Subject:PCA file support?

Posted by: Brooke

Date:9/30/2012 4:14:12 PM

Is there support for Sony .pca files in SpectaLayers? I can't find it mentioned anywhere, and I can't find the SpectraLayers manual on the Downloads page.

Way back when .pca first came out, I thought I was lead to believe by Sony that it was superior to .wav files, both in quality and file size, so I switched all my recording and mastering to that format, only converting back to .wav when clients request it. Now, I'm wondering if there is any support for this format, apart from batch converting hundreds of files to wav, so I can work on them in SpectraLayers.

Thanks!

Subject:RE: PCA file support?

Reply by: ChristoC

Date:9/30/2012 5:46:42 PM

.pca files are in the same league as mp3 files, some say possibly a better quality, with smaller file sizes. But nonetheless they are NOT up there with WAV which is the ultimate quality; never will be, never were.

SpectraLayers does not support .pca - I can't really see any reason for them to change that ; data compressed formats are an anathema to good audio technique.

Subject:RE: PCA file support?

Reply by: Brooke

Date:10/2/2012 6:16:16 AM

I could have sworn that Sony promoted pca as their "loss-less" audio format that was supposed to be superior to wav when it was introduced. That was my whole reason for switching to it and avoiding editing in mp3 all these years. Thanks for the clarification.

Subject:RE: PCA file support?

Reply by: Chienworks

Date:4/26/2013 3:44:39 PM

Brooke, you are correct. PCA files are lossless, and as such are identical quality to WAV. They tend to be about half the size of a comparable WAV file, as compared to MP3 often being squeezed to 1/10 or 1/20 of the original size.

Subject:RE: PCA file support?

Reply by: ChristoC

Date:4/26/2013 7:45:35 PM

> I could have sworn that Sony promoted pca as their "loss-less" audio format that was supposed to be superior to wav when it was introduced. ...

How on earth could .PCA be in any way 'superior' to .WAV ? - .WAV is the full monty, uncompressed, 100% real deal, no clever encoding, direct math representation of every sample according to the prevailing samplerate and bitrate.

Terms like 'loss-less' & 'identical quality' are subjective marketing jargon.

Applications like SpectraLayers are predominantly aimed at the pro market, therefore I can't see the requirement to support the myriad of non-pro formats.

BTW, you don't "lose" anything by converting back up to .WAV. If SpectraLayers did support compressed formats, it is almost certain it would be internally upconverting to .WAV or some raw format first, then recompressing to output the compressed format, as the internal math is just too tricky when trying to directly process a compressed format.

Subject:RE: PCA file support?

Reply by: Chienworks

Date:4/28/2013 8:18:31 AM

Maybe superior in that it has all the quality and fidelity of WAV, in half the space?

PCA does indeed use lossless compression, and as such it is identical to a WAV version. It presumably uses something similar to ZIP compression, which is also completely lossless. This is probably also why it only can compress to about half size. To get any smaller than that requires a lossy compression algorithm.

Why support non-pro formats? Because even professionals are given a variety of formats from their sources. I wouldn't consider myself very professional if i told all my clients "i can only edit WAV, i can't handle your mp3/wma/whatever files". I am professional enough to be able to help my clients in any situation i can handle.