Discussion on Vinyl and digital

[venkatcr]

The results completely depends on the mastering / production quality of the LP or Digital. Both are equally good. The best digital sound amazing and beyond what analogue can do due to the limitations of the medium itself. Technically!

My point exactly. Technically, irrespective of all your complaints of jitter and noise, digital systems are technically far superior. Also because it is so easy to replicate, you can get high resolution digital version at comparatively lower cost.

In practical terms, the LP's that were produced better sounded far better and musical than digital. To the point that ... if most of your music exists and is produced better on vinyl, there is absolutely no point in living in the digital world. This rule applies vise versa too.

Whether you like it or not, analogue recording and storage is dead. I think it died around 1985. Today no one, including your Abbey Road Studios bother to record anything in analogue. The minute the sound leaves the mike, it is digitized and stored in digital form. Movies, TV shows have all switched over to digital recording and storage. And, today, no one bothers to cut or release a CD also.

Professional studio recording using silent rooms and expensive equipment is becoming rare. Many of the new fangled artists do not have the patience to record professionally. They may also not be able to afford them. So what you get is music recorded using a iPhone or an high end Android. Live shows are also recorded in similar manner. The only area where some care is taken for professional recording seems to be Orchestral music.

Streaming will reach 24/192 or even higher within a few years. So you really do not have to depend upon large hard disks or CDs. If Netflix and others can store and stream 4K video with full 7.1 audio, what is a two channel audio?

Companies such as TI, AKM, NXP, ESS and other are spending billions of dollars on delivering improved performance. ESS's 9068, for example, has a patented circuit that completely eliminates issues from input clock jitter. And, in addition, 32-bit/768kHz are becoming quite common nowadays. The sampling and de-sampling is so high that you do no have to worry about about noise and jitter any more. Combine all these with AptX kind of Bluetooth and Wifi 6, you really have nothing to complain about.

Cheers

 

[surfatwork]

Audio distortion may be beautiful to your ears, but that is not what the original artists play or hear in the studios.

This I can vouch for. Someone I know very well is a singer, and I've been in the studio many times with her for recording sessions. What you hear there is very very different from the final output.

 

[Enkay78]

My point exactly. Technically, irrespective of all your complaints of jitter and noise, digital systems are technically far superior. Also because it is so easy to replicate, you can get high resolution digital version at comparatively lower cost.


Whether you like it or not, analogue recording and storage is dead. I think it died around 1985. Today no one, including your Abbey Road Studios bother to record anything in analogue. The minute the sound leaves the mike, it is digitized and stored in digital form. Movies, TV shows have all switched over to digital recording and storage. And, today, no one bothers to cut or release a CD also.

Professional studio recording using silent rooms and expensive equipment is becoming rare. Many of the new fangled artists do not have the patience to record professionally. They may also not be able to afford them. So what you get is music recorded using a iPhone or an high end Android. Live shows are also recorded in similar manner. The only area where some care is taken for professional recording seems to be Orchestral music.

Streaming will reach 24/192 or even higher within a few years. So you really do not have to depend upon large hard disks or CDs. If Netflix and others can store and stream 4K video with full 7.1 audio, what is a two channel audio?

Companies such as TI, AKM, NXP, ESS and other are spending billions of dollars on delivering improved performance. ESS's 9068, for example, has a patented circuit that completely eliminates issues from input clock jitter. And, in addition, 32-bit/768kHz are becoming quite common nowadays. The sampling and de-sampling is so high that you do no have to worry about about noise and jitter any more. Combine all these with AptX kind of Bluetooth and Wifi 6, you really have nothing to complain about.

Cheers

And I hope these are common knowledge to the hobbyists.

Obviously some of us are not seeing the crystal ball(s).


The science is ...breaknecking tech.

The debate is where the art is

 

[square_wave]

My point exactly. Technically, irrespective of all your complaints of jitter and noise, digital systems are technically far superior. Also because it is so easy to replicate, you can get high resolution digital version at comparatively lower cost.


Whether you like it or not, analogue recording and storage is dead. I think it died around 1985. Today no one, including your Abbey Road Studios bother to record anything in analogue. The minute the sound leaves the mike, it is digitized and stored in digital form. Movies, TV shows have all switched over to digital recording and storage. And, today, no one bothers to cut or release a CD also.

Professional studio recording using silent rooms and expensive equipment is becoming rare. Many of the new fangled artists do not have the patience to record professionally. They may also not be able to afford them. So what you get is music recorded using a iPhone or an high end Android. Live shows are also recorded in similar manner. The only area where some care is taken for professional recording seems to be Orchestral music.

