Post by yves on Aug 19, 2014 4:50:12 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.html
wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_%28Vinyl%29
For the most part, I don't like the distortions and colorations that are caused by vinyl. So I definitely agree that a well recorded, well mastered, non-fake Hi Res digital can very obviously sound *vastly* superior to vinyl. However, if the old analog master tape has decayed over time then it may be, and very often is, not technically possible to remaster in such way that the end result bests the vinyl. Further, even if we can assume that it *is* technically possible, this does not necessarily also mean that the record companies have *allowed* this to actually *happen*. So much for theory versus practice.
So, back to the age-old discussion on the socalled "accuracy" of Redbook CD again... Like I already said, the numbers look fabulous on *paper*. In the real-world, *not only* subjective preferences have to be accounted for, including ones that characterize the mastering engineer so that, to add injury to insult, this socalled "accuracy" will always be subjective anyway in the first place, but *also* the blatant *discrepancy* between what the numbers *look* like and what they actually *sound* like. Our ears aren't microphones and our brain isn't a tape recorder. If you are going to come up with the *value* of an error in a signal, you absolutely *have* to understand how we hear (i.e., the science of psychoacoustics). Objectively, not subjectively, the measured magnitude of an electronic artifact, be it analog or digital in nature, says *far* less about sound quality than a wedding picture does about marriage.