What are today's top digital designers doing to reduce the digital edge? Has it been eliminated?
Is there one design approach or many?
Is it possible to quell it and keep the transients in tact, vs. making things too smooth/ mushy?
What are today's top digital designers doing to reduce the digital edge? Has it been eliminated?
They use better clocks, with much less phase noise. I have heard several DACs equipped with the latest 'Femto Clocks', and they all seem to share this ultra smooth, grainless quality (without ever sounding mushy or overly soft).
Aftermentioned Auralic Vega is of the DACs that use femto clocks.
You'll, no doubt, get varying opinions on this definition. For me, 'digital edge' is a perceived lack of continuousness in the natural flow of the music. This isn't an overtly halting quality, but instead seems to leave me feeling increasingly anxious that something isn't quite right about the timing or coherency of the sound. Digital edge puts my nervous system on edge, not to an immediately obvious degree, but to a subtle degree which builds a sense of unease, or lack of interest/enjoyment in the music after a short while. Music should be provide pleasure, even be therapeutic, but not induce anxiety or boredom.
record an LP to a disc, play it back, and then tell me where that "edge" is! I have done this with my digital recorder, and no, it does not produce an edge. Edges nowadays are due to the mix/mastering and playing IMO, all aspects of digital to its extremes, and plain old stereo dont sound good pushed to its extremes, it wants some mono, some fr aberrations, some hf splash, etc. Thats just me, my experience, my gear, my ears. Perfect sound forever meant that once recorded, it would be the same forever no matter how many times it was played, compared to the never the same song twice LP system or the same with the never the same sound twice tape. CD is a storage system, and yes, it will not last forever, but to confuse what we perfer to in sound vs the storage medium is becoming a bit worn, but thats just an old carmagruden like me who has perhaps blabbed a few thousand times too many about my hobby. aha ahah.
Well except as you so impertinently point out when we record LP or reel tape all of that stuff seems gone. Digital recordings of those analog sources seem to pass all the wonderfulness of purest unadulterated analogness right on through. Funny isn't it? Just having the analog in there is magic. Pretty much proof that digital isn't ever quite good enough as curious as that seems. (Seems very curious to me).
This experiment of recording LP to CD, where all the analog character is retained without introducing an 'edge' is interesting. It also seems to point in the direction that, when it comes to production of harsh sound from CD, weaknesses in acoustic noise (room) and electronic noise of systems exposed by the greater frequency linearity of CD and its greater ability to portray natural hardness of sound are the most important, weaknesses possibly more concealed upon the (mostly) somewhat softer and 'kinder' sounding vinyl playback. Some introduction of artificial digital harshness, which undeniably can be real as well, may also play a role, but with the current art of CD playback to a lesser degree.
This experiment of recording LP to CD, where all the analog character is retained without introducing an 'edge' is interesting. It also seems to point in the direction that, when it comes to production of harsh sound from CD, weaknesses in acoustic noise (room) and electronic noise of systems exposed by the greater frequency linearity of CD and its greater ability to portray natural hardness of sound are the most important, weaknesses possibly more concealed upon the (mostly) somewhat softer and 'kinder' sounding vinyl playback. Some introduction of artificial digital harshness, which undeniably can be real as well, may also play a role, but with the current art of CD playback to a lesser degree.
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