Why, oh why, does vinyl continue to blow away digital?

PeterA said:
Could you describe your favorite cartridge/arm/turntable set up? Over what 160K turntables would you prefer the versatile Wadax DAC?
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he did not say it's better. (although maybe he meant that).
andromedaaudio said:
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 )
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PeterA said:
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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I meant technical advantages. Something with substance and technical meaning.
 
Carlos269 said:
I meant technical advantages. Something with substance and technical meaning.
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wrong forum. this is a listening forum. maybe does not fit your audio viewpoint, but it's where you are.

techie stuff is fine, but not the issue ultimately here.
 
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RCanelas said:
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.
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I think it is largely a). Low order harmonics that are a) benign up to surprisingly high levels and b) mask a lot of the higher order harmonics, rendering them sonically invisible. When you look at most digital, the harmonic distortion profiles consist of a lot of high order harmonics and not much low order of higher level. Then factor in other types of purely digital based errors and I think you have a big part of the story. Tube DACs help probably by injecting some low order harmonics that then mask some of the other stuff.

Noise might have some effect but the best vinyl and tape are pretty quiet actually.

Not sure I agree with you about c). If it universally sounded worse I don’t think it would have made a comeback…there is not really a market for VHS tape, for example…
 
Mike Lavigne said:
wrong forum. this is a listening forum. maybe does not fit your audio viewpoint, but it's where you are.

techie stuff is fine, but not the issue ultimately here.
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When having a conversation you need come with substance and not empty meaningless words to support or substantiate your position.
 
PeterA said:
What I have not read from your many posts is which format you think sounds more like real music? Despite all the flaws with analog, I still think in the end that it sounds more like real music. Why is that?
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No clue. I don't think analog sounds more like real music. And I am also regularly attending live concerts of unamplified music.

PeterA said:
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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To me digital does very fine on these points. I don't miss anything compared to analog.

Where does that leave us? Subjective perceptions differ. You have your perceptions, I have mine, and that's it. It's all good.
 
Al M. said:
No clue. I don't think analog sounds more like real music. And I am also regularly attending live concerts of unamplified music.



To me digital does very fine on these points. I don't miss anything compared to analog.

Where does that leave us? Subjective perceptions differ. You have your perceptions, I have mine, and that's it. It's all good.
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How do you know? You don’t have an analog rig do you?
 
morricab said:
How do you know? You don’t have an analog rig do you?
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I have heard plenty high-quality analog in friends' houses for what must have been many hundreds of hours over the years, and I enjoy it.
 
Mcsnare said:
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.
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You may observe that around these here parts *Some* ‘Audiophiles’ appear to have undergone an ‘Evolution’ , or is that ‘Devolution’ , into “Hobbyists” and that “Natural” has become the new ‘Real’ .
 
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morricab said:
Audioholics demonstrated that at least on some recordings, LP had higher dynamics than cd or DVD-A.
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The needle would jump out of the groove if it approached the dynamic range of digital. You can find the dynamic range comparisons here, as I have posted them previously, or look them up on google. They are not close. Now with 32 bit depth audio becoming more widely used, dynamic range is an attribute in digital’s favor.
 
morricab said:
www.audioholics.com

Dynamic Comparison of LPs vs CDs - Part 4

Yes, you have heard all the arguments before, and you are probably sick and tired of it. LP vs digital is a "religious war" that has been played out by various audiophiles ever since the CD format
www.audioholics.com www.audioholics.com
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Did you read the conclusion:

If LPs have higher distortion and are exaggerating dynamics, it may explain why the apparent "benefits" of LPs translate even into LP recordings, and potentially explain why LPs of digital recordings sound better than their CD equivalents.
 
Carlos269 said:
The needle would jump out of the groove if it approached the dynamic range of digital. You can find the dynamic range comparisons here, as I have posted them previously, or look them up on google. They are not close. Now with 32 bit depth audio becoming more widely used, dynamic range is an attribute in digital’s favor.
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You do know what the RIAA curve is , right? Your argument is silly.
 
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