Ah... now that's the $10,000 question now isn't Rich? How does this performance compare to digital? In the way measurements are done, using analog measurements and applying them to digital, digital always shines, the question I have is why does analog sources, ie; tape and those black round things, (LP's) have such a following with suggestions from those that listen to them that they reproduce a superior, or the most superior rendition of the real thing we have?
I believe our ears respond to some digital reproduction parameters we don't like and now we see industry (finally) addressing, time domain errors in the range above where our ears can hear but fall right into the range where our perception of echo and space are produced, and that is pulse response or the difference in time of say how a sound 15 feet out and 45 degrees off to our right in real life can be determined angularily, very precisely by our ears. This website,
http://www.dspguide.com/ch22/1.htm talks of human hearing being able to discern two sound sources as close as 3 degrees apart or a difference in arrival of the same sound to our right and left ear of as little as 30 microseconds. What is 30 microseconds if it is the period of a sound wave? Roughly 33,300 hz. We know digital filters more times than not produce a ringing BEFORE the actual sound is produced. This is not what happens in nature, I'm sure our ears pick this up as a reproduction anomaly and combine that with say redbook CD performance where nothing above 22,000 hz or so makes it through and you are now also missing a lot of the needed pulse response cues our brain needs to locate a sound in space.
I feel the wow and flutter of turntables and tape decks, high as they are in comparison to digital, (using analog measurement principles) is too low in frequency to mess with our brains needed accurate pulse response to assemble a meaningful soundscape so tape and records pass pulse response at high frequencies above our ability to hear periodic waves, (sound), with flying colours, while digital has anomalies, or is missing entirely, (Redbook CD), at these high frequencies, producing errors we call jitter. Whew!
I feel digital is right on the cusp of eliminating jitter entirely from reproduced music to finally deliver what was promised and pitifully absent at the dawn of the digital music age some 25 plus years ago!
1/2 inch 2 track in comparison to 1/4 inch 2 track has double the magnetic material passing in the same time, this improves s/n ratio 3db. Doubling the tape speed, 15ips to 30ips also doubles the amount of tape going by lowering tape hiss due to 30ips high frequency eq, but also raising the frequency of the hiss one octave making 30ips tape hiss so high in frequency as to be almost inaudible.
The latest tape formulations have so much more headroom than tapes of the past. There are +9db tapes and ATR has a +10db tape now so the advantages of 30ips as a need in the past (before noise reduction) is less so now.
Cheers!
Sean
