A very good ENGINEERING explanation of why analog can not be as good as digital..

Digital is like the fresh raw porterhouse steak in the movie The Fly that Jeff Goldblum teleported from one pod to the other. When the atoms of the steak were disassembled and then reassembled the porterhouse steak looked still like a real steak but when it was broiled and tasted it didn’t taste like a real steak 🥩. Yuk!

Pffft!....... I like digital....but I LOVE the sound of analogue vinyl.    Just to confirm my brain wasn't becoming digitized and overly clinical, I got out my old world atlas and sure enough....it was definitely FLAT.

Analogue is a 'real' copy of the sound impressions where Digital is merely coded ones and zeros read by a machine and sound is produced in the process.  There is no 'there' there with digital.  There are NO sonic impressions.  Just a digital program reading directions in binary code.  Zappa's Jazz From Hell album is a good example.  Brilliant and performed without any musicians.  Cold,. hard and exact.  But even that album becomes musical when the vinyl copy is played next to the digital. 

Flat-earthers indeed!  To those who prefer musicians to machines as music makers I think the analogue/digital divide needs to be judged by our ears, not another machine.  Those with the sensitivities to hear music will make the same choices and judgements and do not need to have a machine tell them what and how to 'hear'.  As Captain Beefheart put it, "How'd you get a name like Crazy Little Thing?"

"When the atoms of the steak were disassembled and then reassembled the porterhouse steak looked still like a real steak but when it was broiled and tasted it didn’t taste like a real steak..."

If the description of the movie is accurate, it is not exactly what these debates about digital suggest. That steak retained all the particles and all of them were used to reassemble while digital is said to be missing some parts.

"...like the fresh raw porterhouse steak in the movie..."

"...then reassembled the porterhouse steak looked still like a real steak but when it was broiled...

Maybe it would have not tasted good had it been broiled before being disassembled, either. Maybe the problem was the steak and not the process of transportation.

tom1000

There are no steps, no divisions, or resolution with analog, but there is with digital.

It’s a common misnomer that digital has "steps." To be fair, it seems intuitive that it does. But it doesn’t, as proven here. And analog has limited resolution, too - just as with digital.

There is no Nyquist theorem, which based on an approximation.

There most certainly is a Nyquist theorem. A fairly good explanation of it is here.

Please note that the Nyquist principle is a theorem, not a theory. That means it’s actually provable, using math and science.

I’m much more of an analog guy that a digital guy, but it’s important to understand how digital audio actually works if we hope to ever see it improved.

audioengr

Digital is sampled, not continuous. The reproduction accuracy with digital is a function of the sample-rate and filtering to "smooth" those steps.

The Fourier Transform proves otherwise, and the transform really has more than one proof. One is in the video, but there's mathematical proof, too, if you really want to dive deep into it.

The Nyquist theorem is true and often cited, however, it makes some assumptions such as the waveform is continuous and not transient.

It relies on the Fourier math.

Transient waveforms cause the Nyquist theorem to break-down ... the sample rate required to get an accurate transient reproduced is much higher that Nyquist would predict.

If you could disprove the Nyquist Theorem, you'd be famous. It's already been proven. That's why it's a theorem.

It is not matter of disproving, but rather knowing limitations (understanding it).  This theorem only states that you can recover continuous signal by sampling at least two times per period.  It does not say you can do that when waveform constantly changes.

And to all vinylistas, who highlight the "shortcomings" of sampling, do you think that the small groove of a record is large enough to be able to store all frequencies from 20 - 20 khz, not to mention the relative intensities, ie the dynamic range.  You think all that information is FAITHFULLY written into 20 - 25 micro meters (typical width of a groove for 33rpm vinyl).  No way, since it is limited by PHYSICAL SPACE.

With digital, there is no limit, all you need is a bigger disk.  One can sample at higher frequencies as well as amplitudes.  The typical 16 bit deep CD can store 65k different ranges.  Increase that to 32 bits, and it will be 4 billion.

