Which is more accurate: digital or vinyl?

Hi Lacee,

RE***does Clapton buy a brand new fresh from the factory guitar everytime he records?***

Cut and paste where i did say ...or imply , that he did or would? You missed my point and you missed the context.

Let me try and add some clarity.

When i said (paraphrasing) "musicians will change their strings/use new harmonicas and not go into studio with tired old strings/harmonica's"...to reiterate the point...

I only said this as a RESPONSE to one of your previous statements which was an attempt to "discredit" my "reference" for measuring the quality of my stereo playback. ie, a live marine band harmonica.

In other words basicly you were saying that i can't know if my marine band harmonica has the same timbre as bob's because his might have 10,000 hrs on it (spit, oxidation, metal fatigue etc etc) and mine might have only 200 hrs and you are saying (or a host of other contingencies)...THEREFORE... your contention is that the playback and live harmonica comparison is invalidated and therefore not admissible!

And hence my response...

Which was to say that bob would not go into recording with a harmonica with 10,000 hrs on it! Generally speaking ...and maybe its even standard procedure for electric guitarists, acoustic guitarists and harmonica players to not use dirty oxidized metal parts which are crucial to the integrity of their sound. Most electric guitarists have a schedule based upon how much they play as to when its time to restring. Is this not true? do i really have to waste this much energy to defend this? (smile)

Why do you have to ask me if clapton buy's a new guitar each time he goes into studio? I don't see how or where your logic could follow from my initial statements for you to make such a silly statement.?

So with that said...i say... that my comparison need not be "thrown out". That is too extreme and goes too far!

Ever watch dylans rock movie "don't look back".? There is a scene where dylan is frustrated by the fact that he is minutes from going on stage but has to go up there with "tired harmonicas" he says...(after his buddy attempted to revive it by soaking it in water)(bob blows into it to re check it)

and says...

"it's passable, i'll use it (sounding irritated) its just a drag i dont have a new one"

Also...When i was talking "trumpets and harmonicas" i'm not sure if you got it or not but i was trying to "demolish" your argument by another form of argument called... "reducing it to the absurd"

You said i was (i'm going to paraphrase).... "incorrect... the timbre of a harmonica can be effected by the room" (if you kindly will, in the future , to facilitate the discussion, please only use the word timbre not tone when discussing instruments, since i claim the timbres of my harmonica and my stereo playback are indistinguishable)(timbre is more ideal to hifi discussions)

RE "incorrect... the timbre of a harmonica can be effected by the room" (which is to essentially say therefore again its faulty or inadmissible proof)

In response i would say that i have to disagree with you.

The harmonica's TIMBRE will not change as a consequence of whether the room is "dead, live, or in the middle". These effects will only affect WHAT IS A CAPTURED BY THE MIC (degrees of liveliness or deadness), it can not make the timbre of a hohner marine band harmonica sound like the timbre of a trumpet, can it? No, it cannot. Or would you like to argue that it can? Therefore...

Since it cannot, and since both my room and the ambience of the room that i perceive on the record are negligable (no hall reverb) to compare my live hohner to the hohner in the playback i submit is a high quality test by which to measure the degree to which my system can play back the TIMBRE of a hohner harmonica and should not be rejected on a claim that room changes an instruments timbre and especially to THE DEGREE to which you seem to imply it can!

So, my statement saying that the room effects are negligible are justified. (maybe the correct thing to say is it has NO effect! on an instruments timbre) A live room recorded down to the track at best might only obscure my ability / make it more of a challenge... to hear "past" the recording to the instruments timbre, as i judge its merits but it does not obliterate its timbre at all. These are two mutually exclusive things.

True...bob's harmonica might have 15 hrs and mine might have 100 , true...i cant know if the "liveliness" of my room compared with the recording room was within tolerances of less than 0.005-25 percent, true...the mic's directional p/u might be different from me playing it in my own mouth, true...no, i dont know which speakers it was mixed with , true i don't know which brand mic he used, true...i don't know how good the quality of their recording gear was...etc etc, on and on you can go...

but the point is...

1.I do have a live hohner harmonica!
2.I do have a stereo sound to judge and compare
3.All the rest is irrelevant!

The key is...Points 1-3 !!! read again.

EVERYTHING else...in the final analysis i will leave up to you to analyze (humpty dumpty or not), i like to keep it simple.

I play my hi end stereo composed of extremely fine parts, I play the recording of the harmonica track, i play the same brand live at home and ask....

How identical do they sound? I constantly compare them and continue to compare and build my system around how close i am getting to that goal.

Why does it sound real when it shouldn't according to you? I don't know, you tell me?

I suspect you are either less exposed to REALLY good sounding system's and what is both possible both from a recording perspective to pass on to a playback chain and naturally the scope of your belief is narrower as to what is possible.

