Great article on "Analogue Warmth"

[the sound of Tao]

I hope so. They still have a lot to improve. And you are promising us lots of good thinks for 2020.


I disagree. Current top vinyl playing systems and tube amps are significantly better than those from ten (or even five) years ago.

Digital and analogue have proven to be such brilliant competition for each other, they have both been improving and it is surprising how far both these formats have taken us. It is a credit to the designers of both of these given the differing inherent constraints of each approach.

I would have thought it fair to say most of us hold out hope that digital will progress and overcome it's constraints. Certainly most of us have not really thrown the baby out with the bath water and that progress has taken it so far in terms of it being a competitor to traditional analogue. All this even though its early challenge was so fundamentally critical in that for perhaps the first 10 years (some might say 20 years) or so it struggled to make the experience of listening to music emotionally engaging at all. This is clearly not the case now even if it struggles to match the best of analogue sources in this criteria.

But whether it makes it to the top or not is in reality a moot point and as those many of us who seem to me to be primarily open minded would also be more than pleased to see it get to the summit. But at least for now digital is a for many a great music making option even if it is not necessarily perfect. This is the challenge also for analogue.

But not blessed or cursed with having crystal balls just means you make a whole lot less unnecessary noise when you jump up and down excitedly in arguments about the future. The truth will get here when it gets here so there is little reason for us to get so heated about what that future actually might be.

Hope is good.

 

[Blizzard]

Or, you do...

Read the original article this thread was based on. I don't think it's a mystery why those old recordings sounded like they did. But if I had a Delorean, and I went back to the early 60's with a Merging HAPI, and Pyramix, even better recordings could have been made.

 

[Blizzard]

Digital and analogue have proven to be such brilliant competition for each other, they have both been improving and it is surprising how far both these formats have taken us. It is a credit to the designers of both of these given the differing inherent constraints of each approach.

I would have thought it fair to say most of us hold out hope that digital will progress and overcome it's constraints. Certainly most of us have not really thrown the baby out with the bath water and that progress has taken it so far in terms of it being a competitor to traditional analogue. All this even though its early challenge was so fundamentally critical in that for perhaps the first 10 years (some might say 20 years) or so it struggled to make the experience of listening to music emotionally engaging at all. This is clearly not the case now even if it struggles to match the best of analogue sources in this criteria.

But whether it makes it to the top or not is in reality a moot point and as those many of us who seem to me to be primarily open minded would also be more than pleased to see it get to the summit. But at least for now digital is a for many a great music making option even if it is not necessarily perfect. This is the challenge also for analogue.

But not blessed or cursed with having crystal balls just means you make a whole lot less unnecessary noise when you jump up and down excitedly in arguments about the future. The truth will get here when it gets here so there is little reason for us to get so heated about what that future actually might be.

Hope is good.

The future for the end users is today for the developers. They are listening to gear today that the world won't see for a couple years. No crystal balls required if you are among that crowd.

 

[PeterA]

And soon a slim little efficient inexpensive box will be able to produce everything you love about your vinyl and tube with perfection. You are going to be so thrilled when you hear this level of digital that you will sell off all of your stuff. We are going to see a pile of deals on Audiogon soon. That's all I can say

I'm looking forward to this day. Inexpensive and superb reproduction of the recording. The question is this: Will it sound anything like real, live music?

 

[Groucho]

Has anyone here seen the Stereophile review of a product called the Harmonic Technology Cyberlight?
http://www.stereophile.com/cables/805harm/index.html#YZ0wzoHYrHBbFpXL.97

I think it's pretty relevant to what we're talking about. It's a real life example of a device that adds copious amounts of "analogue warmth" (just check out those measurements) which the world's most respected analogue audiophile perceives as sounding more musical etc. etc.

 

[Blizzard]

I'm looking forward to this day. Inexpensive and superb reproduction of the recording. The question is this: Will it sound anything like real, live music?

