Is Digital actually better than Analog?

To kind of add to this thread, moving on from the Analog or digital, surround or stereo divides, I suggest that it is hard to create reality from a few squiggles (Analog or digital, mono, stereo or 7.1). There are a couple of areas that can be improved though...

IMHO, the most obvious difference between live sound and playback is dynamics. Music loses impact without dynamics and detail is less audible too. A very good system in a good room can usually produce timbre so well that it hard to tell the difference tonality (at least not without a direct A/B comparison; instrument versus speaker). Unfortunately most recordings (even some of the best) are compressed ...so even on a good system they often won't sound anything near life-like.

There may be good reasons for mild compression; it is more comfortable to listen to and it limits distortion/speaker damage from nasty high SPL transients. Some soft sounding instruments and some vocals may fair quite ok with compression, but most music/instruments are played to be heard at a distance, such as the piano forte, and in real life these instruments have huge dynamics and one can easily sense the lack of convincing dynamics on a stereo playback.

A good system test for dynamics is Yim-Hok Man "Poems of Thunder" CD (Naxos).....plenty of transients and dynamic range on this one. This recording is one of the more convincing life-like ones; Yim-Hok appears to be playing live, in front of you. The drumming is alternately soft and then loud and the transients will make your heart jump. Totally exhilarating, somewhat deafening and a litle tiring to listen too for anything but brief periods ....just as it would be with Yim Hok and a real drum set brought into your living room, six feet in front of you. This drum recoding comes across without the slightest hint of boominess...nearly all transients.

The second big difference, IMHO, between live sound and playback is the room itself....more often than not our ears are well aware of the room size from the reverberant sound field and this tells us that the orchestra playing from the stereo does not fit or else there is some reverberant sound in the mix that cues us that the real venue was indeed much larger than our living room or, in most cases, we get some combination of the two reverberant fields (confusing/conflicting information).This may explain why we close our eyes when we want to listen critically and why a great mix can make us feel that we are there in a larger room. Surround sound, I suspect, can help to counteract this reverberation problem, but it won't completely eliminate the room. Anyone who is skeptical of our ability to detect spatial clues, needs only walk through a church door to immediately recognize that our hearing is capable of sensing the dimensions and space from the reverberant field. Blind people use this everyday to get around; they sense their surroundings by using a stick tapped on the pavement as well as the reverberation of natural sounds. This phenomenon also allows us to sense when someone has quietly crept up from behind because they alter the reverberant sound from behind us.

BTW: An anechoic chamber makes most people feel nauseous, due to the complete lack of spatial clues to match what is seen with the eyes...the brain struggles to reconcile the conflicting information.

Greg excellent bravo,

"I don't think there is a "live" system to be bought:);"

A little advice....DUCK! and cover , if that advice came too late...stop drop and roll

Of course you are dangerously close to my side and I will tell you that it can be no fun over here if the skin is thin.

"a music lover can be happy listening to music on a little radio"
agreed
I'm not sure everyone else understands that and yes Guido's point were very insightful.

As you know Greg (or maybe you don't) I have drawn the Ire of the cogniscenti here because I claim that surround is better for digital.

What I am trying to establish is why is this so offensive a concept that people would be motivated to belittle me to the degree above and yet seem to ignore that atleast by your standards I should have a grasp on two channel pretty well and live sound. What is it exactly about surround that makes audiophiles cringe, for me it has given me the freedom to dial in my system to perfection for all types of music. My solution is well tested and my surround system outperforms my two channel system...without spending more money to play old records, I don't see a way to make it better and I've got $9K wrapped up in analog, have I spent enough? :)

I appreciate the extensive thorough input and I agree with and or accept all of what you said, to me your effort is noble and I appreciate it.

Shadorne, I note your point on anechoic chambers. I have beeen in one once and it was wonderful, but the person I was with couldn't handle it for more than two minutes. My point was not that they are comfortable environments without appropriate references, simply that... in order for a M-Ch system which produces spatial cues to be perfectly accurate, room interactions still need to be dealt with. One way is extreme nearfield listening in a room with no delayed reflections. This goes with your point that room effects are a huge factor.

The thing which noone has mentioned, but which I find to be a crucial part of live music, and a fundamental difference between live music and music at home, is the listener's visual interaction with the performer and vice versa. Is the performer interacting with the audience, the stage space (wandering around a big stage or only inhabiting a small space, controlling it or not, comfortable or not, familiar or not), his/her own performance (smiling at his/her mistakes or frowning, improvising slightly or faithful to the music that everyone knows)?; do the band members grin like little kids when they really nail something well together? Do they joke with each other and the audience? Does the solo cellist hold on to a vibrato in a certain way precisely because he can, precisely because he knows it will thrill the particular audience he is playing for tonight? All of these are, for me, a sine qua non of live performance. Hell, not all live venues have as good sound as my living room, but I daresay watching Hiromi Uehara jump up and down on her piano stool as she's playing, or watching a great cellist subtly change the decay of the coda of a sonata from piano to pianissimo because the venue is small enough and well-enough-designed to handle it, or watching Bill Frisell play with reverb tools while in mid-song just because it'll have an effect he hasn't tried before - all these are the things which make for the most interesting live music. To those who have said that live music is their reference... I'd ask them to think about that. It's a wonderful ideal but I know of no stereo system which will improvise because the audience would welcome it, or where one will be visually surprised because the pianist stuck out her tongue to reach the high notes.

Dear T bone: Very good point. I totally agree with you.

Regards and enjoy the music.
Raul.