A very good ENGINEERING explanation of why analog can not be as good as digital..

elizabeth

The 15ips thing caught my eye... On a tape machine.. with it running at 15ips.. Well each magnetized particle of material on the tape could be thought of as a ON/OFF digital particle. So one could calculate the number of magnetized individual particles moving past the head gap per second and get a real bit rate...This might be a way to get some analog to digital comparison?

That won’t work because a tape head can’t read a single magnetized tape particle in isolation. The head has a gap that reads a whole bunch of " magnetized individual particles " all at once.

The notion that any traditional analog media - such as tape or LP - can hold an amount of data equal to that in a CD just isn’t valid. And that’s exactly what led to the invention of the CD in the first place.

This is such a subjective issue yet so many opinions try to be objective. It’s like what is the best colour car to buy? Yes, there are colours that sell better than others but it’s the buyer that decides.

I have albums that sound better than cd’s and cd’s that sound better than albums in my opinion. There is no best here. My James Taylor remaster of Sweet Baby James and MFSL’s Supertramp Crime of the Century can’t be duplicated on any CD based/file sharing format to sound anything like my albums.

That’s all that should matter!!! 

But to the members that made the Canadian comment, I’m a proud Canadian and you made yourself out to sound like everything that is wrong with your country today! You’d be surprised how the rest of the world views you but we keep our opinions to ourselves rather than barfing them on everyone else.

Keep the comments so everyone can read them and not be offended.

Respectfully,

New formats I.e., digital audio/video standards brought higher resolution, for example DVD and SACD. Higher sampling rates and longer bit words. Then along came Blu Ray with its much smaller nanoscale laser beam width allowing even greater bits/sampling rate. And discs could by then be fabricated with correspondingly greater data density per disc. By the way the Blu Ray laser technically isn’t blue. Also, ironically, higher but rates and or sampling rates apparently don’t necessarily equate to better sound. OMG!

Other than you, who has made this claim? You’re suggesting that an LP can hold more data than a CD. That simply isn’t even remotely true.

It’s the mechanical aspects of the LP’s capacity to hold transient phase coherence, timing coherence of the same, across the two channels.

Since this is deeply connected to how the ear works, it tends to be fundamentally important. To the ear. if you look at how the ear works, this little bit of a point becomes critical.

If one wants to equal the inter channel timing of transients and phase coherence that an LP is capable of, the minimum is an approximate 7 million sample per second rate, at about a minimum of 20 bits of depth and with absolutely zero jitter in dc to lightspeed bandwidth. This was known and spoken of in the early 90’s. Odd that it is somehow forgotten or not mentioned.

Look at the whole question and answer set. Math is nice and is a great descriptor of things, as a tool or what not. But it cannot do anything in being a tool unless the tool user is equipped with the correct questions and the math is shaped well enough to be useful in those calculations. In other words one has to have to have the right question in front of them. Most folks don’t. Thus the circular arguments.

eg, if one thinks that this spec is not important as it is swamped by noise, wow and flutter, etc, one might remind them that the world’s finest FFT and intelligent filtering system known, is built right into them. The human body creates an incredible amount of noise for the ear. The ear/brain system filters this out. So much so we are not consciously aware of this huge wobbly and insanely polluted noise floor inside our own hearing.

The ear as being dumb and the instrument and math smarter, more capable? It would be difficult to be more wrong, if one said or thought such a thing.