Forgive me Computeraudiophiles, for I have sinned

[jabbr]

1 minute ago, fas42 said:

 

Ummm, we've already been here - I gave an exensive list of what I did with the first rig, some time ago in a post on one of the threads. Dig it up, and we can go over it with a fine tooth comb if you like ...

 

The "fine tooth comb" approach is how it needs to be done, unfortunately. The audio friend up the road still hasn't achieved the best sound, even with me looking over his shoulder - he resisted doing certain things for ages, because "it's just too awkward, messy!" ... I knew this would always hold the sound back, but he had to convince himself of the need.

 

It's not an easy journey; if the gear one bought was better designed and implemented then "a lot of the nonsense" wouldn't be necessary - but at the moment it is.

 

Frank, you've repeated this 50,000 times. I can't go back and read each one of these repetitive posts to look for any one with details. Are you for real? Have you ever posted details? C'mon details of a single instance would be only a very small fraction of the words you write...

[esldude]

8 hours ago, joelha said:

 

But, and I know for some this will be controversial, I’ve been listening to ripped CD’s recorded onto tape and loving it. Have I made my copy of the music more accurate than the source? Of course not. I know the copied version is a “colored” copy of the original. And I don’t care. For this audiophile, it’s smoother richer and highlights how far digital still has to go. I could far more easily listen to my reel to reel player for five hours at a time than my digital system. And I still love my digital system . . . but now, just not as much.

Joel

I don't have any problem with what you are doing except that in bold above. 

 

You are seeing that tape has a sound, a coloration as you so rightly said.  And that you like it as well which is just fine. 

 

But digital doesn't have anywhere to go.  It is the higher fidelity medium.  We just need some DSP to replicate what tape is doing. It is certainly doable.  There are some tape emulation plug ins.  I've not spent any time with them to see if they work well.  

 

Or before reading Peter's crazy suggestion I had thought of the same thing.  If you have a 3 head deck you could just run CD into it and listen to the playback head real time.  You'll get all the same effects without having to record every digital file onto a reel of tape.  A DSP plug in would be much more convenient of course. 

[fas42]

6 minutes ago, jabbr said:

 

Frank, you've repeated this 50,000 times. I can't go back and read each one of these repetitive posts to look for any one with details. Are you for real? Have you ever posted details? C'mon details of a single instance would be only a very small fraction of the words you write...

 

Well, I used that "terrible" search facility here, with "Yamaha" for the term, and "fas42" for the author and came up with a whole swag of posts ... a key one was this,

 

.

[esldude]

https://sonicscoop.com/2018/03/14/best-tape-saturation-plugins-market/

 

Here is a recent article about tape emulations.  End of the article you can download samples and hear it for yourself. 

 

I also would add I prefer sound of tape to LP. 

 

In the 1990s some friends and I got together with LPs, CD, and pre-recorded reel tape to compare the same albums on all three formats.  While none sounded identical we were surprised to find the basic balance of reel tape and CD were usually close.  LP was always the obviously odd man out sounding very different in balance and other attributes. 

 

[fas42]

6 minutes ago, esldude said:

But digital doesn't have anywhere to go.  It is the higher fidelity medium.  We just need some DSP to replicate what tape is doing. It is certainly doable.  There are some tape emulation plug ins.  I've not spent any time with them to see if they work well.  

 

 

One doesn't have to "tapeify" the sound to make it more acceptable - that's just another effect, which may 'work' or not, depending upon everything. I have heard recordings of Amy Winehouse that have been "vinylfied" and this is truly awful, awful to listen to - the people who did it didn't have a clue, and it grates, baaadly ...

[jabbr]

4 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

Well, I used that "terrible" search facility here, with "Yamaha" for the term, and "fas42" for the author and came up with a whole swag of posts ... a key one was this,

 

Thank you Frank.

 

You've said many times that you first listen to the system using a recording and based on what you hear, you make changes.

