My friend had the Weiss 501…what a crappy sounding machine….
DAC with "Vinyl Emulator?"
Playing with a Weiss 501. It has a ton of DSP related settings from room EQ, headphones, Loudness, cross talk, DeEssing etc. Having a vinyl emulator I think is interesting to say the least. Just thought I’d throw this out there for comment in case anyone is interested- especially you guys...forum.psaudio.com
Why, oh why, does vinyl continue to blow away digital?
- Thread starter godofwealth
- Start date
Have you actually listened to his DACs? There are plenty floating around Switzerland and I can tell you that not one person I know who ever bought one kept it.
Yeah, and if I had $1 billion I'd be a billionaire.If there is a conversion to digital of a full-range analog signal (as opposed to DSP purely for sub-woofer purposes, like around 80Hz and below), then I consider it to be a digital system.
yeshell… with all the pops-n-clicks of a TT, and all the badness of digital.
It’s not quite indistinguishable. When using the best of em, it’s darn close. But converters are not used in a vacuum. Cause something has to initially feed the ADC. The quality of that analog gear can have more to do with the sound of a recording or mastering transfer than the converters.
I think ProTools has a vinyl playback distortion plug-in (emulator) and an analog tape plug-in.
I chat with and follow a fellow Antipodes user on the Antipodes forum who RAVES about PGGB and in fact it’s on my to do list to check out this week. Appears a license is around $300-$350 US.I see there is also PGGB
PGGB - Offline remastering
www.remastero.com
Another software solution that promises better sound quality from digital.
I had asked you a while ago if you had ever listened to your LPs through an ADC and DAC and whether you found the results as pleasing. If you ever do, it would be interesting to know what you thought.
Daniel Weiss covered the distortions and nonlinearities associated with vinyl playback. You covered the added distortions incurred during the cutting process, and I covered the embedded magnetic tape distortions and nonlinearities of the tape playback and medium. That forms the complete picture of all the distortions to the sound along the way. It would be very difficult to model all these as a complete system so rather than do the discrete piece wise emulation you can look at “vinyl playback” as a black box and model the overall resultant effects to emulate the sound signature, and that is what I do as part of my remastering chain to “sweeten” the sound, when needed.
I have tried this with my Ayon DAC, which has analog inputs and a digital volume control. This means it first converts the signal to digital and then digitally attenuates (which I leave on max and use my integrated for volume control) before converting back to analog with the usual DAC chain. The result, while not unpleasant, was not very close to the analog straight into the amp. Perhaps the ADC is not great inside the Ayon, entirely possible, but at least that experiment was a qualified fail.
Have you proven his emulations are any good? How do you know he got it right? His reputation? So, now you appeal to authority for evidence? We played with this vinyl emulator on my friend's 501 and compared to actual vinyl...not even close.
I have not heard his vinyl emulation so I do not know how well he pulls it off, but it appears that he understands all the distortions and nonlinearities that occur to the signal during vinyl playback. Even if the emulation isn’t great his contribution to this thread is the list of distortions associated with vinyl playback.
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I have not tried many other DACs than the one I use (and previous models from the same manufacturer), nor have I used my turntable with a conventional analog system, so my own experience is probably of little value here, but I do feel that in my current system the combination of a turntable with an ADC (which by the way manages RIAA equalization through DSP) does not "kill" the sound of good LPs. Since it is very hard to directly compare all these different solutions, I am always curious to read what others' experience are. But it seems not too many people have tried combining analog and digital - aside for people who use budget turntables with Bluetooth speakers
Lets see; a claim has been made that analogue records sound more “real” than digital records. Many with both digital and analogue concurred, analogue sounds more “real” to them. I supported this finding with results of blind listening tests I had done.
An argument that digital however is more “accurate” is proposed as a rebuttal to the above.
Then the question of accuracy is explored further, how is the analogue signal recorded to master tape being converted to digital then back to analogue then cut onto vinyl more “accurate” than that same analogue signal to master tape recording cut directly onto vinyl without the conversion to digital and back?
The argument to the above was again, that the digital recording is more “accurate”. That the digital recording to DAC to player, has less noise, vs analogue mastered to tape to vinyl with RIAA. So, not like for like, but skewed to get the results wanted. When pressed, that became copying from digital to digital is more accurate than analogue to analogue. Again, not like for like.
The argument morphs to noise. Because analogue has more noise than digital (different too but that not explored deeply), what pleases people is noise and it is that which fools them into thinking analogue more “real”-sounding than digital. This comparison is not like-for-like (see last paragraph), so not valid, however it resulted in some asking if we added the distortions associated with the analogue process (wow and flutter, tape hiss, RIAA processing) to the digital file, would the result sound as pleasant as analogue? How adding anything (including a digital process) to an analogue signal could possibly make it sound more “real” is beyond me.
Those who (to me) seem to have common sense assert that all you have to do is listen and you can hear analogue sounding more real to live music than digital. Then someone actually argued that many of the musicians/singers recorded in analogue are dead so you can’t compare their recordings to live!
