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Post by garbulky on Aug 12, 2014 18:52:09 GMT -5
2. They are using an Oppo 105 - a device meant to do video and multichannel audio and comparing it with a $1500 vinyl table. So you are comparing a DAC to a turntable. Not necessarily CD to vinyl. But it is unavoidable, one must use something. I've always heard the Oppo 103/105 were well regarded for 2 channel audio (using the analog out). Also a $1500 turntable isn't really high end considering the lower quantities make the price higher, did he even mention the cartridge, that's what really determines the sound. I'd say the two devices are probably a fair match. As for the preamp, like you say they have to use something. There will always be something better but that in itself doesn't negate the test. It is well regarded . I've heard the oppo 105 and it sounds really good. Especially when coupled with the XSP-1 pre-amp and an XPR-2. Without the XPR-2 the dynamics were slightly lessened. But get a well selected $1200-1500 2 channel DAC and it would do better imo - hence a fairer test. Or maybe unfair if the $1500 turntable isn't considered high end. I don't know! |
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Post by Kent on Aug 12, 2014 22:43:10 GMT -5
Hello Everyone,
This is a topic that has camps on both sides of the fence. I enjoy both formats and arguments can be validated either way. As we all know a great system can consist of either one of course. I have some cd's that sound better and the same goes for vinyl.
However, IMHO all things being equal as far as the same quality recording/mastering I hear something more organic or "you are there" with vinyl. Please note this is with good quality vinyl on a properly setup rig. Why I don't know? Is it a colouration I find appealing? Maybe? Whatever it is vinyl has a certain quality digital seems to slightly miss.
Don't get me wrong I truly enjoy listening to my CD player and get a "live" feeling from well recorded material:)
Happy Listening!
Kent
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Post by Deleted on Aug 13, 2014 1:40:14 GMT -5
This can/will go on forever - I like and play both (same CD, FLAC and LP version tested under my roof - not a lab) and all I can say is they sound 'different', this does not mean one always sounds better than the other, just 'different' - love it all.
There are other things about formats that the OP didn't address as their interest for that post was on sound only - but to me part of the deal are liner notes and general info etc. This makes up the whole experience which is holistic and warm and fuzzy for moi. LPs win here for me followed by CDs (potentially, not always in practice) and them digital file forms. Sure, digital files can download covers and bios and discography if connected to a capable device but these devices aren't always portable and by nature of screens etc aren't (yet) fully user friendly in all cases (screen glare, linear nature of scrolling etc).
Hell, maybe what I want is a downloadable digital file that sounds as 'organic' as analogue with the cleanness and dynamic range of digital and can also Star-Trek-beam-me a bucket load of physical reading matter into my armchair when I want it and send it back again - all for $20 a pop! .....oh, and make coffee - it must be able to make coffee (and doughnuts and chips and steak with onions, icecream.......)
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Post by garbulky on Aug 13, 2014 1:51:05 GMT -5
This can/will go on forever - I like and play both (same CD, FLAC and LP version tested under my roof - not a lab) and all I can say is they sound 'different', this does not mean one always sounds better than the other, just 'different' - love it all. There are other things about formats that the OP didn't address as their interest for that post was on sound only - but to me part of the deal are liner notes and general info etc. This makes up the whole experience which is holistic and warm and fuzzy for moi. LPs win here for me followed by CDs (potentially, not always in practice) and them digital file forms. Sure, digital files can download covers and bios and discography if connected to a capable device but these devices aren't always portable and by nature of screens etc aren't (yet) fully user friendly in all cases (screen glare, linear nature of scrolling etc). Hell, maybe what I want is a downloadable digital file that sounds as 'organic' as analogue with the cleanness and dynamic range of digital and can also Star-Trek-beam-me a bucket load of physical reading matter into my armchair when I want it and send it back again - all for $20 a pop! .....oh, and make coffee - it must be able to make coffee (and doughnuts and chips and steak with onions, icecream.......) Do you remember Laserdiscs? Now those were covers, not this rubbish blu ray covers they've got now!   vs  |
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Post by autiger on Aug 13, 2014 9:51:02 GMT -5
I love it when the Indians get restless  . My true feelings are that the most important thing is the engineering/recording no matter the format. I personally like the sound and experience of vinyl (probably due to age) but I listen to at least as much streamed music, for convenience, as I do vinyl. Also a few CD's. Just had to create some entertainment due to the slowness of the forum. Everyone HAVE A GREAT DAY. |
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Post by garbulky on Aug 13, 2014 17:47:12 GMT -5
2. They are using an Oppo 105 - a device meant to do video and multichannel audio and comparing it with a $1500 vinyl table. So you are comparing a DAC to a turntable. Not necessarily CD to vinyl. But it is unavoidable, one must use something. Yes, it is comparing a DAC to a Turntable. CD is digital so it needs a DAC. Ah okay, these guys may be bypassing the DAC. www.coreaudiotechnology.com/kratos-fully-digital-amplifier/ |
