King Crimson DVD-A Discussion

ssully said:

But resolution of the source format is not increased by this or any other method....it can't be done. What you're doing is avoiding adding possibly audible artifacts that could possibly lower the 'resolution'. And the main benefit is coming from the bit depth increase (16-->24) not the SR increase.

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I agree with you about not gaining anything by simply upsampling the source. But you absolutely get a benefit from all other aspects of your hi-res session - fader moves, EQ, panning, reverb/effects, etc.

For example, just dealing with fader moves - using my project - a 16-bit (native) mixing session would provide 65,536 possible levels. At 24 you get 16,777,216 levels. Just a simple fade-out reveals a dramatic, smoother difference.

Now, if the King Crimson ADAT masters were 48/16 or 441/16 and SW brought them up to 96/24 or even 48/24, the entire 360 panning soundstage, placement of instruments, fader moves and EQ, reverb would benefit from the higher-res session rate.

Neil may correct me if I'm wrong.

Felix E. Martinez said:

I agree with you about not gaining anything by simply upsampling the source. But you absolutely get a benefit from all other aspects of your hi-res session - fader moves, EQ, panning, reverb/effects, etc.

For example, just dealing with fader moves - using my project - a 16-bit (native) mixing session would provide 65,536 possible levels. At 24 you get 16,777,216 levels. Just a simple fade-out reveals a dramatic, smoother difference.

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Yes, which is why I said the main benefit comes from working in a higher bit domain. It safeguards against audible degradation developing from accumulated quantization errors during extensive digital production/processing. Without it these errors would be most audible during low-level signal (fade-ins/outs). This is one of the few completely noncontroversial benefit of 'high res' vs 16/44. And it's primarily a production thing. You can downconvert the finished product to 16/44 for consumer delivery, and still retain the benefit. (though nowadays, with so much home audio hardware using DSP, a 16 bit signal likely is going to get upconverted to 24bit and high SR anyway)

Felix E. Martinez said:

Neil I'm sure will have a better way of explaining this, but my own personal experience from remixing material in stereo/surround orig recorded at 48/16 (Tascam DA-88s in my case) was that you set up your project at 96/24, import all the tracks, and yes, these will be upsampled to the session rate (96/24). But here's where you get the benefit...now, all your fader moves, EQ, panning, reverb/effects, etc. will be in a 96/24 environment, and when you bounce to disk or create your final stereo or M/C master, the resultant file is a bonafide 96/24 file with all its benefits.

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That's absolutely spot on.
With the higher sample rates there is much more to it than simply extending the frequency response.

Recently I have seen a most succinct post on the benefits of high SR recently; here are bullet points:

f you're simply relying on the high sample rate to keep processing aliases out of the audible band, you need to go into the MHz for some operations. Or do them in a smarter way....[K]eeping the base Nyquist limit a little higher when you're resampling through each of many different DSPs can help in an objective and measurable sense: it can mitigate some of the effects of careless processing and/or resampling in each DSP module. This can be audible is the processing is bad enough - e.g. really trashy resampling. But is the improvement enough to turn trash into perfection? No.

...

[P]eople do it because they can, and they believe it sounds better. Despite an almost total lack of any corroborating evidence. Plus a few people will pay more for a recording at a higher sample rate, for the same reason.

...
I guess the question becomes: why wouldn't you do it? If it costs nothing, and sells one more copy, or lets you charge some people more, or gets you bragging rights in some circles, then it's "worth it" - even if the technical benefit is zero

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An update from Mr Fripp in his diary - both the March 6 and 7 entries have him at "Wilson World HQ" working on Three of a Perfect Pair, though no mention of any release dates for anything yet.

Odys said:

I suspect the issue is with Canadian Mail/Customs, rather than Burning Shed. I always get things from BS very quickly in the U.S. On the other hand, I've given up shipping anything to my many relatives in Canada, it takes weeks for them to get anything, and often it's been opened and gone through by Customs.

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with mail going to CA, I was advised by a member who lives there and we send each other discs, his advice is:
put a value of $15.00 on the tag, and write happy birthday on the package. I do not know if they have been opend, but I do know they are not delayed coming down to the US. I wouldn't assume BS will do this.

An interesting update on Lark's Tongues: http://www.dgmlive.com/news.htm?entry=3778

The 40th Anniversary edition of Larks' Tongues In Aspic is currently being prepared and DGM and Panegyric are currently on the hunt for any previously unheard in-concert recordings of the LTIA quintet (with Jamie Muir) from their only UK tour.

It’s primarily first generation recordings only that the team are looking for. That said if you reckon you have a better quality boot to the one’s that are already out there then get in touch as well.

If you are in contact with anyone holding on to such items please let them know and we’ll arrange to transfer the recording and let them have their original back.

In addition to audience recordings, we are also looking for any eye-witness accounts of anyone who saw the LTIA quintet in concert.

If you think you can help with either of the above items - LTIA quintet only - then please drop us a line via [email protected]

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Thanks to the Sid Smith post visible within on April 3rd, I was reminded to nab all of the Andrew Keeling KC books once and for all!

Neil, any updates on the next reissues in the series?
Last time, you gave us full details in July. I'll patiently wait another month if I have to...

Also, are you authoring the new ELP reissues too?

rtbluray said:

Neil, any updates on the next reissues in the series?
Last time, you gave us full details in July. I'll patiently wait another month if I have to...

