Quality difference from 12 years ago on Equipment

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by Mike Campbell, Mar 20, 2017.

Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.
  1. sublemon

    sublemon Forum Resident

    whatever gets you going :)
     
  2. Dirty Dozen sounds better. :tiphat:
     
  3. GuildX700

    GuildX700 Forum Resident

    Location:
    USA
    My point exactly, that stuff all sounds like crap.
     
  4. POE_UK

    POE_UK Forum Resident

    Location:
    Somerset
    Want a bet. Tape especially reel to reel has over double the bandwidth of any digital file, it is not restricted by bitrate. take a look at steve albini's video, he will explain better.

     
  5. anorak2

    anorak2 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Berlin, Germany
    Analogue is just as restricted, the idea that one of the two is superior to the other in principle is rubbish. The actual performance of a given recording format depends on ist design details, not on wether it's digital or analogue.

    I'm willing to contend that reel to reel tape can occasionally record ultrasonics above 20 kHz which 16/44 cannot, but for the most part it doesn't and it's not needed anyway. Its signal to noise ratio is positively lower than 16/44.

    Well he doesn't eplain it, he merely states it (around 05:20) without giving a reason. His only argument is some early CD productions having been botched, which he blames on digital technology, but that might not have been the real reason. The rest of his talk is about the lack of a single open standard and quick obsolescence in digital technology. All fair criticiscms, but not our discussion.
     
    SOONERFAN likes this.
  6. POE_UK

    POE_UK Forum Resident

    Location:
    Somerset
    Im not talking about ultrasonics, im talking about detail, clarity and depth, but reel 2 reel is capable of well above 60khz, not as if you will ever hear it
     
  7. GuildX700

    GuildX700 Forum Resident

    Location:
    USA
    Bottom line most likely is unless you are talking mid high end and up, the average audio equipment is built worse now than it was a decade ago. The golden age of great, reasonably priced stereo components is long gone for the most part. Brands that were trustworthy back then are either not even the same manufacture making them or if it is the same manufacturer they have significantly compromised their build quality more often than not.
     
    Eigenvector and anorak2 like this.
  8. anorak2

    anorak2 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Berlin, Germany
    Well it's not true. The signal that comes out of a 16/44 DAC is the same that went into the ADC, plus a smidge of noise 96dB down, and of course brickwalled at 20kHz. Otherwhise no detail is lost.

    Any system is capable of what you design it to, and I don't doubt for a second that a reel to reel system could be designed to perform at that frequency response. The reel to reel recorders one could actually buy in the 20th century running at any of the standard speeds probably could not. I just googled up 28kHz for a recorder running at 30ips, but maybe there are better ones out there.
     
  9. POE_UK

    POE_UK Forum Resident

    Location:
    Somerset
    You see what im saying is digital is not actually music, its software consisting of bits, bytes and binary data, an emulation of real audio, with digital what you are hearing is a sample of the music (think samplers) some people when listening to a digital file can actually hear the sampling as it happens and it sounds horrible, like artifacting and aliasing. For example a full analog master recording has to be squashed right down in quality to fit on a cd, and a lot of audio gets lost, a lot of the time this gives music producers a real headache and they have to use compressors.

    Analog is natural uncompressed audio, no different that what comes out of your voice box, this is one of the reasons why steve albini prefers it, real hifi enthusiasts use analog, digital is used for convenience over quality, thats what the cd was designed for. crackling of records and hiss of tapes is nothing compared to how much of the sound you lose from the tape master copy once it gets squashed on to a CD

    Have a listen to this, you should hear what happens to sound once it gets mixed down to CD, more you should notice how compressed the percussion sounds are: this is the cd maxed out for frequency response.

     
    Last edited: Mar 25, 2017
  10. Benzion

    Benzion "Cogito, ergo sum" Forum Resident

    Location:
    Brooklyn, NY
    From my own experience with current-production gear (entry to mid-level) the sound quality is better, the reliability is worse. My 2003 NAD CD player lasted seven years before it started skipping, current Cambridge CXC took less than a year, Project Debut Carbon needed a new tonearm ground wire in about six months.

    My circa 1996 Yamaha gear is still running all-original...
     
  11. POE_UK

    POE_UK Forum Resident

    Location:
    Somerset
    planned obsolescence mate, manufacturers do this on purpose so they dont last as long, just like light bulbs from years ago they lasted 30 years , now you will be lucky to get 2 years use

    This bulb at livermore california has been burning for 115 years! could you see that happening today?

    Livermore's Centennial Light Bulb
     
    Last edited: Mar 25, 2017
  12. profholt82

    profholt82 Resident Blowhard

    Location:
    West Michigan
    Can't help you with SACD players, but I do have an anecdote about SQ differences in portable media players. I have an ancient ipod (32gb video unit) from 2006 and a recent iphone (6s I believe).