Certain parameters of my system at moments mimic reality, mimic timbres and voices (here i just have to give another plug for the allaerts cart, its a cartridge of a different "order" "kind" from all the rest (at least the ones i've heard, it just performs a miracle?)

It's like all the other cartridges are "numbers" when it comes to timbre, but this cart is a "letter" its "doing something "other"" by contrast to them and to try and explain that is ineffable.

So, i give up!

I still can't believe that one person in india can talk to another person in australia without a wire? Well, i believe it but its just amazing!

I have been as narrow as to say in the past, reproduced music will never sound like live but i am more open to that possibility today than ever. Old poor recordings don't stand a chance but new recordings, with better technology, with more attention paid to how they will sound on new modern systems, for the future stand a chance.

RE the weight of real instruments compared to stereo playback weight of real instruments.

If i were to blind fold you and put headphones on ...that could overcome the sound from a real instrument in the room and you had to raise you arm whenever the instrument was played by feeling it on your body but not knowing if and when it played , how well could you do that? and for which instrument? Could you identify the instrument from a plethora of others? which ones do you think you could pick out? or not pick out based on the experiment described? If your life depended on it could you?

How does a lone harmonica feel? trumpet? kick drum? cymbal? violin? Now change the distance between the instrument and you...now can you do it? How much pleasure do you derive from music from this one parameter to the exclusion of the others? then how important does it make it in the big picture of reproduction? (i'm not assuming the answers)

I do feel i understand where you are coming from and i do think instruments weights can and are mimicked by systems to a higher degree than you seem to. It's one important parameter to address but i don't think systems are as bad as you think they are in this area and i think its an important area but i think timbres and matching db's to how the event was recorded is to be more fair to our systems when we judge them. We form conclusion at least to some degree, maybe alot...on unfair comparisons.

If i want to compare a trumpet or nirvana's "nevermind" it is important to crank it as loud as if nirvana were playing live BEFORE I judge. They probably play at between 95-100 db, if i did play my system back this loud i am one parameter, one step closer to imitating them and one step closer to being "fair to my system"!...next would be to close my eyes at both events(this is only rarely possible)...that would be another step closer to being "fair"...what about this..and that...How many other ways do we fail to recognize how unfair we are to our systems? How often do these parameters get overlooked? How often have people concluded it doesn't sound live but don't think to consider they are playing at only 73db? Lots....Lots.

System's today with quality recordings can mimic certain parameters of the live event and they will only get better!

If you never heard "better" you will naturally remain skeptical and maintain your position.

Hearing is believing.

.

Vertigo, I feel dizzy. More to follow; I need time to recuperate.

Lacee...

This is good...

"This makes more sense,have someone blow a trumpet in your room, full tilt.

Did you cover your ears?
I am saying you would, the sound of the trumpet all on it's lonesome will blow you out of the room.

Now play any trumpet recordings you have, Miles, Mangione, Terry,does the recording overload the room?

Not like the sound of the real thing is it?
You can get loud and distorted and use a couple thousand watts, you can get the volume levels loud enough, but,does it sound anything like the real thing?"

I need to think about this...and i would like to respond.

If and when i find time....(other priorities exist)

I'd like to do this question justice...

(The question hasn't fallen by the wayside...not yet)

I know what you're getting at and i think it valuable to address this question.

Frogman...

RE i feel dizzy.

me too! ...and sometimes i wouldn't have it any other way!

Sometimes reality has too many heads.

Sometimes to get your bearings you need to let go of all points of reference if you want to "arrive"?

(friendly smile)

*

I've been in recording studios and made a few recordings with local bands,and some local airplay on a PBS blues station.

I have a decent stereo, in fact I've had several cutting edge systems since the mid 80's,and I have a friend with a system that is not just as expensive as a couple of new homes, but also sounds very realitsic,but the owner ,an avid concert goer, says that even this is nothing close to what he hears in a live event.But he hasn't given up on his quest to further improve his sound.But he isn't fooled.
I stopped trying to keep up with him.
The advancements he's made are too expensive for me to indulge in, so I'll leave it up to him fight the good fight.

I've listened to this system evolve over the years, and even his full blown Scarlatti digital set up and his SME 30/12 fails to make a recording of a Marine Band harmonica become anything more real than what it is, a recording of a harmonica.

Any recording of a harmonica and the system playing it back adds and subtracts so much information from the original, that,the better the system the more you can distinguish, live from reproduced. Or so you should.

This is perhaps what you find so troubling, that the closer you get to reality, the more you can hear that the reality you are hearing is indeed a reproduction.

For example the less resolution a photo has of the real painting of Mona Lisa the more the two will resemble each other and be harder to tell what is real and what is the reproduction.

