[lazydays]

The several years I tried to use only the CDP (ie, another household appliance  ) was the worst several years of my adult music life .  Never again 

That said, the latest crop of CDP's and DAC's are uniformly good and listenable now.....but 16/44.1 just doesn't and won't ever cut it as a hi-fidelity source.

Denny - I know you love me saying it so I will re-iterate for you ..... 16/44.1 just doesn't and won't ever cut it   

At best it will be good enough....but never truly high definition.

24/192 with Meridian Lossless Packing (originally known as DVD-A and now adopted by Blu-Ray and HD-DVD) is just a pip away as good as vinyl and may in fact be better sonically (one day, at least). 

It's simply a great digital format created in the past decade - Redbook was created 30+ years ago when calculators cost $100.00 (and we ohhhh'ed and ahhh'ed at it).  Redbook technology is a contemporary of the fascimile (fax) machine...it was a good first try at digital sampling, but only that.

If anything is recorded at 16/44.1 to start - the entire sonic chain is compromised no matter what format the recording ends up on.

44,100 samples per second and 16 bit resolution isn't enough to convey the essence of the original (analog) event and that's the best they could come up with in 1975 or so...but 24 bit and or 96 or 192K samples per second, with MLP, really is a great format.

Nonetheless, I bought 17 albums for $44 at my local record store (Mill Valley Music) yesterday....man, it was sweet. I dove into the $0.50 bin and came up with lotsa' winners...and even have a 180 gram Herbie Hancock / 'Crossings' re-issue (for $12 new). 

It's so damn quiet and engaging right outta' the sleeve...click and pop-less and this all before giving it a spin in the RCM.

John 

John,
a good post! A few years back I was shopping for new speakers (something I ready do dread to do by the way). Anyway the room I was listening to several sets of speakers in used BAT gear along with an SCD-1 and somekind of a new fangeled DVD-A player. By the end of the day we managed to blowup one amp and the SCD-1! But anyway they had exactly one DVD-A and a couple three SACD's. For the most part I thought both formats were pretty equal till they did some cuts on DVD-A that were 192KHz. Then there was a difference to be heard. The place didn't have a turntable in the system so there was no way to compair, and I wont go into that anyway. We all thought the bass was on par with each other, but the upper end just seemed to go deeper with the DVD-A
(like it never had a roll off). Now I have a DVD-A player as well as four SACD players. Listen to SACD ten times more than DVD-A because we just can't get it around these parts (both have actually pretty much dried up here). But each and everytime I've bought a DVD-A I look for the 192KHz sampleing rate, and have yet to ever see it so far. Did anybody actually do anything in it, or was it just a marketing ploy? Might add here that when we played the DVD-A unit it was the first time the sales people had ever sat down to listen to DVD-A, and they were also stunned. One of the salemen was using a Sony 777ES (still is by the way), and he said to me that it sure didn't sound like what he'd read on the internet! I liked it, but didn't like the speakers I heard, and later bought a DVD-A unit (Yamaha). DVD-HD seems tobe dead around here, but Blueray is going like gangbusters. Right now my DVD-A unit is unplugged (replaced it with a Sansui Tuner), and I'm actually contemplating selling all the stuff except for one DVD player and my trusty old Jolida CD100a. Then I'll buy something like a gently used Ayre universal player X7E(?) that has a built in screen in the front. Only time will tell, as I have to scrounge up the money for this adventure (plus a new phono stage in about four or five months). Damn I got too many projects working at the sametime as it is!
gary

[lazydays]

The several years I tried to use only the CDP (ie, another household appliance  ) was the worst several years of my adult music life .  Never again 

That said, the latest crop of CDP's and DAC's are uniformly good and listenable now.....but 16/44.1 just doesn't and won't ever cut it as a hi-fidelity source.

Denny - I know you love me saying it so I will re-iterate for you ..... 16/44.1 just doesn't and won't ever cut it   

At best it will be good enough....but never truly high definition.

24/192 with Meridian Lossless Packing (originally known as DVD-A and now adopted by Blu-Ray and HD-DVD) is just a pip away as good as vinyl and may in fact be better sonically (one day, at least). 

