Oh Ye of Little Format

Blind tests are interesting. In most blind tests, people tend to look for the obvious differences first. So they tend to find the easy things. A bit more treble or bass or loudness...all the things compression can give you.

Long ago, I remember listening to Brubeck’s Take Five and chose CD over LP. The CD had more treble and the bass was jacked up. It was remastered. It was after listening to the track many times that I noticed more ’air’ and decay in the snare drum with the LP. And after some time, I began to prefer the LP.

This is not an vinyl vs digital argument. I enjoy both. This is about the various recording qualities out there regardless of format. The remastered CD was just jacked up to sound sweeter. This happens more often these days. I prefer digital recordings that are truer to the original production.

The magic is often in the middle. And that is not easy to understand in a blind listening test as I think we’re looking for the obvious.

Time for a gross generalisation interlude?

Music in the 50s was made for radiograms?

Music in the 60s was made for Dansette type record players which had a speaker built inside it's console?

Music in the 70s was made for listening to in cars.

Music in the 80s was made for walkmans?

Ditto the 90s.

Music in the 00s was made for the iPod?

Music in the 10s was made for the smartphone?

Perhaps one day we might finally see music recorded for first rate audio playback systems?

Of course the quality of a recording trumps all formats.

Relar- Thanks for sharing your comparisons.

I wonder if a high res download would sound superior to

the same hi-res ripped of a CD and stored as a file?

Sandy- Magic in the middle. I like that idea. It is funny how

the magazines, Youtubers and other Experts all eschew the

merits of blind anything. 

To me you have to be blind not to recognize the value of such tests.

cd318- Very clever! Thanks for the memories!!

Ok. About 3 years ago, I met Gus Skinas up in his Boulder Studio upstairs at the PS Audio factory. An amazing and very nice man to talk to. Did a great one hour Zoom session with our gang of six 2 years ago.

Anyways. My comment to Gus was. How in hell did I hear a clear difference between the SACD of any of the Elton John reissues that he mastered the SACD layer on and the Super Bit Mapped CD layer. My system 20 years ago was a Denon AVR-1802 Home Theater Receiver and a Pioneer DV578-A Universal Disc Player via its Analog outs to the Analog in of the AVR. The SACD easily sounded more LP like without the inner groove distortion and surface noise that I always hated on cheap LP pressings.
 

Now saying all that. In 2003, I bought both the LP & SACD of the 30th Anniversary Dark Side of the Moon. The SACD’s 5.1 is amazing but to my ears, the LP outclasses the 2.0 SACD. It’s not a night and day difference nonetheless.

As Gus told me. “It’s all in the mastering” and of course there condition of the master tapes.

I stream a lot via AmazonHD (I did a direct comparison to Qobuz - no difference in audio quality). Both companies are clearly adding some “spice” to the streams. The CD version always sounds better in most cases but not all. 
 

As for high bitrate PCM ? Great for preservation but is it better than a CD. Again, depends on how it was mastered.

The Hendrix SACD’s are the best I’ve heard.

My DAC ? PS Audio DirectStream DAC Sr. 

Sounds tedious.  I hope there was a lot of alcohol involved.