As I said before, I also DO like listening (I should say looking at) to vinyl but not because it sounds better but because it LOOKS better :-)

On a more practical level, vinylistas don’t seem to care that most current lp issuues Of Classic albums use digital masters, due to the sticky tape phenomenon.  Vinyl bigots like Fremer and Dudley were embarrassingly silent on this after touting many of these releases only to have the remastering engineers spill the beans.  So if they prefer lps made from corrupt digital discontnous sampled waveforms, that preference must be based upon something completely unrelated to that waveform 

kijanki

This theorem only states that you can recover continuous signal by sampling at least two times per period. It does not say you can do that when waveform constantly changes

Actually, that’s exactly what the Fourier Transform addresses and proves - the transient need only to fall within the bandwidth of the system. It’s why digital audio works.

Again, I’m very much an analog guy. But to claim the digital audio isn’t continuous like analog is misunderstanding how digital audio works. It has problems, but non-existent stairsteps aren’t part of them.

..the transient need only to fall within the bandwidth of the system. It’s why digital audio works.

For any signal to be perfectly band limited it would have to extend infinitely in time.  There are many other shortcomings like less than perfect brickwall filters with uneven group delays, jitter in A/D or D/A conversion etc. 

kijank

For any signal to be perfectly band limited it would have to extend infinitely in time.

I’m not sure what this means, but nothing is perfect.

There are many other shortcomings like less than perfect brickwall filters with uneven group delays, jitter in A/D or D/A conversion

Agreed, of course. Digital audio is not perfect. However, the notion that it is not continuous, and is comprised of "stair-step" signals, is a misnomer. It is a false claim and that can be proven visually, as in the video that I linked, as well as mathematically.

I'm not sure what this means, but nothing is perfect.

That's all I'm saying.  

"So if they prefer lps made from corrupt digital discontnous sampled waveforms, that preference must be based upon something completely unrelated to that waveform."

The cutting head stylus cannot magically appear at the extreme displacement in one direction, disappear, and then reappear at the other extreme; it had to physically travel from point A to point B and at every physical point in between. This is why, even fed an analog signal from a digital filter, vinyl has to sound "like analog." The same goes for the playback stylus and the magnets/coils in the cartridge. The same holds true for the motion of speaker cones and your ear drums.

I do not want to convert any vinyl people to cd or ask any digiphobes to listen to digital. I have no problem with anyone listening to vinyl exclusively or part-time. Same goes for digital.

What I would like to assert is that both analog and digital can sound very good and very bad. So can systems assembled to play one or both of the formats. People hear differently and have different tastes. So there are no absolutes. In the real world of our listening rooms, not theory, vinyl doesn’t always sound better than digital and vice versa. It’s a matter of a combination of specific recordings, systems and people.

You know that Stereophile has a feature each year called, "Records to Die For" or R2D4. Each writer contributes two recordings that excel both musically and in sound quality. Now, IMHO, Stereophile leans vinyl in overall tone, but I think many people would be surprised at how many of the recommendations are cds year after year. These are people who make their living listening to music.

So I think that it’s true that both formats can sound very good or very bad and we don’t have to argue about which is better. We should listen to the format(s) we enjoy and let the other guy listen to what he enjoys, without condescension. I have a funny feeling that that won’t happen though.

"In the real world of our listening rooms, not theory, vinyl doesn’t always sound better than digital and vice versa. It’s a matter of a combination of specific recordings, systems and people."


Amen.

Actually you can find an explanation somewhere for whatever you want. Analog is more accurate than digital, digital is more accurate than analog. What have you. But this all overlooks the many serious problems in digital playback systems, not to mention the horrendous dynamic range compression that has been going on for the last twenty years. Maybe things will be different some day. Sigh!

Of course, sound quality notwithstanding, the sheer joy in finding old collections of records, cleaning the promising ones with my ultrasonic RCM, and cueing them up is often just so amazing. 

