How better is a Turntable compared to a CD?

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#861
a.wayne said:
Accchhh .. NO! .. There are audible differences between CD's when making copies, very much so..
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You're winding me up aren't you? You could take a CD, copy it, copy that one, repeat the process ad infinitum and the last copy would sound exactly the same as the original. Besides, I was thinking of copying it to the cloud, that way you're never going to lose it. If you're obsessive-compulsive you can use EAC, but it really is redundant.

You can't copy an LP once. The very best you can do is record it to a CD. You can record it at 24/192, but it won't sound any better, it'll just make the mastering easier.

A little while ago, in another thread, a guy tried to tell us that copies made direct to a solid state drive were superior to those made to a spinning hard drive. Some people will believe anything. In order to believe such stuff, it's necessary to have absolutely no idea whatsoever how it works in the first place.

The great thing about LPs is you can make a turntable in the shed, apart from the cartridge that is, and it goes round and round.

Round and round.

I sometimes think about building one, like I think about buying a film camera to go with the enlarger I kept, and making a few prints the old way, but in the end I always talk myself out of it.

Now you can design and build your own flash card player that will outperform a turntable hands down, contain the same amount of material on a single replaceable card as 200 LPs, losslessly encoded, it'll run for hours off a rechargeable battery, drive a pair of earphones you wouldn't believe if you hadn't heard them and you can put it in your pocket.

I built my own unipivot tonearm in 1971 to go with a scavenged turntable, long before it became fashionable. There were no unipivot arms then, only gimballed. Everybody told me it would never work, but I made it work. It was a question of economics. I wanted a 'stereo', they cost more than I had. It had 3 'chocolate blocks', 2 pieces of stainless tube and a plastic suspension bridge that bore on the needle. One chocolate block had the cartridge screwed to it, the second allowed the bearing needle to pass through it, keeping the weight below the pivot point, and the third carried a lead counterbalance, hand-cast from airgun pellets in a matchbox tray. The 3.5 gram tracking force was supplied by a (new) penny.

In the first evolution the amplifier had a single BC107 per channel preamp, no RIAA since the cartridge was ceramic, and the power stages used Sinclair IC12s, the first successful chipamps, The speakers were 12" FRs.

Been there.

A hobby is nice, but you need to try and shake off some of these superstitions.

w

Oh, and as regards forming an opinion, there are a lot more resources you can bring to bear, other than just your ears.
 
#862
wakibaki said:
. If you're obsessive-compulsive you can use EAC, but it really is redundant.
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Not always. I have ripped a few copied CDs and they don't always rip well. So the copying software must not have been doing it's job. A secure rip was impossible on these.

Very few original CDs that I own have trouble ripping, unless they are really scratchy.
 
#863
panomaniac said:
Not always. I have ripped a few copied CDs and they don't always rip well. So the copying software must not have been doing it's job. A secure rip was impossible on these.

Very few original CDs that I own have trouble ripping, unless they are really scratchy.
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It's also possible to make copies that are sonically better than the original, which was discussed earlier in this thread I believe.

Best Regards,
TerryO
 
#864
panomaniac said:
There are plenty of folks here on this forum who have enough experience to listen without controls. It a little thing called "experience." Much of it hard won over many decades. I know many of these guys personally.

Sure, controlled listening is great if you want to do real in depth research and make claims of fact, but I know several forum members who have remarkably well trained hearing. There really is a lot of stuff that you can hear for yourself. Believing that everything you hear is wrong is just silly. Skills do exist.
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I never said "everything you hear is wrong". I said "listening is the ultimate test". I don't think you paraphrased me very well. 😛

BTW your belief that individuals can override psychological processes with sheer willpower and "experience" is in complete contravention of all the evidence. You are basically claiming that there exists a "Golden Ears Brigade", a claim which has been put to the test and found wanting. 🙄

Sure, skills do exist: the skill to discern quite small audible changes in sound in controlled listening tests.
 
#865
tnargs said:
BTW your belief that individuals can override psychological processes with sheer willpower and "experience" is in complete contravention of all the evidence.
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I see no evidence in what pano wrote that he has such a belief. However you do appear to have precisely that belief - you believe that 'imagination' is what audiophiles actually hear when they listen in an uncontrolled fashion. If that's not overriding psychological processes with sheer willpower, then what else could it be?
 
#866
tnargs said:
BTW your belief that individuals can override psychological processes with sheer willpower and "experience" is in complete contravention of all the evidence. You are basically claiming that there exists a "Golden Ears Brigade", a claim which has been put to the test and found wanting. 🙄 Sure, skills do exist: the skill to discern quite small audible changes in sound in controlled listening tests.
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+1:up:
 
#867
abraxalito said:
Why the scare quotes around the word 'audible' ?
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Because I was referring to uncontrolled listening. I know it is hard to believe, but when listening without controls we create perceptions that are simply not related to the sound waves reaching our ears, yet we will swear that they are. Add controls and these 'audible' perceptions will disappear. We will then either have a eureka moment and realise the truth about our perceptions, or protect our egos with an attack on controlled testing.
 
#868
Having put a few of these skilled listeners to the test (often without them knowing it) I can say they can be quite remarkable. Highly skilled people exist in audio as well as my bread and butter field, video. Advanced skills are not unique to these fields, of course. Humans are funny like that, they learn.

