30 Years of Perfect Sound?

"He should listen to gear more and report what he hears rather than make technical conjectures why he thinks something must sound better. "

His site seems to be a nice mix of facts and opinion.

Listening and reporting is only an opinion. Anyone can do that. Doing the technical research to understand why one might hear what they hear is a lot harder. If you look at his site, he appears to do a good job with technical research relating to photography first and audio second. Photography and audio are not unrelated technically.

I gather he is 100% bought into digital photography and audio despite being old enough to recall what preceeded it and I think even working professionally in these areas.

I like his site. Not for analog buffs mainly though he does review some interesting vintage audio gear perhaps not well known to high end audio affectionados.

Or better yet- burn a copy of the manufactured cd onto a good quality cd-r and it improves. Moral of the story-Use as much of whatever you've got to make the experience meaningful for you. I'm pretty happy listening to
Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys on a Victrola if that's what's available. The book is important but it's the story that captivates...

Mapman: No hidden agenda here. I've been reading KR's site for several years for his photography reviews and when he started writing about audio I was pleased to hear his perspective. I just thought this was a well-thought out article with a lot of technical stuff that might be of interest on this forum.

I'm still not sold on his premise that 44.1/16 is enough bits, as I've heard some pretty great 96/24 stuff, but I have to say that I've heard A LOT of great 44.1/16 stuff too.

I remember reading about a blind-test done a while back regarding SACD. The testers had people listen to SACD, and then the same music, but with an ADC-DAC in the chain between the SACD player and the preamp. The testers changed the ADC-DAC conversion rate for various tests, and found that a statistically significant number of subjects could not tell the difference between the pure SACD signal and Redbook. I wish I could find the link to this test somewhere. I'd also be interested to see the results of the same test but with LPs as the original source.

Of course the quality of the SACD player has a big impact on a study like this.

"I'm still not sold on his premise that 44.1/16 is enough bits, as I've heard some pretty great 96/24 stuff, but I have to say that I've heard A LOT of great 44.1/16 stuff too."

I think there may be some cases where more is better, but I do think the CD medium was well thought to meet the needs of most (similar to how 33 1/3 vinyl was in its day) which is part of the reason it has lasted as long as it has despite much technical progress in the last 30 years that should have rendered it totally obsolete years ago and still more to come down the road.

No audio product has ever succeeded because it was better, only because it was cheaper, smaller, or easier to use.
Digital was ok the way it is. A Mass Market Medium. Some tried with a lot of money to push it in the "Perfect Sound" Category. This game didn't stop, so stay tuned :-)