Also, are you authoring the new ELP reissues too?

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1 - not that I can talk about right now.
2 - I'd love to but have not been asked.

neil wilkes said:

1 - not that I can talk about right now.
2 - I'd love to but have not been asked.

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1 - ok, I will continue to wait in anticipation for the big news (of content, I know the discs are Larks' and Beat, right? Hope Three of a Perfect Pair for this year too)
2 - that's a shame. I'm really beginning to doubt that these ELPs will be DVD-A, unless Craigman Digital is authoring these. I don't know of any other DVD-A authoring companies. It's also a shame that Sony's not embracing their own creation of Blu-Ray in this instance.

Also just curious, in the case of KC reissues, what are the qualifications for being a DVD QC tester (besides being a member of QQ )

rtbluray said:

1 - ok, I will continue to wait in anticipation for the big news (of content, I know the discs are Larks' and Beat, right? Hope Three of a Perfect Pair for this year too)
2 - that's a shame. I'm really beginning to doubt that these ELPs will be DVD-A, unless Craigman Digital is authoring these. I don't know of any other DVD-A authoring companies. It's also a shame that Sony's not embracing their own creation of Blu-Ray in this instance.

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I thought Steven Wilson had said the upcoming ELPs were DTS DVDs (which implied lossy DVDV)..??

fredblue said:

I thought Steven Wilson had said the upcoming ELPs were DTS DVDs (which implied lossy DVDV)..??

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Thats what it sayus on his Facebook site

So based on past years, we should be getting info (either from Neil or KC's website) in the next few weeks about the next reissues in the series. (They always tend to post the info sometime after mid-July).

I think the remaining three SW remixes (LTIA, Beat, and TOAPP) all offer great opportunities for video extras (let alone audio extras).

For LTIA, there's the Beat Club footage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhudDa3JAyc (and I hope they've found ALL of the footage from this show)
From Beat, I found this footage on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leqotLER_IY as well as this promo video for Heartbeat http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPO3pJEieSU
And From TOAPP, there's the promo video for Sleepless as well as this live performance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSRmv-WZyvE

So I'm looking forward to seeing what Fripp, SW, Neil, and co. bring us next!

And every one of those links is a bootleg upload.
This is the problem with bloody YouTube - stuff gets stolen so easily, and then everyone wonders why the labels stop bothering......sites like this are doing nobody - especially the artists - any favours when it's pirated content.

rtbluray said:

So based on past years, we should be getting info (either from Neil or KC's website) in the next few weeks about the next reissues in the series. (They always tend to post the info sometime after mid-July).

I think the remaining three SW remixes (LTIA, Beat, and TOAPP) all offer great opportunities for video extras (let alone audio extras).

For LTIA, there's the Beat Club footage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhudDa3JAyc (and I hope they've found ALL of the footage from this show)
From Beat, I found this footage on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leqotLER_IY as well as this promo video for Heartbeat http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPO3pJEieSU
And From TOAPP, there's the promo video for Sleepless as well as this live performance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSRmv-WZyvE

So I'm looking forward to seeing what Fripp, SW, Neil, and co. bring us next!

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The 1st link, the video was pulled due to a copyright issue anyway.

hey Neil, you sound like CEO of major label or Metallica's Lars Ulrich
relax, those, who is happy with youtube quality, anyway wouldn't buy anything in either formats.
those, to whom quality and physical medium matters, will still to buy, inspite of free distribution over internet.

0tto said:

hey Neil, you sound like CEO of major label or Metallica's Lars Ulrich
relax, those, who is happy with youtube quality, anyway wouldn't buy anything in either formats.
those, to whom quality and physical medium matters, will still to buy, inspite of free distribution over internet.

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its still technically illegal (theft, even) as they don't own the rights to disseminate any of it on you tube, or anywhere for that matter.

i feel very iffy about all this.

on the one hand, i can see fans want to see all this rare and unreleased video footage and to them, when its seemingly not officially available anywhere, its the only way..

but on the other hand, I agree with Neil. you can see why the labels become so disenchanted and less inclined to spend good money trawling through the archives for this stuff, to spend more money on restoring it all and then even more money releasing it, when folk just share and upload it all on you tube, willy nilly.

just like the PF Pompeii film, when i got battered for saying it was wrong for all the effort (and peoples money invested) to be used to restore a film that they didn't own the rights to - but who knows, PF/EMI (or whoever) may seemingly be on the case.. how do we know what they're upto!?

the labels like to keep a lot of stuff close to their chest, for all sorts of reasons and thats their prerogative, whether you like it or not.

Well I'm certainly not posting any more links after all this...Geez I never thought I'd get people all riled up.

I'm just really excited to see what bonus stuff we get with the next set of reissues, particularly Larks.
I was listening to it last night on CD, and I honestly believe this album has the worst mix out of all the early KC albums, so I'm really looking forward to hearing what SW's done to improve it.

And anyway DGM IMO has been taking advantage of the fans by selling crappy bootleg recordings for the exact same price as the better quality stuff from multi-tracks and soundboards.

For example this show is worth the price being charged, because of the good quality, whereas this show should be sold at half that price currently being charged cause of the poor quality.

But one thing I must applaud them for concerning these 40th Anniversary reissues is that they have used excellent quality footage thus far on the DVDs, instead of giving us crappy quality bootleg footage like Genesis did for their reissues.