Fish People are very
pleased to be able to offer our friends true high resolution recordings
of 50 Words For Snow directly from katebush.com.

The introduction
of the CD in the early eighties brought with it a huge change in the
recording process. CD’s introduced an era of low background noise
listening, they removed the hiss, crackles and pops associated with
cassettes and vinyl LPs. However, despite the huge improvements the CD
brought with it, the state of technology at the time introduced some
limitations in the quality of audio that could be recorded and stored on
the CD.

The many advantages of the CD mean that it has continued
to be the default consumer format for many years. However digital
studio technology has moved on immensely. Now digital download
technology allows us to bring you studio quality files for use at home.

To
preserve the maximum audio quality in her recordings, Kate mixes all of
her audio on to 1/2 inch tape at 30ips. The analogue tape is then
digitally mastered using 24bits at 96KHz. Moving to 24/96 increases the
dynamic range and frequency response of the digital process well beyond
the levels perceivable by the human ear. 24/96 takes full advantage of
the low signal to noise ratio of digital technology while still
preserving all the aspects of the original sound waves.

In the
recording process all of the audio is recorded at a level that ensures
there is sufficient “headroom” in the mix to avoid any clipping.
Clipping is distortion that occurs when the recording level exceeds 0dB.

Traditionally
when mastering for final production on CD, the 24/96 master will be
“normalized” to 0dB as part of the mastering process. Normalizing the
recording effectively introduces digital amplification to ensure the
maximum dynamic range offered by the CDs 16bits is utilised. This
normalisation is critical for a 16bit recording as any “headroom” in the
recording will have a significant impact on the dynamic range. For
example -6dB of headroom in a recording would only utilize 15 of the
16bits available.

Unfortunately the normalization process
introduces quantization errors in the recording - i.e. some bits of the
recording may be unintentionally rounded up or down as part of this
process. However the balance between quantization noise and loss of
dynamic range is an accepted part of the 16bit mastering process.

At
24bit resolution, the issues surrounding dynamic range are not
applicable as a 24bit recording provides an additional 48dB of dynamic
range over a 16bit recording.

With Kate’s high resolution
downloads we have chosen to leave these recordings at the level they
were mixed on the studio tape. We have deliberately chosen not to
“normalize” these recordings to avoid introducing any quantization noise
as described above. As a result, you may notice that the 24/96 files
sound quieter when replayed on 16bit devices such as MP3 players or
portable CD players.

With these files we also wanted you to be
able to hear the recordings as close as possible to the way it sounded
on the analogue master. For this reason we have chosen only to make
available 24/96 .wav files in an uncompressed format. By not using
compression we avoid any further possibility of introducing errors or
noise into the files. The downside of using uncompressed files is that
the files are large and will take a long time to download.

All of
us at Fish People are aware that the market for high resolution audio
is in its infancy and as such no standards or common practices have yet
evolved. We hope that you will agree with our logic in the way we have
made these recordings available, and hope you will enjoy the full beauty
of the music Kate has created in a way as close as possible to how she
wanted it to be heard.

With love as always,

The Fish People.