Vinyl / High qual analog tape / High-res digital -- One of these is not like the other


One common theme I read on forums here and elsewhere is the view by many that there is a pecking order in quality:

Top - High Quality Analog TapeNext - VinylBottom - Digital

I will go out on a limb and say that most, probably approaching almost all those making the claim have never heard a really good analog tape machine and high resolution digital side by side, and have certainly never heard what comes out the other end when it goes to vinyl, i.e. heard the tape/file that went to the cutter, then compared that to the resultant record?

High quality analog tape and high quality digital sound very similar. Add a bit of hiss (noise) to digital, and it would be very difficult to tell which is which. It is not digital, especially high resolution digital that is the outlier, it is vinyl. It is different from the other two.  Perhaps if more people actually experienced this, they would have a different approach to analog/vinyl?

This post has nothing to do with personal taste. If you prefer vinyl, then stick with it and enjoy it. There are reasons why the analog processing that occurs in the vinyl "process" can result in a sound that pleases someone. However, knowledge is good, and if you are set in your ways, you may be preventing the next leap.
roberttdid
Live events and a live instrument is one kind of experience; a cd or a vinyl are other experiences....Is it necessary to preach with engineering numbers the sacred truth of  the digital gospel? Is it realist to ask a cd, a vinyl, or a files or a tape, to reproduce the lived event totally? Each one will do his job with his own means and biases.... 


For me I accept the differences, and I live with them for what they are , a world in itself, not reducible, with his positives and negatives....



I listen to an organ opus of Bach right now, it will be different with a cd, a files, a vinyl, or with Tidal, with various tape recorder, or in a church live on a particular organ.... Why debating about the "truth" ? There is no truth here, except the particular advantages of each experiences.... My grain of salt.... :)


Electronical components and materials and mediums are not sounds, and sounds are not music, they lack the consciousness living the musical experience that will interpret these sounds, recreating them in the mind-body in the form of a synesthesic complexes of gestures, movements, emotions, ideas and perceptions....

Music is the relation between sounds and these synesthesic complexes....Music is not the faithfulness to an alleged " objective truth" about the reproduction of sound....

Too many concrete factors are also implicated to debate that seriously....Never mind the electronic components used, vinyl or tape or cd etc, their embeddings plays the more fundamental role in the final listening experience... Not one audio system sound the same....Is it then possible to decide the "truth" in the abstract, with only engineering numbers to take the decision? Asking the question is the answering.... :)


A final note: Someone can decide for himself, with his own system, be it very refined, but at the end his testimony is an interesting fact with which we can partake or not.... But this is a relative truth not an absolute truth....Mikelavigne for example has spoken about his own experience and his particular audio system in his particular house, and this gives matter to think...But anyone of us live with other system, other houses, and other tastes, and other past experiences etc....



I own close to 15,000 records, and I currently use three turntables.  I also have an SACD player and a music server.  If I was a record producer, and I wanted the best sound, and money was absolutely no object, I would record in digital.  That’s how good the current state of the art is.
mahgister
Live events and a live instrument is one kind of experience; a cd or a vinyl are other experiences....Is it necessary to preach with engineering numbers the sacred truth of the digital gospel? Is it realist to ask a cd, a vinyl, or a files or a tape, to reproduce the lived event totally? Each one will do his job with his own means and biases....

>>>>>While a great many audiophiles consider live acoustic music to be the sine qua non of sound quality and that “live music“ should be the absolute yardstick for measuring our home systems’ performance I believe that’s a logical fallacy. For one thing all venues where live music is performed sound different. Even one’s location at a venue sounds different from others. So how can they ever be an ideal sound? There can’t. Second, we should be striving to reproduce whatever was Encoded on the CD or Record or tape. Live music is a red herring.
Live music is a red herring.
This is also my opinion....Reduction of music experiences to only lived events is too drastic for me....All recorded musics materials and various kind of lived events are different experiences...

How to compare Ray Charles living presence in real time to a files?
It is impossible...

But how to ask to a files or a tape the same thing that a lived event only can give?

Where is the yardstick to compare cd, vinyl, tape, outdoor concert event, indoor concert event, in good acoustical space or in bad acoustical space, and my first love girl playing piano in his own house beside me?

What is a lived event, where is my location in this event? Which event? By who?

Only count a lived event in an ideal acoustical studio or theater?

In a word i love Bach coming from any room, files, players, or planet, even coming from the tape of geoffkait, it will be a hell of a lifetime lived event.... :)


Dear @mahgister : """ How to compare Ray Charles living presence in real time to a files?
It is impossible.. """

Well that’s not exactly the target when some of us speak about nearfield live MUSIC but that through these kind of live events experiences we at least can know the MUSIC and instruments true sound.
We can’t mimic in any room/system but we can take it as a " reference ".

My target is not to mimic what as you said is impossible, my target is to listen my system nearer to the recording having that nearfield live MUSIC experiences and that’s all.

If I’m listening LPs I want of achieve the best quality performance levels I can and the same is with digital.

Something that helps me about is to mantain every kind of room/system developed distortions at minimum.

In home system mimic live MUSIC is out of question.

""" Not one audio system sound the same....Is it then possible to decide the "truth" in the abstract, with only engineering numbers to take the decision? """

Numbers say a lot and additional are each one first hand experiences with their own systems and through other systems. So we can make a comparison of different mediums with facts/numbers and those experiences. The mos controversial/debatible parameter in that kind of comparison is that subjectivity that is different for different audiophiles.

As some other gentlemans in this and other thread as one of the latest posts by @psag I know for sure that exist a superiority level in digital against LP analog alternative but this kind of knowledge does not preclude the fact that I listen and enjoy the LP experiences.

I said in other post that the best for digital is forthcoming in contrast the LP technology is just finished because can’t really grow up as technology it can’t be improved. What we can improve is our system but the analog alternative per sé years ago arrived to its top limit.
We don’t have nothing really new on LP technology even the best is doing is returning to old LP developments as D2D recordings or one step recordings or things like that because fundamental principles in the recording process or playback one as cartridges or tonearms or TT are exactly the same as 20-30 year ago. The only thing that really changed in analog are its very high item prices year after year .

We analog lovers do not like those facts and we are not willing to accept it but at the end like it or not that’s the reality that’s the true and are not " numbers ".

Regards and enjoy the MUSIC NOT DISTORTIONS,
R.