Rediscovering the Joy of Digital?

Just the other day I was doing some comparitive listening to recordings I own in both formats, in order to help get a handle on some analog upgrades I've added recently. On some disks, the LP wins, on others, the CD. Some were about even, with strengths on both sides. There are certain advantages that CD always enjoys, but these hardly equal universal superiority for the format. All in all, mastering quality takes the cake - it is far more determinative than which format. IMO, both vinyl and CD are inherently compromised formats from the sonic standpoint, and if all we were concerned about was obtaining best sound - no holds barred - then we'd all be listening to reel-to-reel.

Yes Plato, the everlasting problem with R2R - aside from its particular brand of impermanence, which is in actuality likely no worse in its way than the real-world impermanence of LP's (and who knows? maybe even CD's) - was always its lack of commercial success as a prerecorded medium. It may have blossomed in this capacity if not for the upstart cassette (and really, the 8-track too, at the time), since it was once quite popular as *the* home-recording format, and obviously the possibility of superior fidelity was always there.

I don't play R2R and haven't since I was a teenager - the only machine I owned wasn't even very good, and I never owned any prerecorded tapes - but anybody who's been exposed to properly maintained studio-quality machines running at 15 or 30 ips realizes that the prevelant consumer formats, while they may be convenient, are like but toys in comparision.

Audiophiles tend to forget this, and equate analog with vinyl, whereas the LP has no monopoly on the claim. And it's intrinsically true that analog disk/electro-mechanical cutter and pick-up technology can never fully impress/recover all the information into/from the grooves that is available on the analog mastertape, while introducing a heaping helping of added distortions and noise along the way.

If/when digital recording processes ever improve to the point where engineers agree that they can capture/preserve enough original event information to render the analog mastertape definitely second-class (we might be close now, but we might be closer tomorrow - time has a way of reevaluating these things), then possible consumer digital media at least hold the theoretical promise of being able to transmit virtually all of that digital mastertape information, uncontaminated, directly to our playback systems in a convenient format - something LP's could never do vis-a-vis the analog mastertape.

But stop salivating guys: Despite the above rant - and come what may - my record collection ain't never going anywhere... :-)

Plato and Eldartford are both correct, but I'll add:

Of course I don't think that any analog tape medium will be making a comeback in the consumer marketplace, but the serial-transfer problem didn't prevent the industry from embracing the cassette as the replacement for the LP and 45 once upon a time (lo-fi high-speed tape-duplication standards notwithstanding).

And I wouldn't be (pleasantly!) surprised if the recording industry actually embraces and promotes hi-rez digital from here on out, simply as another tool to try and combat easy file transfer/storage, or to at least help differentiate the prerecorded medium from what's available online.

Eldee, not only does avoiding tape circumvent the serial-duplication problem, it by the same token permits random-access cueing upon playback, an even more important consideration for me as a consumer.