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Old Dec 22, 2013, 04:05 PM
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_if _if is offline
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Yeah, I read that interview back when it was published and remembered him saying that singled-out line, which further bothers me about this upsampling business. So that's a guy from their marketing department advertising what he intends to be a selling point, implying that the audio is of higher quality when they put it on Blu-ray. It's horribly unscientific enough to claim that 24/96 inherently sounds better than CD (I'm aware this is a controversial statement amongst the audio enthusiast community and I know I'm unlikely to change any minds saying this, but it's really not controversial for the scientists and engineers who study and work with the science of sound. Note that I don't mean recording engineers - they deal with the art of sound recording and do not necessarily need to understand or even really know about the science of sound to get good results), but the fact that in reality what's on that FFXIV Blu-ray he's referring to is actually upsampled CD-quality audio makes his statement either an apparently company-wide (or at least soundtrack publishing/marketing department) honest misunderstanding on multiple levels of how digital audio works or an official deception, a lie.

I say good for their sound team that they use 16/44.1 since it makes so much sense. Perfect sound quality within the range of human hearing and practically any sound equipment's reproduction capabilities and it takes up less space and processing time when you're working with it (24 bits does have some technical advantages in music production, but it's less useful when you're working with primarily synthesized music in a sequencer rather than recorded music because you can manipulate and process it without introducing errors). And it's not going in the games in any higher quality than that; in fact, it goes through lossy compression. But then when they turn the files over for the OST, it's being upsampled. It may not be a highlighted part of their marketing, but they do intentionally say that their Blu-ray soundtracks are 24/96 which is very misleading. We'll see at some point what the source is for this album, but I wouldn't hold my breath that they're going to break with the method they've used with their previous Blu-ray albums.

Now I shall descend from my soapbox.

Last edited by _if; Dec 22, 2013 at 04:07 PM.
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