Can digital get to vinyl sound and at what price?

[christoph]

This forum (AudiophileStyle) is the most worse forum I have ever seen, it is full of wrong information

Obviously you have never been on the roon forum

 

[christoph]

I have tried to keep up the best I can regardless of my advanced stage of brain cancer.

I'm very sorry for your health issues

 

[christoph]

The demonstrations I heard does sound like a pinnacle for digital. But the amount of time, money and effort it would take to get it going is too much for me at this point.

The amount of money, compared to AF Zero with SAT arm?
Come on...

 

[Rexp]

The best digital systems will often make the experience of listening to inferior recordings better. That's independent of excellent recordings sounding excellent on a good digital system.

Not sure if you misunderstood my question, here it is again:

why do some recordings sound good on most digital players and some only sound good on high end players?

 

[godofwealth]

I’m a huge Emile fan.

But to advance digital fundamentally will require orders of magnitude advances. Not the micro-refinements we now see here and there.

We need leaps not baby steps to surpass analog.

Having spent 35+ years buying hifi equipment and also having been to tens of thousands of live concerts all over the world, I’ve spent the better part of my life hearing this endless analog vs digital debate. Here’s a few conclusions I’ve formed along the way, for what’s it’s worth.

1. The only way to evaluate any reproduction of music — analog or digital — is with live music. On that score, current reproduction falls miserably short of live music. You want to hear the world’s greatest hifi? Go to a live concert. Attend a symphony concert or a jazz performance or hear organ music at your local church or a piano recital. In each case you’ll hear sound that is leagues above any hifi at any price. That’s the gold standard. All else is faux.

2. Of course we all like to relax at the end of each working day to listen to music. Back in Mozart’s day, you’d relax either by playing chamber music with your kids — virtually every middle class family in those days owned a piano and several other instruments — or you went to a live concert. We’ve gotten lazier. Now we slouch in our sofas, guzzle some beer and turn on Roon’s automatic music selector and stay on an alcohol induced soporific state while music washes over us lulling us to sleep. That’s the price you pay for automation. It’s going to only get worse. As AI chatbots take over the music business, your kids will likely only hear AI generated faux Mozart or faux Pink Floyd.

3. There’s no denying digital has greatly “improved”, by which I mean through the clever use of tube technology (e.g., Lampizator DACs), the worst excesses of 1980s digital reproduction that I lived through have been banished. Digital is now enjoyable. Listening to my Pacific DAC is actually pleasurable. But does it sound like a live performance? Sadly it does not. When I listen to a 24-bit 192 kHz streaming album of a major classical piece — be it a symphony or a choral piece or piano or opera — or even a jazz ensemble, I’m never in doubt that what I’m listening to is a faux reproduction, not the real thing. I’ve never once hear a recording of a Steinway piano that sounds like a real Steinway played in a concert hall. Or a great singer, like Jessye Norman singing Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs that I heard as a grad student almost 40 years ago. Nothing comes close to hearing a great singer like that light up a huge concert hall. If you haven’t heard a great world class soprano live, you really should. It can change your life.

4. Despite all its shortcomings, and there are so many that it’s hard to know where to begin, vinyl gets closer to what live music sounds like in a few ways. Yes, vinyl has huge distortion in the treble of around 15-20%. Ticks and pops. Cartridges mistrack. Albums last 20 minutes. Gee, you have to move your butt to change sides. No automatic algorithm selection of music. You actually have to physically select an album, put it on the turntable. And search for the right pressing Yet despite all these huge problems, vinyl sounds more true than digital ever does. Fundamentally it’s because digital distorts more and more as the signal gets less intense. No digital recording I’ve heard, and I have > 6000 CDs and SACDs in my house, reproduces the sound of an oboe in an orchestral recording like it sounds in a concert hall. Digital ruins the sound of oboes because relative to the whole orchestra playing fortissimo, a solitary oboe is -60 dB down in intensity. Well, all PCM recordings throw bits away as the signal reduces in intensity. There’s just not enough bits left to get the oboe to sound right. At least not to my ears.

So, we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, to use the cliche. Digital is our future and arguably what’s going to be the dominant medium. But compared to live music, it sucks. Analog vinyl in many ways sounds more real to me, but it’s got huge issues with distortions and it’s inconvenient to say the least.