It will sound anyway you want it to. Depending on your ears, the sound of real music could be different to you, than it is to others.

Put yourself in the shoes of the people who build this gear with the intention of adding the colorations. They minipulate the circuits to create the colorations on purpose.

AKM did a great job with their "velvet sound" filters in the new Ak4490. Vinyl and tube guys will love this DAC chip. Another bonus is they achieved it without adding any distortion. Great example of the future of euphoric colorations.

 

[microstrip]

Maybe if you are talking $200-300k vinyl and tubes. And the improvements are very small.

Vinyl and tubes will never completely die just because of the coolness factor. People still buy precision automatic watches, even though cheap digital watches can keep better time.

Prices are not relevant we are debating top performance. Besides we know that usually after some time these improvements leak to lower prices products.

And the analogy is meaningless unless you listen to the mechanical noise of the watches. We are debating stereo.

BTW, I do know a few watch collectors and buyers. They do not buy them because they are cool.

 

[microstrip]

The future for the end users is today for the developers. They are listening to gear today that the world won't see for a couple years. No crystal balls required if you are among that crowd.

Some years ago the developers created multichannel, a much superior system. Their crystal balls guessed that we would all be listening to it now, stereo would be an inferior system to be relinquished for cheap audio. See what happened.

 

[Blizzard]

Some years ago the developers created multichannel, a much superior system. Their crystal balls guessed that we would all be listening to it now, stereo would be an inferior system to be relinquished for cheap audio. See what happened.

Yes and many people are absolutely thrilled with the multichannel quad DSD playback with the Exasound E28 and Merging NADAC.

Have you heard multichannel quad DSD yet?

 

[nc42acc]

Which is better the E28 or NADAC?

Yes and many people are absolutely thrilled with the multichannel quad DSD playback with the Exasound E28 and Merging NADAC.

Have you heard multichannel quad DSD yet?

 

[esldude]

Has anyone here seen the Stereophile review of a product called the Harmonic Technology Cyberlight?
http://www.stereophile.com/cables/805harm/index.html#YZ0wzoHYrHBbFpXL.97

I think it's pretty relevant to what we're talking about. It's a real life example of a device that adds copious amounts of "analogue warmth" (just check out those measurements) which the world's most respected analogue audiophile perceives as sounding more musical etc. etc.

A good thing to bring up. I remember that review, and thinking at least some of what it did is similar to tubed amplifiers. Such processing of sound can be very pleasing to listen to which apparently is the conclusion Michael Fremer came to at the time.

 

[microstrip]

(...) AKM did a great job with their "velvet sound" filters in the new Ak4490 (...)

Sorry AKM is a great company with excellent products, but "Velvet sound" looks like pure marketing. The objective crowd will probably spend part of 2016 dissecting it in the science section of WBF. http://www.akm.com/akm/en/product/featured/velvetsound/ .

 

[microstrip]

Yes and many people are absolutely thrilled with the multichannel quad DSD playback with the Exasound E28 and Merging NADAC.

Have you heard multichannel quad DSD yet?

Why should I? My musical interests are very far from the recordings we can expect to be available in this format.

 

[Al M.]

Digital distortions are orders of magnitude lower than analog. And in some cases such as frequency response, non-existent. There is no equality there.

I replied:

Not quite. While digital distortions are much smaller on the absolute quantitative level, their qualitative impact can be disproportionately large. Take for example jitter, which at levels that are miniscule in absolute terms still can profoundly impair the human aural experience.

Amir replied:

Speed variations rule the analog kingdom, both in recording and playback. They cause the same FM modulation that clock jitter causes in digital domain. If people think those analog modulations are not audible, then they don't have critical listening abilities to detect them in digital domain either. Clock jitter in DACs can also be shrunk to very low level even in a low cost DAC. Even mass market DACs when driven with S/PDIF are able to stay below threshold of masking and by a good margin.

