enough about audio, computers, OR recording techniques in general to be telling anybody here =anything=...

Now that's out of the way <evil grin> I am not going to apologize for what I had no idea someone dug up from months and months ago, which was part of a discussion on RAP which was started by a 'numbers' guy, and finished up with total frustration on my part at trying to handle what was a reply that I considered 'reasonable practice to remain on the safe side' to someone asking about the difference between 1x and higher speed CDR reproduction. (And because of which general attitudes, I have absented myself from that group for the last four months in disgust.)

I came up here through an invite from Weston to discuss this subject, having NO idea that remarks of mine, snapshotted at the end of a stupid and disrespectful thread, (not to mention totally ignorant of what we call 'art') in the process of mastering... (an art to which I received my first exposure as an artist on Columbia in 1966) had been posted without my knowledge or out of context with the general mien of this fallen group (RAP and now, apparently, Home Recording) though the repost was doubtless well-intentioned...

My Voice Recognition software is down, and I'm typing with my thumbs, so this won't take =too= long... Those of you who really think you know what you're doing =great=... but DON'T inflict it on some of these people desperately trying to understand what to do... your comments alone show that you are unqualified to answer this question (the blind leading the blind, whereupon both shall fall into the ditch) and one other great quote from Jesus, "Take the beam out of thine own eye, before you remove the mote from your brother's".

I see that somehow, unfortunately with a few exceptions, (neadam, at least you show some fundamental good sense and tried to think the problem through and you hit much closer to the heart of the issue than these other great minds here, and I say that NOT because of your kind remarks about my work, but because you are almost wholly there... the only thing lacking I will touch upon, lest this post become another overly long post which apparently is intolerable to those here seemingly afflicted with ADD, [Attention Deficit Disorder] and furthermore are not here to learn, but to teach their own ill-conceived Truth as Law, if not after making a rep for themselves as a fast gun because they can throw crap on someone apparently well-regarded and not here to defend themselves) this group has degenerated into another typical group of a few seekers being led by a LOT of unqualified hacks.

Sorry about the language, but if you're going to take me on behind my back, and you have no idea who I am, I guess you've got homework to do. All I can say to this 'tude is, "No, it isn't safe, it's very dangerous, and we should be very, very careful." --Dustin Hoffman, 'Marathon Man'

To get down before I take my leave of all the rocket scientists here... if you cannot understand the concept of mass, and how it affects =everything= from formula cars, to F-117s (a former AF F111b airman talking here, 77th wing) to microphone diaphragms (which I hope at this point we have well and soundly demonstrated, and as a result you have mondo choices in your condenser big-membrane mikes now, which you did not have before I started SPA 17 years ago, and wrote the book on how to do it) to hard disk drives, and the extremely weighty coils of wire glued to the round circuit card through which the lens pokes in your CD ROM recorder, perhaps you need some instruction in basic phsysics, which I am not here to give you...

If you are lame enough to think that the requirements of software and audio are equal, all I can say is, "Good luck!"

I will conclude by simply saying that examples of my own work in the field of recording, which -led- to my capsule developments, now copied even by Neumann themselves (who will send you to us if you have need of any 50-series capsules as we are currently the only source in the world for them, being the only lab left on earth with the precision equipment, hand designed, conceived, and machined by Yours Truly to recreate and improve upon these delicate things that Neumann themselves has lost the art of making) can be found on my MP3.com page, which contains examples of my recording work based on my apparently faulty and ill-understood judgements. Here you may also find my bio, which might give you some small idea of who, where, how, and what I have recorded over the years, as well as the reults of my application of my warped ideas towards my own recordings.

(One of which BTW is currently #12 on the acoustic rock chart, a duet with Valerie Carter.)

Sorry for the intemperate and excruciatingly long post, (=believe= me, it hurts me, much worse than it hurts you!) but imagine my surprise and dismay, coming up here after following the link my friend Weston sent me, expecting to find a reasoned and intelligent discussion going on to which I was willing to take some time and contribute, and instead I find a vast majority of you stuck in your inane pecadillos with severe cases of Cranial Rectosis... (You figure that one out... obviously most of you are ready for your doctorates in Pro Recording... surely you must understand the diagnosis of the doctor here, concerning the implications of where you have your heads.)

