i know it got a bias compansation but theres also a recording equalization !carlosfm said:
enyways its an old tape deck , nothing compared to modern cd recorders , to me anyways .
carlosfm said:
I know that one.
But it doesn't have a Nak head.😉
It's not only a question of freq. response.
Amplitude resolution.
Better for the "hi-res" formats than to down-sample to CD.
It was pretty highly rated, even against Nak decks in it's day... I did have the pleasure of testing it against a Nak, although I forget the exact model number, I know it wasn't a Dragon. 😀 Certainly stood up well at the time with some tasty TDK metal tapes (the ones with the die-cast chassis).
Not that again!!
The high noise floor of cassette is going to ensure that the "amplitude resolution" is much lower than that of CD.
Start using any form of noise reduction and you get all the attendant "pumping" effects. Don't use any noise reduction and you'd be lucky to get 60dB out of it... your "amplitude resolution" will be swamped by noise.
A.
While Nak 1000ZXL might have been a good machine in its days, it doesn't come that close to the original sound from a good source (in a revealing system). Getting good tape cassetes is even harder these days. I bought this one as a sentimental value mostly, but didn't really use it in the last 4 years. I was thinking about modifying it and installing DolbyS, but eventually I don't think it makes much sense, nowadays.
BTW, Pioneer RT-909 reel to reel measures much better.
BTW, Pioneer RT-909 reel to reel measures much better.
Attachments
sss said:
I was just trying to make a point against this nonsense.
Before CDR I recorded tapes.
I had access to CDR at work since 1997.
But each CDR was very expensive at the time (almost the price of the original CD).
I have more than 800 cassettes on my basement, from all my youth, the majority are 90min. with two albums.
I always spent money to have good sound, most cassettes are TDK SA and SA-X.
Most of them were recorded from vinyl, others from CD.
Either way I have too many recordings on this format that give me pleasure to listen, even today.
Many things I have on tape I never saw again, or were not released on CD or are very difficult to find.
I also have some rarities.😀
Much later I bought on CD or recorded on CDR things I already had on tape, recorded from vinyl.
Too many times it happened that the sound on the CD release was junk and I prefered to listen to the tape I had recorded from vinyl.
What I say is, who says that vinyl is not good just because of the specs are those who were born on the CD era, or, worse, older people that never had a decent turntable and cartridge.
Forgive them Lord...
Don't talk about CD, talk about SACD, Carlos. It is much better format and get away nostalgy about analog, 'cos it is as recording medium dead. I can't go back to noise and pops of vinyl or compressed dynamic and noise of tape. I have many tapes with my original live recording, but when I see, how tape run quickly ( 19 cm / sec. , half track ), I say thanks God, that comes CD. Is more sad, that for most of people is good enough MP 3 format and here is danger, that it will be in future standard.
Supposedly the recording quality of the Stereo VHS is very good because unlike Cassetes it is FM encoded analog. It has a much better SNR than AM recorded audio. And no tape hiss.
Most people have NEVER heard just how good a good turntable sounds. They have never heard a good suspended table with a good tonearm and cartridge. A lot of people thought that if they spent $300 or more on an expensive cartridge, it didn't matter if they put it on a $150 turntable.
The person that sold me my AR turntable / Lynn tonearm back in '84 maintained that it was better to spend more money on the turntable than on the cartridge. A $600 turntable with a $70 cartridge sounds better than a $150 turntable with a $500 cartridge. And the sound he was getting that way was very convincing.
CD technology is kewl because it benefits from modern nano-technology, and thus you can have millions of transistors doing their thing for you. But we leapt into it a few years too early. We should have waited for a higher sample rate.
The original CD players, cost several hundred dollars and despite all of the claims about better sound, they sounded rather appallingly bad until the second or third generation machines added oversampling converters that generated a much smoother digital signal and needed less analog filtering. I also don't think a lot of the early Analog to Digital converters were all that good either.
I have heard this claim about the distortion number about CDs for years, even when the early generation machines were so obviously bad, and I still think that there is something about the distortion numbers that they are not considering. There IS probably something measureable that is wrong about CD audio, but they are making the wrong assumptions about what our ears can or cannot hear.
But if you consider that our ears are sensitive to ultrasonic noise and / or aliasing effects in sounds, then the 44 KHz sample rate of CD audio is much too low. I suspect that it has to be at least twice as high. That may be one of the things that is creating the hyper-imaging that I perceive in some digital recordings; the sounds are getting shifted slightly in time to align up with the sampling rate, creating patterns that the little hairs in our ears can detect.
