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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
roberttdid OP
534 posts
 
It's not a nice neat world Mike, it is having access to all the pieces along the way and knowing what comes out the other end, and knowing what is there and what is missing. It's having had access to the people making music and listening to what comes out and their comments. 24/192 digital in it's pure form, has far more "information" than is possible by any measure on 15ips tape, and way more than vinyl. When you strip away what happens in mixing and mastering and just look at what the format is capable of, 24/192 digital is unmatched, and 24/96 is not too far behind for practical purposes. Vinyl definitely colors what passes through, and even tape will create colorations. Digital is pure, it's detailed, its busy, everything is there ... and maybe that is too raw for most people. Musicians say it sounds truest to what they hear coming from the instrument, but they don't say it sounds the most pleasant. Throw in the cross-talk of vinyl and you have some other interesting psycho-acoustic effects unmatched by other formats.


Strangely enough, a really low noise floor (white noise), may even be a detriment. As Raul alluded, the at some level quantized aspect our auditory system coupled with its non-linear nature means that signal detection can be improved in some instances by adding noise. It's called Stochastic Resonance.


I have absolutely no doubt that high-res digital carries significantly more information than vinyl or analog tape. I have no doubt on a macro level that it is more true to the original sound.


What I have doubts about it whether digital/high-res digital is optimized for getting information into the brain


mikelavigne1,557 posts06-29-2020 3:45pm
Some may prefer vinyl but it can’t hold the information that a digital file can it’s impossible. If a square wave won’t play then something is wrong. No such thing as " all analog".
i completely understand your reluctance to allow actual listening to intrude on your nice neat world view. it does require a bit of effort.

roberttdid OP
534 posts
 
@geoffkait, Has anyone every told you that you project (In the psychological sense), an awful lot? I don’t think I have seen one post from you that indicated you had any significant knowledge in any area important to audio. Pretty much most posts are blathering about CD players, and perhaps vibration, no matter what the topic and whether that was relevant.
geoffkait23,012 posts06-29-2020 4:00pmRobberrttddidd is a pseudo scientist. He is the very definition of one. Notice he doesn’t debate the subject, apparently he would rather pretend to have all the answers and call names.

Wasn’t it Niels Bohr who said never think you have all the answers?

An ordinary man has no means of deliverance.

glupson
7,842 posts
 
"Pretty much most posts are blathering about CD players, and perhaps vibration..."

What about wire directionality?
mikelavigne
2,199 posts
 
Musicians say it sounds truest to what they hear coming from the instrument......
it’s been multi-decades since ’musicians’ had any idea about anything other than digital.

’a’ musician......maybe one in a thousand.

one in a hundred working pro audio guys. and even those guys very rarely have a clue about high end vinyl.

so the opinions of that group about this is just not relevant to me.
bdp24's avatar
bdp24
9,800 posts
 

Leland Sklar, one of the most-recorded electric bassists in history (James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Carole King, Phil Collins, Toto, many soundtracks) posts a video on YouTube every day. They are filmed in an upstairs bedroom of his very nice 2-story house in Pasadena (not a low-income neighborhood), showing him playing along with recordings of songs he is the bassist on.

Leland is VERY particular about the sound of his basses and amp/speaker stage/recording rigs. In todays video, the speakers in the room are shown, and they are little Bose sound bar types. Ay carumba! Lots of musicians I know listen to music on their computer’s speakers, car stereo (people in Southern California spend a LOT of time in their cars), or even a boombox. When I recorded with Evan Johns (look him up, he was quite a character) in Atlanta (his Moontan album), before work on each song commenced he played the musicians his solo acoustic demo tape of the song, recorded and played back on a boombox!

Just like other non-audiophiles, most musicians don’t expect LP’s, CD’s, tapes, and streamed music to sound anywhere close to that of live music. They are viewed as separate events, the attempt to narrow the gap not of particular interest to them. I know: weird, right? ;-)

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