Not too hard.
It is a known fact,that DIYers are a strange breed,that reside in a parallel universe,180 grades out of phase,in relation to ordinary human beings.
We just do it with a "twist" ?
B.L
I meant frequency range (look at the spectral plot) and nice mastering with enough dynamics, contrary to now usual
Loudness war - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Loudness war - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Got it. No one doubts that a carefull digital master,approaches or equals analogue in many aspects.But analogue mastered discs,have some qualities that simply cannot be bested. A to D and D to A,conversion, adds artefacts,that alter the linearity of an analogue recording. All conversions do it.Just think what happens in the production and reproduction chain.Less manipulation,pays back ,with better quality,in the long run.
B.L
FTFY.
Take an analog playback, digitize it, then run it back through a D/A. 16 bits, 44.1k. Do a double blind, level-matched comparison. So far, only one person has ever done that and reported the results.
edit: and a single blind test. The feared Dr. Lipshitz was able to identify out versus in with the levels set 20dB too low- the golden-eared Ivor Tiefenbrun (Mr. Linn) couldn't. This was with a 1984 vintage digital system. http://www.enjoythemusic.com/magazine/bas/0710/
I think that a lot of people are in love with the theory and don't realize that there is still a lot of other factors that can affect the sound of a CD. Winston Ma, the owner of FIM, brought a Glass Master and a CD produced from that very Master and we compared them. There was absolutely no way that the CD came close to the sound of the Glass Master. While the 1s and 0s may be the same, the actual disc is mechanically stamped out and just like the stampers in the bad old days of vinyl, they do wear. That probably explains why many will take a CD and burn a copy, after running EAC or some other program and end up with a better sounding disc than the original.
Before anyone objects and thinks that I'm making this up, it's been done countless times and the results have been pretty consistent.
Best Regards,
TerryO
Not taking issue with these claims, just pointing out that this indicates an issue with digital audio implementation, not with the theory. Yet oddly when digital is dissed here its almost always the theory which is claimed to be wrong - I haven't noticed people here speaking about fixing up implementation issues. Theory and implementation are two entirely separate arguments.
yes, yes. Quite agree. About 90% of the "wrong" in digital is implementation, not the format itself. But the same could be said of analog.
Digital is a nice distribution medium, tho. At least for the masses.
Digital is a nice distribution medium, tho. At least for the masses.
I read that blind test some time back.My opinion about I.T, is ,as far as rumors and stories go,that he is a marketeer,as in musketeer,of the best kind.Nothing more,nothing less.He and the late Julian Vereker,made a time warp,and gave us "flat earth",for pure merchandisation.Linn and Naim are the worst examples of forced opinion in audio industry.Period.
As far analogue versus digital,I am not so sure that I am a golden ear thingy,that I can hear differences all the time,conditions being irrelevant
I am just saying,that the delicate details, that separate these two forms of recording,are the same between being "free" and "unbound".
Some years back ,circa 1985,in a heated argument,someone said that Mary Shelley created the monster of her sick mind ,Frankestein,into a plummy story and and the conversion made her famous and rich.
You cannot mince something alive, as the sound of music,and reglue it back,without serious consequences.
As I said ,I am not 100 % sure if these are audible.But being restless and always a student,even now in mid fifties,I try to figure out,why a synthesizer saxophone sound is a poor replica,of an all analogue blown one.Can anyone tell?
btw, a small "no" is inserted in your quote,in front of the "artefacts" that alters my say.
best regards
B.L.
Not 90%.Make it 99.99%.It is still a 0.01% missing,lost in the translation.
In my school days,my math teacher,gave us a problem:
We had to walk a distance of ten miles,with a speed of half a mile per ten minutes.The only rule was that we had to walk half the distance,stop,and then,walk again the remaining half ,stop,walk the rest half,stop,the rest half,and so on.The time was 08:00. He asked of us to find the time of the arrival.
No one did. Only years later,still thinking that problem,found out that the answer was never.Infinity.
My limited knowledge ties this problem with the digital vs analogue debate,if there ever was one.Digital will be always half the distance away,because of that minute percentage missing
B.L
Cheap Thorens (US$130) with a Grado Red ($100) or Ortofon 2M Red ($100) plus a used NAD integrated amp with phono stage ($100) plus a cheap pair of Polk 2-way monitors on 28" stands will produce an involving sound and entertaining stereo effect. You provide the vinyl!
I"m curious. If we take the LP plugin posted earlier and run a CD file thru it, will it sound as "good" as the LP version? Will the added effects do for the digital file what the real vinyl faults do for analog? Or close enough? Is a large part of what we like about vinyl its "flaws"?