Good analog is expensive. There is no way to cut corners without a profound influence on the sound. Don't knock it if you haven't heard it, and it is an even rarer thing to experience these days than it was in '84.
Most people have NEVER heard just how good a good turntable sounds. They have never heard a good suspended table with a good tonearm and cartridge. A lot of people thought that if they spent $300 or more on an expensive cartridge, it didn't matter if they put it on a $150 turntable.
The person that sold me my AR turntable / Lynn tonearm back in '84 maintained that it was better to spend more money on the turntable than on the cartridge. A $600 turntable with a $70 cartridge sounds better than a $150 turntable with a $500 cartridge. And the sound he was getting that way was very convincing.
CD technology is kewl because it benefits from modern nano-technology, and thus you can have millions of transistors doing their thing for you. But we leapt into it a few years too early. We should have waited for a higher sample rate.
The original CD players, cost several hundred dollars and despite all of the claims about better sound, they sounded rather appallingly bad until the second or third generation machines added oversampling converters that generated a much smoother digital signal and needed less analog filtering. I also don't think a lot of the early Analog to Digital converters were all that good either.
I have heard this claim about the distortion number about CDs for years, even when the early generation machines were so obviously bad, and I still think that there is something about the distortion numbers that they are not considering. There IS probably something measureable that is wrong about CD audio, but they are making the wrong assumptions about what our ears can or cannot hear.
But if you consider that our ears are sensitive to ultrasonic noise and / or aliasing effects in sounds, then the 44 KHz sample rate of CD audio is much too low. I suspect that it has to be at least twice as high. That may be one of the things that is creating the hyper-imaging that I perceive in some digital recordings; the sounds are getting shifted slightly in time to align up with the sampling rate, creating patterns that the little hairs in our ears can detect.
Good analog is expensive. There is no way to cut corners without a profound influence on the sound. Don't knock it if you haven't heard it, and it is an even rarer thing to experience these days than it was in '84.
geewhizbang said:
Wasn't me but it could have been... more than once for a $1000 CAD i'd sell a Linn LP12 with a $150 Grace 707 and a $30 Grade FTE+1.
dave
Yes, new vinyl sound good, but only new vinyl 😉. Or have you stocked it and you play it on vacuum ? 😀
geewhizbang said:
I think the main reason (as always with analog tape) is the higher speed.
The tape doesn't thavel very fast on VHS, the the rotary head does.😀
Upupa, I have old vinyl without a scratch or detectable pop.
I've always been very careful with my discs, and, most important, I don't lend them to anyone. I've done that in the past and they were returned to me like junk.
Some people listen to some vinyl I have, at my home, and they think they are listening to CD. Even between tracks there's silent.
Really.
Listening to Keith Jarrett - "Standards - Vol. 1" and "Standards - Vol. 2" (from 1983) or Neil Young - "Unplugged" (from 1993) on vinyl is an orgasmatic experience.😀
And no noises.😎
EDIT:
I said I have some rarities.
I have one on vinyl, mint.
Let me ask a question to anyone that reads this.
It's like a contest.
Nobody wins anything, just for fun.😀
Here it goes:
What's the first Genesis album?
Carlos, tell me in which distance from boxes are you listening ? How is your listening level ? Objective measured max. SNR is only little bit above 60 dB and I listen it. Crosstalk of typical cartridge is only 25 dB at 1 kHz and 15 dB at 10 kHz. Twenty five years I was damming vinyl and now is it better ? I am not deaf enough 😉.
So there's a lot of measurable problems with vinyl. But can you really hear them?
There are a lot of very hard to measure problems with CD audio. But some people can hear them. The problems are all on the high frequencies, the most logical thing that would be affected by the aliasing errors from the 44kHz sampling rate.
Organ music on a CD sounds great, since there are very few high frequency sounds. However, one of the best organ music peices I have ever heard is a old recording on vinyl.
Dynamic range is not all it is cracked up to be. If you have speakers in a small room, CDs sometimes have too much dynamic range. In order to hear the silent sections loud enough to sound realistic, the loud sections are way too loud.
It's like holding your ear right up to the bell of a trumpet. You get a better dynamic range alright, but it also can make you deaf.
There are a lot of very hard to measure problems with CD audio. But some people can hear them. The problems are all on the high frequencies, the most logical thing that would be affected by the aliasing errors from the 44kHz sampling rate.
