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Vinyl v Digital: The Thirty-Five Year Con


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Concept sounds great, but the harsh reality that I always was dealing with is that the environment in which a setup is running is a major part of the fine tuning - it's not trivial to attenuate all the factors that can degrade the quality below what's necessary. At home, one can do whatever it takes, which may mean shutting down most of what the house is doing electrically, to get a positive result - at a show, you're dealing with an electrical storm, all around you; no wonder rigs there often show up poorly ...

 

Of course, the ideal is that the rig is so robust that you can do what you like, electrically, nearby ... well, I'm not there yet - I'm always learning, trying new things (except for lately). This was the Big Plan, some years ago .. but it hasn't happened, yet.

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14 hours ago, fas42 said:

But I have quite radically altered how a power supply has operated, to attentuate the noise that can pass through. "Miscellaneous hardware" is the term that would be used for many of the items I worry about - in the current NAD literally dozens of parts have been eliminated from the circuit, because they only do possible harm, no benefit apart from convenience to a user.

 

I can attest for that.

As mentioned, I have a friend who used to modify commercial gear and in most cases the improvements were easily noticeable.

You'd expect manufacturers to design the cleanest, shortest signal path but this is not often the case. Here's a photo of modified amplifier (not my photo, nor my amplifier; the modification was made by this gentleman):

 

DSC_3758.jpg&key=c6a7a74d3487b6efd407003

"Science draws the wave, poetry fills it with water" Teixeira de Pascoaes

 

HQPlayer Desktop / Mac mini → Intona 7054 → RME ADI-2 DAC FS (DSD256)

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12 hours ago, fas42 said:

It's about time to post this link again, where I chat with Pano on the why's and wherefore's of this auditory behaviour ... http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/multi-way/177403-linkwitz-orions-beaten-behringer-post3402065.html

If I’ve gotten the right end of the stick, fast42 is talking about the holographic 3D imaging that most top class hi-fi’s produce when properly installed in a decent room. The effect is that on decent recordings the room fills with musicians in their own discreet space and acoustic environment, while the speakers just appear to stand in the room, pillars of silence (unless of course the sound engineer has positioned an instrument  to correspond with the speaker position. The dimensions of this ‘soundscape’ include front to back, side to side and height and often extend beyond apparent listening room boundaries. Of course this sonic picture is built in the brain using sonic attributes like relative phase and amplitude. Even on bad recordings, each instrument will have its own discreet position, although that may be crowded into a relatively small space, making the recording sound congested, with little air and space around instruments.   I believe fast42’s trick is to modify equipment of moderate quality to give it the ability to fool the brain and allowing it to build this spatial soundstage.  On really good systems, each instrument will be heard existing in its own acoustic space and will sound gloriously holographic. This is something rarely heard at dealers or hi-if shows due to the fact that the subtle differences needed to create this illusion are lost to things like poor room acoustics, less than optimal set-up and badly contaminated mains. Typical budget systems also do not create this 3D picture due to an inability to accurately reproduce the clues needed by the brain to create the holographic images.

In the US, the companies Spectral, Avalon, MIT and a room treatment firm whose name I forget actually built a brand around this effect, called 2C3D (2 channels, 3 dimensions), the emphasis was on the system’s ability to create a highly focused, 3 dimensional sound stage. The pity was that the same system lacked that magical rhythmic drive and propulsion that creates deep listener involvement, so the imaging, while impressive was ultimately quite boring in the absence of the music’s rhythmic soul. 

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16 hours ago, fas42 said:

Ummm, been mentioned in many posts. Electrical engineering at Sydney University, with a Science degree thrown in the middle - when I got out, there was a glut of my qualifications; went sideways into computing, with ICL, and ended up doing pure systems development.

Sorry. I haven't read all your posts by a long shot, so I have never seen your bonafides before. I have to say that your credibility with me, at least, has gone up considerably now that I see that you have an EE. That means that you probably do possess the knowledge and skill to modify power supplies and other parameters of an audio component's design to significantly change the sound. I had no idea that you were modifying components at the circuit level. 

Let me ask you this: Rather than starting with other people's designs why do you not DIY audio components like Alex (AKA SandyK) does? I used to do that as a kid when I had the room in my dad's garage and found it very satisfying. But since college, I've lived in duplexes and apartments, (don't want to spend my time maintaining a home and yard. Since I've never married or had a domestic partner, there's been no impetus to "build a nest" like all my married friends' spouses).

George

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3 hours ago, semente said:

 

I can attest for that.

