Can digital get to vinyl sound and at what price?

[Joe Whip]

I can’t wait to see the new thread on this thread over at ASR. While I fall more on the objective side, I realize that measurements are not perfect and in the end, we listen with our ears, not with a measuring device. Over at ASR, anyone who objects to the group think is ridiculed , to no end. It is like a group of flat earthers over on Discord.

 

[facten]

I am not a vinyl guy largely because of the dirth of releases for the sub-genre of jazz that i enjoy and which dominates much of my listening. That said, during an audition of equipment last August at Gestalt Audio the SQ of the music I listened to whether via a Neodio Origine S2 CD player, Tron Electric top of the line DAC and Aurender N20 streamer, or a TW Acustic turntable (don't recall which model, arm, cartridge, or the phono preamp) it was all very good. I listened to each of the three within the same system with consistency amongst the other electronics and cabling. I will state honestly that the analog SQ had an edge over either digital presentation though it wasn't night and day different. If I had access to much more of the music I enjoy on vinyl I'd add analog to my equipment. Since it is not I will enjoy the music I like to listen to via spinning those small silver discs. Enjoy whatever music you enjoy and via whatever format suits you; in the end that's all that matters.

 

[Al M.]

Over at ASR, anyone who objects to the group think is ridiculed , to no end. It is like a group of flat earthers over on Discord.

There is definitely a cult atmosphere around "guru" Amir. If you read the comment section below some of his YouTube videos, people go oooh and aaah, with gushing praise, like "the master has spoken, it's the last word".

Notwithstanding the fact that in a private group email about one Amir video, which I was a participant in, an audio engineer dryly pointed out to us that Amir had been measuring the wrong thing.

Yet again, I can't be all negative. As I said before, Amir has taught me important things about digital theory -- with one crucial lightbulb moment as a result -- that I am very grateful for.

 

[ScottK]

Lol
I'm more used to ASR than this forum
I guess science and measurements aren't that important around here

Correct, I prefer sound quality and emotion.

 

[davidavdavid]

sound quality AND emotion? So, you want both??? Hmm...
We don't do that here. You appear to have the wrong forum but don't you fret as we do validate parking.

 

[Al M.]

sound quality AND emotion? So, you want both??? Hmm...
We don't do that here. You appear to have the wrong forum but don't you fret as we do validate parking.

LOL

 

[Al M.]

Yet again, I can't be all negative. As I said before, Amir has taught me important things about digital theory -- with one crucial lightbulb moment as a result -- that I am very grateful for.

I was asked by someone what caused that lightbulb moment . It's here (post # 22). See the mathematical formula and excellent explanation by Amir.

 

[Joe Whip]

Correct, I prefer sound quality and emotion.

As my grandmother used to say, what do you want, egg in your beer.

 

[Audiophile666]

I was asked by someone what caused that lightbulb moment . It's here (post # 22). See the mathematical formula and excellent explanation by Amir.

Lol
His username says he's banned here

 

[Audiophile666]

Correct, I prefer sound quality and emotion.

There's no contradiction
You can be science oriented and have Good SQ and emotion in your sound

 

[Republicoftexas69]

Lol
His username says he's banned here

It is your hero. The King of ASR.

 

[ScottK]

I thought the point of an audio forum is to discuss different opinions
It would be pretty boring if everybody thought the same way

I agree but the counter opinions need to be presented with convincing arguments and not bombastic responses.

 

[Audiophile666]

I agree but the counter opinions need to be presented with convincing arguments and not bombastic responses.

I just showed some quotes from a website
What's bombastic about it?
No one even tried to disprove all of that

 

[Republicoftexas69]

I just showed some quotes from a website
What's bombastic about it?
No one even tried to disprove all of that View attachment 113865 View attachment 113866 View attachment 113867

From a website, okay more detail. Qualify your source. ASR will not help your credibility.

 

[godofwealth]

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.



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.

