Analog vs Digital Confusion

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.

Atmasphere & AL...I haven't heard Wilson, but I have several DDD classical LPs such as Telarc who say there was no compression used in the making of this record. (And they have excellent sound). They are probably talking about the recording and mixing process, but what about during mastering for vinyl?

Lowrider, I have a great many of the Telarc LP's from the 1980's, and yes, many of them are excellent. A few suffer from excessively swimmy acoustics, but that is clearly attributable to the mic techniques that were used on those particular recordings.

Concerning mastering, the following appears in the album notes in many cases:

During the recording of the digital masters and the subsequent transfer to disc, the audio chain was entirely transformerless. Neither was the signal passed through any processing devices (i.e., compressors, limiters, equalizers, etc.) at any step during production of the finished product.

Another factor which I suspect contributed to their good sonics was that although that was obviously prior to the advent of hi res digital recording as we know it today, the Soundstream digital recorder they used provided a sample rate of 50 kHz, in contrast to the 44.1 kHz rate of the CD format. That difference is, at least potentially, more significant than it may seem based on the numbers. The Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem defines the maximum signal frequency that can theoretically (but definitely not practically!) be perfectly recreated from samples taken at a given rate. Per that theory, 50 kHz can, under certain idealized and unattainable conditions, allow perfect recovery of signal frequencies up to 25 kHz, while the corresponding figure for redbook CD is 22.05 kHz. So the margin between those numbers (beyond which all signal frequencies must be filtered out before reaching the A/D converter, to prevent "aliasing") and the 20 kHz presumed upper limit of our hearing is nearly 2.5 times as great (25% vs. just over 10%) for the 50 kHz rate as for 44.1 kHz.

Regards,
-- Al