Done with digital

[wil]

If you don't enjoy a particular thread, why do you then feel compelled to comment on it? Just move on? Your comment contributes nothing positive to the discussion...

Given the gratuitous negativity of the original post, are you surprised it spawns negative reactions? Apparently, the same post was made on numerous audio forums. That tells you something.

But even so, there have been a few posts that rise above the thread’s DNA, like “godofwealths” above.

 

[bryans]

I have seen plenty of the same topics on multiple forums. I look at the ones I like and the ones I don't like I leave them alone.

 

[PYP]

As I look at the latest NASA photos of the universe, I wonder if in that great expanse there have been civilizations that were destroyed when the arguments of digital vs. analog got out of hand (or perhaps it was vintage vs. new)!

A cautionary tale?

 

[sbo6]

This may very well be true. There is an argument for choosing the flavor you like. However, one can attempt to select components which contribute little or close to nothing to the sound. It is not easy to find these but they exist in the vinyl world. Of course this is a matter of opinion and up for debate.

I suspect people who are into digital do the very same thing with cables and footers and interfaces and streamers and DACs. Which algorithm when chooses or high one chooses to shape the signal is also a form of choosing the colorations you prefer. And I suppose, just like in the vinyl world, digital people will claim that some gear does it cleaner and with less coloration and will pronounce little to nothing added or taken away.

These are the things that people discuss and debate, and they are what differentiates some products from others, whether they are analog or digital sources.

The difference WRT components contributing little to nothing to the sound with digital versus a TT is that - the (proper / improper) TT setup alone can contribute to the sound, sibilance, balance, bass heft or lack thereof. With digital it's essentially plug and play. So right off the bat
TT setups have more variability / contributions to the sound IMO.

I would also argue that TT fans want coloration (admitted or not) evidenced in the multitude of cartridges, tube / SS phono preamps, and materials used in turntables (vibrations, wow + flutter, etc.). And that the digital crowd is truer to the source - a computer / streamer and a DAC with the vast majority being SS.

Also, I'm old enough to have had turntables back in the 70s and also more recently. I see vinyl setups as an extension to the old horns -> tubes -> vinyl crowd. That's not to say it hasn't come a long way in sonics but the nostalgia and sentiment sticks as I'd wager the vast majority of us on WBF are 45+ years old. That would be an interesting poll - Age and source of choice

 

[Audire]

The difference WRT components contributing little to nothing to the sound with digital versus a TT is that - the (proper / improper) TT setup alone can contribute to the sound, sibilance, balance, bass heft or lack thereof. With digital it's essentially plug and play. So right off the bat
TT setups have more variability / contributions to the sound IMO.

I would also argue that TT fans want coloration (admitted or not) evidenced in the multitude of cartridges, tube / SS phono preamps, and materials used in turntables (vibrations, wow + flutter, etc.). And that the digital crowd is truer to the source - a computer / streamer and a DAC with the vast majority being SS.

Also, I'm old enough to have had turntables back in the 70s and also more recently. I see vinyl setups as an extension to the old horns -> tubes -> vinyl crowd. That's not to say it hasn't come a long way in sonics but the nostalgia and sentiment sticks as I'd wager the vast majority of us on WBF are 45+ years old. That would be an interesting poll - Age and source of choice

I would argue that using different carts isn't "coloration" per se, but more like going to different venues and experiencing the same music. Every venue we've been to sounds wonderfully unique and I believe the same can be similarly stated for higher end carts, etc.

 

[PeterA]

The difference WRT components contributing little to nothing to the sound with digital versus a TT is that - the (proper / improper) TT setup alone can contribute to the sound, sibilance, balance, bass heft or lack thereof. With digital it's essentially plug and play. So right off the bat
TT setups have more variability / contributions to the sound IMO.

I would also argue that TT fans want coloration (admitted or not) evidenced in the multitude of cartridges, tube / SS phono preamps, and materials used in turntables (vibrations, wow + flutter, etc.). And that the digital crowd is truer to the source - a computer / streamer and a DAC with the vast majority being SS.

Also, I'm old enough to have had turntables back in the 70s and also more recently. I see vinyl setups as an extension to the old horns -> tubes -> vinyl crowd. That's not to say it hasn't come a long way in sonics but the nostalgia and sentiment sticks as I'd wager the vast majority of us on WBF are 45+ years old. That would be an interesting poll - Age and source of choice

That is exactly what I thought about vinyl and digital until recently. Sure, at some levels, digital is still basically plug and play. I give no thought to playing a CD in my truck or streaming on my computer or TV. However, my friends who are into digital have a different experience and the stories I read on WBF indicate that at higher levels, it is not simply plug and play. Far from it in fact.

