It's based on talking with mixing and mastering engineers that produce for both mediums (as most do).
Can digital get to vinyl sound and at what price?
- Thread starter ScottK
- Start date
It's based on talking with mixing and mastering engineers that produce for both mediums (as most do).
no doubt it's fun for you to 'poke the bear'. ok. i get that and have no problem with it.A 3 year old that can expertly operate a consumer digital device within 10 minutes of being handed one for the first time. Any 20 y/o with enough sense to forgo chasing sarcastic Californication of vinyl new popular releases. Exactly the audience I spelled out as having entered the world after digital everything was unavoidable.
Context mattered. The context of quote above response to you within the same message was easily assignable.
For simplicity sake I'll leave it as a listener only attempting to gain expertise in digital. Someone attuned to changes happening among their peers as they jointly encounter events that will shape their path. My use of blowhards at remove from those able to straddle the crossroads was intentional.
Most people on the internet would define any statement as fuel to spark argument.We both are fully aware in the real world mature adults contribute the lions share to what defines enjoyable youthful encounters. My comment was on the framework lacking completion of this timeworn custom. In the manner it was expected to occur. If not where it was expected to occur.
Last month I encountered a 20 something so distracted by a digital anomaly on a streaming service they were pulling people aside in a public place to see if they could hear it. I considered projecting this experience into "The Young Audiophile's" subforum. Care to guess why I didn't?
but it's lame for you to rationalize generational taste differences to dismiss vinyl preferences. anyway, i did look at your postings in the last year to try and understand where you were coming from. you and i interacted a few times and i never felt your spite before. so i guess you were just having a bad day.
my feeling is you don't really believe what you wrote in response to me. it's gibberish.
My sense is that many people do not understand that when you stream a file, it does not all come together in one large encapsulated file. It comes in discrete packets which travel over the internet in competition with everyone else’s packets.
When it gets to you, some of the packets may be on time and in order for ready use. But some packets may be delayed. A small delay can be easily dealt with. But a long delay may make the packet too late to be properly used. At some delay length the packet may be considered lost, even if it eventually arrives.
You cannot use speed data to discern this. You need to look at latency and packet loss.
My isp was uninterested in my streaming issues until I was able to show them the latency and packet loss data. After I showed them, it took them less than a day to find the problem on their side of my gateway and fix it.
Until this was fixed, no amount of reclocking, fancy switch work, or wiring changes could make streaming an acceptable source for my system. After they fixed their side, streaming here has been a bed of roses.
I shared this test web site in an earlier post, but no one on WBF appears to have recognized it as important
You can send a file and have it returned and compared to what you sent. It will tell you the latency and packet loss for files sent between your location and other sites around the world. https://packetlosstest.com/
These data were invaluable to me in sorting out streaming. On bad days I was seeing packet losses of more than 10% and latencies at and above 250 msec.
I am indebted to Gabor Pernyeszi (admin of the conradjohnsonowners.com site) for sharing this site during my long battle to bring streaming to the level of a high end source. Maybe it can help others to get to the point where streaming isn’t pure detritus.
When it gets to you, some of the packets may be on time and in order for ready use. But some packets may be delayed. A small delay can be easily dealt with. But a long delay may make the packet too late to be properly used. At some delay length the packet may be considered lost, even if it eventually arrives.
You cannot use speed data to discern this. You need to look at latency and packet loss.
My isp was uninterested in my streaming issues until I was able to show them the latency and packet loss data. After I showed them, it took them less than a day to find the problem on their side of my gateway and fix it.
Until this was fixed, no amount of reclocking, fancy switch work, or wiring changes could make streaming an acceptable source for my system. After they fixed their side, streaming here has been a bed of roses.
I shared this test web site in an earlier post, but no one on WBF appears to have recognized it as important
You can send a file and have it returned and compared to what you sent. It will tell you the latency and packet loss for files sent between your location and other sites around the world. https://packetlosstest.com/
These data were invaluable to me in sorting out streaming. On bad days I was seeing packet losses of more than 10% and latencies at and above 250 msec.
I am indebted to Gabor Pernyeszi (admin of the conradjohnsonowners.com site) for sharing this site during my long battle to bring streaming to the level of a high end source. Maybe it can help others to get to the point where streaming isn’t pure detritus.
Just to point that results of network testers depend strongly on the chosen site utility and server localization - in my case I found that https://speed.cloudflare.com/ was a more reliable and useful tool than packetlosstest. My network shows zero losses and zero late data., around 15 mS latency. Probably it is why I have always been happy with streaming, although I was a late convert - I built an assembled Windows server with a NAS and JCat boards, but I only started listening to streamed music regularly after I got the Taiko Extreme.
I used both test sites - I'm getting packet loss of between 1 to 4% after running three tests. Should I be concerned about the lost packets for streaming audio quality? They report the results as "Good" for streaming video.
