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why a 75 dollar blue ray smokes all 2k CD players and any turntable???

Funny story,
I posted a pic of my turntable spinning an lp for a social media fan site for a specific band.I got a response by a guy," OH my it sounds so much better then a cd" my response was basically its all up for debate and in many ways digital is superior on paper and I enjoy both.This is his response..  ENJOY...

   interesting that the world of true audio quality has been grossly mis-represented in the market place. This has mainly been driven by Hi-Fi Press and marketing vogue that perpetuate the myths that what makes a great audio system is some exotic, very expensive speaker cables, a 'high end ' player and some exotic amp. Its also true that vintage audio products like valve amps and vinyl are creeping back into fashion - more of a symptom of the issue that audio quality has for the most part reached an impasse.


The main culprit - loudspeakers represent the main ceiling on audio quality and this really has not changed for many decades. Put simply if you change the speakers to something that really does the sound transduction step (the most compromised part of the audio chain) much better then you begin to see the leap in improvement that is possible. For the most part the amp (as long as it is solid state and has decent power output) and the cable (as long as it is something a bit thicker than human hair) makes little to no audible difference to audio quality.


The type of CD player does not matter either, as the speakers  introduce a degree of distortion and degradation that commonly outweighs any differences my many orders of magnitude.  We have had really good reviews by the audio press but they still don't want to admit that the latest exotic looking £2000 CD player really does nothing special but helps sell magazines so perpetuating the scam! Ridiculous really when you can get a BD player for £40 that trumps the CD spec in every aspect! Don't get me started on vinyl!S


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Showing 2 responses by aschuh

aschuh's avatar
aschuh
41 posts
 

Let me offer a thought: Human information processing is highly limited at about 60 bit/sec.

Hence, we experience our environment vectorially, i.e., we focus on variation.

Variation is not defined as every absolute change, but every change of pattern. Certain patterns are intuitive (eg, variation of leaf shape within a species) and within a continuum, others are not (e.g, when a caterpillar eats into a leaf) - a ‘combinatorial’ boundary is broken.

In analogy, not all distortion is equal. Highly reproducible distortion (narrow spec component) consistent with the fractale boundaries of sound generation seems very tolerable (and - we get used to it; we learn the pattern) yet when the boundary is broken (variation “outside” of the equation which defines boundaries of variation), we immediately notice and are - possibly - attracted, because our attention has been caught, or - often - disturbed, because the variation is random and ‘out of line’.

Short: variation does not equal variation. Distortion does not equal distortion. An argument based on specs alone is not helpful.

But then we all know that. We all hear differences in sound signature and presentation of different components.

Anybody more interested, I encourage to read up on ‘chaos’ and ‘fractale’ - the principles of phenotypic variation in nature. Applies very much to wave mechanics.

aschuh's avatar
aschuh
41 posts
 
@bgoeller  In a way you make my point. From tens of billions of sensoric bits/signals only a tiny (very, very tiny) portion is actually consciously processed, and an even a smaller portion makes it into memory.
Variation and certain patterns of variation create priority. They are "attention grabbers". Variation within fractale boundaries is generally experienced as pleasing. Imagine an oak tree with all leaves identical. Boaring. Then imagine one with natural variation of leave shapes (the underlying boundaries of variation of shape are exactly defined). Nicer. Then imagine a breeze come trough and introduce some movement. Interesting! That is what I tried to say. It is not my scientific field, but it would be interesting to formulate a hypothesis and experiment around this. Clearly we have all experienced that, for example, a perfectly measuring amp sounds not engaging, while a tube amp which measures worse wrt distortion delivers a most pleasing and engaging presentation. Of course, there are also amps which measure poorly and sound bad. I guess all I want to say that distortion by itself is not a good predictor of perceived sound quality. I would even speculate (!) that, when we introduce changes into our system and hear different details, this may not be the result of improved performance specs. Rather, it may be the result of differing emphasis (i.e., shifting fractal boundaries). But then again - how to test this? Anyway, it is my impression that many great sounding systems are much more musical instruments by themselves, rather than objective measuring/reproduction tools in a scientific sense. Musical instruments produce considerable distortion; within instrument-specific boundaries we call that sonic signature. And how else would you explain the preference of tubes and analog by so many music lovers?

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