30 Years of Perfect Sound?

He can throw all the numbers and "logic" at me that he wants, but it doesn't
explain why my shoulders hunch and my brow furrows when digitally sourced
music is playing, and I relax and have a positive emotional response to analog.
24-bit adds nothing? Then why does 24/96 sound like a breath of fresh air after
listening to some 16/44.1 demos? And I'm talking about John Atkinson
personally demo-ing his recordings from his laptop, and the same thing from
Peter McGrath's laptop for demo-ing Wilson Sashas and Maxxes?

10-06-12: Nonoise
Does anyone here know if it's true that a CDP has no jitter as stated in the article in question? It's one thing to knock the guy and how he came to his conclusions but I haven't seen a refutation of the no jitter issue.

Even if that were so, it doesn't address that CDs themselves can have varying amounts of inherent jitter. How could there not be when pits are being encoded on a flimsy disc spinning at high speed?

Does anyone remember the Genesis Time Lens? It was meant to be placed between the transport and the DAC. The Time Lens had enough RAM to buffer all the bits and then reclock the datastream before sending it on to the DAC. Genesis founder Arnie Nudell said one secret to his excellent-sounding demos was that he played CD-Rs he'd recorded through the Digital Time Lens. According to the article, he claimed that his de-jittered copies sounded better than the originals.

In my computer-based audio I use Audirvana's buffering feature, streaming the datastream into a 700MB cache before it's sent on to the DAC. It definitely sounds better than directly streaming it from the USB drive where I hold all my music.

10-08-12: Tmsorosk
Actually CD's don't spin at high rates as someone above has stated. I'm not sure of what RPM they turn at but if you've ever watched a CD player operate with the top off you will see that it turns much slower than an LP.

What time/space continuum are you from? They spin far faster than the eye can follow.

10-09-12: Stickman451
... I would agree that eventually, one day, digital will reach vinyl's performance and will even surpass it; that day just hasn't arrived quite yet...

I agree too, that eventually digital *should* be able to equal a high quality all-analog chain, but I don't think even the best of today's consumer digital technology will get us there. I think it will take a 32-bit word length to approach the fine granularity of amplitude distinctions of good analog, and a sampling rate of 352.4 or 384Khz. I've heard state-of-the-art 24/96 and (I think) 24/192 digital recordings through awesome electronics from Ayre, ARC, D'Agostino, and VTL, powering Wilson speakers, and even compared to my comparatively very modest vinyl rig at home, that digital playback only got me about 80% of the way there when it comes to refinement and emotional response.