I didn’t want to sound negative. I just wanted to add a reality check. I have invested heavily in both digital and analog, for the simple reason that it enhances my ability to listen to all types of music with the widest possible reach. I have bought over the past two to three years a large collection of mono jazz vinyl albums that might never make it to Roon. The only way to listen to a lot of great jazz from the 1930s to the 1950s is on vinyl in mono. It sounds splendid to my ears, even though it’s obviously not very faithful to the real live sound. When I listen to the sound of a big band from the 1930s or 1940s in mono vinyl, I can only imagine how thrilling it must have been to hear the great jazz performers live! I can’t do that, sadly, without time travel. So, mono vinyl is the best I can do. For example, the wonderful Time-Life Jazz series has incomparable liner notes written by music lovers who knew the jazz classics. This series is worth acquiring for just the liner notes with the fabulous black and white photographs. To me, no streaming album compares to this level of liner notes and the dedication required in producing this series.

Streaming provides a great source of enjoyment for me for listening to modern classical music to a wide range of composers with a simple swipe. That’s amazing in and of itself. Roon is a great boon to music lovers like me, and I was one of the earliest lifetime members of Roon, the best $500 I have ever spent in the last 35+ years in high end audio.

But, getting back to the main point. Here’s an analogy. We all take pictures with our digital cameras, from humble smartphones to fancy medium format cameras. I have bought virtually every type of camera format there is, from Nikon film cameras, to Leica rangefinders and 100 mega pixel Hasselbad medium format cameras (that cost a bundle!). You know what? Compared to the real world, all digital cameras simply suck! There’s a simple reason. The CCD sensor used in every digital camera does not see color! It’s not like the human eye in any way at all. CCD sensors (or CMOS sensors) only see grayscale! Color is an illusion created by the Bayer filter (https://www.arrow.com/en/research-and-events/articles/introduction-to-bayer-filters).

That is, an algorithm examines the gray scale pixels and synthesizes color. It’s remarkable that it works at all, but of course, it is no match for the human eye. Even with my fancy 100 megapixel Hasselblad, I can go out into my garden, see a lovely rose in bloom (in the Bay Area, we have an ideal weather for growing roses) with my naked eyes, take a very high resolution image that takes up hundreds of megabytes, look at it on my fancy 8K Dell monitor, and boy, does it suck! I mean, it’s not remotely close to what my eye sees in my garden. So, all this fancy camera technology is great, but it does not come close to the human visual experience.

That’s exactly the analogy I wanted to make with high fidelity recordings. The great violinist Jascha Heifetz called hifi “High Phooey and Hystereo”!. He had a point. It is so far removed from what instruments sound like in the concert hall, and recording live music is like trying to reach the moon by climbing the tallest mountain. Yes, on Mount Everest, you are closer to the moon, but it is still a long ways away!

Yet, that’s the best we have, and I enjoy it (both cameras and hifi), since it does enrich my life But it is no substitute for real human experience in the aural or visual worlds. The human eye and the human ear are miracles of evolution. Cherish and enjoy them.

 

[cjf]

"can-digital-get-to-vinyl-sound-and-at-what-price"

I've asked myself the exact opposite of this question more times than once.

But in any case, with digital you can always add "vinyl" like effects to the playback chain if that is your preference or you can do what some others here have already stated by including some Tube sweetness somewhere in the chain to bring you closer to that side of the line.

For me, no matter how vinyl might sound (For better or worse), the answer for me is that it simply can't do what digital can and that's a none starter for me and my selection of gear.

 

[Rexp]

Both you and Soundman ( who confesses to not listening to or being interested in any music produced after 1979) are doing a good job of convincing us that you actually have a sadly narrow appreciation or knowledge of music.

How so? I listen to both vinyl and digital and not just the old stuff, actually I just recommend a jazz album made in 2015. For me the mastering is key.

 

[godofwealth]

There is definitely a cult atmosphere around "guru" Amir. If you read the comment section below some of his YouTube videos, people go oooh and aaah, with gushing praise, like "the master has spoken, it's the last word".

Notwithstanding the fact that in a private group email about one Amir video, which I was a participant in, an audio engineer dryly pointed out to us that Amir had been measuring the wrong thing.

Yet again, I can't be all negative. As I said before, Amir has taught me important things about digital theory -- with one crucial lightbulb moment as a result -- that I am very grateful for.

As a lifelong academic scientist who now works in industry, I certainly am a strong believer in meaningful measurements. But, you have to look at the whole system, not one particular component, and especially the weakest components (which in my view are the loudspeakers and the listening room). ASR and Stereophile, just to name two measurement oriented forums, take great pains to measure components like DACs (ASR takes it to absurd levels, ranking DACs by SINAD numbers), and both chastise a DAC if its measurement falls below some gold standard (e.g., 20 bit linearity or some such thing). All the while, both John Atkinson and Amir ignore the elephant in the room. Loudspeakers are so bad, even the worst SET amplifiers are far better.

