2. digital
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Its not vinyl

I have read 100’s of discussions on the subject of building a streaming digital option for audiophile systems. Everything from the internet connection to the streaming source and then the dac. In my reading through the posts the argument will quickly turn to its not analog, vinyl is better, on the anti streaming side and then on the pro streaming side posters will fed the argument with its almost as good as my phono stage, sounds better than analog. This will even hold true within the dac manufactures and dac owners who will refer to their dac sound as analog sounding or just like phono. I think this is most referenced in the R2R dac category. I started a discussion on the new Gustard R26 which is a discrete R2R ladder dac. Right away I was confronted with “why do you want to spend the money to replace your phono analog end that you already have and sounds great”?  I  Replied with the usual “phono does sound better, even a $30,000 dac will never beat analog and all the other analog vs digital talking points”. Then it hit me that we have been arguing this wrong all this time. The argument should be that the quest in putting together a top notch streaming digital setup is not a quest to beat analog or beat phono. The quest and objective is to achieve a “ less digital sound”. We all know that sharp, bright  razor blades in my bleeding ears sterile digital sound, that will bring in-listener fatigue and quickly want you turning off the music. What I am reiterating here is that the quest the cost and the journey in digital is not to beat analog it is to beat “digital”.

sgreg1
vanson1
126 posts
 

Fascinating conversations about Digital Sound vs Vinyl Sound. 

Its been shown that a Digital recording is an almost perfect capture of the oriiginal but some like the affect that the entire process of vinyl colors the sound due to its limitation but many people prefer this over the original digital presentation.

I read an article where they took the output of a turntable and ran it thru a good A to D converter. They then played that digital recording and everyone thought that it sounded like a vinyl record playing.

Just goes to show that the human ear does not want a perfect copy but one slightly altered by the vinyl process!

 

mikelavigne
2,199 posts
 

@sns

thank you for the kind words.

today i had 9 visitors for a 3 hour session. it’s a an audio club about 75 miles away that has visited me before. really nice and knowledgeable group and it was great fun for me. love these sessions. we freely switched back and forth from digital to vinyl, and played all three turntables depending on the music. there was no sense of disappointment if the musical choice happened to be digital. each visitor had multiple turns in the sweet spot and choice of tunes. sure, the vinyl mostly was superior, but the digital was awesome.

in past years once a session moved to vinyl it rarely returned to digital. not any more.

this is the way it can be. and what i wanted from my system. have both digital and vinyl at the tip top level, where i can follow the music wherever it takes me and be fully satisfied.

fuzztone's avatar
fuzztone
5,629 posts
 

The only "quest" is to find hardware that is faithful to the music. The rest is gobbledegook.

bigtwin's avatar
bigtwin
1,205 posts
 

Just finished listening to the remastered 50th anniversary re issue of Thick As A Brick.  It came in the original British cover of a 12 page newspaper.  Try cramming all that into your CD case.  🤣🤣🤣

oldrooney's avatar
oldrooney
208 posts
 

I think @mlsstl makes a good point above:

He wrote, “In my mind, most of the complaints I hear about digital have more to do with the intentional choices made in the production of the CD or digital file than any inherent incapability of the digital format itself.”

 

 

 

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