Lies about vinyl vs digital

[Soothsayerman]

Once I purchased a California Audio Labs CL-25 cd/dvd  player as suggested by Kal Rubinson, I left vinyl because I finally found something that bridged the digital - analog gap.  I had the unit refurbished not that long ago and it still is kicking, a great player. I much later got a Wadia 381 and at that point recorded a lot of my LP's and got rid of them.  I had also arrived at a point where I really had to start paying attention to what was a good recording or a bad recording. Vinyl is beautiful, but to say that you cannot get better digital at this point is just untrue and with the right setup, digital has matched vinyls organic sound for quite a while now.  My .02 cents.

[fas42]

In the home of a gent who had close to a SOTA vinyl in the 80's, there was also a CAL CDP. Yes, very easy on the ears, but far too much information went missing; I note in a review of the much later CL-20 again this lack of resolution was mentioned, which starts to imply it was the house sound for the brand - the big trick is to combine both retrieval of detail and "organic character", not the easiest combo to make happen.

[Soothsayerman]

21 minutes ago, fas42 said:

In the home of a gent who had close to a SOTA vinyl in the 80's, there was also a CAL CDP. Yes, very easy on the ears, but far too information went missing; I note in a review of the much later CL-10 again this lack of resolution was mentioned, which starts to imply it was the house sound for the brand - the big trick is to combine both retrieval of detail and "organic character", not the easiest combo to make happen.

 

I agree. I'm not sure how the cl-10 compares to the cl-25.  I really wish those guys were still around, anyway, very low level detail is a little recessed but the dynamics and the overall character is wonderful, but I eventually wanted something more resolving and got the Wadia.   I'm thinking about selling both and trying out the Audio Note CD2.1 but I'm not sure it's worth the hassel.  I don't think I can do better for around 2-3k.  It's a good time to be an audiophile for sure though!

 

[The_K-Man]

On 7/14/2019 at 1:44 PM, AVphile said:

Over the past four months, I have spent a lot of money (for me) incorporating a decent music streamer/DAC into my audio system which heretofore had been primarily CD- and secondarily vinyl-based.  The playback equipment for both is of good quality, but the ease of using CDs as my "go-to" music source has led my turntable to gather dust.  More recently, with the ability to utilize Roon and Tidal, my CD playback equipment has also been relegated -- most of the time -- to dust collection.

 

Yesterday, just for the hell of it, I decided to compare the vinyl to streamed versions of two songs -- For What It's Worth by Buffalo Springfield and Go Your Own Way by Fleetwood Mac -- in a real time A to B switching experiment.  The result was really depressing; the streamed versions were good, but the vinyl version of each sounded even better.  I am hard pressed to assign the reason for this as being due to poorer vs. better equipment.  My current audio system represents an investment costing more than $100K, and I have been careful in my purchases of its components.  Also, in my experiment, I made certain that I was using the same (based on album cover) recording for each version.

 

All I can say is that the vinyl version of each track sounded more "life-like".  Maybe it was due to the underlying frequency response spectrum of my vinyl playback components in comparison to those of my music streamer/DAC; specifically, that perhaps the vinyl version had a gain boost in the "presence" region that I heard as more exciting.  I really don't know.  Regardless, this was the outcome I neither expected nor wanted.

 

How old is your vinyl version of those songs?

 

If it goes back a ways then I would attribute the difference to the fact that the streamers were playing later, remastered, versions of those songs.  

 

As I've pointed out before, most remasters - of purely popular material, consist of compress or limit and crank it up treatment(see my profile avatar pic), which, while making the remastered versions louder at a given volume setting, also remove some of the liveliness and warmth you're used to from the originals.

 

The only time the stream would be a factor is if it is a really low-bitrate stream.  And even then, how something was mastered/remastered would have a more audible impact than the streaming format itself.

[The_K-Man]

On 7/14/2019 at 7:09 PM, One and a half said:

That digital dirt clouds the signal and with many components in the chain , each adding its own dirt. 

 

🤣🤣🤣🤣😂"Digital dirt"??  Ohh that's hysterical!  😂😂🤣😆😆😆

[AVphile]

Actually, One and a half may have a point.  I doubt that any electron has every received a bath in the nearly 14 billion years (or less) since its formation.  Clearly, over that extended period of time even the most fastidious electron is going to become soiled.  What's worse is what all those electrons must be doing to any audiophile's cabling -- both inside and between components.  Unfortunately, this serious problem must be more pervasive than One and a half proposes.  Unless I am mistaken, analog signals also are subjected to the same putrification.

