[nick_charles]

Quote:

Fair enough, but apparently most(if not all) ppl
 
including slightly fascist loonie Uncle Ivor (I'll never make a CD player and I can tell if there is a digital watch in the room) Tiefenbrun
 
can be fooled when blindly comparing a vinyl deck direct output to an additional ADC>DAC stage. So it's good to know that it could theoritically do some things better than the CD, but it all goes up in smoke when you barely have 60dB of SNR and 2.5% THD: http://www.tdkperformance.com/PageFiles/1058/TDK%20Turntable%20USB%20specsheet.pdf
 
While that would be a representative set of figures for an early 70s budget TT it is a little unfair, common Sansui, Denon and Technics TTs of the late 70s/early 80s regularly managed SNRs of better than 70db some managed over 80db - however the medium itself brings the average back down - Ben Bauer did some AES papers on the limits of LPs and he was getting about 62db but this was back in the 60s , iirc a very good half-speed mastered LP may get to about 82db or so
 
 
 
Surely a laser deck will provide much better measurements, but we're not in the consumer market anymore.
 
Play vinyl through a tube amp and you're looking at ±5% THD?

 

 

[leeperry]

.

 

[leeperry]

82dB SNR on vinyl? I'd need to see some measurements, I'm sorry. But OK, w/ a killer cartridge, brand new needle, top of the range deck, brand new unused 180g golden sample LP's..alright, maybe. But it won't remain at 82dB after a few plays either way.
 
Anyway I guess it all boils down to what ppl wanna listen to, as pinpointed in this thread: http://www.head-fi.org/forum/thread/564465/misconception-of-neutral-accurate#post_7634871
 
The picture tells it all, pros wanna stick to the center, consumers/audiophiles don't.
 
And to get back OT, I don't see how a professional music producer such as JMJ could prefer listening to anything else than the most faithful reproduction of what the mastering engineer heard. If vinyl is so amazing, he should have been delivering his work to his record companies on acetate, like in the good ole Beatles days...hah! Now, talk about turning words into actions.

 

[jcx]

actually the laser turntable has a larger laser spot size than the contact patch of a line contact stylus, and any fluff, dust bunnies that a needle would push away cause huge pops when scanned by the laser - cleaning is even more critical
 
but by high end audiophile standards they are quite competitive when you consider turntable, cart and preamp are all included
 
http://www.information-age.com/channels/development-and-integration/news/1644723/google-buys-ibm-patents-to-defend-against-litigation.thtml

 

[nick_charles]

Quote:

82dB SNR on vinyl? I'd need to see some measurements, I'm sorry. But OK, w/ a killer cartridge, brand new needle, top of the range deck, brand new unused 180g golden sample LP's..alright, maybe. But it won't remain at 82dB after a few plays either way.
 
Looks like I was misremembering - but I found a good page from a Scottish physics professor http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/HFN/goodresolutions/page2.html who breaks it down
 
 
 
 

 
 

 

[leeperry]

very nice link! indeed, it matches Lunatique's point of view, audiophiles who seek a colored sound to spice up their life and increase their music listening euphonic enjoyment basically pay for THD....of the "musical" sounding kind of course. They have no interest whatsoever in an uncolored sound, they might even dare calling it "boring", "lifeless" and "too analytical".

 

[Skylab]

Again, IMHO you're massively overstating the case.  A clean record played on a decent TT, even over a tube phono preamp, is not going to seem nearly as colored as you're making it out to be.

 

[leeperry]

Again, IMHO you're massively overstating the case.  A clean record played on a decent TT, even over a tube phono preamp, is not going to seem nearly as colored as you're making it out to be.

We're in the science forum, I'm afraid subjective impressions don't count....got any figures to share w/ us? To you 60dB SNR A-weighted(I'm being generous) and 2.5% THD are far from the truth? I really don't think so, and Lunatique has nailed the whole audiophile matter hard on the head IMHO.

