Actually you can fine tune digital. I've heard it being done successfully on friends' setups. Mostly, it is tweeks to the setup environment--dampeners, isolating mats. One tweak I did myself was to try a lot interconnects. Got some significant improvements on my now dead Wadia. (Lazer blown, can't find a replacement outside the place in LA that bought all the NOS off of Macintosh when they shuttered Wadia. They want more for the parts than the CD player is worth.)
Went looking for a new CD player recently. Three surprises: CD players are starting to get better sounding to the point where analog may not be necessary in 5-10 years, heard a solid state system that was starting to approach tube sound w/o and overdesigned, custom room, and finally heard a streaming source that was pretty darn good.
This steamer was connected to Qubuz (first time I heard that service). Played a bunch of recordings on that. I also could hear the difference on different recordings, per solx's comments of the same piece of music. And the quaity differences were the same as on vinyl. This is the first time that I heard anything streaming show this much depth and character (or lack thereof for bad recordings). Used to be that the digital services acted like a nuance filter and made diffrerent recordings sonically sound the same, and much poorer than the original.
I've been reading everyones comments for the last year or so. Rarely made a comment myself becuase of lack of anything valuable to add. With all of your comments, I'll have to figure out how to put one of these systems in my stereo.
Yea, there is one real and one possible reason that analog sounds better than digital.
The real reason is cost optimization. The push for the CD was really to reduce costs and decrease failure rate of recordings. Vinyl is very expensive to produce, and putting music on a CD, essentially coping a compter program, was much cheaper with an inherintly lower failure rate. CD's were never designed for higher quailty of reproduction. They were marketed that way--namly focusing on theiir lower background noise and eliminating wow and flutter. The companies never commented on washing out much of the overtones and dynamics that makes music really sparkle.
The possible reason is just a SWAG on my part. Digital TV's are way, way better than the analog sets that they replace. And were from the start. I remeber the early analog HD TV's when I went Japan. They weren't as good as the digital signal when introduced in the US. Digital audio is catching up to analog, but really hasn't gotten there yet. The difference may be the speed of transmission. Light travels and 2.998x10^8 m/s. Sound travels at around 740 mph at sea level. Electronic circuits operate near the speed of light, which is best decribed by quantum mechanics. Descrete levels of energy. Sound is much slower, so it is very analog in nature. Countinous levels of energy. The differnce between quantized energy vs analog energy may be a inherit disadvantage to digital systems with regards to sound reproduction. You would need advansces in sonic theory, which is way beyond me. And describing music quality is way beyond the standard sonic equiations we currently use. If the current equasions worked, then we wouldn't have engineers coming on and insisting that solid state sounds better than tubes--mainly because the equations that they learned in school tells them that that is so.
There are probably other reasons, but I am just a former physical chemist, not an expert in sound or electronics. But I am an expert at testing and evealuating data, and this wouldn't be the first time I've seen generally accepted equations be wrong or limited.
Data trumps equations every time. if your equations do not accurately describe the real world, it is the equations that are limited or wrong, not the real world. (Many in science and esp. engineering struggle with that.) That is why we have general relativity now; Newtonian equations stopped being accurate once systems moved faster than 0.10 c. In the same way, sonic equations from undergrad, and possibly graduate, physics textbooks are inadequate do describe music quality. The current equations are just too simple.
Thanks to all for help with help with the different streaming devices.