 

On the bright side, this is an indisputable reason for purchasing all new audio equipment at least annually!

 

 

[sandyk]

 

I don't doubt that AVphile, Ralf11, wgscott and many others have had the opportunity to hear poorly implemented USB audio through a way better than average system, although I don't doubt that they can't hear poorly implemented USB audio through their own mediocre systems, and that they blissfully live with it.   

[Ralf11]

no I never listen to music at all - it is just based on what "many, many members" tell me - and some of them have high post counts and are EE's

 

- or whatever other crazy indicia you've posted

[One and a half]

13 hours ago, The_K-Man said:

 

🤣🤣🤣🤣😂"Digital dirt"??  Ohh that's hysterical!  😂😂🤣😆😆😆

OK, then please put forth your proposal to remove currents caused by parasitic capacitive junctions between gates and the case of every semiconductor from diodes, IC, FETs, switching FETs especially high power ones.

[One and a half]

13 hours ago, AVphile said:

Actually, One and a half may have a point.  I doubt that any electron has every received a bath in the nearly 14 billion years (or less) since its formation.  Clearly, over that extended period of time even the most fastidious electron is going to become soiled.  What's worse is what all those electrons must be doing to any audiophile's cabling -- both inside and between components.  Unfortunately, this serious problem must be more pervasive than One and a half proposes.  Unless I am mistaken, analog signals also are subjected to the same putrification.

 

On the bright side, this is an indisputable reason for purchasing all new audio equipment at least annually!

 

 

Oh another one to jump on the ignorance bandwagon, don't show yourself to be like @The_K-Man.

[esldude]

8 hours ago, Ralf11 said:

no I never listen to music at all - it is just based on what "many, many members" tell me - and some of them have high post counts and are EE's

 

- or whatever other crazy indicia you've posted

I thought it was highly qualified EE's? 

 

Or is EE short for Electrical Encephalopathy?

[Ralf11]

thx - forgot that one

[Ralf11]

12 hours ago, One and a half said:

OK, then please put forth your proposal to remove currents caused by parasitic capacitive junctions between gates and the case of every semiconductor from diodes, IC, FETs, switching FETs especially high power ones.

 

this is covered in EDN, not to mention a number of research papers

 

or do you have something else?

[John Dyson]

2 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

 

this is covered in EDN, not to mention a number of research papers

 

or do you have something else?

When you speak of interelectrode/external capacitances and the equivalent internal/external inductances of each device -- most designs need to carefully consider those (along with effective series resistance of capacitors in many kinds of circuits) -- to even think about doing a design.

Especially, if not considering the interelectrode capacitances of most gain devices, many negative feedback circuits will function as nicely unstable oscillators.

A lot of analog design (I mean TRUE design, not copying circuits from app notes and other designs) now seems to be passe -- why not just use an op-amp and hope that it is adequately specified?   Of course, I don't believe in throwing an op-amp at all solutions.  But -- a good very simple 4-5 transistor RIAA preamp can do amazing things at incredibly inexpensive cost.  (The two-three transistor typical ancient circuit isn't quite good enough.)

The super nice thing about the really, super nice op-amps (like the 'audio' ones from TI), is that it frees the design time from the tedious details of balancing bias currents/gains/distortion/input-voltage-noise/input-current-noise/power-usage/signal-drive characteristics, etc/etc/etc.   A highly optimized 'ancient' style design can give a good opamp a run for its money.  For a full 600ohm drive RIAA preamp, very/super low noise/super low distortion/etc -- it can be done without lots of optimization in maybe 12 transistors at $0.02 for most of them, and maybe $0.25 for a few of them.

Is it worth replacing a $3.00 op-amp with $3.00 (maybe more) in parts?   One thing that it gives you -- the 'you design it' can be worst case designed for YOUR application, while most op-amps aren't adequately specified for every application.   You can guess when using the op-amp, but in the case of the transistor circuit, good knowledge as to the physics and device characteristics -- one can be pretty much guaranteed to come up with a wonderful design.

The 'out' that using op-amps gives you -- many are pin compatible, and if one has unexpectedly high 'in' (input noise current) for example, you can simply try another op amp (well -- maybe with minor circuit changes.)