Even a highly accomplished and expensive professional loudspeaker, like the JBL M2, has horrible distortion, something like -50 dB S/N ratio is all the M2 can achieve even at a relatively low output of 86 dB. That’s barely 8 bits of linearity. What’s the point of berating a DAC manufacturer that his/her DAC cannot achieve 20 bit linearity when we are so far from having a loudspeaker that can even resolve 16 bits of information that is encoded in a CD? It’s a complete hypocrisy not to focus measurements on the weakest link in the chain, the loudspeaker. The only time John Atkinson ever shows distortion measurements of a loudspeaker is when once in a decade, Stereophile reviews a Quad electrostatic loudspeaker (then, John gets all gushy about how the Quad can achieve -70 dB S/N ratio and is really phase linear, but he conveniently forgets to do any such measurement when reviewing other loudspeakers, one can only imagine to avoid pissing off wealthy advertisers). Amir is even worse — he’ll review a Revel loudspeaker (his company does business with them, I understand), and then glow about how a Revel loudspeaker achieves only 5% THD in the bass or some such thing (I think the exact phrase he used was something like “where’s the distortion?”, to which I wanted to say, it’s staring at you right in the face if you actually look at the plots!). Then, Amir will go off on a DAC review, and bash, for example a Chord Dave DAC because it didn’t measure < -120 dB in his SINAD scale (all the while ignoring the inconvenient truth that the very loudspeakers he uses to listen to all the DAC’s he reviews has distortion that’s more than a million times worse!).

I am not opposed to measurements, but one has to be aware of what the major determiners of it are in the listening chain. The most revealing example I have seen of this came in a famous lecture by Professor Amar Gopal Bose of MIT (yes, the guy who founded the Bose corporation). Bose wanted to show his MIT students taking his legendary Acoustics class that the listening room was the primary determiner of distortion. He gave a simple demo where he played a recording through a high quality loudspeaker, recorded the reproduction, and then repeated the same process half a dozen times. Guess what? After about 6 or 8 times through the loop, all that remained was complete noise! The music disappeared! Even though the original loudspeaker was very high quality, the combination of its distortions and the room effects kept multiplying each time through this loop, and half a dozen times later, there was no signal, only noise! One simple point Bose made was that you could repeat that experiment, except use the input vs. output of any amplifier, repeat the process, and the final result would be indistinguishable from the original in most ways (i.e., if you daisy chain 6 amplifiers to each other, level adjusted so the gain was that of a single amplifier, many listeners cannot tell they are listening to six amplifiers, not one, as Peter Walker of Quad demonstrated many decades ago with one of his amplifiers).

Yet, both Amir and John Atikinson persist in measuring distortion of amplifiers and DACs, when these are completely irrelevant and meaningless, because they are completely and utterly dwarfed by loudspeaker and room induced distortions. That’s pseudoscience, in my book.

 

[Rexp]

So, if folks don't listen to the music you listen to they have no appreciation for music or are music adverse? The amazing part of your statement is that you are serious. Sad take frankly!

Nope, it's not about what I listen to. You like Jazz, right? Take John Coltrane for example, now if you actually want to hear how great he is, the best recordings are on vinyl. Imagine a younger person listening to Coltrane on streaming services and dismissing him as an ok saxophone player. Now that's sad!

 

[the sound of Tao]

Appreciate it might upset a few folks but as I asked earlier,

how would you describe someone who chooses not to listen to the best recordings of the greatest music ever made?

Music averse, perhaps?

You’d choose the best recording over the best performance? That makes sense, it’s an audiophile thing and this is an audiophile forum.

Music averse?? Go to a music forum and by far the dominant choice is always for best performance and there’s always plenty of diversity in what performances and what music people love. Often the recording quality will be commented on but still the choice will still be for the best music performances and recordings are a lucky bonus if they align with best performances.

BTW I listened to that 2015 Ferit Odman jazz album you went on about. I can almost hear Coltrane and Miles having a bit of a chuckle over your recommendation… that’s if they haven’t gone to sleep during the album… I’m guessing jazz isn’t one of your special subjects .