Edit: tested again around 7 pm local time, and I'm getting 10 to 15% packet loss. I think I'll need to buy the digital files and store them on my own server.
Edit: tested again around 7 pm local time, and I'm getting 10 to 15% packet loss. I think I'll need to buy the digital files and store them on my own server.
Last edited:
About a year ago, I was given access to a site which gives real time latency information. This was not the common speed test sites. I was happy to see my network has extremely low latency.
The site is called PingPlotter. It was suggested to me to get a 24 hour reading.
Last edited:
cool stuff. Thank you.
Packetlosstest: 0% packet loss; Avg. latency 70.15 ms; Avg jitter 1.63 ms
Speedcloudflare: 0% packet loss; latency 22.5; jitter 2.84
Wonder why the latency is so different. At what point/level does the latency become a concern? Thanks.
Every time you run the test, the results will likely be a little (or possibly a lot) different. This is because the internet traffic and paths are not always the same.
I use my ears to decide if there is a concern. If things sound good, I don’t worry about it. If things start to sound mediocre, I will run the test a few times. Invariably if the sound is mediocre, the packet loss and latency are high.
Thank you! This is the kind of information I always hope to find in threads.
I'll run the tests whenever the sound quality seems to drop. That will be interesting data to have.
Your story reminds me of a power-related problem I had last year. Suddenly, the sound quality wasn't very good, however I hadn't changed anything. I tried to isolate the problem but couldn't find the answer. Time to wait and ponder. A week later the power company replaced something buried in the ground across the street. They powered down the neighborhood first. About a day later the great sound was back (gear with clocks don't like to be powered down and needed to stabilize, I assumed).
These sites are great to determine the overall network quality, and to see if you have issues that may affect streaming. But streaming clients typically can buffer quite effectively (try to physically remove the network cable, and you can likely hear several seconds of music before it stops).
So if you experience that "The background is blacker" or "The soundstage is larger" or any other very nuanced improvements between streaming and CD or vinyl, this is not likely due to network issues, but rather something else. The effect of poor network speed or latency will likely result in more severe effects, like actualy dropouts.
So if you experience that "The background is blacker" or "The soundstage is larger" or any other very nuanced improvements between streaming and CD or vinyl, this is not likely due to network issues, but rather something else. The effect of poor network speed or latency will likely result in more severe effects, like actualy dropouts.
This is an interesting and cool piece of gear: the ELP laser turntable.
www.elpj.com
Here is a nice video on the topic:
It seems that the consensus is that the main benefit is the ability to play records without any wear either to the record itself, or the stylus (because there is no stylus).
It is not "digital", but it does, at least in theory, remove some of the issues associated with vinyl playback.
Don't reply to this before watching the video, especially if you have never listened to the ELP (I have not).
ELP Laser Turntable – Play Vinyl with No Contact and No Wear
ELP Laser Turntable ELP Laser Turntable Official English Site Learn about the original Laser Turntable for Vinyl Records. No Contact, No Wear.
www.elpj.com
Here is a nice video on the topic:
It seems that the consensus is that the main benefit is the ability to play records without any wear either to the record itself, or the stylus (because there is no stylus).
It is not "digital", but it does, at least in theory, remove some of the issues associated with vinyl playback.
Don't reply to this before watching the video, especially if you have never listened to the ELP (I have not).
Last edited:
I have experienced both phenomena.
You appear to be arguing that there is a shelf, where everything is good, and then when things degrade sufficiently, it’s not. To my ears there is a transition from great to good to mediocre to dropouts. Dropouts definitely are the last straw, not the first.
As @PYP describes, in my experience power quality also exhibits a transition that is audible.
I really don’t want to get into another patented WBF argument where one person tells another what the other hears. So … ha det godt
One obvious exception would be if the streaming client is set to automatically adjust quality based on network capacity.
I am sure there could be other situations where the network problems affect sound quality as well, depending on how the streaming client is designed. So I agree that it is not necessarily black and white.
… well, I just got my TT back after it`s been in service for 3 months… so I was stuck with my digital music for a while… I`m just shocked how much better vinyl sounds… crazy!
Good question. IMHO these measurements are just good to diagnose gross faults or network problems , not to rank or quantify possible audio quality. However, since long they are checked by teenagers for online real time gaming, much more exigent than stereo streaming in this aspect.
Latency depends on data path to the chosen server - so on path length and structure. For example, if we add a VPN we can expect a different latency, It is why the Taiko people "forbid" it on their server.
... does that apply to streaming from services such as Qobuz and Tidal only, or also for streaming stored/ripped files from as server in an inhouse ethernet - network? ... and further, is it not so, that the streaming bridge receives the package and prepares it/does something with it so it gets served to the DAC in a usable manner...? I mean, it`s not like the "degraded" or incomplete package gets served directly to the DAC from the internet/ethernet/server - from what I understand it goes into the streaming bridge, where it is basically prepared to then be served to the DAC???
