[lonewolfny42]

John/TCG....

Maybe you can "loan" JCC the Dakioms to check out....

[Wayner]

I have to say that owning a pair of MartinLogan reQuests smooth out any digital harshness at my house. To me there are as many bad and good sounding albums in either format.

Wayner

[TheChairGuy]

Have you heard SACD on a player that does straight DSD playback?

Many don't and use a variety of different conversion techniques.  That might
be part of it.  Also, just because something is recorded at a higher resolution,
if the mastering is lousy, it will still sound lousy.

Beats me, Jeffrey...sounds FUBAR'ed on 3 players thus far...including a (modded) Sony unit (who should have the technology highlighted to its fullest I'd think as they have their skin in that game). Shame on them if they did not.

The other two are Cambridge and Pioneer...no slouches they be, overall.

John

[JCC]

I have to say that owning a pair of MartinLogan reQuests smooth out any digital harshness at my house. To me there are as many bad and good sounding albums in either format.

Wayner

I don't notice any digital harshness with my Daedalus DA-1 speakers and the setup behind them. As you indicated, there are many poor quality albums in all of the formats. When I play certain SACD recordings, I notice an improvement over Redbook. When I play vinyl, to my ears, I get something extra.

Someday I would like to setup a music server that will contain all my formats.

[twitch54]

Personally, I'd rather have great digital than mediocre analog.

agreed, but then I'll take great analog over great digital ! [/Quote]

Unless you are buying remasters of old albums recorded in analog, any new
vinyl you are buying today was recorded digital. 

Now Jeff, me thinks Chan Kassem could argue with that statement...correct ??

[coffeedj]

Reposting from Vintage circle per request:

I don't listen to CD's if I can help it--the technology of 16 bits starts distorting at about 4KHz.  (Forget about Nyquist, that is for time invariant signals.  A great paper out of MIT showed the math to support the distortion figures for CD's.  BTW his conclusion was that 10X frequency is the minimum sampling rate--the same figure that Techtronix uses for the digital oscilliscopes).  However, CD's can be made to sound MUCH better by the process of oversampling.  What needs to be remembered is that oversampling does not add new original information to the signal.  It does modifiy the 'jaggies' where the distortion is noticable by smoothing them in the convolution filter.  This smoothing does add new information, but it does not necessarily duplicate the original sound. 

To check this out a few years ago I did an interesting test.  I took a good vinyl recording of the Four Seasons and recorded it digitally with pro gear at 44.1KHz, 48KHz, 88.2KHz, 96KHz all at 16 and 32 bits.  Then I created a new 88.2 and 96KHz from the 44.1KHz by oversampling and re-masted it back down to 44.1KHz.  I had this combo listened to by muscians (like myself), critical listeners, and people who by their own admission couldn't tell the difference between a tin cup and string vs. high end audio.

The results were somewhat surprising.  First, the tin ear group couldn't really tell any difference between the recordings--not suprising and this was the group Sony listened to when making their decision about CD technology.  The Critical listeners and Muscians all agreed that native vinyl was best, and that as frequency of sampling and word size went up--it got better and better.  At 96KHz and 32 bit words, it was very close to native vinyl.  Musicians could hear a difference, but the critical group didn't always.  The pro studios typically use 196KHz sampling--and this makes sense given these results.

Where the surprise came was in the over-sampled recordings.  Here the musicians all agreed that they sounded better than the 44.1KHz native, but that after listening to the original they stated that it just sounded wrong somehow.  The critical group had no such problem--to them the over-sampling sounded great, even better than native sampling at a high speed.

I suspect that the difference is related to the fact that musicians, especially string muscians (like my listening group) hear the distortion in the harmonics and that sounds wrong.  As a violinist, I learned to tune double and triple stops by listening for the harmonic convergence.   This harmonic information is badly distorted in the over-sampling and filtering process.  Critical listeners, however, have their ears trained by the recordings they listen to--not actual live music in most cases.  Thus, they chose what they were trained by marketing to like.

