DSD to Vinyl Versus Analog Tape to Vinyl

[Carlos269]

I don't get it. Are all those recording tools yours. The ones that roll off the highs and lows to clean up the music. The same highs you are saying are the reason digital is better than analog? Yet you roll is off for production to make it more pleasing to listen too??

You are obviously not familiar with my over 20 different systems. I have two mastering systems that are both world class, actually the equipment in both of these systems is better than what you find in most famous mastering houses. Mastering is about the technique of applying science and technology in an artistic way to produce a better product than what was started with. It is not a simple process of rolling off the high and low frequencies. It is a much more complex process of keeping both dry and wet signals and the decomposition of the stereo signals into X-Y vectors to alter the stereo field while at the same time shaping the waveforms for spatial and spectral content. Way too complicated to explain in a simple post. The mastering world is a world of its own and far more impactful than anything anyone can hope to achieve in the audiophile world. If you understand elliptical equalizers, taps, reverberation and spectral enhancement based on signal level thresholds then we can have a discussion on mastering techniques but if none of those things register, then it is a subject for another day. I spent five years in a deep dive in the high-end mastering world and can tell you that the power of twisting knobs and moving sliders of high-end mastering equipment is phenomenal compared to the child’s play of swapping speaker cables, cartridges and adding grounding boxes. I will leave you with this, in the mastering world you can pretty much control every single audiophile attribute of the musical presentation. The problem for audiophiles in pursuing this route is that it takes knowledge and requires an understating of what is actually going on and what the effects of each control does and it’s a field were money buys you nothing if you do not understand the concepts and fundamentals. With the right equipment and knowledge to utilize it and to put it to proper use, boy is it powerful. It takes time, intelligence and understanding to master it; and the kicker for audiophiles, you can’t just write a check for it, in the audiophile kind of way.

 

[PeterA]

Carlos, Simply writing a check in the audiophile way doesn’t guarantee good sound either. Assembling the right system and setting it up properly also takes time experience and effort though perhaps not to the same degree that you are talking about.

 

[Carlos269]

Carlos, Simply writing a check in the audiophile way doesn’t guarantee good sound either. Assembling the right system and setting it up properly also takes time experience and effort though perhaps not to the same degree that you are talking about.

Peter, with all due respect, 99.8% of audiophile do not have a clue of the science and technology responsible for what they are hearing. It is painfully obvious in most of my exchanges. Can you describe what changing cartridges is about in technical terms that explain the results?

 

[PeterA]

Peter, with all due respect, 99.8% of audiophile do not have a clue of the science and technology responsible for what they are hearing. It is painfully obvious in most of my exchanges. Can you describe what changing cartridges is about in technical terms that explain the results?

Thank you Carlos. I certainly don’t have a clue. All I’m saying is you can’t expect to just spend a lot of money on fancy audiophile gear and expect the system to sound good without knowing something about proper set up and system assembly.

I am simply here to enjoy the sound of my system so I assess quality by listening. I do not have any technical knowledge of what goes into the gear. I followed the advice of others who know far more than I.

 

[Carlos269]

Thank you Carlos. I certainly don’t have a clue. All I’m saying is you can’t expect to just spend a lot of money on fancy audiophile gear and expect the system to sound good without knowing something about proper set up and system assembly.

I am simply here to enjoy the sound of my system so I assess quality by listening. I do not have any technical knowledge of what goes into the gear.

Agree with you 110% that cost is not indicative of quality, in the performance sense of the word. I also think that most audiophiles are like yourself and just enjoy the black boxes (technical term), gold plated boxes in the audiophile world.

If my academic and professional background were not in Physics and Electrical Engineering perhaps I would not go beyond skin deep either but fortunately that is just not my nature. In college my Physics department offered a course on musical acoustics, which I loved, and the very next year I took a course on amplifier design and electronics offered by the Physics department. To this day, those two courses from the Physics part of my academic life serve as the foundation for most of my audiophile and mastering studio worlds musings.

 

[microstrip]

Carlos, Simply writing a check in the audiophile way doesn’t guarantee good sound either. Assembling the right system and setting it up properly also takes time experience and effort though perhaps not to the same degree that you are talking about.

IMHO stereo will never be a turn key process. Too many empirical and subjective variables to control. Surely cost per se is not an indication of quality but wisely used a larger check will return a better system!