As kind of a known audio-guy and owner of a busy bakery/cafe, sometimes customers will just give me their old record collection. If I was a digital only guy, due to digital’s better specs, I’d never have discovered so much obscure music. I challenge anyone to find “The Sounds of the Loon” in any digital format. But the 45 or so minutes of this old monophonic record were a delight. The narrator explained all about the behavior of the Loon with lots of really well recorded audio. 

So so the debate for me is moot. I love it all.

~Oran

I understand BOTH formats have their strengths and weaknesses.  That was not the purpose of the discussion.  Maybe I miswrote the headline.

It was meant to be read by people who CLAIM that vinyl is ALWAYS better then digital.  And to that, I say NO WAY.

@stevecham 
who cares if the cutting head has to make a continuous path, if the the information contained in that path is from a discontnous waveform?  Vinylistas are reacting to some byproduct  of the whole vinyl reproduction chain that they identify as pleasurable, and the rest of us hear as artifactual or distortion.
  Vinylistas always are clamoring for digital systems that sound “analog like”.
Before I sold off my analog system, I tried to make it sound as non analog as possible.  I had a battery powered pre amp because it was quieter with darker backgrounds and I was fanatic about trying to improve speed stability, reduce surface noise, wow, flutter, you name it.  Eventually I decided this is crazy and will go 100% digital.

@mahler "who cares if the cutting head has to make a continuous path, if the the information contained in that path is from a discontnous waveform?"

Obviously, you don't get it. As I said, it also applies to every tympanic membrane responding to pressure waves in air (microphone, speaker, eardrum) as well. This is the crux of the matter. Think about it.

This misses the point. 
If people and a goodly size population say they prefer vinyl then the job is to explain why they do. 
Unless you can do this scientifically then you are failing to apply the rules you espouse to others to yourself.
I don’t believe the answer lies in expectation bias caused by the cultural rituals associated with vinyl either just like addiction to cocain isn’t because people love jabbing themselves with needles.
i suggest the answer lies in the sound differences between the two media. And I’ve not seen much scientific information or study identifying the differences and then comparing preferences in blind tests either. There’s great scope for study here.

No mention of harmonic content, the intentional listening experience of vinyl, or the necessarily more dynamic nature of vinyl releases when compared to their modern digital counterpart.   And the loudness war has been there since vinyl.  Fear is not arbitrary at all. Waste of time 14 mins. 

Play a good recording on an SME 30/2, fitted with a Koetsu Rhodonite cartridge. Then play the digital version of the same recording using the highest rated DACs and tell me analog isn't superior. Yeah... Insert LMAO emoji here>

This entire topic is ridiculous. Next up, “a chemist will explain why chocolate tastes better than apple pie.”

His points are valid in theory.  However, when it comes to implementation, the story changes.  

First, for digital equipment to "smooth" the curve effectively, it must be well designed.  Sure, there is plenty of equipment that is well designed and sounds very good.  

But, second is the software.  He does make the point about the so-called loudness wars.  As digital sound engineers increasingly use higher volume and more compression, the quality of the recording declines.  Similarly, some analogue recordings are poorly produced.  Overall it seems that the quality of most analogue recordings is better than the corresponding digital versions, and even more so with more modern music as the loudness wars have become more prevalent.

So, if sound engineers focused more on producing great sounding recordings, rather than loud sounding recordings, I think you'd see that many more enthusiasts would embrace digital over vinyl.  That's because the sound quality would be similar enough, but the digital versions are often easier to consume... like on the phone, in the car, over the internet, etc.  In today's world, the sound quality problems start with the overly compressed recordings.

This compression issue and the "loudness wars" is the reason I strongly prefer vinyl.  Even though I do occasionally listen to a CD or SACD, and I stream when a record isn't convenient.

