Why is my digital outperforming my analog?

[DrWho]

Back to a lesser point of this knuckle buster, one of my ludicrous points is that if you ever turn up the volume of your rig when playing a recording of an accoustical instrument to be louder than the volume level said accoustical instrument can produce on it's own with no amplification.....you are listening to gear.

I might argue the same analogy applies to listening at a level that is quieter than the original...

[Hifi jim]

Back to a lesser point of this knuckle buster, one of my ludicrous points is that if you ever turn up the volume of your rig when playing a recording of an accoustical instrument to be louder than the volume level said accoustical instrument can produce on it's own with no amplification.....you are listening to gear.

 

I might argue the same analogy applies to listening at a level that is quieter than the original...

Both are good points, and Peter Walker the engineer and founder of Quad electronics believed that any recording had only volume level which was appropriate for playback. In theory that is an excellent point, but in reality that isn't usually practical. I'd also add, that the volume of any recording or performance can change based solely on the listeners position. Sitting closer to the musicians will yield a larger and louder sound as opposed to being seated further from the performers. So, the correct volume would depend upon where exactly one wishes to take in the performance rather than an absolute volume level. And no matter the volume level, we are always listening to gear. All gear has its influence on sound, and we are always hearing that effect while listening.

[colterphoto1]

Back to a lesser point of this knuckle buster, one of my ludicrous points is that if you ever turn up the volume of your rig when playing a recording of an accoustical instrument to be louder than the volume level said accoustical instrument can produce on it's own with no amplification.....you are listening to gear.

I might argue the same analogy applies to listening at a level that is quieter than the original...

I think that was Mr. Paul's raison d'etre

[jacksonbart]

This is a real travesty. Well you could correct it by spending more $$$$ on some fancy platter, some "better" needle or simply break you CD player. Because we all "know" analog is the freakin best.

[bliss53]

I enjoyed this blu-ray. I watched with a friend and we both thought the mikes were "hot" for this recording. There seemed to be alot of gain added to the recording. Reynolds can play.

[bliss53]

"Thus far, Dave Matthews hasn't invited me to any of their recording sessions, and I am not holding my breath!"

You should check out his BluRay with Tim Reynolds at Radio City Music hall in a full surround system.

Shawn

Sorry quote did not come through on previous post

[analogkid]

Honestly this isn't about analog or digital - it's about why the ipod - which is a noisy, tinny source in my opinion - sounds better than his turntable setup. Something is not matched correctly here - any decent amplifier and speaker combo should be able to showcase the ipod's lack of bass response, particularly with the god-awful sounding AAC codec that itunes tracks us. Are you listening to both sources in 2-channel stereo? Music, ESPECIALLY from LPs, is 2 channel only (forget quad LPs for now)and often sounds pretty poor when played back through 5.1. Next, and you were going to try this, what is your cart and can you get a different one? Next, have you tried a different phono preamp? Just because your receiver or Preamp HAS a phono stage doesn't mean that it properly matches the cartridge you are using OR that the RIAA EQ is correct.

AK

[sfogg]

"Music, ESPECIALLY from LPs, is 2 channel only (forget quad LPs for
now)and often sounds pretty poor when played back through 5.1."

Yes, that is why I stopped using my analog rig.

Shawn

[sfogg]

"There seemed to be alot of gain added to the recording. Reynolds can play."

Yes, he can. If you haven't heard it check out the double CD of 'Live at Luther College' as well.

Shawn

P.S. The above CDs are *stunning* in L7, most would swear it was discrete multi-channel.

[Mallette]

"Music, ESPECIALLY from LPs, is 2 channel only (forget quad LPs for
now)and often sounds pretty poor when played back through 5.1."

Yes, that is why I stopped using my analog rig.

Shawn

After a lot of experimenting, I've found that poor performance on Dolby PLII from stereo LP is limited to poorly mixed records where phase has been seriously fouled up. Since the bulk of my collection is acoustic, I don't run into this very often and it's usually on an album I am not going to much care for anyway, since an engineer who pays no attention to such things also usually can't properly set a mike...or uses a crateful to try to make up for it.

Two mikes with a natural pickup pattern properly placed will decode nicely to 5.1, though I turn the center down a bit from movie and TV settings to get a nice front stage. The rear will show as real depth in the image and a sense of sitting out front.

Having come to DPLII by way of 30 plus years of DynaQuad, I was able to leverage that experience to maximize accurate phase recovery from well engineered recordings. DPLII is the first cicuit I've found that does the job equal to the Hafler passive. OTOH, on some of the poorly handled mixes, the information can be incorrectly identified by DPLII and sent to the wrong place, then made worse by emphasis. While that happens to some degree on a Hafler decoder, it is not so pronounced since it is not active and has no steering logic.

