I have to ask this(actually, I thought I mentioned this in another thread.). It's been at least 25 years of digital. The equivalent in vinyl is 1975. I am currently listening to a pre-1975 album. It conveys the soul of music. Although digital may be more detailed, and even gives more detail than analog does(in a way), when will it convey the soul of music. This has escaped digital, as far as I can tell.
I want to defend Tvad here. First, he posts a lot. Second, I believe that he gets more out of posts on audiogon than almost anyone. That is why, I believe, that he is insistent on people posting properly. I also suspect that he might actually be a well-respected reviewer for an audiophile publication(or should be). Also, a very interesting post, Jaybo.
I haven't read this whole thread, so forgive me if this has already been said...but I believe the soul of the music is in the performance, not in the playback format...even listening to an old Robert Johnson recording on AM radio sounds soulful to me... ;-)
Well the best argument I can think of is the fact that analog is still around. It's inconvenient, you need more components. You have to search hard for records without scratches, there's too much to go into just to get things right. CD you pop them in.
So, if digital could match it, there wouldn't be any TT's except for maybe the stuborn die hards. I hope that one day it can, so that I can stop buying record cleaner and stop replacing my cartridges.
I'm a little late in joining this discussion but I think what Onhwy61 said about distortion is absolutely correct. Call it what it is. Tube equipment adds it and I suspect a piece of equipment could be designed that would emulate tape saturation and/or vinyl compression even more accurately. Perhaps a business opportunity exists here. This would not compensate for bad recording technique or bad pressings but in the case of a good CD recording, would provide what vinyl lovers would call "magic".
I can remember the digitally recorded vinyl records from the late 70's, early 80's. They seemed unbelievably good. I also have a compilation CD of Asian music where I swear that one of the tracks came from vinyl. It has the sound of vinyl complete with the ticks and the sense of space and immersion is undeniable. I will agree that vinyl does offer a very pleasant listening experience but I would dispute the assertion that digital is an inferior medium.
Almost "you three"... I was supposed to be in Fremont area tomorrow but things didn't work out. I'll be interested in hearing any commencts, of course.
And yes, "serus" moniker is Ori from Oritek, before there was Oritek... It stands for SE-R-US... But then I went wild and partially converted towards the push-pull design, although my main amp is a minimalist 3 watts SE, still... I can hear Alex laughing... :-)
digital vs. analog vs solid state vs tubes vs IC's vs Kramer.
I have read and seen and heard and have been told , that a top end TT has a hard time against a top cd. we have heard some say cd tops the TT. It's been said that a 1k TT blows away a 25K cd . Now depending on the combo's and mix of prices and wires and ALL that is hi-fi ,you guys have managed to describe CONFUSION . For when a member tries to get the real deal here as far as LOGIC , there is none.
Don't get me wrong ,I'm describing All that is in this site concerning whatever you want to compare or slice and dice.
When a communication is one of logic then one finds answers to questions and can go further in producing more solution to problems. This is logic and REASON.
When a communication is based on confusion then we get this phenomenon of no reason or irrational or no answers or solutions to any problem.We cannot make any advance progress this way.
Now , if this was a confused source of information then.....1, we would have misunderstanding of the subject hi-fi...check 2. we would purchase components based on cofusion and sell it and soon after not getting the satifaction etc...check 3. with confusion our realities towards each others sounds would be ,not so real after all. and would be a source of flames ....check.
4. an audiophile would be always searching through the confusion for a better sound. This is due to confusion ...check.
5 when always faced with confusion ...unless one puts order into the FACTS ,one will always be confused ,lost and going around on a merry go round etc...check.. 6 >>>>to infinity you will never resolve the problem under the cloud of confusion. Infinity + one. When a person is selling ,buying ,cheating,attacking, misleading ,profits , shipping hassles, broken promises, . How does one trust or keep the confusion to a minimum? I'll let you write up the rest.
