A/B Sound quality...what would you check first?

There is a range of quality of bass found on CDs that is all over the map, just like with LPs. Same with digital playback. I've found that the quality of the power supply for the CD transport, independent of the D/A converter, makes a major difference in sound quality in the bass, pitch and dynamics becoming more plausible as the power supply gets stiffer and more current is on tap. I'm thrilled with my Gaucho SACD. There's good and bad mastering found on all formats. I have no intention of dumping my LPs and turntable. But full-surround Digital is mighty entertaining and convincing.

 

Indeed...I was close to an out of body experience the other night listening to my newly acquired 5.1 of the Division Bell. Pure sex for the ears, no other way to describe it.

 

Yep, makes perfect sense. I'm not a vinyl guy (anymore) but I have no doubt that some vinyl sounds better than it's digital counterpart. And I have no doubt that some digital sounds better than it's vinyl counterpart. I think that's what you're experiencing first hand and I don't think it means there's anything wrong with any of your equipment. You should enjoy both worlds, if you can.

Now, where are we meeting for that beer?

 

I agree with some of the posters that masterings vary substantially for both vinyl and CD and hi-rez, and there are crummy and great examples in all three formats. I would add, from experience, that if you find something that sounds great to you, DON'T GET RID OF IT. It will probably still sound great to you years later, and maybe even better as your equipment improves. I have gotten rid of quasi-beat mono LPs that sounded excellent to me because I thought that a newer CD or a different LP of the same album "must be better", only to find after searching and listening that that beat mono LP actually was the best sounding version ever made of the piece of music. Trust your ears - if something sounds truly great to you, it probably is, regardless of format.

 

There is a sheer pleasure in manipulating LP and the whole ritual of setting up and adjusting the player that was never matched by CD, let alone digital files. Album art is another unmatched quality of LPs that I sadly miss. As far as sound itself - there are records that I can't really imagine without the LP cracks and noise - those of Billie Holiday being the ones that come to mind immediately.

Oh, and the fact that "next" is not as easy on vinyl as it is with digital - makes for a much more immersive and relaxed listen )))

 

Perhaps. My digital source sounds excellent even though it is redbook. It is clearly bettered by my analog source. I haven't explored the latest in digital technologies. Frankly, I'm not really interested in doing so because I have seen the "state of the art" in digital change so many times over the last 15 years and none of what I have heard has impressed me enough to buy into the new technology. My expectation is that digital will continue to change and render equipment and media worthless and obsolete while my records just keep on spinning. I don't proclaim vinyl the perfect technology (it isn't and I hate buying records with non fill or other damage, which happens all too often) but it sounds wonderful and terrifically satisfying on my system.

 

I don't know...First thing I was taught in Audio 101 at 5 Towns was that digital will never be able to completely reproduce an analog wave form/sound which is what we hear everyday. It will come close, but never completely replicate an analog wave form. We hear analog...from the drop of a pin to the sound of a bullhorn. It's all analog sound. We don't hear digital. That alone, in my opinion, makes vinyl a better source for sound replication. Not trying to push this conversation one way or the other...just trying to add the fact that analog is what we hear as human beings.

 

Then analog recording will never will never duplicate reality for the very same reasons. We hear 360° and in every direction. Analog reproduction doesn't even begin to make the attempt. And in any case, once you have any real experience with recording you know just how limited transducers with audible mechanical resonances are in capturing sonic events. Sorry, your argument is a fail on all levels.

 

How is it a fail on all levels...Analog out analog in. It's a lot closer than original analog to digital, which will never EXACTLY reproduce an analog form, and then back to analog for us to hear it. One way or another it always comes back to an analog sound because we need a way to actually hear what has been reproduced. The way I look at it is that digital is almost like a "photo copy" of an original. So in essence, it is one layer removed from the original. It's probably the reason why tube amps in a receiver are better than the newer systems that have chips and boards/computers to help reproduce the sound coming out of a unit like a record player/turntable. I could be wrong, but it is a lot simpler than people are making this out to be.

 

Back to the OP's experience: the problem with trying to compare two systems or sound chains, two formats, and often..two different masterings.... is going to be fraught with problems. If you took some time (and money) to tweak your TT rig, room, and even system components, you may find the vinyl creates more openness and detail.

In fact, if you took your two choices around to different systems and compared them, the varieties of differences you hear will be infinite. Each ones going to impart its flavor. So you may be better off deciding what flavor of vanilla tastes best. Which brings up another problem....your tastes may change over time. I've gone back to non-audiophile pressings after years of preferring the better detailed, better extension audiophile pressing and thought....what was I thinking? Sometimes the original mastering and format can't be beat. I keep wowing myself with all these old heavily compressed, non hi fi mastered 45's with lead in crackles - mid range like a locomotive jumping out of the speakers. Audiophile? Who needs it?

My suggestion is pick your preferred format and pursue that to satisfaction or whatever ends you want. Whether thats CD, hi-rez, vinyl or whatever. You have to please yourself first!

