Vinyl / High qual analog tape / High-res digital -- One of these is not like the other

I'm nowhere near Seattle but I would be more than happy to listen in a controlled blind test and see the preference of all involved. It might be vinyl but it still doesn't change reality.

simply tell us the hardware and media to be played. we can all judge for ourselves in our own way. i have less than zero interest in a discussion of DBT.

Musicians say it sounds truest to what they hear coming from the instrument......

it’s been multi-decades since ’musicians’ had any idea about anything other than digital.

’a’ musician......maybe one in a thousand.

one in a hundred working pro audio guys. and even those guys very rarely have a clue about high end vinyl.

so the opinions of that group about this is just not relevant to me.

i have invested high degrees of assets in tape, vinyl and digital. taken each as far as i can go. as far as anyone. and my comments are related to the top level of each format. what happens in each format on the way to these levels could be completely different than my experience.

so for me and my system.......i’d say that the best vinyl sounds really the same as tape. when you play the best pressings, including 45rpm and direct to disc on vinyl, then play tape, it’s doing the same things. maybe 1/2" tape steps up farther.

i have three turntables with different drive systems and different type tone arms and so there are tiny variations in those playback characters that the tape does not have in the same way. yet the tape quality is more all over the board so there are variations on each side. we could spend 10 hours switching back and forth and i think it’s easier to keep playing stellar vinyl and stellar tape is more challenging to find.

with digital there are degrees of things missing, that are not missing from the vinyl and tape. period. exclamation point. m i s s i n g. and i’m a guy with $160k invested in my digital hardware. i’m a serious digital person. yet......it’s not like those other 2. you can talk mic feeds and all that crap. just listen head to head for a period of time. it hits you right in the nose.

i do lots of listening sessions with visitors. we start with digital, but once we switch to analog we rarely switch back unless people want to play something they know that is only digital. analog is just more real. no math conversions holding back reality involved in the formats.

where digital is better, is in the way it works for my life. it fits. i can listen to lots of new music and it works for the 70% of the time i’m not in the mood for analog. i love all the new classical music i can stream at really high levels of performance. i love exploring musically. and the sound is great. the reason i’m so invested in digital is that all around it is better.......but let’s just forget it sounding like analog. it just does not, nor does it need to.

my 2 cents, YMMV.

Wow, three turntables and $160k in digital hardware? Do you mind me asking what you do for a living Mike?

i’m about to retire from managing a car dealership. it took 25 years to build up my system. a little each year. hifi is my way of coping with daily job stress.

I care to differ a little. I was busy typing my last post when yours was added. It is not that digital is missing something. It is that something is added to vinyl. I have several direct to disc albums and it is interesting to note that they sound more like Hi Res digital files than other records.

i cannot argue that the analog process is without any artifacts. OTOH digital absolutely misses things objectively, and by degrees. and the musical experience equation is much more diminished by what is missing from digital, even the very best digital, compare to anything added to the very best analog. been comparing the best of each 30 hours a week for decades. just how it sounds to me and my visitors.

if we take analog out of the discussion, digital music, at it’s best today, is objectively, completely, wonderful and satisfying. missing nothing. but on forums people like to bring up analog....so we do this dance. i don’t start threads like this. but sometimes i finish them.

I certainly agree that digital is more convenient. How could you not? I can’t listen to classical playlists streaming or otherwise. I just can’t enjoy it as background music. I have to sit in front of the system for classical.

there is a multi-task component to my listening which is unavoidable. but my 30 hours a week is time spent in my 2 channel dedicated room. so i might have classical playing while i’m reading or web surfing. the music competing for my attention. with analog there are no distractions, the music is too compelling. not that the digital cannot also be compelling.....and it too can demand i pay complete attention....just not as consistently.

