Analog vs Digital Confusion

I think that some people respond to vinyl and some don't see it. The only way is to try it yourself, but I don't think you need to spend a ton of money up front. When I decided to get back into vinyl, I purchased a Music Hall MMF-5 table for about $700 and a Music Hall Phono stage for about $125. I compared it to my $10K digital player and, despite the the 10/1 price ratio, I immediately recognized analog's virtues. I now have a significantly more expensive vinyl setup, and I feel the improvements are commensurate with the cost, but I still think that little Music Hall was good enough to hear what was going on. So I recommend you spend $1000 or so and find out if you like it. Worst case - you'll dump it for $500-$600 and chalk it up to experience. IMO.

Frogman, Learsfool, and others whose focus is classical music on vinyl: I would encourage you to try to find some of the unfortunately out of print classical CD's that were issued some years ago on the Wilson Audio label (yes, that Wilson). Especially those featuring piano music. You just might find yourselves in a state of amazement at how good the CD medium is capable of sounding, when the recording is engineered to exceptionally high standards.

Of course, the production of those recordings was not exactly run of the mill. From the liner notes which appear on some of them:

The recorded perspective of the piano in this recording is close, as though the 9' Hamburg Steinway in being played for you in your living room. Of course the actual recording was not made in a living room! Instead, the great room of Lucasfilm's Skywalker Ranch, with its incredibly low noise floor and fully adjustable acoustics, was used.... A pair of Sennheiser MKH-20 omni microphones were employed ... amplified by two superb pure class-A microphone preamps custom-built for Wilson Audio by John Curl. MIT cable carried the balanced line level signal to Wilson Audio's Ultramaster 30 ips analog recorder. Subsequent digital master tapes were made through the Pygmy A/D converter on a Panasonic SV-3700.

In addition to many of the CD's in that series, I have one on LP, featuring music for piano and clarinet. Does it sound better on my system than the CD's? I would have to say that it does, but only to a very very slight degree, with the differences being apparent mainly on very sharp transients. And while I certainly recognize that as Frogman indicated individual sensitivities vary widely, IMO/IME differences of that magnitude would be swamped by the deficiencies that are present in the vast majority of lesser recordings, regardless of format.

Personally, I enjoy both formats, to a greater or lesser degree depending on the quality of the particular recording.

Best regards,
-- Al

If you are interested in rather new music that is digitally mastered, you are better off sticking with digital. If you are interested in music from the best era...1950's-1970's where the music is mastered analog, then a turntable makes sense....my two cents.

Re the original post:

If you want the answer, this is it. I run an LP mastering operation so I have seen this first hand. When you are cutting an LP from a digital source, it should come as no surprise whatsoever that the digital source is the master tape or master file.

That file will thus play back with less bit loss; anyone who has issued a CD from a master tape knows that the area of the biggest degradation occurs between the master tape and the final duplicate CD. Yes, I know, its not supposed to happen that way but it most certainly does.

OTOH when you are cutting from the master file, these days its very common for the master file to be 24 bit and at a higher scan frequency. When you play the LP back, you can actually have less distortion than you can have on the CD playback. While it is true that an LP can and usually does have more THD, it is also true that it has far less IM distortion. Of the two, the ear really does not like IM!

Where does the IM distortion come from on a CD? It is a product of intermodulation (inharmonic) with the scan frequency. Its not a distortion listed when you see digital specs, but it should be, as it is the elephant in the room when it comes to problems in the digital recording/playback system. The ear treats this distortion as brightness BTW. That is why the CD can measure perfectly flat but sounds bright.

When the industry made the transition to digital, the fact that the ear behaves this way was not clearly understood. In fact if you are reading this you now have a leg up on a lot of audio engineers, as this phenom is still not well understood 30 years on. I think the industry does not like to talk about it....

Anyway, that is why the LP often sounds better than the CD even when they have the same master. Of course YMMV as setup in an analog reproducer is paramount!

Al, I can't disagree with any of your comments. I have heard the Wilson recordings and they are very fine. Interesting that you mention the piano recordings as standing out. Good digital recordings of the piano showcase the one area where, IMO, digital has a clear edge over analog; pitch stability. With the possible exception of the great direct drive TT's, I have not heard analog set-ups that have the rock solid pitch stability of digital. Timbre, texture, and dynamic nuance is a different story; IMO.

Regards.