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Post by ghebert on Aug 13, 2014 18:59:36 GMT -5
To be fair, audioholics does state older recordings that were done with analog recording equipment sound best, however, digital is better on paper. Recording studios simply master the sound to be as loud as freakin' possible, overuse of compression and limiters distort the sound...vinyl sounds better but only because those who master today's albums for digital choose not to make the sound with hi-fi gear owners in mind but rather for the on-the-go iPod generation. |
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Post by lionear on Aug 14, 2014 14:37:23 GMT -5
To be fair, audioholics does state older recordings that were done with analog recording equipment sound best, however, digital is better on paper. Recording studios simply master the sound to be as loud as freakin' possible, overuse of compression and limiters distort the sound...vinyl sounds better but only because those who master today's albums for digital choose not to make the sound with hi-fi gear owners in mind but rather for the on-the-go iPod generation. My biggest shock is that the article came from the Audioholics. The guys with the big arms don't hear any difference with bi-wiring, think that DC resistance and max. DC current capability are the only things to look at in speaker cable, etc. May be they'll change their mind if they did their tests with the Marantz record player and amp. :-) By the way, I've heard that the Marantz turntable is made by Clearaudio - and that it is one of the best bargains on the market. |
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Post by yves on Aug 15, 2014 8:59:10 GMT -5
this is what I do with CDs   |
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Post by thepcguy on Aug 15, 2014 14:25:48 GMT -5
I know you're just trying to be funny. It's not funny. Here in our part of the world, they're being donated to charity, then bought and appreciated by less fortunate/financially challenged souls. And where do you think your lossless digital downloads came from?  |
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Post by yves on Aug 16, 2014 10:27:46 GMT -5
I know you're just trying to be funny. It's not funny. Here in our part of the world, they're being donated to charity, then bought and appreciated by less fortunate/financially challenged souls. It was just a PC CD-ROM with some more than 15 years old useless crippled free demo software for Windows 95. About 95 percent of them came from vinyl. |
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Post by AudioHTIT on Aug 16, 2014 11:10:28 GMT -5
I know you're just trying to be funny. It's not funny. Here in our part of the world, they're being donated to charity, then bought and appreciated by less fortunate/financially challenged souls. It was just a PC CD-ROM with some more than 15 years old useless crippled free demo software for Windows 95. About 95 percent of them came from vinyl. Hopefully they didn't come from either CDs or Vinyl but rather the master recordings (whether they be digital or analog). |
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Post by yves on Aug 16, 2014 17:18:44 GMT -5
Hopefully they didn't come from either CDs or Vinyl but rather the master recordings (whether they be digital or analog). For most of the music that I like, the vinyl *is* the master recording. Some people think that the HDTracks release is usually better than the vinyl, but the opposite is true, quite unfortunately. You have to keep in mind the fact a 50 years old master tape doesn't sound the same today as it once did, whereas vinyl can, and does, withstand the tooth of time a whole lot better. More importantly on top of that, old master tapes that still sound good enough today to be able to best each and every vinyl version of the same album are often having been remastered in ways that are too abominable to even begin to describe. The same thing has been going on with the vast majority of modern CD releases, whereas early CD releases suffer from severe shortcomings of early digital equipment. However, purely as a medium, Redbook CD has a really very terrible shortcoming that, on paper, can easily be portrayed like it barely even exists, especially when compared to vinyl. In reality, what happens is the human hearing system just doesn't work that way. The part of the human brain that responds to music is typically several dozens of times more sensitive to things like ringing artifacts that are caused by the anti aliasing filter in a modern oversampling ADC if outputting musical data at 44.1 kHz sampling frequency. So much so, increasing the sampling frequency all the way to 96 kHz still does not suffice to make this problem completely disappear. That is, despite the fact there will always be a bunch of strange people who choose to firmly believe that those who *can* hear the difference actually can *not*, that those who *claim* to be hearing the difference are mass delusional, and, finally, that double blind testing is not fundamentally flawed, mainly because the earth is flat. |
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Post by pedrocols on Aug 16, 2014 17:36:52 GMT -5
Are you guys talking about music?
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Post by yves on Aug 17, 2014 0:42:53 GMT -5
Are you guys talking about music? No, we're talking about plastic.  |
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Post by pedrocols on Aug 17, 2014 1:51:27 GMT -5
So I guess I can trust my ears but not my brain?
