Turntable got absolutely crushed by CD

Yep, back in the day, we used to say "garbage in, garbage out".   Today, we have not only that but we also have far better equipment to hear that garbage.  

An interesting discussion, I found the posts quite informative. I won't speculate on the particular setup or why one sounded better than the other did.

 

I will say no one can deny the LP has made a significant comeback. Clearly, it is not from ease of use, the CD blows that away. It is not from "Long Playing" even though that is what LP stands for; the CD has room for two LP's on it without compression. It isn't from lower initial cost or lower long-term costs again the CD wins here. With a CD, there is no stylus to wear out, no fiddling with it, just plug it in, and play.   Yes, a good audiophile will fiddle to extract the most from a CD but a CD is plug and play while an LP is less so.  

 

America votes with their wallet - no one spends more when they can spend less unless that "more" gives them something. In my opinion, the only thing left is the musical sound from the LP. There are way too many LP's and turntables sold today than from a few esoteric audiophiles looking for a sexy setup.   (Although, I do have to say, a state of the art turntable does look a whole lot sexier than a CD player, it's just another black box in the rack!)

Case in point of my own system - I have a Wyred4Sound DAC and a BlueSound Vault 2 music server as well as a duplicate NAS of the server for backup. I can draw digital files from either for playback. I use Roon as my controlling software. I put together a demo playlist of the very best digital recordings I have, about 25 to 30 minutes’ worth of various types of music - jazz, classical, rock, etc.   When that is over, I play a Reference Recording LP of Professor Johnson's African Drum Ensemble. He recorded on the UC Berkeley campus in the mid 1950's using a state of the art all vacuum tube tape recorder and vacuum tube mic amps. (A complete redesign of the original tape unit by Professor Johnson). My system for playback is all vacuum tubes. If you were to listen to this, you might say the digital system does this a little better or the LP does that a little better, as there are differences. However, the fact is overall that old LP recording sounds amazingly good and everyone who hears it wonders afterwards if we have come as far as the advertisements proclaim.  

 

Don't get me wrong, I am definitely spoiled by the convenience of the digital system and the "sit in the listening chair controlling everything" ability. However, I would be quite happy having that sound quality of the LP for the remainder of my life. Just don't ask me to give up the convenience of the digital!

@fleschler - Actually, that LP was recorded in stereo.  Very early stereo but indeed stereo.

It is a Reference Recordings LP, RR-7, 45 RPM, "Professor Johnson's Astounding Sound Show"  All the tracks are excellent, the track I mentioned above is 3rd cut on Side 1.  I don't know if this was ever put on CD.  If so, I'd buy it!

RR is still around - https://referencerecordings.com/

@dayglow - that is a very interesting observation!   3x on analog to equal or better digital playback.   Yeah, now that I think about it, that makes a whole lot of sense!

I've been reading this post for a long while now and I have to say there are some things that everyone has missed.   First, there are distortion mechanisms in digital that do not exist in analog LP, likewise there are distortion mechanisms in analog LP.  Consequently, one cannot compare digital to analog without stating what they are comparing.   As casually mentioned above in a few places, a very good turntable with good source will trash a cheap digital player with good source.   Likewise, the reverse is also true.   It isn't possible to compare pure analog to pure digital and make a consensus about which is better.  What is worse, is I don't know of a single high end source material that was recorded in analog and digital simultaneously.   Sheffield Labs did a few but I don't know if they were ever released since they were recorded in digital format that is not what we use today.  If someone knows of one, please enlighten me.

Second, back in the day when digital was first designed, Sony had to go to Burr Brown to produce suitable DAC's since Japan didn't have the analog semiconductor processes to develop a suitable chip.  The first thing BB told them was the sample rate was too low for a 20 KHz data rate.   (Yes, I know about the 2x Nyquist limit, having published several technical papers on the subject.)   What most folks don't know is the stipulation in the Nyquist limit - in order to sample only twice per bipolar waveform then the two samples must occur at the precise peak levels of the analog data stream.   That is at the maximum positive peak and maximum negative peak.  So, that means that the ADC will know when the peaks will occur - yet it isn't possible for the ADC to know that since 20 KHz may or may not occur at any given sample period.    For a random occurrence near the Nyquist limit, the sample rate must be at least 5 to 7 times the maximum frequency (there are a number of papers published on this fact by Analog Devices, National Semiconductor, Burr Brown, and Linear Technology as well as others).    That puts the ideal sample rate at about 3 to 4 KHz.  But, in order to fit the amount of music onto a the predefined disk size, significant compromises were made. 

Lastly, as we all know, there are a number of distortion mechanisms in analog LP.   These are just as destructive as the ones in digital and we perceive them differently.  There is no point in me repeating them all here.

If someone on this board is going to make a blanket proclamation that digital is better or analog is better regardless of what they play it on, then I argue that they prefer certain types of distortion mechanisms over the others.  

There is no question that digital is getting better year by year as it has much growth potential in terms of sound quality.  Analog LP technology is mature, so the growth potential for sound quality is slower and harder to come by.   With digital downloads, there is great potential to eliminate the limitations of the standard Compact Disk.  32 bit data and 384 KHz is already in experimentation stages and I personally anticipate 32 bits at twice that rate in the future.  With advanced digital signal processing, some of the early destructive distortions in digital can be reversed, although the resulting data file will no longer fit on the original CD, it will be a download only format.  

dynaquest4  Let me know what you don't understand and I will try to explain it better