Digital vs Analog

Personally, I feel the 22KHz frequency limit is only the tip of the iceberg (and may not be important at all).

The problem with the Nyquist theorem of wave sampling (that any wave can be reconstructed perfectly by sampling at twice the maximum frequency you wish to capture) is that it's only true on paper... Actually getting a piece of hardware (DAC) to reconstruct the exact input wave from a 16bit/44.1KHz sample is another kettle of fish entirely. There are a squillion and one obstacles in the path to perfect D-to-A. Things have come along quite a ways since the dawn of CD, but my ears tell me they still have a way to go (and I'm not sure they're ever going to implement Redbook CD to its theoretical potential).

Dunc

P.S. - And we both have the same DAC, which IME is one of the best out there!

 

murray,
i think we are going to have to agree to differ - i'm not convinced that a 'format' that's been lossily compressed, decompressed, had it's dynamic range compressed by 40db and then had 1/4 of it's frequency range (compared to the limits of human hearing) lopped off is worth spending any money on and that's before we get to interference and interruption. the fact it's going to be switched off in about 4 years time just puts nails in it's coffin afaic.
cd may have many similar issues but the extent of the damage is much less and iirc even vinyl has to be dynamically compressed or the cutting heads can;t cope (although i'm not 100% on that) and then there's all that riaa stuff too.
fm just falls below what i consider to be hi-fi. whereas cd and vinyl don;t. i'd also say the same about compact cassette as well.

dunc,
there's no problem reconstructing the waveform (as long as it;s been recorded correctly and had all content over 22.1khz removed before sampling) it's the filtering and analogue output stages that can cause problems but then these things dip into the realms of subjectivity hence the proliferation of nos and oversampling devices.
we both really like the decade but i can understand if someone else didn;t like it or preferred another dac.
cheers


julian

 

Hi Julian,

A friend of mine used to go out & record local folk & jazz groups with a couple of decent microphones & a Revox cassette deck.
The quality of what could be put onto and replayed from 'metal' cassettes was quite startling. I agree that the process of putting pre-recorded music onto them introduces too many compromises but the format itself could be surprisingly good.

I understand your reluctance wrt FM and the big 'turn off' in a few years (scandalous imho) but would vehemently disagree with your view regarding its potential quality. Still, its your loss.

 

Murray - at present there is no date for turning off FM, only TV.

 

glad to hear it. I'm sure the time will come though.

 

Ok, then, I challenge you to name one obstacle for which there is no known solution...

The reality of the situation is that Sony and Denon CD players invariably measure on the limit of theoretical perfection.

If your DAC in some way or other sounds different to those players, then it is broken in the theoretical sense.

 

HMV and Virgin are box shifters, not record shops.
They dont sell "dance" music... you have to goto specialist shops for specialist music.

 

And it follows that those Sony and Denon players are much better than an FM radio broadcast.

Paul

 

HMV oxford st used (not long ago) used to have a decent dance section. Infact, in that shop vinyl used to occupy the whole right hand side of the ground floor (a sizeable area)- but has now shrunk to a far smaller area at the rear. Same thing in Virgin.

Yes, I KNOW there are better places for dance music (Junkies, Sounds of the Universe, Reckless, etc) but that wasnt my point. Infact, those kind of shops have been dwindling, too, such as Atlas a few years ago.

 

IME outside of the major population centres, shops like this sell practically nothing, specialist or otherwise. Even back catalogue by fairly mainsteam artists can be an issue. I can't remember the last time I bought a record in a 'shop'. Vinyl seems to be alive and kicking though. Many independent labels seem to sell direct these days and there are genre based on-line suppliers for most tastes. I won't exactly mourn the passing of the Virgin Megastore.

As to the original question, I've yet to hear a CD player that I've really wanted to own. I'm sure it is possible to purchase such an item but not on my budget... although I'm happy to be proved wrong!

 

Nor would I, but if you read my post correctly you'll see that I was only trying to illustrate a point (namely the reduction of high street vinyl retailers). And the topic is about digital vs analoge- so its relevant.

 

My point was that I'm not sure retailers like these make any real difference since they cater principally for the mass market - and although London may offer a greater range than elsewhere basically anything the enthusiast can find has only ever been a bonus. 10 years ago there was practically no vinyl in Oxford Street HMV (at least on the three regretable occasions I found myself stuck on Oxford street). Vinyl had a surge of popularity and they stocked it again for a bit. Ups and downs. When I lived in York, the Virgin Meagrestore had a facelift that gave over half their floorspace to mobile phones at the expense of CDs! Where I live now there is no HMV or Virgin or any other sort of chain record store. None of this worries me because I think that the explosion of online vinyl retailers has just squeezed the major chains out of that sector of the marketplace.

