[memepool]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Senn20 It's pretty difficult to find a recording mastered on both cd and vinyl in which one edition is up to snuff with the other. There are quite a few albums, mostly older ones, that sound fantastic on vinyl but sound quite rough on cd. I think this has to do more with the remastering than anything. System synergy is another thing. If you're happy with vinyl you don't really need to hear high-end cd players then, do you?

The The Soul Mining original 80's master is a good reference for me because I know the drum machine used. It's surprising how much colouration some turntables can add to this recording by making the drum machine sound like a live drummer!

Blondie Parallel Lines recent remaster is another good one.

A fully loaded Naim CD5 / Flatcap 2 set-up is fairly high-end by most peoples standards costing in the region of 3500USD. On a good day with the right disc it can sound almost as good as a Rega Planar 3, at one third of the price, to my ear, which is actually quite impressive although i don't particularly rate the P3.

I prefer my Studer A727 but that's not a machine many people will have heard so I refer to the Naim as a currently highly lauded player which most people will be able to go and have a listen to.

The The is quite a fair recording as it's mostly electronic so a cd player should be able to sound as good as a turntable. But it doesn't really. Where it's most noticable of course is in Jools Hollands piano solo. the CD player sounds like a Roland GS / Yamaha XG piano patch whereas the turntable sounds like an actual piano-forte.

Am I really going to get a cd player to sound like a real piano if I go or a Teac VRDS or something at 16,000USD. Maybe but why bother if I can get sound that good from a humble Rega, not to mention my Thorens TD125 which takes it to another level altogether...

 

[Publius]

Quote:

Originally Posted by trains are bad Elaboration, please?

Gah! I actually looked up the core and it was an R4300, which is in fact 64-bit. It does only have a 32-bit memory bus, oddly enough. My bad. I was under the impression it was something like the Atari Jaguar (which had 64-bit memory busses but a 32-bit CPU).

 

[trains are bad]

Interesting. Also not really important, because the Playstation pretty much stomped the N64.

 

[Publius]

Actually quite important. The PS2 had a R5900 (same architecture, same basic 64-bitness).

 

[studeb]

as an old fart, can i add a few words.

Why CD? Well before the CD there was digital recording, but it used tape to store the data, not very practical. Phillips came up with the idea of a laser to read pits in a spinning disc.
The disc speed is NOT constant, and never was. This way the pits are a uniform size.
Phillips auditioned the new digital media to Herbert von Karajan, who thought it was great and came on board as a consultant. The length of Beethovens 9th symphony when conducted by Herbie and the Berliners is 74 mins. So he wanted a min of 74 minutes play time on the consumer media.
16/44.1 was chosen as an acceptable consumer resolution, although the professionals had been using higher res for a long time.
the main drive for consumers to buy cd was fueled by price eqaulisation with LPs.
and don't forget about DBX type compression for audio tapes.
more later.

 

[memepool]

Quote:

Originally Posted by studeb as an old fart, can i add a few words. Why CD? Well before the CD there was digital recording, but it used tape to store the data, not very practical.

Not really entirely accurate. The system you refer to I think was the Sony PCM-1 which was 14 or even 16 bit and 44.1k resolution identical to CD and recorded onto a Betamax tape or else Umatic tape. This was very expensive indeed ( around 20,000 UKP) and appeared in 1980. At the time the jury was out as to whether it bettered a Revox open reel tape running at 30 IPS, but it became a practical system, as portable as any professional recording set-up of the time and used by many recording studios in the early 80's.

Umatic tape, a format originated by Sony in the late 1960's remained the industry standard for CD mastering until the late 1990's.

Of course I am sure you are aware of what happended to Betamax in the consumer market despite it's superior sound quality. Sony used the design for it's professional Betacam format which became the international standard for broadcast masters and, in the guise of DigiBeta, still is.

Next Sony came up with DAT around 1985 which recorded at 16 bit / 48k and used the same kind of mechanism as it's Beta machines but greatly minaturised to record on a very compact cassette, slightly bigger than a current MiniDV tape. This was the mainstay of professional users until very recently but was prevented from ever penetrating the consumer market due to the Record industry refusing to ever release any "software".

