I Now Consider The Stereophile Staff Snake Oil Salesmen

[firedog]

7 minutes ago, Alcap said:

Sorry to barge in but what are “listening skills” ? I don’t think I have those,

I hear music  playing on a system, I like it......no skill required.

There’s definitely something called listening skills. Both Harmon and Philips have online listening skills courses you can take for free and shapen your listening skills.

 

There’s hearing and listening. There are people that can hear better than me but can’t tell the difference between a 128k MP3 and a CD. We are all hearing the same music; I’’ve cultivated some listening skills so I can perceive the difference; they haven’t.

There are lots of examples. People who are into electric guitar can differentiate between different guitars; other people just hear “an electric guitar”. 

 

Listening skills are developed: you train your brain to notice differences that you wouldn’t notice otherwise. The result is that you can “hear” more of what’s there. 

[firedog]

6 hours ago, dalethorn said:

 

I have no issue with devotion to digital - I'm totally on board.  But I don't kid myself that the relatively simple digital sampling we do (i.e. no quantum computers yet) captures everything.  It captures what we've defined, to whatever extent, but there are things in the undefined yet to be mastered.

We won't argue that point, but I will make 2 others:

 

1. Many people who think digital doesn't equal analog playback either haven't heard really good modern digital playback, or they have much more invested in analog and digital and are setting up a rigged comparison. 

2. I can make a high quality digital recording of an LP or a tape. If I play them back on the same system no one can tell the difference. The digital version has all those "analog" sounds that digital supposedly can't capture. If digital is somehow lacking, then this wouldn't be possible.

 

See also:https://www.stereophile.com/content/ayre-acoustics-qa-9-usb-ad-converter

where JA says this about 3 LPs he digitized using the

...but there was no doubt that with a 192kHz sample rate I could not distinguish between the LP and the digital rip. And believe me, I tried. I A/B'd the two versions until blood came out of my ears and I was heartily sick of this music I hadn't heard for, in some cases, decades. When, in An Oxford Elegy, John Westbrook declaimed "Come, let me read the oft-read tale again . . ." for what must have been the tenth time, I felt like screaming "No! Don't read it again!"

 

Almost all LPs today are produced from digital masters. Yet LP devotees rave about how much better they sound than the digital master itself (which is often available). So what are they hearing? It isn't some "undefined" aspect of music that digital "hasn't nailed down" -  because their LPs are recorded digitally.

 

It's fine if you like analog better. But it isn't because digital is lacking something. What it means is that analog adds some kind of euphonic distortion that you prefer, not that it is more accurate to source.  
 

[firedog]

7 hours ago, mansr said:

How can anyone publish such twaddle and keep a straight face?

 

The article was way too much of a ramble for me to read word for word all the way through, and anyway I think it is out of date. Digital recording and playback today is way better than in 1992. I don't take it too seriously. 

 

But as far as what is called PRaT, I think I've heard it. Probably has more to do with the speakers themselves (how "quick" they are and how well integrated and time aligned the drivers are) and possibly something in the particular speaker/amp interaction. 

[firedog]

17 minutes ago, dalethorn said:

 

That's the usual reply, that "digital sounds as good or better", and related statements.  That I don't necessarily disagree with.

 

But when someone says that "digital captures and represents everything that analog contains", then I disagree.  Now to be fair, the above quote is an approximation of 100 different wordings on the subject, and some of those statements contain subtle hedges and disclaimers such as "effectively all" or "everything you can possibly hear" and so on.

 

The truth is, a lot of the pointless discussion can be cut off at the beginning when the argument starts with "while digital recordings are a sampling and do not capture *everything* that's in an analog recording, we believe that good digital recordings capture all of the essentials, and eliminate certain analog problems."

 

Words are important, and too many analog/digital arguments contain incomplete or incorrect premises.  Once we get past those, we can focus on the real differences.

Nice post but in no way answers the points I was trying to make.