This is Too Funny Vinyl is Still King
Interesting theories but they did't stand up to technical scrutiny then and they still do not today. I suspect the main reason that analog works well is that you can actually hear below a noise floor (well known that you can hear up to 15 db below a noise floor). It is the higher noise floor (hiss) that allows you to hear or focus on certain nuances. It certainly changes the presentation adding a slightly greater emphasis to background details - instead of disappearing below audibility as they do on CD the noise floor remains modulated by the nuances allowing our ears to pick it up. Analog tape is similar. Think of it like a background for a painting or photo - what is in the background can certainly affect what you see even if the subject of the photo or painting is unchanged. |
Michael Fremer was never young. His real name is Abel. He faked his death and framed his brother Cain for his murder. When looking closely at the CD format, problems seem to occur when there are massed high frequencies. It doesn't seem like CD sampling rates could properly record things like massed strings. High frequency harmonics would seem to be lost or misread. But that's just my opinion. CD proponents would say that those differences in hf harmonics are not in the audible spectrum (I think they are). But they would be if the resulting [erroneous] recorded signal would be in the audible spectrum. Is this the grain we hear in massed violins on CDs? I agree with Shadorne's noise floor comments. |
I'm not trying to spin the same wheel again, but, I for one am not convinced that any medium is king. There are so many more important things that need to be taken into consideration to make quality recordings, than the medium itself. I'm not even convinced that vinyl is the king of analog, never mind all the other options. |
@ Unsound: Sure there are a lot of problems with vinyl. Nothing's perfect. Nothing is really very close. But to my ears (old as they are), vinyl LPs better the other reasonably available options for my system. Nothing that I could have in my system that provides the variety of music I enjoy works better than vinyl LPs. |
I think I have seen this clip before. As I have said so many times before at this very site, I continue to have friends over to my place and of course they want to hear the TT set-up, many of those friends for the first time. They are wowed by the analog every time with no exceptions. Audiophiles and non-Audiophiles alike. |
When I first saw this headline is also the first time I saw in Audiogon that there are more postings in the analog forum than in the digital forum. Cool! _____ |
08-13-10: ShadorneMTV's attempts to explain may have been naive, but they were on the right track. The jagged edges in the digitally-derived waveform are not from the frequency of the sampling rate, but rather from the word length. Word length (e.g., 16 vs 24 bits) determines how large or small the increments of amplitude are. Here is a 'scope shot of a typical 16-bit 1KHz sine wave and here is a shot of a 24-bit 1KHz sine wave. 16-bit provides a theoretical 64K increments of amplitude differentiation. Throw away a bit at the bottom for lower noise floor and a bit at the top for headroom and you're down to a ragged-sounding 16K increments. 24-bit provides 16 MB of increments. Toss away the top and bottom bits and you're still at 4 MB of increments. Analog provides amplitude increments down to near the molecular level. It's far more than "hearing through the noise floor." It's delineating the amplitude subtleties that contribute to musical expression and delineate the basic sequence of sounds that form, bloom, and resolve notes from instruments and voices; that's what Fremer, Gabriel, and Young were talking about and that's what people hear. As for the slow sampling rate, it severely compromises the last octave of audibility by having so few samples per wave (about two) and requiring a phase relationship-wrecking brick wall filter to keep the digital artifacts out of the analog domain. DVD-A and SACD have had their chance to take over the high-rez marketplace for over a decade. People vote with their wallets and they have chosen vinyl as the high-rez medium of choice. With 10 years to evaluate and think about it I doubt that it's a noise floor parlor trick or mass hysteria. Most of us *wanted* SACD to succeed at the time, but I'll take my vinyl over SACD by |
08-14-10: UnsoundBeg and differ all you want, but in the context of high-resolution formats--DVD-A, SACD, and wide bandwidth pure analog, vinyl far outsells the other two formats combined. The sales figures are out there. I don't care what the sales of CD or MP3 are; I was posting about high resolution formats and was very clear about it. |