So, I’d advocate listening to as much live music as your wallets and time permits. Reproduced music is always faux and never as good as real. In Mozart’s day, they didn’t have that problem. But AI is only going to make the situation worse. Your children will not know what an “album” is or what a “human” performance sounds like because by then it will all be generative AI that plays music. A large language model will store the entire musical recorded history in a tiny drive and generate as many variations as you desire. Mozart played in the style of Bruce Springsteen? Yes siree, coming right up. It will sense your mood and tailor its reproduction. That’s the future we are hurtling towards.

 

[PYP]

So, we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, to use the cliche. Digital is our future and arguably what’s going to be the dominant medium. But compared to live music, it sucks. Analog vinyl in many ways sounds more real to me, but it’s got huge issues with distortions and it’s inconvenient to say the least.

So, I’d advocate listening to as much live music as your wallets and time permits. Reproduced music is always faux and never as good as real. In Mozart’s day, they didn’t have that problem. But AI is only going to make the situation worse. Your children will not know what an “album” is or what a “human” performance sounds like because by then it will all be generative AI that plays music. A large language model will store the entire musical recorded history in a tiny drive and generate as many variations as you desire. Mozart played in the style of Bruce Springsteen? Yes siree, coming right up. It will sense your mood and tailor its reproduction. That’s the future we are hurtling towards.

The millennials I know who are into music prefer using a TT (a retro thing for them). And lots of them go to concerts to see human performers and follow said performers on various social media. The concerts are pulling in major $$. That is where the money is. Can AI replace that? Only if you tell me that Taylor Swift is an android.

 

[MarkusBarkus]

...and this sad future is predicated on musicians giving up performing live and recording music. That seems highly unlikely to me.

However, it does seem possible Taylor Swift is an android. Or at least one of her is. <<<<Joke.

 

[PYP]

However, it does seem possible Taylor Swift is an android. Or at least one of her is.

And you base this on the theory that the android version uses auto-tune to obscure its true self? Only a human would use auto-tune, goes the thinking?

 

[Al M.]

And you base this on the theory that the android version uses auto-tune to obscure its true self? Only a human would use auto-tune, goes the thinking?

Debatable and debated if Taylor Swift uses autotune in her live performances.

Google
Taylor Swift autotune
and you'll see pro and con.

I have seen her once give a skillful live performance on Saturday Night Live (I was impressed, didn't expect that), and there she was definitely NOT autotuned. You can hear the strange effects on the voice by autotune pretty easily, and there was clearly none of that.

She does use autotune in the studio at times to correct mistakes.

 

[Bonesy Jonesy]

I think the future of live music from some of the great and famous performers will be digital avatars and artificial intelligence which of course is all digital with only the sound coming out of speakers being analogue for the audience to hear.

The Abba Voyage concert has been a great success and many people said it was close to a real and live performance ;

ABBA Voyage Official Website - 2024 ABBA Concert in London

Experience ABBA on stage in a ground-breaking concert in a custom-built arena in London, UK. Embark on your ABBA Voyage in 2024. Buy concert tickets now.

abbavoyage.com

 

[Amir]

Even If high resolution digital recording/Mixing/mastering and digital processing have less distortion than analog (I am not sure if it is) then It does not mean Digital is better. Distortion is not just a simple number and it is far more complex than a simple number. Our brain and hearing system react differently to different type of distortions.
For example Tube set amplifiers have higher distortion than high feedback high power transistor amplifiers but the distortion of SET amplifiers is more simple than those high power high feedback amplifiers.

Distortion of digital is different (maybe more complex) to distortion of Analog and our brain has different reaction to them.

Expert Audiophiles like David prefer high performance Analog to high performance Digital.

 

[Tuckers]

Wow, I'm sorry I missed this volcanic topic. It just happens to be right in the center of my previous work in digital audio, and also a passion of mine for about 20 years - attempting to create digital systems that can meet or exceed the best analog systems. I haven't gotten there so don't worry too much.

@ScottK From what you've told us about your system and what your experience is between vinyl and digital, IMHO I think you could expect to get another 5% out of digital by upgrading system and accessories. I doubt you would get to the subjective 100% in your own system. This is regardless of whether one source is more accurate or resolute than another, blah blah blah...

Your Zenith and Phoenix and Terminator Plus are all excellent devices to render audio, your next steps up are either bumping up to higher end components, or working on the delivery mechanisms for that digital. I myself have an Innuos Pulsar coming to my system sometime soon. I believe that doing some work on your network, and cables and power/grounding technics can could actually get you further than upgrading a stack like yours (unless you are talking about doubling the price). The ancillaries matter that much in digital streaming. Some of these ancillaries will benefit your analog rig too.

