The Real Kick Out Of Sound...

BUT the thing is Keith CD is coloured just as much as vinyl is coloured or else all CD players would sound the same.....BUT they don't and you know that - I hope. If digital was that good you would own a cheap Philips 850 or better still we would not be having this discussion. If 50% of us are pro-vinyl what does that say about CD?

2nd harmonic distortion maybe pleasant but don't forget you are adding these up in your preamp and poweramp and at different frequencies. At some frequencies they'll be major peaks and others nothing. Is this good? It's like eating chocolate, take a bite, then the whole bar, then get another bar and another until it's too much. High levels of any single harmonic distortion is NO GOOD, you are better off with a mixture.

 

Are you refering to older pop & rock recordings here, or do you include classical as well?


I find it amusing that this thread is titled "The Real Kick Out Of Sound..." and not "The Real Kick Out Of Music..."

 

Rob I don't use a CD player I use a Mac/Amarra software and either Weiss or Metric Halo DACS much better than any cd player.

 

That really isn't the case at all, because in the analogue system you are only just above the noise floor at -60dB.

With only 16bits PCM you've still got 33dB to go, before you take into account the perceptual effects of dither which does to digital what you are arguing for in the analogue realm. Dither decouples the bit limit from the perception of resolution, at the cost of +3dB rise in the noise floor (to -93dB). IOW you can then 'hear into' the noise, up to 30dB below (!) in tests cited by Meridian. All from 16bits done well.

DSD is a mess. Above 10Khz it actually has less resolution than 16bit/44.1khz PCM digital, and monstrous out-of-band (spurious) energy.

 

quote

welcome back simon, it is fun,
rerards,
nando.

 

quote

it does not make you superior nor me inferior,.

 

dance a yard befor you dance abroad, famous lir5ics of advice to the youth,
nando.

 

"I've yet to see a pair of horn speakers in any major studio"

"REAL music come from elsewhere"?

Real music? I suppose that doesn't include the best selling album of all time then?

http://www.westlakeaudio.com/Speakers/Professional_Series/hr-1.html

http://www.thelakestudios.com/Studios/studios.html

Arguably one of the worlds finest studios, and they use horns.:MILD:

 

love it...... not only do they make the speakers, but have also installed them in what they call 'the best studios in the world'..... and they own the studios ....Classic! I must tell my marketing department

 

If DSD is actually worse than 16bit PCM above 10Khz, then why on earth did a lot of you digital fans buy in to SACD?


Purite:

So Keith, I need to ask this question:
Are you saying the Mac/Amarra is better than ANY high-end audio transport available today?

 

Very many didn't, hence Sony dropped it. Well that and the fact that studios didn't see why they should re-equip simply to be able to handle/edit a proprietary format.

 

Quote

THAT IS WHY I NAMED SO. CURIOSITY KILLED THE CAT.
NANDO

 

do you all know what a famous "so called" format on cd tried to saple to 194khz even to word sampling at 196khz, and failed,
nando.

 

I never claimed there were any recordings that used the full dynamic range of a 16 bit system. You claimed CD was limited by 16 bits, and those bits represent the dynamic range and SNR of the system.
So if the dynamic range and SNR are sufficient, then 16 bits are sufficient.

It's called bit depth, bit rate is something else.
And you won't get distortion, you'll get white noise.

"[W]hen the right dither is used, the resolution of the digital system becomes infinite. What results from a sensible digitisation or digital operation then is not signal plus a highly-correlated truncation distortion, but the signal and a benign low level hiss. In practical terms, the resolution is limited by our ability to resolve sounds in noise. Just to reinforce this, we have no problem measuring (and hearing) signals of –110dB in a well-designed 16-bit channel."
-- J. Robert Stuart, Coding High Quality Digital Audio, Meridian Audio Ltd.

So the difference between 8, 16, 24, or any other bit depth is how much white noise you'll get, and thus how far down the noise floor is.

The Nyquist theorem is the foundation for all implementations of digital audio. So if you don't understand Nyquist, you don't understand digital audio.

Here is a good introduction: http://www.lavryengineering.com/documents/Sampling_Theory.pdf

With modern noise reduction you can get close to it, but that does not make up for all the other serious problems with tape.

For comparison almost all digital recordings are done at 24 bits.

All problems with PCM have been with practical implementation, and that has changed considerably since it was introduced in the 70's.

Digital systems can be made almost completely linear and that is pretty much impossible (because of the physics involved) with analog systems.

Are you familiar with the technical aspects of DSD at all?
If you didn't know DSD is PCM in every sense of the word, just based on an outdated implementation of it (1bit/64xFS Delta-Sigma modulation).
So if you like DSD, then you must love modern PCM!

 

quote

i worked with sony japan on that project of sacd, from the beguining i thought it was the biggest bollocks to come out of the woodwork, i told them why via an interpreter, they would not listen, fine i said whhaat dual layer ,ooohm, how much to the buyer? whattt? for miles!!!!!!/? then a bigger blow came, the sacd player, pre-amp power amps and speakers, try this they said, by the way they said no double layer, we went to abbey road and A.P. we supply dsd, what a shambles that was, specially when they tried to release the beatles and rolling stones, the day sacd died,
nando.

 

Fascinating posts D Lundberg, please do stick around, Rob to answer your question a Mac and Amarra and Metric Halo is better than any optical based system I have heard, DCS Scarlatti is the most expensive we have compared to so far.
Keit.

 

By me

what type of system is this..... instead of music - just white noise. Reminds me of Kraftwerk.

I actually don't like CD in any format. I own a Nagra CDP which is like every other CD player I've heard.... unmusical and lacking in detail.....yes DETAIL.

 

Why on earth would you buy such an expensive cd player if it sounds like that?

Are you on a wiind up?

I can recommend you a cambridge 640C at £250 and it doesn't sound anything like your description of CD.

 

By RobHolt

well you've finally lost it.

I take it then you own a technics amp or would that be a midi system