Which is more accurate: digital or vinyl?

"I stand by my statement that if someone cannot distinguish between live and recorded music, then they have a hearing problem of some kind.”

Maybe not a hearing problem, but a listening problem. All of our senses are subject to the selectivity of our mind. Whether music or visual art, our minds tend to disregard or filter elements that are subjectively less important than other elements. As an example, some people can be very content with severely rolled off frequency extremes while others will find it a critical omission. I hope I’m not offending anyone; all I’m trying to say is that when one audiophile doesn’t hear what is so clear to another, it is not necessarily clinical but perhaps a matter of focus.

True, Phaelon.

RE***There has never been now or in the past a hifi system that can even recreate all the dynamics and overtones of a cymbal crash, let alone a whole drum set and orchestra.
****

Have you ever heard a koetsu coralstone cartridge or an allaerts formual one? I haven't heard either of those but when i went from a denon 103 to a Jan allaerts mc1b mk2 the latter was a revelation/paradigm shift in my mind in regards to what is possible. The 'poorer'(older)your gear the harder it is to believe what is possible since you have a certain reference point from which you measure and naturally you remain skeptical. These carts are examples of "extreme audio". A combination of exotic materials , ie , solid gold transmission lines(in the allaerts)and exotic engineering designs. Do some research into some of the thought put into these cartridges and you will see how much effort and passion has gone into these designs.

RE***Think about the foolishness of someone closing their eyes,listening to a pair of Ls3/5A(No slightintended)and being foolish enough to say that, yes the whole Duke Ellington band appeared in front of me.****

Yes, that would be foolish since the ls3 is a minimonitor but how does that have anything to do with our discussion?

RE***Talk about imaginations running wild!
And people laugh at folks who claim to hear power cord differences?***

I do hear differences between power cords and those people can laugh all they want. I believe...the people who can't tell those kinds of difference.... don't really care for the differences, that is... they are not connoisseur's of sound. Some people think every bottle of wine taste's pretty much the same too but if you have an appreciation and a passion for wine your ability to discern goes up too, since with passion comes commitment and with commitment comes all the work of tasting and looking for fine differences between different wines. This transfers over to cables and audio gear in general.

RE***You just cannot get anywhere near the sonic wave attack of live instruments with any home system, no matter how tight you close your eyes****

If you mean to say that i believe how tightly you close your eyes directly effects the quality of ones sound system then you've misunderstood my previous posts about valid blind comparison's between live music and stereo reproduction.

What i was saying/trying to say in my previous post, was in regard to how the combination of both VISUAL and SONIC information at a live event is erroneously a unfair comparison with home systems BECAUSE...home systems don't have the advantage of a "VISUAL feast" of the musical event to boost your satisfaction level. AND that if you strip away that "visual feast" you level the playing field and are making a more fair comparison. There are other factors that make it an unfair comparison too, like , mic placement and quality.

RE***Also when a live band is playing, the whole room resonates,and not just from volume,we can play soft.
But even at soft ,low volume there is still a lot of air being charged and moved by the sonic waves from the instruments, and let's not forget about how everything in the room including the audience all contribute to fine tuning the wave launch.****

When i play the "nirvana unplugged" dvd through my system i set the volume just right so it 'loads' the room just so, that it does in fact feel very much like a live event. Playing loud notes or soft notes at the same time is a system's ability to play in a ...'wide dynamic range', so that soft notes don't lose their character and loud , fast notes don't lose their character at the same time as well. I hear the gentle tapping of dave's sticks on the brass cymbals in all their gentle glory. I hear wood i hear brass. I hear the skin and springs of his snare drum, while chris's bass lines are clear controlled, the air is crisp,clear, charged[i hear and 'feel' the air???!!][if that makes sense][which adds to the spell], the noise floor is low and things are individuated but somehow coherent at the same time.[hearing is believing]

I have amps that are very fast, clean, clear and toneful. I have heavy gauge speaker cables that can carry heft and weight. My speakers have very similar characteristics to my amp and utilize neodymium magnets. If you buy two neodymium n50 disc magnets they come with warnings about how to handle them. They are the size of smarties but can cut you if they catch your skin while they come together...FAST!.

Neodymium magnets executed in a good design [Based on my experience with them] take transient speed response and clarity, through the stratosphere.[things become more transparent, mimicking reality].

My allaerts cart contains them too, so transient response on the vinyl side shows up my digital system. My amp with kr845 tubes recreates the ambience of "charged air" like that in a small concert room ...just right. Some previous solidstate designs i owned made the air cold and flatfield, not alive like in reality! Perhaps its the stripped down, sparse versions(not hard, congested, distorted versions) of these nirvana songs that make my system able to make it so believable. Like it sounds so good i don't how i could improve the sound? It is that enjoyable, that satisfying, that intimate. The sound is ripe, supple, dynamic, tuneful, quiet, clear, powerful or gentle, cymbals have amazing sheen and good decay, ambient.