Perhaps the human cutoff frequency of 20 khz is the problem here. While humans cannot perceive tones (continuous sine waves) above 20 khz or so, there may very well be a psycho-acoustic or other human response to high frequencies. The leading edge of a square wave, for example, has many ultrasonic frequency components. Those high frequencies may be perceived as an initial sound “attack” and may contibute to a sense of realism when reproduced correctly (proper phase and amplitude).
As an electrical engineer, with reduced high frequecy perception due to aging, I cannot explain why adding a supertweeter to my system makes the sound more spacious and realistic.
Btw, in my fairly pricey system, vinyl is superior to most digital, but both are very enjoyable. I think digital needs to increase the sampling rate throughout the entire recording to playback chain.

By your logic, a robotic woman would be better than a real woman. I still prefer the real woman. Imperfect. But more life. More character.

By coincidence I received my January 2019 issue of The Absolute Sound yesterday. I’m looking through the table of contents and I see a review of the MSB Reference DAC and Transport. The blurb says, "After railing mightily against all things digital for almost thirty years, our Mr. Valin (Jonathan Valin) has finally found a DAC and transport he can live with long-term."

A couple of quotes from the review:

"As I just said it wasn’t as if Connick and Marsalis had developed the body and bloom of an LP on voice and sax. And yet, in spite of this, the MSB gear reproduced both singer and sax with such supernaturally lifelike immediacy, resolution of performance detail, neutrality of tone color and dynamic range that they sounded ’there’ enough to astonish me."

"To be frank, when it comes to digital sources, I ain’t no Robert Harley. Still, I know real when I hear it, and with the Reference DAC/Transport I heard it to an extent I wouldn’t have thought possible the day before this MSB gear arrived - and I heard it on CD, SACD, high-res streaming, and (par excellence) MQA streaming."

(me again) So it appears that there were no stairstep soundwaves coming out of Mr. Valin’s speakers, no missing information and no digital ice flecks blowing in his face.

The base price of the DAC is $39,500 with a number of upgrade options ranging from $990 to $14,905 (for a femto 33 clock, the femto 77 clock costs $4,995 if you’re on a tight budget). The transport costs $18,500.

This is not the top-of-the-line model either. The top-of-the-line model is supposed to be better in every way. That’s still a lot of money for a DAC and Transport, though, but it’s chicken feed compared to his analog gear. A couple of examples (he has much more): Acoustic Signature Invictus Jr /T-9000 $123,000 (no cartridge), Walker Audio Proscenium Black Diamond Mk V $110,000 (no cartridge). Add a few good cartridges , a couple of top rate phono stages, a good isolation base and rack, some cables of this caliber and you’re talking real money.  So he was comparing the MSB digital gear to top shelf analog gear. 

So if you think that your turntable sounds better than the MSB Reference DAC and Transport in Valin’s system or that vinyl always sounds better than digital, you’re fooling yourself, and that will only get harder and harder to do as time goes on and digital continues its fast pace of improvement. But if you want to believe that vinyl is always better than digital or that digital is fundamentally flawed and can’t be fixed, that’s OK with me.

Are you implying that the cost of the system determines the quality of the output? If that’s the case, I’ve never seen a $30k Birkin looks and feel better than $1k LV. They’re just more about something else rather than the functionalities.

I do not think that more money necessarily equals better sound. I think that when an audio professional who listens to a variety of audio gear all the time and communicates frequently with the people who design and build the gear spends $123,000 on a turntable and probably has it set up by the guy who designed it, there is a good chance it will sound better than one you pay $5,000 for and set up yourself.

I know that Valin doesn’t pay $123,000 nor would you pay list price for a $5,000 turntable. I’m just using the list prices for comparison purposes.

A very good ENGINEERING explanation of why analog can not be as good as digital..

"They" (analog diehards) said the same about analog cameras (movie or still) vs digital cameras (movie or still)

Cheers George 

It is said that to equal an LP, a digital system would have to sample at minimum of 7 million samples a second, and with ~zero jitter~ in that spec to be met. The interchannel timing accuracy of an LP is way out of the league of the Best digital out there.

