Mak, I would drop digital all together and stick to analog if I were you. Tension in left upper part of body may be an early sign of cardiac muscle distress. |
"Ah Nostalgia, Nostalgia, even you ain't what you used to be!"
Anonymous Bard |
If the choice were simpleton vs windbag. . . I shall choose the former. |
Folks, the soul of music is in the totality of the musical instantiation--composition, performance, recording, reproduction--not merely in the medium, regardless of format.Listen to the Gloria in J. S. Bach's Magnificat in D Major BWV 243
conducted by John Eliot Gardiner and released on CD in distant 1983. Perhaps technologically not the most up to date recording. . . but does it ever have soul? Overwhelmingly so! To claim that the very presence or abscence of pops/clicks, grooves/pits, valves/transistors, mono/stereo/multichannel reproduction, grand or modest sound, in any shape or form, solely determine whether music is capable of affecting our lives or not, is to trivialize the entire musical experience, which instead, because of its very rich and complex nature, transcends technology. |
It was actually the spectrum of a Dover Sole, which I grokked after irradiating it with 4th dimensional subtle frequencies emanating from my Machina Dinamica radionic clock. Unfortunately I found the darn sole not to have a soul, but only shreds of one. . . bunch of little spectra [plural of the latin word spectrum (2nd declination, neutrall)] floating around in little bottles of Brilliant Pebbles, lost in the atomic effect engendered by all those subtle vibes pooring forth from all those carefully machined precious and semi-precious stones. . . oh what a culinary musically moving delight! I am crying pan-galactic tears just thinking about the beloved flounder. . . Ah, if only Gunther Grass were here, I am sure he could make something of this oh most arch-typical of Ur-fish! |
And I wrote pooring instead of pouring on purpose, for the generically branded form of Brilliant little Pebbles being readily available for only penneys per pound at any self-respecting rock show, will perform their higher-dimensional magic for even the stingiest of audiophiles. |
TVAD and C5150, Next round's on me! |
C5150, I have been drinking wine since I was in the stroller, whilst growing up with Toscanini and the NBC Symphony on RCA vinyl. Today I purchase wine based solely on my personal taste and reasonable price. Call this PPr (price/performance ratio). I have also purchased my current CDp -- Teac X-01 based on the same PPR and personal taste last October. . . although my better half thinks I must have 'brilliant pebbles' for brains. In spite of her financial objections I enjoy it immensely and through it I am experieincing the 'soul of music' like never before: today it was Lara St. John on solo violin on Bach's Ciaccona in D minor in an HDCD recording, and Edgar Meyer on bowed double bass playing Bach's 5th suite for cello solo (Sony Classical SK 89183
). I am sure I would also experience music to be as solful through Vinyl, if perhaps marginally less conveniently so. Yet I have made a deliberate decision to retire my LP collection just over two decades ago in 1984 without suffering major regrets. My marriage will endure only 1 major music playback format at a time. I don't do iPods either, nor MP3 on notebooks computers, but then. . . I don't do wine coolers. Do give me a bottle of hardy California Merlot any time, chilled to 18C, or perhaps a liter of 1978 Amarone from the Cantine Sociali Di negrar. . . Alla salute! |
And, if I may so ask, did you still experience 'tension' while listening to Alex's fine digital wares?
Finally, which interconnects did you enjoy best, APL's or your beloved Oritek X2s? and Why? |
Which reminds me, I should suggest my better half to source a fresh bottle of California Merlot. . . the one I have open now is starting to taste as flat as my first CDP sounded in 1984--a McIntosh MCD7000. I should put what's left of the Merlot in a pot roast. . . or perhaps that's what I should have done with my McIntosh instead of selling it in 1994. |
I guess at this point it is safe to declare that digital 'got the soul of music' on January 28th, 2006. Welcome Mak, and good luck! |
No Mak, do not speed up nor slow down anything. . . just listen to the music and follow your heart. If the APL 3910 player gives you joy it's the one for you. If in the end it does not, then it isn't. And this goes for any other player as well as for digital in general. As I posted elsewhere, think of the audition process as 'dating'. Was it exciting yet only a one or two night stand, or are you now ready for a commitment and you want to take 'her' home to Mom? In other words. . . was it lust but the two of you are not truly compatible, or is it true Love? |
Makshak, huh? I thought you had finally fallen head-over-heels in love with your APL 3910. . . hwat happened? |
Sorry Mak the analog music in your head bothers you. Perhaps you should try the kind that plays in my head. . . it is generated completely synaptically and it is truly no bother. |
No MrT, it is evidence based on my experience as a composer. |
Sorry, wrong again. The soul starts in the composer. If the composer does not commit the right notes to the score, no amount of performing skill and passion, no amount of artsy recording engineering, no amount of fanciful analog or digital reproduction, no amount of angst, passion or hyperactive neurotransmitters in the listener are going to make an Iot of difference. . . In other words, the elusive 'soul' of music lives in the chain of artistic, technical and emotional causality. |
