Quote:
I want one!
But it is not available here yet (and I'm done with the winter so I leave for the tropics Friday for 4 weeks, but after that....).
I hope I'm not putting words in your mouth but what I find intriguing is your implication that smoothness vs grain is what is the main reason why many people prefer the SQ of vinyl above digital.
I think you have a very good point there.
This is going to be rather long, but here goes ...
Grain (for me) is a fine layer of high frequency texture that is imposed on everything, and it is largely an artifact that I associate with electronic devices in general, digital or otherwise. I recall in the pre-CD era talking about grain in solid state amplifiers. It's like bowed strings have a little too much rosin on the bow.
Smooth is one of the most abused adjectives in high end audio IMHO. It gets applied to a number of very different sonic attributes, some positive, some not (as in smooth being a polite way of saying something sounds dull).
What best distinguishes analog (whether that be tape or vinyl) from average digital is the sense of ease that analog playback has. There are a number of adjectives applied to this - relaxed, liquid, free-flowing, etc. To me its like digital typically struggles to transmit the music and I feel like the music is "shouting" at me. Analog (and great digital) doesn't seem like the playback system is struggling to convey the music. Someone on a forum I read (I forget where or who) described it as sounding like everything had slowed down, but the pitch and tempo was the same. It is exactly like detuning a string instrument a step or two usually makes it sound more "easy" and relaxed without blunting the transient capability (pitch aside). It makes the music much more pleasant to listen to - you are more in touch with the music rather than noticing the audio reproduction. The stereo "gets out of your way" so to speak.
In the case of digital, I increasingly believe that much of what "ruins" digital in this regard is various forms of jitter (or phase noise for the technically inclined). There is enough evidence with the availability of very low jitter S/PDIF converters and reclockers that lowering jitter in the digital data stream fed to the DAC results in exactly these kind of changes. Feeding the Rega 16/44 via the USB input resulted in very good sound that was still probably identifiable as digital to vinyl junkies. Using a USB-> S/PDIF converter with very low jitter and its own clock (thus putting the DAC into slave mode following the word clock from the S/PDIF source) transformed the sound into what I think is very close to "vinyl" in principle at least.
yes, I think the Rega has very low grain compared to recent DAC's I have heard (my Apogee Duet and the HRT Music Streamer II+ I tried), but that is not what so strikes me as I sit here listening as I type this. It is the complete ease with which the sound flows. Kinda like everyone has had a few glasses of some nice Argentine Malbec to get warmed up
BTW, I happen to think vinyl (as opposed to analog tape - I'm talking 15 or 30 ips 2 inch here) actually adds some euphonic coloration due to micro-acoustic feedback given that it is an electro-mechincal process. But that is a whole different holy war.