 

With the self-designed transistor circuit -- if the design is screwed up or Spice really lets you down, then it might mean -- start over again.

 

Frankly, if I still could see well, had manual dexterity (however I have a vast collection of great TO92 transistors, just in case -- SMT won't work for me anymore), and the need -- I'd do almost all of my designs from scratch.  IT IS FUN!!!   Life is so much nicer to have computers nowadays that can run Spice, and/or the Spice program is already built.  (Back in the day, I had to compile Spice from scratch.  But the newer Spice versions, e.g. LTSPICE, have nice GUI interfaces.)

 

(I was going to offer a bag of PHEMTS gratis for anyone easy-to-ship-to but it is really off topic.  Let me know, and I'll double check that I can find them, and I'll tell you about them -- they are HP/Agilent/whomever 54143 -- wonderful parts, and really should be used.)

 

John

[The_K-Man]

13 hours ago, One and a half said:

Oh another one to jump on the ignorance bandwagon, don't show yourself to be like @The_K-Man.

 

You mean the science bandwagon - as in, not worrying about those "parasitic capacitive junctions" that even DOGS would have difficulty hearing?

 

[AVphile]

Isn't it time to end these humorless jabs?  I recently joined this site, so perhaps bickering is the common practice here, but I was hoping that discourse, regardless of whether one concurred or disagreed, would be civil -- and constructive.

 

Hopefully, no one will take offense at my remark. :)

[mansr]

3 minutes ago, AVphile said:

Isn't it time to end these humorless jabs?  I recently joined this site, so perhaps bickering is the common practice here, but I was hoping that discourse, regardless of whether one concurred or disagreed, would be civil -- and constructive.

It is for the most part. You'll soon learn who to ignore.

[fas42]

"Digital dirt" is just an expression for that very typical distortion artifact that many systems using CDs, etc, are notorious for ... one of most extreme examples I came across, nearly 20 years ago, was at an "ultra high end" audio show - first was a vinyl rig, with beautiful life, vibrancy and sense of a real musical event; then the top of line dCS, three box rig kicked off, with Vivaldi - and it was a shocker. Bits of something scrapping across rusty strands of metal, luckily it was only on for a short time.

 

Unfortunately, the reasons for this are quite complex; there is rarely a simple explanation, that most seem to be constantly yearning for ...

[kumakuma]

1 hour ago, mansr said:

It is for the most part. You'll soon learn who to ignore.

 

20 minutes ago, fas42 said:

"Digital dirt" is just an expression for that very typical distortion artifact that many systems using CDs, etc, are notorious for ... one of most extreme examples I came across, nearly 20 years ago, was at an "ultra high end" audio show - first was a vinyl rig, with beautiful life, vibrancy and sense of a real musical event; then the top of line dCS, three box rig kicked off, with Vivaldi - and it was a shocker. Bits of something scrapping across rusty strands of metal, luckily it was only on for a short time.

 

Unfortunately, the reasons for this are quite complex; there is rarely a simple explanation, that most seem to be constantly yearning for ...

 

[The_K-Man]

37 minutes ago, fas42 said:

something scrapping across rusty strands of metal, luckily it was only on for a short time.

 

Sounds like a bow across the strings of a violin to me!

 

 

[The_K-Man]

1 hour ago, AVphile said:

Isn't it time to end these humorless jabs?  I recently joined this site, so perhaps bickering is the common practice here, but I was hoping that discourse, regardless of whether one concurred or disagreed, would be civil -- and constructive.

 

Hopefully, no one will take offense at my remark.

 

I'm just here to upturn the audiophile apple cart.

 

Nothin' personal!

[fas42]

5 minutes ago, The_K-Man said:

 

Sounds like a bow across the strings of a violin to me!

 

 

 

You were there?! ... I'm impressed!

[mansr]

22 minutes ago, The_K-Man said:

1 hour ago, fas42 said:

something scrapping across rusty strands of metal, luckily it was only on for a short time.

Sounds like a bow across the strings of a violin to me!

Are you sure it wasn't a harpsichord?

[fas42]

 

[rvb]

The music industry is a very strange industry. They put a lot of effort, time and money to register every frequency that is in the air, but they do not write it back on the compact disc, because they decide that we can not hear that high frequencies.

 

However that frequencies are present on a record, a  playback system developed in 1888.