 

1) What did you hear in this system that caused you to rewire the speakers?

2) you said rewired throughout? this system didn't have much digital except for the CDP. -- do you hardwire a computer? DAC?

What about digital connectors/ribbons etc? PCIe cards etc? Do you hardwire these?

3) have you ever worked on the types of systems we typically discuss on CA, i.e. ones with computers, networks, NAS, DAC, USB, ethernet etc? What have you done in these situations? Or do they have a different sound that causes you to do other things? What?

 

[Hugo9000]

So, a Yamaha CD player (vague, how many CD player models has Yamaha made through the decades?), unnamed amplifier, unnamed loudspeakers.  lolz

[fas42]

10 minutes ago, Hugo9000 said:

So, a Yamaha CD player (vague, how many CD player models has Yamaha made through the decades?), unnamed amplifier, unnamed loudspeakers.  lolz

 

Note, my earlier post about using the search facility here - how much do you need your hand held ... ?

 

 

I'll leave it as an exercise, to see if you can find the speakers used ... .

 

 

[GUTB]

23 minutes ago, esldude said:

I don't have any problem with what you are doing except that in bold above. 

 

You are seeing that tape has a sound, a coloration as you so rightly said.  And that you like it as well which is just fine. 

 

But digital doesn't have anywhere to go.  It is the higher fidelity medium.  We just need some DSP to replicate what tape is doing. It is certainly doable.  There are some tape emulation plug ins.  I've not spent any time with them to see if they work well.  

 

Or before reading Peter's crazy suggestion I had thought of the same thing.  If you have a 3 head deck you could just run CD into it and listen to the playback head real time.  You'll get all the same effects without having to record every digital file onto a reel of tape.  A DSP plug in would be much more convenient of course. 

 

Perhaps the Big Lie is that digital is higher fidelity than analog.

 

Have you heard 15-ips tape?

[fas42]

48 minutes ago, jabbr said:

 

Thank you Frank.

 

You've said many times that you first listen to the system using a recording and based on what you hear, you make changes.

 

1) What did you hear in this system that caused you to rewire the speakers?

 

It would be very hard now - this was over 30 years ago - to recall exactly the reasons. The wiring used was the normal cheap rubbish, and I had been provoked by a dealer to buy very meaty Van den Hul speaker cables, the ones that were the rage at the time. It didn't make sense to go from meaty, to gossamer thread inside the box - so I looked around for an "audiophile approved" cable that was cheap, and meaty, and could be bent to fit.

 

Quote

2) you said rewired throughout? this system didn't have much digital except for the CDP. -- do you hardwire a computer? DAC?

What about digital connectors/ribbons etc? PCIe cards etc? Do you hardwire these?

 

I wouldn't hardwire a computer; I would leave this as something outside the "black box" of the rig, and just attempt to shield, isolate it from the audio circuitry as much as possible.

 

The DAC core is normally a tight, hardwired ensemble of parts - the surrounding elements may have non-soldered connections - fuses come to mind. I solder or use silver grease on these.

 

The digital side works well, as is; I wouldn't try hardwiring unless it was absolutely clear that I couldn't get around noise issues unless I did this - a last resort.

 

Quote

3) have you ever worked on the types of systems we typically discuss on CA, i.e. ones with computers, networks, NAS, DAC, USB, ethernet etc? What have you done in these situations? Or do they have a different sound that causes you to do other things? What?

 

 

Only recently have I played with digital file as source - Peter has vastly more worthwhile to say on this side of things. What is clear is that "everything matters!" - my local audio mate spent ages working out precisely the exact routine to use when selecting a track with a media player, for optimum replay - this is silly, of course; the SQ should be independent of what one does - but it's not.

 

Overall, I just don't have the experience to suggest the best moves here; what would be key is that the DAC totally controls the stream of data to its input, by whatever means, and that the highest levels of isolation are in place, electrically, between the source boxes and DAC.