Dave

[sfogg]

Dave,

"I've found that poor performance on Dolby PLII from stereo LP is limited to poorly mixed records where phase has been seriously fouled up. "

That was not my experience, vinyl was consistently less stable and didn't 'opened up' as well as the digital version when using surround. The poor phase performance and lower channel separation likely played a role in this. Actually I'm sure phase had a fair amount to do with it as if I turned off the auto azimuth correction in the processor it got worse.

"DPLII is the first cicuit I've found that does the job equal to the Hafler passive. "

Yes, PLII does do a nice job. Have your heard Lexicon's Logic 7 or Meridian's Trifield? Those are both very good too.

Shawn

[Hifi jim]

That was not my experience, vinyl was consistently less stable and didn't 'opened up' as well as the digital version when using surround. The poor phase performance and lower channel separation likely played a role in this.

I had a similar experience Shawn, but found that 5 ch stereo created a nice surround effect with vinyl but still a distant second to a digital source.

Have your heard Lexicon's Logic 7 or Meridian's Trifield? Those are both very good too.

I'll second Meridians Trifield, the best I've heard and the only which would consistently steal me away from 2 ch.

[Mallette]

Dave,

"I've found that poor performance on Dolby PLII from stereo LP is limited to poorly mixed records where phase has been seriously fouled up. "

That was not my experience, vinyl was consistently less stable and didn't 'opened up' as well as the digital version when using surround. The poor phase performance and lower channel separation likely played a role in this. Actually I'm sure phase had a fair amount to do with it as if I turned off the auto azimuth correction in the processor it got worse.

"DPLII is the first cicuit I've found that does the job equal to the Hafler passive. "

Yes, PLII does do a nice job. Have your heard Lexicon's Logic 7 or Meridian's Trifield? Those are both very good too.

Shawn

I quit when I get something that precisely what needs to be done, no more, no less. While I might be wrong (I often am), logic suggests those units would not be able to do any better in the circumstances I mentioned than DPLII. GIGO. As to your experience, I can only say that if something works for one person, then it works. I must assume some other issue with you experience, as mine is linear. I have no recordings done using simple techniques that do not sound better through DPLII. As the degree of multi-miking and mixing increases, the likelihood of rear heavy or other anomalies happening increase proportionally. That is enough empircal evidence for me to suggest my reasoning is correct.

Playing a two channel recording with ambient information one is missing strikes me as rather stoic behavior. I want it all. In fact, my recent experiments are heading in the direction of how to produce an improved 2 channel recording with out of phase info that will be better handled by DPLII. It's based on the above assumptions, so if they are wrong it will not work.

Onward!

Dave

[pauln]

"I've heard it argued that all sound is converted
to a massive collection of all-or-none, 0 or 1, therefore "digital"
impulses by virtue of the activating of the neurons by the cilia in the
inner ear, i.e., our hearing mechanism is an analog to digital
converter ....... of course, who knows what happens when these
impulses are apprehended by the Ghost in the Machine ..... half serious."

This is quite misleading. Although individual neurons depolarize and envoke an "on" or "1" pulse of action potential, the target for these is the body of another neuron where the signals of many are summated spatially and temporally to determine if that target neuron will pass the signal.

Further, some signals to the target neuron body are inhibitory rather than excitatory and that is also part of the spatial and temporal summation function.

Further, functional "signals" within the brain are never of a single thread of nueral axon, they are always bundles of them so that their actual information content is an averaged value - the on/off or 1/0 aspect is gone, what is left and utilized is an overall level called "neural current" which is quite analog in function.

Furthermore, the way the cilia outputs are integrated is much more complicated. The fasted rate of firing and recovery to fire again of a neuron is a little less than 1000 times per second. The perception of frequencies are not directly based on the cilia response rate but more on their location within the cochlea, and there is much more too all of this...

There are no functionally digital aspects of the working of the brain...no more than one might argue that continuous matter is really digital because at a low enough level there is either space or something there.

[sfogg]

Dave,

"I quit when I get something that precisely what needs to be done, no more, no less. "

Nahh, otherwise you wouldn't have moved on from Hafler.

" logic suggests those units would not be able to do any better in the circumstances I mentioned than DPLII. "

You should listen to them sometime, they all work on different principles (esp. Trifield) and they do sound different.

Shawn

[sfogg]

" I'll second Meridians Trifield, the best I've heard and the only which would consistently steal me away from 2 ch."

Trifield
has converted a lot of 2 channel guys into surround converts. It does a
nice job, esp. up front. The actual process of expansion was designed
for any number of front channel speakers. It would be very interesting
to hear it used for >3 speakers but I don't think anything has ever
implemented that into a product.

I have L7, PLII/PLIIx and Trifield available in my system.

