In the last time dac are using a techniques too poorly and only SNR are going up , and ideal
effective bit resolution but if you knew 106 DB SNR is not possible with a normal power equipment .
But SNR is not the only reason for hi end listen cd or vinyl .
I think vinyl don't have limits for manufactures industries small or large to increase quality on
recorders and players .
effective bit resolution but if you knew 106 DB SNR is not possible with a normal power equipment .
But SNR is not the only reason for hi end listen cd or vinyl .
I think vinyl don't have limits for manufactures industries small or large to increase quality on
recorders and players .
You can get software emulations of valve amps and reel to reel recorders like the Studer A80, it should be possible to emulate the analogue playback chain of a vinyl system
Stuart
Stuart
What has vinyl to do With tubes??
what your saying is just ADD another laver of digital bla bla, Then it Will sound like the real deal. A bit like adding dried fish to the Dinner and then expecting it to taste like real fresh out of the water specimen. It just not gonna work
what your saying is just ADD another laver of digital bla bla, Then it Will sound like the real deal. A bit like adding dried fish to the Dinner and then expecting it to taste like real fresh out of the water specimen. It just not gonna work
As mentioned in post 22 if you cant tell the difference between an analogue source and a digital copy it should be possible to emulate the analogue source with all its imperfections. My wife is a radiographer and almost all plain xrays are now digital and no one is suggesting a return to film
Stuart
Stuart
Tubes can add audible distortions and vinyl certainly does add audible distortions. Iow: Vinyl can never sound like the original. You may prefer it to the original, but that's a matter of taste.
You'll find this test very interesting:
Boston Audio Society - ABX Testing article
Digital technology can, and does in 99% of the cases, sound exactly like the original does sound. If you don't like the original sound, then you may not like digital technology, but that's a matter of taste.
Moved to the lounge by moderation.
LOL I simply love someone citing telcoms/info theory in respect to audio......clearly demonstrates a bias from the get go.
Tell me, where is the error correcting code in digi formats? What is missed here is talk about 192kHz sampling. Until it is mainstream then true hifi digital is a pipedream, por a pursuit of audiophiles only. OF course, satisfying audiophiles is not the industry's aim. Vinyl is flawed, but the single biggest issue with digital is the bandwidth limitation, and whether it can be explained rationally or not, some vinyl recordings have a realism only dreamt of in digital.
It is like trying to compare control systems theory, discrete time verses continuous time, and then concluding that discrete time control is the answer to perfect control mechanisms. It is not, it is merely a sufficient approximation (where T is small enough), but its implementation is cheaper and requires less resource to process, or increased flexibility as only code needs to be changed to adapt the control system to a new situation. I.e. It is driven by other motives other than ideal control models.
This probably has much to do with the relative resurgence of fuzzy logic, and 'more analog' coding systems.
My personal reasoning is this, as a child of the 70s, recording engineers are simply not as thorough as in the past, the album is not the figurehead it once was, and quick, disposable singles sales are all that matters. The halcyon days of albums being a journey in sound are long long gone.
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A bias towards mathematically proven stuff.
Information theory is the basis of digital technology. If information theory is wrong, digital technology wouldn't work. But your typing on a computer so I can reply, I guess this means information theory is correct and digital technology works just fine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_detection_and_correction
As long as you hear uninterrupted music without glitches, the error correction works as it should.
Since when can humans hear above 20kHz?
See the test in this post.
I blame the extreme amount of compression used in modern pop music. Often only 2 bits are used, the rest is noise. Don't think that this makes vinyl automatically sound better, they just use the same squashed masters.
Format manufacturers are of course much more interested in the format.
Content manufacturers are much more interested in content.
Sellers, as "middle men," are much more interested in sales.
End users want to be satisfied with both format and content.
What is the cost when content is added?
Anyhow, I see these digital vs. analog discussions in the same way as the tube vs. transistor discussions. Little purpose other than an outlet for personal pleasures or frustrations.