Ideally digital and analog should sound exactly the same. If they don’t something is happening in the signal path or master to alter the original recording. What sounds better I suspect is a matter of taste more than anything.

filtering a musical signal through a math equation is not without a cost. on a forum here we can debate this. if we were both sitting in my room the debate would be very very short. a note or two likely, but sometimes a dozen cuts are needed to get it. i’ve had that experience dozens of times. my yard is littered with the bones of former digital zealots.....now reborn.

i agree that these threads seek some sort of objective result, but that unless you are weapons free to approach these questions with unlimited resources we are going to have multiple "valid" if "not too useful" anecdotal based viewpoints. which is why i qualify my views.......and that your mileage may......and likely does.....vary....from mine. not many crazy enough to take my approach, even though many have that option.

Cleeds Asks;

This could be true, and it’s sometimes how digital sounds to me. So please tell us @mikelavigne : What is digital objectively missing?

objectively the things digital misses are the tonal and timbrel completeness of musical parts, the focused dynamic power of the music, and the inner musical pace and flow. the data density of analog is much higher. the continuous-ness and tonal density are better. the ability to separate musical parts and retain air and dynamic shading is better......especially when the music gets very dense and complicated.

this is what i hear when i compare my best analog to me best digital.

and you can add multiple channels of digital, and the analog still comes out net better. i have a 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos separate home theater system and honestly, even with all that firepower digital high rez still falls short of the musical connection of two optimized analog channels.

when i add a big screen i love my movies. but for music i’m out in the barn.

well; i have lots of digital and vinyl masters from the same tape source.

my darTZeel amplifiers have steady state and peak watt readouts on their face plates. readable from the listening position.

i can play the same recording back to back and see the peak readout in wattage. it’s not close how much more dense and dynamic the peaks are on analog. for that matter the tape is better then the vinyl.

a horn at full tilt, a drum whack.......

digital simply cannot muster the information at peaks. cannot do it. on paper it is suppose to be better. your engineering prof said it’s better. our friendly local goofball physicist said it’s better. but they were wrong.

and this difference is at the heart of every difference i speak about. digital is washed out and blunted relative to great analog. it’s a fact. you do have to have analog that can actually play back what is in the grooves or on the tape. and also proper resonance treatment so you are not blunting the peaks. i do have that treatment.

I just compared Fleetwood Mac Rumours on audiophile vinyl (Pallas pressing) versus SACD. I used an EMM SACD player and ARC Reference level preamplification. The SACD had better and clearer highs (guitar fills mostly). The vinyl had a denser and more satisfying vocals and mids. Ultimately it was a draw.

sorry to break it you, but the Pallus 45 rpm pressing of Rumours sucks. i have 2 copies of it. the bass is fat and lacks articulation, and the sound is congested and life less. my guess is the 45 is digitally sourced. not surprised the SACD is better, as i recall i also prefer the CD.

i love Rumours, one of my favorite recordings. so 10 years ago i went on a mission to find an original pressing; which after buying 10 early pressings i finally found an original, and it’s awesome. most of the early pressings are ’decent’. they did sell like 25 million copies of Rumours in the 70’s so there are lots of them out there. i also have a 15ips 1/4" early generation RTR master dub of Rumours which is even better than the original pressing.

typically a 45rpm reissue of a vintage rock album is on the same level but a little different than a good original pressing. but in this case the 45 is not very good at all. it is still great music, and the 45rpm format and vinyl gear will bring some positives, but it’s way down the list of best ways to hear this.

Somewhere out there Mike, there is a guy called George who would say your amplifiers are crap because they don’t double in power output when you 1/2 the speaker impedance :-) ... and no I am not the one saying that and I don’t agree with him.

everyone has a right to their own opinion, even george. if i listened to measurements, then he might have a point, but i use my amplifiers for music reproduction.

