How much do you need to spend to get digital to rival analog?

$200, $2000 or infiniti.

mijostyn covered off the obvious issue of the masters being different.

If you are currently a "vinyl" person, then you may have an expectation of a sound that digital .... well just isn’t. The fairly high channel cross-talk of vinyl certainly creates a sound "field" that can be pleasing and I am inclined to believe that perhaps it has a benefit in untreated or poorly treated rooms, and hence offers a euphonic advantage over digital for many people. Even that slight background "hiss" can give an airyness that again many find pleasing.

There are features, typically in higher end DACs, but not exclusively, that allow you to play with filters that may allow you to tune the sound to how you like .... literally by adding imperfection, but nothing wrong if you enjoy the result. You can also pay an arm and a leg for a non oversampling DAC that will do the same thing, but without the ability to remove the imperfections when you do.

If you have a good listening space, a reasoned blend of absorption and diffusing to create a nice "environment" and you are not emotionally invested in vinyl, then you may find a good but fairly low end DAC sounds wonderful.

Keep in mind that almost everything in the last few decades was recorded and mastered in digital, and even remasterings often will be, so any "advantages" of vinyl come down to specific masterings and pleasant "flaws".

No offense mikelavigne,

But that article and then things claimed in it at times sounds like the technically questionable, at times arguably wrong, and certainly not universally proven or accepted claims made about MQA. Actually it gave me a total MQA deja-vu, and let’s be honest, there is certainly no agreement, between audiophiles whether MQA is better than simple 24/96 or 24/192, but based on the claims, it should be.


There is one example they use that gave me pause. They claim to hear 15-20db into the noise floor of an analog tape. Then they "pishaw" dithering claiming it is just averaging. If it averaging in the same sense as being able to hear 15-20db into the noise floor is averaging.  (some of the claims they made w.r.t. sound localization w.r.t. waveform distortion are not accurate and supported by current research)


But that was 1995, and much of the problems they identified were from 1986 when they started, and that was really the infancy of digital recording.



Serious question for everyone. How do you reconcile claiming that vinyl is technically better ... not euphonically better, but technically better, when the vast majority of recordings made in the last 2 decades have been recorded on digital? Even where the original is analog, many remasters have been remastered via digitization? At some level, Vinyl is just another "DAC" for many records.

Some would argue that it is painfully obvious that that statement is gobbly-gook :-)

Not yours, the one you quoted.

You only answered a very small portion of the question I asked and effectively ignored the most significant part of it.

As well, are you implying it would be impossible to build an analog limiter that soft-clips like magnetic tape and put that in the circuit before the A/D?   (not that that would have been needed in the last 20 ish years with 24 bit A/D with 20+ bits effective for studio equipment)

sadono91 posts11-05-2019 11:40pm@atdavid

Serious question for everyone. How do you reconcile claiming that vinyl is technically better ... not euphonically better, but technically better, when the vast majority of recordings made in the last 2 decades have been recorded on digital? Even where the original is analog, many remasters have been remastered via digitization? At some level, Vinyl is just another "DAC" for many records.

Digital recording is non-destructive and far easier to use. That said, there are still a select group of studios and artists that still record using reel-to-reels.

Reel-to-reels have a soft clipping nature, as it reaches 0. Those analog recordings keep part of their characteristic sound, even if they’re converted to digital and processed digitally. This is why some mixing and mastering engineers will transfer their mixes/masters to reel-to-reel, before - or as - their final format.

👍👍👍👍

mijostyn1,294 posts11-06-2019 9:28amThe normal background noise on vinyl excluding the rare scratch or loud pop I find not to be objectionable at. It is dithering your brain and in some ways, believe it or not makes the music more realistic. When have you been to a concert with no background noise? Never. People talking coughing, shuffling around, chairs squeaking and the -ss behind you that has to whistle after every song. Vinyl is actually quiet in comparison!The quietness of digital is actually spooky, sterile. You know you are listening to an artificial recreation because there is no noise. Is this one of the reasons I prefer live recordings? Maybe.
There is more behind this than the technical aspects and this issue is highly multi-factorial. Gross characterizations do not work and anyone making them has a hidden bias.

Mike,
The problem with many of these "high fidelity techies", is that they are long on notoriety, but often weak on being a real "techie". I don't know this person, so I hope that is not the case, but it seems to occur a lot in consumer audiophilia. Anyone who claims that 24/192 with remotely modern studio A/D and playback does not have, at least the potential for superior dynamics, I do have to question. I don't claim to be a music or recording engineer (because quite obviously I am not), but I do have a fair amount of practical (and some not so much) experience with the technical end of this.