Read MikeL's efforts to optimize his new WADAX. He brought in many things and wrote about them pretty extensively. Sure, he plugged and played his DAC, but to go further, he had to optimize seemingly everything. One friend here uses very specifically chosen power conditioning and power cords to optimize his DAC. I suspect his transport to DAC link is also very carefully chosen for its impact, er, flavor. Another friend here had difficulty figuring out what was wrong with his streaming until a friend came over and discovered something about some long cable picking up EMI or some noise and replaced it. His server interface has also needed to be sorted out, multiple times. They also compared footers and multiple accessories to optimize to a sound (flavor) they preferred. Check out Ron Resnick's questions about his digital infrastructure in his room thread. Apparently, unbeknownst to me, all this stuff matters. At the WBF level, digital does not seem plug and play.

Yes, TT setups have more variability and require careful set up to optimize their potential. I find it worth the effort. I can assure you that as a TT fan, I do NOT want coloration. I actively seek out less colored sound from my table/arm/cartridge/phono, cable source. In fact, I am experimenting with belt versus string drive now for less coloration.

I think an argument can be made for preference and for being "truer to the source" for either format. Those debates will continue. I just do not think the generalizations you propose in your post hold for everyone, that's all, and it is just not that simple.

Carry on!

 

[microstrip]

That is exactly what I thought about vinyl and digital until recently. Sure, at some levels, digital is still basically plug and play.

IMHO at any level.

I give no thought to playing a CD in my truck or streaming on my computer or TV. However, my friends who are into digital have a different experience and the stories I read on WBF indicate that at higher levels, it is not simply plug and play. Far from it in fact.

For a start your friends and WBF are less than 1% of top digital users.

Read MikeL's efforts to optimize his new WADAX. He brought in many things and wrote about them pretty extensively. Sure, he plugged and played his DAC, but to go further, he had to optimize seemingly everything. One friend here uses very specifically chosen power conditioning and power cords to optimize his DAC. I suspect his transport to DAC link is also very carefully chosen for its impact, er, flavor. Another friend here had difficulty figuring out what was wrong with his streaming until a friend came over and discovered something about some long cable picking up EMI or some noise and replaced it. His server interface has also needed to be sorted out, multiple times. They also compared footers and multiple accessories to optimize to a sound (flavor) they preferred.

Mike optimizes tape, vinyl and digital. IMHO it is intrinsic to him, not to the formats.
Don't you also read Eliot, Steve, Al. M, Rhapsody and even my posts on digital?
There are more than 100 members using the Extreme in WBF, only a few fiddle with digital set up. Most are as me, lazily waiting Emile or his people to carry the hard work remotely from the Netherlands.

Check out Ron Resnick's questions about his digital infrastructure in his room thread. Apparently, unbeknownst to me, all this stuff matters. At the WBF level, digital does not seem plug and play.

Ron fairly and clearly stated his dislike for digital. And in this hobby, most of the time we ourselves decide what matters or what does not matter. Or ask someone to decide for us.

Yes, TT setups have more variability and require careful set up to optimize their potential. I find it worth the effort. I can assure you that as a TT fan, I do NOT want coloration. I actively seek out less colored sound from my table/arm/cartridge/phono, cable source. In fact, I am experimenting with belt versus string drive now for less coloration.

Happy that you are enjoying it. the same way I am happy with those who enjoy fiddling with digital .

I think an argument can be made for preference and for being "truer to the source" for either format. Those debates will continue. I just do not think the generalizations you propose in your post hold for everyone, that's all, and it is just not that simple.

Carry on!

We debated "truer to the source" in Ron's proposal of audiophile objectives. I think that only an extreme minority of WBF claims that his objective is being "true to source".

Audiophiles seem to be afraid of the word coloration. Proper coloration is a good thing - it is the essence of the high-end. IMHO coloration is an hard subject, we have limited knowledge on it, except in extreme cases. Digital coloration is even harder to understand. But our hobby has been essentially empirical, we keep the theory essencially for WBF debates ...

 

[sbo6]

That is exactly what I thought about vinyl and digital until recently. Sure, at some levels, digital is still basically plug and play. I give no thought to playing a CD in my truck or streaming on my computer or TV. However, my friends who are into digital have a different experience and the stories I read on WBF indicate that at higher levels, it is not simply plug and play. Far from it in fact.

