Good analog and good digital converge?

[Macca]

So, I'm sitting here playing Tango in the Night - Fleetwood Mac in 96/??? (Christ knows what it is) and compared to the CD, it absolutely shits on it. Deeper, wider and way easier to listen to. This is nearer to the fluidity of vinyl as far as I'm concerned

Can someone explain why ?

Harmonic distortion, arm and cartridge resonances and feedback. It's not a secret or anything. Add to that you have arguably the best turntable ever made and I don't know what you are using for digital but I'm guessing it's not the best ever made.

[Bigman80]

Harmonic distortion, arm and cartridge resonances and feedback. It's not a secret or anything. Add to that you have arguably the best turntable ever made and I don't know what you are using for digital but I'm guessing it's not the best ever made.

Lol, yes I agree about the TT

I'm using an M2TECH Young DAC. I was only using Digital sources to compare. The 96/ bitrate battered the 16bit version so I was asking why, if nothing is missing from the lower bitrate version. Digital is a mystery to me mate.

[Macca]

OK Martin I've got your point, that you have made on numerous posts before.

A digital COPY is a digital copy and is all we need for music storage given adequate bit depth.
However it could be like saying I have xyz vinyl on my shelf, it's no good until it is reproduced on the TT.

Or it's like saying I have a digital copy of SOS in my brain, or other storage media, which is of no use unless it is transmitted or communicated to somebody else.

So analogue and digital convergence must include the replay chain in this instance, otherwise it's very difficult to hear and appreciate it.

Sorry man I've been out all day. Yes that is sort of what I was saying - consider that any digital system regardless of how cheap will have no issues reading what is on the disc or file 100%, what happens after that read is where it can or will fall over. With vinyl just reading the disc accurately requires some very serious and expensive engineering and even then it won't be 100% accurate.

In case anyone thinks I'm trying to argue that digital sounds better than vinyl I am emphatically not. I'm saying that the reason most of us agree that vinyl done well sounds the best is not because it is technically the better medium. It's subjectively better because of its technical flaws.

Having said that all of you who think digital is inherently poor, that it has glare, it is hard, it is harsh, it gives you fatigue regardless need to sort out your digital - or come round mine and have a listen. If you think digital technology has come on in leaps and bounds I've got top-end CD players here from 1987 and 1993 that will give you pause for thought.

As for hi-res sounding better - they remastered it! Can you hear sounds at 40KHz? No! - and that's all 'hi res' is. CD with sounds you can't hear. Or sometimes just with spurious noise you can't hear (in case anyone checks to see if they bought what they paid for). It's the biggest and most successful con in hi-fi history. Get with the program folks!

[magiccarpetride]

Harmonic distortion, arm and cartridge resonances and feedback. It's not a secret or anything. Add to that you have arguably the best turntable ever made and I don't know what you are using for digital but I'm guessing it's not the best ever made.

Objection! If "harmonic distortion, arm and cartridge resonances and feedback" make the sound "deeper, wider and way easier to listen to", then the worse the turntable is, the better it should sound. Which is not really the case (or maybe it is?)

[Joe]

Harmonic distortion, arm and cartridge resonances and feedback. It's not a secret or anything. Add to that you have arguably the best turntable ever made and I don't know what you are using for digital but I'm guessing it's not the best ever made.

It could also be a poor transfer to digital. Just now I was listening to a 1950s mono recording transferred to CD, and it sounded great. I have the same recording on vinyl, but, like myself, it's a bit old and knackered.

[magiccarpetride]

Sorry man I've been out all day. Yes that is sort of what I was saying - consider that any digital system regardless of how cheap will have no issues reading what is on the disc or file 100%, what happens after that read is where it can or will fall over. With vinyl just reading the disc accurately requires some very serious and expensive engineering and even then it won't be 100% accurate.

I'm not quite sue that's 100% correct. Knowing what I know about software (after spending 28 years developing the same), I won't be surprised if reading and buffering auxiliary storage comes with certain levels of fault tolerance, so instead of just falling over at the first sign of trouble, software makes its best educated guess, interpolates some values it figures could statistically be the closest to what the unreadable data represents, and then move along.

It would be naive to assume that in the digital world, either stored information is being read 100% correctly, or the system bails. I suspect a lot of cost-cutting digital readers are prone to 'fill in the blanks' while reading and encountering any hiccups. Ergo, fatiguing, brittle and tiring/unpleasant playback.

In case anyone thinks I'm trying to argue that digital sounds better than vinyl I am emphatically not. I'm saying that the reason most of us agree that vinyl done well sounds the best is not because it is technically the better medium. It's subjectively better because of its technical flaws.

Wow, that's quite a stretch. So technical flaws make something better? I vehemently disagree.

Having said that all of you who think digital is inherently poor, that it has glare, it is hard, it is harsh, it gives you fatigue regardless need to sort out your digital - or come round mine and have a listen. If you think digital technology has come on in leaps and bounds I've got top-end CD players here from 1987 and 1993 that will give you pause for thought.

