The character of analog and digital

“As someone who is one hundred percent streaming digital there is one commonality that stands out to me about the thinking and approach towards digital from those I know who are fundamentally analog audiophiles:

That digital should be easy and deliver without much effort.

I find this especially surprising given the effort and years it has taken them to get to where they are in terms of sound quality and performance from their analog systems.

The second standout point, in my experience, is spending pennies on the dollar for digital when their budgets for the analog side of their systems are up there, way up there.

Digital takes effort and expense and experience. When executed correctly the results are stellar.”

+1, @david_ten

You nailed it 🖐️🎤 ⬇️

@millercarbon 

Welcome back!

Shouldn’t we compare recent releases of digital and vinyl rather than waxing lyrical about 70 year old recordings where the digital release is cheap and cheerful mastering because you otherwise can’t make money on it? Claiming outright superiority of vinyl givien fast progress on digital seems a bit outdated.

@lalitk 

+1, well said.

@mikelavigne ,

your postulate of asymptotical closing of the gap between vinyl and digital seems counterfactual: vinyl suffers from distortions simply not present in digital, e.g. tracking angle on conventional tone arms, warp and flutter depending on pressing quality, imperfect reconstruction of the RIAA curve in the analogue domain, tonearm, step-up and analogue cable distortions to name but a few. Admittedly harmonic distortions on vinyl are euphonic and therefore often preferred to the ‘cold glare’ of digital, that however doesn’t mean they aren’t distortions. I fully agree with @lalitk that digital needs lots of work and am well aware of your state of the art setup on both vinyl and digital.

With recent upgrades in streaming setup...still in evaluation phase, I'm finding both more and less uniformity in digital recordings. More in the sense I don't hear major differences between 16/44 and various degrees of up and over sampling. Less in the sense of I now have the ability to choose various music players, for instance Roon, HQPlayer, Stylus EP,  two machine or single machine streaming, and much, much more available from proprietary operating system that allows a variety of streamer settings.  Every single iteration has unique sound qualities to the point I've yet to determine a favorite, point being one can manipulate digital sound to have entirely unique sound qualities, love this about digital, although can be a pain at times!

I agree most of my best vinyl from 50's, 60's, analog became much less uniform once we come to the 70's, I always believed this due to solid state entry into recording studios and multi tracking. 50's, 60's mostly all tube equipment in studios, many recordings pretty much live in nice sounding recording studios.

With the recent streaming upgrades I've now been motivated to finally upgrade my analog setup, in midst of those upgrades with more planned. Made a decision I couldn't give up on vinyl, damn sound quality, even with lower resolution vs my digital is deserving of major upgrades to challenge my digital resolution.

Bottom line for me, both digital and analog capable of damn fine character.