Just because it's easy to conflate things when writing in a non-native language, the accurate interpretation is "-70 dB is the max S/N of average high end cartridges before the needle ever touches the vinyl." I could only find one as good (if one believes the claimed specs) as -80dB, and of course that goes away when you put actual records and phono preamps into the picture.
If you don't normalize FFT data to bin width, etc. you can get any answer you want, i.e. there are several A/D manu's using the same AP plots to "prove" -165dB noise floor of their products.
Normalize that plot to nV/rt-Hz and integrate it 20Hz-20kHz or you and SY are speaking two different languages.
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I am always fascinated by the misunderstanding what the narrow band FFT noise bottom is like. Maybe if someone told them that it is like tuning notch filter over audio band, they would understand. The nonsense of -160dB, -140dB etc. can be seen everywhere in amateur discussions, and manufacturers do misuse this lack of knowledge of the common consumer/believer customer.
To defend myself here, first, I can´t "Normalize that plot to nV/rt-Hz and integrate it 20Hz-20kHz" because I did not make that measurement nor did I extract any single number from it.
Second, it was SY who said "it shows exactly what I'm talking about" not me.
I did not claim "-160dB, -140dB etc" nor "70 dB" or "65 dB" so I can´t see how
I have triggered this arrogant type of response.
That said, the distribution of noise over the audio band certainly makes a difference
in how obtrusive this noise is perceived.
And now I´m going to listen to a 50 year old Prokofiev recording. It sounds great.
Second, it was SY who said "it shows exactly what I'm talking about" not me.
I did not claim "-160dB, -140dB etc" nor "70 dB" or "65 dB" so I can´t see how
I have triggered this arrogant type of response.
That said, the distribution of noise over the audio band certainly makes a difference
in how obtrusive this noise is perceived.
And now I´m going to listen to a 50 year old Prokofiev recording. It sounds great.
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Hey Georg,
What Scott said, and I am sitting down listening to Prokofiev on vinyl at this very moment. It is my preferred medium with SACD running second and my media server running third. (A variety of the higher end modern SPUs with Lundahl LL1941 suts the combination of which is relatively quiet.)
My naive take on the noise situation is if the system electronic noise is buried by the noise present playing a silent groove (tracing noise, cutter and player rumble) then I have done my job. (Perhaps 10dB or so better than the best the medium is capable of)
I tend not to make judgments about noise performance from FFTs unless it is concentrated in a couple of specific bins and is extreme as I am not very good at it, and they look misleadingly impressive since it is not a sum of the noise power such as you would get with an old analog analyzer. (I'm lazy and tend to use plain old A weighting or unweighted measurements as my old brain understands these best.. I have an outboard filter box with a 20 - 20kHz filter and an A weighted filter based on a design by Audio Precision in the System 1, and both of my Amber analog test sets offer A weighting and defined bandwidth options.)
What Scott said, and I am sitting down listening to Prokofiev on vinyl at this very moment. It is my preferred medium with SACD running second and my media server running third. (A variety of the higher end modern SPUs with Lundahl LL1941 suts the combination of which is relatively quiet.)
My naive take on the noise situation is if the system electronic noise is buried by the noise present playing a silent groove (tracing noise, cutter and player rumble) then I have done my job. (Perhaps 10dB or so better than the best the medium is capable of)
I tend not to make judgments about noise performance from FFTs unless it is concentrated in a couple of specific bins and is extreme as I am not very good at it, and they look misleadingly impressive since it is not a sum of the noise power such as you would get with an old analog analyzer. (I'm lazy and tend to use plain old A weighting or unweighted measurements as my old brain understands these best.. I have an outboard filter box with a 20 - 20kHz filter and an A weighted filter based on a design by Audio Precision in the System 1, and both of my Amber analog test sets offer A weighting and defined bandwidth options.)
What the "problem" is, is that digital replay is highly prone to having relatively unpleasant low level noise, distortion coming along for the ride, and this is well above the nominal -96dB or so noise floor of the intrinsic medium. If one is not aware that this is happening then it's easy to believe that it just always part of the package - it's when one goes to the effort of eradicating this unpleasant addition that the penny drops: the subjective dynamic range of CD is truly superb, but is only revealed to be so when all the electronics are fully sorted out ...
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A properly dithered recording should have no such issue at low levels. Some early Mercury Living Presence tape to CD transcriptions were done at rather low average levels, but are amongst the best sounding 44.1K/16 bit recordings I have even now, and these were not done in accord with what is considered best practices now. (Remastered to CD under the direction of Wilma Cozart Fine.)
Lest you think I am a digital troll I will mention that I design what I like to think are high performance tube phono stages for fun, and prefer vinyl (or stupidly expensive tape machines and media) for daily (non casual) listening. I have heard a lot of bad digital, but I have also made some needle drops at 16/44 and 24/96 that have me fairly well convinced that the digital process is not really the problem and what happens to the audio before and after conversion might have more bearing on what you complain about.
I use Ortofon Royal N and Meister Silver SPUs on Schick or modified SME 3009 Series II arms on restored and modified TD-124s in slate plinths with the tubed phono stages I designed and shared here on diyAudio. (Muscovite and Muscovite Mini)
I recently abandoned analog tape because I can't afford the gear required to do it right, and my digital needle drops sounded consistently closer to the original vinyl source than my tape recordings of same. (All of the standard analog buzzwords like imaging, soundstage, depth, timbre, palpability, yada yada yada, all there on the digital copy and in some cases badly compromised on bulk erased 10.5" reels of BASF Pro on a properly set up tubed ReVox G36 MKIII half track stereo machine with new heads.)
Lest you think I am a digital troll I will mention that I design what I like to think are high performance tube phono stages for fun, and prefer vinyl (or stupidly expensive tape machines and media) for daily (non casual) listening. I have heard a lot of bad digital, but I have also made some needle drops at 16/44 and 24/96 that have me fairly well convinced that the digital process is not really the problem and what happens to the audio before and after conversion might have more bearing on what you complain about.
I use Ortofon Royal N and Meister Silver SPUs on Schick or modified SME 3009 Series II arms on restored and modified TD-124s in slate plinths with the tubed phono stages I designed and shared here on diyAudio. (Muscovite and Muscovite Mini)
I recently abandoned analog tape because I can't afford the gear required to do it right, and my digital needle drops sounded consistently closer to the original vinyl source than my tape recordings of same. (All of the standard analog buzzwords like imaging, soundstage, depth, timbre, palpability, yada yada yada, all there on the digital copy and in some cases badly compromised on bulk erased 10.5" reels of BASF Pro on a properly set up tubed ReVox G36 MKIII half track stereo machine with new heads.)
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