Serus (Ori), I really hoped you can make it over tomorrow at 3PM. At this point I hope your customer Mmakshak makes it over. Since he has visited you in the past, I am sure he can give you a nice report. Please feel free to contact me at any time and schedule e visit.
I've heard about your cables. People say they are amazing. I hope Mmakshak will bring your latest tomorrow for A-B test against my ICs.
The reason I wanted you to stop by tomorrow is because I still have the re-engineered Esoteric UX-1 Universal Player. This one was supposed to be my own, but the first one I built got stolen in a DHL warehouse in Belgium (another DHL horror story), so I will need to send this one to Europe early next week. I will sure have another one, but I don't really know when. :-(....It really deserves to be heard as it does not have any signs of “Digital”.
Robm321, I would agree with you to the extent that the IMPLEMENTATION of Digital is clearly inferior to vinyl. Please believe me when I say that, if you need 5 things to make vinyl sounds best, you need at least 50 to make Digital sound best.
A really nice guy and also owner of $100K SOTA vinyl setup visited me at the CES show. I played 88.2KHz/24bit DVD-A for him which I have personally recorded from a $25K vinyl setup. Although the 25K vinyl can not compare with 100K vinyl, the above mentioned gentleman agreed that it was just like the actual vinyl was playing - no sign of digital. We have also A-B-ed this recording with the actual 25K vinyl setup it was recorded from. There is no difference one can hear.
I will soon visit the nice gentleman with the 100K vinyl setup and will record 96KHz/24bit DVD-A out of it. There will not be any difference on A-B test, I guarantee it. Bottom line is that whatever vinyl carries as information can be captured and reproduced with Digital without any negative artifact to the ear. Digital offers the resolution and sound quality of vinyl; it’s just that it takes a lot more with it to get it right.
Jayctoy, I don't believe this to be true. Everyone comes back to Vinyl because $2000 vinyl carries a lot more soul of the music than usual $5000 digital does.
I told you guys....logic will produce answers.....cofusion will produce .....
Everyone comes back to vinyl . cd has been taking more away then vinyl will ever get back and dvd out sells both but I-pod rules. Computor generated stuff is the rage ,but the purists know best. Confused yet....this is a #'s game and nothing to do with hi-fi. Measure and calculate all you want .it has nothing to do with this hobby. Do you guys calculate when drinking good wines. If you buy wine because the bottle is pretty then you are in the wrong game. If wine tastes like wine .....next. Then if you pick components on #s .....you need to stop calling yourself an audiophile. You are a bottle collector.
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!
I just got back from Alphifi's, and I appreciate the fact that you guys haven't actually call me a neophyte. He, and many others out there, are far, far more experienced than I am. Now, I have to say that Alphifi has made all his own equipment, including interconnects. He may be selling these interconnects. They deserve to be heard. They definitely gave me pause for thought. I do want to say to the less experienced to still trust your own ears. I also know that back in the day, that the Linn way of PRAT helped me know what to look for. Today with digital, PRAT is almost a given, but I think it helps to have some way of evaluating what is better.
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?
I want to apologize Aplhifi, for misspelling your name, and thanks for having me over there. I also heard that DVD-A disc that Aplhifi made, and my comment was "this sounds like analog vinyl". I did notice that the most natural sounding discs were originally recorded in analog. That would be an Elvis Pressly recording, a Nat King Cole made by Reference Recordings, plus that DVD-A Aplhifi recorded. This might related to what Jlambrick and the guy who recommended Mapleshade's cd's were saying. C5150, this might relate to your point. Discussions are good.
I want to apologize Aplhifi, for misspelling your name, and thanks for having me over there. I also heard that DVD-A disc that Aplhifi made, and my comment was "this sounds like analog vinyl". I did notice that the most natural sounding discs were originally recorded in analog. That would be an Elvis Pressly recording, a Nat King Cole made by Reference Recordings, plus that DVD-A Aplhifi recorded. This might be related to what Jlambrick and the guy who recommended Mapleshade's cd's were saying. C5150, this might relate to your point. Discussions are good.