In case you also would like some indication of who "This Stephen Paul guy is" you may also find out by visiting our spaudio site, both links below...

Perhaps after some looking, reading and listening, and if I am informed that I would be addressing a somewhat chastened group, (if not better informed and at least a modicum of respectfulness) I might one day consider returning... until then, take a good, long, hard look at yourselves in the mirror, (those of you who can stand to) and ask yourselves, "What have I done to truly serve my brother today," and I don't mean for lunch.

Most of you guys really gave me an awfully good laugh today... no wonder pros like myself don't visit these things anymore... who needs this? I can get better laughs going to a studio.

Yours truly,
That Giant Bag of Unrepressed Wind
Stephen Paul
President
Stephen Paul Audio Inc.
Los Angeles
http://www.mp3.com/stephenpaul
http://www.spauio.com
 
Stephen quotes me at some points in his post, which leads me to beleive that he somehow includes me in the group of people that he racks down on, and probably among the people that he says are "taking me on behind my back, and have no idea who I am". If he hadn't quoted me I wouldn't at all have thought he ment me, since I have done no such thing.

See, even if I HAD known who Stephen Paul are, I wouldn't care. No ones ears, no matter how inflated that persons view of his own fame is, can be trusted unless it is a double blind situation. And no magical sound improvement tricks can be trusted unless they can be explained.

Thats a fact. And it's not any criticism against anybody, and least of all against Stephen Paul. It is just a realistic reminder, that if somebody tries to sell you a sound improving idea but can't tell you why or how it works, they are most likely wrong. This is what this posting started with (and it wasn't Stephen Paul).

Now, this is repeating myself. I won't do that anymore. I have sad what I have to say, and I have shared my knowledge and experience with others. Thats what *I* do for my sisters and brothers. I can not force anybody to listen. If you don't want to, you don't have to. And there is absolutely no reason to get upset about it, and there is no reason to write long posts racking down on other people. I like to give advice and share my experince with others, because I want others to give me advice and share their experiences with me. Thats how we all grow.
You can either take my advice or you can leave it. But don't go around whining about it.
 
And There You Have It

Directly from the horse' mouth.

I don't know what else to tell you guys after ALL this. Obviously, discussion groups such as this wonderful place the great Dragon has created for us all is pointless for you to participate in. You're wasting EVERYONE'S time; not to mention your own. NO MATTER what the opinion or who it's from, their words do not hold ANY merit considering they actually knew what the hell they were creating an opinion about. Sorry Stephen, you're life does not count considering YOU'RE THE MAD SCIENTIST. You stupid idiot!!! Don't you know you're suppose to figure in your OWN biases into the experiment; everything you KNOW from ALL you've learned over the MANY years? Obviously, Stephen, you are too wasting our time as well as your own life. Damn it!!! Get with the program!!!

Ahhh... Snap out of your dream.

It KEEPS on being mentioned that Stephen can't explain a DAMN THING of "why" or "how". The fact IS you SIMPLY DON'T WANT to hear it; especially when it was explain (even if it's over your head or mine) in the quotes of Stephen from RAP I posted HERE previously in THIS VERY thread.

You want to talk about what this post was started with? It SURE AS HELL WASN'T accusing Stephen Paul of trying "to sell you a sound improvement idea" with his inflated view of his own fame. Yeah. We've ALL seen how Stephen likes to puts himself upon a pedestal above us ALL when he visited us for the first time in the Dragon Cave. Boy. What a pissing-match THAT one was. FAR worse than what you're pissing-on here.

HELL, while we're pissing-on Stephen Paul's credibility, disrespecting him, and down-right being rude, might as well run-off Bruce Bartlett. He's just trying "to sell you a sound improvement idea" too.

Pros at homerecording.com? They don't belong in here anyway!!!

Man. All this sarcasm is starting to make me actually believe it.

NOT!!!

But I'll leave you with this...

Considering Digital Domain http://www.digido.com has been brought-up in this thread (heaven forbid we bring-up something to discuss the original topic) since it IS one of the BEST sources on subjects as such as this, I thought I'd share this with you.

Or do we not hold ANY merit to what's on there either since it does not say their tests are blind tests?