It's simply a great digital format created in the past decade - Redbook was created 30+ years ago when calculators cost $100.00 (and we ohhhh'ed and ahhh'ed at it).  Redbook technology is a contemporary of the fascimile (fax) machine...it was a good first try at digital sampling, but only that.

If anything is recorded at 16/44.1 to start - the entire sonic chain is compromised no matter what format the recording ends up on.

44,100 samples per second and 16 bit resolution isn't enough to convey the essence of the original (analog) event and that's the best they could come up with in 1975 or so...but 24 bit and or 96 or 192K samples per second, with MLP, really is a great format.

Nonetheless, I bought 17 albums for $44 at my local record store (Mill Valley Music) yesterday....man, it was sweet. I dove into the $0.50 bin and came up with lotsa' winners...and even have a 180 gram Herbie Hancock / 'Crossings' re-issue (for $12 new). 

It's so damn quiet and engaging right outta' the sleeve...click and pop-less and this all before giving it a spin in the RCM.

John 

almost forgot: I picked up several mint LP's yesterday myself.
three Dizzey Gillespie LPS
one McCoy Tyner
one Joe Pass
one Rod Stewart
and five classical (all Russian artest)
gary

[Wind Chaser]

Denny - I know you love me saying it so I will re-iterate for you ..... 16/44.1 just doesn't and won't ever cut it   

According to you. And according to your ears. Vinyl/analog is your preference. That's fine. But the arguments you and other audiophiles use to re-enforce your preferences are hardly supportive in fact.

Great post DGO!

I live in a small community of 30 some thousand and discovered a remarkable vinyl store today.  I couldn't believe how much inventory this guy had.  I've seen stores in vastly bigger cities with a fraction of the inventory.  But it was all old stuff of course…  The nostalgia was so overwhelming that for a moment I briefly considered buying a TT for the first time in 27 years!.

Then I recalled from experience how back in the early 80's cheap analogue (1k) sounds like crap compared to costly analogue (10K) that can sound awesome.  Yet even then everything hinges on the recording.  Today there is hardly a blip of new stuff recorded with today’s technology that is pressed into vinyl.  So what TT fanatics are stuck with are the limits of yesterday’s music recorded with yesterday’s technology.  From a perspective of higher fidelity that is really futile, more nostalgic than relevant.

That being said I understand the passion but not the desperation to cling on to vinyl when it really should RIP.

[ohenry]

...The nostalgia was so overwhelming that for a moment I briefly considered buying a TT for the first time in 27 years!...

And you have no hesitation expressing a "qualified" opinion on the worth of vinyl playback? 

I agree with you that there are less current releases available on vinyl, but most music I'm interested in is on vinyl.  I'm over 50 and find most new pop/rock music to be dreadful (fossil alert).   My perspective on music availability would be different if I wore your shoes.

For me, it's all about the emotion that my vinyl conveys in MY room.  Although that took a little persistence to find, it wasn't very expensive to obtain.

I don't think my CD's sound as good as my TT, but I won't presume that others here haven't found some special CD synergy in their systems that yield amazing results.  I do think CD's sound good and I do listen to them routinely, but when I want to really escape through music, it's vinyl that takes me.

[TheChairGuy]

'The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education' AND 'Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts'.

With such an inconvenient and flawed format as vinyl...why does it still exist today if not for it's quality('cause quantitatively it bites)?  We ditched our abacus' for calculators, our horse-driven carriages for cars, and candles for electricity in most of the world because they were conclusively better with little remorse for the former.

So why do accolades for natural musicality and popularity continue with vinyl?.....'cause CD never fulfilled the quest for musicality with an increasing number of folks worldwide. It got better and is decent now, but 16/44.1 ain't ever gonna' be any better than good 'nuff.

