Can digital get to vinyl sound and at what price?

[Ron Resnick]

Unfortunately, digital is an inherently lossy format, which also produces an inordinately large amount of high frequency distortion.

It also sounds distinctly artificial.

Which DAC are you using?

 

[SoundMann]

Which DAC are you using?

There are no commercially available dacs that can completely overcome digitals deficiencies, so currently none.

I have never liked the sound of digital, and am very sensitive to what it does wrong.

 

[Joe Whip]

I had the opportunity to visit a record pressing plant on Sunday that uses state of the art equipment for the entire record pressing process. after witnessing it first hand with detailed explanations, I am shocked that vinyl can sound good at all. So many things can go wrong to effect the sound. I watchEd making the lacquer from a damn good sounding digital file. I was told by vinyl fans there that the digital file sounded better by far than when they played back the lacquer. I have also been in studios listening to the live mic feed and the digital playback sounded identical. If you love vinyl, great. But all this bitching about digital is just that bitching. Endless bitching. Enjoy your music in any way you want.

 

[jfrech]

and in my system, every time my digital gets better.....my analog also gets better....maybe by a very slightly greater margin. i keep pushing both. the evidence points toward the analog media being less optimized by the analog hardware compared to the digital media. maybe the nature of an analog mostly mechanical process.

this is just what my ears are telling me......at this point in my system. maybe just my unique experience and not a widely held viewpoint.

Mike,

This has been my experience also. I am able to advance both formats. Just when one format is catching up, the other takes another step. For me both formats are incredibly enjoyable and it is down to the recording. Modern hi rez digital recordings can be very real and palpable. So can something off tape from the 60's on vinyl.

For new recently recorded music, I am preferring digital. For music recorded on tape, I tend to prefer vinyl if the mastering process has kept the digital stuff out.

So to the original posters question, my answer is, it's the recording that dictates which path I like best. The are equally enjoyable in my system, even thought both formats have strengths and weaknesses in general.

 

[SoundMann]

I have also been in studios listening to the live mic feed and the digital playback sounded identical.

Precious few people have the hearing acuity to percieve differences under these circumstances, which is why live unamplified acoustic performances serve as the only true reference.

 

[ScottK]

I'm going to pull a 180 - I've been vocal in the past about how digital $ for $ is better than analog until you reach ~$20K investment. Now, I believe the opposite as I unexpectedly jumped back into analog with a modest setup that I would argue is darn close to my digital. Yet, the digital setup is ~2x the price of the analog.

With regard to your questions and situation (being 125% frank) - I'm sure you can make your digital match or surpass your analog, since, I've heard the Terminator and the Innuos line of products (I had the Statement in my system) and there's many significantly better digital front ends. DCS and MSB (I've heard several models of each many times) would certainly be levels better. And even though I haven't heard you exact analog setup, IMO and IME - yes you can vastly improve your digital to meet or surpass your analog.

WRT the philosophy of analog (the up, down ritual, the cleaning, the tweaking, the purchasing of physical media, etc.) for me, I've always said, if I got back into vinyl, it would be for the records that haven't been remastered and available on digital and / or were remastered horribly on digital, that would be my focus, and I'm sorry I didn't act sooner. There is a plethora of phenomenal vinyl remastered that expands on our "best of" musical favorites adding to digital, and for the select few, you can add tape. So, I'll get up, and down to hear that extra ~5% of music that I would've never had the opportunity previously with only digital, it's worth it. Good stuff for us all!

Thank you. This is the first response to my question. After reading through the very informative "Various DAC Audition impressions" thread I'm leaning toward the Lapizator Horizon. But somewhat concerned about the lack of local (USA) service if needed.

​

 

[Joe Whip]

Precious few people have the hearing acuity to percieve differences under these circumstances, which is why live unamplified acoustic performances serve as the only true reference.

Oh. The old my hearing is not good enough argument, rephrased. Thanks for that.

 

[Carlos269]

Precious few people have the hearing acuity to percieve differences under these circumstances, which is why live unamplified acoustic performances serve as the only true reference.

Sounds like you have closed your mind to hearing the reality that digital captures of live performances are demonstrably more accurate. In reading the latest replies to this thread, I’m pleased to read that there are others who have taken the blinders off and are acknowledging the simple truth.