    Last summer I was walking the dog listening to a lossless file on my ipod when it died because I had forgotten to charge the battery. I had the same exact album in apple lossless on my iphone. So I connected the headphones to the phone and continued on the album right where I left off on the ipod. I was shocked by how poor the sound quality was compared to the ipod. Instead of lush, full sound, it was thin and tinny sounding by comparison.

    After doing some reading after that, I came to find out that my ipod has a very well regarded Wolfson DAC in it that Apple no longer uses. I would hope that their current standalone ipods would sound better than their current phone line, but by my experience, this is a case of the 12 year old product being superior.
     
  13. anorak2

    anorak2 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Berlin, Germany
    Youtube is digital. The audible difference is obviously due to different mastering
    If you doubt this, download the audio as WAV and burn it to a CD. It will sound exactly like the youtube clip.
     
    JoshM likes this.
  14. POE_UK

    POE_UK Forum Resident

    Location:
    Somerset
    Ok but my point still remains, you cannot squash that much musical information onto a 5" cd and expect it to sound good because it wont.
     
    Mike Campbell likes this.
  15. Mike Campbell

    Mike Campbell Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Minnesota, USA
    Absolutely true....
     
  16. anorak2

    anorak2 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Berlin, Germany
    You mean because the disk is smaller??
     
    JoshM likes this.
  17. POE_UK

    POE_UK Forum Resident

    Location:
    Somerset
    Vinyl yes, vinyl is very much capable of such high bandwidth, but CD not a chance.
     
  18. JoshM

    JoshM Forum Resident

    Uhhhh....as anaorak2 said, YouTube is digital! The idea that audio information can't "fit" in a digital format is total nonsense. What you're hearing in the YouTube video is different mastering.
     
  19. POE_UK

    POE_UK Forum Resident

    Location:
    Somerset
    Yes you are trying to squash very high bandwidth music on, music that was mixed and designed to have a lot of headroom. cds cannot cope they are only 16 bits.
    it was a direct comparison of a reel recorded to a CD and what happens when you do it.
     
  20. JoshM

    JoshM Forum Resident

    Once again, YouTube is digital. The "analog" sound example in YouTube is itself digital.
     
    anorak2, nm_west and Mike Campbell like this.
  21. JoshM

    JoshM Forum Resident

    Please watch this video for an explanation of A/D to D/A and a demonstration of its effectiveness. Your description of sampling itself isn't really accurate.

     
    anorak2 and SOONERFAN like this.
  22. anorak2

    anorak2 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Berlin, Germany
    If you're trolling, you're good at it, because I'm falling for it. Anyway. How much physical space a given piece of information takes up is irrelevant, as long as it can be read correctly. That clip probably takes less than a square millimeter on the hard drives at Youtube, or even less if it's on a solid state drive.

    The Youtube clip probably uses the same sampling parameters as CD (tried to check that, but found no tool to do so), in any case it adds lossy compression on top. So its fidelity is at best equal, but probably worse than CD. The quality of the analogue recording you prefer did not noticeably suffer from going through that bottleneck, so why should it suffer from being recorded on CD?
     
    JoshM likes this.
  23. POE_UK

    POE_UK Forum Resident

    Location:
    Somerset
    Along the way of recording studer professional reel to reel master tapes to a CD sacrifices will be made, for starters cd in fact all digital has a maximum recording level of 0db, secondly 16 bits is far to low to capture a professional recording without doing compression and limiting, and lastly as i said above analog has no bitrate restriction, it goes as high as the tape and machine will allow. all along the digital chain there are limitations and sacrifices, and mastering tries to cure some of them, but unfortunately most of the time a digital remaster sounds plain crap.

    you get any vinyl from the 60s and 70s and it will beat any CD for sound.

    Cds are NOT the perfect audio they were made out to be, in fact far from it.
     
  24. SOONERFAN

    SOONERFAN Forum Resident

    Location:
    Norman, Oklahoma
    Great video. I discovered this one recently and it was very helpful in developing a better understanding of digital audio even though I not not very technical minded. I also found the video linked below very educational. I don't have a dog in this fight so to speak but am interested in understanding the different format technologies better just out of personal curiosity. I would love to hear some of the more technical minded folks comment on what Mark has to say in this video. I thought the technical analysis of the Neil Young Heart Of Gold master tape particularly interesting.

    High-Resolution Audio Demystified
     
  25. POE_UK

    POE_UK Forum Resident

    Location:
    Somerset
    This is correct there is no stair stepping in digital thats always been a lie, but what im saying is if you want to record a master tape properly CD is not the way to do it, a 24bit 192k or above file is the way
     
Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.

Share This Page

molar-endocrine