Remember that when your audience taping your also taping the room not just the band - I find my DSD recordings sound more open and have more of the room ambience then my 24 96khz PCM recordings
The DSD recordings give you a more of being there feeling
I find that very interesting, since it is one of the top-level recording goals for me. Besides the technical analysis Jon suggests (which I fully agree is more illuminating of actual differences in output, if not of subjective interpretations of differences), it would also be interesting to audibly compare recordings made simultaneously from the DSD and PCM outputs of the same converter to listen for differences. H20, If you ever get a chance to do that I'd be interested to hear your observations on the aspects you’ve noted. Whether any perceived differences are due to differences in converters, low level distortions, psychoacoustics, listener bias or whatever, the subjective impressions would be interesting, specifically in light of their contrast to, or correlation with those reached by technical analysis.
..my DSD recordings sound more open and have more of the room ambience then my 24 96khz PCM recordings
The DSD recordings give you a more of being there feeling
I mentioned above that’s a top goal for me, and I completely understand if you choose not to explore this route (you certainly would not be alone), but if that immersive ‘feeling of being there’ is important to you and you find the pursuit of even subtle improvements in conveying it worthwhile, you might consider recording for more than two channel playback. That’s been my primary motivator in moving to recording for 3, 4 or 5 transmission channels. When done well, the contrast with 2-channel stereo is not subtle, it is immediately apparent and downright tangible. Although there are a number of other playback aspects which also benefit, the “gives you more of a feeling of being there” thing is one of the most shockingly obvious ones both in my own listening experience and from the comments I hear most often from friends for whom I get to properly play these recordings. At this point that experience is not an easy one to share, but it conveys (future-proofs if you like) the ‘you are there’ aspect of the event to a far greater extent than relatively subtle differences from recording to higher resolutions. It is at least as dramatic and obvious a difference as going from mono to 2-channel stereo, and arguably more so. Forget about commercial surround music releases, I'm talking about live music recordings made more in the 'purest techniques' sense like we do around here.
To me the return on investment in recording for additional playback channels is so much higher than that from improved conversion or increased recording resolution above a certain threshold (for me that threshold is 24/48PCM with a decent current-day ADC, for others it may be 24/96, or 16/44.1 or whatever) that the decision of which route to take in pursuit of that goal has been an easy one. I acknowledge it’s a heavy investment- not only in recording and playback gear, and in recording expertise, but perhaps most importantly in a greatly reduced ability to share the experience widely, at least currently and into the near-future. Yet for me it's worth all that.
Topic: DSD over PCM (Read 9174 times)