Read MikeL's efforts to optimize his new WADAX. He brought in many things and wrote about them pretty extensively. Sure, he plugged and played his DAC, but to go further, he had to optimize seemingly everything. One friend here uses very specifically chosen power conditioning and power cords to optimize his DAC. I suspect his transport to DAC link is also very carefully chosen for its impact, er, flavor. Another friend here had difficulty figuring out what was wrong with his streaming until a friend came over and discovered something about some long cable picking up EMI or some noise and replaced it. His server interface has also needed to be sorted out, multiple times. They also compared footers and multiple accessories to optimize to a sound (flavor) they preferred. Check out Ron Resnick's questions about his digital infrastructure in his room thread. Apparently, unbeknownst to me, all this stuff matters. At the WBF level, digital does not seem plug and play.

Yes, TT setups have more variability and require careful set up to optimize their potential. I find it worth the effort. I can assure you that as a TT fan, I do NOT want coloration. I actively seek out less colored sound from my table/arm/cartridge/phono, cable source. In fact, I am experimenting with belt versus string drive now for less coloration.

I think an argument can be made for preference and for being "truer to the source" for either format. Those debates will continue. I just do not think the generalizations you propose in your post hold for everyone, that's all, and it is just not that simple.

Carry on!

I think you might be mixing optimization for better sonics versus flavoring. We all optimize our source components, amps, preamps and speakers via isolation devices, cables, etc. for better sound that, in some instances may flavor the sound but that's not necessarily the primary goal. I think your example with Mike's digital aligns. But with turntable setups (and all tube gear in general) there's the added flavoring. For example, I may buy an audiophile switch for a blacker background and more clarity (= better sonics) but my goal is not to flavor the sound just to improve it. Contrast that with the plethora of cartridges each a different flavor, and yes some are simply better but the goal often evident in reviews is to turn the flavor dial in your preferred direction. An exception WRT digital might be the Lampizator fan boys who tube roll.

Also, I think it's great that you are striving for the least coloration with your analog setup however, I'd wager you are in the minority whether folks admit it or not.

 

[sbo6]

I would argue that using different carts isn't "coloration" per se, but more like going to different venues and experiencing the same music. Every venue we've been to sounds wonderfully unique and I believe the same can be similarly stated for higher end carts, etc.

The difference is the venue is virgin music reaching your ears including the room effects versus the cartridge taking that pre - recorded event and adding flavor on top of it. It would be like trying and choosing your earplug of choice at the venue you described.

 

[zerostargeneral]

 

[GSOphile]

Very nice. My favorite is Gundula Janowitz/Karajan/BPO on DG CD.

 

[PeterA]

I would argue that using different carts isn't "coloration" per se, but more like going to different venues and experiencing the same music. Every venue we've been to sounds wonderfully unique and I believe the same can be similarly stated for higher end carts, etc.

I would expand on this point and suggest trying different cartridges, the best of which sound very natural, is similar to hearing performances played On different violins are different pianos. Each has a unique sound and obviously sounds like the real thing but just lightly different.

But this is only the case with certain top cartridges which avoid gross colorations and still sound unique.

People can and do make the same claims about other groups of components that they are familiar with for instance different DACs or different cables or speakers. Everyone has a group that they hold up as being the best examples of a type. Within the group there are differences, but I would not describe them as colorations.

 

[zerostargeneral]

Voice for sure conductor mmmmmmmmm.

 

[Phillyb]

I’ll share my (longish) thoughts on this endless analog vs. digital question. I’ve been buying digital recordings for 37 years (first CD bought in 1985!), and have bought vinyl all the way through these years as well. I have owned countless DACs and transports over the past 37 years, from Theta Digital to dCS and Esoteric to now the Lampizator Pacific. Digital has come a long way towards sounding more like analog. The old threadbare sound of early digital has greatly reduced on todays best DACs. The Lampizator Pacific is truly state of the art. But the gap has not been closed. Not by a long shot.