I completely agree with you. And I'll go one further: yesterday I was doing a little bit of side-by-side comparison between my turntable and my digital playback (that exercise was a part of the ongoing conversation I'm having with an audiophile friend). So first I listened to Santana's "Jingo" (off their first album) on my near-mint original LP, then I switched over to the remastered FLAC, then back to the LP.

My conclusions? Are you ready for this? I found out -- believe it or not -- that digital playback sounded more 'analog' than the LP playback!

Whaaa? Digital sounded warm, smooth, silky, no rough edges, everything tame and proper and carefully ironed out.

LP, in contrast, sounded impolite, unruly, with lots of rough edges. The instruments were carved out in space much more clearly, the sound was incisive, not nearly as warm as the digital. Cymbals and electrical guitar leaped out of my Maggies. It was a real 'balls to the wall' fiesta, and the LP made Santana sound very unvarnished.

If that were a blindfold test, I'd put my bottom bitcoin on the FLAC playback being the vinyl playback.

Goes to show how little I really know...

As for hi-res sounding better - they remastered it! Can you hear sounds at 40KHz? No! - and that's all 'hi res' is. CD with sounds you can't hear. Or sometimes just with spurious noise you can't hear (in case anyone checks to see if they bought what they paid for). It's the biggest and most successful con in hi-fi history. Get with the program folks!

Hear, hear! You nailed it. I'm ashamed to admit, but if I take a hi rez FLAC (24 bit/96 kHz) and dither it down to Red Book format, and then play hi rez and Red Book side-by-side, to my mushy ears they always and invariably sound bloody IDENTICAL! So much for the supremacy of the hi rez...

[Macca]

I'm not quite sue that's 100% correct. Knowing what I know about software (after spending 28 years developing the same), I won't be surprised if reading and buffering auxiliary storage comes with certain levels of fault tolerance, so instead of just falling over at the first sign of trouble, software makes its best educated guess, interpolates some values it figures could statistically be the closest to what the unreadable data represents, and then move along.

It would be naive to assume that in the digital world, either stored information is being read 100% correctly, or the system bails. I suspect a lot of cost-cutting digital readers are prone to 'fill in the blanks' while reading and encountering any hiccups. Ergo, fatiguing, brittle and tiring/unpleasant playback.

..

Dude you really need to read up on how digital audio works. If there is a problem reading, first of all the information is on multiple sections of the disc, so there is redundancy. Second if that fails you have error correction, which either works perfectly or fails completely. If it fails completely you will get a skip, or a screech, or some other obviously audible flaw. Everyone has heard that happen. Usually the disc just needs a wipe on your sleeve and your are good to go. None of this is speculation it is fact, it is mathematics until you get to the analogue output stage. There is no unknown as to what is happening just as there are no unknowns in a computer program.

fatiguing, brittle and tiring/unpleasant playback. Will be nothing to do with any failure to read the disc. There are multiple things it could be. For example a system that has been selected to make recordings sound like live music (aka the 'Flat Earth' movement) with analogue sources that all exhibit some gentle compression (compact cassette, reel to reel, vinyl) will sound a bit rough when presented with a source without that compression. Digital designers cottoned on to this years ago and now you can buy 'analogue sounding' digital components. Not quite the same and not going to replace anyone's turntable but they are at least listenable when combined with such a set up.

[magiccarpetride]

Dude you really need to read up on how digital audio works. If there is a problem reading, first of all the information is on multiple sections of the disc, so there is redundancy. Second if that fails you have error correction, which either works perfectly or fails completely. If it fails completely you will get a skip, or a screech, or some other obviously audible flaw. Everyone has heard that happen. Usually the disc just needs a wipe on your sleeve and your are good to go. None of this is speculation it is fact, it is mathematics until you get to the analogue output stage. There is no unknown as to what is happening just as there are no unknowns in a computer program.

That flies in the face of what proponents of digital streaming are harping on. According to them, when you rip a CD, the CD reader is not under duress to keep playing in real time, so it can take its sweet time to read and reread (notice no-hyphenation) each and every byte. The result is much more accurate file, which then you can stream from your hard drive into your digital transport. They claim this approach results in much better digital sound reproduction.

Another audiophile myth?

[Macca]

That flies in the face of what proponents of digital streaming are harping on. According to them, when you rip a CD, the CD reader is not under duress to keep playing in real time, so it can take its sweet time to read and reread (notice no-hyphenation) each and every byte. The result is much more accurate file, which then you can stream from your hard drive into your digital transport. They claim this approach results in much better digital sound reproduction.

Another audiophile myth?

Yes. And no. It may be more accurate but it doesn't matter. At all.

[magiccarpetride]

Yes. And no. It may be more accurate but it doesn't matter. At all.

OK. So what matters (at all)?