Why does vinyl (analog) sound better?

Well, IMO the point has to be geared towards commercial release capabilities. as consumers of commercial Redbook CDs the technical capacities for Redbook are meaningless unless it extends into the commercial mass production of them.

I think you have to look at both. but I think the starting point is with a master tape, a commercial LP from that master tape with no processing and a commercial CD of that master tape with no processing. Both made to the highest standards possible through commercial mass production. As I have pointed out we already have such a beast with the Boyk recording of Pictures at an Exhibition. I'd bet dollars to donuts if one were to come up with a reasonable proposal for investigating these differences Boyk would make the master tape available for technical measurments and controled listening tests.

I am also interested in getting the best sound. But as a consumer of commercial goods it has to be able to make it's way to me through commercial products.

 

Maybe it's a good thing maybe it's a bad thing but the scientific world is quite disinterested in audiophilia. When on looks at the great debates in audio one is pretty hard pressed to find any conclusions in any peer reviewed published scientific papers on those subjects.

 

Right now, I'm loading the household's CDs into the I-Mac in MP-4. Fine for boomboxes and cars. I paid $140 for 250 gigabytes of storage. Storage is no longer a meaningful issue, it's cheap, it's easy and there's lots of it. Downloads are becoming the new paradigm. I'm predicting hi-rez downloads in the very near future. I see defense of the Redbook standard as some sort of "ultimate" or "perfect" playback medium become more pointless with each passing day. Commercially (those of you with access to "Billboard's" charts will know what I'm talking about), the CD is in the "Crash & Burn" stage of the product roll-out cycle.

(EDIT: I'm up to 5971 songs in the I-Tunes library right now.)

 

This at least has the merit of plausibility. FWIW, I couldn't agree more that the weakest link in sound reproduction is speakers and rooms. (That is, at the playback end. At the recording end, the weakest link is microphones and their placement.)

Why worry about whether vinyl sounds better than CD when your room is causing huge peaks and dips, or your speakers are too "hot" in the treble? The best audio investment I ever made was an inexpensive analog EQ. Move your speakers around your room until you find a position without deep nulls, then EQ them flat below about 300Hz. The results dwarf any subtle differences between vinyl and digital. (Or any subtle differences among electronics or wires, for that matter.)

 

We've gone over this before. As I said then, the digital data isn't changing. Make a CD-R and any pressing specific issues are gone.

 

So was Robert Greene (and, by extension, I) misinformed about Bob Stuart having done blind listening tests to support his conclusions? If he didn't, it is difficult to see what validity his findings could have.

 

Ah. I think you answered my question above. As I mentioned, I wasn't able to open the pdf file for some reason, but if what you say above is true, I won't bother.

You are right about your proposed tests for transparency, of course. Would you agree that until someone does them, the nearest thing we have is the evidence of recording engineers? Granted, such evidence is anecdotal, and not tested under blind conditions. But the pros are in a better position than anyone to compare a recording chain to a live mike feed. So I take seriously what they have to say about the transparency of DACs, for example.

 

Yeah we went over it and we drew very different conclusions. There is absolutely no proof that what you cited applied to the problems they had with the making of the Mercury reissues. Those problems were never tested with that fix. Them's the facts. Besides that it is irrelevant. The CDs are what they are from the manufatcurer even if you can fix some problems with a copy.

 

Yes, that made a big difference in my listening room as well. I was luckily able to eliminate any substantial bass resonance modes without using EQ. I still have a treble problem which I will tackle someday soon. However, once you knock back the major room problems, you can hear differences between formats and media, as well as different components inserted into your system.

 

There's also nothing to suggest I'm wrong, either. They said a different LBR resulted in different sound. They never said the digital data was changed. Based on other evidence (such as the aforementioned Roger Nichols article), the LBR differences do *not* result in differences in the digital data.

Plus, as I've pointed out, it is player dependent. What's a big problem on one player might not be on another.

In the larger scope of this discussion, I find this quote interesting:

 

Shouldn't a well-designed DAC (i.e., one that buffers and re-clocks the data) eliminate such jitter? If so, why does it matter?

 

And after fifteen straight hours of comparing the sound of the real thing vs. what's being laid down on tape, all the sandpaper and Vaseline in the mix starts to jump out at you from the monitors. Sounds that coarsen in texture, sounds that lack "grip". Sounds that don't sound like the real thing. Get out of the AD/DA chain and things improve.