Last edited:
Regarding references, my posts are merely reprising and summarising the findings of 4 audiophile IT engineers who started 7 or more years ago by designing and building state of the art servers and power supplies and reporting the result of their trials, experiments and findings on the Audiophile Style DIY forum. In addition, I follow the posts and developments of companies like Innuos and Taiko Audio, who also contribute hugely to improving the sound quality of streamed audio.
These particular individuals and companies enjoy a following of avid readers who try the reported developments and new product releases and report back their own findings. Over the 7 years I‘ve followed these developments I‘ve implemented many of their discoveries and developments in my own dedicated streaming system, often with jaw droppingly good results. The results have very often defied explanation by contradicting old/established IT standards and expectations, with which I was very familiar.
When I initially started building a dedicated local and remote streaming system, I took on board the sage advice to check my network’s performance and integrity by ensuring that the files I was transporting around my network were arriving ‘bit perfectly’. i.e that the pattern of bits in the file remained unchanged. Essentially a ‘bit perfect’ file is a file that is unchanged from the originating file. If a file that starts and ends as the ‘same’ file i.e has the ‘same‘ bit pattern, has been ‘improved’ in that it ‘sounds better’, then the inescapable logic is that something other than the bit pattern is responsible for the improvement. A change in the bit pattern would be a neat explanation of what’s going on with changes to sound quality but when the bit pattern doesn’t change, an alternate explanation is obviously required.
A bit pattern is often thought of as 1s and 0s, which are unalterable but this isn’t correct. A bit file may be a series of voltages in a wire, light pulses in a glass fibre, a series of radio frequency pulses, or a pattern of high/low charge values stored in an array of memory cells on a silicon chip. If we take voltage as an example, that voltage has different quality characteristics, for example how accurately it represents the desired voltage, how quickly it changed. between the 2 specified voltages (the 1 and the 0), how much noise is included, how accurate the time interval, how much noise is on the reference voltage etc. Each time those bits are converted, the ‘convertor’ leaves its own imprint on the file, that can be heard in the way the music sounds, which is why servers, media convertors, FO FTCs, network switches, bridges etc. all impart different qualities to the final sound.
Both anecdotal and empirical evidence has shown that a myriad of things affect the sound quality of streamed files without changing the actual bit pattern of the file. The type of RAM memory in a server, the type and noise profile of a disc drive, the impedance and noise profile of power supplies, the type of capacitors in powers supplies, the type, specification and power supplies of oscillators, the type of wire and screening used in DC cables, the type of interfaces used between modules, the screening layout of network cables, the type of CPU in the server, vibration control of components, the switching chip in a switch, power usage and noise profile of network connectors like RJ45, the removal/avoidance of EMI, the configuration of BIOS files, the amount, type and degree of isolation of network traffic, the topology of the network, the brand of fibre optic SFCs, modem chip-sets, modem set-up, galvanic isolation, the list goes on and on. All the above produce effects that influence the quality of the network’s and bitstream’s physical layer.
All of this information is available, spread over 7 years worth of specialist forum posts.
This is not my original work. I‘m just the reporter.
Identifying what I reported as being ‘made-up’ and therefore by definition ‘new’ is simply an indication that your knowledge about streaming is several years out of date. When I came to building my own streaming system 7 years ago, my knowledge, experience and beliefs were similar to yours. But in the intervening years I have discovered, thanks to the efforts of several kind and highly knowledgable individuals, that networking for purely IT reasons and networking for streaming audio do not have the same requirements IF resulting sound quality is the main consideration, because things that have absolutely no effect on IT related aspects have a profound effect on the resulting sound quality of the music produced from streamed digital audio files.
I’ve been a music fan since I was a small boy lying in bed with a single earphone and radio Luxemburg on Short Wave. For me music generates beautiful emotional responses and the better I can get the sound quality, the more intense those emotions. As a consequence I’ve owned some really great hi-fi equipment which I‘ve constantly upgraded as part of the audiophile addiction to emotion-laden high-quality music.
In all my 50 plus years I never found an area of hi-fi so rich in upgrade potential as digital streaming and its supporting networking. Following the developments and discoveries mentioned above has been an absolute pleasure, getting me to levels of musical fidelity and enjoyment I never imagined possible. It gives me pleasure to write about those discoveries and share them with like minded individuals who strive to achieve the same goals of greater musical enjoyment.
Denying all the new found information about streaming, based on out of data IT knowledge does nothing to advance and promote hi-fi and is to a large degree what is holding back digital audio to the point its quality rarely exceeds that of a similar system based on analog.
Last edited:
Blackmorec has been spot on over the last 2-3 years on WBF and specifically with regard to his network posts on the several Taiko network threads.
I for one stand by the findings that he has reported regarding networks and specifically their effect on streaming over the last several years.
imho. YMMV.
I for one stand by the findings that he has reported regarding networks and specifically their effect on streaming over the last several years.
imho. YMMV.
Similar threads