 

I don't know about you or the guys at Audio 101, but the rest of the human beings on Earth do not hear analogue electrical waves as in analogue audio signal. What we hear every day are acoustic sound waves, which are by nature mechanical

 

We can get into semantics all you want...analog sound waves are as close as you will get to what we hear as human beings. Digital will never be analog. It can try to replicate it, and with today's tech it will get close, but it will never be a true analog sound. Digital will always have that middle process that makes it one step removed from what was originally recorded. If an album was recorded digitally then that would be a completely different story. We've only had Digital recordings for about a quarter of the time that there have been analog recordings.

 

Bingo.

 

Either way, digital or analog, the music is being REPRODUCED into analog sound. 'Reproduced' is the key word here, not digital or analog. There's a 'middle process' regardless. Whether the music is reduced to 1's and 0's or little bumps in plastic, its being converted from the media and 'reproduced'.

You may feel that keeping the chain 'analog' is truest to the original sound but I'm not sure that's true. In the past, phone connections were 'analog' or more correctly, non-digital. As the signal got passed farther along it deteriorated, especially international calls. Today, those signals are digital and you can talk to someone half way around the world and it sounds like they're in the next room - the signal doesn't (necessarily) deteriorate. My point, as it relates to audio, is that as that 'analog' signal keeps getting passed (from the master tapes, thru the electronics, to the cutter, to the vinyl, thru the cartridge, etc.) it's losing something each time.

Edit: I'm not saying that vinyl can't sound good. But I think maybe you have a romantic notion of analog signals.

 

And I'm back in. Never works to keep my mouth shut. You are acting as though the analog recording process is somehow this pure, ideal thing where soundwaves are lovingly rendered directly onto a vinyl disc & then reproduced just as lovingly directly from the grooves in the vinyl to your ears. The sound is picked up by a microphone/direct input & converted to weak electrical signals. These signals are them amplified by a mic preamp (adding its own characteristics/distortions) prior to hitting the mixing board (adding its own characteristics/distortions), then running to effects (some of which may be digital-adding its own characteristics/distortions) & then back to the board (adding more of its own characteristics/distortions), then to analog or digital multi-track media (adding its own characteristics/distortions). I'll summarize the rest in a nutshell- multitrack media > EQ and/or compressor > master tape > amplifier > cutting heads > laquer > metal master > mother > stamper > LP > stylus > cartridge > preamp > amplifier > speakers > your ears. I probably missed a few steps. A little simpler for digital.

Point being, stop acting like sound reproduced from a vinyl record is somehow the pure, unspoiled sound of the original performance, cause it ain't, just like digital ain't.

 

Thank you! And it's both losing and gaining, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.

 

Actually, come to think of it, a setup like Edison's is closer to what people like to imagine the process of sound recording & reproduction is for vinyl. Sound travels into a horn that acoustically amplifies it and vibrates a needle that cuts a groove in wax. The wax groove vibrates a needle attached to a horn which acoustically amplifies the sound.

I'm sure you've heard the level of fidelity that setup produces:

 

It's not about semantics or nit-picking - you make it sound like the analogue audio is some kind of direct lossless representation of the acoustic sound waves we hear with our own years and this is simply no true. Magnetic tape, vinyl and digital are all medium and they all have their limitations and drawbacks and they all degrade the information recorded. They all keep the information in some kind of converted form - charged electric particles, mechanically cut grooves or bits and neither of them has unlimited resolution or dynamic range and neither of them is "lossless" for reasons specific to each medium.

The question is which medium brings most of the original information to your amp and unfortunately the answer to this question is not as easy or as straightforward as you suggest. Do you know that the first records were produced entirely acoustically (the acoustic sound waves were not converted to electrical signal through mics) - instead someone talked or sang or whatever into a horn causing a membrane to vibrate thus transmitting these vibrations to the cutting stylus. That would be the most direct acoustic sound transfer, which according to your theory, should have the most potential of hight fidelity sound and yet I don't see it used much in the last 100 years or so.

I completely agree with you, though, that "digital will never be analog" - I just don't get what's the point of this as an argument in the discussion of digital vs analogue. Apples will never be oranges either, so - which one of them is better?

 

I wrote exactly the same thing at exactly the same time ))

 

Exactly - digital has one major advantage over the other mediums - the digitised information can be replicated without any loss and reproduced infinite number of times without any degradation.

 

I have a vintage "tube" guitar amplifier and tube based microphone and I love the sounds they make. Analog technology, no?

However, I also have a digital 24 trak recording system that sounds absolutely wonderful. From an overall usability, reliability and sonic accuracy point of view, the digital system is better than the tape systems I have used except in one area.

The tape machines had a "sound" that was the result of tape compression when the inputs were slightly overloaded. Great for recording drums! However with tape, you were constantly trying capture the high end and the "air" in the sound of the high end, something that digital recording systems do with much greater ease.

