macdef wrote:
First off please excuse me for not addressing you by your name, but I didn't
notice it anywhere and I didn't want to refer to you as MACDEF.
> las <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >>Granted, you have to spend a LOT more money on a vinyl system, and
> >>put a LOT more care into it, to get sound comparable to a CD system,
> >>but that's another story.
As you stated, this debate could go on forever. But after your apparently
derogatory statements about Rock, I realize it would be pointless because we
don't just disagree about analog vs digital. We are on two different planets
altogether!
>You mentioned that older vinyl recordings sound better to you.
"No I didn't."
Here I stand corrected. I thought that your e mail was coming from the same
person who started the vinyl vs CD debate. That person was actually Gerry
Morgan He stated:
"My older (late 1950s and 1960s) LPs generally sound better than those from the
70s and 80s."
I think there is room for a discussion between you and Gerry, if you disagree
with his statement.
"You said this several times, but it's not necessarily true. In fact, many of
the audiophile records labels still do everything using analog equipment."
Your talking about those vintage studios that I mentioned.
"What specifications?"
Frequency range. THD. S/N ratio. Dynamic range. Channel separation. To name
a few. These are objective specifications. Often they may not correlate with
the subjective findings of your ears and brain. So subjectively to some people
vinyl will sound better than digital.
You keep mentioning "analog to analog". But the analog sound that you hear
live, is not the same analog sound that you hear on the recording. Because of
the limitations of analog storage, frequency response must be cut off and the
original sound must be compressed so that you do not over saturate the analog
tape.
This is actually more critical in classical music than the Rock that you seem to
dislike. The dynamic range of Rock is generally not that great. But in
classical music it can be far more dB than analog tape and vinyl can handle.
Take the 1812 Overture. You have passages where the volume is so low that you
can almost not hear the music. Then you reach a point where cannons are often
actually fired.
You keep mentioning the on going improvements in things such as ADC and DACs.
But that is just akin to all of the improvements that analog made over the
years. In fact the improvements in analog sound are much greater than those
from the first CDs to the present.
Poor quality mikes. Hum that was louder than the music. Going from speakers
with a frequency response of 1500cps / 3000cps to speakers that almost go down
to 20 and almost make it to 20,000.
The same applies to the early stylus and cartridge. "Dynagroove" The constant
inability of record companies to decide whether thinner or thicker vinyl
produced better fidelity. I'm sure that if digital storage hadn't come along,
new advances in analog would have been developed that would make analog
recordings today as different as Tom Edison's tin foil player is to today's
vinyl recordings.
But research in the area of improving analog was abandoned once digital became
the accepted means of storage and playback. The last major improvement in
analog sound that I can think of was the invention of HiFi video recorders.
Their sound quality was considered a vast improvement over vinyl and other types
of analog storage.
Once they managed to take advantage of the fast speed of the recording and
playback heads of video tape, the difference between the sound quality of a tape
recorded at faster linear speed became insignificant in comparison.
All the things that you mentioned about places like "Ambrosia Audio" are
impractical in the real world.
Motion picture film is analog and even video majors would have to concede that a
high quality film image still can not be matched by video. In theory film could
always be superior to video, because for each step that you make in improving
the quality of video, whether it is digital or analog, you could always double
the size of the film and thereby double the resolution.
But as in audio, there are practical limits. When you get to the point where
you are describing the dimensions of film in feet or yards rather then mm, you
have something so impractical to work with and so costly that it could not be
used in the real world.
But to me one of the most significant improvements in analog sound of the 20th
century was the advent of stereo (once they learned how to use it correctly and
stopped making those ping pong effect recordings).
I have a feeling that our debate may actually have more to do with musical
preferences than analog vs digital or vinyl vs MP3 or CDs.
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