Republicoftexas69
Well-Known Member
And Michigan, A&W floats rocked. In Arlington Heights we had Cock Robin and they had dang good cones too.
Can digital get to vinyl sound and at what price?
- Thread starter ScottK
- Start date
Aspergics get very upset when people agree with them, at least that's what my wife tells me. I don't have the insight.
This was explained above:
First of all, great cartridges and phono stages allow 80dB (or more) of dynamic range, not 70.
Second, you don’t need more than 70. Even a quiet room will have about 30dB of background “noise”. Add 70 to that and you’re at 100. Most systems can’t even reproduce 100dB without clipping or distortion.
Thats a tough one to answer. And honestly, i believe source material and playback equipment have serious shortcomings. There is not a lot of really well recorded works. And a lot of high $$$ systems leave a lot in the source material that is there.
I also feel there is a real investment that has to be made in equipment, but somewhere around $40k and you have the ability to resolve as well as many systems that cost $300k. You may not have the ability to preasurize a large room with earth shatteing energy that is free of distortions. But you can have a very realistic and as close to live sound as your going to get from anything else.
I have to think about how to describe inner detail. But its similar to distortion you don't hear until its gone. Then your very aware it was there. When you hear really good inner detail, you know you heard it. One of the very first systems I heard outside my own was Jazdocs. I heard stuff in his room I never heard again on a scale that size. Not until I had a very similar amp to his from the same maker in my room. Then I was very aware what was missing in my system. I bought the amps that night. Then told my wife.
Its a very different thing than scale, density and intensity. Its more an intimacy and level of life. I hate to say it this way. Its much closer to live. A moment in my system that stuck with me was a cuban style song with simple guitars, drums and wood percussions. One of those percussionis being a hollow wood piece hit with a wood stick. Everyone hears it on their system for what it is. They have heard it before and know it's a piece of wood being hit with a stick. A system with true inner detail would allow someone to sit in the soundstage with the actual instrument in their hands and strike it along with the song and if you had your eyes closed you wouldn't know if it was the song or your friend playing along. Very few systems I have heard would fool someone. The real instrument would jump out and grab you. You would easily distinguish between your friend hitting the Percussion and what was in the record.
So, it's not that we have different processors between our ears: it's the same processor, with different programming...
In addition to @Zeotrope 's comment above: it not only how high a DR the hardware can offer, it's mostly how high the DR of the medium is.
In real life, that is what makes the biggest difference.
That's rather disrespectful of the sound recording industry.
Over here in the UK, there is a clear path of excellence in recording going back 100 years, very much in parallel with developments in the USA. The advantage over here was that EMI and Decca with their research facilities and recording venues based in London also had an extraordinary wealth of music talent a taxi ride away, often just a short walk. That gives us the pleasure of being able listen to world class performances on a regular basis and then go home and listen to their equally magnificent recordings. Jared Sachs of Channel Classics (Amsterdam) has made some of the best recordings of the last couple of decades, including with Rachel Podger at St Judes, a church I can see here from my window. In particular, at Decca you had Arthur Haddy and his protege Kenneth Wilkinson (of Decca Tree and ffrr fame), who made thousands of great recordings. Wilkie's protege is Simon Eadon, who was as Decca for 27 years and is still going after 50+ years.
The rather bizarre RCA Victor Royal Ballet/Ansermet 1959 recording that people rave about (now on Analogue Productions) was actually a Decca production, engineered by Kenneth Wilkinson at Kingsway Hall, one of Decca's main venues.
If you want a reference, try this one, engineered by Simon Eadon during extreme lockdown in Henry Wood Hall, a favourite venue for many record labels for some 50 years. I've heard this performer many times and on my humble audio system it takes you very deep into the music.
Another favoured venue is St Silas (https://www.discogs.com/label/385986-Church-Of-St-Silas-The-Martyr-Kentish-Town).
This St Silas recording, by a close friend of AI above, who we've also heard perform many times, was engineered by David Hinitt. He trained at Surrey University, where the Music Recording course was run by John Borwick, probably the leading recording engineer of his time and who trained a generation of BBC recording engineers. (He was also an audiophile and was the Audio editor of Gramophone for about 30 years.) His reference book has been in print for over 40 years.
In my experience, recorded music has only one real shortcoming that can be fully explained in a few words - "it's not live". That aside, there are many thousands of incredibly well recorded productions, more than I could listen to in my lifetime.
16/44 PCM was chosen to provide more than enough dynamic range for human hearing. I have some recordings from the 1970s that were done in 14-bit PCM, so 16-bit was not a given. One of the skills of the recording engineer is, if necessary, to compress the recorded sound so that it is audible in a typical listening space. There are some recordings with too much dynamic range that cannot be played in a decent audio room without tweaking the volume.
So a big shout-out for recording engineers who continue to do a great job and provide magnificent source material with lots of "inner detail".
Conservatively , 90% of audiophiles have under powered systems for proper playback of music with high crest factors , leading to a lot of “bad” sounding recordings..
Regards
Regards
...probably more of us than you might realize, but who cares what I think? Sometimes not even me. At present, I have a little dog. I have had big dogs. And cats. They all have their virtues, but I don't care to take a stand re: which is better/best, or in devising tests/performance metrics that support my assertions, only to have the vinyl-tube-cat people clear leather and open fire. It's all good. Just flavors.
Some of the swordplay online is interesting, funny at times, but finally...just opinions and statements of preferences, for the most part. Most days you "learn" more about human nature than audio. And usually, that's fine too.