With that said, it is complete hogwash to say that analog recording and playback systems are superior to digital in the accuracy of capturing the acoustic sounds made by humans singing and playing their instruments. One example being that there is a limitation in the "resolution" of the pits and grooves in the vinyl that a stylus has to detect and "feel" to create the field that is turned into a signal that is amplified and sent to a playback transducer. (the speaker) You dont believe that there is some distortion introduced in this process relative to the original acoustic sound?

This process does not provide a perfect replication of the original acoustic sound, and it has limitations in signal to noise and frequency response compared to digital. It's inferior in many ways.

However, and this is a big one, the analog system has a "sound" that is described as rounder, softer, more natural, and more pleasing than digital. Its rounder and softer because of the subtle amount of distortion introduced through the analog electric circuitry. A lot of work was done to fine tune this back in those analog days! (and at least 60 years of use. Digital in comparison 90's -2014 is but 24 years)

The sound of analog/vivyl is this something to be valued, but the resurgence of vinyl has been driven by the terrible use of brickwall limited digital masters that seek maximum loudness at the cost of quality sonics. A lot of new and re mastered has suffered from these techniques!

I think that this will pass............ (I hope!)

Sorry for War and Peace

 

While the point was made in a longer post above, it is worth highlighting the fact that there is a level of granularity that defines the maximum resolution of analog media and prevents it from perfectly reproducing a sine wave just as there is with digital.

With analog, the level of granularity is based on the number of magnetizable particles on a tape or the number of molecules in a vinyl groove. I am not sure how this degree of resolution compares to the degree or resolution of the highest resolution digital formats (I suspect it is superior) but the disadvantage is that the orginally recorded signal is not then transmitted from one part of the signal chain to the next perfectly, it is effectively being resampled and the next medium's level of granularity imposed on it at each step in the reproduction process, of which there are many.

(summarized above as multitrack media > EQ and/or compressor > master tape > amplifier > cutting heads > laquer > metal master > mother > stamper > LP > stylus > cartridge > preamp > amplifier > speakers > your ears)

Also the level of granularity in analog media is not fixed and cannot be as readily worked around mathematically as with digital media, where the nyquist theorem defines what can and can't be reproduced accurately, letting you design a format that can accurately reproduce up to a certain frequency level (well above audibility with the highest resolutions being used) and filter out the rest.

 

Have to say my recent experiences are very much like the OP's. I've got a turntable that probably is in the same general level of quality as the OP. A lot of my records being used and making needledrops for others, my system was hobbled together to get the most out of sources that had built-in compromises. Rolling off the top octave and pumping up the lower-mids was just fine by me. All things considered, the phono section of the Kenwood KR 9600 from 1977 is pretty good, with a generous overload margin and a low noise floor. the Strathclyde/SME/Shure 'table is somewhere in Linn Sondek LP-12 territory, without the mid-bass bump. The SME/Shure combo will track anything. I have an oddball set-up involving multiple speakers. So far so good.

An Onkyo TX SR 606 AV receiver, made around 2008, shows up at a local thrift store for $49. How can I resist? I find that this 7.1 receiver does a much better job of driving my speaker array than the Kenwood, not at all surprising. But I couldn't help but notice that the Onkyo has a built-in D/A converter, one that is much better than the D/A converter for my ten-year-old Sony DVP-NS-775v, the cheapest SACD player I could find at the time. Bought two of 'em, they expereinced lots of use, do not regret it. As CD players, the Sony's onboard converters are less fluid and detailed sounding than the AV receiver's built in resources. Comparing the overall character of the 6 year old Onkyo as an amplifier in two channel playback to the 37 year old Kenwood, the Onkyo is less distorted, less grainy. My digital gear would all be regarded as mid fi stuff, but the level of difference in sound quality is very much improved via the Onkyo, with its more up-to date digital technology compared to the technology of even ten years ago.

I suspect that digital, right now, can easily sound as good as good analog. As regards the very best analog as compared to the very best digital, haven't heard either, have no real frame of reference circa 2014. Best analog rig I heard was in 2000. I know the best is yet to come for Digital formats. Right now, comparing LPs and Digital sources, I could toss a coin.

 

As far as I can tell, the 'granularity' of the system appears to go away as one approaches 24 bits, something like 144db of dynamic range. Only problem being that electronic self-noise swamps the S/N ratio, so no gear is actually performing at 24 bits. Not the fault of the digital circuits as much as the analog side of the system. Barry Diament, who once upon a time helpfully posted here, claimed that the Metric Halo recording system got out of the way of a microphone feed better than anything else he's ever used.

 

Ah, but the ritual of setting up the tape deck when making hi-res digital files is every bit as significant as setting up a turntable. Do it once when you make the file and you'll never have to worry about it being off again.

Personally, I'm pretty lazy and like doing something once so I won't have to do it again. With playing LP's you really have to set up your table for each record if you're really fussy. That to me is a big advantage of digital. You can be assured that your set up is always spot on once you've done the work.