RE***Live music is an experience involving all the senses.
Listening to reproduced music involves one maybe two at best.

So how can reproduced music ever be called accurate?***

By that definition you're right it can never be called accurate but if you define it live music differently, it changes the ball game.

So with that said...it can be called accurate when we can say that how we heard it and understood it with our eyes closed LIVE is mimicked in our HOME STEREOS with our eyes closed.[THIS is the correct standard to judge by]

RE***I can tell you that when I play bass and stand next to the drummer,I don't have to close my eyes to get the full measure of what he is doing.****

No you don't, but to understand my point, you should!

Its also an unfair comparison, since the position of your ears and their distance from your bass and the drum kit are naturally going to sound different from a mic that is recording possibly from a very different location and is receiving info probably coming from a different angle from the source of the sound. A recording made from this mic will have a different perspective than yours, so it would be an unfair comparison, since all things are not equal.

But...make a recording where all things are equal from your perspective(ie, your ears/the mics... are both 2ft from the bass and 5 ft from the drums and directionally the same)and play it back on a system with great tone, heft, speed, no blurring of transient, plays low(so not a ls3/5)(or with a myriad of other brands that are colored and distorted)(not with a myriad of colored, muddy, slow cables, cartridges, amps, etc)but gear with superb timbres and i say the differences between how you heard it while you were standing there playing it and how the playback is...the difference would be negligible. Or to the point where the differences are vanishingly low and unimportant.

With all this said, i will grant that perhaps i overestimate how good the nirvana dvd sounds in my place, and a few other selections.... overestimate in the sense that because i wasn't actually their in the audience that night i have no reference to judge by but... you know how if someone asks you how a speaker you owned a few years back... sounds? you can't really remember in totality how it sounded because your memory fades/is fuzzy? this is true also of our memory of just how reality sounds! We recharge our memories by going to live music... well... i would say some of my belief that the nirvana dvd sounds identical to reality is because of this condition, ie. it sounds just like how i remember they should... BUT... even if that's not the case , the great thing is... that it doesn't matter! because obviously i still retain some memory of how live music sounds and if it sounds so good that i have to strain to find a point at which it differs, then it must be sounding so good that at this point , it doesn't really matter.

Maybe in your systems its easy, in mine, at certain moments, its difficult. Maybe if i heard your system's i would understand where you're coming from.

These days, my system sounds 'great' with more regularity regardless of format or quality of recording. On the few spectacular recordings though, with certain tracks, my systems sound is a amazing.[imho]

As i alluded to earlier, if you've never heard how good something can sound til you've heard your last 'reference'... bettered, you will naturally mock any such claims.

If you read some of my other posts in other places you will see how i have been quite critical of the whole hi end audio industry in terms of its promises and the actual delivery of those promises. It wasn't until i shelled out waay more carefully spent money that i actually felt i was getting "hifi" so when i say at certain moments i can't distinguish my stereo playback from real instruments, it comes from a person who has been frustrated with 'hifi' for over 5 years and from a person who only in the last year or so, is starting to feel much better and different about that. That difference can be explained by the increase of quality of the gear in my system.

RE*** I stand by my statement that if someone cannot distinguish between live and recorded music, then they have a hearing problem of some kind. ****

We are both obviously looking/listening to two different things. So, actually we are both right! Is it possible that your system cannot mimick reality to the degree that mine can? As bob dylan sings " you are right from your side and i am right from mine..."

RE*** if I misunderstood part of your post, I apologize. I am often reading and typing on here late at night when I am tired after a heavy concert, as I was last night and again now. ***

No problem, I do something like that too...ie,post in a certain frame of mind.

As, i think about it further...when i said my systems sound is like the live event i did not mean to say, nor did i ever think that my system was able to reproduce Nirvana's drummer, David Grohl's drum set in its totality during a very congested fast musical moment like i was standing 3 feet from his kit[though if i had a well miked recording from that position,,,who knows!] rather what i meant to say and had in mind was that at certain moments, with simpler musical passages, with sparse instruments, in my system, they have fooled my mind into thinking i am listening to the real thing to the point of straining for differences. [Please note those qualifications.]Especially vocals and timbre[see jan allaerts cartridge]. A good example of this is Norah Jones's last track on the lp..."Turn me on"

I know i'm not alone on this and i wouldn't have understood it til a year ago. But now i know and understand what people mean when they say the playback becomes so good its...