This has been one of the most bizarre threads yet on this forum and most entertaining.
An argument that digital however is more “accurate” is proposed as a rebuttal to the above.
Then the question of accuracy is explored further, how is the analogue signal recorded to master tape being converted to digital then back to analogue then cut onto vinyl more “accurate” than that same analogue signal to master tape recording cut directly onto vinyl without the conversion to digital and back?
The argument to the above was again, that the digital recording is more “accurate”. That the digital recording to DAC to player, has less noise, vs analogue mastered to tape to vinyl with RIAA. So, not like for like, but skewed to get the results wanted. When pressed, that became copying from digital to digital is more accurate than analogue to analogue. Again, not like for like.
The argument morphs to noise. Because analogue has more noise than digital (different too but that not explored deeply), what pleases people is noise and it is that which fools them into thinking analogue more “real”-sounding than digital. This comparison is not like-for-like (see last paragraph), so not valid, however it resulted in some asking if we added the distortions associated with the analogue process (wow and flutter, tape hiss, RIAA processing) to the digital file, would the result sound as pleasant as analogue? How adding anything (including a digital process) to an analogue signal could possibly make it sound more “real” is beyond me.
Those who (to me) seem to have common sense assert that all you have to do is listen and you can hear analogue sounding more real to live music than digital. Then someone actually argued that many of the musicians/singers recorded in analogue are dead so you can’t compare their recordings to live!
This has been one of the most bizarre threads yet on this forum and most entertaining.
Great summary. You forgot the part where, if you increase your spend from 10k to 100k, the accurate, quieter source gets closer in sound to the inaccurate, noisier source - and the live musicians start sounding like the dead ones. If all else fails, just record tape hiss and pops and crackles into the digital.
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Republicoftexas69
Well-Known Member
Republicoftexas69
Well-Known Member
Or people using the SU-R1000 …..I have not tried many other DACs than the one I use (and previous models from the same manufacturer), nor have I used my turntable with a conventional analog system, so my own experience is probably of little value here, but I do feel that in my current system the combination of a turntable with an ADC (which by the way manages RIAA equalization through DSP) does not "kill" the sound of good LPs. Since it is very hard to directly compare all these different solutions, I am always curious to read what others' experience are. But it seems not too many people have tried combining analog and digital - aside for people who use budget turntables with Bluetooth speakers
Honestly, I could care less (or couldn't care less
) about the "accuracy" argument. I am not persuaded by technical specifications either way. My own DAC, as an R2R DAC, also by default does not measure as well as a delta sigma DAC, and I just don't care (the DAC designer also makes delta sigma DACs, but reserves the R2R architecture for his top DACs, since he thinks it simply sounds better; if in general he is right on that point is another discussion).I just sit down and, as you say, listen. In days past, like many others still do, I would have given the nod to vinyl for more realistic sound -- in fact, I have learned from intense exposure to vinyl in friends' systems over the years what to listen for and where my digital, and system, at the time was lacking. Yet now I am at a point with my digital and system where I think that digital sounds very real, relatively spoken --- a system can never replicate the sound of unamplified live music, which I have regular exposure to. I don't feel vinyl has an edge anymore.
That's just my listening. Again, I couldn't care less about which medium measures "better" -- and obviously, about the "better" and what it means there is a lot of discussion, where sometimes I even side with the faction skeptical of digital, as will be obvious to those having closely paid attention (I am not an indiscriminate digital "fan boy"). As far as the technical side goes, it primarily interests me to bring it up in the discussion when trying to counter anti-digital false myths brought up by certain vinyl enthusiasts -- and also to inject a skeptical note against uncritical embrace of all things digital. The technical side does not factor into my listening.
The only scenario where I can imagine that analog's added distortion would sound less obnoxious (note I don't mean more pleasing) is that it has a fairly high amount of 2nd, 3rd 4th harmonics in descending amplitude with increasing order. This could provide a significant degree of masking to other, higher order distortions that would otherwise be heard. Digital generally doesn't have these masking low order harmonics in any significant amount but does contain a fairly large number small, high order harmonics that can be detrimental to sound quality (creating a "synthetic" feel).
True noise is interesting because it is uncorrelated with the signal. It is possible to hear correlated signal below a true noise floor (tape hiss is a good example). So, even though the S/N ratio is lower than digital (although the Audioholics article shows that a good vinyl can have noise at -90dB above 400Hz), it is possible to hear signals below it. Noise might give some kind of psychoacoustic advantage but I haven't seen any research on this to either prove or disprove this assertion.
What I can tell you is this. Apples to apples direct recording and playback for R2R tape, Cassette tape, 24/192 digital and direct to disk lacquer of my voice sounded more real with the direct playback of a lacquer recording of my voice. I would not say that R2R tape (Technics X-2000) was that much better than the others (Cassette tape (metal tape on Nakamichi ZX-9 or Tascam digital recorder).
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