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The muddy waters of Analogue vs. digital today

With new technology, everything is changing so fast it is hard to keep up with new recordings. I have had a turntable all of my audiophile life, although I admit I played mostly CDs for many years. It was only since I upgraded my analogue system to a certain degree in the mid-nineties, that I could hear that records sounded better than CDs. It wasn’t a very expensive upgrade, a used Rega 3 with glass platter, new Sumiko Bluepoint Special, and a floor demo ARC PH-3. Probably somewhere around $3K. Mid-90s remember.

Now my system is very upgraded and I can hear more differences between vinyl and streaming at high resolution. CDs have kind of been left in the dust. 44.1 resolution sounds kind of tinny and flat. I listen if that’s my only choice, but I can easily hear the difference. I credit myself with a decent ear after doing critial listening for 30+ years. My ear is not as good as most reviewers, but you'll understand why it’s good enough to write a forward to this thread.

I won’t go through the differences I hear between analogue and digital, because you’ve heard it all before. What I want to talk about is my confusion in this new recording landscape. 

I had purchased Roberta Flack’s "First Take" when it came out and I’d kept the record for more than forty years when I realized it had really seen its better days. Basically, it was unlistenable, even after a few washes in the Degritter. I looked at near mint copies of the record and they were quite expensive. Then I saw that there was a new pressing for a reasonable price.

I was listening to the new pressing of "First Take" a few days ago when I realized it sounded overly compressed at the high end. I asked my new audiophile friend chatgpt if the record was pressed from an analogue source. Nope. I was basically listening to a digital recording pressed into vinyl. Chatgpt says that most records made after 1980 come from digital sources. So, I found a reasonablly priced orignal pressing of "First Take." My grandaugher in college can have the digital one.

Today I was playing a fairly new recording of Gustavo Dudamel and Yuja Wang playing Rachmaninoff’s Variations on a Theme by Paganini. I live in L.A. and have been lucky enough to see Dudamel live many times and Yuga Wang several times. It’s a beautiful recording, wide and deep and detailed and musical. I pronounced it the best classical recording I owned. But it was put out recently. So, I checked with my audiophile buddy chatgpt. The record is from a very high resolution digital source. Chatgpt says that digital can sound more analogue on vinyl because the engineers roll off the high end a bit.

So, now things are more than a bit confusing. Do I buy a recording from before the 80’s on expensive vinyl or might it actually sound better streaming at 192 kHz? If you listen to Patricia Barber’s "Clique" at 172 kHz, it sounds pretty good. So good, i have not bothered to go out and buy it on vinyl.

Does anyone else feel a similar confusion in this modern market, and do you have any suggestions for negotiating it?

audio-b-dog
inna
8,240 posts
 

If it sounds good, no matter how it was done, it's good. Right ? Wrong. You may have no idea how it should sound when done right.

And that Fremer's ridiculously expensive junk will sound worse than half inch tape Studer A80, and he knows it, let alone one inch tape. Let alone with custom tube head amp.

 

larry123
2 posts
 

I think music on all formats can sound excellent, except cassette tapes (or 8 tracks).  

 

I really like playing records and I think they generally sound great, but it does bother me to think of any modern artist being recorded in a studio on digital equipment and then pressing that down to a record.  Why not just get the digital files over streaming and run them into a good DAC?  

 

In the old days I thought reel to reel tape was the best source since that was the closest you could get to the original master tapes.  Now the closest you can get is a high quality lossless digital file. 

 

Once again, I think any source can sound great.  I’m sure many of you could invite me over to impress me with your record player, CD player, SACD player, reel to reel tape deck or streaming set up and I would be amazed at the sound quality.  They can all sound very good. 

billstevenson
1,167 posts
 

Well said Larry.

audio-b-dog's avatar
audio-b-dog OP
782 posts
 

@larry123 

I think all formats can sound great, but sometimes they don't. An analogue recording can be made hastily with less than ideal equipment, and it won'e sound all that good. It is my understanding that most recordings made after 1980, unless otherwise indicated, were stored digitally. If they were stored at 192/24 instead of 44.1/16, they will sound much better. 

It is in the high treble where digital, however, cannot quite sound like analogue. A record itself is an analogue source. It reproduces the music wave in its grooves. If you put a sewing needle (as small as possible) through a cone of paper and put it in a record groove, the paper cone will act as a speaker and you will hear the recorded music. When a cartridge turns that into an electric signal, the signal is also a wave and nothing is lost.

Digital must use on/off bits to reproduce a sound wave through a DAC. The highest registers are very jagged and complex and something will be lost in the sampling. Software attempts to interpolate what is lost, but you can generally hear in the decay (of cymbals, for example) that the analogue sound is not all there. Of course, you'll need an analogue record and a digital recording to compare to one another to really hear it.

As I have mentioned before, certain very hi-rez digital recordings sound pretty good. One example is Patricia Barber's "Clique" through either Qobuz or Tidal. I like the album, but I won't bother to buy it because the digital recording is very good. It is unusual, though. 

One of my favorite recordings is Alice Coltrane's "Journey Through Satchidinanda." I wore out the original copy after more than fifty years and bought a reissue before I knew about reissues often being from a digital source. I can't listen to the album. It has so much sound in the treble region which the digital recording captures badly. When I have a few extra dollars, I'll buy the reissue that was cut from an analogue master. In the case of this album, at least, it makes a big difference between analogue and digital.

nitewulf
453 posts
 

Mastering, it’s not resolution or signal to noise or whatever you think, differences are mainly in the mastering. Tracy Chapman is 16 44.1 original into vinyl for example, fantastic sounding. Or Cowboy Junkies Trinity Sessions for example. All digital. 44.1 kHz is more than good enough, it’s Nyquist theorem. Can’t defy science no matter what you feel about it.

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