A very good ENGINEERING explanation of why analog can not be as good as digital..

By coincidence I received my January 2019 issue of The Absolute Sound yesterday. I’m looking through the table of contents and I see a review of the MSB Reference DAC and Transport. The blurb says, "After railing mightily against all things digital for almost thirty years, our Mr. Valin (Jonathan Valin) has finally found a DAC and transport he can live with long-term."

A couple of quotes from the review:

"As I just said it wasn’t as if Connick and Marsalis had developed the body and bloom of an LP on voice and sax. And yet, in spite of this, the MSB gear reproduced both singer and sax with such supernaturally lifelike immediacy, resolution of performance detail, neutrality of tone color and dynamic range that they sounded ’there’ enough to astonish me."

"To be frank, when it comes to digital sources, I ain’t no Robert Harley. Still, I know real when I hear it, and with the Reference DAC/Transport I heard it to an extent I wouldn’t have thought possible the day before this MSB gear arrived - and I heard it on CD, SACD, high-res streaming, and (par excellence) MQA streaming."

(me again) So it appears that there were no stairstep soundwaves coming out of Mr. Valin’s speakers, no missing information and no digital ice flecks blowing in his face.

The base price of the DAC is $39,500 with a number of upgrade options ranging from $990 to $14,905 (for a femto 33 clock, the femto 77 clock costs $4,995 if you’re on a tight budget). The transport costs $18,500.

This is not the top-of-the-line model either. The top-of-the-line model is supposed to be better in every way. That’s still a lot of money for a DAC and Transport, though, but it’s chicken feed compared to his analog gear. A couple of examples (he has much more): Acoustic Signature Invictus Jr /T-9000 $123,000 (no cartridge), Walker Audio Proscenium Black Diamond Mk V $110,000 (no cartridge). Add a few good cartridges , a couple of top rate phono stages, a good isolation base and rack, some cables of this caliber and you’re talking real money.  So he was comparing the MSB digital gear to top shelf analog gear. 

So if you think that your turntable sounds better than the MSB Reference DAC and Transport in Valin’s system or that vinyl always sounds better than digital, you’re fooling yourself, and that will only get harder and harder to do as time goes on and digital continues its fast pace of improvement. But if you want to believe that vinyl is always better than digital or that digital is fundamentally flawed and can’t be fixed, that’s OK with me.

Are you implying that the cost of the system determines the quality of the output? If that’s the case, I’ve never seen a $30k Birkin looks and feel better than $1k LV. They’re just more about something else rather than the functionalities.

I do not think that more money necessarily equals better sound. I think that when an audio professional who listens to a variety of audio gear all the time and communicates frequently with the people who design and build the gear spends $123,000 on a turntable and probably has it set up by the guy who designed it, there is a good chance it will sound better than one you pay $5,000 for and set up yourself.

I know that Valin doesn’t pay $123,000 nor would you pay list price for a $5,000 turntable. I’m just using the list prices for comparison purposes.

A very good ENGINEERING explanation of why analog can not be as good as digital..

"They" (analog diehards) said the same about analog cameras (movie or still) vs digital cameras (movie or still)

Cheers George 

It is said that to equal an LP, a digital system would have to sample at minimum of 7 million samples a second, and with ~zero jitter~ in that spec to be met. The interchannel timing accuracy of an LP is way out of the league of the Best digital out there.

This was known by the mid 90’s.

In complex harmonic signals, which is what music is.... the human hearing..meeting that spec with digital... might require a minimal sample rate of a few million samples a second.

Just to hear a single short bell tone in proper space, acoustically, in a triangle or equilateral set up of listener and speakers, at 8 feet apart, etc..a digital system would have to sample at a minimum of 225k samples er second, at a 20 bit depth, with ZERO jitter. that’s a minimum, for a single short pure tone. If the point source seems to move to the ears, by one inch of placement in space and we can hear that easily (we can!)..well..that ’s the minimum spec (225/20) required to get that out properly.

Now add in an entire orchestra and accompanying space.

We were discussing this on line and arguing about it, again, by the mid 90’s. On the bulletin board systems in the "rec.highend" discussions.

None of these critical specs have miraculously changed.

Neither has the argument from those espousing digital as superior. Such arguments don’t take into account the ear and how it works, nor do they take into account the fundamental physical specifications of an LP, in a complete way.

It’s the standard case of cherry picking one’s ignorance into a false premise.

23-24 years later these tedious arguments still come around.