When is digital going to get the soul of music?

Learsfool - I was just responding to your statement that digital will never rival analog. Music is recorded in digital (recently in DDS) not for convenience but for the sound. Analog is delivered from digital tapes and since extra element in the chain cannot improve sound in fact destroys purity of the original digital information. Studio quality equipment will be available at home in 5 or 10 years but analog will never improve - nobody will design newer standard of the LP - not enough customers. I don't know how you define dynamic range but LP does not even come close to 24 bit digital recording with it's poor S/N.

Again you have to realize that analog reproduction (LP) in not an improvement of the digital master tape it was derived from. As I said analog already lost to digital and it will loose even more when Wide 4 channel DDS will be in every home. In my opinion CDs will eventually disappear replaced by 24bit/192kHz (or better) downloads. You might be even able one day to dial-in sound simulation of the LP player (adding rumble, crosstalk, hiss, bloom, wooly bass, pops, and coloration).

Kijanki, I've heard many times audiophiles/phonophiles proclaiming that LP has superior dynamics compared to CD. What is the absolute dynamic range of CD? 90dB? LP's have dynamic range of about 50dB (or less). But I think what those audiophiles who claim that LP has better dynamics than CD really mean is that LP has subjectively better dynamic contrasts than CD, especially in the critical midrange. Probably it has to do with the rise time of cartridges, which is "faster" than that of CD. Of course this is just speculation from a non-techie. What do you think?

Chris

Chris - you are probably right. It is impression and not absolute numbers. My Benchmark DAC plays bit games increasing resolution to 24-bit and noise floor to -140dB. Impressions can often be misleading. Sound with small amount of harmonic distortion is "lively" and "dynamic" while absolutely pure sound is clinical and sterile. Having very little exposure to high quality audio I look at it from the practical perspective. Digital Master tape feeding DAC driving my amp has to sound better than the same digital tape feeding DAC that drives micro lathe machine to create LP master then pressing LP then pickup/tonearm, RIAA preamp then my amp. Original master tape has to sound purest because is original and LP is derived from it with a loss of quality. Therefore argument that digital will never rival analog is hard to understand. Not liking CD media with its 44kHz carrier limitation is another story.

Herbert von Karajan said once that digital recording surpasses everything we know so far.

Kijanki, your last couple of posts are simply inaccurate. Analog was not made from some digital master tape, except in the last 20 years or so, and as I said before, some of it is still not. Digital recording technology did not even exist before the very late 70's, and I don't think it was commercially available until 79, though I don't know the exact date. And again, the amount of distortion, in either medium, is not small. And in the digital medium, it occurs at much more musically objectionable frequencies, which cannot be helped, no matter how much better the medium gets. I am not talking numbers here, I am talking in terms of the audible difference to the human auditory system, which is much more sophisticated than any machine yet invented. In respect to it's resolution of harmonic overtones produced by the voice and other acoustic instruments in particular, analog is much closer to the sound of these instruments. Which is why von Karajan later retracted that statement, which was made in the early days of digital when it was hoped that this harmonic distortion problem could be solved. When so-called sound engineers try to "prove" otherwise, you can be sure they are crunching numbers instead of using their ears. Those are the same engineers that maintain that there is no audible difference between two pieces of equipment with the exact same specs. Most audiophiles actually use their ears, and know otherwise. This is getting us into the classic subjectivist vs. objectivist debate. I repeat - no one I know who has ever heard the same recording on the same system has ever preferred the digital to the analog. There are many fine recordings one can use to test this - my brother's favorite is the Reiner/Chicago Symphony recording of the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra.

I like vinyl and digital.

I would agree that analog is more mature today than digital (its been a round a lot longer). But it also ain't going anywhere new at this point. It is what it is and is ever going to be anything much more. That's jut the reality of things for better or for worse.

I've done specific a/b tests between vinyl and CD releases of the same title (a couple of reviews posted here on Agon as well). I've found subtle differences both ways that might affect preference either way in specific cases.

Each recording had limitations compared to the ideal in that I have never heard a perfect recording. I suppose any limitation short of lifelike can be considered distortion. Noise was not an issue in any case. Signal in all cases far exceeded any noise.

Granted these were pop/rock titles, which are less demanding. I agree that large scale classical works on CD may typically lag behind their vinyl brethren in regards to being completely satisfying.

But I don't associate "soul" with classical music in general. For titles more in the "soul" genre, CDs generally work fine.