If you are open to experimenting, for not a lot of money ($150), there is a change that could tell you whether its worth it to pursue the ancillaries. Its whether your ears hear a positive difference that matters after all. If you like the impact of this, then you will know if it is worth pursuing more. It is adding a fiber bridge to your network to isolate your Zenith from the influence of outside ethernet. The positive differences that many people hear are to make the sound a bit more 'analog sounding' - more detail, organic, liquid, lower noise floor, wider deeper soundstage. IF you don't hear a positive difference, then you will save some money and grief . Generally, the better the digital system, the greater the impact and I think your system is fine enough to hear this clearly. But please if you try it, give it a few days to settle in, to my ears the improvement peaks at about 2 days then with subtle improvement given further time.

My new inexpensive Fiber/Ethernet Bridge (See last post with updated improvements.)

 

[SoundMann]

The amount of money, compared to AF Zero with SAT arm?
Come on...

I don't own them myself. I have 2 Micro-Seiki's, the SX-111 Air, with MA-505 tonearm and 2 platters (brass and SS), used with an Air Tight PC-7 cartridge, plus a BL-51, with a Grace 707 II tonearm, and a Signet TK7e cartridge.

My phonostages are an Accuphase C-17, and a highly optimized EAR 834p clone.

 

[hopkins]

Having spent 35+ years buying hifi equipment and also having been to tens of thousands of live concerts all over the world, I’ve spent the better part of my life hearing this endless analog vs digital debate. Here’s a few conclusions I’ve formed along the way, for what’s it’s worth.

1. The only way to evaluate any reproduction of music — analog or digital — is with live music. On that score, current reproduction falls miserably short of live music. You want to hear the world’s greatest hifi? Go to a live concert. Attend a symphony concert or a jazz performance or hear organ music at your local church or a piano recital. In each case you’ll hear sound that is leagues above any hifi at any price. That’s the gold standard. All else is faux.

2. Of course we all like to relax at the end of each working day to listen to music. Back in Mozart’s day, you’d relax either by playing chamber music with your kids — virtually every middle class family in those days owned a piano and several other instruments — or you went to a live concert. We’ve gotten lazier. Now we slouch in our sofas, guzzle some beer and turn on Roon’s automatic music selector and stay on an alcohol induced soporific state while music washes over us lulling us to sleep. That’s the price you pay for automation. It’s going to only get worse. As AI chatbots take over the music business, your kids will likely only hear AI generated faux Mozart or faux Pink Floyd.

3. There’s no denying digital has greatly “improved”, by which I mean through the clever use of tube technology (e.g., Lampizator DACs), the worst excesses of 1980s digital reproduction that I lived through have been banished. Digital is now enjoyable. Listening to my Pacific DAC is actually pleasurable. But does it sound like a live performance? Sadly it does not. When I listen to a 24-bit 192 kHz streaming album of a major classical piece — be it a symphony or a choral piece or piano or opera — or even a jazz ensemble, I’m never in doubt that what I’m listening to is a faux reproduction, not the real thing. I’ve never once hear a recording of a Steinway piano that sounds like a real Steinway played in a concert hall. Or a great singer, like Jessye Norman singing Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs that I heard as a grad student almost 40 years ago. Nothing comes close to hearing a great singer like that light up a huge concert hall. If you haven’t heard a great world class soprano live, you really should. It can change your life.

4. Despite all its shortcomings, and there are so many that it’s hard to know where to begin, vinyl gets closer to what live music sounds like in a few ways. Yes, vinyl has huge distortion in the treble of around 15-20%. Ticks and pops. Cartridges mistrack. Albums last 20 minutes. Gee, you have to move your butt to change sides. No automatic algorithm selection of music. You actually have to physically select an album, put it on the turntable. And search for the right pressing Yet despite all these huge problems, vinyl sounds more true than digital ever does. Fundamentally it’s because digital distorts more and more as the signal gets less intense. No digital recording I’ve heard, and I have > 6000 CDs and SACDs in my house, reproduces the sound of an oboe in an orchestral recording like it sounds in a concert hall. Digital ruins the sound of oboes because relative to the whole orchestra playing fortissimo, a solitary oboe is -60 dB down in intensity. Well, all PCM recordings throw bits away as the signal reduces in intensity. There’s just not enough bits left to get the oboe to sound right. At least not to my ears.

