Article: "Spin Me Round: Why Vinyl is Better Than Digital"

The original phenomenon is not a signal, or if it is one, it is a complex one with digital and analog aspect link to acoustic of room and ears relation...

The acoustical timing of many events in the room constituting the "timbre" instrument for the brain analog and digital "computer" to speak metaphorically, cannot be reduced totally to only "digital timing" signals , the digital signals are also a timing approximation...They create a kind of noise of their own...

Digital and analog are necessary at the same time to understand the phenomenon.... It is the reason why digital or analog are on par and able to give each one something the other one cannot give...

You can call the analog way a "colored" taste, completely useless but it is not so simple....Ears are not replaceable by  computers... It will be someday in some way, but it is not the actual matter of the thread to discuss the limits of this replacement...

If you are going to make stuff up to suit your view of the world, I don't see how we can have an intelligent discussion on this topic.


And no they are not on par.  A digitizing and playback system can capture the output of a vinyl playback system and recreate it such that you cannot tell which is directly coming from vinyl, and which is the digital system.  There is no current analog system in audio which can accomplish the same with digital.

If you are going to make stuff up to suit your view of the world,

When i said that they are on par, i was not speaking about the technological possiblities, but of their different qualities contributing to the perceived phenomenon...

You also make stuff up to suit your technological view of the world...

I only say from the beginning that analog is not superior to digital in audio design, but i oppose the affirmation that all there is in sound is captured only and completely by digital cooking recipe....The brain is NOT a digital computer and the ears are not an analog mechanical engine....

in my experience, digital was the best thing that could happen to us working-class types that previously could only barely afford crappy entry-level analog whose welter of blatant distortions both ruins the software [records] as well as irritates the ears of all listeners within earshot. cheap digital sounds glarey and borderline harsh but at least there is no inner groove distortion, mistracking on challenging passages, poor pressings with molded-in distortion, crackle and hiss and groove roar and rumble. 

That was fun (the slices of bread analogy). I should qualify it as being an explanation given to me back in the mid-late 80's. My first digital player was of the single laser type. The sound was horrible. In addition, early CDs were digitized copies of LPs. I still have some where the jewel box art was a picture of an album cover, complete with ringwear! You could even hear a few pops and clicks from the vinyl they were copied from. We've come a long way baby. If the instrument isn't live in your ear, all reproduced sounds differ in some way from the original source. I'm going back to my sourdough toast now, "different strokes for different folks" (Sly Stone). AB