The very best sound I get at my house is on a restored Garrard 301 turntable with an SME 312S arm with a Miyajima Infinity Zero mono cartridge. Yes, mono! If you want to hear vinyl at its very very best, mono is the way to go. Forget silly stereo! As the great violinist Jascha Heifetz put it, forget “high phooey and hystereo”. If you want to hear The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Ella Fitzgerald, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, and literally thousands of the greatest singers, musicians and performers from 1930s-1960s, the golden age of recorded music, vinyl is it and mono tops stereo by a country mile in my house. Once you hear John Coltrane’s throbbing sax shimmering in absolute three dimensional mono sound, or the huge explosive dynamics of the original recordings of The Beatles in true mono, or Bob Dylan’s gravelly voice in beautiful mono, you can forget about stereo versions, all of which sound cartoonish in my system in comparison. Bob Dylan absolutely hated the stereo versions of his recordings, which sound grotesque to my ears, harmonica in one channel, his voice in another, guitar somewhere in one or the other, sometimes the engineer forgets to pan the sound, so instruments change from one channel to other. What a joke!

Just imagine Bon Dylan, the only rock and roll musician to win the Nobel Prize in literature, singing in front of you, his guitar in front of him and his trademark harmonica dangling from his mouth. Where’s the “stereo” here? The Beatles also absolutely hated the stereo versions of their legendary albums. They personally supervised the mono mastering, which has explosive dynamics. The fake stereo versions were done by some flunkey and they never cared for it. It’s a throttled version of their original sound.

if you’ve never heard a true mono cartridge, you’d be amazed. Surface noise is almost completely banished, thanks to the cartridge only responding to lateral groove modulation. Even beaten up 70 year old records from the 1950s sound fabulous on my Miyajima Infinity Zero cartridge, the world‘s best mono cartridge. Forget audiophile nonsense. Buy mono albums, the earlier the pressing, the better. The original Ella Fitzgerald mono recordings of the great American songbooks are the ones to get. Even the Time Life Jazz classics featuring the greatest jazz performers from the 1920s to 1940s, many sourced from 78 rpm masters, sound fabulous. Yes, there some unavoidable noise in the earliest masters, but your ears tune this out in a few seconds. The Miyajima cartridge is a beast, probably twice as big as any other cartridge. Weighs a lot too, so you need a massive arm. But, boy, does it blow the Lampizator Pacific away.

I enjoy streaming music on Roon as much as any of you, and the convenience of listening to many new classical high resolution albums of music I don’t own. But when I want to have a true spiritual experience, like listening to Frank Sinatra singing his heart out on “Only the Lonely”, or Ella Fitzgerald great songbooks or Johnny Cash or Elvis Presley or heck, even The Beach Boys great album Animal Sounds, the recording that so captivated The Beatles (Paul McCartney called it the greatest rock and roll album of all time), I turn to vinyl in true mono. That remains for me personally the closest approach to the original sound (as Quad’s Peter Walker used to say). Stereo is a gimmick and surround sound an even worse gimmick. Every time I hear a piano recording with the mike thrust inside the instrument painting a ridiculous sonic image, I wonder if these recording engineers have ever hear a piano in a concert hall. The piano is placed sideways and you hear the sound in, you guessed it, mono! There’s no stereo sound from a piano when you’re sitting hundreds of feet away looking at the piano sideways.

I could give a long geeky argument on why digital PCM is inherently flawed, but that would require math. Don’t get fooled by the specs you see reported, that’s a lot of malarkey. When you record an oboe in an orchestra, ask yourself how many bits of resolution do you have to work with? Remember you cannot overload in digital. If you start with 16 bits, as many recordings over the past 30 years have done, you have to give some slack and you loose a couple of bits of headroom. The orchestra playing full tilt has to be captured in 14 bits or so. Ok, now consider a solitary oboe playing. That’s 50 dB down in volume from the full orchestra. How many bits do you have left? Roughly 6 bits of resolution to capture the oboe. No wonder my 5000 odd CDs I have, 80% classical, have not impressed me with the sound of the oboe I hear in the concert hall.

Digital PCM is linear. Human hearing is nonlinear and adaptive. As the sound reduces, we turn up our aural resolution, so to speak. It turns out that at our most sensitive frequency zone, we can hear sounds that move the eardrum by less than the width of a hydrogen atom! Human hearing is a true wonder of biology. As the decibel level increases, our ears automatically compress the sound to prevent long term hearing damage (otherwise the first jackhammer drill you heard at 120 dB on the street passing by would have left you permanently deaf). For a true revolution in digital, we have to throw away linear PCM and start over, paying close attention to how nonlinear human hearing actually works, focusing on the region we are most sensitive and not wasting bits where we are deaf (e.g., 40 kHZ!). But I don‘t hold out hope that this will happen in my lifetime.

I heard Oboe's sound real on my CD-based system and I have been going to the Cleveland Orch at Severence Center for the past 35 years. I have many recordings of them playing and when recorded right and mastered right the listening is like being there.