 

I think these retailers have a lot more influence than we are giving them credit for. They have massive marketing budgets and ways to attract people to their stores. They also sell a lot via websites. It is not by accident that we see the fact that they stock vinyl or not as an indication of its success in the market.

What they are not indicative is of the enthusiast markets, which are many.

I for once found a really nice Oxfam shop that stocks cheap, good quality vinyl (mostly classical) and go to the exchange shops (Notting Hill, Camden Town) often. They do supply much diversity of musical genres in both vinyl and cd.

I guess there are many record mail order shops on the net that are more specialised (and I would love to hear which ones you recommend, like Baudrillard mentioned) but I still enjoy browsing in the physical sense of the word, for a few hours, in the shops.


But there is one thing that I really don't understand. Most people agree on the revival of the vinyl, the great sound it provides particularly with great orchestral works (but not just that). We all know that the classical music market is mostly an enthusiasts market... Why then do we not see HMV in Oxford Street, well known for its classical music cd section, stock classical LPs? Why don't we see new classical music LP releases? I really don't understand!

(sorry about going a bit off topic here...)

Jack

 

OK, fair enough. However, it's still true that people who are serious about buying music on vinyl probably would not goto HMV when practically just across the road you have a wealth of indie shops such as the ones you mention.

I've not really had a huge amount of experience of record shopping in the capital, but I do know that Vinyl Junkies has just moved across the road to a larger shop, and they ONLY sell vinyl

 

Because the substantial technical superiority of CD as a medium was most apparent with wide-dynamic-range, wide-bandwidth orchestral recordings, and of course the recorded sound of real acoustic instruments is easily compared with real life to show up the lack of colouration and noise. As you've pointed out, the classical market is particularly fussy WRT accuracy of recorded sound, and as a consequence CD absolutely obliterated vinyl in the classical sector pretty much overnight - there's been virtually no new classical released on vinyl since the 80s AFAIK. You can trace vinyl's very rapid sink without trace in the title of the Penguin Guide to recommended classical recordings: in 1975 we had the Penguin Stereo Record Guide, which by 1985 was dealing with Records, Cassettes and Compact Discs and by 1988 was down to only Compact Discs and Cassettes.

Karajan famously announced "Everything else is gaslight" during his involvement with the earliest commercial CD recordings, and the classical record-buying public was very quick to agree with him.

 

Sadly (??) I'm not an electronic engineer so I can't name these things off the top of my head, but I'll see if I can dig up some interweb articles, or something. Anyone else here care to interject?

Maybe in the parameters you happen to like to measure.

Dunc

 

And the rise of compact cassette presumably heralded this new age of uber sound quality?

Karajan was a great conductor, but was he an audiophile..? (Genuine question.)

Dunc

 

The compact cassette hung around for a few years while it had advantages over CD (recordable, usually quite cheap, portables readily available) - even into the mid-90s they still covered a few cassettes in Penguin. Vinyl OTOH had no advantages over CD, thus demand in the classical sector dried up very quickly and supply stopped accordingly.

Yes, definitely - he was well known for being a serious technology enthusiast and during the 1980s (the last few years of his career) he was hurrying to re-record a lot of the repertoire digitally for posterity, a body of recordings which now forms the Karajan Gold series from Deutsche Grammophon. You could argue that he conducted like an audiophile anyway - he spent decades developing the distinctive weightily opulent sound of the Berlin Philharmonic from the rostrum. I think it's fair to say that he probably knew what an orchestra was supposed to sound like, at any rate.

 

If you just plan on goggling "why digital sounds sh!te" and posting links to (junk) science - which you don't know whether is right or wrong - then please do not bother.

Why do you believe that the known measurement techniques are insufficient? Seriously, ask yourself what do you really know about "measurements" and why should you hold a position (and this does appear to be your opinion) that "measurements don't tell all"?

 

to my mind the main challenges for an external dac are...
1) recieving the digital signal correctly (reducing jitter etc.)
2) converting the digital signal to an analogue one
3) filtering out any etraneous noise produced by 1 + 2
4) outputting this to a power amp.

1 and 2 are usually the focus of 'why digital sounds kak' with jitter being the main bogey man. however as oedipus says these have prety much been sorted out with common jitter measurements below 100ps (and believe me a picosecond is small) and dacs with fantastic measurements that designers from the 80's could only dream about.
3 is getting there however it's a personal choice as to what filtering you prefer - there are so many schemes that many dacs allow this to be altered to tweak the sound.
4 at present this is pretty much ignored other than to say it could be tube or solid state and maybe has some neat power regulation next big thing in digital?

one of the main differences between analogue and digital is that analogue has a large mechanical component where things like motors have to be constant torque and bearings have to be smooth, belt drives can;t slip, and arms need to be engineered to nasa stanards. basicly there's a whole lot more to go wrong with vinyl than with cd.