Fremer and i will muddle through with our flawed amplifiers. we both could choose to own any amplifier out there, and we both have the ones we prefer.

here is a link to a post that George might like (or not like);

https://www.whatsbestforum.com/threads/dartzeel-nhb-468-mono-blocks-in-my-system.29522/page-3#post-648874

What happens if we consider albums that were recorded digitally? As I understand it, most music has been recorded digitally for the last 40 years. Let’s say it was recorded digitally at 96/24 and I have a download or stream at 96/24. Is it missing anything? Does vinyl have something that the digital doesn’t? If it does, is that good?

it’s not that simple. yet in some ways it is.

in the late 60’s solid state was replacing tubed gear for recording and mixing, and more and more multi-track and plugs-ins and such were used. so from there into the late 70’s it was still analog mostly but the process was changing. then early 80’s it’s all digital plus those previous changes.

so if you compare the golden age of 2 channel analog it’s mid 50’s to around 1970. you have the relative purity of the process and the gear. those recordings are hard for digital to compete with. plus in many ways the expectations to make ’live’ recordings were much greater on the artists. and more resources were devoted to the process by the labels. the best of this era can’t be touched by the digital era.

fast forward to today and still the artist and recording quality is paramount; with the format helping the sum of the whole to another level. how often do we get all these elements to line up? statistically since there are vastly more digital recordings today, the best of those will end up at the top of the heap; but all analog recordings still will potentially sound the best.

the current crop of direct-to-disc Lp offerings are untouchable by digital, as well as the few done to tape and offered as tape to the public.

vinyl and tape (when well done) have a palpability and presence digital misses. a rightness and ease. yet digital has degrees less of those things. it's 'good enough'.

does this mean a recording done with 96/24 or 192/24 (or dxd and Quad dsd) is worse than analog? all other things being equal......yes (some would reasonably beg to differ). but it’s very rare that all other things are equal. the best music well recorded still serves us well......regardless of the format. i love all my classical digital and it’s a big important part of my listening.

As an aside, I think you were quite brave on taking that controlled cable (or was it messing with your mind?) challenge. Especially with the results posted online.

brave.....or stupid and naive. that was 13 years ago.....but Amir drug it up to get under my skin. i’ve made myself vulnerable to ner’do-wells that way.

when you have a 20 year posting history using your real name, being open about the highs and lows of your experiences, with 25,000 posts over 5 forums, there are going to be stumbles. no one held a gun to my head and made me hit send on any of those posts. i asked for it.

what did you learn from those moments?

Not everyone who has heard Mike’s system loves it: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/a-visit-to-mike-lavignes-home-and-sound-g...

to be fair.....over the years, there have been plenty of well-intentioned criticisms of my room and system, which i’ve appreciated and has helped me to overcome my own ignorance and move forward. i’ve written often about this issue.

i will leave it up to the readers to determine whether Amir’s comments fall into that category.

It was pretty brave having him over given his reputation and you can’t win all hearts.

the time he came for the meeting related in his comments, i never invited him or knew he was coming. we had already locked horns by that time and so his viewpoints were expected. he came with an agenda. big surprise.

some years prior to that, i had invited him over. but at that time he was not a listener, he was a techie who liked writing about hifi. trying to fix what he saw was wrong with audiophiles. so he arrived to listen, stayed 15 minutes, and left. he cared nothing about listening. he cared about being the smartest guy in the room.

some things never change. and i fully admit he is a smart guy.

@rauliruegas

Mike I don’t know if I’m missing something on your statement so please tell me if it’s that way:

Your statement really " disturb " me in the way we can read it because for me you are in reality telling that the vinyl experiences is better than tape.
Let me explain about:

in the recorded tape normally does not exist the RIAA eq. that one way or the other makes a signal heavy degradation in the vinyl pressed LPs and in the recorded tape the bass range comes in stereo and in the LPs comes in mono. Additional the recorded tape during system playback does not pass through ( again. ) that inverse eq. RIAA as all the LPs.