John, you've well stated what I also find to be the conundrum with contemporary digital audio playback. After more than three decades of commercial development, I think that digital audio via CD qualifies as a mature technology. I've obtained CD playback that sounds convincingly like a live microphone feed - crystal clear, freely dynamic, tonally full, and, well, live sounding to a degree I've never obtained from vinyl. However, after about three or four full CDs worth of listening (2 to 3 hours), boredom and fatigue still begins to intrude some. I've noticed that the feeling of boredom possibly occurs after the sense of fatigue begins, and so, may be physiologically caused by it and not an independent phenomenon. However, I'm uncertain whether one always precedes the other as their onset is subtle, seemingly beginning at a subconscious level and rising over time to reach overtly conscious awareness.
Vinyl doesn't induce fatigue and boredom until much longer. Which doesn't necessarily mean that vinyl playback is more like live music than is digital. It may indicate just the opposite, as live music can also become fatiguing and, ultimately, boring. However, there just may be something beneficial to the human enjoyment of music that vinyl playback provides and that digital playback doesn't - whether or not such quality was true to the live event. As you said, it's a bit of a mystery.
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A nice presentation of the "dilemma" ... . Which in fact is not what the situation is, rather that the remaining distortion from the replay taxes the brain, bringing on fatigue, and boredom. The CD playback may be "live sounding" when you focus on it ... but is it really? Put on an album with prominent vocal content, turn up the volume - and then disregard the music: turn your attention to something else, like reading a book, talking to someone, etc, and just notice what the sound is like every now and again, from a corner of your mind, in a casual fashion ... does it sound real, convincing - or does it have an irksome, artificial, disturbing quality about it - when you "listen without listening"?
If the system "fails" this test then you have a distortion problem - more work needs to be done to clean up the sound, in spite of what you may have already done to optimise the playback - been there myself, many, many times ...
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What distortions, exactly, would those be? Digital replay has far lower measured distortion than does vinyl replay. Simply stating that some unnamed, or measured, distortion is the problem amounts to handwaving.
That experiment sounds like it might produce interesting results, however, the digital replay I'm getting sounds more live than my vinyl replay, whether I'm paying attention or not. In addition, the fatigue of which I spoke only begins to become apparent after an extended listening time.
re. listening fatigue....
As someone said, live music can become fatiguing after a while, the main 2 reasons I personally think are the studio/concert acoustics not suiting the music, and the volume level not being optimum.
Home reproduction is much the same, the volume level has to be believable so for example with rock music I tend to base the volume setting on the vocals and/or drums as I just have to believe they could be there in front of me, performing live. With some records there is no optimum setting due to the mix, get one thing right and something else is wrong, a recipe for fatigue.
As for acoustics, my aim is to have the sound in my listening room possess the acoustics of the performance, with no input from my listening room. Most systems present a mix of the 2 acoustics so it's not surprising it gets fatiguing, it's a mess. Some systems 'cut through the air' and you really feel that you're in the concert hall. I've managed to get to this level of reproduction with digital and analogue, but in my experience it's more easily lost with digital - why? No idea.
As someone said, live music can become fatiguing after a while, the main 2 reasons I personally think are the studio/concert acoustics not suiting the music, and the volume level not being optimum.
Home reproduction is much the same, the volume level has to be believable so for example with rock music I tend to base the volume setting on the vocals and/or drums as I just have to believe they could be there in front of me, performing live. With some records there is no optimum setting due to the mix, get one thing right and something else is wrong, a recipe for fatigue.
As for acoustics, my aim is to have the sound in my listening room possess the acoustics of the performance, with no input from my listening room. Most systems present a mix of the 2 acoustics so it's not surprising it gets fatiguing, it's a mess. Some systems 'cut through the air' and you really feel that you're in the concert hall. I've managed to get to this level of reproduction with digital and analogue, but in my experience it's more easily lost with digital - why? No idea.
I'm sitting here, endlessly amused at this thread. Why?
Because the original poster's linkie to all the pretty Fourier transforms and spectrum plots and all the rest … was sampled digitally, was plotted digitally, was spectrum-analyzed digitally and was presented digitally. The irony couldn't be more mirth-causing.
As far as this old bag of bones (me) can determine, there are waveforms, and there are recording-and-playback methods; to assert that "analog is like how the world works, but digital is a bunch of chopped up bits" (highly paraphrased) is just a big stinking bucket of fish head stew.