"spooky"

Well, this is what i am trying to articulate...when i play that dvd or the song "turn me on" its so real...its "spooky"

When it sounds that Good that means that EVERYTHING in the system is synergizing. This is so fragile and i've experienced this myself...change one interconnect or one cable, or plug something in in another place, one little change and the spell is broken! and it sounds like a stereo again. Those same recordings! I am talking very fine nuances being preserved or lost! [these kinds of subtle cues and nuances, this level of playback artisanship imho can only be found on upper level products and even only in well synergized combinations of those same products]

If you're not experiencing 'spooky' from time to time, where recorded music sounds like 'nothing'and 'spooky real'... check both your ears and .... your system's.

I never believed it either til i heard it myself. I don't feel my system is finished. Nor am i always completely satisfied but as my ear continues to develop, as i experience new levels of paradigm shifts in regard to what is possible from 'gear', as the technology moves forward, i am building a system that is more consistently pushing the boundaries of what i believed possible.

Over the years I've come across quite a few audiophiles or psuedophiles, who seem to be on a mission to either prove that their gear and ideas are the best, everything else is either bunk, snake oil or doesn't hold up to conventional wisdoms.

These folks are pretty much against everything that claims to make an improvement.

How can it? Show me the proof!

Yet, inspite of all their objections, they have no experience with the things they are arguing about.

The other observation is that a lot of the same folks have limited experience.

Limited experience, for instance with amplifier designs.

If they use a solid state amp, then all tube amps are flawed.If it's a tube amp, then solid stae is flawed.Add in whatever stereotypes you want to describe the deficiencies of each.

And yet they never seem to get it, that matching the right amp to the speaker and actually listening to the combination is what has to be done before you can make any claims one way or the other.

This applies to the whole accuracy debate,most everyone has an opinion about what accuracy means to them, but there is no clear way to measure what we are hearing.
And no two poeople will hear the same things from the same systems.So is the solid state amp more accurate than the tube amp?Even if they both measure the same?
How come some folks prefer the sonics of one over the other.
If both measure the same can one be better than the other in some unmeasurable way?

Ah, yes, I believe that is the case with all things audio.

Over the years and with experience to different systems and approaches to listening to music(stats, cones, tubes,solid state, SET, class D)you start to understand that there are merits to every approach, that none are perfect, yet any can be enjoyed.

What sets one audiophile apart from another is not golden ears, it is experience, and with that experience comes wisdom .The kind of wisdom that would never say system A is better than system B or is more accurate,. All that can be said at the end of the day is that they were different.It's also the wisdom that was acquired hands on, not read from a white paper and either agreeing to what has been written or disagreeing if something seem outside your frame of reference.
And forgive me for being so long winded,but if the mind is kept closed, and one only limits themselves to limited exposure of "safe" components, then there is a whole world out there filled with people who would beg to differ with you.

So who is right and who is wrong? Digital vs vinyl, tubes vs solid state.

No one will ever win the "argument" that this audio hobby has turned into.

Lacee,

I think often here, the existence of more esoteric products (high end turntables, tube amps, etc.) has to be justified to generate interest. Nothing wrong with that, these things are easily justified.

But the thing is I think often rather than merely letting these products stand on their own merits, there is a tendency to try to categorically debunk the mainstream competition, ie SS amps, digital, etc. Mainstream products from mainstream vendors are a bigger threat to the competition than vice versa. The little guy always has to work harder to justify their existence.

Vertigo wrote (among a great many other things): "..make a recording where all things are equal from your perspective(ie, your ears/the mics... are both 2ft from the bass and 5 ft from the drums and directionally the same)and play it back on a system with great tone, heft, speed, no blurring of transient, plays low(so not a ls3/5)(or with a myriad of other brands that are colored and distorted)(not with a myriad of colored, muddy, slow cables, cartridges, amps, etc)but gear with superb timbres and i say the differences between how you heard it while you were standing there playing it and how the playback is...the difference would be negligible. Or to the point where the differences are vanishingly low and unimportant."

I am truly at a loss here. It greatly saddens me that anyone, let alone an audiophile, could possibly believe this. Yes, Vertigo, I understand your points. And yes, I am a professional musician who experiences live music literally every day of my life. My job has also exposed me to the very best of audio reproduction, both past and current, and I have experience with a great variety of recording techniques, mike placement, etc. And no, I do not claim that my own system is the be-all end-all, or that anyone's is, for that matter. And yes, I do have both very good and very well trained ears. In fact, I have been trained to train other people's ears. And yes, I still say that if you really cannot hear the HUGE differences between the live and the recorded in your own above example, or you truly think they are negligible and unimportant, then I truly pity you, as you are clearly missing a very great deal of what the musicians are trying to communicate to you.