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Is... Analog Dead?


Schu

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I've been asking myself over the last month or two, is Analog source material dead?

 

I have a fairly sizable Vinyl collection along with a good Analog front end in my system, but lately it seems when I listen to a SACD, DVD-A or Bluray Audio disc, that the sound is at the very least equal to my very best vinyl discs and in many many cases, the digital medium is seemingly considerably superior in Sound Quality. I can upgrade my Analog front end, but now we're into 1500$+ cartridges, another Turntable at perhaps another 2500$, and more tubes for my Pre-amp/sut at 125$ea... when a great DAC with top of the line DSD decoding begins at around 2500$'ish or less.

 

I know Vinyl is on a considerable up tick over the last couple years, perhaps based on Nostalgia... but with really great DSD, why choose an Analog source material?

 

discuss.

Edited by Schu
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well then there's that^... and on top of it all, a proper digital high definition recording probably needs further handling/processing to make it sound superior.

 

but there is still a WOW factor with HD digital that goes beyond a simple newness. perhaps some of it is system related also.

 

I just received a Genesis remastered Vinyl box set last night ($$$), and have not had a chance to listen to it yet... I know the very same set was available on SACD and DVD-A, but I did listen my a new copy of King Crimson's "Red" on DVD-A and all I can say is WOW.

Edited by Schu
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"To listen to music not available in a digital format." (Don Richard)

 

A great reason, Don.  Probably the most compelling.

+++

 

When I had good stuff 25 years ago, I had the separates, a decent turntable, high quality cartridges, etc.  I had my time with adjusting anti-skate, setting up records to spin just right, and still had hiss on the high end (which I hated with a passion) and pops, etc. Then CD's came out and they just flat worked, and sounded at least 90% as good as my records, WITH NO HISS!

 

I now have a single AVR which takes the place of all the separates I used to have, and it sounds just as good.  I use Blu-ray, CD's and digital.  No more Beta-max for for me!

 

I have left records behind, the same way I left 8 tracks behind, and cassette tapes behind.  I now listen to CD's and mp3's.  I have the means to convert my records and CD's to digital, and my goal would be all digital, all the time.  There is no setup, there is no variance from listening sessions, they take up ZERO space, unlike my records which took considerable shelf space, and even the CD's which took up space and still had to physically be accounted for.

 

I would no more return to records for the "tactile " experience of playing records any more than I would return to watching TV without a remote, where I had the tactile experience of getting out of my comfortable chair, walking across the room, and feeling the TV knob in my fingers while changing channels or turning the volume up and down.

 

Digital isn't the ONLY way to go, but it has a lot of positives which in my view offsets the few perceived negatives.

Edited by wvu80
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Digital does have a lot of positives.  Better bang for the buck?  Maybe, depending on how you build a system.

 

It's certainly simpler, and technically can sound much better than vinyls except for one glaring problem.  Subliminal distortion.  I always want to turn up the sound when I'm playing a record, but I almost always end of lowering the sound a bit when I'm playing a cd.  To me that's distortion at play.  Cd's at concert levels make my skin crawl. And, yes, I have cd playback of a similar quality to my vinyls playback.

 

That's why, aside from my car radio, I play about 95% wax.

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Having just returned to having the means and interest in playing vinyl this last year, I think it is just a very personal choice. When I get home from work and need some quality downtime, it's digital and I have a great time pumping up the volume and putting the day behind me.  On the other hand, getting around to different vinyl stores, meeting people with similar interests and histories has been great. Last week I found an album recorded live in a bar that I was at in 1977.  Not going to get that any other way, and what a trip that was.  On a Saturday afternoon putting on some vinyl and stretching out on the couch takes me places I'm happy to be.  I'm guessing everyone's mileage varies, but as the previous poster mentions in a different manner.  Different strokes for different folks.  Now I'm getting in the car and driving three hours into Farm Country to listen to Willie Nelson and Neil Young, live in a corn field.  Could be called-Cornstock!  

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Its dead for those of us who dont use it. I never thought in a million years I would be the guy that streams music. But being able to listen to anything instantly with really good SQ is to good to pass up imo.

Spotify is worth every penny. Think of all the songs that we love but will never buy because its the only good song on the cd. All the remastered versions that sound WAY better than the original cd release. All the movie sound tracks for every movie we can think of but would never go out and buy. And the best part is all the new music we find that we would have never found or heard with out Spotify (or another online web)

Edited by reference_head
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Great thread. I like to listen to music in as many ways as possible.