 

[Phillyb]

I would expand on this point and suggest trying different cartridges, the best of which sound very natural, is similar to hearing performances played On different violins are different pianos. Each has a unique sound and obviously sounds like the real thing but just lightly different.

But this is only the case with certain top cartridges which avoid gross colorations and still sound unique.

People can and do make the same claims about other groups of components that they are familiar with for instance different DACs or different cables or speakers. Everyone has a group that they hold up as being the best examples of a type. Within the group there are differences, but I would not describe them as colorations.

All gear adds coloration and TT do, the mats used to do, the arm does, room feedback that the stylus picks up does, cartridges do, and the stand you sit the turntable on also does. I love vinyl, I grew up with vinyl, but when folks start saying how superior it is, well that's not true, it cannot be, but can you enjoy it, sure because you can make it sound like you please, much like tube rolling can do. Nothing in our systems sounds natural, it does to our own taste of natural, some like the meat on the bones, and weighty, others clear and transparent and detailed. MM vs. MC etc. It's a hobby to enjoy music. As for the Beatles the best sounding Vinyl set I have heard and that includes the newest ones with EQ changes is:
The Beatles – The Beatles Collection (1978, Box Set) - Discogs

 

[bryans]

It's a hobby to enjoy music.

This is what I thought it was about, enjoying music.

 

[godofwealth]

I heard Oboe's sound real on my CD-based system and I have been going to the Cleveland Orch at Severence Center for the past 35 years. I have many recordings of them playing and when recorded right and mastered right the listening is like being there.

I think the key phrase is “recorded right and mastered right”. Cleveland Orchestra is an interesting example because of the great recordings that Decca made there and the early Telarc recordings with Jack Renner. These were miked simply with just three mikes. I agree some of those early recordings do sound great. Digital recordings can sound terrific if great care is taken with the recording and mastering. In my many San Francisco Symphony concerts, I have attended quite a few that were recorded live in DSD. Walking up to the podium during the intermission, you can plainly see the cables marked DSD channel X and so on. But boy, do they use an enormous number of mikes. In the end, having heard Michael Tilson Thomas live many times conducting the massive Mahler symphonies, which he loves to conduct each year, and listening to his SACD releases, the DSD recordings pale in comparison to the sound of the real orchestra in Davies Symphony Hall. The SACDs sound compressed and bright to my ears. I’m not surprised when I see the way they record live. The huge number of mikes probably feed into some gigantic 100 channel mixer and the engineer probably tweaks the balance on each channel. You have to wonder who the real conductor is.

 

[sbo6]

Digital recordings can sound terrific if great care is taken with the recording and mastering. In my many San Francisco Symphony concerts, I have attended quite a few that were recorded live in DSD. Walking up to the podium during the intermission, you can plainly see the cables marked DSD channel X and so on. But boy, do they use an enormous number of mikes. In the end, having heard Michael Tilson Thomas live many times conducting the massive Mahler symphonies, which he loves to conduct each year, and listening to his SACD releases, the DSD recordings pale in comparison to the sound of the real orchestra in Davies Symphony Hall. The SACDs sound compressed and bright to my ears. I’m not surprised when I see the way they record live. The huge number of mikes probably feed into some gigantic 100 channel mixer and the engineer probably tweaks the balance on each channel. You have to wonder who the real conductor is.

IME any recording can sound great or horrible transferred to any medium, the method is independent of the resulting format.
Also, I'm curious, when you say you can plainly see the mike cables marked "DSD", are their additional cables and as per your statement possibly less or more for analog? I'd be surprised if that's the case as that would require significantly more effort and potential cost. Also, just trying to separate your thoughts on DSD = many mics versus analog possibly = less mics.

 

[Pokey77]

basically; i enjoy hanging with like minded folk who i share interests with. that sorta understand where i'm coming from. feeling a part of something and belonging. and chewing the fat. with no particular place to go.

the best plan.....is....no plan.

where was i?

Seems that sometimes those who are verbal jousting can get offended and then the thread can go a little sideways or get heated as they try to prove a point or defend themselves. I'm with ML, just like hanging with like-minded people who are cordial and like to share their own personal experiences or thoughts. BTW, you can go to other websites that are nothing but contentious most of the time. I'm not sure any of us would want that, but they are out there, and I sure hope that WBF never goes that way.

 

[Pokey77]

This is what I thought it was about, enjoying music.

And enjoying the company of those who also feel the same.