If you don't believe in skills, I really have nothing more to say. We live in different worlds. :shrug:
 
#869
tnargs said:
Because I was referring to uncontrolled listening.
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Yeah, I got that impression. But you have such a dim view of uncontrolled listening that you seem to think people don't actually hear what they hear in uncontrolled listening. Which is obviously wrong.

I know it is hard to believe, but when listening without controls we create perceptions that are simply not related to the sound waves reaching our ears, yet we will swear that they are.
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How do you know that the perceptions are not related to the sound waves reaching our ears? Some original research so far unpublished?

Add controls and these 'audible' perceptions will disappear.
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There you go again with the scare quotes. So how would you know these people's perceptions aren't perceptions (which is what you're saying by claiming some special meaning for the word 'audible' when encased in scare quotes) ?

To save any confusion, I agree that peoples perceptions change between sighted and unsighted tests. That's not even disputed by audiophiles - they say something pretty much like 'I can hear it when I see the equipment, I can't when I can't.'

We will then either have a eureka moment and realise the truth about our perceptions, or protect our egos with an attack on controlled testing.
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The truth about our perceptions is that they're a creation of our unconscious minds. You seem to somehow reserve the creation element for only sighted testing, as if something more 'real' is perceived in unsighted listening. Do you have any idea why you might be in possession of such bias?
 
#872
tnargs said:
Hi abraxalito, each of your questions above seems to be answered by my next sentence that you quote. Weird!
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Yes, I can only conclude that your perceptual processes create different meanings from the symbols presented to it than mine do😀 However how does your perception create an answer to my last one - for avoidance of doubt (given your perceptual distortions) that's the question about your bias. Imagination perhaps?
 
#874
tnargs said:
(sigh....) I really, really want to be nice here, but at the same time I would love to straighten out the crooked thinking. Please be patient with my writing skills here, I am a well intentioned dude..😱

The whole idea of listening in an uncontrolled manner and then looking at differences in measurements to explain the 'audible' observations is the fastest way into audio hell while thinking one is in nirvana. Don't bother. The uncontrolled listening will generate impressions that simply don't exist when the same ears do controlled listening, so the whole process is starting with false data. Then the spiral deepens, and deepens, and over time the poor audiophile develops a whole belief system about what sounds good and what doesn't, and why (supported by measurements!). And if the poor fellow is then suddenly lucky enough to participate in controlled listening tests of his beliefs (which would be a very rare thing to happen) nearly all his beliefs would not be supported, and he would come to the Great Fork in The Road: modestly accept it and ditch his beliefs and start looking at what controlled listening tests have revealed, or succumb to the ego driven by years of uncontrolled listening and reject controlled listening and in many cases attack the methodology.

Reading the comments on audio discussion boards it is easy to tell who is in nirvana-hell and who is outside, paying attention to research. I would like to think that new or budding audiophiles get some exposure on the discussion boards to the scientific audio community as a counterbalance to the constant encouragement to 'listen with your ears' (meaning uncontrolled), 'trust your ears' (uncontrolled), and even 'try LP and you may never look back' 😛 .
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I'm glad you're basically a nice guy.. 😀 Just wondering how much actual commercial audio hardware you have designed in your lifetime. You make valid points about the need for controlled listening, but particularly IMSLE there is quite a lot of uncontrolled listening that goes on in professional circles during product development depending on both the manufacturer and individual designer(s) involved. (My experience is in commercial HIFI, MI, and my now defunct high end audio business. I spent 4yrs designing MI electronics, and those folks are almost entirely subjective, no controlled testing at all.)

I worked for a decade for a certain very large manufacturer of domestic, automotive, and pro audio equipment that certainly would be categorized as a follower of scientific method, double blind acoustical testing, etc. Even so individual designers at this company had many different iterative design processes, some relied heavily on their perceptions, whilst others relied entirely on controlled testing - at both extremes these designers delivered the acoustical goods expected based on the original project specifications. I designed electronics for this company, and worked extensively with the guys in acoustics. The electronics end of things was comparatively easy for me as no subjective assessment was required at all - if I met or slightly exceeded the target performance, cost, and reliability criteria I was good to go.

It was not an unusual occurrence despite rigorous design analysis and simulation that the actual prototype would bomb so badly in informal listening tests that we would not proceed to controlled listening tests at all. You just knew it wasn't right, and you went and performed a battery of measurements to find out why. (Things like impulse response, room and anechoic chamber frequency responses, directivity/dispersion, distortion tests, box resonance tests with accelerometers, waterfall plots of stored energy decay in drivers and elsewhere, etc.) Hopefully you get the idea.

You don't need to "educate" me at all, even after 20+ yrs doing audio design both commercially and on a hobby level there is still a huge amount I don't know, and I am acutely aware of this.

Note that comments in my previous post were specifically relating to my hobby activities, and if I don't hear anything wrong I don't feel compelled to go looking for trouble, and frankly it's not too hard to find in any typical system in any typical room... I don't think my system or room are perfect, but for the moment I am relatively satisfied - it permits me to enjoy the wide range of music that I like on a variety of media.. That for me is the whole point of the hobby. (Besides the fun of designing, building, and testing something and having it meet your technical expectations and sound good.)

Edit: Maybe I should be clearer: From scratch I design, simulate, build, test, and listen in that order.. if the listening test is not to my liking back to the drawing board. Small changes I usually don't bother to do anything but some very basic testing, and then listening. (These days all changes are "small.") Regardless of technical merit if I don't like the listening result it doesn't stay, very arbitrary and delusional of me.. 😛
 
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