When is digital going to get the soul of music?

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 Then to make matters worse, our only choice is an outdated format that's too low a sample rate to replicate what was on the master.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...

Seems simple enough. Obviously the entertainment industry, broadly speaking, has concentrated most of their research on video, not audio. They make much more money off of film than music. Any audiophile who is concerned with the progress of home theater systems knows this painfully well. The industry has always chosen formats much more suited to video, and audio has lagged far behind. In fact, they just did it again, as anyone who has been following all that mess knows.

Speaking of cameras, the same debate does still exist among professional photographers. Many like the convenience and speed of digital, and will take a digital camera on their first trip to a site and take literally hundreds of pictures, sorting through them later to figure out their perfect shot or shots. They will then take what they call their "real" camera on a subsequent trip to the site, and concentrate on the shot or shots they actually want to sell, and this is the one that is actually printed in your magazines, books, catalogues, brochures, what have you. I have a cousin who does that, and as recently as this summer was saying that that is still how all of the best professional photographers work. In this way, they get the best of both worlds, and save alot of time and precious film. Since digital video is so far ahead of digital audio though, this is much more of a real debate (amongst the pros, I mean). As I said before, very few professional performing musicians will argue that the best digital sound reproduction has surpassed analog. Unfortunately, we aren't the ones making the decisions in the industry. Profit rules - that's the American way.