My SHM-CD results...

Old people associate computers with work. Young people associate them with fun--surfing the net, downloading videos and songs, playing, socializing, porn, gaming.

Anyway, many serious people think that streaming music from computer to DAC is often better than any other method. Look at Linn--they dropped their players for a line of streamers (the DS line). People are VERY impressed with the sound.

 

I'm not old and most of my work is done with a computer now, though I do scribble into notebooks from time to time. Call me old-fashioned but I hate confusing a computer with music listening (or playing), much less with real human joy, interaction and experience. I like music that you can actually touch -- it's a kind of context for me -- as much I love holding books by those authors who changed my life, and so on. I thought what yenyen said was lovely, and funny.

 

I'm late to this thread, so my apologies if this has already been answered. What method did you you use to determine that they are absolutely the same mastering (i.e. bit identical)?

 

Wow. Fabulous post yenyen. I can totally relate to that. Even if I'm only 24 and far from being "techno-stupid". I must be sick.

 

I enjoyed what he said but it would be more appropriate in the 'ripping CD's is boring' thread.

 

Hey art--you're old fashioned.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I personally don't go in for all that "authenticity" stuff. I mean a cd is an "artificial" medium too. And then so is an LP. Just different types of artifices. Different strokes.

Yenyen's best point is about the stability of cd in terms of no network glitches or what have you. But then have you ever dropped a disk and scratched it. Ever not been able to find a disk? Those are cd instabilities, for me anyway. I have thousands of the damned things and never enough room. So I'm moving to a server.

 

Hasn't Mr. Diament repeated said things along those lines here? Is his "master" not a file on a hard drive?

 

The authenticity bit seems funny to me also. I'm 44, grew up with vinyl and the best sound I've had at home was from a modern Nottingham turntable and EAR tube preamp. The only point I was trying to make was that sometimes it seems that the amount of labour over a CD seems pointless if maximum fidelity is the goal and an alternate superior method of digital playback is readily at hand. It's like designing a glove to allow faster use of a rotary dial telephone. I do have some discs in the closet with purple marker around the edges and filling in the clear centre so I've done my CD dues.

I easily understand the resistance to converting a CD library to files as that chore is truly awful.

 

As far as the hard drive/computer thing goes, as lukpac implies, the music we hear if it was mastered in the past decade all comes from hard drives on workstations, even if it was tracked to tape to begin with. No one records direct to cd. It is an intervening media. If you want to hear music as the engineers made it, you should get a workstation, Wavelab (or similar), and an Apogee or Lavry or Weiss or other pro-DAC set-up. Certainly not a cd.

 

Heck, I am "old" (56) and I ripped ALL of my CDs and am using a Squeezebox exclusively now...I love computers, but I am an old IT manager, so....

 

Why does this SHM-CD thread remind me, a little bit, of the movie "Brazil"?

Maybe it's the "better glove to dial a rotary telephone" idea. That's the sort of thing that is such a wonderful "Brazil" concept.

BTW, my grandparents had a late 1930's vintage rotary telephone, and its fidelity was vastly, vastly superior to today's crap...........

 

A great post!

 

If old-fashioned means understanding that things you love are disappearing, then yeah, I suppose I am. You're right. But who said anything about 'authenticity'? That word has no meaning, and even if it did I'd never claim such. Never. Yikes.

Apologies for derailing the thread .... Carry on, gents ...

 

Is this post:
1) for real:
2) or in jest.

 

I plan to attach a high-end DAE wirelessly to a hard drive full of ripped CDs and 24/192 needledrops one day and feel thoroughly confident that I have not compromised the digital medium one iota.

Different strokes for different folks, people.

 

Real!

 

Clearly.

 

Hey Art, what do you mean by "real" interaction, or experience? Or "real human" joy. You don't have to answer that if you don't want. From my perspective, though you did not say authenticity, what you said fits within a longstanding discourse of authenticity as technology's opposite.

Anyhoo, from where I sit, my experiences and interactions on a computer are real! And many people experience "human joy" under the auspices of computers!

Look, yenyen and others, we are here at a forum that celebrates a mediated experience--recorded music. We are here under the auspices of someone whose career it is to mediate, someone who sits as the final step in a long chain of processing that brings music to us. To say that CD is more elegant, or less obsessive, or whatever, well that is certainly your right and your opinion.

I just don't think too many people share that opinion, even within the audiophile community, and certainly among up-and-coming audiophiles. If you asked 1000 people whether an ipod or a stack of SHM cds and a DCS stack were more elegant, 998 would say the former. If you asked the same question to 1000 people at a hi-fi show, 700 would say the former.

