Woa! It's been a busy morning on this thread
More than a digital/vinyl debate which cannot be resolved, I would be interested in a CDP/DAC debate which holds some possibility of being resolved. We have begun this debate many times on the forum but personally I opt out when arguments become convoluted, complex and confused. I woule love to read clear and concise accounts of various options for:
I'm sure that debate will go on, and I'm sure we'll be right there! But resolved? That it might not be!
CD is a collection of bits on a physical medium that may or may not have been subject to manufacturing faults and damage in handling during its lifetime. It is read in a slow, clunky way and I'm not sure that errors get corrected (I don't know).
HDD is a collection of [theoretically and ideally] the
same bits (for the same song) on a physical medium that is fast and streamlined and incredibly accurate.
So, unless someone is going to wax lyrical about the silver disk (the light refraction is pretty!), at the level of
storage, I don't think there is any competition whatsoever.
And before someone screams out, "But they
sound different!" let me repeat that bit about
the same bits. They do not, and cannot sound different --- and if the end result does (which it certainly might) then
something else, other than the storage medium, is causing that.
So we can disassociate
storage/transport and
processing.
...Almost, but not quite: the CDP
does have its timing of transport and DAC closely linked. Those who believe that jitter is anything other than the spectre of digital sound might quote this as giving first place to the CDP
Even then, at the point the data leaves the HDD, there will be misunderstandings and misconceptions
and valid disagreements about what can, should, and does happen to it before it finally leaves a DAC chip as analogue sound.
I would rely on
resolution any time soon
Till day all my experiments have not ended well with using a good Firewire/USB SPDIF converter with a good DAC Vs the regular CD transport.. the future is definitely based on Async USB DACs...so waiting for this whole "technology" to stabilize.
I wonder what was wrong. Maybe you shuld have tried simple analogue out from a good sound card! Maybe you did?
Gentlemen,
Dont you know when Audio CDs came out there was a mess of the job of digitization as engineers wanted to put in as much loudness as possible which resulted in less dynamic range and compression to the point of clipping.
I suspect that, at the start, the process wasn't properly understood, and was still being learned by the engineers, however skilled they might have been in analogue sound. I also suspect that this led to some very bad
digitally-recorded/processed sound being issued on vinyl.
Compression (as in reduction of dynamic range to make everything sound loud) seems to be a sickness of more recent times. Music is produced to sell to the masses: the masses base their assumptions about what it should sound like on cinema, tv, and the ipod. It is unlikely that decent production values would even survive outside of niche music.
Let's assume for a moment that all the recordings of the past 50-60 years are stored in a 'digital bank'. Let us also assume that more information cannot possibly be added to the recordings stored in this digital bank. Therefore remastering can only filter out noise which may have been passed through at the time of the original transfer from analogue to digital. Perhaps audience noise can also be filtered out of live recordings. And perhaps along with the noise, some of the essence of music may also be filtered out. Therefore can the remastered CD's, SACD's and high resolution downloads be better than older recordings? Do they really provide enhanced sound quality?
The remastering/remixing and the digital format are two separate issues. I don't think there is a doubt that modern technology can find more in those old recordings, and present it better (to the cries of "unoriginal" from some). Having done so, what
then is the role of the sample-rate/bit-depth in our listening? I don't mind those numbers being turned up
just in case, but I would object to being
charged more, because, hey, it doesn't take any more work to set the numbers higher when exporting the finished master --- it just takes a few more bits to store it. Thus, I see it becoming a marketing thing, not an audio thing.
The really good USB dace are expensive.. Although Siva at Acoustic Portrait has developed a really good one
Do they have to be? Watch that Ethan Winer presentation I linked to above. Note the experiments using a cheap soundcard. I found it an eye-opener
But we do love
expensive. The choice between a PC case and something 10mm thick hand-milled from a solid block of metal? Hmmm... I think I'll go and google hand-milled PC cases!
rolleyes: at self)
malvai said:
earlier i misquoted ultasonic frequencies as sub sonics.. while i meant that the body reacts to sub and ultrasonic frequencies in EXACTLY the same way. having said that, let me say this once again: the redbook format is devoid of such frequencies, while is why hardcore vinyl heads find that CD's just don't do it for them...
Yes, sorry: all of us make mistakes. Apologies for my reaction.
But still: the frequency response of your amplifier and speakers goes up to those dizzy numbers? Another reason I'm slightly sceptical about high-sampling-rate digital audio.
And possibly part of the reason that live, acoustic music will always beat recorded audio hands down!
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