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On Saturday, June 16, 2012 10:31:54 AM UTC-4, Audio Empire wrote:
I can hear the howls of derision now from certain parties who post here
regularly. I'm out of my mind. There can just be no other explanation for it!

Actually, what you'll hear is a big yawn. Cuz we've heard it all
before, too many times.

snip

The first thing I did was make as sure that we used the controlled outputs of
the SACD section of the Marantz player, the volume controlled outputs of the
Weiss, for both the CD and the Firewire feed from the Mac to insure that the
record, the SACD, the CD and the HD feed were all level matched exactly (at
least to the test signals).

Which, alas, doesn't mean anything, esp. given that you're comparing
an analog recording to digital ones, all three of which have been
mastered differently.

I told my host, that most likely, what he was hearing as "sounding better"
was simply because the LP was louder than the HD feed and my set-up procedure
should eliminate that.

That's one possibility (and you didn't really fix it), but there are
at least two others that are as important or more so:

1) It is well known that LP reproduction involves audible levels of
distortion that are often heard as euphonic. Your description of the
sound is quite common, so this was almost certainly a factor.

2) As I said, you are listening to three different masters. Even if
she tried to make an identical recording, Wilma Fine was not a
calibrated test instrument. Her hearing wasn't same, her tastes and
sonic preferences weren't the same, and she would certainly have been
expected to take advantage of what digital recording offered her. Even
if the only difference was in the levels of compression used, that
would be enough to make one sound better than the other (and the more
compressed one sound louder, most probably, your efforts at
level-matching notwithstanding)/

I admit that this isn't very scientific and there's plenty of room for slip
between the audio quality of the various "versions" of these two venerable
analog "classics" , but at the very least it shows that we shouldn't be too
quick to pronounce the death of vinyl yet... even OLD vinyl. There's still a
lot of musical enjoyment to had there.

Just as you say. I didn't mean to tweak you for being unscientific
above, so much as to point out that it's impossible to be fully
scientific given what you're trying to do. Of course vinyl can sound
wonderful, for a variety of reasons. I'm glad your friend got to find
that out.

bob