CD v Vinyl - My preference.

Surely if Linn sell CD players then he must be slightly biased. He is not going to say vinyl sounds much better when the company sell high end CD players is he?

There is a clear difference between the sound of vinyl and CD, which is better is a matter of personal taste.

 

For me, the issue isn't really the playback medium, more those monkies recording and mastering everything digitally and using computers as musical instruments. geez it makes everything sound boring after a while

 

I don't mind synthesised sounds when its done well, it can still be very musical (I a not talking about modern boy/girl bands here!).

Remastering works on some older tracks which tend to be of low quality, the remastering of the tracks on Simon and Garfunkel's Old Friends is great. However I agree far too much stuff is remastered that dosn't need to be and quality must be lost in the process.

 

Ivor stated publically that he couldn't listen to CDs or anything digitaly recorded. A HiFi magazine challanged him to prove he could hear the difference. He accepted the challange. This was mid 1980s.

They set up a Linn system for vinyl playback, with an ABX box and a Sony F1 A to D and D to A conversion system in one leg. This system, commonly used for mastering back then, involved 14-bit conversion at 50KHz, if memory serves me correctly. They switched the F1 in and out of circuit in a day-long double blind test. Ivor was permitted to tweak the system as much as he liked. He couldn't hear a difference. Neither could any of the magasine staff present. Within a year, Linn launched their first CD player.

 

Personally I'm very happy with my new cdp and tt...
The Clearaudio blew my old Marantz cd63ki into the weeds with everything, but with the Advantage things are much closer - depends now on the type of music, the pressing, and the mood I'm in.
One thing's for sure, I don't use the TT after far too many bottles of vino any more.. It's cost me £330 in new stylii so far!

 

There was a show or musical evening organised by Linn a couple of years ago where they stuck the CD12 up against a LP12 / Ekos / Arkiv II – I guess Linn were confident that the CD player would deliver the goods. The punters were allowed to vote for the source they preferred and about 70% went for the TT! I'm sure it was done blind too… a lovely example of bullet / foot interfacing.

Tony.

 

I'd be very interested if we could find out for sure if it really was done blind - I'd written the result off as being down to the kinds of people you get going to hifi shows

 

here is an interesting link on red book digital vs analogue - brace yourselves as it may upset (I am not supporting this article - it merely gives an interesting alternative opinion). It appears to have been written in 1984 at the dawn of comercial cd audio.

http://www.anstendig.org/CDandDig.html

 

We had a similar experiance at the Bristol show, we left the TT running (space deck/£1K cart/£2k phono), with the arm over the record and turn the display off on the Wadia cdp, every kept getting up to check the record that was playing
However I feel a top TT is the Biz. Wm

 

Are you referring to this one as reported by HiFiWorld in 2001?

http://www.hi-fiworld.co.uk/hfw/featureshtml/linnreport.html

There is no mention whether the comparison were blind or not. Any of the people who were there could inform us. Certainly interesting test but good to see some people also has same opinion that if they were done with blind comparison then the result is even more remarkable. By the way, for the record, if all those people who attend the comparison didn't listen with blind comparison and prefer LP then it DOES NOT mean they are delusional. Just that if they do prefer LP and gave this opinion after blind testing then everyone will certainly take that the test are even more astonishing.

That is all I am saying as I do not wish to inflame the forum more then it is already.

 

help me
im blind!

 

:SCIDB: (wolfie)


:ffrc: :lol: (penance and WM)



:zzzz: boring..... (robbo)

 

Yes, that's the one. I've just done a search and Lucio's TNT site states that it was blind, link here: http://www.tnt-audio.com/sorgenti/turntabletest_e.html

I was not there, so have no idea.

The other issue is that vinyl vs. CD is IMHO very source dependant, you can find certain CD masters that will beat certain vinyl pressings and vice versa, so it is easily possible to stack a dem to give the results that are wanted. The thing that made me laugh is that Linn missed a trick here! I'm sure the primary goal was to flog the CD12...

Tony.

 

I am not worthy. :notworthy




Guess Ivor was doing this :banghead: that night.

