How better is a Turntable compared to a CD?

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#3,042
scopeboy said:
Yes, I agree with you on this. But I also believe that if we want to make progress in hi-fi, it can't be done by just listening for pleasure in the living room. The results of this kind of "test" mean nothing. You might feel that the system sounded bad, so you changed something and it got better. But because you aren't doing a properly controlled test, you can't be sure that the thing you changed was the cause of the improvement! It could have been one of the extraneous factors we discussed earlier.
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Yes, and it's even worse: you don't even know if there really was an audio-only difference!

jan
 
#3,046
davym said:
To clear up any further confusion. I am what could be considered bi-format (I like both vinyl AND digital) Although I am quick to acknowledge that both have their good and bad points.

It could be worse, I used to be tri-format. I used to like analogue tape too but I have now been cured of that particular malaise (tape that is) I once was very fond of reel to reel tape but not so keen on cassette (except in the car or Walkman where a reel to reel machine was not a very practical proposition).

I hope my poor attempt at humour here causes no further issues or confusion.
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Hehe... how did you cure yourself from the tape disease ?

IMO, good reel to reel tape recordings are even better than vinyl
 
#3,048
RCruz said:
Hehe... how did you cure yourself from the tape disease ?

IMO, good reel to reel tape recordings are even better than vinyl
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I saw the light, or more accurately the rapidly rising cost - for the dwindling amount of listenable recordings available & the cost of blank tape.

The space that lot took up and the strange looks I got from the 'new wave' of digiphiles and my then girlfriend when I mentioned my 'problem' also proved to be a strong deterrent 😀
 
#3,049
DF96 said:
The thing that turned me off listening to DAB radio in the UK was that below 192k the MP2 processing cannot cope with audience applause at the end of a live piece. The coder just collapses in a heap when presented with so many random transients and just produces a mush which sounds like a white noise generator with random volume variations.
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That's a more extreme form of what I listen for when evaluating a system. To me, virtually all audio playback creates mush at a certain point, I zoom in, aurally speaking, to where it starts happening and that then guides me as to where problems may lie.

Something like that the DAB playback is so poor, and so obviously distorting, that the collapse into congestion can't be ignored. However, conventional audio is doing exactly the same thing all the time, except that it occurs at a much lower level - but it's largely masked, subjectively, unless one is sensitive to it, or deliberately look for it. It's the elimination of that distortion that creates 'magic' playback - once you've experienced the difference, with conscious understanding, then you have the mental tools to better evaluate reproduction ...
 
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#3,050
jan.didden said:
Now you're mixing up things again. We are not testing how good the equipment is in pleasing our ears - that not a 'test'. Its that differentiation starts with proving that there is an audible, ears-only difference in the first place. This is a technical/scientific process.

Listening and deciding what you like best (for instance by laying out cash for a purchase) is a personal and largely emotional activity. A lot of the continuing discussion here comes from the fact that lots of participants fail to keep the two apart.
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Yes, BUT... The two schools of thought have to meet at some point. They can't be kept completely apart. Say you design hi-fi equipment for a living. The scientific process is your tool, but your goal is to create equipment that appeals to customers on an emotional level enough that they'll buy it.

If you build the gear yourself it gets even more confusing! You wear your technical head when designing it, hoping that your emotional head will like it when you're done.

If you go into the design process with your emotional head on, that is where it goes wrong, you end up spending $100 on a capacitor because the thought of a silver-foil-in-beeswax capacitor makes you feel good, without any evidence that it will have any effect on the sound. In that sense, I think people sometimes fail to keep the technical and emotional processes apart.
 
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#3,051
scopeboy said:
What do you consider to be a decent rate? I stop noticing the "splashy cymbal effect" somewhere between 256 and 320kbps.

The old style of USB DAC could be influenced somewhat by processor load. The new asynchronous ones are much better. The sampling clock comes from a quartz crystal in the DAC and the audio driver is slaved to it. So you either get jitter-free playback, or obvious nasty glitches if the CPU can't keep up.
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192 should do it. Glitches are not the problem, and I don't subscribe to this jitter carry-on; the latter word has become a catch-all for whenever digital doesn't sound right, and IME things are a lot more complicated than that ...