Sony later addressed these problems of course by simply buying a large chunk of the recording and film industry.

It was Philips who popularised magnetic tape in the consumer market in the 1960's with their compact cassette, a technology they were still trying to get us to buy with DCC in the 90's. Sony's magneto-optical Minidisc system beat Philips in the marketplace despite being inferior in the sound quality stakes.

However the research into perceptual encoding undertaken by the Fraunhoffer Institute which went into the codec for DCC ended up as the basis for MPEG 1 Layer 3. Despite Sony's best efforts to get us to use ATRAC, which despite it's inauspicious beginnings ended up being quite good, MP3 / MP4 have of course become the de facto standard for music distribution these days.

But as the recent IBM report, discussed at length on this forum, confirmed, there is nothing "impractical" about magnetic tape. It's mechanism is considerably less complicated than a CD mechanism to get right and in terms of longevity, which is one of the most important considerations for any format, it is far superior.

 

[studeb]

Quote:

Originally Posted by memepool Not really entirely accurate. The system you refer to I think was the Sony PCM-1 which was 14 or even 16 bit and 44.1k resolution identical to CD and recorded onto a Betamax tape or else Umatic tape. This was very expensive indeed ( around 20,000 UKP) and appeared in 1980. At the time the jury was out as to whether it bettered a Revox open reel tape running at 30 IPS, but it became a practical system, as portable as any professional recording set-up of the time and used by many recording studios in the early 80's. Umatic tape, a format originated by Sony in the late 1960's remained the industry standard for CD mastering until the late 1990's.

umm no.

i was referring to the Soundstream system. i will look up the specs for you.
looked up, 1977 and 16/50
i was not trying to say it was a consumer system, rather that digital recording had been around before the advent of CD. CDs made digital media accessible to the consumer at more affordable prices.

 

[Garbz]

Quote:

Originally Posted by memepool A fully loaded Naim CD5 / Flatcap 2 set-up is fairly high-end by most peoples standards costing in the region of 3500USD. On a good day with the right disc it can sound almost as good as a Rega Planar 3

I mate of mine is an absolute record nut. He always preferred his turntable untill he bought the Naim CD5x. And it's true. It really involves the listener as much as a turntable. That said now that he's sold his for the Naim, and I've bought a P3 I can't get rid of the guy.

 

[memepool]

Quote:

Originally Posted by studeb umm no. i was referring to the Soundstream system. i will look up the specs for you. looked up, 1977 and 16/50 i was not trying to say it was a consumer system, rather that digital recording had been around before the advent of CD. CDs made digital media accessible to the consumer at more affordable prices.

point taken. Going back to the whole computer-as-source tone of this thread I think in many ways the invasion of computers in the home audio market, as many in the industry would see it, is a positive thing insofar as it has put the clock back into the pre-cd era in many ways.

By this I mean that when Sony and Philips introduced the CD they made hi-fi into a commodity just like any other electronics product. The differences between CD players are far less apparent than the differences between turntables, they are by nature far more quanifiable and can be very easily measured, and can't be influenced by user - tweaking to anywhere near the same degree.

CD is a result of serious scientific innovation and engineering that can only be produced by huge engineering companies like Philips and Sony, not specialist manufacturers, the traditional core of Hi-Fi. When companies like Naim or Linn build a CD player it is mostly a process of choosing the best OEM parts from a Sony catalogue, and adding better quality capacitors and bespoke bits and pieces.

Computer Audio has brought this firmly back into the realm of the the end-user audiophile tweaker. Just as back in the 50's and 60's one would design and build a plinth for the Thorens 124, Garrard 301 or Rek-O-Kut, chose and install a tonearm ( SME 3009 or 3012?) and build a cabinet to hide those Quad II's or Marantz's, so today one choses special ultra quiet Silentmaxx or Zalman power supplies, Scythe CPU fans, Antec casings and whatever soundcard and DAC are currently in vogue....