When is digital going to get the soul of music?

Analog only lovers are going to have to face the fact that maybe digital will never capture the soul of music for themselves but for many people digital already surpasses the sound quality of vinyl and it will surpass it for most people very soon.

I have read many reviews and threads where dedicated vinyl lovers have found digital players that they enjoy as much as their vinyl gear. This will never happen for Michael Fremer or for some on this forum, but you have to realize that you are a very small but vocal minority.

I have already mentioned a few of times on these threads that according to the RIAA and Nielsen Soundscan, about one million new vinyl albums were sold last year. That is just not a lot of people buying a lot of vinyl.

Digital sound is improving rapidly and the learning curve on how to make digital sound great is about to go parabolic. I suggest that everyone keep an open mind on digital and get ready for high-res digital downloads.

Learsfool, lets just say that *you* prefer the distortion created by Lps. I have read in the audiophile press many articles and interviews by people with well trained ears who find listening to digital to be as enjoyable as listening to vinyl. Your personal tastes are absolutely valid but you are speaking for a small minority of a small minority.

In addition, there are many albums that just about everyone agrees sound better in digital than on Lp.

Many people don't have the cash or the time to put together and maintain a sophisticated analog rig that trumps digital at every turn. These people love music and the enjoyment they get from digital is valid too.

The high-end would be dead without digital. The numbers don't lie. We need to attract more people to our passion, not push them away.

Relating capturing the soul of the music to sound quality is only relevant to audiophiles.

Young ears, for instance, are, in general, oblivious to the digital artifacts that some audiophiles find so offensive, unless the young person in question has trained his ears to hear these artifacts and judge them to be objectionable.

Sophisticated musicians, not rock, hiphop, etc., must train their ears to be able to play proper pitch, tone, etc. To other people, this practice will interfere with your finding the soul of the music.

Most people my age can probably recall being lost in the music coming out of a cheap AM radio with a cracked speaker, blissfully singing along, dancing, or playing air guitar. Distortion measurements were probably in the 25 - 50% range, but man, did that music sound good.

I have no doubt that the golden eared, analog only, perfectionists' systems sound better than mine, way better. But I don't want to have to buy a system like that, tweak it constantly, hunt down audiophile recordings (old or new), wash them a couple of times and turn off the refrigerator and A/C to enjoy my music. If you enjoy doing all that though, it's fine with me.

I want to be able to listen past digital grunge, or analog grunge for that matter, and feel the joy or sadness or anger or whatever, expressed in the music. I need a much better system now to be able to do that than I used to, but I don't want to make it harder than it has to be because I have trained myself to be a human distortion detector.

So no offense to the Lp fans, but it is possible to get to the soul of the music by listening to cds. In many cases it may be easier.

Learsfool, I will defer to your obvously superior knowledge.

My concern was that many audiophiles tend to overanalyze music to begin with. If you add to that a trained ear and the fact that most albums are poorly recorded, it just seems that it might be harder to focus on the music and not on the problems with the recording and playback system. I guess that we just have to learn to enjoy rather than critique.