What seems near impossible to find is an exact equal mastering of vinyl and high res digital, and not with crushed dynamics on the digital. They all seem to have not so subtle differences.

Your system ... saw it on Facebook, is very impressive! I would love to hear it.


Not to challenge you, but do you believe that vinyl/analog has more headroom to work with even when the vinyl was recorded and mixed via digital means?   I think that is an important question to answer.


I have a fair amount of experience with the digitization and reconstruction of audio, even more in some fields (mainly software radio) where we really push the limits of the A/D and D/A performance and they really do live up to their specifications.   So, something must be wrong, somewhere in the chain,  if audiophiles like you believe that vinyl has more dynamic range and I am not convinced it is the reasons that HDCD or MQA gave, but I don't discount there is something.

Cheers!

Mike, thank you for taking the time to respond, and for others keeping this civil.


I was on a Facebook forum yesterday, and someone whose opinion I value, and is certainly accomplished in this field, said something that I have believed for a while, but have not tried to prove .... that you have to voice your system (room treatment + speaker placement) for vinyl or digital due due to inherent differences ... i.e. cross-talk.

As tzh21y said, perhaps it is just what we are used to?

In other areas of perception, like light, our preferences change as you change intensity, and we know that in sound, the Fletcher-Munson curves define how intensity impacts our perception. Perhaps inherent dynamic range limitations in vinyl coupled with aforementioned dynamic compression creating the ideal results for our interpretation of music and dynamic range from a perception standpoint, not a measurement standpoint?

Back to the thread, best answer as pointed out ... is no answer, as it is deeply personal it appears.

I have a new favourite answer, "Sound equally awesome in a different way, yes!"

Are you saying that a CD transport or CD player is better than a streamer/DAC?

rauliruegas,
The problem with your statement is it takes a simplistic approach to "information".
I won’t disagree with you that digital, especially high resolution digital contains within it more raw information, but let’s look at a really simple example:

A CD is 1411 bkps to achieve 44100 samples/second at 16 bits and 2 channels.

What if we had an uncompressed signal at 128kbps? ... That would allow us to do say 2 channels, 10 bits, 6400 samples/sec or 3.2KHz. We could do 8 bits, at get up to 4KHz. Not too terribly impressive huh?

How do you think 8 bits at 8ksps would sound compared to a 128kbps MP3 or AAC? It would sound awful by comparison even though technically both have the same amount of information.

Why does the MP3 sound better for the same raw information? Because the MP3 concentrates the information into areas in which the brain can make use of it.

Perhaps due to dynamic compression during the mixing/mastering process, other intentional choices made during mixing and mastering, even what we consider limitations during playback, we are maximizing the audio information that the brain can take in. Perhaps that inherent "filtering" that a turntable does maximizes the useful audio information that the brain can take in my minimizing extraneous information that can cause information overload. I am more of a digital guy, but even I feel this happens at times.

That information limit will be different for different people. That could even explain why some love vinyl, and some, not so much. I think it could also speak to the listening fatigue that some claim to experience when listening to digital. It is simply information overload, especially when coupled with "loudness wars" information levels which could be considered extreme.

You could make arguments against this, like, "why are high end DACs" then viewed as being closer to vinyl? I would counter with, who is making those statements and why is their brain telling them that and why do some of those DACs measure so poorly. Why do non-OS R2R DACs sounds better (only to some). Perhaps the high frequency artifacts that modulate into the audio band mask additional information allowing the brain to concentrate on what it most wants to hear?

rauliruegas9,612 posts11-11-2019 10:24amWhy do you want to replicate the analog experience that’s wrong and different medium where you lost a huge signal amount of information and where adds a lot of non recorded signal information. Digital is truer to the recording to what recording microphones pick-up?:

We are talking DACs here. There is no feedback on a Delta-Sigma DAC.

Much else of what you wrote appeared incorrect as well.

zalive15 posts11-12-2019 9:56a

R2R is basically a natural, straightforward approach in itself. There's no feedback in the process, unlike delta-sigma for which the feedback is necessary means of getting the DA done. And feedback is generally associated with corrections, approximations and messing with the time domain (as with the feedback you always correct with the time delay relative to the signal you're correcting with).

Whether it releases on analog or digital, most music in the last several decades was digital right up to the cutting machine.

When you say "right", do you mean as you have heard them in an acoustic club? ... or how you think they should sound?

