Which format is closest to the master: vinyl, CD, DVD-A, or SACD? - Page 3

Carefull JaZZ! I see a new TT in your future!
CPW

Jazz,

I have heard of Gibbs Phenomenon in reference to medical artifacts in imaging devices, but don't believe in the phenomenon in audio. Maybe my ears aren't good enough to hear that high.

I am not sure that they involve tranients in the audio signal sense, but harmonic transients in the actual waveform, at a frequency only dogs can hear.

I had the opportunity a couple of years ago to hear "Jazz at the Pawnshop"
on SACD, CD, and a 15ips tape copy. The tape was vastly superior to
either of the others, and sacd was marginally better that CD. With the
continuing improvement in DACs and ADCs, I expect that digital will
continue to close the gap with tape.

I am not a vinyl fan because I dont like all the fiddly things involved with
it, nor do I like the rice crispies sound effects. And further, I cant really
hear the superiority of vinyl, and I have tried. I think those folks who
tout the superiority of vinyl to other media are trying to convince
themselves of its supposedly superior qualities.

I think the problem with the ringing is that it actually causes distortion that is easily measured. An anti-aliasing filter is applied in these upsampling cases. I decided to put my money on NOS for the heck of it. I figure little to no music is at 20khz in the first place, not to mention my ability to hear it.

I guess I'm kinda tolerant of the crackle. It reminds me of my youth (long time ago and there aren't that many things still around that take me back!). My next purchase may in fact be a cleaning machine which should help w/ the crackle.
As for the lazy part, I can certainly relate to that but in those rare occaisons when I have some time to dedicate more than 20 mins to "critical" listening, I don't really mind the "ritual" of vinyl. I know these have nothing to do w/ sound quality but for me vinyl is more than just about the "sound". That said, I have a handful of records that really sound "better" than my cds.
CPW

I think this is an unanswerable question. All the equipment you use to play them back will vary from person to person and from system to system. Even a universal CD/SACD/DVD-A player may be better or worse at any one of the formats than the others, biasing the result you hear. Also, comparing a digital front end to a turntable which is a horse of a totally different color, a completely different and separate output device will make direct comparison complicated. As has been pointed out, different gear with different signal paths will be used in converting the master tape to CD, SACD, DVD-A and vinyl, so it's never an apples-to-apples comparison.

Finally, we still need to play back the tape on an analog tape machine to hear it or to transfer it to digital. Therefore, the playback device will always impart its own coloration on what we hear. We'll never really know what the analog tape really sounds like in the abstract sense. How do we know we are hearing the sound of the master tape or the sound of the playback device?

Yeah, that's probably splitting hairs but I think this is a complicated question. I would also venture a guess that virtually no one here on the site has ever actually listened to an original master tape to begin with, so they have no baseline to compare to make a pronouncement one way or another. And if they have heard a master tape, it was probably material that they didn't know like they know their favorite CD/LP/SACD/DVD-A version of it, and played back in a studio on unfamiliar gear. So they still have no real sense of what it might sound like on their own rigs as compared to CD, SACD, DVD-A or vinyl, in an environment/test bench with which they are familiar.

notwithstanding the superb and beautiful comment by Geise,

I do not have a copy of the original article but
The people involved are in the business of creating and/or evaluating recordings and IMO their opinons are the ones that matter more than any measurement since they are the ones that hear the original unmixed music and then decide how it should sound.

So what is it that you're trying to quantify since the process of music creation itself is subjective?

Doesn't that only apply to that particular square wave? I dont know why the example that stereophile chose to show was at the edge of the spectrum. Square waves at other frequencies could well be within the audible range, starting from 20hz and up, right?

AKAIK, it affects any waveform where the ultrasonic harmonics interact with the base tone to alter the shape of the resultant wave in the audible spectrum (ie most if not all musical instruments). This would cause a change in the percieved timbre of the instrument when the harmonics are missing. The square wave example is just an excellent illustation of this effect (as everyone knows what a square is supposed to look like, and it simply cannot be reproduced prefectly in digital rts without infinite harmonics).

another simple example:
http://www2.sfu.ca/sonic-studio/hand...rposition.html

In the end, the argument about whether we can directly hear or 'detect' ultrasonics is irrelevant, because they inevitably affect the waveforms in the audible spectrum anyway.

Even in the old days of 1/4" tape, transferring means lossing a fair chunk of dynamics in the process, not to mention today's digital master tape. So vinyl would probably come last in this topic, and I would go for either SACD or DVD-A as the winner.

They will still be affected, just less severely, as more harmonics will be present in a 20hz tone (more headroom to capture more harmonics- 20kHz on cd) than will be in 16kHz tone (only 4-5 kHz of headroom on cd) so, treble will suffer the most dramatically from this phenomenon (scratchy cymbals anyone?). If you want good, accurate treble you need this headroom!

Yeah, you're guessing all right...