I listen to CD, I employ tubes to smooth out it's rough patches to make it wholly pallet-able to me...but I don't confuse the issue of higher order format of vinyl and Redbook.  It just ain't 

Y'all who think otherwise may well be over-educated  Dumb down and enjoy the music on vinyl....and get in the groove  (just leave the $0.50 bins for me )

John

[Daygloworange]

Well first off, in case you haven't looked where your posted

Uh...ok, should I not have posted factual info about what the analogue medium is truly comprised of?

where us uninformed half-apes can gather, sharpen our flint arrows, huddle around a fire we just made by vigorously rubbing two twigs together

Sounds like fun.  (Nice try at making me look like I was implying that you're all Neanderthals BTW)

and bash CD all we like

Because it's the right thing to do, right?

I recognize the advances...but Redbook won't ever progress past vinyl.

Still banging that drum again huh?

Redbook surpasses analog(tape) recording in so many ways, it's not even funny.

You're listening to a vinyl(degenerative) transfer of another format. With a troubled mechanical (physical) playback mechanism. And prefer it, and call it superior. When in fact, it's not.

Just look at the non linearities of recording to analog tape, the crosstalk problems, pitch problems, aliasing problems, pre emphasis/post emphasis problems, self erasure, print through, high frequency aliasing, high frequency roll off, bias problems, signal to noise problems, magnetization problems, tape saturation and overload compression problems....

All true, yet despite this...vinyl is an inherently more listenable format. 

According to you. That again is entirely (your) subjective opinion. That doesn't make it a fact, no matter how many times you try and assert it.

Nor, do I...but neither do I lose context between musicality and convenience.  I believe you have and do - often and regularly

Dead wrong. If I was that type of lethargic personality, I wouldn't be able to achieve the results I do in my work. You don't know me barely enough to even come close to drawing that conclusion.

But since we're analyzing each other, I find it amusing that despite all the facts I put forth about the inherent non linearities of analog, you choose to blissfully sweep them under the carpet, and continue to try and convince yourself (and others) that vinyl is more musical (ie: superior fidelity).

You argue facts, with subjective opinions, and inaccurate data.

most of us come together and know we're not doing this for the convenience, for the memories; we do to because we honor the music.  And, vinyl honors the music more capably than Redbook ever can or likely will.

Yeah, that doesn't imply that you "vinyl" guys are superior music philanthropists. No con descention there....

If you wanna get all artsy with me, that's totally cool. I can (as well as virtually every recording engineer) tell you how digital recording is amazingly conducive to the artistic process.

- No stopping a session when the creative juices are flowing, and the musicians are grooving to change out reels on the tape machine.

- No endlessly stopping and waiting for a tape to rewind to a point to re-record (or overdub).

- No stopping to re-calibrate, de gauss, and re bias, the tape machine.

- No tedious (and irreversible) tape splicing edits.

- No degeneration of signal due to multiple passes across the record and playback heads.


Digital is not merely convenient, but enormously more conducive to the artistic process. It is a less cantankerous format, much more user friendly, a seemingly endless amount of recording time.

Many auto features to totally eliminate the (time consuming) drudgery of analog.

The editing possibilities of digital are on an order of magnitude that makes analogue(in comparison) truly seem like trying to make fire by rubbing 2 sticks together.

Sorry, analogue falls miserably short on the artistic end as well.

There are legitimate reasons why it quickly became the dinosaur that it is, in the recording field.

Analogue only exists in studios today for those that dogmatically cling to it, not for legitimate reasons of higher fidelity.

I don't want my chosen medium to "make" music. I want it to reproduce the recording in the purest, most linear fashion possible.

The music is "in the grooves" (pun intended), not in the gear.

Cheers

[Daygloworange]

"Albert Einstein"]'The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education

Al was brilliant, was he? 

So why do accolades for natural musicality and popularity continue with vinyl?.....

One word.  Distortion.   

Overtones are what make things musical. Overtones and harmonics (added to sinewaves) transform sinewaves into what we emotionally connect with, and call musical waveforms.

So from that purely analytical perspective, it might in fact be more pleasureable to you (again, I'll never debate that), but not higher fidelity. Quite the opposite actually.

'cause CD never fulfilled the quest for musicality

I, and many others (including former vinyl lovers) have achieved total musical fulfillment with Redbook format.

