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CLASP
(yes, author confuses bits & bytes)
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/st...2/1?csp=34news
excerpts:
The recording studio is the same Music Row space where stars such as
Elvis Presley,
Chet Atkins and
Joe Cocker made albums during an era in which bulky analog tape decks faithfully captured the sound in a studio and music was sold on vinyl records. Analog captures the entire spectrum of sound, as does vinyl, because the music isn't compressed or squeezed to fit.
Digital recordings, on the other hand, are captured by computers, which record only certain slices of sound at split-second intervals that are then encoded into computer language. All those 1's and 0's end up representing a numeric interpretation of sound.
But Niemann's recording session relied on a new piece of recording machinery known as CLASP, which takes a hybrid approach.
It records on analog tape and feeds it into a digital machine, giving producers the ease of editing digital with a better-recorded sound, said CLASP's inventor, local music business entrepreneur Chris Estes.
Vinyl is most faithful medium
Although no medium is capable of duplicating exactly the quality of a live performance, the best audio recordings and playback equipment capture the entire range of sound in the studio.
Vinyl is the most faithful medium, with no compression or translation of music.
Among digital recordings, Blu-ray offers one of the highest resolutions possible — the biggest digital space to capture and then rebroadcast a much higher portion of the recorded sound.
But CDs subtract portions of the sound to fit on discs. And MP3s subtract even more.
In mathematical terms, a typical Blu-ray song contains 2,304,000 bits of information. A CD contains a third of that — about 705,600 bits.
But a digital version — an MP3 downloaded from iTunes or the Internet — captures just 70,000 bits.
For all of the hundreds or thousands of minute human-driven adjustments of microphones, sound boards, mixing and mastering that go into constructing a professional album, it's a computer software program that uses a standard algorithm that decides which of the millions of bits of information aren't necessary for the human ear — in effect, which parts of a song a listener can do without.