Plato, I was thinking about it, and I believe we may have forgotton one very important class of factors. . . that is the cultural macro and micro environments for all the stages listed before. Which may perhaps explain why the classical music of Southern Laos, of Tibet, of the Sarmatic Tuvan region, and of relatively nearby Croatia do not have much emotional impact on me. On these I would have personally to add much of popular music from both sides of the Atlantic pond. |
Thank you makshak for the reminder. Yes, I have analog LPS from 1949 to 1984. I shelved it in 1984 and moved on. |
Don't bother paul, MRT is just unleashing a bunch of mechanical froggies in the audiopond. He just enjoys the spectacle of the audiocarps frantically chasing after all those useless toys. (Chuckles!) |
There is likely to be more raw jitter in a car stereo. On the other hand this is also likely to be cancelled by the extremely poor S/N ratio in the car. Furthermore, being the jitter signal in question in the acoustic domain, rather than in the RF domain, placement of the CD's electronics in close proximity to one's gonads is not expected to exacerbate the situation. |
Having just checked my references, it is at this point unclear if the mutagenic gonadotropic effect of runaway digital jitter is at all limited to the acoustic domain, or if instead it is generated in the RF domain, and what its effective range may be. IT is interesting to note that, if a vinyl disk were produced from an early digital recording which exhibited runaway digital jitter caused by problems in the recording or mastering equipment, playback of such disk on a purely analog rig would be as deleterious to the listener's integrity as listening to its CD counterpart. |
Yes, according to a recent study by M. Borzatta and Aloysius Q. Schmaltzenstein Gavronsky, published in the last preprint of Lancet&Dunset, runaway digital jitter can in fact produced significant swelling of the prostate through the formation of pre-cancerous nodules. As the study was based on a very small sample, the team headed by the above researchers is now planning to expand it, and is seeking more volunteers in the audiophile community of the state of California. |
Mak, are you experiencing the timing problem on every track of every CD, or on just one track of 1 CD? If the effect has a physical origin, you should be able to reproduce it no matter what track of which CD you are playing. The test is very simple: clock any track on a stopwatch. If the final reading is significantly shorter than what's reported on the CD jacket, you may have a transport problem, otherwise the problem is entirely psychosomatic. |
Mak, let me say it bluntly, pre 1982 digital is TERRIBLE, unless it is absolutely awful. If you are fixated on recordings prior to that year you should stick to analog vinyl and worry no longer. life's too short for fussing about trivia! |
Sure Mak, I understand your requirements. And as I do no longer own an analog rig, nor will I own one in the future, all I can say is: no problem, No need to try to take me seriously. And quoting that pearl of modern epistemology, Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, I shall bid thee farewell, and thussly leaving say to thee: "So long, and thanks for all the fish!" |
Ah yes, don't we all love TRUE BELIEVERS? |
Cdwallace, I'll drink to that! |
This is definitely yesterday's news folks. . . lots of CDPs out there that are fully emotionally involving. |
MRT, I conveyed your thoughts to my TEAC X-01 Limited this morning. . . and I would like to let you know that she immediately started to throw hissy fits. . . she's rather emotional sometimes, no matter how much I threaten to put her on a strict regime of Brian Eno. |
Oh definitely, Newbee, pitch control problems throw any performance out the window. . . vocalists, string players some woodwinds can occasionally make me feel sea-sick. I would follow that by metric/rythmic problems. In reproduction I personally abhor treble overpressure, followed by bloat in other spectral regions. Subtractive problems may easily sap the 'life' (MRT plese note single-quote marks--I mean this metaphorically) out of a recording, but do not arouse in me the same 'fight or flight' reflex. And like I suggested elsewhere, bad engineering cuts and edits drive me positively batty. |
Hi Detlof, if you really were bent to source terrible newer digital recordings, there are still a few around. . . for the fan of slow dentist drills grounding one's front upper teeth, that is! Try the Supraphone box set of the Panocha Quartet playing all string quartets by Antonin Dvorak'.. . . truly an enlightening experience. . . haven't had a roach in the house since I unwrapped the box and played the darn thing for the first time.
Yet, the opposite is also true. I have a most wonderful live recording on CD of the Israel Phil playing Dvorak's New World Symphony under Leonard Bernstein (DGG). In spite of this having been recorded c.ca 1983, you can hear plenty of ambient clues, including a sweet sense of the hall, objects being dropped from the music stands, Lenny stomping on the podium to press the 'tempo'. . . . then again Lenny muttering encouragements to the orchestra.