Hey listen, I love the sound of magnetic tape and vinyl replay and can hear why most find it so pleasing and natural sounding. The analogy that I will give is this, if you accept and understand the fact that microphones respond differently to sound than our ears then you will also understand that digital captures with a state of the art ADC are neutral and have no bias to any frequency regions or signal levels, obviously prior to clipping, unlike our ears which have a Fletcher-Munson response.

Much of the magic that we attribute to magnetic tape and vinyl playback is due to distortion, dynamic range compression in the case of tape, an attribute that is embedded in vinyl sourced from magnetic tape, and frequency bandwidth attenuation at the frequency extremes. All of those negative attributes make up for a very euphonic and pleasing sound compare to the neutral and faithful to original digital captures. There is no mystery here. In mastering studios, in my 2-buss Remastering chain at home, some judicious addition of saturation, some tape compression emulation, and high frequency contour sculpting can make digital files sound very close to what they would have sounded like in an all analog production chain.

 

[SoundMann]

Sounds like you closed your mind to hearing the reality that digital captures of live performances are demonstrably more accurate. In reading this the latest replies to this thread, I’m pleased to read that there are others who have taken the blinders off and are acknowledging the simple truth.

I have performed exhaustive test that prove your assertion wrong. In fact, one can measure many of digitals rather gross deviations.

Furthermore, those of us who worked to bring you a digital format knew that it could never achieve a high enough level of fidelity to challenge the best of what analog is capable of.

 

[wil]

Even though my hearing acuity is world renouned, I refuse to engage in such BORG buffoonery!

How does one become “world renowned” for hearing acuity?

 

[SoundMann]

How does one become “world renowned” for hearing acuity?

By being able to audibly discern to a higher level than others are capable of.

 

[Carlos269]

All things being equal, a digital transfer of a technically inferior analog source should be transparent. The fact this is not, and is not in repeatable and predictable ways demonstrate artifacts inherent in digital capture and playback, that do not exist in analog ones.

This is just as true if you are recording the audio directly without any tape or vinyl intermediary. If the engineer is sitting at an analog mixing console, the piano microphones are coming in, he inserts the ADC/DAC of a digital recording interface, and the sound changes in a specific way, that tells you something. When that change is qualitatively the same as with an analog to digital transfer, it also tells you something. And when even the best DACs can't completely remedy this change, it says something inherent to the ADC and the capture format.

Some of us have been at this a long time dealing with the same qualitative signature across most digital systems. I'm personally happy with improvements in digital hifi, but the gap has not been entirely closed.

Ian, if you ever get a chance to listen to the original Meitner DSD ADC that were used in the advent of SACD, I highly recommend it. These Meitner DSD ADC were never commercially available as they were built and used for Sony’s internal use for SACD creation and authoring. I have three of these Meitner DSD ADC stereo units and consider it the best sounding ADC ever made. The Grimm DSD AD-1 is also a good sounding ADC. These ADC’s use the SDIF3 format so are no longer compatible with the studio world today but for those that still have Sadie, Sonoma, or Pyramix systems, there is no better sounding ADC. Some times we have to look to our past to give us some insight into the future:

 

[Joe Whip]

BORG? Hard to take him seriously after that. But hey, that is just me. Although I do like 7 of 9.

 

[Carlos269]

I have performed exhaustive test that prove your assertion wrong. In fact, one can measure many of digitals rather gross deviations.

Furthermore, those of us who worked to bring you a digital format knew that it could never achieve a high enough level of fidelity to challenge the best of what analog is capable of.

You keep believing that. As they say, ignorance is bliss.

 

[SoundMann]

You keep believing that. As they say, ignorance is bliss.

I will stick with my decades of knowledge and research on the matter.

 

[bonzo75]

Even though my hearing acuity is world renouned,

Were you there at the world audio listening competition in May?

 

[Joe Whip]

Is that where they separate the wheat from the chaff bonzo75?

 

[SoundMann]

Were you there at the world audio listening competition in May?

No.

 

[christoph]

Even though my hearing acuity is world renouned, I refuse to engage in such BORG buffoonery!

In which world would that be?
What hearing committee of which world gave you that "title"?

 

[SoundMann]

In which world would that be?
What hearing committee of which world gave you that "title"?

Those who I knew and interacted with respected it (and mockery isn't appropriate behavior)!