Those tape recorder characteristics makes a huge differences. So, common sense to me says the tape recorder is an inferior medium than the LP because even with all those signal twice RIAA eq. degradation and mono bass even the tape recorder experiences.
Again what am I missing here. Is it an absolute misunderstanding to your statement?

tape heads have EQ in the same sense RIAA works for vinyl playback. it is a method to optimize the magnetic tape technology and the music frequency spectrum. playback gets adjusted to bring it into musical coherency. so both analog technologies have that in common. in fact; most phono stages can double as tape repro outputs with a different EQ to select. My King Cello is like that.

i completely agree that tape has the lower distortion potential, greater data density and can be better than the best vinyl. but to be clearly on another level than vinyl, 1/4", 15 ips needs to be almost perfect. when you get into this question, the line between these two formats is blurred, depending on the quality of each in your particular system. 13 years ago when i got into tape, almost every one of the tapes i acquired were clearly better than my vinyl; maybe 80-90%. some by a long way. since then, my vinyl has steadily improved, but my tape is similar as then. now i would guess that 60% of my tapes are better than my vinyl, and maybe only the top 20% are a lots better. but my vinyl is quite a bit better now. really a long way better.

understand that my tape collection widely varies in quality as many are grey market master dubs of unknown provenance. and the perfection of the transfers varies with the source and the method used. so my experience is not as much a refection on the format difference as the access to perfect dubbing and source perfection differences. none of my tapes are poor, but my vinyl is so good that an average tape might only be equal or less to a great pressing.

but i do have 8000+ records to choose from and 250 tapes. so there are thousands of absolutely fantastic records to choose from. statistically a big advantage.

the exception to this is 1/2" tape, 15ips, or 30 ips. here no matter what vinyl does, it cannot get there. there is a gap from all other media to 1/2" (or wider) tape. it’s crazy good.

@rauliruegas

"" the things digital misses are the tonal and timbrel completeness of musical parts, the focused dynamic power of the music, and the inner musical pace and flow. the data density of analog is much higher. the continuous-ness and tonal density are better. the ability to separate musical parts and retain air and dynamic shading is better.....""

It’s not easy to disagree with some gentleman with your kind of " pedigree " but I have good objective and subjective reasons to disagree with you ( not in all. ) and in other threads I posted about. This link speaks about:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/40319018?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

this one is pretty easy.

"one signal was sent to an analog cassette tape (Nakamichi MR3)......"

a cassette tape is 1/4" tape, 4 track, and auto reversing, running at 1 and 7/8th ips.

’4-track’ means 4 tracks on a 1/4" tape. those tracks are tiny, and the sound, while nice on a good cassette, is nothing to write home about.

every one of my Lp’s is better than 1/4" 2 track running at 7 and 1/2 ips. those tracks are twice the width of the 4-track, and it’s running 4x the speed and much more robust and solid sounding.

my tapes are all 1/4" 2 track, 15 ips (8x the speed of the cassette). a cassette deck weighs 10-15 pounds, and mechanically is a lightweight. my master recorders weigh 200 pounds, and are the most solid audio devices ever built. and the sound quality is relative to the weight difference.

this ’study’ has zero relevancy to the subject of this thread. this cassette player used is a competent playback machine for home use, but has no place representing SOTA analog playback performance.

@rauliruegas

to be clear;

---1/4", 15 ips tape on a high quality RTR deck is superior to even the very best vinyl, when the source tape for the transfer is pristine, and the transfer is well done. tape is better. vinyl is not equal. even direct to disc vinyl does not measure up to the very best of this tape.

but what has changed is that the vinyl in my system has moved up so far now that the degrees of pristine for the source tape, and quality of the transfer, are simply higher to maintain that margin. so fewer of my tapes hold up as clearly better.

but.......the best tapes are on another level.

so vinyl does not equal tape.

and it takes a huge commitment to vinyl to get it to this point. so for most people tape is still the easiest access to the very best sound. unless you have a ’daddy’ vinyl set-up. then.........getting better tape than vinyl is harder than before.

i don’t personally know about that Wind Music Lp, Paramiter.

my opinion is that there are many modern digital recordings which have ended up as very good sounding Lps. and i buy quite a few of them and enjoy them. but......there is nothing like tape sourced or direct to disc Lps. so if i have a choice, i’m staying analog, but i’m happy to buy great music on vinyl that happens to be digitally recorded. the music comes first.

here is a tape sourced Lp i highly recommend that was recorded in 2015. it was recorded on a 24 track Studer A80, mixed on an analog mixing board to 2 track analog on a Studer 810. and then mastered to vinyl on an Ampex ATR-102.