Glenn Meadows' tests were done around October '98 (at least that's when it was last updated on the site). While VERY useful in comparing 2X speed vs. 4X speed,, it really did not compare much of 1X speed vs. 2x speed.

Well I have a cover letter and a rates-sheet for Digital Domain's services which came together. The rates-sheet must have not be as updated as the cover letter considering the rates-sheet had a 2X speed glass master as standard. If you wanted a 1X speed glass master, you had to request it and it was an additional $125US.

Well the cover letter (dated February 15, 2000) says something a little different about the glass master. OK, a BIG difference. Hehe...

The entire paragraph containing information about the glass master on the cover says:

"A word on sound quality: Many people are not aware that glass mastering and even pressing cycle time affects your pressed CD. If you are interested in obtaining the best-sounding CD pressings, insist on 1X glass mastering. We only (with "only" in bold) glass master at 1X speed, proved to sound best by numerous blind tests. We do not charge extra for 1X speed; our quality control, our silk-screening and packaging are the best in the industry. Our competitors charge extra for 1X speed glass mastering; many of them don't even know what that means! Stick with a vender you can trust-- a quality product sells better and sounds better."

Well that said "numerous blind tests". Are they REALLY blind tests even when they say they're blind tests? How do you know? MMMmmm... Let me see... TRUST!!!

I'm sorry Stephen for bringing you back here for this, but I had to let you know.

Weston
 
Recording Engineer said:
You want to talk about what this post was started with? It SURE AS HELL WASN'T accusing Stephen Paul of trying "to sell you a sound improvement idea" with his inflated view of his own fame.
Click to expand...

Exactly. Which I also pointed out in my previous post. I think your understanding of what I'm trying to say probably would improve if you read it first. Maybe then you wouldn't be pissed off without any reason either.
I have said that you shouldn't trust people that try to do sell you a sound impovement idea without explaining how it works, and since Stephen doesn't do this, I have absolutely no idea why you think I'm referring to him when I say that.

HELL, while we're pissing-on Stephen Paul's credibility, disrespecting him,
Click to expand...

If you are, thats up to you. I sure as hell aint, and have never been doing it. My opinions are clearly stated in this thread. If you do not care to read what I am writing, there is nothing I can do about it. It is you who get to look like you can't read, so it's your problem.

and down-right being rude,
Click to expand...

Yes, you sure are being rude, and generally behaving like a complete moron. I have absolutely no idea why, but if you think I will listen to your advice in the future, you should probably stop it. The respect I have had for you this far is now gone.
 
Fuck

Is this thread still going ..........
I go away for a month to have a holiday from the site and come back to this LOL

Tony
 
I read through this entire thread and don't see anything posted by regebro that warrants this type of response.

Everyone is entitled to his or her opinions, whether you agree or disagree is the point - that's discussion, and how things are learned.

I guess we won't be graced with s_paul's presence again anytime soon - the whole site has been condemned because of a difference of opinion in one thread on the BBS? Give me a break.
 
waste of time

Thats why I dont bother comin here anymore
everybodys slingin shit at everyone
 
Hmmm...

"I read through this entire thread and don't see anything posted by regebro that warrants this type of response.

No?

"I have no clue what this Stephen Paul guy is ranting about. He just seems very upset with the whole universe, but can't explain why..."

"Anyway, my original point was that the original post was bogus. Digital data does NOT degrade when copied, unless there is an error in the copying process. Thats it."

"See, even if I HAD known who Stephen Paul are, I wouldn't care. No ones ears, no matter how inflated that persons view of his own fame is, can be trusted unless it is a double blind situation."

"Thats a fact. And it's not any criticism against anybody, and least of all against Stephen Paul. It is just a realistic reminder, that if somebody tries to sell you a
sound improving idea but can't tell you why or how it works, they are most likely wrong. This is what this posting started with (and it wasn't Stephen Paul)."

"Yes, you sure are being rude, and generally behaving like a complete moron."

"The respect I have had for you this far is now gone."

Everyone is entitled to his or her opinions, whether you agree or disagree is the point - that's discussion, and how things are learned."

Yeah, that's why regebro was out of line to respond the way he did to the Stephen Paul quotes I posted. He kept-on implying Stephen couldn't exlain himself.
 
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