Sorry about the doubling of the same post. The point that Aplhifi was saying about the digital recording mechanism not being that much of a problem, might have been proven by that DVD-A disc that he recorded.
But, what about the soul of the music? Tvad, you have to admit that it is a catchy title? I think I evaluate reproduced music now by how it affects me after I've listened. Things like changing my mood, relaxing me, getting the serotonin going. Guidocorona, I told Aplhifi that it made me tense at first, but later that went away. It had definitely affected me positively after the listening session was done. I only heard one song comparing Oritek X-2's and Aplhifi's interconnects. I know you've heard this before, but I need more time to compare.
Mmakshak, thank you for coming over! I have to say that your (Ori's) cables were among the best Copper cables I've heard, very nice.
The Nat King Cole was Steve Hoffman's amazing work (DCC) made from the original Analog Master Tape. It was not Reference Recordings although these are really great as well.
I would also agree with you that Analog recordings have "more soul" than all Digital ones, but again, this comes to implementation because everything starts with Analog anyway. :)
Keep in touch! May be you can come back here again, this time with Ori.
I seem to have it; and to make matters worse, it is from a computer based system! I know that anything I would think would be suspect; after all who hates their own work?
But I have quite a few listeners over from time to time, and they get to remark on my failures (plenty of those) as well as my successes. The remarks I am getting now all the usual superlatives but what really matters is that they wont leave!
The trick? Digital eq/xover; done well it is an amazing thing. I did try the Deqx, which is a fine product, but found it dynamically...er...off. But the vastly cheaper DBX unit captures the dynamic life of music (makes sense,perhaps, in that it is design for use in live music). Though I have tube gear (SET and OTL) SS is what rules here. Emotion is the reason for music, and it is what I have here.
I have to mention one more thing about listening at Aplhifi. The high I get from listening to reproduced music was more pronounced and longer lasting than I get from my system. I thought maybe it was due to tubes, as Gunbei suggests. Aplhifi has a tube output, I believe, on his player and his amp has a tube input. I took a look at Aplhifi's web-site, and there might be more to it. Maybe Aplhifi can say something on this?
Aplhifi, thanks for the correction, but that was fantastic Nat King Cole. I had one question, though. You showed by that direct from turntable to digital disc that it's not necessarily digial, per se, that is a problem. But I think we played a cd that had what I would call unnatural detail in their singing. With Elvis and Nat, it was a given that that was how they sounded. With the all digital cd, we heard details that almost distracted me. I'm thinking that I heard one voice where it seemed like it was coming from the left side of his throat. I'm sure that was where it was coming from, it's just not what I would expect to hear live. It can't be the recording technique after 25 years of digital, can it?
Robm321, I used to listen to vinyl exclusively throughout the 70's and most of the 80's and I still like the sound of it. What I didn't like is the inevitable deterioration that results from playing records. In addition, back in the heyday of vinyl, about 2/3s of the records I bought were so poorly made and exhibited so much surface noise, ticks and pops, excessive warpage and harshness that they were nearly unlistenable. I'm sure that whatever miniscule vinyl production is done today is done much more meticulously than it was back then but I think that deterioration is still a problem. One could argue that many CDs are unlistenable but the reasons tend to be poor recording or mastering - or possibly large amounts of jitter inherent in the pressing. Now maybe I didn't have the most state of the art playback system. My vinyl setup consisted of a Micro Seiki DD-33 turntable with a carbon graphite tonearm, a Denon MC-301 cartridge, and a DB Systems preamp with separate power supply and head amp. This is a very modest setup compared with the many thousand dollar systems that are available today. I'll also admit that I haven't heard the absolute state of the art in digital playback but I can set that my digital setup now outperforms my vinyl setup of yesteryear. My main point is that if most people believe that vinyl actually does sound better, it's not because it is more pure or provides more actual information. It's because the types of distortion it creates are complimentary to the source material.
