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| camomile Best Audio | The entire disk is green |
In the past three times, we've been introducing how the recording engineer Tetsuya Abe and Mr. Kanai who is an audio design professional made tags and made Emma Fujita's album. This time, which will be the final round, I talked to Sony's Shigeru Inoue who worked to convert the sound made to DSD and make it SACD.
I asked about the flow of album production including the general theory of SACD production, such as what kind of tools were used for this SACD production, how it was done, what was different from PCM, and so on.
■ Create a DSD Disc with Sonoma and VAIO, a sound master, confirm it before pressing
Fujimoto: Looking at Mr. Inoue's business card, there is "Super Audio CD Project, DSD Engineer", but what kind of work do you do in this department and what kind of work do you do?
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| Shigeru Inoue |
Supporting the field (field) to clear it is field support. I myself originally designed the mechanism of the home audio products such as cassette deck, MD deck, CD player and SACD player, but because they wanted to motivate them to join the professional audio in the first place, I volunteered I have been doing this business since 2001.
Fujimoto: What kind of thing is field support in a bit more concretely?
Inoue: There are three major divisions. The first one is support for SACD production. It brings DSD equipment called Sonoma developed in-house to the studio, supports recording and mastering, etc. It helps in various aspects up to releasing SACD. The second is the awareness raising activity of the goodness of DSD. I went around every studio to have professional recording engineers, mastering engineers and others experience the goodness of sound. The first and the second are often linked, trying to record immediately when it comes to saying "Like" while listening to the sound as a studio caravan ... ....
In Japan alone, I was involved in more than 400 projects, including those that did not eventually become SACD. And the third is the activity to establish DSD / SACD production in the industry for the voluntary and ongoing release of SACD. At present, a specialized company for field support is also made in Japan, Europe and the United States, so the first activity is over and we are putting our emphasis on this third activity. Since a considerable number of studios and production companies have introduced DSD equipment in the past few years, I think that DSD / SACD production has penetrated considerably a lot.
Fujimoto: I got a name of Sonoma, but Sonoma is a start-up laboratory selling as an imported equipment from the United States, is not it Sony's equipment?
Inoue: Although it is somewhat confusing, originally Sonoma was developed by Sony's American unit. The prototype was completed in 2000 and it has been used as a field support tool for launching the SACD format.
But later members who developed and introduced Sonoma in the US spun out and established the Super Audio Center, LLC, to succeed Sonoma technology and commercialize it. What the sales laboratory sells is its Super Audio Center, LLC 's Sonoma Systems product.
The meaning of this Sonoma has two meanings, inspired by Idei, who was president at the time of announcement of the Super Audio CD, that he was "like something like wine, who knows who he knows" A wine-loving engineer can show that this editing system is the "SONY One-bit Multi Audio" system and its development was done in San Francisco close to the famous place of California wine, the north of San Francisco Named after the famous "Sonoma" of wine.
The prototype era was a multitrack of 8 ch and had an internal mixer containing EQ of Sony Oxford (now independent Oxford Digital Ltd.), but Sonoma which was commercialized from Super Audio Center System has become a recorder that can expand to 32 tracks by further strengthening the multitrack property by omitting the mixer function etc. By the way, the mixer function of the prototype era is inherited to the DAW called DSD 8 of UK SADiE.
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| Sonoma |
Inoue: Yeah, Sonoma is a Windows based application with a dedicated PCI card inside. In addition to signal processing, the dedicated PCI card is also an interface for connecting AD and DA with ST-Link. In this example, we convert from ST-Link to BNC connection using prototype conversion box and use Sony prototype AD "DSDX-202" and DA "DSDX-201".
Fujimoto: I'd like to tell you a story about this project, but what kind of position is Mr. Inoue participating in the album production by Emi Fujita?
Inoue: Since it was authorized that Kanai oversees all the processes of this project, this time Kanai got a voice from me and I was supposed to support the master production process in general.