. . . all of this musical Heaven and Hell takes place through my TEAC X-01 Limited. |
Detlof, I now understand what you meant. . . in spades. . . but only a few months ago I was slightly less aware of the pervasiveness of the issue of black-inter-track background vs in-track musical silence. Since I have replaced my trusty Maggies IIIAs with the Vienna Mahlers, I have become increasingly upset by the cavalier attitude of those recording engineers who cut off a recorded track before all harmonics have decayed, all ambient echos have subsided, and the recording venue has returned to a state of baseline quiescence. Similarly, I get even more annoyed when a track starts at the very millisecond of the attack transient, or even worse, a couple of milliseconds into the attack without letting me hear the 'new' acoustic--which on a revealing system is positively gross sounding: The transition from black opacity of absolute lack of sound to acoustics 'in medias res' and viceversa is disconcerting, and most unmusical. With my current system, on a reasonable track which has not been recorded by implanting a microphone surgically into the uvula of the vocalist, those very faint ambient cues a--musical and not musical--are present and obvious. The true 'black' background exists only between tracks, and is. . . shapeless. A good acoustic track, recorded live or in a studio, brings to me the sound of the silence of the venue. Related to this is the problem of sudden engineering splices in the recording created out of acoustic context: the new fragment may have been inserted correctly into the final recording, but its low level ambient signature may sound disconcertingly different from what was heard in the previous millisecond. My source is the TEAC X-01 Limited CDp. |
Thank you Detlof. . . unfortunately English is far from being my mother tongue. . . I fear I am just a neighbour from South West of the Brenner Pass, now residing in the American South West. . |
"its the music and the style of its performance that imbues it with soul."
Absolutely! And the equipment is a more or less imperfect conduit for that performance to reach us and trigger our emotional response. Example: several years ago I purchased a re-issue on 2 CDs of all the Dvorak [yes, I know, I am absurdly monomaniacal about this author] string quintets and sextets played by 'strings of the Berliner Phil'. I bought it as a documentary recording of sorts, it was recorded in the very early '60s. My initial impression was that the recording was blandly hazy. . . and supremely boring. My system consisted of EAD 1000 + DSP7000 MK3 CDp, ARC LS2B linestage, Rowland 7M monoblocks, Maggie IIIAs. I then started to replace some components one at a time: first the CDP was switched to X-01, then linestage became ARC Ref 3, recently speakers became Vienna Mahlers. At each step the music became cleaner, deeper, more emotional. . . and started to become 'beseelt'. . now because of its sweet emotionality it is one of my favorite recordings, in spite of being far from 'audiophile' quality . |
Thank your MRT for your valuable lecture in Poetics. I consider myself duly chastized. next time I Listen to the aforementioned recording, I shall remind myself that my emotional reaction is woefully incorrect, or at least that my recollection of emotive change is essentially flawed. |
You are correct MRT--to know is to judge; to judge is to process; to process is to filter; that which is filtered is degraded; that which is degraded is flawed; to know objective Truth is but a pipedream; attempting to share knowledge is illusory and further corrupts the episteme; dribble dribble dribble; add more trite sophistry. you have vast audiophilic and musical experience, graduate studies, thousand of systems auditioned, have reviewed for years on end, have a clear command of the English language and an outstanding facility to communicate; we just can't measure up. . . who cares!
In the meantime. . . a few of us are enjoying each other's company, while talking about the beauty of Music and Sound from both sides of the ePond. |
More sophistry. . . Yaaawn! |
That was beautiful Detlof! MRG |
Mak, Rife machines are thought to eliminate the common cold in 7 to 10 days, very much like Radionics machines, Brilliant Pebbles, and Clever Little Clocks, and sugar pills. . . for more serious infections I suggest you consult an AMA certified physician instead. |
Hi Vince, that would be Alex Peychev of APL. See:
http://www.apl-hifi.com |
Makk, I hope to see before long an audiophile-grade version of the Rife machine offered by Machina Dynamica. |
Holy XXXX guys. . . what happened all of a sudden. . . Everyone feelin' hurricane Ike approaching mayhaps? G. (grins!) |
Hmmm, music propagation at speed of light? Is that why I always thought of Toscanini performing Beethoven a little to fast? G. |
Would that be high quality NOS analog lipstick, or some of that new compressed digital stuff with fizzies and sparkles? I's just concerned about the 'soul' of the poor pig, you understand Grant? |
This old argument of analog vs digital is getting more and more far fetched as time passes. . . unfortunately our neurophysiology in its richness and complexity transcends the trite definitions of 'analog' and 'digital'. . . I just hope no one starts invoking pop quantum mechanics as the next obvious facile mantra that just explains-it-all'. G. |
Ah thank you Detlof. . . I think I need to get my humor detector looked after. . . I've been laid off last Thursday and I'm taking things far too seriously. . . do you think that taking a micro Brilliant Pebble a day for 30 days might help my uncharacteristicly grim Weltanschauung? I am thinking that if it does not help me directly, at least it will benefit the finances of old GK (grins!) |
Prosoundman, you going to keep the identity of your player a secret? G. |
Oddly enough Geoff, no.... I have not noticed any obvious band-pass filter limitations on most of my very standard CD pressings, nor an overall lack of dynamics in the music. Invariably, occasional slight treble distortions appear to be originating from places other than my vintage Esoteric X-01 CD player.
Guido |
How is Rhodium used in the High Fidelity PC... And what is its audible performance virtue? G. |