Streaming will reach 24/192 or even higher within a few years. So you really do not have to depend upon large hard disks or CDs. If Netflix and others can store and stream 4K video with full 7.1 audio, what is a two channel audio?

Companies such as TI, AKM, NXP, ESS and other are spending billions of dollars on delivering improved performance. ESS's 9068, for example, has a patented circuit that completely eliminates issues from input clock jitter. And, in addition, 32-bit/768kHz are becoming quite common nowadays. The sampling and de-sampling is so high that you do no have to worry about about noise and jitter any more. Combine all these with AptX kind of Bluetooth and Wifi 6, you really have nothing to complain about.

Cheers

If majority of your music is fairly new and mastered in digital it makes sense to stay with digital. However, like Prem mentioned in an earlier post, even with new music that is mastered in digital, it will eventually sound compressed when it reaches the customer. I have heard this problem with many new artists. The LP version will sound much better. How do you solve this issue ? This problem is quite common especially with popular music. Classical and jazz seems to be immune to this problem to some extent.

On ground realities matters in audio.

 

[superczar]

My point exactly. Technically, irrespective of all your complaints of jitter and noise, digital systems are technically far superior. Also because it is so easy to replicate, you can get high resolution digital version at comparatively lower cost.


Whether you like it or not, analogue recording and storage is dead. I think it died around 1985. Today no one, including your Abbey Road Studios bother to record anything in analogue. The minute the sound leaves the mike, it is digitized and stored in digital form. Movies, TV shows have all switched over to digital recording and storage. And, today, no one bothers to cut or release a CD also.

Professional studio recording using silent rooms and expensive equipment is becoming rare. Many of the new fangled artists do not have the patience to record professionally. They may also not be able to afford them. So what you get is music recorded using a iPhone or an high end Android. Live shows are also recorded in similar manner. The only area where some care is taken for professional recording seems to be Orchestral music.

Streaming will reach 24/192 or even higher within a few years. So you really do not have to depend upon large hard disks or CDs. If Netflix and others can store and stream 4K video with full 7.1 audio, what is a two channel audio?

Companies such as TI, AKM, NXP, ESS and other are spending billions of dollars on delivering improved performance. ESS's 9068, for example, has a patented circuit that completely eliminates issues from input clock jitter. And, in addition, 32-bit/768kHz are becoming quite common nowadays. The sampling and de-sampling is so high that you do no have to worry about about noise and jitter any more. Combine all these with AptX kind of Bluetooth and Wifi 6, you really have nothing to complain about.

Cheers

I for one am not complaining.
From saving up pocket money every month to treat myself to 1 max 2 CDs a month in college days - and playing the same boring library over & over.

To having real time access to a million times larger library - which is at least the same resolution , if not more
At a cost that is less than the absolute cost of what I used to pay for a single CD - let alone accounting for inflation adjustment

PS; I have a reasonably large collection of analog pressings that my dad had collected over the years .. and maybe another 20-25 that I picked over time while travelling.
I certainly don’t mind them - but its really really difficult to extract anywhere close to the amount of Dynamic range that even a ultra cheap airport express/ CCA can eke out from a 150/- a month service

 

[Bloom@83]

Unless you have LPs gifted by your parents or grand parents, the chances are that the LP you are hearing is pressed from a digital copy.

There you are actually wrong. There are many online and offline sources to purchase original analog pressings.I listen to pre 1990s music , 90% of my records are analog pressings.

 

[square_wave]

Whether you like it or not, analogue recording and storage is dead. I think it died around 1985. Today no one, including your Abbey Road Studios bother to record anything in analogue. The minute the sound leaves the mike, it is digitized and stored in digital form. Movies, TV shows have all switched over to digital recording and storage. And, today, no one bothers to cut or release a CD also.

You seem to be completely skirting the issue. The discussion is not about the future of mainstream recording industry.

Let's say a person is mostly into popular music and most of his music already exists on vinyl and sounds better on vinyl. He also listens to select new popular music that also sound better on vinyl due to compression issues in digital versions, would you still recommend digital to him ?

 

[firearm12]

Seems the focus is now shifted to analog vs digital. Digital provides far more convenience than analog be it playback or recording. But music exists as analog sound waves only. To convert that analog to digital and back to analog, science uses approximations, no matter how technologically advanced we become, we will never be able to convert an analog signal to digital data and recover it back 100% especially with current binary format. It can be 99%, it can be 99.999% but never 100%. People say it's not audible. As an analogy, let's say we have a painting and then we compare it to a high resolution photo of that painting displayed on a monitor that displays it at a resolution our eyes can't fault and with perfect colors and vibrance. What will you prefer?