IF "CD recording" is genuinely compressing the as-mixed waveform, in order to get a tighter band of dynamic range which is both the unwritten standard amongst media-houses, and many recording engineers, then … what you're hearing is exactly that. CHOICES made by the recording house to compress the dynamics, then golly gee … the playback sounds compressed. Color me purple and call me an eggplant.
Other posters have quoth, "digital recording has come a long way since CDs were invented; I've listened to 192 kHz ÷ 24 bit, and it is amazing, blah, blah, blah…"
Again, of course it is! … for the aforementioned reason, to begin with. It doesn't much matter what the sampling rate is (truly), so long as the full dynamic range of the recording is preserved. This is what our friend the cut-out-trough-in-a-disk-of-vinyl does pretty darn well. But few of us (except inveterate invertebrates such as moi) have had a chance to digitize (for analysis) the signal being piped to the vinyl cutting machine, and compared THAT to the playback with a great needle and a decent granite loaded spinner, to see what the "round trip difference" is.
You would be surprised. Recording on vinyl also compresses the signal because of the inertia of the cutting head's moving parts; the compression isn't linear; the moving parts of the playback needle and so on are different, so their contribution to the actual millisecond-by-millisecond playback waveform are substantial. They work in harmony to "kind of" untangle the mechanical compression of the cutting head.
Nope. Remember, the RECORDING STUDIO's sound engineers produce a "waveform track", sometimes analog, these days mostly high-res digital. This is what they listen to, over, and over, and over again, making tweaks and adjustments on their reference speaker array. It is this waveforms track that most closely holds the "original intent" of the recording artists and their army of engineers.
Now, with that - it is fair to say that compared to bog-standard CDs (as already discussed, as being 'conventionally compressed'), a pickup stylus and a decent analog turntable (and all the attendant amplification and speaker-izing fetishes) will do a better job. BUT… if you get ahold of the "as mixed" 24 bit ÷ 192 kHz track, and play that through a good, but not crazy DAC … through the same system of amplifiers and speaker fetishes, it will sound both different and very probably better even than the vinyl. BUT BEWARE: unless the recording studio actually produced a 24 bit 192 kHz release, most likely any 24 … 192 you get will just be a rip of the vinyl, through a great needle and decent turntable (and a good ADC). In this much more common case, the playback will be no different than the analog vinyl disk. Can't be: it faithfully reproduces on each channel the waveforms that were sampled from the disk(s), microvolt by microvolt.
GoatGuy
Because the original poster's linkie to all the pretty Fourier transforms and spectrum plots and all the rest … was sampled digitally, was plotted digitally, was spectrum-analyzed digitally and was presented digitally. The irony couldn't be more mirth-causing.
As far as this old bag of bones (me) can determine, there are waveforms, and there are recording-and-playback methods; to assert that "analog is like how the world works, but digital is a bunch of chopped up bits" (highly paraphrased) is just a big stinking bucket of fish head stew.
IF "CD recording" is genuinely compressing the as-mixed waveform, in order to get a tighter band of dynamic range which is both the unwritten standard amongst media-houses, and many recording engineers, then … what you're hearing is exactly that. CHOICES made by the recording house to compress the dynamics, then golly gee … the playback sounds compressed. Color me purple and call me an eggplant.
Other posters have quoth, "digital recording has come a long way since CDs were invented; I've listened to 192 kHz ÷ 24 bit, and it is amazing, blah, blah, blah…"
Again, of course it is! … for the aforementioned reason, to begin with. It doesn't much matter what the sampling rate is (truly), so long as the full dynamic range of the recording is preserved. This is what our friend the cut-out-trough-in-a-disk-of-vinyl does pretty darn well. But few of us (except inveterate invertebrates such as moi) have had a chance to digitize (for analysis) the signal being piped to the vinyl cutting machine, and compared THAT to the playback with a great needle and a decent granite loaded spinner, to see what the "round trip difference" is.
You would be surprised. Recording on vinyl also compresses the signal because of the inertia of the cutting head's moving parts; the compression isn't linear; the moving parts of the playback needle and so on are different, so their contribution to the actual millisecond-by-millisecond playback waveform are substantial. They work in harmony to "kind of" untangle the mechanical compression of the cutting head.
