adamdea;578505 Wrote: > Yes I agree with most of what you say (almost anything recorded by > Hyperion sounds great for example). I also note that Gramophone > reviewers (who are plainly not neophiles) took to CD more > enthusiastically than Hi Fi reviewers. I cannot imagine wanting > regularly to listen to the slow movement of a piano sonata on record > (especially not an old one.) > Nevertheless the fact that CD can sound great does not mean that it > can't be bettered. Also I think that there probably is something > instructive to be learned from the fact that an awful lot of picky > people still seem to think there is something in analog that Cd missed. > > > I think though that the concepts of analog noise floor, dynamic range, > quantisation noise and resolution need unpicking. Digital basically > wins in practical terms in terms of hearing quiet sounds because its > overall snr and dynamic range can easily be made greater than that of > eg a record player. > [But analog tapes manage to capture even if not immediately reproduce > sounds below the noise floor. The notes to the later editions of > Solti's Ring cycle disclose that once modern noise reduction system > were applied to the old analog masters, they found all kinds of things > they didn't know were there.] > > A digital system simply can't reproduce any sound below its > quantisation noise and that quantisation noise appears throughout the > amplitude range. In a digital system then the smallest value which can > be given is (I think) equal to the smallest incremental value of > amplitude. -If you look at John Atkinson's measurements of a sine wave > in dac reviews, a good unit will make a sinewave that looks like (er) a > sinewave in 24 bits. But in 16 bits even the best players can only make > a squiggly thing half way between a squarewave and a sine wave. This is > clear in the touch review but even clearer in the Transporter review. > The cause of this as I understand it is the limited range of sample > values in the 16 bit file. > > An analog system it seems to me may still make a very finely textured > range of sounds above a noisy background. I think it is very confusing > and probably inaccurate to measure the noise floor of an analog system > relative to max, convert that into bits and then treat that figure as > being the equivalent bit depth of the analog system for all purposes. > (I think that this is because in the analog system the smallest value > which can be given is not also the smallest incremental value-ie > dynamic range does not equal precision. I do hope this is correct]
OK - the analogue noise floor is not a hard-stop barrier, it's a sliding scale. So yes you can get back information previously "buried" in the analogue noise floor BUT: 1) this is ONLY possible using (24 or 32-bit) digital signal processing techniques - ironically :-) 2) the digital noise floor - whilst a hard stop - is WAY below that of the best analogue (this is particularly true of 24-bit recording) so it's less of a problem in the first place with digital!. ...and yes I've seen those sites that claim the noise floor of analogue is not as bad as it seems on the surface. Anyone who has ever ripped vinyl can come to their own conclusions on that front :-) -- Phil Leigh You want to see the signal path BEFORE it gets onto a CD/vinyl...it ain't what you'd call minimal... Touch(wired/XP) - TACT 2.2X (Linear PSU) + Good Vibrations S/W - MF Triplethreat(Audiocom full mods) - Linn 5103 - Aktiv 5.1 system (6x LK140's, ESPEK/TRIKAN/KATAN/SEIZMIK 10.5), Pekin Tuner, Townsend Supertweeters, Blue Jeans Digital,Kimber Speaker & Chord Interconnect cables Kitchen Boom, Outdoors: SB Radio, Harmony One remote for everything. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Phil Leigh's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=85 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=82050 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
