When is digital going to get the soul of music?

Tomcy6 - you are correct, there are a great many different perceptions out there in the audiophile world. My well-trained ears remark was meant to be much more specific to professional performing musicians. And yes, we are unfortunately most definitely a very tiny minority. However, I do not mean to imply that only professionals have or can have trained ears. I am actually trained in ear-training, and have helped many people in this respect. I just wish that alot more folks who call themselves audiophiles would actually use their ears, instead of quoting engineers and reciting specs and numbers. There is way too much love of technology in this hobby, and not nearly enough love for music, which is the reason the hobby exists.

The only other thing I would add is that your comment that most people can't afford a vinyl rig good enough to rival digital is sadly mistaken. It is very much the other way around. Digital has improved, yes, but only the very highest quality equipment, I would say at a minimum cost of at least $50,000, can even begin to be spoken of in the same conversation, sound-quality wise, as a properly set-up vinyl rig costing in the neighborhood of $2500. This will eventually change, of course, as music server technology is further developed (the direction digital is clearly headed in), but the sound quality of that technology is still far behind the best digital can offer. It will be a very long time yet before the sound quality catches up to the technology, and then another very long time before the price becomes affordable for most of us.

Learsfool,

How is it that good digital pictures (better than analog/film many would say) can be had with the latest digital cameras for just a couple of hundred dollars but it still costs 10s of thousands to get digital audio right?

I know they are two different things technically, but economically, something just doesn't seem to add up here to me.

Digital has improved, yes, but only the very highest quality equipment, I would say at a minimum cost of at least $50,000, can even begin to be spoken of in the same conversation, sound-quality wise, as a properly set-up vinyl rig

So which $50,000+ CD players have you heard and would recommend as a minimum to purchase? Can you rank the best ones between $50,000 and $250,000? How about in the $250,000 category and up to $1 million?

Or are you playing an Edward Lear game of absudity?

On the topic of both music and photography, and digital versus analog.

A great LP record (even from a digital master) is capable of delivering more information than a CD, and until digital is available in a format that's closer to the digital master, this will remain true.

The digital (or analog) master tape is not the issue here, the CD format is.

If any of you could hear a master digital tape (or hard drive) and compare that to CD or LP, you would realize how much we've been screwed. The problem with digital is when that great master is "moved" for public distribution.

The fact that we're discussing a 131 year old format in Audiogon forums along side modern digital is an absolute embarrassment to the state of digital delivery.

Moving that master digital signal from one place to another and from one sample rate to another does it so much harm it cannot be repaired. Then to make matters worse, our only choice is an outdated format that's too low a sample rate to replicate what was on the master.

However, when you convert that super high rez digital master to analog at the hard drive, it is a more effective way to preserve content. My comment would not be true if CD was EQUAL resolution as what was used to master THE LP. All this, allowing for the multiple errors in the mechanical process of CD and LP.

This is not something I made up, I know two of the most famous people in the recording business and this is what they say and how I got my info.

I originally said two things, so second, when the discussion about film and digital capture is brought up in music threads there is a huge factor that everyone forgets.

With music, the recording studio is the creator. THEY set the quality of format and then the record companies decide how much quality you are allowed to own.

With digital photography, the photographer is the creator and sets the quality of the format by choosing whatever capture engine (chip and camera) they are willing to pay for. They choose the lens, the processing engine and output quality. Perhaps most important, they can preserve their work in the highest possible bit rate, color, format and with NO compression at all.

Digital photography is limited only by what you are willing to pay and how much work you're willing to put in and every few months the format is improved. REAL improvement with better chips and higher resolution delivered to the end user.

So basically, the difference is that in photography you set the quality limit and in music you have no choice. With an LP you get a more true representation of the music regardless if the master was analog or digital.

With CD, you get a severely downsampled format that's only a shadow of what could be if the format had evolved this last 25 years.

Would you be happy with a computer based on 25 year old technology and zero upgrades? Before you say analog is even older. Remember analog is not a sample of the signal, it is the analog (or complete) signal and it's problems have be open to change and evolution for all 131 years.

Analog has evolved, it's better than it's ever been and although digital has evolved a great deal, it cannot escape the format that's required by law to conform to so it plays in ALL Red Book capable machines.

As for the future, I agree with the digital guys that digital is here to stay and also believe that digital could surpass analog. The problem is, the music business is run by marketing people that don't give a damn about what's the best quality, they want what's easy to package, has the fewest returns, costs the least to ship and offers the highest possible profit.

When you look at Apple, now surpassing even WalMart in music sales with MP3 downloads by the hundreds of millions of dollars, do you really think the guys in the music business care about audiophiles? We represent no market at all.

So basically we are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Digital masters are superb and analog masters are superb. Which are better? Probably depends on the engineer and the equipment.

But from EITHER master, what is offered to the public is very limited. A direct conversion from digital to analog at the studio and an LP capable of delivering a good percentage of what was on the tape.

Or, a mixed down, degraded CD with sampling rate that should have been discarded years ago. If CD had been upgraded to match what's on the master tape, I would not be on this forum making these comments.

I hope I live long enough to see REAL PROGRESS with high rez digital. Until then, it's LP for me as the ultimate source (omitting my master analog tapes, but that's another discussion).

And the LPs are made from digital master - that's funny...