As it is in audio, the more resolution of the system, the more you hear into the recording, the venue and all the other things that make it so much different than what you would hear in your own home , and you can use any instrument you may have at your disposal.

I've heard some high res downloads at my well healed friend's(yes he's big into this now)and the results are very good on some material.

I could easily hear that Neil Young was playing a harmonica on the Massey hall cuts,just like I could tell that Perry Mason was played by Raymond Burr back in the 50's. on my parent's first TV.
The fact that I could tell it was a harmonica and not a trumpet would be quite apparant on any system.
Now was it a Marine band? Perhaps.
I know it wasn't a Lee Oscar, they weren't available of course.

But was that harmonica right there in the room with me?Did it sound just the same as it would if my friend played one of his harmonicas?
No it sounded like the harmonica that Neil Young played that night in Massey hall as recorded by his tape deck and played back thru a hifi system.
Even with hundreds of thousands of dollars in a well set up room with all the bells and whistles of exotic power cords and wires and conditioning, it wasn't real, and neither of us were buying that it was.But we enjoyed it, even more as we discovered hidden details that made it perfecrtly clear that this was a recording.

Now here's a few examples of how people were fooled in the past.
The old live vs recording contests done back in the 1950s.
AR speakers I believe ,they had a great many people convinced that what was actually recorded music was real live performers.The gear was pretty primitive compared to todays reproducers as far as accuracy goes.
Also remember the adds for cassette tape from TDK, the sound was so real, it would blow you right out of the chair.
Again, no where near the resolution of todays gear, and yet the folks were fooled, or so the ads would lead us to believe.
Just a couple of examples of how low resolution can fool us into believing it's the real thing.
I am saying that high res systems do the opposite.
They expose the details that distinguish between a live musical event and a recorded one, and that makes it easier to tell the differences.

Now some folks prefer to be fooled.
Some folks find it more pleasing to the ear to listen to systems that are not revealing,they want the music to have soul,they want it warm and romantic,they find systems that reveal the music warts and all to be too sterile and find it fatiguing.
In other words they prefer to listen to music without all the added information and find systems to match their preference.
These people mostly prefer vintage gear, because it is not as resolving of all the inner detail that the better new gear is capable of.

No one is or should be tied down to either preference.
One is true to the source, one is not.One is true to the heart, the other true to the ear.
You choose what speaks to you

Now back to my listening session with the high end goodies.
You could hear the faint echo of the hall, the sound of the harmonic in it, the sound of the faint tape hiss on his stage tape recorder.
All that was there in the hall to hear was there in his system, and yet it still wasn't real.
It wasn't as imediate as the sound of a harp played back in his living room.There were differences, and many of them.There were a lot of clues that revealed this is a recording, it's not real.
The same as there are a lot of clues when you listen to an unrecorded instrument,or the lack of such clues would be a better way to put it.A lack of the effects of the recording process that are absent live which are there when recorded and played back on a hifi rig.
A resolving system doesn't blur the lines between live and real,it only puts them into sharper contrast.

However, what we heard was the sound of his harmonica of whatever make, being reproduced by a microphone, perhaps Shure 57 or 58, and all the cabling into the tape recorder.I was perhaps more there at the venue than he was there at my friends.
Which was pretty good considering the time of the recording and how it was recorded
So let's forget about all the electronic circuits adding and subtracting from the "real" sound of a harmonica,let's focus on what the engineer and old Neil himself felt about the sound of those raw tapes.
Should we add some more reverb and make the sound of the venue more pronounced, should we take some away,and make his harp sound larger that it is in real life?

Probably added a little of this, take away a little of that, and there you have it, their take on what the Marine Band harmonica as played by Neil Young should sound like.

So we really don't have a pure sound of what that harp sounds like do we.It's sound has been altered , the whole recording process alters it, the hall altered it, and my stereo, my friend's stereo, and even your stereo is altering and distorting it even more from reality.

So I am not doubting that to you thru your system,you can hear no difference between a recording of a Marine Band harp and your own live playing of it.
You 've stated that you do, in fine fashion I should add.

All I am saying is that I can't say the same about any of the systems that I am familiar with or have ever been familiar with.

I have never in my experience, ever been fooled by a recording thinking that it was a real event.
Perhaps it's knowing what goes on behind the scenes that skews my perception, but I also trust my ears, and so far, live is live and reproduced is reproduced.I can hear the studio trickery, and gimmicks that aren't there in real life.

And the better resolving the system,the easier it is for me to tell the difference between live and recorded.

This is the paradox.The more we seek reality and higher resolution, the less we are fooled into believing that what we hear is real.
It's the dirty little secret some folks don't want you to know.