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.