Fujimoto: What kind of work does it specifically mean?
Inoue: First of all, it is examination of all the production process leading up to master. And I made final master production with the mastering engineer of Pony Canyon.
What I was asked from Kanai was to make a master of DSD with a sound that is not different from the sound when I was mixing, but in fact there are several methods. As Abe is working on the mix at 24 bit / 96 kHz PCM, I have digital data in the form of PCM. So I thought about file conversion and DD conversion from PCM to DSD, but I thought that it was not suitable for this project empirically. Sure enough, in file conversion it was a situation where Kanei's OK did not come out.
Meanwhile, as a result of combining Abe's equipment which Kanai tune-up and the equipment developed and adjusted by the development member of former SACD, analog output and analog suction, I decided to go through analog sucking at one shot . Even if I actually listen to it, I do not understand the difference at all. Again there is only one thing that examines one cable, one.
Fujimoto: Is the Sonoma equipment that used the DSD siphoning?
Inoue: That 's right. However, this is not the Sonoma System currently sold by the start laboratory, but the prototype developed in-house. As I mentioned earlier, Sony Oxford's EQ etc. are also installed, but this time I do not change the sound at all in Sonoma, so it's obviously not totally fiddling with it. The result sucked up by Sonoma was reproduced by Sonoma, and we confirmed that there was no change in sound. In addition, this time we did groundbreaking things due to one production process. Originally, the sound of the final SACD was not heard unless SACD was pressed, but I tried using the example DSD disk. Using DSA data sucked up by Sonoma with VAIO, I made a DSD disc with a takumi DVD-R. And by playing with the combination of PLAYSTATION 3 and TA - DA 3200ES tuned by Kanai, we check the sound in the environment as close to the final product as possible before pressing.
As you can burn the DSD disc, you can immediately check the sound from the disc, so by feedbacking the results of the audition on the spot and fine tuning the equipment again we were able to actually help improve the quality of the master.
Fujimoto: Because of its structure, SACD can not burn with write-once, but can DSD discs be considered as a write-once version of SACD and it does not matter?
Inoue: Although there is a fundamental difference in the mechanism of protection and arrangement of data, the fundamental part related to sound quality is exactly the same with DSD, so please consider DSD disk for SACD as CD-R for CD-DA does not matter. This sound confirmation method seems to be usable in various professional production places in the future.
■ SACD / CD Finished to enjoy the difference in sound quality
Fujimoto: According to Mr. Kanai, I heard that I actually checked the sound quality until the press
Inoue: That's right. At Kanai 's request, I went from sucking up DSD to pressing and label printing, and examined the sound quality through the same process as the final product. At that time, the specification to coat the special special ink of green used in DVD-R of the "musical instrument" series which is known for good sound quality was very faithful to the original sound and it became the specification of the final product. So we had a chance to review the sound quality twice more than usual production by examining the sound quality on the DSD disk and examining the sound quality of this promotion board.
Fujimoto: By the way, this album is a hybrid of SACD's 2ch, SACD multi, and CD, but does the sound of the CD layer use the one sucked up by Sonoma?
Inoue: No, I did not use what I breathed in Sonoma as a result of examining the sound quality of the CD layer. The choices were roughly divided into three ways. One is to write digital data directly with internal bounce by Abe's DigitalPerformer. The second method is to convert the DSD sucked up by Sonoma to PCM using SBM Direct, and the third is to convert DSD to PCM using Sonic Studio 's nexStage AFC (Audio Format Converter). In the AFC, there were 8 conversion processes depending on the combination, so we generated a total of 10 WAV data for one source, burned it to CDDA and compared it with PS 3. Kanai, Mr. Abe, I was listening with three people, as a result I was going to go with internal bounce this time without breaking the opinion.
Fujimoto: How are you dividing that CD and SACD 2ch?