Here is test you can do that will make a believer of you.  Get your best CD recording of symphony that has lot's of cymbals in it.  Listen until you are familiar.  Then go to a live symphony and listen to the cymbals as they are played.  You will swear it is not even the same instrument. 

[coffeedj]

Read the posts and have a few comments:

1. DSD has inherent distortion built in.  AES presented the math on this a few years ago (I think it was 2004) and you can look it up.  It is deep, but for those of you who could hear problems with DSD--now you can add a reason.

2.  Great links to read re: tubes vs transistor.  http://www.milbert.com/tstxt.htm  Gives one of the reasons analog records sound better--independent of the CD/digital world.  At the same time the world moved to digital--recording was moving to transistor front ends for studios.

3. As others have noticed, correct mastering is absolutely key for CD's.  One of the consequenses of track mastering is that it brings audible digital error into the signal.  We're not talking about fuzz here--this is gross anomaly that is completely asychronous to the music.  To fix this there must be random dithering in the lower bits (think of this as random fuzz added at a very low level).  For sixteen bits it only takes about one or two track masterings (combining tracks, changing volume, filtering noise, removing pops, ets.) to make the fuzz audible.  Thus mastering is generally done at 24 or 32 bits where you can get a lot more digital playroom before the signal sounds like a scratchy record.  This is just one "rule" for digital mastering.  There are a whole lot of factors that trade off like DSD, alising filters, skew response, and on and on.   It is actually a lot more complicated than analog mastering where all you need is infinite frequency response, huge S/N ratio, and noiseless microphones  .  The bottom line is that there is a huge range of mastering quality to CD's.  Michael Hedges albums tend to be nigh unto perfect--I use them as my standard when checking out CD systems.

[coffeedj]

Final intesting thoughts:

CD's start to distort at 4KHz -- really bad above 12KHz.  Vinyl has sound information up to the 49KHz biasing signal.  That extra high frequency information is not necessarily heard, but it is percieved as 'presence' or 'sound stage' or 'something special.'

Signal to noise ratio of C/Ds is better than vinyl (new, pure) only up to 500Hz according to the math from an article I read from AES.  Above 500Hz vinyl whumps CD for S/N.  Unfortunately, 90+% of recorded sound energy is below 500Hz.

[Freo-1]

I've owned a lot of equipment of various types and topologies over the years. From what I've noticed, vinyl can indeed sound better than standard CD playback, BUT, hi-resolution digital can and often does outperform vinyl recordings.

I've got examples of DVD and SACD that outperform the vinyl equivalent of the same performance. The hi-res format provides the advantage of extended range similar to vinyl, and also provides a noise floor that vinyl can never hope to achieve.  Get a copy of Sam Cooke Live at the Copa on any format you want, and after listening to all of them, it's easy to hear that the SACD version sounds best (assuming the equipment you use is up to the job  )

Mastering issues occur regardless of the format, so that argument, although valid, is a bit overblown, IMHO.  Besides, most of the pop music recorded today is poorly done.

[coffeedj]

SACD is definately the best of the Hi-res digital.  AND it can sound really good.  However, I would not place it ahead of best vinyl.  When I compare my best SACD recording with either the Vanguard 180 gram remasters or the Club 497 direct analog recordings from Fone--well there is just no comparison.  The vinyl is such much better it is scary.  But you pay upwards of $30 a record for these recordings, and Vanguard is now out of business.  The Fone vinyls are 45 RPM, single sided 240 gram.  The noise floor on these is equivalent to SACD.

If I compare apples to oranges (old vinyl to new SACD) then it takes a really virgin record to equal the quality and a superb setup.  My Koestsu Urushi played through a EAR 324 the does the trick though. 

The other point is that high frequency presence really depends on the speakers.  I use Lowther drivers in Terasonic cabs, and although there are trade-offs, these are the most revealing speakers I've ever heard.

