When is digital going to get the soul of music?

I have to mention one more thing about listening at Aplhifi. The high I get from listening to reproduced music was more pronounced and longer lasting than I get from my system. I thought maybe it was due to tubes, as Gunbei suggests. Aplhifi has a tube output, I believe, on his player and his amp has a tube input. I took a look at Aplhifi's web-site, and there might be more to it. Maybe Aplhifi can say something on this?

Mmakshak, thank you for coming over! I have to say that your (Ori's) cables were among the best Copper cables I've heard, very nice.

The Nat King Cole was Steve Hoffman's amazing work (DCC) made from the original Analog Master Tape. It was not Reference Recordings although these are really great as well.

I would also agree with you that Analog recordings have "more soul" than all Digital ones, but again, this comes to implementation because everything starts with Analog anyway. :)

Keep in touch! May be you can come back here again, this time with Ori.

Regards,
Alex

I seem to have it; and to make matters worse, it is from a computer based system! I know that anything I would think would be suspect; after all who hates their own work?

But I have quite a few listeners over from time to time, and they get to remark on my failures (plenty of those) as well as my successes. The remarks I am getting now all the usual superlatives but what really matters is that they wont leave!

The trick? Digital eq/xover; done well it is an amazing thing. I did try the Deqx, which is a fine product, but found it dynamically...er...off. But the vastly cheaper DBX unit captures the dynamic life of music (makes sense,perhaps, in that it is design for use in live music). Though I have tube gear (SET and OTL) SS is what rules here. Emotion is the reason for music, and it is what I have here.

Aplhifi, thanks for the correction, but that was fantastic Nat King Cole. I had one question, though. You showed by that direct from turntable to digital disc that it's not necessarily digial, per se, that is a problem. But I think we played a cd that had what I would call unnatural detail in their singing. With Elvis and Nat, it was a given that that was how they sounded. With the all digital cd, we heard details that almost distracted me. I'm thinking that I heard one voice where it seemed like it was coming from the left side of his throat. I'm sure that was where it was coming from, it's just not what I would expect to hear live. It can't be the recording technique after 25 years of digital, can it?

Robm321, I used to listen to vinyl exclusively throughout the 70's and most of the 80's and I still like the sound of it. What I didn't like is the inevitable deterioration that results from playing records. In addition, back in the heyday of vinyl, about 2/3s of the records I bought were so poorly made and exhibited so much surface noise, ticks and pops, excessive warpage and harshness that they were nearly unlistenable. I'm sure that whatever miniscule vinyl production is done today is done much more meticulously than it was back then but I think that deterioration is still a problem. One could argue that many CDs are unlistenable but the reasons tend to be poor recording or mastering - or possibly large amounts of jitter inherent in the pressing. Now maybe I didn't have the most state of the art playback system. My vinyl setup consisted of a Micro Seiki DD-33 turntable with a carbon graphite tonearm, a Denon MC-301 cartridge, and a DB Systems preamp with separate power supply and head amp. This is a very modest setup compared with the many thousand dollar systems that are available today. I'll also admit that I haven't heard the absolute state of the art in digital playback but I can set that my digital setup now outperforms my vinyl setup of yesteryear. My main point is that if most people believe that vinyl actually does sound better, it's not because it is more pure or provides more actual information. It's because the types of distortion it creates are complimentary to the source material.