in theory, a pink floyd record from the 70s recorded on high quality tape could be remastered to 24 bit audio, although i'm not aware of anybody doing that.

however, a nine inch nails or tool record recorded using pro tools in the 90s is limited to 16 bit, max.

to be clear: high quality master tapes are often at very high resolutions with frequency ranges over 30 khz. they are way better quality than the vinyl copies that were sold in stores, and you can in theory retrieve and retain a very large amount of information by digitizing the old tapes that you cannot get on vinyl. if you can get it on to a virgin consumer quality reel, you're getting something comparable to 24 bit audio, until it starts to degrade, which is instantly. the best tapes in the best studios in the 70s are comparable to a 24 bit or 32 bit master in terms of information. it's the masters produced for vinyl from those tapes that were of low quality, because vinyl playback is incapable of producing a high frequency spectrum. you can completely solve the problems in vinyl playback by digitizing, and you also permanently preserve the information when you do. but you only preserve it at the level you take it in at.

24-bit audio didn't exist at all until the late 90s and my understanding is that, even in 2026, it's virtually impossible to get a clean 24-bit chain. at some point, you're downsampling, and then all is lost. you should stay at 16 the moment you downsample. you should never re-up, but the reality is that the signal is bounced back and forth repeatedly and then sent out at both rates for consumer sales. when that's the case, the better quality to sell it at is almost always 16-bit rather than the 24 bit upsample.

there are consequently better opportunities to digitize old tapes, if they aren't yet totally degraded, then there are to upsample recordings in the digital era, but only if you actually go back and do it, and when they tried to do that people yelled that it didn't sound like vinyl, so they went back and used the old vinyl masters, instead. 

so, you go to a store and buy a dvd audio or log on to a streaming site and see something marketed as 24-bit audio, but it's often just a digital capture of the fucking vinyl master with a low cut at 15 khz. you're not getting 24 bit audio, even in those rare cases where you could. you're not even getting cd quality audio. you're getting something worse than a lossy mp3 sold to you as 24-bit.

i'm avoiding the a-word. my dad used the a-word a lot, and i don't like the pomposity of it. but i'm a math nerd and a recording engineer in addition to being a composer and i know what i'm doing and i certainly want to listen to the best quality i can get my hands on at all times. i'd love for 24 bit audio to be a real thing and i'd invest in it if it were but it isn't. 

or it is not yet.

When we began the project there was no 24-bit recording. We did eventually transfer everything to 24-bit/48k and kept it at that.

right. so it's upsampling.

see, this is the real-life limitation: if it's recorded at a lower digital quality, you get nowhere up-sampling it.

you can buy this in 24-bit audio. but it's just upsampled.

http://web.archive.org/web/20260302092037/https://www.soundonsound.com/people/richard-chappell-recording-peter-gabriel

while i'm sure some exist, i cannot cite a single verifiable example of a recording that is actually in 24 bit audio from front to end.

as mentioned previously, my best approach would be to make requests. i think that peter gabriel's rabbit proof fences ought to be released in 24 bit audio, and i'd like to hear it, but i don't want to hear it upsampled, i want him to do it right. likewise, there's a selection of abstract music released from nine inch nails, mostly in the 90s, that i'd like to get remastered properly for 24 bit. and i'd like to hear some of son lux' early recordings in that format.

that's what i've got.

almost anything recorded with an orchestra would be better in 24-bit, if it maintains the bit level from start to finish, with no conversion at any point in the processing chain. if any plugin, eq, etc converts to 16 bit to process, it's lost and you can't get it back. it's worth looking for if you can find it, but the truth is it's not standard industry practice, to my knowledge, or not yet. 

the vast majority of recordings you will find in cd stores or on streaming sites are going to max out at 16 bit and a 24 bit conversion is just upsampling the 16 bit, which is a slight decrease in quality. that's just a technical fact. it's not resolvable.

you'd have to go back to source and re-record it, like they did with that holst cd. that means you need to do the research on a cd by cd basis.

it's better to let them act out and prosecute them than it is to ban them from demonstrating. democracy is valuable. the french should not be hypocritical, and i don't intend to be hypocritical in my positions, myself.

the stupid french children should not be banned from marching, but there should be cops in the commercial districts and outside of important buildings, and they should be aggressive in making arrests.

so, how would i rank the different audio playback mechanisms?

i will acknowledge that the recording medium makes a difference, but only on the very high end. i don't have a system like that and few people do. further, the reality is that the analog technology has an end of life. if you don't digitize it eventually, you lose it, and once it's digitized it should stay digitized. it makes no sense to dump it back to analog.

condition A: analog tape masters

this probably means a reel-to-reel and i want to be clear that my disdain for vinyl does not extend to analog master tapes themselves. this is arguably the highest quality recording possible, or was. but it degrades, even if you don't play it. you don't have to play the tapes from them to demagnetize.

in 2026, it is probably already too late for your reel-to-reel playback mechanism and it's probably well past the time to move on. it probably doesn't sound very good at all and you're probably deluding yourself, you're probably paying top dollar for a medium with no workable input source. you'd have to really, really, really like that one record from the 70s. 

but, if something was recorded to high quality tape then it does continue to make sense in theory to master and manufacture it on high quality tape. these are not the little tape cartridges for your 90s ghettoblasters you had as kids. these are big, clunky reels. they are short in duration and it takes 20 minutes to swap them carefully. it costs like $100/lp. it's unworkable, but it's the best quality - in theory - for old analog masters.

in reality, then you need to find sufficient playback equipment, and you need to accept that the reels are probably warped and degraded and the result is it in truth probably sounds like absolute shit.

this then is best to worst - according to objective scientific analysis.