Inoue: CD is an internal bounce of DigitalPerformer, which generates 16 bit / 44.1 kHz stereo WAV file, while SACD 2 ch is analog sucking up the same on DAC and then sinking it to Sonoma. However, because CD requires 3 dB penetration, 3 dB compressor is put in the final stage.
Fujimoto: Although the story of a 3 dB compressor came out from Mr. Abe and Mr. Kanai, can you tell me a bit about SACD or the difference between DSD and CD standards?
Inoue: Sure, this place is quite difficult to understand. You can also be asked a lot at the work place (laugh). First of all, since CD is PCM, Max level is 0 dB, and if it exceeds it clips it. On the other hand, DSD is somewhat different. The maximum level at which no distortion occurs at all is defined as 0 dB, but in reality it is possible to record even sounds beyond it. The limit is +6 dB, and if it exceeds it it will be distorted whether it clips reliably, but up to + 3 dB can be used almost without problems. If you measure it correctly, distortion will occur with sine wave, but normal music will not be made with sine wave, so there is usually no problem up to + 3 dB. Even if you take it beyond that, even if you take it up to + 6 dB, you can record it as a sound but considering the balance between the sound quality and the output level, SACD stipulated that the recordable signal is up to + 3 dB in the format. With that relationship, it is possible to record + 3 dB larger sound than CD.
Fujimoto: That means that if you listen to the same song on CDs and SACDs, you can generally hear SACD sound louder?
Inoue: It is true that it means the maximum peak level. Depending on genre, however, there are many people who make sounds that do not apply comp as much as possible in SACD production, so the actual sound pressure tends to be higher in CD. Therefore, when you compare and listen to the same songs, it seems that there are many cases where the CD sounds more loud. Since Kanai is completely controlling around here this time, the volume feeling is the same, so that you can enjoy the difference in sound quality.
Fujimoto: One more point at the end. If you record DSD multi at the same time, it will become tighter in terms of capacity. How do you solve this?
Inoue: SACD can record 2 channels of DSD for 109 minutes in the case of single layer. However, if you insert multi as it is, if it is 5.1 ch, it actually has 6 channels, so we calculate that it will only enter about 27 minutes because 4 times the capacity is needed together with 2 ch's. There is one of 5.1 ch and 5.0 ch in the album of this time, but it does not fit in any way either, and even if I consider the reading bit rate of the SACD player, it will exceed the limit as it is.
Therefore, compression called DST (Direct Stream Transfer) is used. This is lossless compression, compresses the DSD data recorded by Sonoma, reduces the amount of data and records it on the disc, since it returns to 100% original DSD data in the player during playback, there is no sound quality degradation. Compression rate will vary depending on the song, but usually it will be about 40% more capacity after compression. By using this, one album contains one album. There are also albums with classic and the like often with a high compression ratio so there are more than 74 minutes recorded on SACD's 2ch and 5.1ch, but popular and rock compressions are often lower compared to classic, and things that can not be recorded for 70 minutes There are also many. It was about 72 minutes on this best board, but I am relieved and managed to relax (laugh). Once you check the capacity on the Authoring screen, it's 100%. Surprisingly it was 99.4% when I did a detailed calculation.
The sound of SACD is about 72 minutes for 2 channels and multichannel, respectively, about 144 minutes in total. It is about 216 minutes when combined with CD track. I think that the popular hybrid SACD software which recorded for such a long time is unusual. Even in that sense, this album is an album that has completely launched SACD's abilities (laugh).
Fujimoto: I see that well. Thank you very much.
Inoue: For the information on the DSD / SACD production related to this time, such as information on equipment and equipment, studio, etc., there is details on the page " For Professional " in Super Audio CD official website . Those who would like to know more certainly would like to visit this page.
As mentioned above, I talked about producing the best version of Emi Fujita for 4 times, but how would it be? I think that I do not know without actually listening to the sound, but "this kind of thing is about surround music Is it possible to be surprised that? " Emi Fujita went to fire earlier in Asia other than Japan, but it will spill over to Japanese audio mania with "camomile Best Audio".
