Thinking about starting a small Vinyl to Digital conversion service. Thoughts?

[sqvare]

I'm guessing you were hearing the kmixer driver doing some processing. Bits are bits unless some manipulation is happening.

Or could just be the beer! What were you drinking?

Yeah, apparently Microsoft rectified kmixer's buttinsky behaviour in Vista and Win7.

Also, KMPlayer has an "audio transform filter" that enables resampling audio and what not, but being an untrusting soul, I'd disabled it right away. The default recommended setting is "enabled". Well, actually, the "disabled" setting is "not recommended"

And it was some cheap new "strong" beer the wine shop guy was pushing - I think it was London Pilsner Strong or something

 

[shaizada]

Hi Shaizada,

I trust in your experience and hearing if you found the XRCD recordings lacking in something that the vinyl had. My question is not whether the difference is there but why so. From my understanding of CD (and XRCD) dynamic range, on paper it is more than vinyl, and so is the headroom. Is it something in the recording process itself, or is it that recording engineers invest more into a vinyl recording than the digital one? Curious to know from you or someone who has first-hand experience with audio recording industry.

I promised an answer to this question so here goes my perspective.

Here is the difference:

Digital

Analog

The digital waves are just an approximation. We can get a better and better approximation, but it still doesn't give us the "resolution" and textures available in the natural wave. See, we can keep increasing the resolution of the digital wave 24bit, 192Khz, 384Khz, but it all is still an approximation.

Look at this differences in the wave patterns. The natural analog waves have billions of foam particles, textures, other baby foam particles etc. As soon as we try and translate that to digital, how many bits will it take to translate some of those foam bubbles we see? We can keep increasing the sampling rates and resolution bits and just get an inaccurate representation, while the natural waves keep bouncing randomly as god and mother nature intended.

That is what the analog medium is....natural just like life. Hence even the flaws have the beauty of nature hidden in them and hence, appeals to our more natural and HUMAN senses, rather to our technological brain that we have developed through learning and understanding. See, what is is that we are understanding? It is the Nature of things, the Universe, the state of life around us. We have personally developed our scientific research (something we keep on refining) to UNDERSTAND the world around us. It is this science that has helped us develop the digital medium as well and so it is flawed in its nature because we ourselves are flawed as well. Our science is still way behind as we haven't understood nature yet...but do pursue it on a daily basis.

Yes, digital can be made to "measure" better (dynamic range, noise floor etc.), but there is a long way to go for us.

Our ears, our hearing, our heartbeat is a culmination of our mind, our soul and our connection with this earth and universe. Things that harmoniously occur with this nature (like the analog listening medium) helps us connect at an instinctive level and helps our being resonate with the universe as one. Digital in its current state....simply does not.

That is the difference we hear and we keep trying to understand.

Sound is one of our primary senses, yet the scientific community still has much more to learn and understand before we can REALLY understand it.

The answer is very philosophical, but to understand the answer, we can't address it scientifically as it is fundamentally flawed being bind to our current humanistic level of understanding. It must be understood philosophically and then it actually makes sense.

Hope you guys didn't get bored reading this, but I really wanted to point out the difference as I understood this after pondering over it for a long time. I had to put aside my preconceived notions to really "get" it.

I hope this post sheds some light into that direction of understanding.

 

[malvai]

I promised an answer to this question so here goes my perspective.

Here is the difference:

Digital

Analog

The digital waves are just an approximation. We can get a better and better approximation, but it still doesn't give us the "resolution" and textures available in the natural wave. See, we can keep increasing the resolution of the digital wave 24bit, 192Khz, 384Khz, but it all is still an approximation.

Look at this differences in the wave patterns. The natural analog waves have billions of foam particles, textures, other baby foam particles etc. As soon as we try and translate that to digital, how many bits will it take to translate some of those foam bubbles we see? We can keep increasing the sampling rates and resolution bits and just get an inaccurate representation, while the natural waves keep bouncing randomly as god and mother nature intended.

That is what the analog medium is....natural just like life. Hence even the flaws have the beauty of nature hidden in them and hence, appeals to our more natural and HUMAN senses, rather to our technological brain that we have developed through learning and understanding. See, what is is that we are understanding? It is the Nature of things, the Universe, the state of life around us. We have personally developed our scientific research (something we keep on refining) to UNDERSTAND the world around us. It is this science that has helped us develop the digital medium as well and so it is flawed in its nature because we ourselves are flawed as well. Our science is still way behind as we haven't understood nature yet...but do pursue it on a daily basis.

Yes, digital can be made to "measure" better (dynamic range, noise floor etc.), but there is a long way to go for us.

Our ears, our hearing, our heartbeat is a culmination of our mind, our soul and our connection with this earth and universe. Things that harmoniously occur with this nature (like the analog listening medium) helps us connect at an instinctive level and helps our being resonate with the universe as one. Digital in its current state....simply does not.

That is the difference we hear and we keep trying to understand.

Sound is one of our primary senses, yet the scientific community still has much more to learn and understand before we can REALLY understand it.

The answer is very philosophical, but to understand the answer, we can't address it scientifically as it is fundamentally flawed being bind to our current humanistic level of understanding. It must be understood philosophically and then it actually makes sense.

Hope you guys didn't get bored reading this, but I really wanted to point out the difference as I understood this after pondering over it for a long time. I had to put aside my preconceived notions to really "get" it.

I hope this post sheds some light into that direction of understanding.

nice one Shaizada! Its a fairly good take on the debate...

Incidentally, I agree with you 100%. And at the end of the day, I'd say, the difference is for one to hear!

At an average, I've found that if a TT costs X, its sonics usually beat CDP's costing 10-15x!

Plus, the sound texture is somehow "more real". And no matter how we argue this unexplicable fact, it remains a moot point.

So, long live analogue!