 

What is interesting is if you listen to analogue recorded cds, they sound more 'analogue', and less 'digital', hard edged, more like vinyl.

also, I had a marantz scratch supressor for vinyl once, and guess what? yes it uses a digital convertor to convert the analogue signal into digital to filter the noises.

did it affect the 'analogueness'? Not noticably, it came out the other end....ooooer missus...as analogue as it went in. A very slight degradation, almost negligible, but not in the digital hard sense, just as though more was in the signal path.

I like em both, the convenience and quiteness of cd, the tactileness and knowing nothing is like a good record playing.

Its like the difference between a german lager, and a british ale.

 

I have had another damn good read of the info found on the link in my previous post regards digital vs analogue - it does make very interesting reading - has any one in this forum encountered the Nyquist Theory? Its pretty damning - essentially digital needs to sample at around 20 times the current rate to preserve the true nuances and "life" of the original performmance - i.e. current red book cd's offer 44kHz - the ideal proposed being 1MHz. We have simply grown accustomed to listenting to 44kHz sampled sound and despite all our ravings about the purity and realism our multi-thousand pound hifi systems may or may not deliver - the answer is NONE of them are actually delivering. Unfortunately DVD Audio is still VERY short of the Anstendig Institute's proposal... infact I do not think a storage medium has been invented yet that can deliver this amount of data in something the size of a cd.

Anyway... you folks were saying?...:JPS:

(Hope the icon slightly resembles Devil's Advocate)

 

We're probably all familiar with it to some degree. That is why a sampling frequency of 44.1kHz is sufficient to reproduce frequencies up to 22.05KHz. You must have misread or been misinformed - you only need to sample at twice the rate of the top frequency you want to reconstruct, mathematically speaking.

 

i read somewhere that the digital harshness attributed to early cds was down to lazy engineers using pre riaa equalised tracks as the master recordings. for vinyl this is ok as the phono stage contains the stuff to de-riaa the recording however cd's do not so you end up with bright upper frequencies and no bass - exactly the symptoms of early digital.
from the vinyl vs digital listenign i've done - none of it double blind so it means nothing of course i've come to the conclusion that there is little difference qualitively between vinyl and cd. vinyl has certain advantages in that various recordings sound better on it (the riaa issue imho) and that some recordings are more easily available for vinyl. cd's are far more robust and convienient and also some recordings are more easily available for cd.
to answer the title of the thread... 700cd's vs 12 bits of vinyl stuck in a garage means for me cd's win hands down.
cheers


julian

 

You're confusing two things, Nyquist doesn't state anything about the life or nuances.

Nyquist-Shannon simply states that when converting from an analog signal to digital (or otherwise sampling a signal at discrete intervals), the sampling frequency must be greater than twice the highest frequency of the input signal in order to be able to reconstruct the original perfectly from the sampled version.

Now that doesn't imply, for one second, that all A-D / D-A processes are perfect - they are not.

The second bit of your quote is a different discussion and depends on whether you feel our hearing is capable of listening to the same frequencies that bats can.

In my view this is a red-herring, the issues relating to audibility of effects that take place above 20kHz are solely due to effects ultimately occuring within the audio band.

That is, in my view, you cannot hear above 20kHz, but you may well be able to hear the effects on your audio equipment of signals above 20kHz.

It's not the same thing and I don't believe CD is inherently bandwidth limited for the function it needs to fulfil. It may well be too limited in terms of dynamic range though and this is where I would concentrate my efforts.

I suspect we're fighting a losing battle though, with the era of data reduction. Look at the quality of FM radio, an effective data rate reduction of almost 7 times in the move from FM to DAB.

Andy.

 

I started CD early, Julian, and I have some very early examples. I confess that I've never heard this alleged harshness. Indeed, one of my early examples (in more ways than one), "Music of the Gothic Era", from David Munrow and the Early Music Consort, is one of the most vivid recordings I own - when they clang bells, the sound just seems to hang in the air beside you. And my Pinnock Handel's Water Music is (to me) aurally indistinguishable from the vinyl (except for the inevitable clicks and pops of elderly, much-loved and much-played vinyl). Now I'm a classical listener, and perhaps they took more care with the classical stuff. I can't speak for any other music, because I don't have any that far back.