Hi Paul:

You must have sent that message from a "smart" device, or you've taken up typing with your tongue!
;)

To your point, that's what I was saying, that I suspect the problems Emerick heard were in the
audible band, driven by what was happening in the ultrasonics, or causing the ultrasonics (that may
be more directly your point).

I think it's also been shown that a big problem with early CD technology was the design of the
low-pass filtering on the DAC side of things. If I recall, Sony's design did it in the analog realm
and sounded particuarly "harsh," "brittle" and "metallic." Philips did someting additional in the
digital realm (I might have it reversed), and their DACs tended to sound better, according to
reviews of the time. I suspect what people were hearing was ringing from the brickwall filter, in
the audible bands.

-- Tom Fine

----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Stamler" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2014 10:09 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Fwd: [ARSCLIST] "Why Vinyl Is the Only Worthwhile Way to Own Music"


> On 3/25/2014 9:38 AM, Tom Fine wrote:
>> The Rupert Neve thinking came about because he had designed a new mic
>> preamp and was with Geoff Emerick, who was testing it at Abbey Road.
>> Neve said that Emerick told him that "something is oscillating,"
>> although no one could hear anything. Sure enough, looking on a scope,
>> there were oscillations at ultrasonic frequencies. What I wonder is,
>> would a sharp-eared engineer listening at high SPLs typical of the 70s
>> hear problems with lower harmonics of the oscillation, rather than
>> detect the oscillation through skin/ear stuff. In a way, it really
>> doesn't matter because sharp ears heard the problem, but it would be
>> interesting to know if ultrasonic material is beneficial to enjoying
>> music or if frequencies over 20k are mostly trouble and should thus be
>> filtered (which is the long-time thinking in most audio circles).
>
> I spoke with Geoff Emerick about this event; se said the piece of equipment was a new console,
> that, rather than tell Rupert Neve something was *osillatig* he said that he told Neve something
> :sounded wrong" or peraps was *ringing*. Neve investigated and discovered that some channels of
> the console did not have proper terminations on their transormers and were, indeed, ringing. Now,
> an improperly-terminated transformer can have all sorts of anomalies in the high frequencies, some
> of which manifest themselves as frequency and phase errors in the audible range. I'm not one to
> disparage Geoff Emerick's ears -- I have the utmost respect for them. But his report of hearing
> "something wrong" may have come from anomLies within the audible range, not above it.
>
> Peace,
> Paul
>
>