 

[superczar]

Seems the focus is now shifted to analog vs digital. Digital provides far more convenience than analog be it playback or recording. But music exists as analog sound waves only. To convert that analog to digital and back to analog, science uses approximations, no matter how technologically advanced we become, we will never be able to convert an analog signal to digital data and recover it back 100% especially with current binary format. It can be 99%, it can be 99.999% but never 100%. People say it's not audible. As an analogy, let's say we have a painting and then we compare it to a high resolution photo of that painting displayed on a monitor that displays it at a resolution our eyes can't fault and with perfect colors and vibrance. What will you prefer?

Let’s assume analog to digital and back cause deterioration.

It’s also a fact that analog storage deteriorates with time (but not digital)

Current recordings are anyway recorded digitally so no pure analog exists.

While for Old original analog records , enough and more time has passed for time to have an impact ergo that can’t be 100% either

I suppose the question then is which of the aforementioned degradations is worse?

 

[firearm12]

Let’s assume analog to digital and back cause deterioration.

It’s also a fact that analog storage deteriorates with time (but not digital)

Current recordings are anyway recorded digitally so no pure analog exists.

While for Old original analog records , enough and more time has passed for time to have an impact ergo that can’t be 100% either

I suppose the question then is which of the aforementioned degradations is worse?

I don't think it's all about deterioration. It's more about texture and taste. Some artists still have tried record on analog format although no. is very less.

8 Bands That Went All-Analog on Their Albums

And it sounded way better than any over-produced ProTools effort.

www.ultimate-guitar.com

 

[raghupb]

What started out as a debate on storage medium/technology become digital vs analog
For 2-ch music playback a simple spinner HDD or even a flash drive is sufficient. SSD maybe an overkill for audio.
And USB 2.0 is fast enough for data transfer too.
Cheers,
Raghu

 

[OM_2K19]

You can check your interface. To avoid surprises I always use a wired 1Gpbs lan connection to the router. Here is the output of iftop, where it can be seen that my device is consuming peak of 4 Mbps for playing a flac with sample rate of 44.1 kHz. 4 Mbps is well below the speed that the interface supports. In fact when I do a scp of a large file I easily get a transfer rate of 1 Gbps (around 120 Mega Bytes per second).
View attachment 65672

Yup, that's another way; however, I usually rely on my firewall (Untangle) log that traces those packets at the application layer.

Edit:-

Here is the trace for Sportify.

 

[OM_2K19]

Another observation, for a Tidal FLAC (Hi-Fi), the bitrate starts with around 80KB/s and then jumps to around 150KB/s after about 7/8 second. Then fluctuates between 120-150 KB/s bitrate through the track before coming down to again around 80KB/s just before the track ends. I wonder at that bitrate how they will even deliver a FLAC.

 

[mbhangui]

Another observation, for a Tidal FLAC (Hi-Fi), the bitrate starts with around 80KB/s and then jumps to around 150KB/s after about 7/8 second. Then fluctuates between 120-150 KB/s bitrate through the track before coming down to again around 80KB/s just before the track ends. I wonder at that bitrate how they will even deliver a FLAC.

View attachment 65679

View attachment 65680

Impossible to deliver quality sound at that bitrate. Unless this is compressed data that is flowing?
I have no idea about tidal, spotify and these streaming service. I guess it must be compressed and the application does decompression on the fly like what happens in the case of flac in my case it is the music player daemon that is doing the decoding/decompression

 

[OM_2K19]

I guess it must be compressed and the application does decompression on the fly like what happens in the case of flac in my case it is the music player daemon that is doing the decoding/decompression

That's my guess too, looking around the OS layer via Procmon should give me some idea how they are pulling this off.

 

[venkatcr]

Let's say a person is mostly into popular music and most of his music already exists on vinyl and sounds better on vinyl. He also listens to select new popular music that also sound better on vinyl due to compression issues in digital versions, would you still recommend digital to him ?

No. Absolutely not. I have no issues with people liking and using analogue systems to listen to music.

What irritates me is the constant disparagement of other systems without understanding the enormous amount of work and technology that has gone into it. And, more important, the state of play it has reached today. Companies such as ESS have, for all practical purposes, completely eliminated jitter and noise. Whatever disruptions you can hear is, frankly, far beyond what your ears can discern. I am not saying this. Measurements are saying this and arguing with that is clearly illogical.

I can write a full book on the limitations of analogue systems, but what will it achieve?