As mentioned, I have a friend who used to modify commercial gear and in most cases the improvements were easily noticeable.

You'd expect manufacturers to design the cleanest, shortest signal path but this is not often the case. Here's a photo of modified amplifier (not my photo, nor my amplifier; the modification was made by this gentleman):

 

DSC_3758.jpg&key=c6a7a74d3487b6efd407003

That is a strange aspect of all consumer products. You'd think that these designers would build the best sounding equipment possible, especially on equipment at the upper end of the price spectrum, but they often don't. Cutting corners is understandable in price constrained budget equipment, but it's done across the board even with extremely high-end equipment. Same with cars. I've seen TV shows where a custom modification establishment will take a vehicle and put it on a dynamometer and "tweak" the memory chip in an electronic fuel injection system to get significantly more horsepower out of the vehicle. It turns out that this reprogramming also improves other parameters such as emissions and fuel economy. Makes one ask the question: Why didn't the factory do that in the first place? 

George

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dunno re audio, but with cars the factory often allows a safety margin for an owner who buys poor quality fuel on a trip, and to ensure there is a very very low failure rate for warranty costs, or EPA/CARB testing

 

remember, the device is operating in a multi-factorial space, and running up to the edge on one dimension can often entail compromises in other factors (depending on how the response surface looks)

 

the human body - and other animals - often have safety margins built in for bone strength, muscle power, fascia etc. ... but the failure rates are non-zero...

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5 hours ago, Blackmorec said:

If I’ve gotten the right end of the stick, fast42 is talking about the holographic 3D imaging that most top class hi-fi’s produce when properly installed in a decent room. The effect is that on decent recordings the room fills with musicians in their own discreet space and acoustic environment, while the speakers just appear to stand in the room, pillars of silence (unless of course the sound engineer has positioned an instrument  to correspond with the speaker position. The dimensions of this ‘soundscape’ include front to back, side to side and height and often extend beyond apparent listening room boundaries. Of course this sonic picture is built in the brain using sonic attributes like relative phase and amplitude. Even on bad recordings, each instrument will have its own discreet position, although that may be crowded into a relatively small space, making the recording sound congested, with little air and space around instruments.   I believe fast42’s trick is to modify equipment of moderate quality to give it the ability to fool the brain and allowing it to build this spatial soundstage.  On really good systems, each instrument will be heard existing in its own acoustic space and will sound gloriously holographic.

 

Yes, what I'm doing is nothing new in one sense; the difference is that I pursue the experiments with relatively low cost gear, to see where the limits are with respect to the intrinsic quality of the components; and how solid the illusion is.

 

The remarkable thing is, that even poor recordings yield up the holographic experience - this requires an extremely high order of competence of the playback chain. Then "congested" recordings no longer are such, and the "pillars of silence" become completely aurally invisible, no matter how closely you go up to them - this is a 'switch' behaviour in how the mind interprets what it's hearing.

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3 hours ago, gmgraves said:

 

Let me ask you this: Rather than starting with other people's designs why do you not DIY audio components like Alex (AKA SandyK) does? I used to do that as a kid when I had the room in my dad's garage and found it very satisfying. But since college, I've lived in duplexes and apartments, (don't want to spend my time maintaining a home and yard. Since I've never married or had a domestic partner, there's been no impetus to "build a nest" like all my married friends' spouses).

 

Well before the current path I'm on, I did the usuals - audio systems from kits; a valve guitar amplifier, and speaker for my brother, got him going on his musical life; enclosures for Goodmans Axioms speakers - recently, the most DIY effort was using a chip amplifier to create effectively active speakers. The latter was nothing like the usual tinpot things you see around; it had a huge power supply by comparison, which was 95% of the assembly - you could pull the plug from the wall while running, and it would happily keep producing good music for up to 10 mintues, before finally running out of juice ...

 

There are plenty of people very active in producing their own special stuff, to sell; I have lost most of the energy or motivation to do this - but I get a buzz from having people "see the light" as to what's possible; the hard work is getting them to adjust their thinking, to try looking at things from other than the usual angles, :P.