[Brinkman Ship]

9 hours ago, joelha said:

Forgive me Computeraudiophiles, for I have sinned

 

I’ve been a devoted digital music listener for a long time. I’ve gone the Mac, Linux and Windows routes (currently Windows). I’m using an SLC SSD OS drive with a Pachanko Sata cable and linear power supplies to power my server, external hard drive and router. My current player of choice is XXHighend. I’m using the Berkeley Alpha Reference 2 DAC and a Mutec clock. I could go on, but you get the idea. I’ve been committed to making my digital sound the best I possibly could.

 

The convenience of digital combined with the fact that I can constantly tweak my signal chain to further improve the sound has always been attractive to me. And I’ve loved the sound.

 

Friends have hounded me to get into vinyl. And, as good as vinyl has sounded, given the very considerable expense of getting very good sound and the additional trouble of playing albums, I haven’t been sold.

 

But something changed all of that.

 

Reel to reel tape.

 

Believe me, I know the issues. First, if albums are inconvenient, tape is even more so. When is the last time you had to rewind a vinyl album? I suppose the time to thread a tape onto a machine and cueing up an album aren’t that different.

 

But then there’s music catalog availability. I’m only interested in playing 15 ips (inches per second) two track tapes. The availability of those tapes is very limited and for those recently recorded, crazy expensive. You can spend up to $500 and more for an album. Even a really good 2500 foot blank tape can run $70+ dollars with aluminum reel. And then you’ll only get 33 minutes of recording time at 15 ips.

 

If the story ended there, I would have said stayed away from the reel to reel option.

 

But, and I know for some this will be controversial, I’ve been listening to ripped CD’s recorded onto tape and loving it. Have I made my copy of the music more accurate than the source? Of course not. I know the copied version is a “colored” copy of the original. And I don’t care. For this audiophile, it’s smoother richer and highlights how far digital still has to go. I could far more easily listen to my reel to reel player for five hours at a time than my digital system. And I still love my digital system . . . but now, just not as much.

 

A few comments about replies to this post.

 

If you want to debate the benefits of custom sata cables, linear power supplies and the like, please do it on the thousand other threads on this site which do that.

If you want to question the value of spending so much money on a dac or using a clock, please do that elsewhere as well. That’s not the point of this thread.

 

If, on the other hand, you want to tell me you have a digital system which matches or exceeds the enjoyment factor you have had from reel to reel tape, please chime in.

Other comments or questions are welcome as well. I’m very new to this reel to reel part of the hobby and, for all the reasons I’ve mentioned above, won’t abandon the digital part of my system. But it’s a heck of a lot harder to go back to now.

 

Joel

tape rules. period.

[joelha]

1 hour ago, esldude said:

I don't have any problem with what you are doing except that in bold above. 

 

You are seeing that tape has a sound, a coloration as you so rightly said.  And that you like it as well which is just fine. 

 

But digital doesn't have anywhere to go.  It is the higher fidelity medium.  We just need some DSP to replicate what tape is doing. It is certainly doable.  There are some tape emulation plug ins.  I've not spent any time with them to see if they work well.  

 

Or before reading Peter's crazy suggestion I had thought of the same thing.  If you have a 3 head deck you could just run CD into it and listen to the playback head real time.  You'll get all the same effects without having to record every digital file onto a reel of tape.  A DSP plug in would be much more convenient of course. 

esldude,

 

First, thanks for understanding my first post the way I intended it to be understood.

 

If digital didn't have anywhere else to go, then there would be no new dacs, no questions about upsampling, NOS dacs, ethernet vs. usb. There were would be no new technologies. No one would hear digital sounding any better today than they did when the Sony CDP-101 first came out in 1982.

 

As for a DSP plugin, I've searched. The reviews from the folks who use them describe them as very incomplete solutions to tape. If someone knows of a killer plugin, why wouldn't I want it? It would beat the heck out of what I have to do now to listen to music sounding the way I like it.