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Post by garbulky on Aug 17, 2014 5:38:08 GMT -5
So I guess I can trust my ears but not my brain? If you can see it then you can believe it. So then you can't trust your ears but you can trust your brain and eyes. But if you go by the video posted above that shows how the eyes can fool you by people moving their mouths... Then you can trust your ears as long as your speakers are not moving their lips. Moral of the story: Don't buy these speakers  Does that make sense?  |
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Post by yves on Aug 17, 2014 6:03:32 GMT -5
Those look semplicemente gorgeous!  |
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KeithL
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Post by KeithL on Aug 18, 2014 14:36:25 GMT -5
I'm a little confused here..... The master is the master.... If you PREFER the way the vinyl record sounds to the actual master (which is certainly your right), then you are simply asserting that you like the colorations introduced by the recording and playback process. (I read this to mean taht you consider the way the record sounds to be most important, and don't especially care if it sounds like the master or not.) You also seem to be saying that vinyl stands up better than tape (which I would agree might often be true); but that, even if the master tape sounds better, we shouldn't like it "because they've done abominable things to it"... If you're suggesting that, in a misguided effort to make it sound better, things done during remastering often end up making the remastered copy sound worse instead, then I'll agree with you there. I also don't disagree with you that digital filters tend to cause at least some ringing - although it can be minimized. However, there are also all sorts of distortions associated with vinyl. The vinyl itself is subject to mechanical wear and distortion; the cartridge is a mechanical moving part with mass, suspended by a spring, so that has resonances; and the inductance and other electrical characteristics of the cartridge also add their own frequency response colorations and electrical resonances. And one of the links below describes, in gory detail, all of the nasty stuff done to music on its way through the recording lathe. If you could find a picture of a square wave recorded on a record and reproduced by a cartridge, I suspect you would be even more horrified at what it looks like that at what the output of most decent DACs looks like. Oddly, people who like analog and don't like digital always seem eager to point out the flaws of digital technology, yet seem reticent to provide equivalent information about their favorite analog format. (So, let's see frequency response, THD, and S/N numbers for vinyl... or the same transient response and filter ringing plots for a vinyl recording that you find so worrisome for digital....) I would agree with you that many DACs sound slightly different... from each other and from vinyl... but I don't think I've heard two phono cartridges that sound identical either... so whither lies perfection  (And, incidentally, I also agree that many modern recordings sound like crap..... but I don't think it's because they're digital.... ) In short, I don't disagree with your choice of the sound you prefer.... but picking out one minor flaw that is present in CDs (to some degree), and claiming that it "proves" that CDs are inferior to vinyl - while, at the same time, ignoring the myriad flaws of analog formats - isn't especially fair or accurate. Here are a few links to some .... interesting reading.... for those who find this subject interesting. www.macfh.co.uk/JavaJive/AudioVisualTV/Vinyls/VinylVsCD.htmlwiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_%28Vinyl%29Hopefully they didn't come from either CDs or Vinyl but rather the master recordings (whether they be digital or analog). For most of the music that I like, the vinyl *is* the master recording. Some people think that the HDTracks release is usually better than the vinyl, but the opposite is true, quite unfortunately. You have to keep in mind the fact a 50 years old master tape doesn't sound the same today as it once did, whereas vinyl can, and does, withstand the tooth of time a whole lot better. More importantly on top of that, old master tapes that still sound good enough today to be able to best each and every vinyl version of the same album are often having been remastered in ways that are too abominable to even begin to describe. The same thing has been going on with the vast majority of modern CD releases, whereas early CD releases suffer from severe shortcomings of early digital equipment. However, purely as a medium, Redbook CD has a really very terrible shortcoming that, on paper, can easily be portrayed like it barely even exists, especially when compared to vinyl. In reality, what happens is the human hearing system just doesn't work that way. The part of the human brain that responds to music is typically several dozens of times more sensitive to things like ringing artifacts that are caused by the anti aliasing filter in a modern oversampling ADC if outputting musical data at 44.1 kHz sampling frequency. So much so, increasing the sampling frequency all the way to 96 kHz still does not suffice to make this problem completely disappear. That is, despite the fact there will always be a bunch of strange people who choose to firmly believe that those who *can* hear the difference actually can *not*, that those who *claim* to be hearing the difference are mass delusional, and, finally, that double blind testing is not fundamentally flawed, mainly because the earth is flat. |
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Post by lionear on Aug 19, 2014 0:08:28 GMT -5