Yes this is a very logical way. The thing is Price has nothing to do with the quality of the product, Wine/hi-fi. If you didn't have this barrier of " cash " you would be drinking other stuff. The thing is when wine is done right,and there are so many factors to producing great wine that the price sky rockets for the simple reasons of supply and demand. The other factors are ignorant rich guys who drink 2k bottles of Bordeaux wih poached eggs and macaroni and chesse just to impress. There is the other factor of if mac and egg is ready to pay 2K then next years batch will be 2.5K regardless of average ,if not bad production/year. The product is "in " it's cool it's "i've made it" etc...
Now hi-fi is exactly the same. Nothing to do with the actual production from sunshine,rain ,earth ,altitude... to your glass,or recording session ,musicians,atmosphere...to your ROOM, to your ears.....cheers.
My comment was a little unfair. I think it is more a matter of preference. I am far from an analog purist. I listen to CD and SACD more than analog - mostly because I don't always have the time to mess with all that is involved.
I enjoy both formats and probably overreacted. There's no sense in making blanket statements since people have different preferences.
Let me restate and say I prefer vinyl if given the choice, but definitely will continue to listen and continue to improve my CD and SACD performance.
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.
If I listen to your set up, it will most likely shift my paradigm. Then when I go back to my system, it won't sound as good. So, I'm afraid to come by ;).
I hear you, Tvad, mine has made a drastic sway towards a more musical presentation with the addition of the TRL/Sony DVP-NS900V. I still have the TRL/SA-14, but find that it is accurate, but not as anywhere near musical as the Sony 900.
I've had the SA-14 described as being more like a vdH Grasshopper, quick and accurate but not as musical as a Koetsu Rosewood Sig. Platinum.
It's funny how our journey changes in this hobby. Of course it's not as if I have no complaints about accuracy now.
Stock, the SA-14 is thin and hard sounding, with a sucked out mid-range and without much frequency extension in the bottom end. (To my ears, in my system) Not overly dynamic, either.
After the mod, that ALL changes dramatically, however it still sounds a little mechanical to some degree, especially when compared to a player that is both accurate and incredibly musical.
I could still live with the SA-14 (I don't plan on selling mine), but find myself desiring the musicality that I now enjoy. (And it is more accurate to boot).
"No TRL dig intended."
Thank you. It's pleasant when we can share our opinions, even though we may walk different paths. Don't you agree?
This will show my ignorance, but by recording techniques, I meant something like the singer who's voice was coming from the left side of his throat to maybe step further away from the microphone to give a more natural presentation. D_edwards, would surround sound help this a bit? I still can't get over the high I got when I listened to Aplhifi's system. If I judged it a 15, I judge mine a 1 or less. I do know that when I'm away from my all analog system, that the songs start playing through my head. Does digital do that?
FWIW: The Dodson 217 Mark 2 D DAC that I own is fantastic. The new (and improved) Dodson 218 flagship, which is pricey, is claimed by Ralph Dodson to have essentially duplicated the analog experience, if I'm paraphrasing him correctly. I obviously can't say for sure, but in talking to him on the phone, his laconic, no nonsense conversation style would suggest that he's not at all the type of guy who's prone to hyperbole. Pretty terse, matter of fact, and believable.
Try 192/96 DAC - the sound becomes smoother, so you can play louder without hurting your ears, so more emotion comes through.
There are computer programs that will convert it to higher specs as well. If you re-burn your red book CDs on a good cdr like taiyo yuden, the sound becomes better.
EAC program is best for ripping the data into the computer.
C5150, I've just joined your ranks, for reasons other than your own. I'm confused from my audition of Aplhifi's sytem. Fortunately, he sells what I heard. First though, I have to understand it. It almost seemed like it didn't matter what was being played. It affected me so much, that it was a letdown to even think about playing my system. My sytem still has something that causes the songs to play in my head when I'm away from it, but the way it affects me after listening to it is not comparable to Aplhifi's. Now, I don't want to add to your confusion, but maybe he's on to something. I'm trying to investigate it.
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