Organ music on a CD sounds great, since there are very few high frequency sounds. However, one of the best organ music peices I have ever heard is a old recording on vinyl.
Dynamic range is not all it is cracked up to be. If you have speakers in a small room, CDs sometimes have too much dynamic range. In order to hear the silent sections loud enough to sound realistic, the loud sections are way too loud.
It's like holding your ear right up to the bell of a trumpet. You get a better dynamic range alright, but it also can make you deaf.
Upupa Epops said:
I listen at around 2.5~3m from the speakers and usually at moderate-low levels.
Of couse I hear hiss and very little cracks between tracks if I listen loud , but on most of my discs (in very good shape) not the kind of noises you were talking about ("cracks and pops").
Compressed dynamics is only on paper , as a good turntable gives cracking dynamics, bass slam to die for.
Yes, a cheap vinyl setup has no bass.
But then again, cheap CD doesn't have bass too.
Bass on good vinyl has a different "scale" than on (even good) CD.
You only understand when you listen to it, no need to argue anymore.
No sibilance, no digital nasties, no jitter. 😀
I know that CD or any digital media is more "convenient" and user-friendly.
I love the sound I have from CD too, but vinyl is another story.
Each one to his own.
If vinyl sounded so bad as the specs, I would not listen to it.
Most CDPs/Dacs until some years ago had miserable distortion figures at low levels (30~40%😱 ), worse than vinyl, and people didn't complain.
geewhizbang said:
Bass is a big problem on CD.
Jitter affects bass much more than anything else.
Dacs are very sensitive to jitter at low frequencies.
A very low jitter CDP has tight bass.
But a commercially available very low jitter CDP is very hard to find and very expen$ive.
What happens when you have good, tight bass?
Everything else gets better too.
A good vinyl setup has this.
Some expensive CDPs don't.
Actually, it is not. For example, some cheap Sony machines are pretty low jitter, SOA jitter for about 200EUR.carlosfm said:
I thought it was Selling England by the Pound. (Do you know why?) Checked around and found it to be fifth.carlosfm said:
Heh, offer the prize and I’ll tell you the first… 😉
What has vinyl or cd's to do with buffer design?
BTW: my old local "audio master" told, that mono vinyl is really great.
With the introduction of the stereoprinciple in just one track, vinyl never was as good as mono!
This is the absolute truth. Recording equipment was top at the end of the fifties.
There is great dynamics and even a (two dimensional) soundstage!
Franz
P.S.
I love vinyl and use a Thorens with a Denon DL103 and a NAD pre (some NE5532 inside waiting for replacement...)
BTW: my old local "audio master" told, that mono vinyl is really great.
With the introduction of the stereoprinciple in just one track, vinyl never was as good as mono!
This is the absolute truth. Recording equipment was top at the end of the fifties.
There is great dynamics and even a (two dimensional) soundstage!
Franz
P.S.
I love vinyl and use a Thorens with a Denon DL103 and a NAD pre (some NE5532 inside waiting for replacement...)
Some of the earliest Beatles albums are recorded in mono because George Martin prefered the fidelity of good mono to stereo.
He reluctantly gave way to stereo because the record buyers demanded it.
As for myself, I'd rather do stereo properly than have five channels of junk. The extra channels add some gimmicks, but I have a limited budget already and having to spend 2.5x as much for the same quality would just break my finances.
He reluctantly gave way to stereo because the record buyers demanded it.
As for myself, I'd rather do stereo properly than have five channels of junk. The extra channels add some gimmicks, but I have a limited budget already and having to spend 2.5x as much for the same quality would just break my finances.
Exactly what I think. My stereosystem reproduces a three dimensional soundstage.
I cannot add a fourth and fifth dimension...
Franz
P.S.
For my children, I attached some fostex personal monitors (active) at the rear side of the room DVD's are running over the stereosystem, no sub, no center and this monitors as rear speakers. Works well, to produce noise.
So would I.
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
Find out more .
From Genesis to Revelation.
Sadly, the oldest i have is Trespass.
No doubt your hearing is much better now.
analog_sa said:
That's it.
"From Genesis to Revelation"
(P) 1969 The Decca Record Co. Ltd.
I have a canadian pressing, distributed by Polygram.
Mint.😎
I've read too many times at several places Genesis' history and they always say Trespass is the first album.
It's not, this is the one.
I have a rarity.😎
In stereo, my favourite way to listen to music.😀
I have two ears, and the players should be in front of me, not at my back.
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