 

At work (yeah, I work from home) its mostly music from my digital music library (flac) and some Pandora as well. Most recently I have returned to vinyl and its been a fantastic experience. I now have my dad and father in law scheduling time to bring over their records and play them. Its great watching them relive and enjoy music from their youth!. They are both in their late 70s so I try to enjoy them as much as I can.

 

I really enjoy sitting back in my music room with a glass of wine and putting on a record and getting lost in the sound. LOL then the music ends and I wake up and realize that I have to get up flip the record to side 2. Not sure if that is good or bad. But I do enjoy the experience.

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I wouldn't say it's dead yet, but it's has been sick for a while with a little serge in health the last couple years. This will probably be it's last showing before it's death, but there will always be some who keep it on life support as long as possible.

 

For digital people Cd's, and BR disc will probably be the last format, before it all becomes streaming, people want convenience with no storage problems and little effort to almost unlimited volume.

 

Just a guess ?

 

I don't think there is a wrong way to enjoy music, whatever makes you happy, as long as the quality does not go downhill so far as to make it a waste.

Edited by dtel
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I have a really nice turntable, cart, and tube phono preamp, and I hardly ever listen to it. I sounds great, but not as good as quality digital files. For me one of the big weaknesses is bass. There is not the bass extension and overall clarity on vinyl that I can get with the good digital stuff. And there is always a bit of snap crackle and pop present which is nostalgic but also annoying. Every once in a while I think about selling off my turntable but I do have a lot of neat old recordings which I would miss.

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I've been asking myself over the last month or two, is Analog source material dead?...but lately it seems when I listen to a SACD, DVD-A or Bluray Audio disc, that the sound is at the very least equal to my very best vinyl discs and in many many cases, the digital medium is seemingly considerably superior in Sound Quality.

 

I can upgrade my Analog front end, but now we're into 1500$+ cartridges, another Turntable at perhaps another 2500$, and more tubes for my Pre-amp/sut at 125$ea... when a great DAC with top of the line DSD decoding begins at around $2500'ish or less.

 

I know Vinyl is on a considerable up tick over the last couple years, perhaps based on Nostalgia... but with really great DSD, why choose an Analog source material?

 

discuss.

 

That was the topic of this bait for Thebes: https://community.klipsch.com/index.php?/topic/152495-what-is-hip-why-we-are/?p=1783659

 

The implications of this little experiment by Ian Shepherd are pretty serious, IMHO.  It also helps me to finally validate what my ears have been telling me for at least 3 decades. I didn't invest any more heavily in vinyl records, since what many people are hearing as "sounding better than digital" isn't what the mastering engineer put on the original track, but rather artifacts, noise, and special types of distortion that vinyl brings. I believe that a lot of people have gotten used to hearing it from their childhood, but I've always found that vinyl records sound duller, with less stereo, less deep bass, no stereo in the bass, and really not-so-good cymbal sounds no matter what I try to do to correct the issues in reproduction.

 

What I've done is to put my money into a nice old and quiet turntable with a reasonable cartridge and reasonable RIAA curve-correction (i.e., phono) preamp.  This helps me to hear my old vinyl discs that haven't been made into CDs better than I ever heard them up until the advent of CDs en masse in mid-1980s.  I have maybe 50 or so vinyl records that I still like to listen to from time to time--maybe about once/year that I can't buy the CD. 

 

I've found that the CD replacements for these old records that have been made, once you make sure that the DR hasn't been squashed by looking at their DR values when buying, these old-record/new CDs always are a revelation in sound that I savor hearing.

 

If I get into a nostalgic mood, perhaps I'll shop at the thrift stores for more vinyl records, but I've found that I really don't like listening to someone else's damaged records--which has been my experience greater than 50% of the time when I buy old vinyl records at these places, and I never could stand pops, ticks, infrasonic bass wow from warped records, and suffering high frequency as the record plays toward the center of the platter.  None of these problems exist in CDs.  Now we know that the other artifacts of vinyl records are just that, artifacts, not really the source material.

 

The interesting thing about digital is that all you need are good DACs--I didn't say "expensive" DACs, since no one that I know can really hear any difference between the two once you control for errors in acoustic polar lobing due to cabling or analog amplifier changes.

