What is needed to have the best CD/Digital sound?

What can it be about tubes and vinyl that adds warmth and richness except distortion? I concede that the quantization process and the conversion back to the analog domain can be flawed in a number of ways, but this is an area of understood signal processing. Done correctly, isn't digitization of the acoustic information more likely to capture an accurate representation of that information?

db

Great Northern Sound Steve Huntley's upgrade Magic

Donbellphd, it depends on how you define accuracy. I hate to get off the initial thread but I don’t think we can say that digital sound is inherently or potentially more accurate than analog sound or vice versa. It’s all a matter of definition and execution. Both technologies have their own strength and weaknesses in dealing with complex musical information. Digital sound gives you the MAIN musical signals accurately without noise but misses some of the musical subtleties--richness and warmth are not all distortions; they are high harmonics in the musical signals themselves. Analog sound gives you the main AND subtle features of the musical signal but also additional noises. One error is mostly subtractive, the other mostly additive. But both technologies are capable of reducing their inaccuracies though not the same way.

I am a pragmatist with little emotional attachment or dogmatic belief in either format. I just look at the end results. The sound of analog master tape, a 50-year old technology, has all the attributes of the best digital sound but in far greater degree and is stunningly musical. If to get all the music I have to also get a little distortion, I’ll take it. Mind you, digital sound is improving all the time. By definition, however, digital sound will always remain an approximation. One day it can be close enough to the real thing that the tiny difference may not really matter to anyone. But that day is far from here yet and may or may not come.

Digitization is a very powerful tool that allows us to do things heretofore impossible with analog approach. Digital sound also offers great compatibility with the Internet, computer, telephone, and other digital technologies we currently enjoy. But digital sound is far from perfect and it is not a panacea. It has its own kind of “distortions” that are different but as (if not more) difficult to eliminate as analog distortions. The best analog sound is warm, rich, highly musical but a little noisy. The best digital sound is clean, detailed, and extremely quiet but a little dry. BOTH are inaccurate and I have no proof that either is inherently superior. They are just different.

Justin,

I think you're talking about beats among high frequency harmonics that result in sounds you can hear. At the sample rates used with some digital capture, several times the usual limits of audibility, you would expect to capature those harmonics. I'm not sure what the current trend is, but even in my day the best spectral analzers were digital. My experience with tape was that it was delicate stuff. We used professional Ampex machines in the lab and Nagras in the field, and rewound the tape slowly and backwards to reduce print-through. I wonder if any recording studios still use analog tape recorders.

Afterall, the acoustic energy goes through at least two transduction processes, first into electrical energy by the microphone during recording and then back to acoustic energy by whatever speaker is used during playback. In the case of vinyl, there is at least two additional transductions, electrical energy to mechanical at the lathe that cuts the master then mechnical to electrical by the cartridge assembly that tracks the grooves in the vinyl. If a tape recorder is used, there's also electrical to magnetic and back to electrical. Lots of opportunities for distortion to creep in.

db

Don, I am not sure I follow your line of thought. Sorry.

My point was simply that analog is just as capable of outstanding sound as digital. For either format, it still comes down to execution, not theoretical superiority.

I had the privilege to listen to some analog master-tape recordings of pop songs and the sound was vastly superior to the sound from analog LP or digital SACD/CD both of which I own. So excellence resides in the execution, not in a specific format. While the convenience of the digital format is quite abvious, I am unconvinced that it has any INHERENT or THEORETICAL ability to capture and reproduce music better than analog.

So far, the best digital sound from SACD/CD still has quite a way to go to catch up with the best LP sound. Theoretical explanation notwithstanding, SACD/CD is still unable to convey the richness and subtleties found in real music which LP seems to be able to routinely deliver albeit laced with colorations and noises.

I wish things were the other way around. I am sick and tired of adjusting my turntable/tonearm/cartridge and keeping my LPs clean--a real pain in the neck--and I long for the days when I can just enjoy the music with the convenience of the digital format. But so far, while digital sound is getting much better, it is still missing quite a bit of the richness of live music.

It may be premature to proclaim the superiority of digital sound now while it's still running behind. Let's wait and see.