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8 hours ago, Blackmorec said:

If I’ve gotten the right end of the stick, fast42 is talking about the holographic 3D imaging that most top class hi-fi’s produce when properly installed in a decent room. The effect is that on decent recordings the room fills with musicians in their own discreet space and acoustic environment, while the speakers just appear to stand in the room, pillars of silence (unless of course the sound engineer has positioned an instrument  to correspond with the speaker position. The dimensions of this ‘soundscape’ include front to back, side to side and height and often extend beyond apparent listening room boundaries. Of course this sonic picture is built in the brain using sonic attributes like relative phase and amplitude. Even on bad recordings, each instrument will have its own discreet position, although that may be crowded into a relatively small space, making the recording sound congested, with little air and space around instruments.   I believe fast42’s trick is to modify equipment of moderate quality to give it the ability to fool the brain and allowing it to build this spatial soundstage.  On really good systems, each instrument will be heard existing in its own acoustic space and will sound gloriously holographic. This is something rarely heard at dealers or hi-if shows due to the fact that the subtle differences needed to create this illusion are lost to things like poor room acoustics, less than optimal set-up and badly contaminated mains. Typical budget systems also do not create this 3D picture due to an inability to accurately reproduce the clues needed by the brain to create the holographic images.

In the US, the companies Spectral, Avalon, MIT and a room treatment firm whose name I forget actually built a brand around this effect, called 2C3D (2 channels, 3 dimensions), the emphasis was on the system’s ability to create a highly focused, 3 dimensional sound stage. The pity was that the same system lacked that magical rhythmic drive and propulsion that creates deep listener involvement, so the imaging, while impressive was ultimately quite boring in the absence of the music’s rhythmic soul. 

As you say digital replay systems can do imaging, its everything else, emotion, synchopation, naturalness etc they cant.

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1 hour ago, Rexp said:

As you say digital replay systems can do imaging, its everything else, emotion, synchopation, naturalness etc they cant.

 

For me this was false from nearly my first encounter with digital.  This was the first CD issue of the Ferrier/Patzak/Walter Das Lied von der Erde, which was emotionally overwhelming.  

 

Further, it was on a cheapo portable CD player (Emerson?) and the cheaper Sennheisser on-ear phones (with the yellow foam pads).  I didn't even realize it was a mono recording at first, it was so vivid

 

Holy Schiit, that was 30 years ago!

 

Soon after that I could be found haunting the classical room in various Tower records like a junkie looking for a fix.

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1 hour ago, Rexp said:

As you say digital replay systems can do imaging, its everything else, emotion, synchopation, naturalness etc they cant.

 

Interesting the comparison between your comment, and that by Daverz - in part, people are looking for, and are sensitive to, different aspects in the sound ... well, the good news is that everybody can be happy, ^_^. Subtle distortion artifacts in digital replay are what kill the "emotion", "naturalness", etc - and if these are identified and sorted, then you get the whole shebang.

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3 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

Interesting the comparison between your comment, and that by Daverz - in part, people are looking for, and are sensitive to, different aspects in the sound ... well, the good news is that everybody can be happy, ^_^. Subtle distortion artifacts in digital replay are what kill the "emotion", "naturalness", etc - and if these are identified and sorted, then you get the whole shebang.

I hope you're right fas, been wating 36 years for such a solution.

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1 hour ago, Rexp said:

I hope you're right fas, been wating 36 years for such a solution.

 

It's really just another version of the LP journey - it took them decades to work out how to retrieve everything that was in the grooves of vinyl, and they're still trying to get more! When CD turned up, they applied the same sort of thinking to that medium - and, it was unhappy time for lots of music lovers, hoping that digital would simply nicely add the bits that weren't quite there with analogue. Well, that was true, but a lot seemed to have gone missing, once the initial enthusiasm died down ...

 

I was fortunate enough to get it to all snap together over 30 years ago, and from then on it was a waiting game ... how long would it take for people to 'learn' the rules to follow, to get better digital sound? I always kept an eye on the reviews, but progress was painfully slow - only in the last few years has the very top of the tree gear, very expensive, finally aced just about everything that matters. Trickle down will now ensure that eventually the "normal stuff" will also work as required, straight out the box.

 

If one wants to short-circuit the wait, then one solution is to DIY the optimising process. This has always worked, but it requires a certain mindset, which many are probably not going to be comfortable going with.

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7 hours ago, Rexp said:

As you say digital replay systems can do imaging, its everything else, emotion, synchopation, naturalness etc they cant.

It is my pleasant task to be able to tell you that using some of the latest hardware and software they actually can. Indeed, what I’m finding is that they can ‘out-analog’ analog, in my case a highly optimised Michell Orbe SE, SME IV and Ortofon Cadenza Black. In comparison, the digital system  is cleaner, faster, quieter, more rhythmical, more dynamic and sounds more natural (less of the analog noise overlay) with better image focus, bigger 3D sound stage, greater ‘impetus’ and drive and therefore massively more listener involvement.  But I will say that everything has to be right. I clean and reclock incoming Ethernet signal, send it through a highly optimised server with vibration control and power supply properly taken care of, then clean and reclock the USB signal before upsampling to 24/196.  I was perfectly happy with the analog replay, but this latest digital gear does make it sound ‘beautiful but old’ with the stylus to vinyl noise, contamination noise, lack of dynamics and by comparison, less rhythmical drive and impetus. 