 

IT ISN'T JITTER.

http://www.prismsound.com/m_r_downloads/cdinvest.pdf

 

OK, OK. But what about my question concerning DACs that buffer and re-clock the incoming data? Shouldn't they eliminate this... er... "problem"? LATER: Ah. Your source does answer it.

(As others in this thread pointed out, burning a CD-R copy should eliminate it, too.)

 

Again - CD players don't clock off of what's coming off of the CD, they clock via an internal oscillator.

Also from the paper:

That said, they didn't have much of a conclusion when it came to blind listening tests.

 

You may feel comfortable drawing conclusions in complete absence of proof. I am not. I think science is on my side on this one.

They never checked it either. So again you are basing conclusions on an absence of evidence. No thank you.

The other evidence does not apply. Period.

Again, in the absence of information all you are doing is speculating. I'll take your speculation as just that and nothing more. You may think you know what was going on with the Mercury reissues but I don't think you *know* what was going on. What you offer is a *possible* explanation and I am willing to take it as such but nothing more. Period.

Personally I found the path that lead them to this more interesting. But why do you find it interesting? What do you think it proves?

 

It doesn't? Exactly the same differences in sound? Exactly the same differences in production?

If anything, the fact that you keep citing that article is a bit perplexing. It simply says that different LBR's produced different sounding CDs. No attempt was made to investigate the issue further. While it may not prove my point (as Nichols' article seems to), it by no means disproves it, either. There is *no* evidence to suggest that the digital data is changing, either in that paper or elsewhere.

 

It is, it just isn't the more important sampling jitter. Here's something I wrote a while back about jitter related to CD-Rs, but also with some pointers to the same problems in pressed disc manufacturing:

http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/showpost.php?p=1682441&postcount=239

 

CD manufacturing-based jitter is discussed by Bob Katz:

 

But "disc jitter" isn't a correct term. Jitter is a timing issue in A/D and D/A conversions.

 

Luke, as Bob uses the terms and David Smith as well, there are types of jitter, one of which is that caused in the disc replication process.

Here's some interesting thoughts on analog versus digital from Bob which also gets to the original thread question:

 

No, it doesn't.

How on earth can you claim exact differences in sound from anecdotes from different people with different source material?

Really? I must have missed this one. They came from the same cutters with the same consoles?

And you find citation of this phenomenon perplexing? In an envirement where many claim such things don't even exist? I find that perplexing as well as your conclusions based on an absence of relevant information.

I agree. Sooooo your hypothesis is an an untested hypothesis. Nothing more nothing less. I have already said as much. Glad to see you finally have come to the same conclusion.

And there is *no* evidence to suggest it did not. Again your reference to an absence of evidence is, as you say, perplexing. it is quite unscientific to draw any conclusions based on an absence of evidence when the absence is due to no one checking for it.

 

I've posted Nichols' article several times. He obviously claims such problems *do* exist.

I've never said the problems don't exist. I've said they are system dependent and can be reduced/eliminated easily enough.

Yes, there is, actually. Both the Nichols article and the Prism paper indicate the digital data is identical. I've tested CDs that other claim sound vastly different, and guess what - they are identical too. Thus, we have a body of evidence that indicates that when different sounds are produced by different LBR's, the data is digitally identical, yet *no* evidence to suggest the data is changed.

 

Because the "subtle differences" that I hear between vinyl and CD can also be detected using headphones (and different headphones at that), where room interference doesn't even play into the equation. The plusses that I hear -- those distortions as some refer to them -- are not strictly frequency response (i.e. EQ) dependent. That's not to say I'm anti-CD or oblivious to vinyl's negatives (of which there are many). Nor do I have any kind of emotional attachment to either format. I use CD and use it regularly. I just feel, at the end of the day, that vinyl sounds better.

 

Yes, it is, which is why there is a specification for it. In communication systems it would be termed transmission jitter. It's the same thing, and you need to keep it within certain limits to prevent decisions on whether you are receiving/decoding a 0 or a 1 from being incorrect.

What you are referring to is sampling jitter. The sampling jitter is 'locked' into the data, and cannot be removed. You minimize it by using the most accurate clocks available to you. Disc/transmission jitter, on the other hand, is managable, and can be completely eliminated.

It should be borne in mind that the disc jitter only affects the EFM-coded signal, not the raw PCM data, since that is re-created after fourteen-to-eight demodulation and de-interleaving, i.e., the raw PCM data is created new inside a DSP. The disc jitter is a problem if it is so high that errors are generated in the EFM-encoded data that cannot be corrected by the forward error correction scheme (CIRC in the case of CD).