What is PCM Stereo: 48K/24-bit?

[earwhig]

I decided to come here in my search and ask if anyone around here knows what this is. (What is PCM Stereo: 48K/24-bit?)

Reason:

A lot of music DVD's seem to be having this feature of sound quality. Why is it so special? What is it?

I got a DVD of a bunch of music videos by my one of my favorite bands. I was playing it one the DVD player on the computer of my recording setup, listening with my hafler TA 1600 amp and my Yorkville Ysm-1 monitors. It sounded great/better then the ordinary cd's of which these songs are also on. EXCEPT: My monitors tweek out on certain snare hits. (possibly around 5k???)-sounding VERY harsh, as if my monitors are puking/coughing out that one, lone frequency.....(This doesn't happen on said song(s) when I play them off of their olrignals cd's as apposed to playing them off of this music video DVD compilation)

Anyone have some thoughts/theories on this??? Please share.

 

[kq300325]

PCM stands for Pulse Code Modulation and is the process of turning analogue signals into serial digital data.

The 48K represents the sample rate. i.e. the data is sampled 48000 times per second.

The 24bit refers to the quantisation resolution. This process assigns a series of numbers to each sample which refer to a given amplitude.

Hope this helps there is much more to it but this is very basically it.

 

[mshilarious]

I decided to come here in my search and ask if anyone around here knows what this is. (What is PCM Stereo: 48K/24-bit?)

DVD-Audio has a number of different formats, that tells you which one it used. Choices are:

Stereo 24 bit/48K sample rate
Stereo 24 bit/96K
Stereo 24 bit/192K
Surround 24 bit/48K
Surround 24 bit/96K

There are probably more out there . . . anyway, what that tells you is that it's stereo only, no surround, and it uses a 24 bit word length, which means the recording has a theoretical 144dB dynamic range (practically it will have much less), and the sample rate tells you how frequently that 24 bit sample is taken. Higher sample rates correspond with higher frequency reproduction, although it's very controversial as to whether sample rates higher than 48K are truly useful. In fact we were just arguing about that on another board.

Oh, and PCM stands for 'pulse code modulation'. But you probably don't need to know that.

 

[earwhig]

""""listening with my hafler TA 1600 amp and my Yorkville Ysm-1 monitors. It sounded great/better then the ordinary cd's of which these songs are also on. EXCEPT: My monitors tweek out on certain snare hits. (possibly around 5k???)-sounding VERY harsh, as if my monitors are puking/coughing out that one, lone frequency.....(This doesn't happen on said song(s) when I play them off of their olrignal cd's as apposed to playing them off of this music video DVD compilation)

Anyone have some thoughts/theories on this??? Please share."""""""



Thanx for sharing the knowledge folks much appreciated

I'm also still wondering about this part of my question. I don't get this "single frequency harshness" (between1and5k, maybe) even when I CRANK the standard album versions of these songs my monitoring chain. (only happens with the 48k/24-bit DVD versions)

Why would this sound format and ONLY this format make my monitors sneeze(or distort) while everything else that I play through them (reg.DVD, CD, Vinyl, radio, VHS, my own music which can be very rough and harsh) sounds absolutely fine......could it be a faulty DVD???

.......what I mean by distort: It sounds as if the highest frequency of a few snare hits is jumping out of the speakers....or farting , if you will.

 

[mshilarious]

Why would this sound format and ONLY this format make my monitors sneeze(or distort) while everything else that I play through them (reg.DVD, CD, Vinyl, radio, VHS, my own music which can be very rough and harsh) sounds absolutely fine......could it be a faulty DVD???

.......what I mean by distort: It sounds as if the highest frequency of a few snare hits is jumping out of the speakers....or farting , if you will.

Almost certainly not the format. However, the DVD-A version will have been remastered, and who knows what happening during the remastering. I would guess that the original CD might be more compressed than the DVD, not because it necessarily has to be, but maybe the perception of DVD-A is a more dynamic format.

Just a wild guess though