Which is more accurate: digital or vinyl?

EBM, even limited to the analog domain, vinyl isn't even a pretender to the throne.

Jump on CD if you think its great its your taste!!

11-07-11: Atmasphere
My guess though is that when we can do 64-bit DACs on a regular basis that digital will start demonstrating the promise that its been showing.

Thanks, Ralph. It seems to me, though, that it would be a pretty safe bet that that will never happen. In fact I suspect it is theoretically impossible, due to Johnson noise, shot noise, etc. Quantization of a 2 volt full-scale range into 64 bits would mean that the least significant bit corresponds to about 0.0000000000000000001 volts. (That's 18 zeros between the decimal point and the "1").

Intuitively it seems to me that although as you say the Nyquist theorem assumes unlimited resolution of the samples, 24 bits or so should be precise enough to be just as good for all practical purposes.

Best regards,
-- Al

11-07-11: Unsound
Hifihvn, no, not unless the analog tape's sampling is very much larger than microscopic.
Unsound (System | Threads | Answers | This Thread)

After thinking about it more, we do hear the hiss from audio tape, even on the masters. I actually wonder if it does play games with the bit-stream when this same type of tape is used for digital?

Nice post, Frogman. I would agree wholeheartedly. I am also thinking that the phenomena you describe are also a good answer to a question that has been discussed on this forum quite a bit lately, namely what is PRAT? Too many audiophiles think about timing only in terms of the technical specs, the actual speed of the turntable, for instance. What you describe is a different kind of timing that is far more important, and this to me is the "timing" implied in the term PRAT.