Is Direct Drive Really Better?

Raul,
I'm in general agreement that measured numbers determine the accuracy, but I will take issue on one small nit-picky area.

Lumping of wow and flutter is misleading, because I suspect that the frequency distribution of the wow and flutter noise will have a very pronounced effect on the perception of sound quality, just as it does with digital jitter.

I could have a table that had lousy wow measurement at 0.5Hz, but I suspect it would be much more pleasant to listen to than a better measured table with wow around 2kHz, right in the midband.

I truly believe in measurements and a scientific approach to audio, but often the most difficult thing is knowing exactly what to measure.

This has been a really fascinating debate, by the way, and I hope one day I'll have the time and/or the money to try a few more of the tables out there.

Just a thought. How many YEARS passed before it was recognized that one side of Miles' "Kind of Blue" was recorded and released off-speed? When the second side, recorded at the right speed, was available for comparison all the time? So much for our sensitivity to speed accuracy.

Albert,
I think that's a tremendous observation. A lot of people bickering about a subset and we've perhaps forgotten that we are all talking because of our agreement on a larger point which is the benefits of analog. Thanks for bringing that to my attention.

Upon mature reflection, I have to say that my last post is about as relevant as Raul's numbers :-)

Dopogue: That thought had occurred to me as well, and I think it's a perfectly legit observation. But I'm probably more immature than you ;^)

Macrojack: If I say I didn't think we were "bickering", will it sound like bickering?