So, we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, to use the cliche. Digital is our future and arguably what’s going to be the dominant medium. But compared to live music, it sucks. Analog vinyl in many ways sounds more real to me, but it’s got huge issues with distortions and it’s inconvenient to say the least.

So, I’d advocate listening to as much live music as your wallets and time permits. Reproduced music is always faux and never as good as real. In Mozart’s day, they didn’t have that problem. But AI is only going to make the situation worse. Your children will not know what an “album” is or what a “human” performance sounds like because by then it will all be generative AI that plays music. A large language model will store the entire musical recorded history in a tiny drive and generate as many variations as you desire. Mozart played in the style of Bruce Springsteen? Yes siree, coming right up. It will sense your mood and tailor its reproduction. That’s the future we are hurtling towards.

The purpose of an audio system is not to replace live performance.

You don't need a direct comparison to live music either to assess a system's performance, or to understand the differences between analog and digital.

You can easily evaluate the quality of a system even with "electronic" music (that is only created in a recording studio).

 

[microstrip]

Having spent 35+ years buying hifi equipment and also having been to tens of thousands of live concerts all over the world, I’ve spent the better part of my life hearing this endless analog vs digital debate. Here’s a few conclusions I’ve formed along the way, for what’s it’s worth.

1. The only way to evaluate any reproduction of music — analog or digital — is with live music. On that score, current reproduction falls miserably short of live music. You want to hear the world’s greatest hifi? Go to a live concert. Attend a symphony concert or a jazz performance or hear organ music at your local church or a piano recital. In each case you’ll hear sound that is leagues above any hifi at any price. That’s the gold standard. All else is faux.

90% of people only listen to live music that is commonly amplified. They educate their ears to know how live music sounds and can use such experience to evaluate systems for the music they listen. IMO the important aspect is listening to live music, that creates a real vector sound field and decays associated to life. And yes life amplified music is leagues above any hifi at any price.

IMO evaluating a system is completely different from diagnosing it. In order to carry improvements and improve a system we need the proper recordings, that probably we will never listen life. With such recordings it is much easier to analyze the system and know what is wrong or missing.

2. Of course we all like to relax at the end of each working day to listen to music. Back in Mozart’s day, you’d relax either by playing chamber music with your kids — virtually every middle class family in those days owned a piano and several other instruments — or you went to a live concert. We’ve gotten lazier. Now we slouch in our sofas, guzzle some beer and turn on Roon’s automatic music selector and stay on an alcohol induced soporific state while music washes over us lulling us to sleep. That’s the price you pay for automation. It’s going to only get worse. As AI chatbots take over the music business, your kids will likely only hear AI generated faux Mozart or faux Pink Floyd.

You are purposely mixing everything that is actual to create a negative view of current high-end times. It is easy to do and usually generates a lot of bravos from the nostalgic crowd.

3. There’s no denying digital has greatly “improved”, by which I mean through the clever use of tube technology (e.g., Lampizator DACs), the worst excesses of 1980s digital reproduction that I lived through have been banished. Digital is now enjoyable. Listening to my Pacific DAC is actually pleasurable. But does it sound like a live performance? Sadly it does not. When I listen to a 24-bit 192 kHz streaming album of a major classical piece — be it a symphony or a choral piece or piano or opera — or even a jazz ensemble, I’m never in doubt that what I’m listening to is a faux reproduction, not the real thing. I’ve never once hear a recording of a Steinway piano that sounds like a real Steinway played in a concert hall. Or a great singer, like Jessye Norman singing Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs that I heard as a grad student almost 40 years ago. Nothing comes close to hearing a great singer like that light up a huge concert hall. If you haven’t heard a great world class soprano live, you really should. It can change your life.

Many people (me included) will tell you that the best sound reproduction of a piano they have listened is from digital, that is free from the wow and flutter effects associated to any mechanical device. Surely just opinions.
Or even voices. BTW, I have found that the big limitation of digital are our systems that understandbly are prepared mostly to complement analog sources.

