this whole situation reminds me very strongly of how A=440 Hz is a totally arbitrary standard that we don't even follow half the time. It's total fucking madness.
I dunno, man, the minute someone invented the harpsichord it was gonna be One Temperament To Rule Them All for the simple reason that retuning a harpsichord/clavier/piano is a nightmarish ordeal. Frankly if it was possible to drag one pipe organ over to play next to another we would have settled on something in like 300BC.
Maybe, but we're still arguing about pitch now. Yeah, if you're playing with a keyboard, the you tune to the keyboard, and yeah 440 is the standard, but orchestras routinely use 442, Vienna is at 446, some people advocate for 432 (they're mostly nuts). Baroque musicians use a different arbitrary standard, 415, even though A has historically been as low as like, 392, and as high as 460something. That doesn't even go into intonation systems. We use one equal temperament, but there are others - 1/4 comma is popular in some baroque circles, and groups without a keyboard instrument often aren't even using equal temperament, they're using a form of just intonation! Shit's wild, fam. Frankly if it was possible to drag one pipe organ over to play next to another we would have settled on something in like 300BC.
Personally? I like Indian music with the movable frets so "all over the fuckin' place" is A-OK with me. But I also know that most people experience recorded, not performed music these days and most of that is sample libraries. And if I had to worry about my Vienna samples being at A=446 while my Synthogy concert grand is at A=440? Interoperability is this thing normies like and tweakers eschew just to feel special. Nobody gives a crap how many key signatures Dream Theater goes through except the people who won't shut up about Dream Theater. And we know better than to ask them.
Are you saying I shouldn't invite you to my 24 hour restream of Change of Seasons? Seriously, though, I get that these are not as wildly different as the Van Halen example. It just reminded me of a similar phenomenon. Alternatively, it's a bit like calling out a classic tune at an Irish folk jam and having 4 people start in 4 different keys because "that's the one I was taught it in". Nobody gives a crap how many key signatures Dream Theater goes through except the people who won't shut up about Dream Theater. And we know better than to ask them.
LOL there are things that are impressive that are not enjoyable. And I mean, humans both hear and see relatively, not absolutely so if Eddie and... whoever the bassist was at that show had ratcheting whammy bars on their axes no one would have noticed a thing. The only reason it's a problem is that Sony needed to fit 74 minutes of stereo program audio on 120mm of lexan to be read by a 780 nm laser and physics says you can't do that at 48kHz. - random googling occurs to see how far back DASH dumbness goes; author is reminded of "44.056kHz" which you never see but which exists; the author is again reminded of PCM adaptors which are well before his time but goddamn it a pet theory dies: - Okay kids ignore that Norio Ohga Beethoven's Ninth thing. We're stuck with 44.1 because backintheday if you wanted to record digital audio, you were doing it on a 3/4" U-Matic VCR through a PCM transcoder that turned sound into video and so that it would work with NTSC and PAL VCRs, it HAD to be 44,100 Hz because it's the least common multiple that works with 29.97 frames @ 60Hz, and also 25 frames @ 50Hz. And if you were PAL you were actually recording at 44,056 Hz because of dropped frames.Are you saying I shouldn't invite you to my 24 hour restream of Change of Seasons?
It is simplest if the same number of lines are used in each field, and, crucially, it was decided to adopt a sample rate that could be used on both NTSC (monochrome) and PAL equipment. Since NTSC has a field rate of 60 Hz, and PAL has a field rate of 50 Hz, their least common multiple is 300 Hz, and with 3 samples per line, this yields a sample rate that is a multiple of 900 Hz. For NTSC the sample rate is 5m × 60 × 3, where 5m is the number of active lines per field, which must be a multiple of 5 (the rest used for synchronization), and for PAL the sample rate is 6n × 50 × 3, where 6n is the number of active lines per field, which must be a multiple of 6. The sampling rates that satisfy these requirements – at least 40 kHz (so can encode 20 kHz sounds), no more than 46.875 kHz (so require no more than 3 samples per line in PAL), and a multiple of 900 Hz (so can be encoded in NTSC and PAL) are thus 40.5, 41.4, 42.3, 43.2, 44.1, 45, 45.9, and 46.8 kHz. The lower ones are eliminated due to low-pass filters requiring a transition band, while the higher ones are eliminated due to some lines being required for vertical blanking interval; 44.1 kHz was the higher usable rate, and was eventually chosen.