 

Joel

[joelha]

1 hour ago, esldude said:

https://sonicscoop.com/2018/03/14/best-tape-saturation-plugins-market/

 

Here is a recent article about tape emulations.  End of the article you can download samples and hear it for yourself. 

 

I also would add I prefer sound of tape to LP. 

 

In the 1990s some friends and I got together with LPs, CD, and pre-recorded reel tape to compare the same albums on all three formats.  While none sounded identical we were surprised to find the basic balance of reel tape and CD were usually close.  LP was always the obviously odd man out sounding very different in balance and other attributes. 

 

Hey esldude,

 

Thanks very much for the article. I'm going to read through it and see if something wonderful exists for me . . . and maybe others as well.

 

Joel

[jabbr]

23 minutes ago, fas42 said:

Overall, I just don't have the experience to suggest the best moves here; what would be key is that the DAC totally controls the stream of data to its input, by whatever means, and that the highest levels of isolation are in place, electrically, between the source boxes and DAC.

 

If you don't have the experience with digital, then why do you keep claiming to have done this countless times? Or if you have experience with digital systems such as we discuss here, what specifically have you done?

[elcorso]

My tape machine and LP player damaged by the time in disuse and the cruel humidity of the climate in which I live. Also the tapes and many LPs ...

 

Good memories of listening to music on them, but ...

 

As a friend told me, if you really want to enjoy digital, stop listening to analog recordings in tapes or LPs ...

 

Roch

[fas42]

39 minutes ago, jabbr said:

 

If you don't have the experience with digital, then why do you keep claiming to have done this countless times? Or if you have experience with digital systems such as we discuss here, what specifically have you done?

 

I don't have the in depth experience with using computer sourced digital - the data of course is identical, to what is on some CD - but the "transport", reading mechanism is very different. Once you have data heading to the input of a DAC, from then on it's all the same - but the electrical issues of that original source mechanism may be the crucial variable.

 

I note that USB, which I have never tried, is very prone to causing SQ issues - and when I see how it's implemented, in many cases, I can see why this would be so. If I were to to go down this route I would track down the best raw mechanism, in terms of its design; buy a cheap one that people had positive experiences with, and then experiment like crazy so see what factors were relevant - and modify as necessary; if that still didn't work well enough I would try another approach. It's an evolutionary process, always.

 

Digital as a means of reproducing high quality sound requires lots of TLC - that's the core of my experience. Every actual physical implementation of that chain will need its own, specific set of 'tweaks' done to get the best out of it - what I've done many times is to explore this, to the point of getting satisfactory quality, when one considers the underlying limitations of the system parts.

[fas42]

31 minutes ago, elcorso said:

As a friend told me, if you really want to enjoy digital, stop listening to analog recordings in tapes or LPs ...

 

Roch

 

Which merely emphasises that it's harder to eliminate disturbing anomalies in digital - analogue "is easier" ...

 

Digital replay at its best easily outperforms analogue, in every area - I have never had the slightest interest in trying tape, or vinyl, over the decades - because I have never heard the latter do anything special, "beyond what digital can do" ... .

[esldude]

3 hours ago, GUTB said:

 

Perhaps the Big Lie is that digital is higher fidelity than analog.

 

Have you heard 15-ips tape?

Yes, and 30 ips too on a Stellavox.  I owned a Revox for a decade or so. 

 

You can't make tape sound like digital, but you can do the reverse. 

 

BTW, on the use of plug-ins.  Some pro recording people say this one gets some of it and another gets another part better, and find using more than one gets closer to a reel tape sound.  You can do that with plug-ins.  Mix and match and have more than one effect going on together concurrently. 

 

I guess is someone makes an LP plug in that is good, you could go thru a tape plug in and then an LP plug in to emulate the old LPs.  Of course you don't know what emulations have already been used on pop recordings. 

[TubeLover]

9 hours ago, GUTB said:

Well, welcome to the club of audiophiles who are learning about the LIES of digital vs analog.