 

YMMV.

 

Chris

 

EDIT: I just saw tromprof's posting above - and it reads surprisingly similar. 

Edited by Chris A
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I didn't invest any more heavily in vinyl records, since what many people are hearing as "sounding better than digital" isn't what the mastering engineer put on the original track, but rather artifacts, noise, and special types of distortion that vinyl brings. I believe that a lot of people have gotten used to hearing it from their childhood, but I've always found that vinyl records sound duller, with less stereo, less deep bass, no stereo in the bass, and really not-so-good cymbal sounds no matter what I try to do to correct the issues in reproduction

 

About 10 years ago, a recording engineer wrote an article in one of the mags in which he said that, in his work, the finished CD always sounded closer to what heard in the booth than the vinyl version, when the vinyl version was played on a very expensive turntable/arm/cart combo.  But then again, maybe he was just a great recordist.

 

My (older) vinyl, played on Thorens/Ortofon/SME, ranged from wonderful to terrible, but the very best vinyl sounded more "there" than the CD of the same recording.  A recordist at Shefield made a direct to disk and what I assume was a top quality digital at the same time, off the same board.  He said the vinyl sounded more "there."  That's where I got the term "there." 

 

I enjoy SACDs, and while I no longer do comparisons, they sound close to the better, but not the best, vinyl to me. 

 

Chris: what kind of music do you usually listen to?  Is it true that classical, modern orchestral, and jazz have less compressed dynamic range in their CD  or SACD forms that popular music?

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From my profile:

 

Quote

 

Music: classical including renaissance, baroque, classic, romantic, impressionist, neoclassical, modern, postmodern. jazz, jazz fusion, choral, folk, new age, Celtic, blues, world, pop, dance, AOR, and many other genres.

 

I listen to CDs, SACDs (mostly multi-channel SACDs), DVD-As, and Blu-Ray music discs, about in order here in terms of frequency.  My CDs and DVD-As are ripped to FLAC (lossless) and played back over HDMI to my preamp's DACs (Burr-Brown).  From there into the active crossovers (one for the Jubs, one for the center Belle, and directly to the surround Cornwalls). 

 

My FLAC library is on foobar2000, where I've taken the time to analyze all tracks using the Dynamic Range Meter plugin, which tells me crest factor for each track, and ReplayGain, which tells me average loudness for each track.  I often sort on DR ratings (highest first) for the 13,000+ tracks that I've ripped to FLAC, and play the highest DR tracks, then switch to the lowest DR tracks for grins (don't ask--it's awful).  I often sort by genre first and DR second so that I can pick my mood of music.  All this is displayed on my fairly large flat screen TV using foobar2000 so that everyone gets to see all information about each track being played. 

 

Everyone that reads this display asks the question, "what does all the columns of numbers on the right side of the screen mean?".  When I explain it to them, they typically are mesmerized by the DR ratings and how the music sounds. 

 

It's a really entertaining "party trick".  :)

 

foobar_screen.PNG

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Chris: ... Is it true that classical, modern orchestral, and jazz have less compressed dynamic range in their CD  or SACD forms than popular music?

 

Yes.  When you consider that most classical music is miked in the far field, that should really get your attention, i.e., it should be the opposite way around for close-miked pop/rock music, in a very big way.

 

I don't believe that most people understand the degree to which popular music is really destructively mastered.  And we are talking only about dynamic range here, which is but one way that mastering engineers (and really--the producers) put their "mark" on the music.  It's really stomach turning, IMHO, regardless of how much I'm accused of making a big deal out of it. 

 

It's a really big problem-and a cultural one, to boot.

 

Chris

Edited by Chris A
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Faster, cheaper, better, and easier to use is pretty hard to beat. I look at vinyl like old cars. You will always have people who collect them and even drive them. The old saying that they don't make it like they use to is just not true in this case. But I agree with the post that said they are all good if they make you happy. 

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Faster, cheaper, better, and easier to use is pretty hard to beat. I look at vinyl like old cars. You will always have people who collect them and even drive them. The old saying that they don't make it like they use to is just not true in this case. But I agree with the post that said they are all good if they make you happy. 

Yes I agree with this. I also agree with dtel that its likely on its last legs. I prefer the digital medium.

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