4. Despite all its shortcomings, and there are so many that it’s hard to know where to begin, vinyl gets closer to what live music sounds like in a few ways. Yes, vinyl has huge distortion in the treble of around 15-20%. Ticks and pops. Cartridges mistrack. Albums last 20 minutes. Gee, you have to move your butt to change sides. No automatic algorithm selection of music. You actually have to physically select an album, put it on the turntable. And search for the right pressing Yet despite all these huge problems, vinyl sounds more true than digital ever does. Fundamentally it’s because digital distorts more and more as the signal gets less intense. No digital recording I’ve heard, and I have > 6000 CDs and SACDs in my house, reproduces the sound of an oboe in an orchestral recording like it sounds in a concert hall. Digital ruins the sound of oboes because relative to the whole orchestra playing fortissimo, a solitary oboe is -60 dB down in intensity. Well, all PCM recordings throw bits away as the signal reduces in intensity. There’s just not enough bits left to get the oboe to sound right. At least not to my ears.

I do not expect you to change your opinion on my words. But yes, tape noise throw away solitary instruments. It is why sound engineers use techniques to enhance such instruments - please read from the Decca sound engineers or other sound professionals writings. Most of the time people address the "magic" of tape to the media and forget the expertize of the people who created it - most time using "non-natural" methods. For some reason, during the first decade of digital we assumed that the best CD were AAD. It took decades until sound engineers adapted to the digital media and recording systems of high quality were developed.


FIY, quoted from the M Fremer site :


“As a fact of long DG history, the heads of the recording department were also in charge of operating the cutting lathes, because until 1945 a lathe was a recording machine. With our management buyout we took over the last DG VMS 80 and analogue tape machines for cutting. We thought about ways of using the lathe and since EBS emerged from the recording department, one idea was to go back to the tradition of using the lathe directly as a recording machine, instead of tape or a computer. So we started doing Direct-to-Disc recordings. As an engineer and producer I watched our cutting engineer Maarten de Boer while he worked on D2D productions. We immediately became aware of the strong relation between recording and target media (CD or vinyl). We discovered that recording for vinyl needs a different microphone setup than recording for CD. Engineers in the past had made different sonic decisions, knowing that they were producing music for LP and not a tape."


https://trackingangle.com/features/...groundbreaking-original-source-vinyl-reviewed

So, we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, to use the cliche. Digital is our future and arguably what’s going to be the dominant medium. But compared to live music, it sucks. Analog vinyl in many ways sounds more real to me, but it’s got huge issues with distortions and it’s inconvenient to say the least.

So, I’d advocate listening to as much live music as your wallets and time permits. Reproduced music is always faux and never as good as real. In Mozart’s day, they didn’t have that problem. But AI is only going to make the situation worse. Your children will not know what an “album” is or what a “human” performance sounds like because by then it will all be generative AI that plays music. A large language model will store the entire musical recorded history in a tiny drive and generate as many variations as you desire. Mozart played in the style of Bruce Springsteen? Yes siree, coming right up. It will sense your mood and tailor its reproduction. That’s the future we are hurtling towards.

You are really trying to be negative. I am an optimist in these matters - I foresee an evolutionary brilliant future for music and digital high-end. Soon the latest achievements we see in SOTA very expensive high-end, highly compatible with digital, will expand to lower price products and more people will be able to listen to music with better quality.

Surely MHO, YMMV.

 

[ScottK]

Wow, I'm sorry I missed this volcanic topic. It just happens to be right in the center of my previous work in digital audio, and also a passion of mine for about 20 years - attempting to create digital systems that can meet or exceed the best analog systems. I haven't gotten there so don't worry too much.

@ScottK From what you've told us about your system and what your experience is between vinyl and digital, IMHO I think you could expect to get another 5% out of digital by upgrading system and accessories. I doubt you would get to the subjective 100% in your own system. This is regardless of whether one source is more accurate or resolute than another, blah blah blah...

Your Zenith and Phoenix and Terminator Plus are all excellent devices to render audio, your next steps up are either bumping up to higher end components, or working on the delivery mechanisms for that digital. I myself have an Innuos Pulsar coming to my system sometime soon. I believe that doing some work on your network, and cables and power/grounding technics can could actually get you further than upgrading a stack like yours (unless you are talking about doubling the price). The ancillaries matter that much in digital streaming. Some of these ancillaries will benefit your analog rig too.

If you are open to experimenting, for not a lot of money ($150), there is a change that could tell you whether its worth it to pursue the ancillaries. Its whether your ears hear a positive difference that matters after all. If you like the impact of this, then you will know if it is worth pursuing more. It is adding a fiber bridge to your network to isolate your Zenith from the influence of outside ethernet. The positive differences that many people hear are to make the sound a bit more 'analog sounding' - more detail, organic, liquid, lower noise floor, wider deeper soundstage. IF you don't hear a positive difference, then you will save some money and grief . Generally, the better the digital system, the greater the impact and I think your system is fine enough to hear this clearly. But please if you try it, give it a few days to settle in, to my ears the improvement peaks at about 2 days then with subtle improvement given further time.

