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

i have invested high degrees of assets in tape, vinyl and digital. taken each as far as i can go. as far as anyone. and my comments are related to the top level of each format. what happens in each format on the way to these levels could be completely different than my experience.

so for me and my system.......i’d say that the best vinyl sounds really the same as tape. when you play the best pressings, including 45rpm and direct to disc on vinyl, then play tape, it’s doing the same things. maybe 1/2" tape steps up farther.

i have three turntables with different drive systems and different type tone arms and so there are tiny variations in those playback characters that the tape does not have in the same way. yet the tape quality is more all over the board so there are variations on each side. we could spend 10 hours switching back and forth and i think it’s easier to keep playing stellar vinyl and stellar tape is more challenging to find.

with digital there are degrees of things missing, that are not missing from the vinyl and tape. period. exclamation point. m i s s i n g. and i’m a guy with $160k invested in my digital hardware. i’m a serious digital person. yet......it’s not like those other 2. you can talk mic feeds and all that crap. just listen head to head for a period of time. it hits you right in the nose.

i do lots of listening sessions with visitors. we start with digital, but once we switch to analog we rarely switch back unless people want to play something they know that is only digital. analog is just more real. no math conversions holding back reality involved in the formats.

where digital is better, is in the way it works for my life. it fits. i can listen to lots of new music and it works for the 70% of the time i’m not in the mood for analog. i love all the new classical music i can stream at really high levels of performance. i love exploring musically. and the sound is great. the reason i’m so invested in digital is that all around it is better.......but let’s just forget it sounding like analog. it just does not, nor does it need to.

my 2 cents, YMMV.

Having made numerous digital copies of vinyl albums I am inclined to agree will cleeds. As I mentioned above it is difficult to tell which is which.
However in comparing a vinyl album with it's digital download  is another issue. It is very easy to distinguish the versions even with a very clean record. As to which one sounds better it is a toss up. I will say there is a consistent quality that the vinyl has across several cartridges that distinguishes it from the digital download and these are all 24/96 or better. The vinyl sounds a bit more distant and (this is hard to describe) you get the sense of an echo or perhaps air around voices and instruments. The digital is more up front with less going on in the background. Given that there is much more going on in the analog signal path to get to the vinyl copy one would have to believe there is additional harmonic distortion added which many of us like. You get this even with vinyl versions of digital recordings. With digital recordings played back digitally you are in numbers immediately and stay there all the way to your DAC. You can do pretty much anything to a digital file without unintentionally adding distortion. Certainly we all try to minimize distortion in our own systems but there is nothing we can do about the process that produced the software. In short, vinyl adds something to the music that is missing in Hi Res Downloads. Call it whatever you want. Sometimes it sounds better. Sometimes not. If I had to guess I would think analog tape and Hi Res downloads have more in common than any comparison with vinyl. 
If I did not have a huge vinyl collection would I get started now? You bet. Turntables are cool devices and a tinkerer's dream. A turntable is a record playing tool. I love tools. You can never have enough of them. Holding on to a record cover is so much more fulfilling than a CD box. It is artwork. But as an early adapter I also have 2 terabytes of music on my hard drive. One can never have enough music. Music is a tool for happiness. People who listen to a lot of music live longer. That is an association and not necessarily causation.  

mikelavigne

i have invested high degrees of assets in tape, vinyl and digital. taken each as far as i can go. as far as anyone. and my comments are related to the top level of each format. what happens in each format on the way to these levels could be completely different than my experience.

I trust your opinion because I cannot experience this to the level you did.... And it speak volume.... Thanks for sharing...


I go entirely digital for convenience and anyway at the price level where I am the differences is sometimes not clearly perceptible if the digital is good and if the system is rightly embedded because a rightly embedded digital system will crush a wrongly embedded turntable...

The most important factor in audio is the acoustic of the room way more than owning a low price turntable or a low price dac ( I means a few thousand dollars max)….But you already know that yourself with all these money involved in the room.... :)

My regards to you....

P.S. I own an audio system that is of way less value than the 4 feet of  one your turntable, but never mind, I am proud of my work to make it sound great by controlling the resonance, electrical grid, and acoustic.... :)

Nevertheless I am a bit envious of your house..... :)

Wow, three turntables and $160k in digital hardware? Do you mind me asking what you do for a living Mike? I care to differ a little. I was busy typing my last post when yours was added. It is not that digital is missing something. It is that something is added to vinyl. I have several direct to disc albums and it is interesting to note that they sound more like Hi Res digital files than other records. 
I certainly agree that digital is more convenient. How could you not? I can't listen to classical playlists streaming or otherwise. I just can't enjoy it as background music. I have to sit in front of the system for classical. 
Ideally digital and analog should sound exactly the same. If they don't something is happening in the signal path or master to alter the original recording. What sounds better I suspect is a matter of taste more than anything.

Cleeds,

I am not sure why you are taking such an adversarial tone. The links you posted really do not discuss this topic, and this is not a conversation about "mastering", which if done differently for the formats, will make them all sound much much different.

This is a discussion about high resolution digital, good quality analog tape, and vinyl and what they are capable of. The link that CD318 posted gets into this, but dig further, and you realize that even though the first post makes it look like an exact comparison, read farther into the thread and it is not (as I posted), not to mention at that time he didn't even want to discuss high res formats due to, at that time, lack of availability. There is little discussion of the playback chain as well.


I never mentioned distortion at all with regards to vinyl. I specifically said "analog processing". That is a critical difference. Again the link that CD318 posted is interesting as Steve says they could tell CD and vinyl apart by listening to the tails on sounds (which does make me question their digital signal chain), and that tape and acetate master sounded the same (to him). I could sit someone down and in about 10-15 minutes teach them how to easily identify vinyl at least with headphones and near-field monitors, based on how the "sound-stage" changes. In normal listening environments because of the interaction of speakers, room, and cross-talk, the effect is not as consistent. Notice I said changes, not better, worse, but different and you don't hear that differences between high res digital and tape.

I am familiar with Mike's tests, and see that you have different results. I know that Mike has very high end equipment, but in the audiophile world, with digital, that could work against the most transparent result.  Most high end audiophile companies claim to make products "tuned" for the best sound (to whoever was doing the tuning by ear). There is a difference between technically transparent, and "tuned". If the DAC is "tuned", then it is not a faithful transparent reproduction of the digital capture. This is similar to some high end DACs now having user selectable filters, which all sound a bit different, but without knowing what the original source material sounds like, how do you know which one is most transparent?  It's the same with MQA. Claims technical superiority, but is it transparent or tuned? 


Cleeds, you saw my posts w.r.t. azimuth tuning on a turntable, and how tonearm pivot effects azimuth with height changes. Should be obvious from those posts I am not a neophyte w.r.t. vinyl. You did, however, make my point with your last line. I never said as a group you are preventing advancing, nor did I say that enjoying LPs was flawed (just the opposite actually). What I said is that blind devotion to a format based on perceived superiority, that may not actually be the case, can prevent you from moving forward. You could call that blind devotion, blind aversion as well. It would be akin to not buying a 2020 Hyundai based on how bad the 1980's vintage Hyundai Excel was.

"The suggestion that those of us enjoying LPs may be "preventing the next leap" is just absurd. Many of us have made that "leap" and found the potential of digital is often not realized."

This applies both ways too. There is a lot of blind devotion to Redbook CD capturing all the possible range of human experience.