It got better and is decent now, but 16/44.1 ain't ever gonna' be any better than good 'nuff.

I guess that makes you the final word and authority on the topic. 

You know, it's funny, we had a number of tube loving audiophiles at our Amp Comparo 2007 fail miserably at being able to discern tube amps from solid state amps in our blind comparison. They brought their own amps, and many mistook their tube amps for solid state, and mistook solid state for tube amps:

http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=36452.0

http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=36489.0




Bang on John, bang on.....

Cheers

[TheChairGuy]

But since we're analyzing each other, I find it amusing that despite all the facts I put forth about the inherent non linearities of analog, you choose to blissfully sweep them under the carpet, and continue to try and convince yourself (and others) that vinyl is more musical (ie: superior fidelity).

You argue facts, with subjective opinions, and inaccurate data.

I convince, nor try to convince anybody of anything at all....I have the weight of thousands of audiophiles and music lovers that hated most of the time spent with a CD player, only to re-discover the joy of music (as damned inconvenient as it is) in a 100 year old technology.

I've purposely swept nothing under the rug, I am aware of 95% of all you have already posted, yet vinyl honors and conveys the essence of music better, despite this absolute quantitative superiority.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

Far from lethargy, I think your mind is overly keen and active.  My prescription for the calm you need are some good vinyl, a spot or two of grog and lotsa' poontang  Great sleep, your best investment, is near assured with those handled.

Regards, John

[Daygloworange]

I've purposely swept nothing under the rug, I am aware of 95% of all you have already posted, yet vinyl honors and conveys the essence of music better, despite this absolute quantitative superiority.

You simply dig vinyl better.

Cool. 

I actually dig analog too. It rocks! 

Cheers

[TONEPUB]

Tonepub wrote

you must be listening to some average CD playback..
With the Naim CD555...

Naim CD555 is £15000 here in UK - lots of folk have to listen to 'average' cd palyback if thats the price of entry to 'above average'.

I'm glad your pleased with it Geoff

Jim

It costs 33k here in the US and it's fantastic.  It's not the cost of entry for above average playback.
But it is one of even the mega players I've heard that I enjoy music on as much as vinyl.

Don't get me wrong, I still love LP's and have about 6000
of them (and always buying more).  But it's finally at a point where I enjoy CD playback as much as LP
playback.  So the LP doesn't "kill it every time".  All depends on the recording and the mastering.

I'm just happy to have two options for great playback.

[Rocket]

Hi Jeff,

My sentiments exactly, I enjoy both formats and it depends on the quality of the recording imo.  15 years ago cd sound pretty awful imo but it now sounds a lot better

I have spent approx $4000au on each format.

Regards

Rod

[lazydays]

Denny - I know you love me saying it so I will re-iterate for you ..... 16/44.1 just doesn't and won't ever cut it   

According to you. And according to your ears. Vinyl/analog is your preference. That's fine. But the arguments you and other audiophiles use to re-enforce your preferences are hardly supportive in fact.

Great post DGO!

I live in a small community of 30 some thousand and discovered a remarkable vinyl store today.  I couldn't believe how much inventory this guy had.  I've seen stores in vastly bigger cities with a fraction of the inventory.  But it was all old stuff of course…  The nostalgia was so overwhelming that for a moment I briefly considered buying a TT for the first time in 27 years!.

Then I recalled from experience how back in the early 80's cheap analogue (1k) sounds like crap compared to costly analogue (10K) that can sound awesome.  Yet even then everything hinges on the recording.  Today there is hardly a blip of new stuff recorded with today’s technology that is pressed into vinyl.  So what TT fanatics are stuck with are the limits of yesterday’s music recorded with yesterday’s technology.  From a perspective of higher fidelity that is really futile, more nostalgic than relevant.

That being said I understand the passion but not the desperation to cling on to vinyl when it really should RIP.

I think you need to visit the Elusive Disc website. They are pressing new stuff each and everyday. There's so much to pick from that it actually gets confusing.
gary