ralphpnj wrote: > As you said in the early days CD not only were they rather expensive but > many times they sounded quite unpleasant, especially all those poorly > mastered and hastily released CD versions of analog recordings. Heck in > those days the record companies often just digitized the analog master > that was used to cut the LP, even leaving in the RIAA equalization. A > very sad state of affairs. Add to this the fact that many "record" > stores and individuals were in such a mad rush to get of their vinyl > that more often than not the vinyl (which at that time often sounded > superior to the CD) could be bought for quite a bit less than the CD. > Yes indeed in the late 1980s and early 1990's at the beginning of the CD > era my vinyl collection grew quite a bit.
I was very underwhelmed with CD in the early days. They seemed good in a superficial sense, having low noise and elimination of ticks and pops. But the sound seemed mostly dull and lifeless, although a few were just grungy and nasty. The worst early CD I had was an Abdullah Ibrahim disc on the Denon label, recorded using 14-bit conversion. I suspect no dither was used in this recording either. The piano, when decaying into silence, had this nasty ringing sound. In the early days, I had better luck with CDs made from analog tape. Maybe the analog tape had enough hiss to dither the A/D converters? The situation didn't improve for me until around 2000, when I bought the universal player, a Denon 1900. The improvements seemed to suggest that maybe, once dither was used, the early A/D converters used in recording studios were better than the DACs in consumer CD players. DACs saw vast engineering improvements from the early 1990s to the early 2000s, so maybe that was the ticket. I am very happy with the sound I'm getting now. I am running Squeezeplay on an HTPC using HDMI out to an Emotiva UMC-200. No digital nasties at all. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ andy_c's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3128 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=103238 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
