[sdiy] Nifty Slider/Fader alert

[Richard Wentk]

At 11:06 03/06/2004 -0600, The Peasant wrote:

>In some respects maybe. With decent hardware, cassettes can actually sound
>fairly good, and they certainly don't give you the un-natural digital
>distortion of an MP3. In fact, I still prefer them to MP3s.

But you have to compare like with like. With decent hardware and a decent 
bitrate (i.e. >128k) MP3s don't sound bad either. Some of the newer 
encoders sound even better.

I used to have a Nakamichi deck that sounded great. But with a four figure 
price tag, I'd expect it to.

> > And while vinyl
> > has some advantages over CD in theory, *real* vinyl always seemed to turn
> > into a crackle and wow-fest.
>
>Vinyl has some advantages over CD in practice as well, it's not just theory.
>And if you take good care of your vinyl, it is possible to keep clicks and 
>pops
>to a minimum. As far as wow goes, maybe you should try a better quality
>turntable?

No, this doesn't work, because aside from audiophile pressings, most 
physical vinyl pressings tended to be appallingly shoddy. Far too 
many  suffered from manufacturing problems (off-centre holes, warping, 
cheap plastic that attracted dust like a magnet, etc.) CD at least tends to 
be more consistent. A cheap CD pressing will fall apart after 5-10 years 
and BLERs will cause the error correction to work overtime, but that will 
be less immediately distracting than the audio fry-up that was common 
practice in the vinyl industry.

If you're comparing an audiophile pressing that's been kept in a vacuum and 
is played on a $10,000 turntable with a $200 generic CD player, then of 
course the latter will sound terrible in comparison. But if you stack up an 
audiophile CD release (there are a few) played on a high end player with 
care and attention paid to digital nasties like jitter, filter phase 
smearing, and so on, the difference becomes negligible, and I doubt would 
be at all audible in a double blind test.

Analogue only appears to have inherent advantages as long as you don't 
compare equivalent cost levels. Instead of mud and boom, digital gives you 
zzzzzrrrrzzz, but both are still obvious and objectionable distortions.

>There is a fundamental difference between digital distortion and analogue
>distortion in audio. Vinyl surface noise is easier for the ear-brain 
>mechanism
>to ignore, as it is a separate artifact to the music. The music still sounds
>realistic, you just ignore the noise. But digital distortion artifacts affect
>the musical signal directly, they become a part of the sound of the 
>instruments
>themselves, and the ear-brain mechanism cannot ignore this. It just doesn't
>sound "right" or natural.

I think this just depends what you're used to. I tend to listen to WAVs off 
a hard disk rather than CDs, and it's remarkable just how much hard disk 
playback sounds a lot more smooth and solid than a cheap jittery CD drive.

A basic test is that CD will reveal imperfections in master tapes from the 
60s and 70s, while vinyl often disguises them. The latter may sound nicer, 
but it sure as hell isn't accurate reproduction. If you want nice, then 
obviously vinyl is the 'best'. But it's a very contingent and limited best 
and - as I said - it's not going to get any better, while digital still has 
quite a lot of quality headroom to explore.

>Well, it's the industry standard, for better or worse, so they really have
>little choice in the matter.

No, that's not true either. Dolby SR put up a valiant rearguard effort 
against digital tape, but in the end people's ears showed which system was 
better. There are plenty of technologies that were supposed to be 
improvements but sank without trace.

Of course in studio engineering there's a lot of *controlled* distortion 
added while recording, often using analogue hardware. But the basic 
reproduction medium needs to be as neutral as possible. Pro-level digital 
offers that. From what I hear, DSD/SACD sounds very nice indeed.

The bottom line is that analogue will only ever be analogue. Digital can 
simulate analogue, although in synthesis it's true that the number of 
cycles required to do the simulation well has been underestimated. 
Similarly digital recording should be able to simulate 'nice' analogue 
distortion.

The real issue is that digital is still maybe only in its third generation. 
The first two iterations were pretty bad, but it would be a mistake to 
assume that they defined 'the digital sound'. They didn't. They defined 
digital when it was badly engineered subject to serious technical limitations.

Unlike analogue which will always sound analogue, digital has the potential 
to be truly *neutral.* If you want to keep doing DIY, there's then a lot of 
scope for dialling in your own custom distortions ad lib and seeing which 
ones you like best. But you need to start from a neutral baseline, and you 
can never do that with analogue.

Richard