 

[Kingrex]

I don't know anything about mastering, but I fully appreciate the impact it has on playback. Most music from the 90s forward was mastered to sound good in a car and subsiquently sounds mediocre on a high fidelity system. I understand the impact enough that I listened to a friends demo CD and explained why it sounded horrible. He took it to the band and they agreed. They took it to the studio and the studio agreed. The studio said the CD duplication company must have fiddled with the master file. And they had. The duplicator decided to perform their own compression and what ever else. Totally screwed the CD. And they only found out after returning from Memphis and giving the CD to a bunch of labels.

But my point was that your comments were about leveling off the high and low frequency. It struck me as odd. If it is a necessary evil, then why blast on about CD has such a higher bandwidth than tape or vinyl if in the mastering a lot of that information is filtered to make the media work on our audio systems. Or to at least sound good in a car.

I have always wondered why artist such as Jack White and David Grohl who profess to appreciate high quality recording don't make 2 copies for sale. One for the radio and one for home. Maybe your comments on the difficulty in mixing down the whole and making it into a master is too complex and time consuming to bother. In the end, what, 1% or less of people listening to audio care. Its about the musical content. Not the quality of the music production.

 

[Kingrex]

IMHO stereo will never be a turn key process. Too many empirical and subjective variables to control. Surely cost per se is not an indication of quality but wisely used a larger check will return a better system!

There is truth to this. There may be levels of diminishing returns. I bounced around in a price range for a while and the quality did not go up. It went sideways. When I spent more money on higher quality equipment, the sonic performance did improve.

 

[sbo6]

You are obviously not familiar with my over 20 different systems. I have two mastering systems that are both world class, actually the equipment in both of these systems is better than what you find in most famous mastering houses. Mastering is about the technique of applying science and technology in an artistic way to produce a better product than what was started with. It is not a simple process of rolling off the high and low frequencies. It is a much more complex process of keeping both dry and wet signals and the decomposition of the stereo signals into X-Y vectors to alter the stereo field while at the same time shaping the waveforms for spatial and spectral content. Way too complicated to explain in a simple post. The mastering world is a world of its own and far more impactful than anything anyone can hope to achieve in the audiophile world. If you understand elliptical equalizers, taps, reverberation and spectral enhancement based on signal level thresholds then we can have a discussion on mastering techniques but if none of those things register, then it is a subject for another day. I spent five years in a deep dive in the high-end mastering world and can tell you that the power of twisting knobs and moving sliders of high-end mastering equipment is phenomenal compared to the child’s play of swapping speaker cables, cartridges and adding grounding boxes. I will leave you with this, in the mastering world you can pretty much control every single audiophile attribute of the musical presentation. The problem for audiophiles in pursuing this route is that it takes knowledge and requires an understating of what is actually going on and what the effects of each control does and it’s a field were money buys you nothing if you do not understand the concepts and fundamentals. With the right equipment and knowledge to utilize it and to put it to proper use, boy is it powerful. It takes time, intelligence and understanding to master it; and the kicker for audiophiles, you can’t just write a check for it, in the audiophile kind of way.

I've spent many hours in studios as an amateur musician watching and learning from engineers along with my mini home studio many decades back. And from what little I know / saw I concur that's there's a mastery to recording, mixing and mastering. However, this doesn't diminish the joy and pursuit of higher quality sonics that we audiophiles pursue. And there is much to learn and much reward in sonic journeys to better sound - and I don't just mean by spending more $.

 

[Kingrex]

Carlos, I looked at your signature and the about page to see if you have any albums you have mastered listed. Is there a place to see and hear the work you have done. Are there any projects you are especially proud of the sonics we can find on Qobuz or Spotify? Asking in a friendly way, not challenging.

 

[Carlos269]

I don't know anything about mastering, but I fully appreciate the impact it has on playback. Most music from the 90s forward was mastered to sound good in a car and subsiquently sounds mediocre on a high fidelity system. I understand the impact enough that I listened to a friends demo CD and explained why it sounded horrible. He took it to the band and they agreed. They took it to the studio and the studio agreed. The studio said the CD duplication company must have fiddled with the master file. And they had. The duplicator decided to perform their own compression and what ever else. Totally screwed the CD. And they only found out after returning from Memphis and giving the CD to a bunch of labels.

But my point was that your comments were about leveling off the high and low frequency. It struck me as odd. If it is a necessary evil, then why blast on about CD has such a higher bandwidth than tape or vinyl if in the mastering a lot of that information is filtered to make the media work on our audio systems. Or to at least sound good in a car.

