Analog vs Digital Confusion

Frogman, Learsfool, and others whose focus is classical music on vinyl: I would encourage you to try to find some of the unfortunately out of print classical CD's that were issued some years ago on the Wilson Audio label (yes, that Wilson). Especially those featuring piano music. You just might find yourselves in a state of amazement at how good the CD medium is capable of sounding, when the recording is engineered to exceptionally high standards.

Of course, the production of those recordings was not exactly run of the mill. From the liner notes which appear on some of them:

The recorded perspective of the piano in this recording is close, as though the 9' Hamburg Steinway in being played for you in your living room. Of course the actual recording was not made in a living room! Instead, the great room of Lucasfilm's Skywalker Ranch, with its incredibly low noise floor and fully adjustable acoustics, was used.... A pair of Sennheiser MKH-20 omni microphones were employed ... amplified by two superb pure class-A microphone preamps custom-built for Wilson Audio by John Curl. MIT cable carried the balanced line level signal to Wilson Audio's Ultramaster 30 ips analog recorder. Subsequent digital master tapes were made through the Pygmy A/D converter on a Panasonic SV-3700.

In addition to many of the CD's in that series, I have one on LP, featuring music for piano and clarinet. Does it sound better on my system than the CD's? I would have to say that it does, but only to a very very slight degree, with the differences being apparent mainly on very sharp transients. And while I certainly recognize that as Frogman indicated individual sensitivities vary widely, IMO/IME differences of that magnitude would be swamped by the deficiencies that are present in the vast majority of lesser recordings, regardless of format.

Personally, I enjoy both formats, to a greater or lesser degree depending on the quality of the particular recording.

Best regards,
-- Al

Lowrider, I have a great many of the Telarc LP's from the 1980's, and yes, many of them are excellent. A few suffer from excessively swimmy acoustics, but that is clearly attributable to the mic techniques that were used on those particular recordings.

Concerning mastering, the following appears in the album notes in many cases:

During the recording of the digital masters and the subsequent transfer to disc, the audio chain was entirely transformerless. Neither was the signal passed through any processing devices (i.e., compressors, limiters, equalizers, etc.) at any step during production of the finished product.

Another factor which I suspect contributed to their good sonics was that although that was obviously prior to the advent of hi res digital recording as we know it today, the Soundstream digital recorder they used provided a sample rate of 50 kHz, in contrast to the 44.1 kHz rate of the CD format. That difference is, at least potentially, more significant than it may seem based on the numbers. The Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem defines the maximum signal frequency that can theoretically (but definitely not practically!) be perfectly recreated from samples taken at a given rate. Per that theory, 50 kHz can, under certain idealized and unattainable conditions, allow perfect recovery of signal frequencies up to 25 kHz, while the corresponding figure for redbook CD is 22.05 kHz. So the margin between those numbers (beyond which all signal frequencies must be filtered out before reaching the A/D converter, to prevent "aliasing") and the 20 kHz presumed upper limit of our hearing is nearly 2.5 times as great (25% vs. just over 10%) for the 50 kHz rate as for 44.1 kHz.

Regards,
-- Al