So while I advocate healthy margin of safety for digital jitter, it is not a good argument to use in this context.

(Emphases added.)

Except that you seem to be precisely making my point on your website, Amir:

Computing the above level in the context of jitter distortion can be rather complicated mathematically. Fortunately for us, Dunn and Hawksford in their Audio Engineering Society paper performed this analysis for us. Their conclusion was that the blue bar is as small as 20 picoseconds of jitter. Let me repeat: it takes just 20 trillionth of a second for the distortion created by jitter to rise up to the level of audibility! Inverted, unless you can demonstrate that jitter is below 20 picoseconds, you can't claim it is inaudible.

As I explained in one of my articles on jitter, mass market AVRs routinely have jitter over their HDMI input of 4,000 to 7,000 picoseconds based on measurements performed by Paul Miller in HiFi News (UK magazine). S/PDIF distortion was far lower but still measured in hundreds of picoseconds, not 20.

From:
http://www.madronadigital.com/Library/AudibilityofSmallDistortions.html

 

[the sound of Tao]

I'm looking forward to this day. Inexpensive and superb reproduction of the recording. The question is this: Will it sound anything like real, live music?

That's the million dollar question... or $500 one hopefully.

And on the promised land of what's perfect ultimately sounding real would be awesome but just sounding natural is a start.

But if the perfect recording and perfect source came along how would we ever know it with our imperfect rooms, imperfect speakers, imperfect amps and imperfect cables. We have a way to go before we even get to having the understanding of what perfect needs to be as we are yet to fully map the process of our cognition and perception.

Which opens room for a question, if there is potentially a difference between what can be experienced within the unconscious and what we can consciously identify within the consciousness (because these things happen within very different processes within our minds) then how can we ultimately know objectively what we are assessing for let alone developing measurements for that... And if not objective then subjective... and how do we map against the seeming infinite complexities of the human condition. How is any complete perfection possible if we haven't yet identified all the processes involved in the human condition.

 

[Mike Lavigne]

Which is better the E28 or NADAC?

not close. heard them both a number of times at RMAF with the same Quad files.....although different systems.

the NADAC is on another level as far as what I heard. which it should be for more than double the dollars.

 

[Purite Audio]

not close. heard them both a number of times at RMAF with the same Quad files.....although different systems.

the NADAC is on another level as far as what I heard. which it should be for more than double the dollars.

How on earth could you possibly isolate the contribution or otherwise of a dac in two different systems in two different rooms!

Keith.

 

[nc42acc]

Thanks Mike that is what I thought. Merging sure has a small dealer network :-(

not close. heard them both a number of times at RMAF with the same Quad files.....although different systems.

the NADAC is on another level as far as what I heard. which it should be for more than double the dollars.

 

[microstrip]

Has anyone here seen the Stereophile review of a product called the Harmonic Technology Cyberlight?
http://www.stereophile.com/cables/805harm/index.html#YZ0wzoHYrHBbFpXL.97

I think it's pretty relevant to what we're talking about. It's a real life example of a device that adds copious amounts of "analogue warmth" (just check out those measurements) which the world's most respected analogue audiophile perceives as sounding more musical etc. etc.

You have a point spotting this review filled with nonsense . The technological part of MF is ridiculous - a case when a reviewer should not talk about what he does not know. At best he can write about the phonon, not the electron or the photon!

These cables were used as an equalizer in his system and it seems in this particular system at some time (around 2005) they sounded good. Great to know. But IMHO no way MF is the world most respected analogue audiophile and you can use his preference to generalize any point about this ambiguous concept called "analogue warmth".

 

[Blizzard]

Prices are not relevant we are debating top performance. Besides we know that usually after some time these improvements leak to lower prices products.

And the analogy is meaningless unless you listen to the mechanical noise of the watches. We are debating stereo.

BTW, I do know a few watch collectors and buyers. They do not buy them because they are cool.

Why do these people buy these watches then? Only to see what time it is?