Vinyl more exciting?

[maxg]

OK - I might be missing something here - of couse I am - but I thought gravity was a curvature of space time in the presence of either mass or energy in large amounts. Space/time bends and things fall in - no? Isnt that what Einstein said? Wasnt this the reason light is affected by gravity without having demonstrable mass?

Of course I am about 70 years out of date on this.

Max, your are probably recalling the common graphic used to explain gravity by the use of a figure that represents space as a sheet that is deformed by mass. The curvature of the sheet makes it look like if you placed a marble on it, it would roll around the "gravity well" and show the appearent attractive aspect of the mass. I don't like this example because it assumes what it sets out to explain - the deformation of the sheet by the mass is caused by the mass pressing into the sheet - what makes it do that?

What makes the marble move and roll, and change direction? While it is true that if you set up a sheet of material and put an object in the center to deform it (because Earth's gravity would pull it down), and then placed a marble on the sheet and watched it roll and move around and toward the object (because Earth's gravity pulls it down)... well you see, the model only works if you already assume that there is a gravitational force present acting from under the sheet. This is a false model, a false analogy. It works at the Earth's surface because of the Earth's gravity, but if you take this model into space it will not work. The marble will just stay where ever it is placed.

To set up the model and see it work is nothing more than observing that the model at the Earth's surface behaves under the influence of Earth's gravity just as one would expect consistent with other gravitational observations. If you need the model to reside within a gravitational field in order to use it to explain gravity, it doesn't. It does not explain the source or nature of the gravity that is being assumed to have to be present in order for the model to work. If you start off without gravity, bending the sheet has no effect on the marble on the sheet unless you posit a separate gravitational force at right angles to the sheet external to the model.

We know a lot about how things happen and how different things are related, but we know nothing about the things themselves or the nature of what makes the relationships.

Paul,

The real problem with this disucssion is that I don't even understand what the issue is. You did correctly identify the model I recalled but I cant understand where your issue is after that. This is the reason I am not an astro-physist. Basically all I got is that mass deforms space and things fall in. the effect is local - so at a certain distance you are outside of this induced curvature and so not affected. The bigger the object - the bigger the curve - so things fall in from further away.

What is a graviton anyway? Isnt that a particle of gravity? Is it a ray of Gravity? Clueless.

Talking of clueless - as I recall magnetism - although obvious only with metals, actually affects all substances just to a lesser degree. In other words magnets attract all items other than like poles. How do we know Gravity is not just magnetism from a large solid body? I never understood that one.

Probably a child like question - sorry.

[maxg]

Oops - I just understood - how embarrassing. The actual physical model doesnt work in space. Gotcha.

I am a blind Buck(No idea (eye-deer)).

Or is that a motionless blind Buck (Still no idea).

[pauln]

Oops - I just understood - how embarrassing. The actual physical model doesnt work in space. Gotcha.

I am a blind Buck(No idea (eye-deer)).

Or is that a motionless blind Buck (Still no idea).

Fish don't know they are wet, we don't ever really think about gravity because it is constantly with us. The extreme of gravity is a black hole, in which the escape velocity is so great due to the intense gravitation that nothing can get out, not even light (photons). There is a hugh puzzle about the black hole that no one seems to want to address...

Electro-magnetic force is mediated by the exchange particle we call the photon (light).

The strong force (hold nuclei together) is mediated by the exchange particle we call the gluon (glue-on, cute)

The weak force (neutrino interaction and beta decay) is mediated by three particles we call the intermediate vector bosons.

The gravitational force is still a mystery, but now thought to be mediated by a particle that will be called the graviton.

So now we have a black hole that does not allow any particles to escape, yet the black hole's main claim to fame is it's gravitational attraction (or interaction) with bodies outside it. If gravity is mediated by gravitons, how do they exchange between the body and the black hole? If nothing gets out of a black hole, including gravitons, where does the gravitational attraction of a black hole come from?

Talk about embarrasing! The deeper you go the worse it gets... sometime I wonder if they are just making this stuff up without thinking about it.

[maxg]

If a graviton cant escape from a Black hole - but a black hole exerts huge gravitational attraction then maybe Gravitons might be attracted to mass - rather than emitted from it?

Its kinda like the old Phlogisten theory of fire.

Probably not - just a thought.

[Klipsched with Yamahas]

Yes, I have.

At 24/176.4, only a golden ear will detect difference. I could only hear a slight difference from 24/88.2 when I switched back and forth.

Before going farther, you might ask "Why not 24/192 and 24/96?" Those are fine unless you want to make CD's, which will require downsampling to 16/44.1. Using an uneven multiple requires dithering and that will have an audible impact to the audiophile ear.

Once digitized, I'd recommend the following, depending on your tastes.