[TONEPUB]

Personally, I'd rather have great digital than mediocre analog.

agreed, but then I'll take great analog over great digital !

Unless you are buying remasters of old albums recorded in analog, any new
vinyl you are buying today was recorded digital. 

Now Jeff, me thinks Chan Kassem could argue with that statement...correct ??
[/quote]

I don't see how he could. Almost no records were made in a major recording studio
on analog equipment since the mid 80's, and precious few are done today if any.

Ask any recording engineer in the business and they will tell you the same thing.

Even the Tom Petty Highway Companion disc that was done about two years on
LP that was mastered by Steve Hoffman and Kevin Gray (who do all of Chad's work)
was brought in on a 2" analog safety master taken from the 24/96 master tape.

I was there in the studio while this was being done and talked to TP's engineer.
He told me the session (multitrack original) was done on 24/96.

So at least if you are buying records of popular music from the last 10-20 years,
chances are it was recorded digitally.  There is a certain bit of analog warmth when
it gets put on vinyl and played back on a turntable, but it started out as a digital recording.

I've heard enough good digital and analog that it's just not an argument for me anymore.

It all depends on the care taken in the recording and mastering.  You can achieve great
results with digital (even 16/44) if it's done with care, and there's still plenty of ways
to make analog sound lousy in the hands of an inferior technician.

I like both and I dislike both pretty much equally.

[Wind Chaser]

To me there are as many bad and good sounding albums in either format.

Absolutely!  Just before the end of the vinyl era, most recordings were mediocre at best.  There were only a hand full of record companies that specialized in creating a good product.  When the CD officially debuted in 1984, all those mediocre recordings were slapped onto cheap turntables with lousy cartridges and most likely not even aligned, just to expedite the task of making as many titles available in CD as quickly possible. 

[coffeedj]

http://www.fone.it/

Check it out.  I think their stuff is unbelievable, but what do I know.  I'm only a violinist.

[JCC]

SACD is definately the best of the Hi-res digital.  AND it can sound really good.  However, I would not place it ahead of best vinyl.  When I compare my best SACD recording with either the Vanguard 180 gram remasters or the Club 497 direct analog recordings from Fone--well there is just no comparison.  The vinyl is such much better it is scary.  But you pay upwards of $30 a record for these recordings, and Vanguard is now out of business.  The Fone vinyls are 45 RPM, single sided 240 gram.  The noise floor on these is equivalent to SACD.

If I compare apples to oranges (old vinyl to new SACD) then it takes a really virgin record to equal the quality and a superb setup.  My Koestsu Urushi played through a EAR 324 the does the trick though. 

The other point is that high frequency presence really depends on the speakers.  I use Lowther drivers in Terasonic cabs, and although there are trade-offs, these are the most revealing speakers I've ever heard.

As per your recommendation, I was looking for FONE recordings. As you stated most are 45's and are expensive. One is a 33, "Robert Schumann: Faschingschwank aus Wien" and the price is right. Any comments on this recording?

[coffeedj]

I don't have that recording, but I can say that everything I have purchased from them has been absolutely wonderful.  No problems at all. 

I was a little concerned about some of the 'unknown' status of performers/groups (not really unknown--just not top shelf), but the musicality and interpretations have been superb.

[JCC]

Got some Brimar 13D5 tubes, and wow am I impressed. I have ordered a FONE record and will let you know how it sounds. I just listened to Harmonia Mundi "La Folia" and I was blown over by the quality of the sound.

[BillB]

I'd say you ARE crazy....for not having spare tubes on hand!! 

 

[hmen]

I'd say you ARE crazy....for not having spare tubes on hand!! 

 

You're absolutely right. That was my first reaction when I saw this thread. With proper planning audio emergencies such as this are preventable.   

[JCC]

Agreed - Always have been, but now I have some spares.

The upside has been from this thread. Learned a few things, and got some great tips.  aa