My new inexpensive Fiber/Ethernet Bridge (See last post with updated improvements.)

Thanks Tuckers were back on topic. Somewhere in this long thread I did mention I already have a fiber bridge powered by a linear power supply and a LHY SW-8 network switch. Have considered a bump in power amps but improvements at this level are $$$$$$. My move from Alexia 1 to Alexx V did yield a lot.

 

[Al M.]

You are purposely mixing everything that is actual to create a negative view of current high-end times. It is easy to do and usually generates a lot of bravos from the nostalgic crowd.


Many people (me included) will tell you that the best sound reproduction of a piano they have listened is from digital, that is free from the wow and flutter effects associated to any mechanical device. Surely just opinions. Or even voices. BTW, I have found that the big limitation of digital are our systems that understandbly are prepared mostly to complement analog sources.


I do not expect you to change your opinion on my words. But yes, tape noise throw away solitary instruments. It is why sound engineers use techniques to enhance such instruments - please read from the Decca sound engineers or other sound professionals writings. Most of the time people address the "magic" of tape to the media and forget the expertize of the people who created it - most time using "non-natural" methods. For some reason, during the first decade of digital we assumed that the best CD were AAD. It took decades until sound engineers adapted to the digital media and recording systems of high quality were developed.


FIY, quoted from the M Fremer site :

“As a fact of long DG history, the heads of the recording department were also in charge of operating the cutting lathes, because until 1945 a lathe was a recording machine. With our management buyout we took over the last DG VMS 80 and analogue tape machines for cutting. We thought about ways of using the lathe and since EBS emerged from the recording department, one idea was to go back to the tradition of using the lathe directly as a recording machine, instead of tape or a computer. So we started doing Direct-to-Disc recordings. As an engineer and producer I watched our cutting engineer Maarten de Boer while he worked on D2D productions. We immediately became aware of the strong relation between recording and target media (CD or vinyl). We discovered that recording for vinyl needs a different microphone setup than recording for CD. Engineers in the past had made different sonic decisions, knowing that they were producing music for LP and not a tape."


https://trackingangle.com/features/...groundbreaking-original-source-vinyl-reviewed


You are really trying to be negative. I am an optimist in these matters - I foresee an evolutionary brilliant future for music and digital high-end. Soon the latest achievements we see in SOTA very expensive high-end, highly compatible with digital, will expand to lower price products and more people will be able to listen to music with better quality.

Surely MHO, YMMV.

Yes, the nostalgia crowd, looking for some cheap applause lines. I share your optimism. The nostalgic people always complain about the young generations, a favorite pastime since civilization started, many millennia ago, nothing new. In our biotech company we have hardworking, brilliant, well-educated, very friendly and helpful young people. The future is bright. Let the grumpy old men complain, the world moves on. It always does.

As for the rest, all good points.

 

[Tuckers]

Thanks Tuckers were back on topic. Somewhere in this long thread I did mention I already have a fiber bridge powered by a linear power supply and a LHY SW-8 network switch. Have considered a bump in power amps but improvements at this level are $$$$$$. My move from Alexia 1 to Alexx V did yield a lot.

Ah good, then you know the improvements that can be made. I would suggest looking into grounding products and power improvements. If you PM me I can send you some inexpensive things to try in that area as well if you are interested. IMHO grounding EMI /RFI improvements can get your system to the next level of performance for far less than upgrading your digital stack. Plus they improve all sources, but the digital chain more.

 

[Socrates428]

Why stop the digital train at all, destroying fidelity by sending a signal from speakers to ears, when we can truly go direct with this remarkable neuralink tech coming soon via Elon Musk.

(Insert Cypres Hill lyrics and Matrix references here

 

[SoundMann]

Why stop the digital train at all, destroying fidelity by sending a signal from speakers to ears, when we can truly go direct with this remarkable neuralink tech coming soon via Elon Musk.

(Insert Cypres Hill lyrics and Matrix references here

Now you are touching on what I believe is the end goal of this satanic digital conspiracy, which is to utterly enslave mankind in a synthetic virtual world of sophisticated control mechanisms which one cannot escape!