Vinyl vs Streaming

@audphile1 

Great post. I like the explanation and the car analogy.

Vinyl can’t be mapped to a resolution of digital. There are no bits and nothing to process and convert unless you’re using ADC. 

I am guessing vinyl must have a theoretical equivalent to the resolution of digital due to the limit of accuracy of the cutting lathe. Yet, better turntables seem to have been able to extract ever more information from the grooves of records. Surely, this can’t go on forever. 

Incidently, I am using an ADC and consider it takes things to a higher level by reducing noise and distortion and facilitating DSP room correction. Apologies to analogue purists.

@newton_john Mcintosh MP100 phono stage has a USB out that, using internal ADC pumps out 24/96 digital signal. Cool phono stage that sounds great doing its primary function although I never tried its USB out. A friend owns this piece and I always enjoy it when I borrow it. May be next time I’ll give it a shot and see what kind of noise it makes feeding my Meitner dac. 

@audphile1 

I didn’t know about the Mcintosh Preamp having USB. I was referring to the Linn Urika II. This moves the RIAA equalisation to the digital domain and potentially also allows the preamp and crossover functions to be digital too. That avoids distortion and noise from the analogue path. It is effectively streaming from vinyl. Yet it avoids one of the disadvantages of streaming which is the noise from the network. That may be one of the reasons why I prefer vinyl in my system.

I believe it’s also possible to do this for local digital files with a Melco server by connecting it to the streamer by USB. That’s something I haven’t tried myself because because I use a Roon ROCK NUC server. I haven’t yet exhausted all the possibilities for getting the best out of that. So far I have made progress by more careful positioning of switch and NUC away from sources of interference and upgrading the cable between them to a Melco C100.

One of the benefits of having both streaming and vinyl is that each encourages you to strive to improve the other. Neither is perfect yet. It is ironic the improvements that made to to digital side during my vinyl hiatus, actually enabled me to reach a higher standard from vinyl when I returned to it. Which in turn highlighted the deficiencies of my server setup that I am now working on. It's been a long and winding road, but it is getting better all the time.

@newton_john it’s fun to implement all these improvements in the streaming chain but keep in mind you’re still left with whatever the version of the master that’s available for streaming. I don’t know what kind of music you’re listening to but if your selections consist of older recordings they will all be digitally remastered, which in most cases is the worst sounding version you can play. At the end of the day the master of the album is one of the biggest contributors. This is where it all starts. There are some absolutely wonderful quality new recordings out there on streaming that sound amazing though. It’s a mixed bag. Essentially it all starts at the source. Your equipment just faithfully reproduces it. 

ghdprentice (quoting "AI")

If vinyl can reach roughly the top of the audible band under good conditions, then 44.1 kHz digital already covers that, because it can represent frequencies up to a little above 22 kHz under the sampling theorem. 

That’s simply mistaken. First, LP can easily reach well beyond 22 kHz, a trait that some believe gives LP its "air." Meanwhile, 44.1 digital never, ever gets to 22 kHz because it has to filter the output to prevent aliasing. But I give credit to AI for its use of boldface, which really lends an aura of certainty and credibility to its assessment, no matter how misguided.

Using the standard rule of roughly 6 dB per bit, 60 dB of vinyl-like dynamic range works out to about 10 bits, and 72 dB works out to about 12 bits. That is why people often treat very good vinyl as somewhere around 10–12 effective bits. 

So what? You’ll be very, very hard-pressed to find any LP or CD with even 60dB dynamic range. If you doubt me, check the dynamic range database. But even that is moot, because with analog and LP, you can easily hear signal that is below the noise floor. Not so with digital, though.

It’s difficult to compare analog and digital based on numbers like this, and it’s prone to the sort of misinterpretation that AI stepped right into.