Nope. Remember, the RECORDING STUDIO's sound engineers produce a "waveform track", sometimes analog, these days mostly high-res digital. This is what they listen to, over, and over, and over again, making tweaks and adjustments on their reference speaker array. It is this waveforms track that most closely holds the "original intent" of the recording artists and their army of engineers.
Now, with that - it is fair to say that compared to bog-standard CDs (as already discussed, as being 'conventionally compressed'), a pickup stylus and a decent analog turntable (and all the attendant amplification and speaker-izing fetishes) will do a better job. BUT… if you get ahold of the "as mixed" 24 bit ÷ 192 kHz track, and play that through a good, but not crazy DAC … through the same system of amplifiers and speaker fetishes, it will sound both different and very probably better even than the vinyl. BUT BEWARE: unless the recording studio actually produced a 24 bit 192 kHz release, most likely any 24 … 192 you get will just be a rip of the vinyl, through a great needle and decent turntable (and a good ADC). In this much more common case, the playback will be no different than the analog vinyl disk. Can't be: it faithfully reproduces on each channel the waveforms that were sampled from the disk(s), microvolt by microvolt.
GoatGuy
Agreed, most stuff is over compressed.
Agreed info theory is mathematically proven (i have actually studied this...)
CD format, as I assume many here would agree, is far from ideal. Various 'tricks are employed to reduce error is CD playback, interpolation, oversampling. All.of these are band aids, to correct flaws inherent in the CD media and encoding.
Where is the evidence that ultrasonic harmonics are not audible? (even if not directly audible, but as a byproduct of there inclusion)
Vinyl is most definitely flawed (note: I'm not a vinyl fan) but the CD standard is certainly due an update. Noise floor and repeat ability is CDs prime advantage. Give me CD at 192khz and with the dynamism of good vinyl and ill be happy....(yes you can hear the difference)
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Since most music recorded in the last 25 years , including what ends up vinyl, has been thru at least one A/D then D/A there is only one conclusion. People who prefer vinyl like the way it changes the signal.
Far lower measured conventionally distortion, yes - the audio world constantly plays around at the edges of the concept that the type of distortion is very important, but then fumbles it, because it is not something that can conveniently dealt with, at the moment. A parallel is buzz and rub in speaker drivers - this is extremely irritating "distortion", but conventional means of measuring THD, etc, are useless at picking this up.
It's only termed "handwaving" because it's not easy to pull numbers from somewhere at the moment. But practiced ears can pick the attribute in replay, in complex passages the higher harmonics are not rendered sufficiently correctly, there's too much of what one may term IMD. A simple test track is high energy R&R, with heavy use of the cymbals by the drummer - clean vs "dirty" renditions by competent, vs ordinary digital sources can be very telling.
IME there is a hurdle of playback quality that has to be surmounted: if below par then irritation or fatigue will always build up; if over the hurdle then the desire is to listen more and more, the experience of listening keeps triggering the pleasure centres in the brain, only exhaustion in the positive sense of the term, and practical affairs, etc, brings things to an end.
A very good summary of the goal, and, the 'problem' - the "why" is because systems which are digitally based are more vulnerable to having audible distortion artifacts that are quite disturbing, and one may need to train oneself to clearly identify these elements. The fact that digital equipment has distortion spec's that look brilliant is irrelevant, they're measuring " the wrong things" ...
The solution is to understand what's causing the distortion problems, and that typically will be a myriad of "the devil's in the details" issues - all need to be resolved, and then premium sound can be enjoyed, continuously.
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This is also the conclusion I came too, after over 35 years I have finally given up on vinyl, got rid of my lp collection and embraced digital. I had spent quite a bit of money on recent pressings only to find that an FLAC/EAC ripped file of the CD (windows mixer bypassed) sounded every bit as good, in fact without all that surface noise it's even better.
I did have a few old analogue recorded vinyl lp's which sounded really stunning - possibly better than my digital up set could achieve but they were so few in number that my turntable rarely got used these past few years. It's gone now and I don't miss it at all.
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