Can Digital beat our Analog installations?

Grannyring, ticks and pops can be an artifact of the preamp where it exacerbates a tick or a pop that may have otherwise been inaudible.

I have seen LP surfaces that are as quiet as digital (IOW the electronics was the noise floor, not the surface of the vinyl).

While it is true that digital continues to improve, its not like analog has been standing still either. In the analog world, the limitation is mostly in the playback side, not the record side. Because of this the mastering engineer for any LP has to be aware of those limitations, but the cutterhead and the media otherwise has dynamic range that puts digital to shame.

One reason for this has to do with resolution. Digital files often have to be compressed so that the signal won't loose resolution in the quieter passages (in a 16-bit system, at -45db its only using 8 bits, which sounds pretty bad). Vinyl's limitation in this regard has more to do with the individual pressing (noise) than the overall media.

With regards to bandwidth vinyl currently has it all over digital. Anyone remember CD-4 4-channel LPs from the mid-1970s?? That employed a 50KHz carrier onto which the rear channels were encoded in FM stereo. That takes some bandwidth! Digital is usually limited to about 20KHz or so; the newer systems sounding better because of the higher scan frequencies, eliminating the need for the traditional brickwall filter. But even on such systems getting bandwidth is a problem- you can't have any signal exceeding the Nyquist frequency or you have trouble. If you don't have a brickwall filter that means you have to be careful about what the highest frequency to be recorded actually is.

So far the Stahltek is the best digital system I have heard- beating out the dCS pretty handily without much of a fight (although it is also one of the more expensive units I have heard...). I had the designer in my room at RMAF one year, and IMO it is his pragmatic nature that has resulted in the extreme quality of his product. He played a track for me which I realized I had on LP, so I offered to play for him, which he gladly accepted. After listening for 5-10 seconds he turned to me and said "Digital has *such* a long ways to go..." He plays analog at home himself.

Seems to me its been the Elgar, which was accompanied by some sort of upsampler unit. For a long time this was one of the better setups I had heard, until hearing the Stahltek.

The Stahltek is the first unit where I was not thinking about analog/digital when listening to it- it was very much about the music. None of any previous digital systems I have heard were that successful at not drawing attention to themselves. I don't know how else to put that- the Stahltek is simply more musical (and without coloration). Anyone who has heard it knows what I am talking about.

Thuchan, with regards to the Stahtek I think you can go either way.

Jfrech and Thuchan, while I agree that the software plays a huge role, I feel like I have to point out an often overlooked issue:

We often see very well done digital recordings. They sound amazing, and seem to challenge analog reproduction. The question though really is- what would this same recording sound like if the master was analog instead of digital? I ask this because you might be surprised at how modest the record chain can be in an excellent digital recording (although there are recordings that sport some high end hardware in the record chain too). What I am getting at here is how easily a good analog recording system can best the best of digital. It can do it in a heartbeat.

If you are playing an LP that has a digital master, it quite often can sound better than the CD simply because it is mastered from the master file and has less data loss. But you really aren't hearing what that LP can do unless it also has an analog master.