Ringle On The Noise Floor

It seems that not only are ringtones not going away, they are now going to be actively promoted and sold directly to consumers by the major record labels. The new packaging format is to be dubbed the ‘ringle’, and the industry is hoping this will take over from the standard CD single release, which has been suffering a serious sales decline lately…

The ringle is expected to be sold in stores as a CD with a slip-sleeve cover, probably containing three songs – the main track, a remix and a bonus track. You will also get the ringle itself – a ringtone version of the song in question. Sony BMG Music Entertainment are the creators of the idea, and are the only major player that already has a digital aggregator service lined up to allow consumers to redeem their ringtone purchases. Universal Music Group are also at the forefront of the ringle revolution, and have somewhere between ten and 20 ringles ready for release next month. It is reported that Sony have somewhere in the region of 50 titles which they will release in this new format throughout October and November.

In a slightly related vein, the hotness of singles (in audio production terms) has been causing some more confusion; an illuminating clarification of issues relating to digital recording, analog/digital distortion and loudness measurements was posted on Shado’s Blog by an anonymous audiophile. Here he differentiates between the human hearing decibel scale and that used by digital recording engineers.

All recording systems have an upper and lower limit of sensitivity – this is the range they can successfully record audio in. The upper limit is where distortion begins to set in, and the lower limit is where we find the noise floor – where the audio signal can’t be distinguished from the ambient static of the system.

For a digital system, anything that exceeds 0dB will be truncated – creating a nasty sounding square wave. Analog equipment behaves in a different way – signals that exceed 0dB are also distorted, but with a harmonic distortion that is musically compatible with the original. Small amounts of analog distortion can be quite pleasant, unlike the digital equivalent.

The bit resolution of the DAW being used directly affects the position of the noise floor – for analog tape, the noise floor can be anywhere between -55dB to -85dB. For a digital 16-bit system, the noise floor drops significantly to -96dB, which allows for a far greater dynamic range and sensitivity in the recordings. If you use a 24-bit recording system, the noise floor drops to -144dB. So with all this range available in the digital domain, why are we still listening to recordings whose entire dynamic range is compressed into the top 6-10dB of this scale?



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