"Jacob Kramer" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 29 Aug 2003 00:53:54 -0400, "Robert Morein"
wrote:

CDs versus vinyl is no contest - digital wins. Tubes is IME like SS
with
more hassle.

The frontiers of high quality audio relate to personal audio and mobile
audio, which is practically speaking digital and solid state to its
core.
This tubes and vinyl stuff is strictly a boomer thing, and boomers are
quickly approaching the age where their interest in audio falls off
because
their ears no longer work so well.

Commercially, that is true.
But the absolute frontier of quality is in extremely low distortion,
massively constructed solid state amplifiers for home use, some of which
have innovative construction, or extreme attention to detail -- such as:

active constant current sources where others would use a resistor and a
voltage drop
heavily shielded chassis
distributed capacitance
regulated power supplies
and
low hysteresis drivers, with composite diaphrams vetted by laser
inferometry
and
upsampling DACs, which allow construction of low pass filters with less
phase shift

I was particularly curious about the claims of one poster that 16-bit
digital truncates the signal more than vinyl (his claim being based on
interaction with sound above 20khz interacting with sound in the
audible range). Has anyone ever ABXed vinyl and a 16-bit recording of
vinyl? (With so many remastering vinyl, I thought perhaps someone
had.) My understanding was that you couldn't hear the difference, on
the other hand it might be difficult to make vinyl sound exactly the
same twice.

That's my understanding also.
Vinyl introduces huge, frequently pleasant distortions.
The complication is, a recording on any media seldom reproduces the most
significant aspects of a live event. A classical recording, with microphones
above the podium, or third row, does not provide the perspective of a seated
listener. Typically, the recording is far too bright. In the recording,
instruments are spatially and tonally distinguishable, while the concertgoer
experiences the sound of the hall as a highly complicated and intrusive
transformation of the original sound.

Variations of the above are likely the reason tubes and vinyl have a
following. I still remember the lush, reverberant sound of my Dynaco PAS-3X
preamp/AR turntable into an "Integral Systems" solid state amp, with a set
of Rectilinear III's. I doubt my more mature ears would savor the same
experience, but the melody lingers on...