I mean, my multiple shelves and drawers and piles of 4000 cds and a Naim CDS (two box player), or two USB hard drives, a five year old laptop, a DAC, and a choice of slick interfaces? Are you joking? The cd player is more elegant? Really? Ok, the player may be, but the disks are not.

I also think it's funny that CDs are described as not obsessive, when this forum contains a daily paean to obsessiveness about cds. Including this one. Not that I'm putting it down--I'm here too after all.

 

None. He assumes because the booklet doesn't say "REMASTERED FOR SHM" it must be the same.

 

This is from David Shapiro's NEUROTIC STYLES:


"...the obsessive-compulsive person...will not say, 'It is true,' but will say something like, 'It must be' or 'It fits.'"


This SHM thread is shot through with folks coming aboard - many from the hard drive side, since the last thing that hard drivers want is someone coming up with a better-sounding CD of any kind - and doing the above Shapiro thing.

Without listening, they are dismissing SHMs as "marketing ploys", or they say that "clearer plastic can't possibly make CDs sound better." (Shapiro's "It doesn't fit" the obsessives' narrow and technical cognitive style.)

I'd also suggest that those who dismiss SHMs out-of-hand are envious of markl's etc. child-like willingness to play and to experiment, to use his own ears, to go beyond "it doesn't fit" into the world of infinite richness and possibilities. Helmut Schoeck's book "ENVY" might help here, as well as Ann and Barry Ulanov's "CINDERELLA AND HER SISTERS: The Envied and the Envying".

Now, somebody get off your fat ****, and tell me, definitively, which sounds better: a cut off a regular CD, an LP, a Blu-Spec CD, an SHM-CD, or something massaged off a hard drive and pulled through the ether, provided that all have the same mastering, of course. Well?

Can't do it, can you? Of course not.

That's what makes this kind of thread so much fun............

 

I've rarely read a more misinformed or insulting post in all my years here.

 

So . . . the same way you dismissed hard-drive based playback, without even understanding what it is?

 

Edb15: Ah, man ... sorry if I sounded like a pompous idiot. I meant real is anything -- a person, a song, a f**k, that last day of school, a three-day bender, whatever -- that connects me to world greater than my own, technology driven or not. For me, that doesn't involve staring into a computer screen, but it does often involve things/places/ideas that are in no way 'authentic.' It's but a personal definition, albeit inarticulate as all hell.

& so as not to be a total threadcap: I've a few shm-cds that i dig more than their counterparts whose masterings are identical. Others I have offer absolutely no sonic upgrade ...

 

Here we are having an involved chat, on a fairly arcane subject, and folks have weighed in with opinions from all over the US, plus from Canada, England, France, Australia, Germany, Japan, Poland, Spain, Croatia, Russia, and Ireland! You may not agree with all of the opinions expressed, yet they are the honest and truthful views of everyday folks. Not born of marketing BS, or media hype, or political spin.

Name me one cultural innovation that has connected folk's to a world greater then their own, more so then the personal computer has done?

 

Yenyen, no one is upset at the prospect of better sounding cds. And I am not saying an SHM cd can't sound better on a CD player. But first, we need an apples to apples comparison--to verify that the disks compared are identical masterings, which we don't have in this thread, despite the fact it is dead easy to do via shareware programs.

Second, and this is the important part:

If CD media have an effect on sound when played on a CD player, then all they can do is make it worse than the data, not better. The chain with a CD player goes laser to bitstream to DAC to analog out. On a hard drive ripped from cd you can get the data perfectly off the disk (which is verified by something called AccurateRip, which compares the checksums of the files you ripped to what other people who ripped got, creating in many cases astronomically small odds of an error). Then it gets clocked into a bitstream and goes to the DAC to analog out.

On the CD player side, it is possible that the optical qualities of the disk affect the player and how well it constructs a bitstream, and it ranges from perfect to unknowable subtle degradation. The issue is that the bits off a CD is not just data, but the timing with which it is read is that provides the clock for its conversion to analog. So the ease of reading *might* affect sound.

On the computer side, either it rips perfectly or not--and you know whether it did. Badly scratched or perfect, SHM, gold, or whatever, what comes off the disk is just the bits. No unknown degradation to what was on the CD, subtle or otherwise, is possible. The computer then takes the bits and clocks them into a bitstream before sending on to the DAC. By separating the reading of the bits from the construction of the bitstream, the computer takes one variable out of the equation.

Thus, even if SHM provides a superior read for CD players, that represents an asymptotically approached perfection, whereas the computer is always already operating at that level. So even if SHM is better on a CD player, all it shows is the imperfection of the CD player as a tool.