The big difference between digital and analog is that in analog you get the music, with a separate overlay of noise, whereas with digital the noise becomes part of and damages the music. But remove all the digital noise and disturbances from the signal and you can achieve magical levels of musicality and listener involvement. 

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1 hour ago, Blackmorec said:

It is my pleasant task to be able to tell you that using some of the latest hardware and software they actually can. Indeed, what I’m finding is that they can ‘out-analog’ analog, in my case a highly optimised Michell Orbe SE, SME IV and Ortofon Cadenza Black. In comparison, the digital system  is cleaner, faster, quieter, more rhythmical, more dynamic and sounds more natural (less of the analog noise overlay) with better image focus, bigger 3D sound stage, greater ‘impetus’ and drive and therefore massively more listener involvement.  But I will say that everything has to be right. I clean and reclock incoming Ethernet signal, send it through a highly optimised server with vibration control and power supply properly taken care of, then clean and reclock the USB signal before upsampling to 24/196.  I was perfectly happy with the analog replay, but this latest digital gear does make it sound ‘beautiful but old’ with the stylus to vinyl noise, contamination noise, lack of dynamics and by comparison, less rhythmical drive and impetus. 

The big difference between digital and analog is that in analog you get the music, with a separate overlay of noise, whereas with digital the noise becomes part of and damages the music. But remove all the digital noise and disturbances from the signal and you can achieve magical levels of musicality and listener involvement. 

Can you recommend a dealer where one can audition a similar system?

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On ‎7‎-‎4‎-‎2018 at 2:07 AM, fas42 said:

 

A home system sounding like a rock concert ... help!!! The appalling SQ of such affairs is due to the only thing relevant being that it's LOUD, LOUD, LOUD - everything else is treated with contempt ...

 

Vastly greater enjoyment can be had at home from this sort of music, because it can be super clean, distortion free, with as much impact as you like, with miles of competent headroom - unlike the junk PA rigs, running in the red all the time.

 

Rock or metal music or even some classical music should be (very) loud. Part of a Sunn O))) concerts is that you not only hear but also feel the music. Feel the hair on your and your clothing vibrating. Same with some classical music. The last few minutes of the Bolero can be almost painfully loud 90+dB.

Large orchestral music is IMHO the most difficult music to sound good in a home environment.

[br]

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1 hour ago, Rexp said:

Can you recommend a dealer where one can audition a similar system?

I bought it from several dealers. I’m not aware of a single dealer carrying everything that I use. Send me a PM and I’ll outline what I’m using. From there you can identify dealers in your area. 

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4 hours ago, diecaster said:

 

Sure....you found something no one else found until when? Recently? Not yet?

 

Do you sort of notice that Blackmorec is saying the same things as I am ... O.o? This has always been around, and a few people have cottoned on to it - using their own methods, and ideas. You see, it's all about being fussy - and the people who get results have all realised the importance of having that attitude.

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37 minutes ago, mordante said:

 

Rock or metal music or even some classical music should be (very) loud. Part of a Sunn O))) concerts is that you not only hear but also feel the music. Feel the hair on your and your clothing vibrating. Same with some classical music. The last few minutes of the Bolero can be almost painfully loud 90+dB.

Large orchestral music is IMHO the most difficult music to sound good in a home environment.

 

The term I use is, "intense" - high SPLs, without distortion. Nature can do this easily - I sometimes have a formation of cockatoos wheeling around our house; and each is letting the others know he's there, :D. This is, "painfully loud" - and our hearing adjusts to the sound; it is quite overwhelming, but not disturbingly "wrong".

 

A system that can do Big Sound with sufficient headroom will get all forms of intense music right - an orchestral climax is just one of those, and should be handled with ease. Personally, I find most systems are nowhere in the hunt with pipe organ - the power and the richness of the harmonics of the real thing is just not there.

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8 hours ago, Blackmorec said:

I bought it from several dealers. I’m not aware of a single dealer carrying everything that I use. Send me a PM and I’ll outline what I’m using. From there you can identify dealers in your area. 

 

can you post the $$ costs of the 2 systems?  (not setup times; tweeking labor, etc.)

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