Well one thing we can be 100% sure of is that GK will at some point make a post that is totally irrelevant to the topic at hand.

geoffkait18,240 posts11-14-2019 11:05amI’ve said this before, gentle readers, but I’ll say it again. By the time the signal gets out of the transport and goes to the DAC it’s TOO LATE. The damage has already been done! And it can never recover. Sadly, the Reed Solomon Error Correction Codes are NOT TOO GOOD for scattered CD laser light 💡 interference, seismic vibration interference, vibration produced by the CD transport and the self-inflicted vibration and flutter of the CD itself whilst spinning. 💿

Again, we/you were talking DACs, and I have copied that "qualities" you have associated with "Feedback" below. None of these properties you have assigned to "Feedback" apply to a Delta-Sigma DAC. Anything that appears as feedback in a Delta-Sigma DAC is a bit-perfect, time-perfect mathematical process. It could all be calculated ahead of time and simply fed to the actual single bit DAC output (though usually 3-6 bits). A DSD signal can be technically be fed directly to a single bit DAC.
You can't escape low pass filtering in a NOS DAC either, though some seem to try, and older audiophiles with poor high frequency hearing seem to tolerate them and mistake aliased noise for "air" and "ambience".


A "typical" record today was recorded on digital gear, mixed and mastered on digital gear as well. That has been true for quite some time.

zalive17 posts11-14-2019 3:29am

We are talking DACs here. There is no feedback on a Delta-Sigma DAC.

Delta-sigma conversion is based on a feedback, it’s how it works. In fact, feedback is described even in very words ’delta-sigma’.

Delta-sigma conversion

And feedback is generally associated with corrections, approximations and messing with the time domain (as with the feedback you always correct with the time delay relative to the signal you're correcting with). This basically renders technical problems and various noise generated in the DA process which depends on the input sequence. Delta-sigma is from the very beginning on the path of constant improvement of the DA process...because it requires constant improvement, because of its imperfection.

Cymbals on LPs made from digitally made masters don’t sound right either, if you listen critically. I can go to a hifi show, listen to many analog systems, but on a typical record I usually can’t hear an ’analog sound’ out of the analog rig, With digitally made records it’s not what’s there.

Most music in the last several decades was recorded with DSD ADCs, then converted to PCM for mixing and mastering. Conversion from DSD(Delta-Sigma) to PCM and back is a mathematical process and if done with enough mathematical precision introduces no noise, losses, or distortion within the limits of useful audio, i.e. will be  bit perfect to 24 bits.

DSD is a different story since DSS native conversion is different than PCM and basically it's again more straightforward than delta-sigma PCM conversion. So DA converters with direct DSD DA conversion path (no conversion to PCM prior to DA) can benefit in sound since DSD conversion doesn't require output filter at all, so no ringing as well. However typical cheap DAC converts DSD to PCM, then processes DA as with ony other PCM signal.

mahjister,

To say that "imaging" in headphones is all in your head, would be completely accurate. There are many imaging cues that your auditory system has for localization that simply do not exist in headphones. That makes the rest of your assertions about imaging open to "interpretation".

Now, I am not saying You shouldn't like your NOS DAC. If it brings you audio nirvana great, stick with it.  I will even accept your Perception that the NOS DAC creates a 3-d holographic image.

What I won't accept is that the image it creates is accurate (or more accurate), or even that the sound coming out is a more accurate representation of the original.  A lightly filtered NOS DAC, as are being promoted today, create sounds that were not in the recording. There is no other way to put it. They create sounds that were not in the recording. Those sounds tend to create an "airy" feel that some will interpret as "3-d holographic imaging", while others will interpret it as "crap". Frequency range of hearing will have an impact on this.  mahjister, If you like it, does it matter why you like it?

By the way I want to know if 3-d holographic imaging in headphones or speakers, and natural musical timbre instrument and voices rendering is also the results of very old age with this NOS dac of mine? Let me guess that your answer will be "probably" ….:)

And this I agree of wholeheartedly. It is the same with the ridiculous turntable/digital debate. Some people prefer what comes out of turntables, some prefer what comes out of DACs, and some prefer what comes out of NOS DACs, and whether what comes out is accurately portrayed or not for that listener matters exactly 0. There is no debate over whether these 3 things sound different. They do.  It is much different from the debate about whether a tweak does anything at all.

mahgister755 posts11-14-2019 11:13amBut for my pleasure all that is of no avail because I enjoy tremendously my "illusion"... My best to you ...

Except almost all vinyl in the last several decades has been digital right up to the cutting head. Pre-digital, most analog tapes and cutting head amps/systems had bandwidth limitations too, even if the theoretical cartridge limit was higher.


The dynamic range database is purely an indication of the mixing and mastering, nothing about the limits of the format.


Absent any proof, your points about CDs are just conjecture, the overall robustness shown in ability to store data shown in data CDs. The real time nature of audio called for different error correction but data CDs show that putting 650mb of data on a CD (similar to amount of audio data) and recovering it is possible. Either way streaming negates that.