1. analog reel-to-reel, in theory. not in practice.

2. digital audio that was digitized from master tapes (as 24 bit), either as an optical disc or a file. same thing. note that you want to avoid streaming this to ensure clarity. download it instead. further, be careful about the effects of fans in computer equipment. netbooks tend to have less interference but bad sound cards. i use a raspberry pi with a dac for digital audio. another option is a dvd or bluray player with a usb port.

3. digital audio that was digitized from master tapes (as 16 bit) <---cd or download (flac). see above.

4. digital audio digitized from master tapes and compressed to 320 kbps mp3 is actually better quality than consumer analog media. it's actually less filtered.

5. commercial cassettes made from an analog master source (without digitizing) have higher frequency ranges than vinyl playback, in theory. in reality, your tapes from the 90s are probably so degraded that they're unplayable.

6. vinyl cut from analog is the worst available playback mechanism and on par with lossy digital audio formats, like 256 kbps or lower mp3, due to the filtering process

7. lossy digital audio

8. digital audio that was digitized from the for vinyl analog masters which were already heavily filtered is the worst possible choice. it's also one of the most popular choices, unfortunately.

condition B: digital masters

if you recorded to digital you shouldn't even consider converting it to analog. it's consequently the same hierarchy, with the analog playback sources removed.

however, upsampling doesn't increase quality. the quality has to be there in the master already. you get what you record at.

1. 24 bit digital (optical or digital, including lossless), if the recording was at that rate, legitimately, without conversion at any point of processing (very, very rare). really only relevant for classical music.

2. 16 bit digital audio (optical or digital, including lossless). this is the best you're going to get for 99.9% of non-classical music recordings in the commercial market.

3. 320kbps mp3s compressed from high quality ddd sources are better than vinyl because they have less frequency loss.

4. vinyl cut from lossless digital audio requires it to be mastered for vinyl, which requires hefty high and low cuts that the amplifier is supposed to rebuild, but it in truth can't do that without a severe decrease in detail on the high and low end. it just results in a bass blur and a treble ring. it's not only not comparable to any form of lossless digital audio, it's worse than a high quality mp3.

5. lossy digital audio (including almost all streaming).

clearly, the education system in france is failing to uphold french cultural values and needs to be reformed to better do so. that is a lesson we should learn here, too.

we have a serious problem in front of us in the west that we need a real answer to.

why are the children so fucking stupid?

it turns out that macron's clarification is that france is not having difficulties assimilating it's muslim migrant population, but that that muslim migrant population in france is being manipulated by foreign muslim states that are interfering in france's sovereignty. it's consequently not a muslim invasion, it's foreign interference by muslim states.

i have used different language than the american right on this, but the evidence seems to uphold their narrative, and not the narrative that it's economic or about fuel prices, and we're seeing now that the french government isn't buying into that, either. if you wanted the last piece of evidence; and this is not the difference in explanation that the liberal media reported.

i don't see any evidence that the french population has been brainwashed by the irgc into smashing store fronts, which is something along the lines of what macron is actually saying. it's clear enough that there's a strong level of support for iran, for hamas and for a broad concept of islamic fascism on the street, but there's no evidence that this is due to manipulation by some evasive iranian secret service that in truth doesn't exist at all. this was imported to france by france itself over the last several decades. it's not being exported to france on the fly by belligerent state actors.

what the iranians have succeeded in doing in years past is sending funds and weapons to existing groups and essentially taking control of them, rather than creating them on the ground. iran didn't create the houthis, or hamas, or hezbollah, it just became their arms dealer and then asserted immense influence as a result of it. while it may be generating propaganda for the french market, and dumb young people may lack the education or experience to understand it as propaganda, that's not exactly "foreign interference". foreign interference implies somebody on the ground trying to actively alter the situation, not just sending signals out through the internet, looking to cause problems. that's something more like "national interest", and you can't fault the iranians for making their argument. you expect the iranians to make their argument. 

but you also expect french kids to reject the iranian arguments and make french arguments in favour of secularism, free speech and democracy. 

why, then, are french kids today so amazingly stupid that they fall for iranian propaganda?

the irony is it demonstrates a different type of problem in france's education system, but we already knew that existed, and we know it exists in canada and the united states, too. it's the great dumbing down, and it requires more than money for textbooks to resolve, before we end up in another dark age of our own making.

it's helpful that the french authorities have clarified that they are in fact treating this as a muslim insurrection, but they're blaming foreign actors rather than homegrown ones. that's probably wrong. they're probably in denial. but, once again, it's not what the liberal media is reporting, and the liberal media once again fails to get the facts on the ground right.

there are a lot of very good reasons to oppose arms deals to turkey, which is a fascist state and a rogue international actor, that i remain in full support of. i strongly condemn any moves by ottawa to normalize relations with turkey.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-turkey-defence-trade-deal-9.7391275

this is a stupid comment.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-why-does-france-burn-while-canada-forges-ahead/