https://www.discogs.com/Ferit-Odman-Dameronia-With-Strings/release/7850724

try and find a digital recording that can match the dynamics on this record, the tone of the horn, the authority of the piano. i know i cannot.

really wonderful. that is what we have from the golden age of vinyl. we should all appreciate those analog sourced records. they are precious.

yes; that is the same one.

same codes and product numbers as mine.

i know it's limited, but exactly how many i cannot say. so i cannot exactly answer your question other than the record i have and i am recommending is the same as what is for sale at Acoustic Sounds.

my bad on the cassette tape width. my memory is what it is.

i lived through that time period and had plenty of cassettes. they were remarkably good for what they were, especially for in car listening. 8-track was a better system technically on the tape side of things, but did not get the attention to detail and development of cassette.

you could have a nice sounding cassette based system. and tape is analog and has that going for it.

but nothing like vinyl, or real ’big boy’ RTR.

Robert,

play this all analog record on a very high quality turntable......

https://store.acousticsounds.com/d/125556?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIzfa9h_Cl6gIVEhLnCh0oigBLEAYYAyABEgI-EPD_BwE

.......then provide a link to a digital recording that can do an acoustic piano or horn in a similar way.....as good or better.

then let’s talk.

or come on over and bring the digital file of your choice (or point me to one i can acquire) and we can listen together. btw; i do this often for others who have your perspective.

i keep trying to listen to a square wave and it won’t play. damn.

@roberttdid

Mike, I will try to take you up on that offer to come listen after this whole Covid thing dies down which unfortunately looks like it won’t be any time soon. I may even bring my own digital source. I would be interested in your thoughts compared to your reference unit.

i would enjoy it if you can. anytime, i’m in the Seattle area.

and you would be welcome to bring your own digital source....happy to compare it to the MSB Select II <-> Extreme server.

Some may prefer vinyl but it can’t hold the information that a digital file can it’s impossible. If a square wave won’t play then something is wrong. No such thing as " all analog".

i completely understand your reluctance to allow actual listening to intrude on your nice neat world view. it does require a bit of effort.

djones51,

I bought orange vinyl and when I sent that link to mikelavigne before my purchase he said it was the same record that he has (number, I guess). He did not comment on the color, though. In any case, the orange one sounds just fine to me, but do not tell geoffkait. He will recommend you paint it green. At the same time, I do recommend you play it in clockwise fashion. It is, in fact, directional.

this record only was pressed in the orange vinyl to my knowledge. in any case it sounds superb.

i have 2 copies; one that i got in a box set directly from Turkey, and another from Acoustic Sounds as a back up.

on another forum one member is a local Turkish friend of Ferit Odman;

https://www.whatsbestforum.com/threads/zero-distortion-tango-time.26464/page-173#post-656827

i might actually be able to acquire a copy of the master tape of this recording.

I wonder if people would be interested in a r2r edition of Dameronia with strings. He has the master tape. If enough people is commited, I can convince him for a limited run.

here is where it gets interesting to compare the source tape, the vinyl and a digital transfer. then a few get an ’ah ha’ moment. done it many times. i compare vinyl and the digital every day for years. don’t always pull out the tape.

@rauliruegas

to make sure i am on the same page with you, you are asking for 2-3 Lp’s where the digital version is better sounding than the vinyl version. right?

i’m at work right now so i’ll pull a couple from my memory.

Reference Recordings does some amazing digital recordings.

RR-93---Eiji-Copland---Cd verses 33rpm Masterworks Lp.
https://referencerecordings.com/recording/copland-100-minnesota-orchestra/

i own both. the Lp sucks. the CD beats it like a drum.

RR-25 Nojima Plays Listz--CD

https://referencerecordings.com/nojima-plays-liszt-now-available-on-vinyl-2/

this is an analog recording. and the original Lp pressing of this recording is really great. but the CD is also very good.

unfortunately the digitally sourced 45rpm vinyl reissue referenced in the link sucks and the CD is better.

i have to get back to work. when i have more time i will list more.