When is digital going to get the soul of music?

Davemitchell is right to my mind and ears: If a LP is properly cleaned and well treated, there will be no clicks and pops on a properly set up TT and quite often, Abe, there is a hell of a lot of hiss on prerecorded open reel tapes. I know, I own and listen to a lot of them. Abe is right about dynamic range of digital, but wrong to my ears about "details" and if you are familiar with live music and take that as reference, "black background" to my ears is completely unnatural ( just as a noisy one of course ). Rather the background in a good concert hall is full of tiny reverberant clues, it "breaths" so to speak and I would expect that as well from a good recording of classical big orchestral music. Even the great Zanden or the DCS gear will not pick that up, a good analog recording of a classical piece will. The proof lies in the listening.
In fact I am wondering, if by the means of clever advertising and constant repetition of it, one of the central failures of digital, the lack of rendering of all the necesary ambient clues in a recording have not been turned into the so called advantage of "black background". There is simply no such thing in a live event as every regular concert goer knows.

On the other hand however, to pay justice to digital, the art of digital recording has tremendously improved in the last 10 to 15 years. Recordings of small combos, indidividual solo instruments and voices seem to my ears mostly better rendered through the digital medium, simply have more presence and imediacy than analog. The harshness which used to plague early digital and made it unlistenable for me is thankfully no more. All the same, I would never give up my analog rig, because with big orchestral music, digital falls sadly short so far, even though well designed USB-DACS like Steve Nugent's "Spoiler with PaceCar" show promise also in this field, in spite of the fact, that here silences are really pitch black (;
Cheers,
D

Hi Detlof, if you really were bent to source terrible newer digital recordings, there are still a few around. . . for the fan of slow dentist drills grounding one's front upper teeth, that is! Try the Supraphone box set of the Panocha Quartet playing all string quartets by Antonin Dvorak'.. . . truly an enlightening experience. . . haven't had a roach in the house since I unwrapped the box and played the darn thing for the first time.

Yet, the opposite is also true. I have a most wonderful live recording on CD of the Israel Phil playing Dvorak's New World Symphony under Leonard Bernstein (DGG). In spite of this having been recorded c.ca 1983, you can hear plenty of ambient clues, including a sweet sense of the hall, objects being dropped from the music stands, Lenny stomping on the podium to press the 'tempo'. . . . then again Lenny muttering encouragements to the orchestra.

. . . all of this musical Heaven and Hell takes place through my TEAC X-01 Limited.

Hi Guido, do you think the Panocha disk would also work with ferrets? We have some frolicking in the attic. Yes, and I must try the Lenny CD. It might get the ferrets out of my head...Seriously now, I also know quite a number of redbook CDs full of ambient cues. But that is not quite what I meant.As you probably know, there are cues much more subtle than the ones you refer to. You can hear them in those silences, which simply are not "black" in reality, but also in the way a tone will spread into space, creating an aura around the instrument. Here to put in bluntly, both analog and digital fall terribly short. I always get a shock, when I settle down in orchestra hall and hear the first notes spread in the hall. And, there is just no way around this, the analog facsimile of this, though still far off the real thing, does come closer. The soul of music, to come back to the essence of this thread, can be found anywhere, even on a table radio. If the music moves you, the gear rendering it, is of no importance. However, if you wish to come as close as possible to the real thing in your home, for classical music, as far as i am concerned, the "soul" still has its lonely place in analog in spite of the fact that sometimes digital comes close and can enthrall you. If however the music becomes more complex, where the tiniest of modes of intonation and tempi play a role ( I am thinking of the Alban Berg Quartet right now and their ensemble playing)and you begin to compare the same take both in digital and on LP, you will be amazed, what digital will gloss over and thus in a very subtle way change the piece. Of course I don't know if it is my gear or the medium itslef, which falls short.
Anyway, basically I don't worry about these things, don't even think about it, when I sit down to listen to music. I am glad we have all these media and can pick and choose for our enjoyment. We are truly privileged and i am very grateful for that.

Detlof: your description of the sonic differences between analog and digital is superb!