What is needed to have the best CD/Digital sound?

Justin,

All I'm saying is that the richness you enjoy may well be the result of distortion of commision or omission. Each transduction process in which energy changes form, i.e. acoutic to electrical or mechnical or magnetic or whatever is frought with technical and production compromise. I suspect most recording studios use direct digital recording, because analog tape is difficult to manipulate and subject to deterioration.

db

What can it be about tubes and vinyl that adds warmth and richness except distortion? I concede that the quantization process and the conversion back to the analog domain can be flawed in a number of ways, but this is an area of understood signal processing. Done correctly, isn't digitization of the acoustic information more likely to capture an accurate representation of that information?

db

Justin,

I think you're talking about beats among high frequency harmonics that result in sounds you can hear. At the sample rates used with some digital capture, several times the usual limits of audibility, you would expect to capature those harmonics. I'm not sure what the current trend is, but even in my day the best spectral analzers were digital. My experience with tape was that it was delicate stuff. We used professional Ampex machines in the lab and Nagras in the field, and rewound the tape slowly and backwards to reduce print-through. I wonder if any recording studios still use analog tape recorders.

Afterall, the acoustic energy goes through at least two transduction processes, first into electrical energy by the microphone during recording and then back to acoustic energy by whatever speaker is used during playback. In the case of vinyl, there is at least two additional transductions, electrical energy to mechanical at the lathe that cuts the master then mechnical to electrical by the cartridge assembly that tracks the grooves in the vinyl. If a tape recorder is used, there's also electrical to magnetic and back to electrical. Lots of opportunities for distortion to creep in.

db

Justin,

If I understand you right, you listened to the analog master tape, a CD, and an LP of the same recording session. Is my understanding correct? As I wrote in an earlier post, I suspect most current recording is direct to digital, because analog is more difficult to manipulate and more degradable.

I gave away all my LPs, except for my Westminster Lab series and a couple of early Capitol Full Dimensional Sound (FDS) recordings. These, of course, are monophonic and of mainly historical interest.

db