A good de-noiser, especially the nx reduction plugin for Soundforge, will eliminate the pops from any record in reasonable condition. It's defaults are fine for records with only a few clicks or pops. The user settings on this require some expertise and practise to produce optimum results...but properly set they are do a superb job. Bear in mind the signal is NOT processed or altered in any way except when the target noise signature is spotted.

A high quality dynamic range expander is also a good thing, at least for me. Many eschew this as "impure." Horse hockey, says I. LP's are dynamically compress by up to 30db so aren't natural to start with. If you wanna be REAL pure then get rid of that RIAA eq curve! In my case, I use a DBX 4BX before digitizing (and for playing the LPs as well). Properly set, it will restore a realistic dynamic range and virtually eliminate noise from unmodulated grooves. There are also settings for this in Soundforge, but I prefer the DBX.

BTW, if you are of the 78 pursuasion, DBX can also effectively alter the speed of the TT by changing the pitch digitally. Touch proposition, but it can work wonders on recordings made at non-standard speeds. I also used it to good effect to restore tapes made many years ago on the cheap battery RR machines of the 60's which were all over the place speed wise.

Once done, you can have REAL "perfect sound forever" if you store the result on a RAID 5 server and keep it backed up.

Dave

I like your thinking Dave, and I occasionally employ my SAE Noise Reduction unit and DBX1 to compensate, but what I find is that THOSE LP's that are too far gone only serve to provide gaps in playback (pop/click elimination), which I find more offensive than the imperfections themselves. Not sure about you, but once I hit the threshold setting on my SAE, it becomes ineffective.

[Islander]

If the Sun somehow instantly disappeared, would the Earth continue on its orbit for another 8 minutes? After all, gravity should travel at the speed of light and not any faster, so the information that the Sun's gravitational field is no longer there could not reach the Earth in less than the roughly 8 minutes that it takes light to travel from the Sun to the Earth.

It'll be great to someday know the answers to questions like this and why coathangers seem to multiply in dark closets.

[Mallette]

I like your thinking Dave, and I occasionally employ my SAE Noise Reduction unit and DBX1 to compensate, but what I find is that THOSE LP's that are too far gone only serve to provide gaps in playback (pop/click elimination), which I find more offensive than the imperfections themselves. Not sure about you, but once I hit the threshold setting on my SAE, it becomes ineffective.

Ah, the venerable SAE. Yes, the cure can be worse than the desease and some discs should be put out of their misery. Nice thing about the software (assuming it is as sophisticated as the Sound Forge NX plugin) is that you can tweak the parameters far more accurately than the SAE was capable of achieving. Also, as I mentioned, you are not adding another leg to the signal.

Dave

[pauln]

If the Sun somehow instantly disappeared, would the Earth continue on its orbit for another 8 minutes? After all, gravity should travel at the speed of light and not any faster, so the information that the Sun's gravitational field is no longer there could not reach the Earth in less than the roughly 8 minutes that it takes light to travel from the Sun to the Earth.

It'll be great to someday know the answers to questions like this and why coathangers seem to multiply in dark closets.

Here is a nice little gravity simulator, just click and drag to create bodies and their initial velocities http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/applets/satellites.html

That is a good question. The answer is that the Earth would be released and move off "at the same time" as the Sun went away from the Sun's point of reference after an 8-9 minute delay for the info about the Earth to get to the Sun. From the Earth's point of view, the result would be immediate with an infered delay of 8-9 minutes (folks would say, "oh, that happened 8-9 minutes ago and we are just finding out"; but "at the same time" is a tricky thing. Even in space-time one is not allowed to think of two things as happening at the "same time".

Another aspect of gravitation which is ignored today concerns just this line of questioning - how fast is gravity? This is a major puzzle because in the Newtonian equation F=(G*M1*M2)/R^2 there is no account for time - the "t" variable seen in dynamic equations just is not there (and not necessary). The implication is that gravity acts instantaneously across any arbitrary distance; that is the equation and it works. Since relativity, gravity is viewed a little differently, but in a strange way.

If you look at the Sun, you are seeing where it was about 8-9 minutes ago. It's actual position, if you could do a "line of site" straight to the Sun would be ahead in a place in the sky where it will appear in 8-9 minutes. Now, the real interesting thing is that if Gravity goes at lightspeed, one would expect that the pull of the Sun would be in line with it's image in the sky (it's light and the gravitons arriving at the same time). Here is the weird part - they don't! The "line of site" pull of the Sun's gravitation LEADS the image of the Sun by the difference between where it appears in the sky and it's actual position. This is called aberration (propogation delay; light has it, gravity does not) - the force is acting as if it is instantaneous and so the origen of the force appears to look like it is coming from ahead of the Sun's path (where it will be in 8-9 minutes).

