The Sound of Analog, the Sound of Digital

[Alrainbow]

It’s my observation bad digital runs me out of the room. It evens removes much of what great music sounds like to pleasing my brain.
Now even bad analog does not have this horrid effect to me. I fact over a brief time period or becomes less obtrusive. Digital is the polar opposite ina short tine it becomes annoying.
good analog has a much lower threshold to me where good digital is harder to achieve.

 

[microstrip]

(...) You forgot to mention the effects of different types of distortion and their effect on how we perceive realism, naturalness, or the sound of music .I do not think different types of distortion and their effects on us is a controversial subject. And many people seem to agree that analog and digital produce different kinds of distortions, some more harmful toward our perception of musical realism than others.(...)

Unfortunately, considering the current status of modern electronics, it becomes very controversial as soon as we start debating it with a minimum of knowledge and trying to make correlations. All the evidence we have on the subject was obtained in listening tests carried long ago with equipment having significant levels of total harmonic distortion, orders of magnitude higher than those of current equipment . Some others were obtained using software that added distortions using mathematical algorithms to digital musical content - something that is not representative of real behavior of electronic equipment.

When properly used the distortions of digital are much inferior to those of analog. What is changing is not the digital per se, but the implementations and the practical use of digital recording.

 

[Alrainbow]

Love y

It's actually simpler than that Tim, use one of his amps and run everything off the regenerators he makes and I guarantee that you wont hear a major difference between analog, digital, tube or anything else either. Those IRS's have their own massive coloration for a final topping ! He's on the money in the context of his system.

david[/QUOTE
Love your Arrogance but true. having said this all speakers have color. No one speaker does all great. color is to me the wrong word to use in this context. what any given system does is far more complex then just tone as color suggest to me.

 

[morricab]

Well, this just shows how resolving can be the digital media and the human hear.



Wow, great sounding sentence. A pity that after being analyzed is just a repetition of what many people who loved tubes say about solid state. Or many SET lovers say about pushpul. Or many horn lovers say about box speakers ...

No, it shows how sensitive the human ear is to synthetic artifacts.

 

[microstrip]

He's accessible and entertaining, not everyone cuts it in front of the camera.

I don't see the necessity for consumers to be versed in the technical aspects of digital sound recording and reproduction to know what they enjoy or dislike. You're stuck with it's nature or lack of.

david

IMHO WBF standards of debate are usually higher than those of most forum's, but you have a point - if people just want to speak about their headaches and preferences we do not need technical knowledge.

 

[morricab]

Yes, it stops there. Any scientific evidence to the contrary is controversial and anecdotal at best, not supported by a wider systematic body of evidence.

Human hearing stops at 20 kHz (in newborn babies, going downhill from there), just like we obviously cannot see UV light, unlike bees, for example. As to the latter, it is very instructive to look at images of what they actually see when they look at flowers, with details only visible in UV light shifted for us into the visible range. There is just a hard stop for us.

I don't consider the CD medium perfect, but frequency reproduction is not the problem, in my view. It does cut it awfully close to the theoretical limits of transparency, in terms of practical demands on filtering (a 48 kHz format would have been better), and in terms of bit depth. A more 'generous' format makes proper practical implementation easier and more forgiving, and may even add some theoretical gain in transparency, when it comes to bit depth.

On the other hand I am constantly astonished about the incredible and realistic resolution of fine detail from the CD format. And it can be on just a mindboggling level if reproduction through the rest of the chain allows it, as I also recently witnessed in Madfloyd's system especially on orchestral music (and from the same DAC that we have). The purity and ease of tone there was just astonishing as well. All from a plain Redbook CD file.

But you are not taking into account that we don’t really hear discrete frequencies, we hear patterns that are largely reconstructed in our brains. If a live cymbal crash has a pattern that extends to 100Khz, it doesn’t matter if you hear it beyond 20khz as your brain realizes what the pattern does. When it gets unnaturally truncated this almost certainly disrupts this pattern and this could be audible.

Noise floor is tricky this way too because if it is true noise, uncorrelated with the signal then you can hear correlated signal below the noise floor. However, if the noise is modulated by the signal, or is distortion masquerading as noise then it will be signal correlated and you won’t hear below it. This gives the effect of truncated decay and collapse of space in recordings.

The point is that what we “hear” is largely a reconstruction by the brain and therefore is not so simple as engineering theories would like it to be.

 

[microstrip]

No, it shows how sensitive the human ear is to synthetic artifacts.

Should we conclude that differences in signal cables , power cables and anything that is not pure SET or vinyl distortion are due to "synthetic" artifacts?

 

[morricab]

Unfortunately, considering the current status of modern electronics, it becomes very controversial as soon as we start debating it with a minimum of knowledge and trying to make correlations. All the evidence we have on the subject was obtained in listening tests carried long ago with equipment having significant levels of total harmonic distortion, orders of magnitude higher than those of current equipment . Some others were obtained using software that added distortions using mathematical algorithms to digital musical content - something that is not representative of real behavior of electronic equipment.

When properly used the distortions of digital are much inferior to those of analog. What is changing is not the digital per se, but the implementations and the practical use of digital recording.

BS. There have been amps with vanishing levels of THD for decades and most sounded horrible. Geddes demonstrated in research that there was ZERO correlation between THD and listeners finding the sound clean or distorted. He found instead, like most others who dive into this that it is the pattern and root causes of the distortion that correlate with listeners hearing or not hearing distortion.

 

[Al M.]