Does it really matter if it's 1, 10 , 100 , 1000? Is the number going to change your personal decision on what format you prefer? Get the digital components that perform best in your system and sit back and enjoy some music. The endless tit for tat on this subject seems pretty pointless, better to satisfy yourself versus worrying about what satisfies everyone else.
Indeed, if you have a lot of "bad" sounding recordings:
"It's your system, stupid."
(no offense, just playing on a known phrase)
Good morning, AG. Please allow me to ask you these questions.
When was the last time you listened to a really good vinyl set up?
Next question - What was the gear/level of playback of said vinyl system?
Next Question - Were you able to do a direct comparison of vinyl on the same system as the digital, listening to the same song selection(s)?
Tom
some here are idea oriented, some are listening oriented, some are system oriented, some are all three. i think the answer to your point is contained in how this forum's members approach the hobby. mostly they are serious listeners with active systems. the time listening and believing their ears is of greater weight in their perspective than any other data points. and so this forum respects listening mostly as opposed to some greater technical reasoning.
which does not mean we all agree, but it seems the listening does end up with most of us hearing similarly. not all, just most.
if someone enters the forum with mostly ideas, and not really any listening based perspectives, then they are going to be on the margin and not fit in fully. but that's ok, it's not required we all agree. but expecting to influence the forum with idea based reasoning is not realistic. what did you hear? how did you hear it? those are what most of us want to know. lacking that part will not get you far. but there is no problem with it.
if you tell us about some measurement based idea, it's just not going to get any traction. it carries zero weight here. if you have posted about your listening perspectives for a few years first, then maybe it might get some attention as something to look at. but that's just how it is. we are not looking to be educated about numbers. not why we come here. and outside data is just noise, to be ignored mostly.
Last edited:
To me, there are some out boundaries that get defined such as width or depth of the soundstage, the macro dynamics, or bass or highs of the system. You will get it if it sounds realistic or not on tone. To me this is not inner detail, e.g.
Example of a system description without touching on inner detail - This system has great midbass/lean sounding, extended highs/rolled off, plastic/very real tone, stopstart/continuous flow, wide and deep/narrow between the speakers stage.
But when you play a violin or a piano or any instrument, it is not just the above, but what is happening to each note - do you hear a strike, then depth to the note, a decay, inflections in the note...this is inner detail. Is it a one note bass (can be powerful and deep), but one note bass does not have inner detail.
A good friend use to have access to a performance venue to record the concerts. He was shocked at how much information was never captured on the tape or digital recorders. No matter the microphones used, he found every copy of the live event to be significantly diminished from the real evert. Not even close.
What about all the stories of the artist walking out to a car to see how it plays?
My perception of a recording label is a machine focused on profits. Profits profits profits. Screw the artist and performers. Profits. That does not sing quality to me. It sings content to sell to a mass market that plays music over Alexa.
Some artist care about quality. But that does not mean audiophile quality. It means a very good production that plays well on earbuds.
There are some very good older pressings of jazz. There are some new recording of orchestra that are very good. There are also masses of material that is made to generate money.
Thats my view
What about all the stories of the artist walking out to a car to see how it plays?
My perception of a recording label is a machine focused on profits. Profits profits profits. Screw the artist and performers. Profits. That does not sing quality to me. It sings content to sell to a mass market that plays music over Alexa.
Some artist care about quality. But that does not mean audiophile quality. It means a very good production that plays well on earbuds.
There are some very good older pressings of jazz. There are some new recording of orchestra that are very good. There are also masses of material that is made to generate money.
Thats my view
Here you are describing macro sonic attributes, not detail.
Why not describe this merely as detail?
What do you mean by - idea oriented - listening oriented -system oriented?
I listen seriously (as if focused a live event) and casually. With regard to what we actually hear, I'm reminded of a masterclass I attended about 5 years ago by Andras Schiff. On the first evening he performed Janacek and Bach, possibly Beethoven, can't exactly remember. The next evening he did the masterclass with his protege. This was done at the Wigmore Hall, excellent acoustics. He was demonstrating a motif in Janacek's "In the Mists". It was a very delicate few bars in the upper registers. The unfortunate young man just couldn't get it right. Hearing Schiff play it you knew exactly what he was trying to achieve. It was extremely subtle, but dead obvious (if that makes sense). It was fascinating as I am not a trained musician and it illustrates some of the subtleties of performance that only professional musicians, and perhaps only the better ones, would appreciate.
The musical point being made would easily be audible on a very modest system (say Harbeth and a Hegel for $5,000 all in). You really don't need to spend much to get deep into the music, what with cheap digital gear with very low noise floors. I looked at @Kingrex's website and he said about his Torus mains transformer: "The whole of the music feels like a layer of mud removed. With that noise removed, more space and ambience is heard around individual instruments. The music no longer gels into a homogeneous blob." I have very modest hifi by WBF forum standards, but if anyone here experiences a homogeneous blob, they should take legal action against their audio dealer or seriously consider their room acoustics.
That said, I appreciate that, for example, some DACs present more detailed imaging of different instruments than others. I've been to demo's of some serious hifi and more modest stuff, such as I own, and it seems to me that the difference between systems at whatever price and whether digital or vinyl is not the ability to discern the musical content - but far more ethereal differences that, frankly, are near impossible to put into words that anyone can actually understand in terms of a sonic experience. You know it when you hear it, but can I explain how Schiff played that bit of Janacek? No chance.
"Digital vs. analogue" seems far less relevant than "music vs. format", which is the elephant in the room.
Similar threads