This is troubling if you take an easy to imagine example. It's appraoching noon at the equator and the Sun is about to be straight up at the zenith in the sky absolutely directly overhead in 8-9 minutes. Yet the gravitational vector from the Sun IS already straight up! Gravity is leading or ahead of the light image of the Sun...

From a dynamic point of view, it is actually critical that the force behave like this to preserve stable orbits - if the influence of the force was delayed by lightspeed, both the Sun and the Earth would be pulling on places where the body had already been and gone. This would lead to a counpounding and increasing amount of momentum (instead of a conservation of momentum a la Kepler's laws), and no orbits would ever be stable; planets, stars, galaxies, clusters - all would mess up.

So what about relativity? More weirdness - by using the curved space-time and other tricks, the aberration displacement is accounted for by sort of letting the delayed gravitational force get ahead of the body in question by changing it's vector orientation as if it was there "on time" to begin with.. More tricks are used to "explain" how the gravity "knows" which direction to pull the body after it get there (since faster than light communications is not allowed in relativity). That is, when the delayed gravitation gets to the body, it has to make an ajustment to the angle of pull because neither the Sun nor the body are in the right position for the unadjusted angle to pull the body and Sun as observed and measured. How does it know how to do this and by how much? If the distance between to bodies is extremely large the adjustment becomes absurdly bizarre. It's like showing up for work late, but knowing how to change the clock back so you can punch in on time, then set it forward back to the correct time - pretty good trick for a lowly subatomic particle. And like the cheating timeclock puncher, this has to be performed without detection (virtual particle that cannot be observed, uncertainty relations, etc.)

So again, we do not know what gravity is, just a little about how it operates, and nothing about its true nature. One of my favorite quotes is, "The world is not only stranger than we know, it may be stranger than we can know".

All this thinking about gravity has me in the mood for some heavy music tonight...

[Islander]

Thanks for the interesting info, pauln! I wasn't aware that anyone had measured the gravitational vector, although (like many good ideas) it sounds so obvious when you mention it. Gravity is pretty mysterious for something that's so easily measured and obvious to see.

Right now I'm reading a book called The Fabric of Reality, by David Deutsch (Penguin Books, ISBN-13: 978-0-140-14690-5, ISBN-10: 0-140-14690-3), which is very thought-provoking. The dedication reads: "Dedicated to the memory of Karl Popper, Hugh Everett and Alan Turing, and to Richard Dawkins. This book takes their ideas seriously."

I suspect I'll look at the world in a different way when I finish reading it.

[Parrot]

Fish don't know they are wet.

If they're that dumb, blame their schools.

[coda]

Folks, if you ever remember
anything I ever wrote it should be this - the Big Bang is wrong. I know
now adays all consider it to be "proved", but mark my words, there will
come a time soon when - surprize! Turns out they were wrong about
that... Steady State will come back and make sense of the mess
cosmology is in today.

good reading. on the issue of scale alone, it's hard to imagine how "our" universe emerged,

Powers Of Ten

much less the origin of all the other parallel universes.

more fodder on gravity

NOVA The Elegant Universe

[germerikan]

I myself have not heard any new music, say after 1987, on vinyl but on cd everything is digitaly enhanced trying to get the "best" quality and possibly filtering out things that were left in due to how hard it was to get rid of them.

...but then again as some one said "oppinions are like a** holes, everybody has one" that's just mine.

Randy

You're missing out on some fantastic vinyl. The newer high quality pressings are great. Also, the latest reissues of older LPs from the likes of Classic Records, Analogue Productions and a few others are top notch. Some of the best I've heard.

How are the high quality pressings bieng mixed??? As far as I know (which is not much imo) if the recording is digital all of the editing could be done before the LP is pressed, thus filtering out any "unwanted" background noise. Thus sounding like a cd on a very high quality systems like you guys have. Are LP's bieng produced differently now a days??? Would that be DDA then???

Randy

[maxg]

I myself have not heard any new music, say after 1987, on vinyl but on cd everything is digitaly enhanced trying to get the "best" quality and possibly filtering out things that were left in due to how hard it was to get rid of them.

...but then again as some one said "oppinions are like a** holes, everybody has one" that's just mine.

Randy

You're missing out on some fantastic vinyl. The newer high quality pressings are great. Also, the latest reissues of older LPs from the likes of Classic Records, Analogue Productions and a few others are top notch. Some of the best I've heard.

How are the high quality pressings bieng mixed??? As far as I know (which is not much imo) if the recording is digital all of the editing could be done before the LP is pressed, thus filtering out any "unwanted" background noise. Thus sounding like a cd on a very high quality systems like you guys have. Are LP's bieng produced differently now a days??? Would that be DDA then???