It would be a fun test. 😛
It would be a fun test. 😛
🙂
Terry ,
What is EAC ?
Ohh , I'm sure we can safely say both medium have there delivery flaws. Digital does have many more stages to " travel " before we hear it vs analog.
EAC is "Exact Audio Copy" a CD ripping program. The default for perfect rips.
DB Poweramp is as good, and more practical to use. I have both in my toolkit.
DB Poweramp is as good, and more practical to use. I have both in my toolkit.
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It's interesting to see this still hotly debated - as we used to do so about 1980. The early compact discs were awful, some of them couldn't be released (some of the von Karajan's Beethoven cycle I think). It was considered an immature technology. The engineers wanted to wait a year or two (for a bigger format) but there was a bit of a slump in sales and the marketers prevailed.
Anyway space that was available was apportioned differently on the compact disc format than on "Long Playing" records - an engineer told me that bass information on compact discs was increased over LPs but mid information was less and treble even less than on vinyl. On high end equipment I noticed less three dimensionality, as if the aural clues for that had been left out.
Ten or fifteen years later the quality of CDs had increased enormously - somehow they had managed to slip in all sorts of nuances sideways, but vinyl always sounded to me as having more air and delicacy - at least for classical, jazz, vocals...
Vinyl also appears to be much more archivally stable medium than compact discs. Some of the surface noise of old recordings can be minimized by using a monophonic cartridge (Grado is supposed to make a good one).
Anyway space that was available was apportioned differently on the compact disc format than on "Long Playing" records - an engineer told me that bass information on compact discs was increased over LPs but mid information was less and treble even less than on vinyl. On high end equipment I noticed less three dimensionality, as if the aural clues for that had been left out.
Ten or fifteen years later the quality of CDs had increased enormously - somehow they had managed to slip in all sorts of nuances sideways, but vinyl always sounded to me as having more air and delicacy - at least for classical, jazz, vocals...
Vinyl also appears to be much more archivally stable medium than compact discs. Some of the surface noise of old recordings can be minimized by using a monophonic cartridge (Grado is supposed to make a good one).
This should not matter for digital. For instance how much travelling did the software on Microsoft Windows Vista install disc travel? And yet it is read in bit-perfect by the PC when required on a DVD.
So how can 4.5GB from Microsoft, read in at 10x speed, arrive in better shape than 600MB from EMI read in at 1x speed? The answer is error correction: Data CDs and DVDs all have it, but the CD does not. Often that hard edgy sound from CD is caused by simple mis-tracking. The fact that on a given day one can never be quite sure what comes off a CD made me rip them onto a PC with very thorough reading programs about 3-4 years ago. That also gives me the chance to declip them too giving me a smoother sound without all those square edges going through my system!!
If you are serious about playing a CD properly I recommend the following:
1) Read into a PC with a very picky reader than reduces error to a minimum
2) Declip all modern pop to give your DAC a chance
3) Upsample (not oversample - upsample) - a Ultramatch does this
4) Play through a decent DAC - a rewired Ultracurve does this
Oh yes and this method is much much cheaper than a posh CD player, plus you can choose what you listen to in iTunes etc 😉
RedBook audio CD does have digital error correction built in - some of the transport tweakers have reported monitoring hardware bit error flags - the hypothesis is that even if the final data is correct the "extra work" of error correction is somehow influencing playback - perhaps thru ps/gnd coupling to the DAC/analog out
home rips of commercial CDs can be checksummed and compared with online databases to verify the bits are correct - an automatic option in better ripping SW
home rips of commercial CDs can be checksummed and compared with online databases to verify the bits are correct - an automatic option in better ripping SW
Yes CDs have error correction but its not as good as the correction on data discs. There are 2 types of errors: type 1 and type 2 the first being correctable and lossless, the second not correctable so the software interpolates what should be there. Fortunately the non correctable are very rare (acording to another thread on this site) a few per CD.
The part about hearing the error correction working harder is hard to believe. (as always, wheres the double blind test ) The error correction is always working, "working harder" is just a different combination of bits.
WTF is declipping? Did you make that one up?
JCX. When these comparisons are made do you know how close the 2 versions are?
Cds freq response is flat (a lot flatter than an LP) Whas he a recording engineer or a real engineer? (dosnt matter, he was wrong)
Hi,
1 - You are not right when you say, that CD players do not use error correction circuits.They do.In fact good units can restore data taken off heavily damaged discs.
2 - Edgy sound should not be credited to simple mistracking.Jitter and lowpass brickwall filters, are the reason for harsh and edgy sound.
You can test it using machines with switchable,low pass filtering.
I think that you must pay a visit to the "Red book" of digital.
B.L
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