How Good Can Digital Get?

gendut3 - having perused your posting history, it's quite apparent that you've mistaken me for a kettle, mr. pot.

yes, i have stated that i prefer high-quality digital and NO - i don't say that vinyl sucks. to my ears, i prefer the quiet background of digital. IMHO, the surface noise of vinyl obscures the details of a recording. this is ME and vinyl (analog) is still my reference. notice i say "digital is as good and in some cases better than vinyl" on my meitner gear. what does this imply? it means that vinyl is still my basis of comparison! vinyl sounds more fluid than bad cd. this, i admit. i like good digital because to ME it has the silence of digital with the fuidity of vinyl. i'd like high-end vinyl JUST AS MUCH if i could get it as quiet as a cd/sacd/dad/dvd-a.

YOU prefer the ease of analog, which i have found now with my cd player. i'm happy. you're happy. let's leave it at that and keep our minds open.

you may disagree with me ALL YOU WANT - but don't accuse me of having a closed-mind when you have no ability to back it up. especially when YOU are guilty of exactly what it was i was pointing out.

i'd invite anyody reading this to look at our respective post histories and judge for themselves who has the more open mind, sir.

Lazurus,"...the surface noise of vinyl obscures the details of a recording..."
I looked at your system post. Do you use a record cleaning machine like vpi? While it will not remove scratches, it virtually elimnates surface noise.

gregadd - back when i had a vinyl setup (it was a Teres 265, an SME V arm and a Van den Hul Colibri Cartridge) i used a nitty gritty (which i still have) and borrowed a vpi for a while.

and they certainly helped, but they didn't eliminate the surface noise, unfortunately.

even pristine pressings were noisy - not distractingly so necessarily, but noisier than cd, anyway. and it obscures fine detail only in the same way that a fan buzzing in the room will, or the hum of an ac vent. it's not huge - just a bit perceptible and distracting.

oddly enough, though - tape hiss doesn't bother me nearly as much.

go figure.

:-)

I really find this back and forth with Lazarus28 to be very interesting indeed. It seems he owns the very digital gear I find so damn good. The thing that perplexes and troubles me is he HAD a 265 that seems not to have competed with the EMM Labs gear. HMMMM. I've listened to Rockports, Walkers and VPI TNT's and know that any digital I've heard to date can be bettered by these machines. The system that my friend has the Meitner gear in also has a 265 with battery power supply/Illustrious/901 and it too doesn't seem to compete. Is the Teres table over rated? I'm beginning to think so. Uh Oh! I'm in deep doo doo here at Audiogon for saying that.

Again, I love the Meitner gear and wish I owned it but even if I did I'd still have analog because of the many great performances you can only get on vinyl. For me it's more about the music than the gear but hey, keep in mind that a poor man WOULD make that kind of statement.

Best to all and Merry Christmas.

Lugnut - the teres rocked! it really did. we all just have different things that distract from and/or draw us into a recording.

noise distracts me. i haven't heard a rockport or walker, so i can't say what they're capable of.

and, as far as software goes, it's much easier to find what i like on cd. cheaper, too and in better condition.

and i'd say that were i a classical music junkie, i'd keep the vinyl around, but that's not true, either. SACD has so many classical titles, that i still couldn't justify it.

plus, i should also mention this taboo - i have a high-res mltichannel setup and vinyl don't do surround. (and i ain't buying the 70's equipment for quad, either) cd doesn't, either, but SACD does. and the few times a multichannel recording is done properly - YOWZA!

see:
peter gabriel - up
roxy music - avalon
pink floyd - dark side of the moon
nine inch nails - the downward spiral

these are all, to me, so superior to the 2-channel versions such that i hate listening to them in stereo afterwards.

of course, this isn't to say that they're all good. some music just shouldn't be done multichannel.
see:
nick drake - a treasury
beck - sea change
james taylor - everything

and some music could have been good, but is ruined by a lousy multichannel mix
see:
bowie - all of the MC sacds. i haven't heard "heathen" in multichannel yet, but i do have high-hopes for it. it could be really good - that music lends itself to great MC done right.
t-rex - electric warrior

and merry x-mas back to yaz!