Randy

There are a number of smaller audiophile labels that are actually now doing all analogue recording again. Tacet and Opus 3 spring to mind along with the Audio Analogue Association. These are generally staggeringly good productions - but I cannot say for a certainty that this is as a result of the analogue approach. I would guess they take extreme care in the mastering and all other aspects of the production.

[germerikan]

.......- but I cannot say for a certainty that this is as a result of the analogue approach. I would guess they take extreme care in the mastering and all other aspects of the production.

That could be true with analogue they could be checking and rechecking everything thus putting out a better quality. I know this from telecommunications, when I did the analouge equipment I took loads of time for cleaning and calibration. With digital just change the card and see if it works, must say after a while you get sloppy when everything is easy.[|-)]

[Mallette]

As has been true since Edison't hit release "Mary had a Little Lamb," the finest discs are direct to disc. I have NOS 78's that are 80 years old that have superior sound and presence because of this. Add the finest modern technology to two mikes, and master cutter operator, and a great orchestra or jazz band, and you're making magic. The LP equivalent to "a straight wire with gain" would be "two mikes plugged in to a cutting head."

Dave

[JBryan]

There's a fella (Pierre Sprey) who runs Mapleshade Records that shares the "less-is-more" philosophy and pursues the purest recordings possible. His studio (a farmhouse outside of Washington DC) is judiciously miked (2-4 mikes) and his equipment is customized to achieve the slightest intrusion between the music and CD (he doesn't do LPs). No overdubs, EQ or compression  - the CDs I've heard sound as close to the real experience as any out there... Mr. Sprey said:

"We design and build, or custom-modify, all of our electronics from microphones to tape recorders to wires. All must meet standards well beyond commercial state-of-the-art. We record live to two-track analog, transfer to digital at a rate 100 times faster than the CD standard, and use no add-on EQ, reverb or noise reduction electronics. Our recordings are made with only 2 to 4 microphones and no cables longer than 20 feet. The resulting sound has startling, "in-the-room" clarity, brilliance, spaciousness and dynamics." 

[Mallette]

Any audiophile whose not sampled Mapleshades' catalog is missing a bet. There's something for everyone there, including superb LP's. His philosophy is very similar to mine. I've often wondered about using a half track tape deck and digitizing later. I go direct to digital >Mike>Preamp>DAC>HDD. I really cannot figure what the advantage is in doing this with another medium in between, nor how "digitizing 100 times faster" would benefit the sound. Perhaps I should ask him?

However, I am only questioning here and it appears they've good reason for what they do...the products are extraordinary.

Dave

[kaiser SET say]

Indeed JBryan and I'm sure you are aware if you purchase 4 or more he sells these fine recordings for what I consider an honest price of $9.60 a piece[]

http://www.mapleshaderecords.com/index.php

If you care for this genre this is one of the finest studio recordings I've ever heard. http://www.mapleshaderecords.com/cds/06552.php

A very good bluesrock player on Mapleshade is http://www.mapleshaderecords.com/cds/08752.php

You might like percussion driven folk/blues and this is stuning http://www.mapleshaderecords.com/cds/04252.php

[Guest " "]

"The adjustments, matching of parts, cleaning, balancing, aligning, and listening - active listening to hear if it is set up well and performing right..."

before the days of CD's, I remember going thru the ritual of setting up the perfect play session so I could capture that first play of a new LP on to a large reel tape traveling at high speed as a way of preserving the play at it's best.

[JBryan]

Any audiophile whose not sampled Mapleshades' catalog is missing a bet.  There's something for everyone there, including superb LP's.  His philosophy is very similar to mine.  I've often wondered about using a half track tape deck and digitizing later.  I go direct to digital >Mike>Preamp>DAC>HDD.  I really cannot figure what the advantage is in doing this with another medium in between, nor how "digitizing 100 times faster" would benefit the sound.  Perhaps I should ask him? 

However, I am only questioning here and it appears they've good reason for what they do...the products are extraordinary.

Dave

I didn't realize Mapleshade sold LPs  - I'll have to look for them. Mapleshade's offices are here in Baltimore and a few years back, I met a fella who worked for them. He sold me quite a few of their CDs and brass footers. I didn't recognize most of the artists in the catalogue but I've enjoyed listening to a lot of them and the sound is extraordinary. Some of the early recordings were exercises in purity. Mr. Sprey mounted a microphone (which he built himself) above the band and recorded the session. The result essentially mimicked the early studio recordings - even the band played old jazz standards from the period. The only difference being the newer recording equipment but even that is dated. Mr. Sprey didn't use a mixing board (he mixes by moving the mike around), just a battery-powered and heavily modified preamp and Sony RTR. Now he has someone who scouts the talent and he uses another room for the soloist but he uses the same equipment although he's continually modifying it. His attention for detail comes from his last "real" job working at the Pentagon where he was the primary designer of the F-10 and F-16 Fighter jets. Thanks for the tip.