 

I’ve heard reel-to-reel at shows, and they never fail to impress. I liken the sound to high end vinyl except better — quieter, smoother, even more totally correct, etc. Music that would have a certain stridency or edge in even the best digital setups are delivered with total elegance from tape.

 

 

You think you've sinned? I'm somehow completely agreeing with GUTB!!!

 

But seriously, I can echo everything he is saying. Evert tape demo I've heard at an audio show has been just superb, sonically. Good tape is better than good vinyl. It simply is. More analog, richer, smoother, and the best playback I've heard when the source material was of the best quality.

 

I agree that the $500.00 master quality tapes being offered are prohibitively and excessively expensive for all but the most well heeled, but they do sound incredible. Back in the late 70's to early 80's, I had a very good Tascam reel to reel, and would buy a new album on vinly, play it once, clean it, and then record it to tape on the reel to reel. The music always sounded better when I played it back on the reel to reel, and people would be amazed when I A?B'ed it and proved it to them.

 

I completely understand your thoughts on the reel to reel, and your growing attachment to it. I tried to recreate this scenario within the last year, but with the cost of tape, etc. It simply got too expensive to move forward with it, long term.

 

JC

[TubeLover]

Joel, what reel to reel deck are you using, by the way, just out of curiosity?

 

JC

[PeterSt]

3 hours ago, GUTB said:

Perhaps the Big Lie is that digital is higher fidelity than analog.

 

GUTB, you miss the point (yet again). The tape instances it is about in this case, are the self-recordings of the same digital which does not sound right to joelha's ears when played directly.

 

Nothing is easy (to explain) ...

[joelha]

21 minutes ago, TubeLover said:

Joel, what reel to reel deck are you using, by the way, just out of curiosity?

 

JC

Hey JC,

 

I've got a Technics RS-1500 reconditioned by J-Corder including upgraded internal electronics. 

 

Joel

[PeterSt]

1 hour ago, fas42 said:

Digital replay at its best easily outperforms analogue, in every area

 

I don't think this is correct. Digital playback - especially the "computer type -  is so much more difficult than analogue that analogue will sound "infinitely" longer term for the better.

Btw, you know it.

 

So sadly it is merely about the implementation.

I kind of guarantee that anyone starting with computer playback has it worse than with his CDP (for a long time). But the potential is there because computer/digital *is*  the better one.

 

Frank, we don't disagree. And to others : it is Frank's story (on a record always jumping back to the same groove, but alas, truth anyway IMHO).

 

@joelha, maybe it isn't all that bad. You just heard "an" aspect in tape that overrules something in digital which disallows you to go back. This is fully understandable. But what aspect is that in its element ?

Try another Operating System. You will be so, so surprised how that does wonders that suddenly you're sure that digital isn't the way to go (because not comprehending the (OS) situation). But that is the beauty too, because it gives you infinite options (some go crazy of that - but it is part of the hobby just the same). Try Windows 10 Build 10074 (I have it for you if needed). It could be the analogue you are seeking.

 

But

 

It wouldn't be the correct approach (because it needs too much luck). I would hunt down that element doing it to you. And for that the monitor and noise and 3 head etc. proposition is the better one. So not to forget, depending on the outcome there should be (intermittent) conclusions. Btw, the listening to the 3-head monitor and 100x the same reel is only a solution. It is not part of finding the "cause". Just saying ...

[Daverz]

It should be possible to capture the impulse response of the tape system with, for example, REW.  The impulse response can be used as a filter with a convolution engine.

[TubeLover]

6 minutes ago, joelha said:

Hey JC,

 

I've got a Technics RS-1500 reconditioned by J-Corder including upgraded internal electronics. 

 

Joel

Great deck, Joel, one of my all time favorites. Congratulations! I'm sure it cost a pretty penny, but you can't put a price on the enjoyment it is bringing you.

 

JC