But you are not taking into account that we don’t really hear discrete frequencies, we hear patterns that are largely reconstructed in our brains. If a live cymbal crash has a pattern that extends to 100Khz, it doesn’t matter if you hear it beyond 20khz as your brain realizes what the pattern does. When it gets unnaturally truncated this almost certainly disrupts this pattern and this could be audible.

No, just like digital is bandwidth limited, so is the human ear. I found this old post by Amir illuminating:

https://www.whatsbestforum.com/thre...t-timbral-resolution.18340/page-2#post-334892

Noise floor is tricky this way too because if it is true noise, uncorrelated with the signal then you can hear correlated signal below the noise floor. However, if the noise is modulated by the signal, or is distortion masquerading as noise then it will be signal correlated and you won’t hear below it. This gives the effect of truncated decay and collapse of space in recordings.

Yes, signal modulated noise is a major issue for digital. To my knowledge, it has also been responsible for "glassy" digital sound of the past.

 

[Al M.]

BS. There have been amps with vanishing levels of THD for decades and most sounded horrible. Geddes demonstrated in research that there was ZERO correlation between THD and listeners finding the sound clean or distorted. He found instead, like most others who dive into this that it is the pattern and root causes of the distortion that correlate with listeners hearing or not hearing distortion.

Yes, there is a good article by Bob Katz on this as well:

https://www.innerfidelity.com/content/katzs-corner-episode-25-adventures-distortion

 

[ddk]

IMHO WBF standards of debate are usually higher than those of most forum's, but you have a point - if people just want to speak about their headaches and preferences we do not need technical knowledge.

I agree this is the only forum I visit and post in regularly, but it's not for everyone and don't forget that we purged those deemed undesirable too !

david

 

[ddk]

Love y

It's wisdom Al !

david

 

[morricab]

Yes, there is a good article by Bob Katz on this as well:

https://www.innerfidelity.com/content/katzs-corner-episode-25-adventures-distortion

Yes, I have been staring much of what he puts in his article (and in some ways much more) since about 15 years on various forums. What I think his blender might be doing is restoring to some degree the pattern of distortion that is maskable by the ear/brain. This is in line with Cheever’s hypothesis and that the distortion pattern has to “hide” in the pattern that one’s own ear mechanism makes and that it is level dependent as well. This is because the pattern of harmonics made by the ear mechanism change with level. What Bob is wrong about, IMO, is making any device sound like any other (Boyk and Sussmann showed this is not really true) nor can push/pull be made to perform just like a SET in terms of harmonic distortion pattern.

Nor, IMO, can distortion from digital be the same as analog, although the output stage of a DAC and a phonstage could be designed very similarly. Digital distortion itself is rather unique.

 

[tima]

How can you check whether Paul's view/theory can ever be correct? Carrying a poll in AnalogPlanet? I am sure that top DAC manufacturers will support him!

Ah, more sampling.

 

[microstrip]

I agree this is the only forum I visit and post in regularly, but it's not for everyone and don't forget that we purged those deemed undesirable too !

david

As far as I remember the deemed undesirable were only undesirable because they could not understand the limitations of their measurements and were extremely aggressive in their crusade against the high-end. Seeing them leaving WBF was a needed but sorrowful moment - IMHO WBF has been losing a lot with every secession along its flow.

 

[tima]

And it reconstructs those samples into the original analog wave which is fully represented, in a continuous manner upon analog reconstruction, in those samples as long as the signal is bandwidth-limited, as it is in digital (at a frequency above the threshold of human heari

We have different perspectives, Al. My post was somewhat tongue-in-cheek.

You're talking about an end product. I'm talking about the process and 'data' from which it comes. Making a whole from parts. I don't claim to be knowledgable about digital technology, but I understand words you use to describe it, such as 'samples' and 'reconstruct'.

 

[microstrip]

BS. There have been amps with vanishing levels of THD for decades and most sounded horrible. Geddes demonstrated in research that there was ZERO correlation between THD and listeners finding the sound clean or distorted. He found instead, like most others who dive into this that it is the pattern and root causes of the distortion that correlate with listeners hearing or not hearing distortion.

Exactly my point. Since long it is known that there is no subjective correlation with minimization of THD and we have no established solid alternatives - it is simple to say there is hypothetically a preferred pattern of distortion, but the subject is still controversial.

IMHO someone becomes an expert in such matters and is recognized as so if he has a continuous and persistent work on the area, recognized and referred by his peers.

An occasional interesting paper concluding that

The main point to be made, however, is that now that we have a metric with a high degree of stability and predictability we can begin to do a whole array of subjective studies of distortion mechanisms that were heretofore impossible to quantify for lack of a value yardstick with which to measure the results. (quoted from the Geddes paper)

is not enough IMHO, YMMV.

Unfortunately as far as I know these anticipated studies were never carried or published, Geddes and Lee interests moved away from amplifiers.

 

[Lagonda]

I agree this is the only forum I visit and post in regularly, but it's not for everyone and don't forget that we purged those deemed undesirable too !

david

Not all ! I’m still here

 

[tima]

Not all ! I’m still here

And we're glad for it !

 

[Solypsa]

For those that are 'only digital media' here on the forum:

Do you use analog preamp and analog (passive or active) speaker crossovers? If so any comments on why?

In HiFi digital playback has by most accounts become really good lately, yet it seems to be very very rare for anyone to run a fully digital rig (volume/crossovers/dsp processing etc.) up to the amps/speakers. I know Sharp did it ages ago but that isn't a main player in our wheelhouse...

Pro audio (studio and pa) routinely use this sort of implentation.