The character of analog and digital

@lalitk,@charles1dad,

well put, moderation is wisdom

@millercarbon 

Welcome back!

Shouldn’t we compare recent releases of digital and vinyl rather than waxing lyrical about 70 year old recordings where the digital release is cheap and cheerful mastering because you otherwise can’t make money on it? Claiming outright superiority of vinyl givien fast progress on digital seems a bit outdated.

@lalitk 

+1, well said.

@mikelavigne ,

your postulate of asymptotical closing of the gap between vinyl and digital seems counterfactual: vinyl suffers from distortions simply not present in digital, e.g. tracking angle on conventional tone arms, warp and flutter depending on pressing quality, imperfect reconstruction of the RIAA curve in the analogue domain, tonearm, step-up and analogue cable distortions to name but a few. Admittedly harmonic distortions on vinyl are euphonic and therefore often preferred to the ‘cold glare’ of digital, that however doesn’t mean they aren’t distortions. I fully agree with @lalitk that digital needs lots of work and am well aware of your state of the art setup on both vinyl and digital.

@mikelavigne 

far away from wanting to prove you wrong! I am just pointing out that digital would have to have a fundamental problem yet to be identified to be eternally inferior to vinyl.

Enjoy the music.

@sns,

+1, digital doesn’t have the euphonic distortions typical of vinyl but can sound harsh when poorly implemented. I’d also generally recommend valve amplification with digital with its more benign higher harmonics distortions compared to silicon.

Intrigued, though with progress on class D, may obviate the latter statement