At the end of the day, all this is meaningless. Irrespective of what you feel and say, the industry has already gone completely digital.

At the same time, I do suppose this argument will never end.

 

[superczar]

Done it via network trace... The flip happened anywhere between 30-60 seconds...

check the actual network speed (To ISP and not just LAN) and loaded latency /bufferbloat you are getting on your end point.
I get about 350mbps /4-6ms unloaded/loaded latency on the streamer I had tested on (and this was a while ago)
Audio is almost always immediate full res and video playback takes a few seconds at most

Another observation, for a Tidal FLAC (Hi-Fi), the bitrate starts with around 80KB/s and then jumps to around 150KB/s after about 7/8 second. Then fluctuates between 120-150 KB/s bitrate through the track before coming down to again around 80KB/s just before the track ends. I wonder at that bitrate how they will even deliver a FLAC.

View attachment 65679

View attachment 65680

Untangle does not update flow rates in real time. Nor does sophos or any web UI UTM for that matter.
pfsense is a little better but just about.

Combine that with the fact that Audio/Video streams do not maintain a constant network flow rate (read ahead buffers) - and you will realize that this is far from an accurate measurement method.

What you need to do is to look at the total data used by the client for a given number of playback minutes - and then use that to derive the actual stream bit rate

 

[Bloom@83]

As I mentioned in some review, I could hear sounds and parts of the music from behind my head in a stereo system that vinyl can never dream of creating.

This is interesting. I’ve heard quite high end vinyl setup ( Technics SP 10 with EPA 100 tonearm ,Shure V15 Type IV cart , Rethm Saadhna with separate bass drivers ) playing some reference audiophile recordings ( Analog Productions Time Out , DSOTM original UK pressing etc )in a well-treated room and even here I never experienced this ‘behind the head’ effect.

I’m interested to learn what was your setup in this case including source and source media.

 

[arj]

Unless you have LPs gifted by your parents or grand parents, the chances are that the LP you are hearing is pressed from a digital copy.

until around 2015 odd a lot of 2nd hand vinyl was available under 1000. These days it's a different story and it is pretty expensive

The only reason I got into Vinyl was to listen to the 60s to 70s and some 80s bollywood music since they did not sound as good especially the asha/lata even Hemant Kumar, Rafi et AL. They usually sounded harsh and with bass cut off. Ditto for most of dire Straits /Floyd and even Simon and Garfunkel

Maybe due to the Re mastering Prem was talking about.

You seem to be completely skirting the issue. The discussion is not about the future of mainstream recording industry.

Let's say a person is mostly into popular music and most of his music already exists on vinyl and sounds better on vinyl. He also listens to select new popular music that also sound better on vinyl due to compression issues in digital versions, would you still recommend digital to him ?

And that is exactly the point.

This is interesting. I’ve heard quite high end vinyl setup ( Technics SP 10 with EPA 100 tonearm , Rethm Saadhna with separate bass drivers ) playing some reference audiophile recordings ( Analog Productions Time Out , DSOTM original UK pressing etc )in a well-treated room and even here I never heard this ‘behind the head’ effect.

I’m interested to learn what was your setup in this case including source and source media.

I know they can be formed on Headphones and in multichannel speakers

Usual stereo mastering is for an image to be formed in front of the speaker and my guess is if it is forming behind the head then either the speakers are wired out of phase where the soundstage can be pretty weird and seem like coming from inside the head Or there is some rear wall reflections forming an image.

 

[square_wave]

No. Absolutely not. I have no issues with people liking and using analogue systems to listen to music.

What irritates me is the constant disparagement of other systems without understanding the enormous amount of work and technology that has gone into it. And, more important, the state of play it has reached today. Companies such as ESS have, for all practical purposes, completely eliminated jitter and noise. Whatever disruptions you can hear is, frankly, far beyond what your ears can discern. I am not saying this. Measurements are saying this and arguing with that is clearly illogical.

I can write a full book on the limitations of analogue systems, but what will it achieve?

At the end of the day, all this is meaningless. Irrespective of what you feel and say, the industry has already gone completely digital.

At the same time, I do suppose this argument will never end.

I don't think an level headed audiophile will disparage other systems. People don't choose a path after considering "only " the theory on paper. It is their on-ground realities that make them choose their path.

For example, if you write a book on the technical limitations of analogue systems, nobody in the analogue world will care. That info already exists. It also does not matter if the industry has already gone digital because many digitally mastered albums still sound better on LPs due to compression methods used on the retail master for digital. Many audiophiles in the west buy LPs of pop music only due to this problem. Adele is a good example of how bad the digital version sounds.