 

[bigshot]

I have to be honest... Although I like my equipment to have a SNR rating as high as 90dB, I don't like listening to music with anywhere near that. I remember when Karajan's early digital Tristan und Isolde came out, I hadn't made the switch to CD yet, so I bought the vinyl box. It was one of the most frustrating listening experiences I've ever had because the volume kept going up and down and I was forced to keep getting up and adjusting the volume. That album probably had over 55 dB of dynamic range. I much prefer 30 to 40 tops. I subsequently bought the CD version, but I rarely play it despite the sumptuous BPO because of its uncomfortable dynamics.

 

[bigshot]

Leeperry, records don't sound bad and they aren't excessively colored for the purposes of listening to music. The LP format is a full frequency range high fidelity format. The point is that records don't sound *better* than CDs, not that they don't sound good.

 

[leeperry]

I have to be honest... Although I like my equipment to have a SNR rating as high as 90dB, I don't like listening to music with anywhere near that. I remember when Karajan's early digital Tristan und Isolde came out, I hadn't made the switch to CD yet, so I bought the vinyl box. It was one of the most frustrating listening experiences I've ever had because the volume kept going up and down and I was forced to keep getting up and adjusting the volume. That album probably had over 55 dB of dynamic range. I much prefer 30 to 40 tops. I subsequently bought the CD version, but I rarely play it despite the sumptuous BPO because of its uncomfortable dynamics.

SNR and dynamics range aren't quite the same: http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/970658/0#9196238

Leeperry, records don't sound bad and they aren't excessively colored for the purposes of listening to music. The LP format is a full frequency range high fidelity format. The point is that records don't sound *better* than CDs, not that they don't sound good.

But they're a far cry from the original master tapes...so for team "as close to what the recording engineer heard as possible", they are not acceptable. They're meant for consumers and audiophiles. Alright, after quite a bit of brainstorming, I got my answer /o/
 
Steve Hoffman said that the SACD of "Thriller" was the closest he had ever heard to the master tapes, SACD and vinyl have completely different goals for completely different end-users then I presume.

 

[grokit]

Most of the very highest-end DACs are slightly rolled off on the high end because not to do so would detract from the listening experience. Unlike for example the Benchmark DACs, which have been described ad infinitum as distinctively unpleasant to listen to. I think that this is Skylab's point, that sound science or not what we all want to have is a pleasant listening experience. For most of us that's what counts in the end, how much we enjoy the music. It's hard to quantify that but there you go; you either like it or you don't.

 

[leeperry]

Most of the very highest-end DACs are slightly rolled off on the high end because not to do so would detract from the listening experience. Unlike for example the Benchmark DACs, which have been described ad infinitum as distinctively unpleasant to listen to. I think that this is Skylab's point, that sound science or not what we all want to have is a pleasant listening experience. For most of us that's what counts in the end, how much we enjoy the music. It's hard to quantify that but there you go; you either like it or you don't.

Which is exactly my point in the OP...ppl compare vinyl to shrill sounding DAC's and then decide that vinyl>CD. OPA627BP sounds far better on all accounts than the ear shredding 5532/4562 opamps you can find in the DAC1. And yes, I'm entirely willing to believe that some uber-audiophile DAC's have severely rolled off trebles, as this is exactly what audiophiles are in the market for...the so-called "analog sound" color, which is actually THD.

 

[Skylab]

And again, I have NEVER tried to claim that vinyl has better technical specifications than CD.  I'm not even claiming it is universally better sounding, as I do not believe that either.  But it's simply misleading to try to claim that vinyl is massively colored or "utterly distorted".  That's a very marginal position to try to take, and I think it does a disservice to the point you were trying to make about the technical superiority of CD. 

 

[bigshot]

SACD and vinyl have completely different goals for completely different end-users then I presume.

I don't think SACD has many end users at all.

Consumers have been enjoying faithful sound reproduction in various formats since 1953. Formats don't have a "sound". In my collection I have fantastic sounding recordings in a bunch of different formats. I even have acoustic recordings from a century ago that make the hair on the back of my neck stand up with lifelike presence. If you think LPs don't sound the way the music was intended to sound, you don't know much about LPs.

In the LP era, recording engineers didn't record for the master tape. They had the final vinyl in mind at every stage, and they tweaked all along the line from microphone to cutting lathe to make the record sound its best. I agree that it's pointless to waste time with LPs mastered from digital masters, but the ultimate end product in the 50s wasn't the master tape. It was the record itself.