With every new iteration of this discussion, there is increased bit depth and sampling rate. The information is less incomplete.
Why, oh why, does vinyl continue to blow away digital?
- Thread starter godofwealth
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With every new iteration of this discussion, there is increased bit depth and sampling rate. The information is less incomplete.
I bet we can double that. Easily. I believe in the good folks on WBF.
I ll take the versatile Wadax dac over any 160 K TT anytime .
For the best analogue you only need to spend 1O K ( a 50 year old restored tape machine plus some tapes )
Mike, I have a strong feeling that you and I would tend to agree about an overwhelming amount of observations if we did listening tests in the same room. I simply have a different context and experience from the production side that informs my opinions. And opinions about some things have changed over the years when I have proven things for myself. I continue to remain open to all of it.
I simply bristle at many audiophiles using the term “real” as a way to justify their enjoyment of a certain version of music or the gear used to play it back.
It is just like the use of “weight”, which is the extra bass energy impaired to analog vinyl playback by the combination of the recording/playback RIAA equalization misalignment and induced by low frequency modulations.
when Bernie says 'things are missing' from the digital conversion/transfer....what does that mean?
What are the advantages of vinyl play versus digital file playback in terms of sound quality?
Technical evidence doesn’t win the day. It’s what does it sound like? I can’t speak for Mike but I know what he means by saying completeness.
In a studio while a project is going down to tape, the live feed has some things about it that the tape playback loses, but it also has a congealing and densifying effect that makes the playback sound more “like a record”. That “thing” is what I find more pleasing in most but not all cases.
Transformer saturation will provide the increase density. Transformer saturation = distortion.
Dave, have you listen to high-rate DSD from HQPLAYER? NativeDSD uses it for their releases. If you have not, give it a listen and then let us know if you still think that analog sounds better.It sounds better.
Hqplayer has lots of vibe. Things have progressed quite a bit. You should check out the cutting edge of digital, you may be surprised by your findings.
A live piano or cello or trombone has a certain amount of low frequency energy which we hear and feel. When these instruments are reproduced by our systems and we experience less of this energy, how would you describe that without using the word “weight”? What is a better way to describe this quality from these instruments?
That’s what I was explaining, I have recorded my voice direct to analog master tape, high quality digital, cassette tape and direct cut record…the winner by far in realism was the direct cut record. Now, obviously most commercial recordings are not this…er…direct, but to me it shows where the least information loss occurs.It sounds better.
Brad did your wife or anyone else listen to and compared these recordings? I ask this because when I hear my voice on a recording is sound nothing like what I hear in my head when I speak.
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Yes, we understand the meaning of “weight”, I meant the the “extra”weight.
I posted earlier today a sound recoding that I made of my WAAR system playing St. John’s Night At Bald Mountain. If you listen to it you hear how nice the bass sound and “weight” sounds without the extra muddiness and indistinct bass energy.
Carlos; I was going to link my relevant posts in this thread addressing that, but instead you are welcome to take a look. at this point people don't need me to go there again in a long post. with all due respect, not trying to be evasive.
Could you describe your favorite cartridge/arm/turntable set up? Over what 160K turntables would you prefer the versatile Wadax DAC? I am asking for any direct comparisons that you might have made to put your comment into some kind of context. Or is it simply a feeling or preference for the new Wadax?
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I have reference recordings that sound better in vinyl and others that sound better in digital. Neither sounds more real to me (or the people I work with from my short survey here) just because it is one or the other, it is material dependent. Could be due to the different mastering, recording chain, or any other dozen issues. I can provide examples if you'd like. As such, I pose again the idea that this distinction (analog-digital) doesn't really track well with reality. There is nothing more continuous or natural about analog than digital, it is still stored media using a discrete resolution and an engineered encoding scheme.
As to why analog sounds so good, I have three ideas: a) low order harmonics b) noise and c) fetichism.
a) Low order harmonics are what you get from mechanical systems, and everything in analog is electro-mechanical. These mask away obnoxious higher order modes very effectively to our earing apparatus and are, again, compatible with what you find in a real live music scenario from things that the mics don't pick up, either because they get buried (remember the best mic in the world is about 14 bit resolving...) or because the recording eng deliberately filtered them away by using highly directional mics and other techniques. Effectively analog could be filling in the blanks, with distortion that we find engaging. This is by happy coincidence more than anything.
b) Noise is pleasant. We get nervous in an anechoic chamber. We evolved to take cues from background noise, and seem to be effectively very good at it. To the point where adding given types of noise to recordings makes things more readable for us. If you really think about it, it's perfectly inline with tweaks that audiophiles do all the time. We're just used to confuse certain noise with silence. The start of a crescendo is much more fascinating to me on vinyl that usually on digital, and I'm willing to bet it is because of the noise that my brain doesn't interpret as such, unless I focus on it.
c) Then we come to the last. I'm ok with people pushing back, but I have very little doubt about it. Need to read up on psy studies a bit more to formalize this better. We all know our experiences are brutally filtered and colored by our state of mind. The act of preparing and putting on a record or tape is a ritual just like any other, and it has consequences. It is not for free, it is not convenient, it involves dedication and sacrifice, so it playing with our expectations is just, well, expected. Some people align immediately with the act of just listening. They are not searching for the next track on a stupid screen, they just sit back and lift off. The impact of this might be bigger than we expect of care to admit, at least it is for me the times I tried to analyze it.
I don't think so. The analog process seems to discard a lot of information (a stylus simply can't move fast enough for certain things, it does have inertia; a tape doesn't really record 20kHz cleanly, it is frequency limited), but what it does seems to be so aligned with our internal mechanisms, that we are can still have valid discussions like this one well into the digital age. Encoding something to bits is very efficient and errors are well controlled. We can discuss why a lot of ADCs and DACs simply suck, but if you reverse a) b) and c) you can probably derive a good fist order approximation to my opinion pretty quickly.
That is an excellent question Carlos. For me, vinyl better captures the gestalt, the whole experience of live unamplified music than does digital. As Tim wrote earlier, it basically comes down to the energy and the information of the live music experience.
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