I'm a little confused here..... The master is the master.... If you PREFER the way the vinyl record sounds to the actual master (which is certainly your right), then you are simply asserting that you like the colorations introduced by the recording and playback process. (I read this to mean taht you consider the way the record sounds to be most important, and don't especially care if it sounds like the master or not.) You also seem to be saying that vinyl stands up better than tape (which I would agree might often be true); but that, even if the master tape sounds better, we shouldn't like it "because they've done abominable things to it"... If you're suggesting that, in a misguided effort to make it sound better, things done during remastering often end up making the remastered copy sound worse instead, then I'll agree with you there. I also don't disagree with you that digital filters tend to cause at least some ringing - although it can be minimized. However, there are also all sorts of distortions associated with vinyl. The vinyl itself is subject to mechanical wear and distortion; the cartridge is a mechanical moving part with mass, suspended by a spring, so that has resonances; and the inductance and other electrical characteristics of the cartridge also add their own frequency response colorations and electrical resonances. And one of the links below describes, in gory detail, all of the nasty stuff done to music on its way through the recording lathe. If you could find a picture of a square wave recorded on a record and reproduced by a cartridge, I suspect you would be even more horrified at what it looks like that at what the output of most decent DACs looks like. Oddly, people who like analog and don't like digital always seem eager to point out the flaws of digital technology, yet seem reticent to provide equivalent information about their favorite analog format. (So, let's see frequency response, THD, and S/N numbers for vinyl... or the same transient response and filter ringing plots for a vinyl recording that you find so worrisome for digital....) I would agree with you that many DACs sound slightly different... from each other and from vinyl... but I don't think I've heard two phono cartridges that sound identical either... so whither lies perfection (And, incidentally, I also agree that many modern recordings sound like crap..... but I don't think it's because they're digital.... ) In short, I don't disagree with your choice of the sound you prefer.... but picking out one minor flaw that is present in CDs (to some degree), and claiming that it "proves" that CDs are inferior to vinyl - while, at the same time, ignoring the myriad flaws of analog formats - isn't especially fair or accurate. Here are a few links to some .... interesting reading.... for those who find this subject interesting. www.macfh.co.uk/JavaJive/AudioVisualTV/Vinyls/VinylVsCD.htmlwiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_%28Vinyl%29For most of the music that I like, the vinyl *is* the master recording. Some people think that the HDTracks release is usually better than the vinyl, but the opposite is true, quite unfortunately. You have to keep in mind the fact a 50 years old master tape doesn't sound the same today as it once did, whereas vinyl can, and does, withstand the tooth of time a whole lot better. More importantly on top of that, old master tapes that still sound good enough today to be able to best each and every vinyl version of the same album are often having been remastered in ways that are too abominable to even begin to describe. The same thing has been going on with the vast majority of modern CD releases, whereas early CD releases suffer from severe shortcomings of early digital equipment. However, purely as a medium, Redbook CD has a really very terrible shortcoming that, on paper, can easily be portrayed like it barely even exists, especially when compared to vinyl. In reality, what happens is the human hearing system just doesn't work that way. The part of the human brain that responds to music is typically several dozens of times more sensitive to things like ringing artifacts that are caused by the anti aliasing filter in a modern oversampling ADC if outputting musical data at 44.1 kHz sampling frequency. So much so, increasing the sampling frequency all the way to 96 kHz still does not suffice to make this problem completely disappear. That is, despite the fact there will always be a bunch of strange people who choose to firmly believe that those who *can* hear the difference actually can *not*, that those who *claim* to be hearing the difference are mass delusional, and, finally, that double blind testing is not fundamentally flawed, mainly because the earth is flat. I think the article left out "tracking error" - unless you have a linear tracking arm. Issues with recording high volume signals on inner grooves. Noisy grooves. Record warps. Eccentricity. Whatever you measure off an LP will vary very widely based on the turntable, arm and cartridge that you use to play the test tracks. And yes, they'll sound very different, too. The cartridge cantilever and the turntable bearing take a while to reach thermal equilibrium - for my turntable, the first side of an LP is just a warm-up - so I always play a cheap sacrificial LP first. But that means I have to accept greater stylus wear (see below). Many phono stages pick up hum. This is usually more of an issue with a tube phono stage, and with low-output MC cartridges. If you obsess about putting your ear close to the tweeter or woofer and expect to hear dead silence when the volume is turned down.... you might not want to play LP's. (But of course, the issue is whether the hum is audible in your listening position...) Temperature affects the damping material in the cartridge cantilever. If your listening room is very cold, then you may want to shine a lamp over the record player. LP pressings vary a great deal. The first pressing is usually the best. I have four copies of George Benson's "Breezin". The original US pressing, a Canadian pressing, a German pressing and a late US pressing - and they all sound different. Has anyone mentioned stylus wear - this is much more of an issue that record wear. You can change the stylus on most MM cartridges, but you have to get a new MC cartridge (you can get about 1/3 value if you trade in your old MC cartridge). You have to remove the gunk that builds up around a stylus. This can be pretty scary when your cartridge costs $15,000. You have to say "No" when your friend wants to borrow your LP's. Did I leave anything out? :-) |
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. My true feelings are that the most important thing is the engineering/recording no matter the format. I personally like the sound and experience of vinyl (probably due to age) but I listen to at least as much streamed music, for convenience, as I do vinyl. Also a few CD's. Just had to create some entertainment due to the slowness of the forum. Everyone HAVE A GREAT DAY.
Old school rules-we had it right the first time, (just and old timer's rant) 