This was known by the mid 90’s.

In complex harmonic signals, which is what music is.... the human hearing..meeting that spec with digital... might require a minimal sample rate of a few million samples a second.

Just to hear a single short bell tone in proper space, acoustically, in a triangle or equilateral set up of listener and speakers, at 8 feet apart, etc..a digital system would have to sample at a minimum of 225k samples er second, at a 20 bit depth, with ZERO jitter. that’s a minimum, for a single short pure tone. If the point source seems to move to the ears, by one inch of placement in space and we can hear that easily (we can!)..well..that ’s the minimum spec (225/20) required to get that out properly.

Now add in an entire orchestra and accompanying space.

We were discussing this on line and arguing about it, again, by the mid 90’s. On the bulletin board systems in the "rec.highend" discussions.

None of these critical specs have miraculously changed.

Neither has the argument from those espousing digital as superior. Such arguments don’t take into account the ear and how it works, nor do they take into account the fundamental physical specifications of an LP, in a complete way.

It’s the standard case of cherry picking one’s ignorance into a false premise.

23-24 years later these tedious arguments still come around.

Past job our office was near this company, https://www.vanausdall.com/history/. One they invited us over to view their Thomas Edison Wax Cylinder collection.

That's the way to go.

This question may never be answered in our lifetimes. So, I'd suggest, let your ear's do the listening and decide for yourself. And then proceed to have a good time, because that my friends, is what this hobby is supposed to be about.

What a yawn fest. Get a life. I couldn't care less if you prefer digital. Good for you. Next topic...

The sampling rate of lacquer/metal/vinyl is the number of polymer molecules flying past the stylus at the outer edge, ~15 ips, to ~ 8 ips at the inner part of the groove. This is what limits the resolution of the physical wave form on the lacquer/metal/vinyl. That number is astronomical and blows away any conceivable, let alone practical, digital sampling rates.

In the late 90s, the president of Sony Music said that at the dawn of the CD era, it was decided that the industry’s sampling rate for CDs was to be in large part shaped by marketing considerations. Specifically, it was determined that 95% of music consumers preferred convenience to quality and could not hear the difference between vinyl and CD at the sampling rate settled on. Therefore, there was no reason to cut into profits by spending more money on a higher sampling rate for the 5% of the market that could hear it. 

I have worked in advertising and marketing as a creative director for decades, and at least for me, it is not at all difficult to understand this industry approach. 

I have posted this information many many times in several forums. For many people: their hearing is so bad on this topic that they must be among that 95%. 

Anyone who does not take into account industry’s self interest in this debate is naive.  

Hitler was into goth and death metal. 
My grandparents told me. That’s why they left Germany. 

And the other 5% are superhumans.. as I keep on saying :-)
Kinda like cold fusion :-)

Question - How did Sony management in the early 80s judge or determine who can hear what? Did they have a bevy of audiophiles on staff? I suspect it’s more likely the Redbook CD committee decided on 16/44 based on technical considerations and constraints only.

stevecham

The sampling rate of lacquer/metal/vinyl is the number of polymer molecules flying past the stylus at the outer edge, ~15 ips, to ~ 8 ips at the inner part of the groove. That number is astronomical and blows away any conceivable, let alone practical, digital sampling rates.

For that to be true, each molecule would have to be capable of registering either a 1 or a zero. Were that the case, we’d be loading computer software such as Windows and MS Office from LP - there’d be no need for a CD-ROM. We wouldn't need the DVD, either - we could put entire movies on a single LP side. But of course that isn’t even remotely true. CD can store substantially more data than any LP.

teo_audio

It is said that to equal an LP, a digital system would have to sample at minimum of 7 million samples a second, and with ~zero jitter~ in that spec to be met.

Other than you, who has made this claim? You're suggesting that an LP can hold more data than a CD. That simply isn't even remotely true.