Thoughts on Hi-Fi news demo from the 80's?

Around the same time that CD first hit the market (1982) Sony also put out a manageable-sized digital tape recorder on the market.

I was at a Hi-Fi News show in London and went to a demo by Hi-Fi News reviewer Paul Messenger.

The setup used the Marantz CD player (which used an upsampling DAC and digital filtering, if I recall), a Linn Sondek driven system, (with Naim amplification and Spendor speakers, I think) the Sony recorder, an expensive-looking Revox (who made some of the best analog tape recorders then.)

The music was a live recording of a baroque orchestral performance that Paul had made - recording simultaneously on the Revox and the Sony, and Dire Straits “Private Investigations” - featuring Knopfler’s delicate E-minor melody on nylon acoustic guitar - played from the “Love Over Gold”  LP* and from the CD.

The 60 or so people in the room unanimously preferred the analog renditions - the richer timbre of guitar, the spatial ambiance around the orchestra - to the digital: something like “scotch vs scotch and water”.

But, Paul explained, the Sony had sounded “exactly like the mic. feed” on first playback.

So I asked if we could hear the analog sources playing through the Sony, monitored on and off the tape. He set this up, but with just the ability to switch the ADC/DAC stage in and out (without recording the feed). To me, for both tracks, there was no difference in the sound with the digital conversions in or out of the loop! With Paul switching them and out “blind”, the audience seemed to be guessing right about 50% of the time when asked.

But, as Paul pointed out, the Sony was not storing the bits.

My inference then (and it is still the same) was that the Redbook CD spec. was as good as any other storage medium for home music reproduction - but only theory. After all, all recordings are quantized - but with analog (magnetized particles, vinyl molecules) the quanta are not all the same size. So, with enough resolution, and accurate encoding and decoding, there is nothing wrong with digital.

At first, I think, some CD’s released were made from analog masters mixed to sound intelligible on AM radio - and the harsh accuracy of digital made them unlistenable. There could have been, I suspect, quality deterioration from repeated coding/decoding at only 44k/16bit - as could happen when mixing?

(When I edit an 8-bit .jpg file with Photoshop I first convert it to a 32-bit .psd image and do all the filtering and resizing at that resolution, before saving the result as a .jpg again)

* “Long Playing Record”