Metal Reviews

I recently bought a decent receiver, and have discovered the joys of 24-bit FLAC audio. Among other things, I have reconnected with the Beatles catalog which sounds glorious in high fidelity, even the songs I used to hate (such as 'All You Need is Love').

I am wondering, are there some good resources on the internet to find high resolution metal? Or is metal a genre that even needs or would benefit from 24-bit? Most of what I have found is classical, jazz, pop, prog, rock etc. Very little metal other than Metallica.

Metal would sound the best because there is a ton of harmonic distortion in it from guitar amps and higher and higher orders of frequencies and overtones would be far more accurate with 24 bit. Metal albums would sound amazing in a studio. They are mixed most likely in the highest quality imaginable and altered to work with 16-bit CD. NB and CM have a ton of releases that are HDCD which sound far superior to the redbook. Panasonic owns the codec so go buy one of their DVD players to make this playable.

People also forget that even though CD can get up to 20.5Khz which is supposedly the human hearing limit. That is techncally true but also wholey false. the harmonics up to the radio frequencies drastically alter the sound when absent and distorted. Ty it. Load up a track with audacity that is 96Khz and mess around with stuff higher than 25Khz and there is a clear difference. In any event a lot of bits are used for anti-aliasing purposes as well so you won't necessarily get a distortion free signal to the Nyquist frequency.

In reality the HDCD releases are more realistic and widely available and likely what the actual master sounds like. CD's sound like a copy. Avoid Steve Hoffman related albums and products. I saw Dio's camp (?) accussed of cashing in on BM when his dumb ass liscenced the right for a "audiophile version" that is simply a tape transfer of a second generation from the "real" master that he acts like he made some huge improvement to when it is a scratch tape that has not been mastered. Actual entire tracks going missing is a hallmark of his laziness and ignorance.. Don't do it. Stick with the REAL label that put it out. They actually have the master. His loudness war is the stupest thing ever. Everyone in every genre has ignored his point because they don't like a ton of unused bits describing the signal. 48db of headroom equals an 8-bit recording. You can do the math. A brand new album has no reason to tolerate the limitations of tapeless recordings.

I think we can't keep going on acting like CDs's and especially MP3 are actually the album made in the studio. Every High resolution format I've heard sounded much truer to the source and songs are much more realistic that way. MP3's are the worst thing to ever happen to music. There's a reason no one really cares, because it's half the frequencies are missing from the version you've tirelessly heard. Your mind doesn't like a drastic decrease of detail to encode information.

I'm very excited about the future. Some albums from metal I have you just know it sounds sharper, crisper and 100% distortionless on the master, but the CD just didn't have it.

Thanks for the interesting reply.

I really have to try this. I remember I had this discussion with Addy months ago, and I still haven't tried. Let's see if I can hear the difference.

Ya know, for all of the stuff you say it still annoys me that you keep getting this basic thing mixed up. Bit depth has nothing to do with frequency. That's the sample rate. Bit depth is the number of volume levels available. Sample rate is to do with the frequency that can be captured. Ergo the bit depth couldn't care less for any overtones unless they're really fucking loud.

Also most mics'll not capture anyway stuff that high anyway as they're not built for it. Your most common mic for recording guitars, the SM57, has a roll off starting from 15kHz and drops out at just over 20kHz. A mic trying to vibrate at 20+kHz at silly SPLs would cause the diaphragm to rupture, and you'd have one dead mic. Basic physics.

A tad pedantic.

You are wrong. Bit depth has everything to do with anti-aliasing of frequencies (dithering?) and the more headroom a signal can capture the further the spectrum it can get before it has to sacrifice. Yes. I am talking about shit that is buried down in the -60 to -90db range. naturally most instruments roll off at a certain level per octave but the overtones are still present and avoiding noise floor that would mask said frequencies. You are working from a simplified version of how these things work and not how they actually work. A mic that can go up to 40Khz that is capturing the overtones in the 20-40Khz octave at -89db is going to retain far more information at 24-bits than 16-bits. The 16-bit wouldn't even capture those because of anti-aliasing, I believe. The noise floor alone would effectively mute them anyway. As far as masking goes, I refuse to accept that a higher order overtone that is buried deep in the signal is actually being masked because it is accompanying different space entirely, but I am sure that arguement is when mixing two signals at any event.

A SM57 is a dynamic moving coil mic which almost always roll off at 15Khz, that does not mean they contain no frequencies above 15K or 20Khz (where you say it can not capture info). They do, I can get my dynamic mic (Behringer XD3500) to capture the frequencies of my voice all the way up to 48Khz, albeit nowhere near as loud as it's operating range. However these are very critical frequencies as I have exhaustively pointed out. This is beside the point. Condensors are far more commonly used in the studio and they extend all the way up to 80Khz in some cases with 20 or 40Khz being more normal. But for drums I wouldn't even consider less than 80K for cymbal miking. Dynamic mics would be used for drums and guitar amps because the pressure gradients would break a condensor.