½ a decibel louder

I rather like audiophile music brands. It’s nice to have recordings captured with integrity, often with higher than usual resolution, sometimes with surround sound. I like Blue Coast Records for just that reason. I’ve downloaded one of its DSD files for testing purposes, and on the rare device which can play it this sounds wonderful.

But I stumbled across something which casts into doubt any and all of its claims.

It sells some of its recordings on ‘MQD’ CDs. MQD stands for ‘Master Quality Disc’ and they are carefully constructed and use a 24 karat gold data layer. Blue Coast says that they are archival quality and can last for 300 years.

All that’s well and good, if true.

The company will also sell you blank MQD CDs, which you can burn yourself (does the dye on a recordable disc last as long as the gold substrate? Who knows!)

This is where things go off the rails. It makes a number of claims which are just plain idiotic:

When used for mastering music

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, we have noticed an increase of approximately ½ db in volume along with better frequency response and enhanced imaging when compared to our former mastering discs. We suggest you compare with your regular blank discs by recording the same music on to both and do a blind listening test.

Now they say that these discs have a lower error rate, by which I assume they mean a reduced number of incorrectly recorded bits. But this ought to be low anyway. What it cannot do is change either the volume or the frequency response, let along the imaging. It simply can’t.

To increase the level by some portion of a decibel means to alter the actual samples. Not just a few, but tens of thousands of them on a wholesale basis by a significant amount. If this is the more accurate medium, then the replaced one must have been on average reducing the absolute value of the samples. By how much? Half a decibel reduction is a 5.6% reduction.

But why would errors be biased towards the zero value? Bit errors should be random around the correct value.

And how would this affect frequency response? I assume they mean the top end, but bit accuracy has no effect on any particular frequency. The stream of samples is pretty indifferent to frequencies, and all the different frequencies are plastered over the top of all the other frequencies.

Still, they give themselves the traditional out: ‘Many of you may not hear the difference, which is fine. But a few of you will.’

In fact, if a half decibel of volume were a reality, it would be clearly revealed in properly conducted double blind tests. Not necessarily as volume difference, but as some qualitative difference. In fact, what this statement does is prime some people so that they are more likely to imagine a difference.

The problem with these silly claims is that they lead me to doubt the reliability of their other claims.

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3 Responses to ½ a decibel louder

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