Shawn

[Mallette]

"I've heard it argued that all sound is converted
to a massive collection of all-or-none, 0 or 1, therefore "digital"
impulses by virtue of the activating of the neurons by the cilia in the
inner ear, i.e., our hearing mechanism is an analog to digital
converter ....... of course, who knows what happens when these
impulses are apprehended by the Ghost in the Machine ..... half serious."

This is quite misleading. Although individual neurons depolarize and envoke an "on" or "1" pulse of action potential, the target for these is the body of another neuron where the signals of many are summated spatially and temporally to determine if that target neuron will pass the signal.

Further, some signals to the target neuron body are inhibitory rather than excitatory and that is also part of the spatial and temporal summation function.

Further, functional "signals" within the brain are never of a single thread of nueral axon, they are always bundles of them so that their actual information content is an averaged value - the on/off or 1/0 aspect is gone, what is left and utilized is an overall level called "neural current" which is quite analog in function.

Furthermore, the way the cilia outputs are integrated is much more complicated. The fasted rate of firing and recovery to fire again of a neuron is a little less than 1000 times per second. The perception of frequencies are not directly based on the cilia response rate but more on their location within the cochlea, and there is much more too all of this...

There are no functionally digital aspects of the working of the brain...no more than one might argue that continuous matter is really digital because at a low enough level there is either space or something there.

Heck, Paul, everybody knows that... []

Good stuff.

Dave

[Mallette]

Dave,

"I quit when I get something that precisely what needs to be done, no more, no less. "

Nahh, otherwise you wouldn't have moved on from Hafler.

" logic suggests those units would not be able to do any better in the circumstances I mentioned than DPLII. "

You should listen to them sometime, they all work on different principles (esp. Trifield) and they do sound different.

Shawn

Never make assumptions based on insufficient evidence.

Until DPLII, I had a rather complex switch system to go from Dolby for TV to Hafler for audio...because the earlier Dolby PL didn't do as good a job. I did not move up, I just simplified my system...as I mentioned, when DPLII screws up, it sucks and the level of error is magnified compared to the much more forgiving Hafler passive.

I am an Occam's Razor type and often consider restoring the Hafler to my system. It cannot fail unless the material is really bad...and I don't listen to bad anyway.

No way I can or would dis something I've not heard. That was not the intent of my statement. I'd love to hear those sometime. I guess I am just skeptical that they could do a better job than Hafler on 2 channel native material.

Dave

[Hifi jim]

Trifield

has converted a lot of 2 channel guys into surround converts. It does a

nice job, esp. up front. The actual process of expansion was designed

for any number of front channel speakers. It would be very interesting

to hear it used for >3 speakers but I don't think anything has ever

implemented that into a product.

Shawn, I used Trifield in a 2 ch system for some time and was always amazed at the results, I'd swear there was a center channel where there was none. I was using Magenpans at the time, and would often compare 2 ch Direct vs. Trifield. Stereo provided a wider soundstage, but Trifield was deeper and more focused and usually preferred to stereo. In the end, I was too ADD to use the Meridian processor as I was always trying different surround effects and then comparing those to stereo, Music is a good Meridian surround effect too, but I felt it too distracting from sitting down and listening to music. 2 channel music relaxes me in a way that multichannel cannot... but then I haven't heard your system, or Daves for that matter. []

[sfogg]

"..because the earlier Dolby PL didn't do as good a job."

No, it did lousy on music... everything collapsed into the center and it tended to be unstable with pumping/breathing.

When you did Hafler were you doing that at speaker level? If so that would be tough to integrate with other processing.

"I'd love to hear those sometime. I guess I am just skeptical that they could do a better job than Hafler on 2 channel native material."

If you liked Hafler that much there are numerous products that did that at line level. Should be pretty easy to integrate that into your existing setup. For example a Dolby Surround decoder (not Dolby Pro Logic) is basically just Hafler passive with the addition of a 7kHz low pass on the rear channel to make Hafler's very low channel separation F/R less distracting. They might also add delay for the rear channel again to reduce the distraction by taking advantage of the precedence effect. There are lots of other products that implement variations of Hafler too, I can send you a Fosgate if you wanted to try it at line level with delay for the surround channel.

If you are ever up my way you are welcome to come and hear the other modes and to compare that to Hafler. IMO Hafler is decent but doesn't compare to the others. Its single mono rear channel can't properly surround you with a halls ambiance. A halls reverb is not corollated, the mono rear of Hafler of course is and doesn't sound as natural or nearly as open as some of the other methods. The lack of steering means there are no steering errors but in turn it means it can't pull material out of L/R and move it to where it would try to image from anyway. For example front and center vocals can't move front and center to reduce the comb filtering between L/R which is not natural.

FWIW Trifield does not use steering either but works on a totally different principal then Hafler up front. Its rear channels are closer to a Hafler matrix though.

Shawn