I'm going to go through the exercise, yet again, of encoding at different rates a 'testing' track, and if all goes well will upload them, purely as WAV files - there could be a little test, à la Pano ... 😉
 
#3,052
45 said:
Ohhh! You must listen. That's the only way.
You will never understand the correlation simply because the MATHEMATICAL basis for physical sound and musical sound is different. Physical sound lives in the INVARIANT world. You can apply Fourier and all the other tools. Musical sound only lives in a non-invariant world because you have to put a listener in the chain and thus physics cannot describe it. Never. Invariance is a basic requirement for physics. In other words for a given problem with boundary conditions you will NEVER get a unique response it you try to explain music by means of physics and mathematics. The solution will never be unique. So it is useless to push in this direction (i.e. find correlations at any rate). One will just find empirically technical sulutions which point is the right direction but listening is the one and only instrument to judge the musical sound.
On the other side invariance is a fundamental hypothesis for the Fourier analysis. If this hypothesis doesn't stand you cannot use it. It is just simple as that. In between the two worlds one might put the physiological sound but again this can even cause more confusion than clarification and still will not give any definitive response.
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Clearly you like to wax philosophically more than you like to think through the solution to a problem.

Analog vinyl audio is full of bad stuff. Some people like it that way.

With digital audio, all that vinyl bad stuff is gone. A tiny, imperceptible amount of other bad stuff is added. Some people like it that way.

Problem solved.
 
#3,053
DF96 said:
(to 45) I'm not sure whether you are confused or just trying to be confusing. Pressure variations in air obeys the same mathematics as voltage variations in a piece of wire, so Fourier is equally applicable. Note that Fourier theory was originally developed (IIRC) to calculate heat flow in solids. That is the wonder and mystery of maths: universal applicability.

Mathematics can't tell us what our ears/brains require; only careful listening tests can do that. Once we know (and we do know, to a large extent) we use physics and maths to deliver it. Note that "I added this gizmo, and the sound improved" tells us a lot about your preferences and almost nothing about sound reproduction.
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Precisely. The massive 'distortion' in this discussion arises from the distorted listening tests that so many rely on for their concluding remarks!
 
#3,054
scopeboy said:
Elephant in the room: The hi-fi can communicate with the brain through the eyes by its shiny looks and glowing tubes. Hence blind testing. 🙂
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Funny, I was just about to refer to the same phenomenon by the same name!

I would like to add to the elephant's definition: hifi can communicate with the brain not only through the eyes (how it looks) but also through prior knowledge (what equipment is involved; what I have read or opinions I have formed about that equipment or class of equipment), and through pre-set biases and prejudices.

This is the mistake that the neophyte like 45 makes: when 'listening', our brains combine sonic and non-sonic cues unconsciously, along with unconscious biases, to form an impression, but the conscious mind insists that it never happened and ascribes the impression entirely to the sonic cues. The neophyte hasn't learned this yet. He is prone to using phrases like "I trust my ears".

I try to be gentle but firm with the education of neophytes -- we were all in that position once upon a time. Sort of like arrogant teenagers who think they have figured it all out!
 
#3,057
45 said:
Ohhh! You must listen. That's the only way.
You will never understand the correlation simply because the MATHEMATICAL basis for physical sound and musical sound is different. Physical sound lives in the INVARIANT world. You can apply Fourier and all the other tools. Musical sound only lives in a non-invariant world because you have to put a listener in the chain and thus physics cannot describe it. Never. Invariance is a basic requirement for physics. In other words for a given problem with boundary conditions you will NEVER get a unique response it you try to explain music by means of physics and mathematics. The solution will never be unique. So it is useless to push in this direction (i.e. find correlations at any rate). One will just find empirically technical sulutions which point is the right direction but listening is the one and only instrument to judge the musical sound.
On the other side invariance is a fundamental hypothesis for the Fourier analysis. If this hypothesis doesn't stand you cannot use it. It is just simple as that. In between the two worlds one might put the physiological sound but again this can even cause more confusion than clarification and still will not give any definitive response.
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I was going to ask, in response to your first sentence, what's the mathematical basis for musical sound (other than what is commonly attributed to Pythagoras).

But it appears you mean "musical sound" to be some metaphysical thing that cannot, even in "theory," be analyzed with science.
 
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#3,058
All the pseudoscience of this thread will probably amount to nothing, I cannot see there being a long term future for vinyl.
Back in the 70's record companies began to produce their masters digitally, remember the sleeves bragging the extra fidelity and headroom? So, since then vinyl has not been truly analog.
CDs are being sold now in thrift shops for a $1 a pop because they have been copied to mass storage devices and are no longer needed. Music is being downloaded off the internet for cheap and free. Indie bands are are producing their own music thus breaking the shackles of recording companies and using Youtube to promote themselves.
It's a different world
 
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