[Audio Empire]

On Mon, 14 Feb 2011 03:54:11 -0800, Kele wrote
(in article ):

Wow, this is a heck of a subject. I have done my own experiment
between a Gold CD against a Japanese vinyl pressing of Dark Side of
the Moon. Does that count? I think so. I know which my favorite
rendition is. I suppose to explain the difference is similar to
explaining the difference between live and recorded music. It is
difficult to explain, but it's not difficult to tell which is which.
Even the best sound reproduction systems I've heard aren=92t the same as
live. My memory of hearing live is all I have. And I agree that the
environment of the live also influences my memory. If I compare each,
digital and analog sources, against my memory of live... that answer
would be my preferred medium.

OK, this question might SEEM to be an attempt to denigrate rock music as a
reference, but it really isn't. It's an attempt by me to understand how this
kind of music can be used for serious audio evaluations.

I don't listen to rock and never have. Of course, I've heard it all through
high-school and college as everybody else listened to it so I heard it
whether I wanted to or not. But you talk about live vs recorded here, and I
wonder when you have ever heard Pink Floyd "Live"? Now before you list the
number of Pink Floyd concerts that you might have attended, let me define
"live music" as I understand and define the term.

The term "live music" infers (1) real musicians, (2) playing un-amplified
music (3) in real time (IOW, if you go to a symphony orchestra concert, you
have a good chance of hearing the orchestra with NO amplification. That's
"live music"). And while the average rock concert certainly meets criteria
numbers one and three, it misses out on the critical number two. All
hard-rock concerts are artificial. You are not listening to the actual
instruments, you are listening to a public address system. Not only that, but
every rock live sound engineer that I've ever read about says that they mix
and EQ the performance to sound as much like their band's recordings as
possible because that's what the fans want to hear - familiar music that
sounds familiar to them. Solid-body electric guitars, make no sound (to speak
of) without an amplifier. Neither do any other electronic instruments such as
synthesizers and Fender Rhodes pianos. So, in effect, there is no way to hear
most rock "unamplified."

So the question remains: how do you discern the sound of "live" rock from
recorded, when it's never really live in the first place, and when the
concerts are engineered to mimic the group's recordings?

I've done the blind test (unofficial), but all that's doing is helping
prove if there is a difference. The difference between analog and
digital? No, we shouldn=92t stray away from the true goal, the sound of
Live. [I=92m leaving the environment out of this, ok] This is the part
that leaves science behind... Which "feels" closest to live? Or,
which reminds me most of live. That's all. I don't know if digital
discs can potentially sound better than record albums or not. So far
neither sounds like live - really. It's like a ripple sandwiched
between two panes of glass, the ripple can't fully expand. But which,
analog or digital, is the glass further apart? I say lets remove the
glass!

This is, basically, the crux of the debate. Those to whom the sound of vinyl
is anathema say that vinyl is so fatally flawed as to be unlistenable. They
cite all kinds of different types of distortion inherent in the medium. Funny
thing is, people who listen to vinyl and enjoy it, don't notice these
anomalies. Only vinyl's detractors claim to find the act of listening ruined
by these various distortions. Can vinyl feel closest to live? Sometimes, yes,
other times digital is the closest approach to the original sound.

Both digital and analog have their strong and weak points. Is this
topic trying to uncover the weaknesses (against live)? We know vinyl
grooves can=92t be cut to save all the sound, and we know that
converting to digital involves rounding to the nearest whole. Either
way, the information is not all there and that=92s why it sounds flatter
than live. I=92m guessing analog is the least processed, and digital is
capable of holding more information. How then can the best of both be
combined? Saying it to myself like this, I would say digital has the
potential to be better than analog (vinyl) if only the processing can
be truly out of the way. Cannot a laser light track a continuous
groove (sound wave)? If the signal didn=92t have to be converted to
mathematics, there can be greater chance to approach live.

Aside from the fact that your description of the digital process shows a
basic lack of understanding about how the digital quantification process
actually works ("...rounding off to the nearest whole"), this thread started
as an examination of how record companies so purposely dilute and restrict
the sound that they put on CD, that often, the end result is no better than
vinyl and that in some cases, the vinyl is much easier and much more
"lifelike" to listen to.

For now, vinyl reminds me more of live, but I think vinyl has reached
its max capability.

The point is that vinyl shouldn't remind you more of live as digital is much
more accurate. Many recording engineers (including yours truly, here) have
noted that a high-resolution digital recording can be indistinguishable from
the microphone feed from which the recording was made. You really can't ask
any more of a recording medium than that.

What if it weren=92t made of vinyl? What if the
recorded medium was made of a substance that could support all the
information and the reader could collect all the information (without
physical touch). No ones & zeros, just ripples. Then we could more
clearly hear what=92s not right about the pick-up devices. Like vinyl,
I fear digital will also plateau short of the mark.

That's been tried. Analog (ripples) recorders, even very high resolution
analog recorders (there was an analog optical recorder in the early eighties)
suffer from problems that make digital better. For instance, an analog
recording is always going to suffer generational losses when copied (a copy
will always be at least 3 dB noisier and have increased distortion over the
generation from which it is copied). Digital, can, OTOH, theoretically, be
copied, serially, an infinite number of times with no generation loss. In
reality, of course, the added noise with each generation is THERE, it's just
that the noise is analog and the system is looking for ones and zeros. BUT,
eventually, it is conceivable that the background noise can get so high that
the digital intelligence cannot be read through the noise. Of course, when
that happens, you don't really get an increase in noise in the digital
signal, in the digital recording, you get read errors and enough of those
will cause the file to not play at all, and that is the practical limit of
serial copies of a digital file (although, that would indicate a very high
number of generations away from the oriiginal recording, and realistically
speaking, would never happen.

Kele