I have always wondered why artist such as Jack White and David Grohl who profess to appreciate high quality recording don't make 2 copies for sale. One for the radio and one for home. Maybe your comments on the difficulty in mixing down the whole and making it into a master is too complex and time consuming to bother. In the end, what, 1% or less of people listening to audio care. Its about the musical content. Not the quality of the music production.

There is not a lot of musical content beyond 16Khz or below 30 Hz. While the extended frequency extremes can be reproduced by capable hi-fi or high-end systems to enhanced ambient cues and ambience, for the mass-market this extra energy frequency content only serves to muddy the sound. If you get a hold of a decent equalizer apply a low frequency shelf cut at 30 Hz and you will hear the sound open up and become clearer. You miss the point of the greater capabilities of the digital capture, which is to get the entire spectral content that the microphones can deliver. It all goes back to the myth that flat from 20 Hz to 20 KHz is always best, most of the times it isn’t.

I think that we are having multiple conversations in parallel and perhaps it is best to break them down and dissect them individually

 

[Carlos269]

Carlos, I looked at your signature and the about page to see if you have any albums you have mastered listed. Is there a place to see and hear the work you have done. Are there any projects you are especially proud of the sonics we can find on Qobuz or Spotify? Asking in a friendly way, not challenging.

I do not remaster recordings for anyone other than myself. I do not own or have worked at a professional studio. My day job compensates me too well to purse any of my hobbies as anything other than hobbies. But with my personality anything that I explore, I do a deep dive with and my explorations into the high-end mastering world was no different.

My two mastering systems enable me to remaster music real-time as I listen to it. I can furthermore archive it in DSD format with my EMM Labs DSD ADC machines and author SACD‘s with my Sadie 5 DSD8 audio workstation if I chose to. So I have the entire installation to produce my own remastered SACD’s if I wanted to, obviously if these were to be commercial releases then copyrights and legalities would need to be taken care of, neither of which I’m interested in pursuing. So the remasterings are just for myself.

If I can point you, or anyone interested in remastering, in the right direction, I would highly encourage you to use Signalyst’s HQPLAYER. Jussi Laako (Miska) has done all the hard work and provides modulators and filters in the digital domain that accomplish the same things, and more, without the need for in-depth understanding. I use HQPLAYER in three of my systems, including my massive Wisdom Audio Adrenaline Rush based system and on my SET DHT and OTL driving single high efficiency full-range driver based systems.

 

[Addicted to hifi]

Hi-fi, could you describe the best vinyl source you’ve heard, the record, and the rest of the system?

I have heard plenty of excellent systems with excellent turntables.i have often heard dohMann turntables at hifi shows and events as they are made locally.I own a mcintosh mt10 with a koetsu urushi cartridge.don’t get me wrong I love vinyl but I think good digital is less compressed and more accurate with better dynamics.some lps do sound better than digital but not all of them?

 

[sbo6]

I do not remaster recordings for anyone other than myself. I do not own or have worked at a professional studio. My day job compensates me too well to purse any of my hobbies as anything other than hobbies. But with my personality anything that I explore, I do a deep dive with and my explorations into the high-end mastering world was no different.

My two mastering systems enable me to remaster music real-time as I listen to it. I can furthermore archive it in DSD format with my EMM Labs DSD ADC machines and author SACD‘s with my Sadie 5 DSD8 audio workstation if I chose to. So I have the entire installation to produce my own remastered SACD’s if I wanted to, obviously if these were to be commercial releases then copyrights and legalities would need to be taken care of, neither of which I’m interested in pursuing. So the remasterings are just for myself.

If I can point you, or anyone interested in remastering, in the right direction, I would highly encourage you to use Signalyst’s HQPLAYER. Jussi Lasso (Miska) has done all the hard work and provides modulators and filters in the digital domain that accomplish the same things, and more, without the need for understanding.

Carlos - your "remastering" can only be done after the finished and multi - track compiled source, correct? You don't have access to the original tracks (digital or analog) to truly re-master, correct? You're essentially flavoring the music post production unless I am mistaken.

 

[Carlos269]

Carlos - your "remastering" can only be done after the finished and multi - track compiled source, correct? You don't have access to the original tracks (digital or analog) to truly re-master, correct? You're essentially flavoring the music post production unless I am mistaken.

Yes, I remaster the released versions and not the multi-tracks. I do have access to raw-DSD sources from released medium and of course digital sources in both medium and from streaming. That is why I use the term “Remasteing” as opposed to “Mastering”. I have the equipment to keep the remastering all in the digital domain, all in the analog domain, or a combination of both, which I find produces the best results.

