A very good ENGINEERING explanation of why analog can not be as good as digital..

I do not want to convert any vinyl people to cd or ask any digiphobes to listen to digital. I have no problem with anyone listening to vinyl exclusively or part-time. Same goes for digital.

What I would like to assert is that both analog and digital can sound very good and very bad. So can systems assembled to play one or both of the formats. People hear differently and have different tastes. So there are no absolutes. In the real world of our listening rooms, not theory, vinyl doesn’t always sound better than digital and vice versa. It’s a matter of a combination of specific recordings, systems and people.

You know that Stereophile has a feature each year called, "Records to Die For" or R2D4. Each writer contributes two recordings that excel both musically and in sound quality. Now, IMHO, Stereophile leans vinyl in overall tone, but I think many people would be surprised at how many of the recommendations are cds year after year. These are people who make their living listening to music.

So I think that it’s true that both formats can sound very good or very bad and we don’t have to argue about which is better. We should listen to the format(s) we enjoy and let the other guy listen to what he enjoys, without condescension. I have a funny feeling that that won’t happen though.

By coincidence I received my January 2019 issue of The Absolute Sound yesterday. I’m looking through the table of contents and I see a review of the MSB Reference DAC and Transport. The blurb says, "After railing mightily against all things digital for almost thirty years, our Mr. Valin (Jonathan Valin) has finally found a DAC and transport he can live with long-term."

A couple of quotes from the review:

"As I just said it wasn’t as if Connick and Marsalis had developed the body and bloom of an LP on voice and sax. And yet, in spite of this, the MSB gear reproduced both singer and sax with such supernaturally lifelike immediacy, resolution of performance detail, neutrality of tone color and dynamic range that they sounded ’there’ enough to astonish me."

"To be frank, when it comes to digital sources, I ain’t no Robert Harley. Still, I know real when I hear it, and with the Reference DAC/Transport I heard it to an extent I wouldn’t have thought possible the day before this MSB gear arrived - and I heard it on CD, SACD, high-res streaming, and (par excellence) MQA streaming."

(me again) So it appears that there were no stairstep soundwaves coming out of Mr. Valin’s speakers, no missing information and no digital ice flecks blowing in his face.

The base price of the DAC is $39,500 with a number of upgrade options ranging from $990 to $14,905 (for a femto 33 clock, the femto 77 clock costs $4,995 if you’re on a tight budget). The transport costs $18,500.

This is not the top-of-the-line model either. The top-of-the-line model is supposed to be better in every way. That’s still a lot of money for a DAC and Transport, though, but it’s chicken feed compared to his analog gear. A couple of examples (he has much more): Acoustic Signature Invictus Jr /T-9000 $123,000 (no cartridge), Walker Audio Proscenium Black Diamond Mk V $110,000 (no cartridge). Add a few good cartridges , a couple of top rate phono stages, a good isolation base and rack, some cables of this caliber and you’re talking real money.  So he was comparing the MSB digital gear to top shelf analog gear. 

So if you think that your turntable sounds better than the MSB Reference DAC and Transport in Valin’s system or that vinyl always sounds better than digital, you’re fooling yourself, and that will only get harder and harder to do as time goes on and digital continues its fast pace of improvement. But if you want to believe that vinyl is always better than digital or that digital is fundamentally flawed and can’t be fixed, that’s OK with me.

I do not think that more money necessarily equals better sound. I think that when an audio professional who listens to a variety of audio gear all the time and communicates frequently with the people who design and build the gear spends $123,000 on a turntable and probably has it set up by the guy who designed it, there is a good chance it will sound better than one you pay $5,000 for and set up yourself.

I know that Valin doesn’t pay $123,000 nor would you pay list price for a $5,000 turntable. I’m just using the list prices for comparison purposes.

I’m always a little surprised to almost never encounter any reference to the top (or really any other) audio reviewers when sound quality is discussed in AG forums. Valin (perhaps the most respected) of Ab Sound has said digital can sound excellent but is no match for analog as far as low-level information is concerned in numerous areas.

john,

From my post on page 2, here is what Valin said about the MSB Reference DAC and Transport in this month’s TAS. Any gap that vinyl has over digital is becoming very narrow and in the real world where we don’t listen to state of the art systems, it’s a matter of preference and skill in assembling a system to play one or both formats. You and everyone else are free to prefer vinyl without being constantly reminded that it's an inferior format. I just wish you would grant the same consideration to people who prefer digital.

Valin:

"As I just said it wasn’t as if Connick and Marsalis had developed the body and bloom of an LP on voice and sax. And yet, in spite of this, the MSB gear reproduced both singer and sax with such supernaturally lifelike immediacy, resolution of performance detail, neutrality of tone color and dynamic range that they sounded ’there’ enough to astonish me."

"To be frank, when it comes to digital sources, I ain’t no Robert Harley. Still, I know real when I hear it, and with the Reference DAC/Transport I heard it to an extent I wouldn’t have thought possible the day before this MSB gear arrived - and I heard it on CD, SACD, high-res streaming, and (par excellence) MQA streaming."