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

audio2design, it is like running into a brick wall. I suspect that most of these people have very little experience with digital equipment and obviously have no idea how powerful it is. They will keep coming up with baseless explanations for digital sounding awful or why vinyl "sounds better." I suspect most of their opinions are based on the very early CD players that had bad filters and did sound pretty bad. I do not even read mahgister's posts any more. They make me dizzy.

Folks, if I make a 24/96 recording of any vinyl album and play both the recording and the album back synchronized none of you would ever be able to tell the difference between the two and that is a fact. (it has been done.) I suggest you get some experience. Buy the program Pure Vinyl and download a few hi res digital files. Use Pure Vinyl to record some albums to your computer. Have fun and learn. Notice I have not said a thing about better sound and the capability of your hearing. One format will sound better than another when it comes to a specific album depending entirely on the mastering. But, there are many instances when the digital version sounds definitively better. I wish I could demonstrate this to you online but it is impossible.

I do have friend who had diploma in physics and who worked in university. So he can speak about Nyquist an hour as he now in retirement so he had a time to get into it up to human ear construction. But in general if somebody says that digital / Nyquist is perfect - no. Nowadays digital changed as it has less space limitations so hi-res is better and we can leave Nyquist in the dust of history.
But if to speak about DAC there is 2 sides of it - digital and analog. And implementation can't be perfect. So we don't hear what was recorded anyway.
With analog rig it's more complicated. Much more. It's not perfect either. No medium can be perfect.
With digital everything is more easier especially recording process... and software allows to do a lot of tricks. But at the very end it's not perfect as we do have perfect recording engineer who knows everything except ...

bukanona, I think that is a given that very little in this life is perfect. The other problem is that "sounds better" is a purely subjective issue with psycho-social ramifications. If you just look at the waveform as it comes out of the microphones or console a digital process up to the vinyl is beyond belief more accurate than an analog one, but this says nothing about "sounding better." "Sounding better" is a whole other issue which is tied to evaluation by humans. Now you get into a whole mess as you see here. 

Physics is not a field where strength in Nyquist theory is strong on the curriculum, especially at the diploma level.  "digital/Nyquist is perfect" ... what does that even mean? Nyquist simply puts a limit on what digital can do, but also explains why digital can (within the technical implementation limits) capture the waveform very accurately.  Even with redbook, over sampling on recording and upsampling on playback pretty much removed in band filtering effects. This is likely what, as that high end label showed, well done red-book was not distinguishable from high-res with their discerning customer base.

I do have friend who had diploma in physics and who worked in university. So he can speak about Nyquist an hour as he now in retirement so he had a time to get into it up to human ear construction. But in general if somebody says that digital / Nyquist is perfect - no. Nowadays digital changed as it has less space limitations so hi-res is better and we can leave Nyquist in the dust of history.

audio2design, it is like running into a brick wall. I suspect that most of these people have very little experience with digital equipment and obviously have no idea how powerful it is. They will keep coming up with baseless explanations for digital sounding awful or why vinyl "sounds better." I suspect most of their opinions are based on the very early CD players that had bad filters and did sound pretty bad.

First: i own many dacs, they were not so good at first but at the end i stumble on a very good one.... I dont regret turntables one second for too many reasons anyone can guess, sound quality included...

Second: All these remarks in your post about turntable afficionados with a negative tone about me at the end of this rant, including indiscrimately all analog people in one bag with me is only that: what someone else call "Gibberish"...I never said that turntable are superior to dac.... I use only dac myself....

Third: Insulting people dont count for an argument.... if you would have read my posts about what is TIMBRE, a bundle of real " timing" events in room acoustic coupled to human ears, you would know that my critics of those who put analog on the side of the road, with a contempt for those "ignorant people" who stick to it, was based not on comparison analog/versus digital only, but on the difficulty to seize the complex event of timbre with ANY audio system analog or digital...And you would know that audiodesign call the colored tone dynamic, namely timbre, an only subjective phenomena that is secondary... Which is totally false because timbre is like a rainbow phenomena, at the interface of objective and subjective events..... Audiodesign affirmed digital coding being primary and supreme in audio and call ALL analog people ignorant crowds for their ears evaluation...

Fourth: you will know that myself i affirm that indeed digital is different than analog but able to emulate it, ESPECIALLY if the dac chosen is good BUT mainly rightfully embedded mechanically, electrically and acoustically with the audio system itself....And this point is my original contribution here to the discussion because no one speak about that ever except me...

Five: You must read about TIMBRE perception before saying that you know what is is.... If someone understand timbre that means that he understand the absolute necessity of ears evaluation for this complex phenomenon implying timing of bundle of concrete events in a phase space of his own...Timbre identification is a complex LEARNING process at the foundation of language not a digital artefact or only a musical event...

Six: denigrating someone dont count for an argument, if you read my post you will see that i NEVER insulted audiodesign, i even recognize his competence.... BUT no one knows it all...

Seven: Nyquist theorem is about coding and decoding signals and also the implicit limitations and not only the power to do so.... This theorem has nothing to do directly with TIMBRE, which is the cornerstone of musical perception but more than that the cornerstone for evaluation of audio system in their acoustical controlled or uncontrolled embeddings...




I have written these 7 points and no one can accuse this post to be like your last post and the post of audio design accusation of ignorance against all analog people...I clearly set my point and i remind you that i believe myself in the power of digital system to compete with analog then spare me the insult....

My main point in one word is ANY evaluation of analog versus digital cannot be based on Nyquist theorem only, except for those who ignore acoustic and the fundamental PERCEIVED timbre phenomena and the powerful transformation of an audio system with the rightful embeddings controls...(This last point is my own experience for 2 years experiments)

To my knbowledge EARS has not been replaced and would not be replaced in acoustic studies by only ONE theorem...It seems engineers are not all acousticians...And it seems that experimenting with our own ears is not a good recommendation for many here....😁

Happy new YEAR 😊 May God give you the best health ever and may the only doctor you encounter this year be yourself in a mirror.......