As I mentioned above, HQPLAYER is also very powerful and much easier to do “remastering” with.

The equipment is all in place to do mastering from multi-track raw tracks as I have essentially 8 to 16 track capabilities with the PCM and DSD systems, but I start with the released files as my starting point, with both my two “remastering” systems and my four HQPlayer workstations.

 

[Gregadd]

Ralph, you do of course realize what the Nyquist frequency of 768 KHz sampling is right? We are no longer in the 44.1 and 48 KHz digital age now.

On the progress of digital.
Having a rudimentary understanding of this subject, i am still not sure what the 768khz rate means. Care to explain?
Edit
Hopefully you can understand my confusion. Having been beaten over the head with the nption that 44.1khz is perfect(not by you) to hear an argument based on 768 khz is at least contradictory. Or maybe I just missed the point.

 

[Carlos269]

On the progress of digital.
Having a rudimentary understanding of this subject, i am still not sure what the 768khz rate means. Care to explain?
Edit
Hopefully you can understand my confusion. Having been beaten over the head with the nption that 44.1khz is perfect(not by you) to hear an argument based on 768 khz is at least contradictory. Or maybe I just missed the point.

As digital technology has progressed and storage medium sizes have increased (and their costs decreased) over the years, the acquisition or sampling rate of the digital recordings or captures has also increased from the original standard of 44.1 and 48 KHz (the professional sample rate), first to double rate of 96KHz, then to the quadruple rate of 192KHz, then further to 384KHz (DXD) and now ultimately to 768 KHz. That means a sample, or digital quantization, every 1.3 micro (10 to the negative 6) seconds or 768,000 samples/acquisitions every second. The Nyquist frequency that Ralph refers to is the bandwidth of the sampled/resulting digital information. In general the Nyquist frequency or bandwidth of the sampled digital files is half (1/2) the sampling frequency. This was a big deal back in the 44.1 and 48 KHz days as you had to use steep, often called brickwall, filters to keep the carrier or sampling frequency out of the audio spectrum (below 20KHz). The Nyquist frequency or bandwidth of 44.1 is only 22.05 KHz and for 48KHz is 24KHz which require a very steep, or brickwall, filter to filter-out the noise between 20KHz and the Nyquist frequency out-of-band extension and keep the noise of the sampling or carrier frequency out. Brickwall filters were notorious for causing the digital “artifacts” and audible harm in digital playback in the early days of digital. As the sampling rate increases the noise gets shifted further up and outside of the audio-band and therefore allows for gentler sloped filters that are less intrusive and noticeable in the audio bandwidth. The reason 768 KHz sampling rate is important is that the resulting Nyquist frequency or resulting bandwidth of the music is 384KHz which allows for very gentle filtering (gentle slope) with no noticeable impact on the audio spectrum. Hope that makes sense and highlights the advances in digital related to higher sampling rates.

 

[Gregadd]

A 768khz sampling rate quadrupleds the sampling rate[ for which audiophiles have been
wildly ridiculed.
It has been postulated that higher rates can cause its own problems..

 

[Carlos269]

A 768khz sampling rate quadrupleds the sampling rate[ for which audiophiles have been
wildly ridiculed.
It has been postulated that higher rates can cause its own problems..

You missed the point, that it has much more to do with filtering than the extra bandwidth. This technical discussion may be beyond your grasp. Sorry.

 

[sbo6]

Yes, I remaster the released versions and not the multi-tracks. I do have access to raw-DSD sources from released medium and of course digital sources in both medium and from streaming. That is why I use the term “Remasteing” as opposed to “Mastering”. I have the equipment to keep the remastering all in the digital domain, all in the analog domain, or a combination of both, which I find produces the best results.

As I mentioned above, HQPLAYER is also very powerful and much easier to do “remastering” with.

The equipment is all in place to do mastering from multi-track raw tracks as I have essentially 8 to 16 track capabilities with the PCM and DSD systems, but I start with the released files as my starting point, with both my two “remastering” systems and my four HQPlayer workstations.

Understood, but it's not really re-mastering in the traditional sense. Re-Mastering involves manipulation of the individual tracks' levels, phase, panning and effects. You're taking a finished product and overlaying effects, DEQ, etc.

Also, I use HQPlayer, an excellent player with filters, dithering, oversampling etc. It's the best sounding and capable player and digital manipulator I've found.