Some of you might wish to contribute to this discussion, which I think
could benefit from it:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=...ad&cid=6791612

"Jacob Kramer" wrote in message
om
Some of you might wish to contribute to this discussion, which I think
could benefit from it:


http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=...t=0&ti d=137&
mode=thread&cid=6791612

I agree that the level of the discussion is very low, but...

"Jacob Kramer" wrote in message
om...
Some of you might wish to contribute to this discussion, which I think
could benefit from it:


http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=...ad&cid=6791612

A buddy of mine has some good tube stuff, and some good vinyl to go along
with it.

I listen to it, but never with envy.

To me, good solid state and good CDs are better.

"Robert Morein" wrote in message


"Jacob Kramer" wrote in message
om...

Some of you might wish to contribute to this discussion, which I
think could benefit from it:


http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=...t=0&ti d=137&
mode=thread&cid=6791612

A buddy of mine has some good tube stuff, and some good vinyl to go
along with it.

While I personally know maybe 80-100 serious audiophiles, I know none with a
100% tube-vinyl system in operation. Indeed, I personally have as much if
not more tube-vinyl equipment in operation as any of them. With all that is
written about tubes and vinyl, I wonder who is it that actually has all this
stuff?

I listen to it, but never with envy.

Agreed. Vinyl is noisy and can be very ugly-sounding. The best tubed
equipment is sonically indistinguishable from SS.

To me, good solid state and good CDs are better.

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.

Arny said



While I personally know maybe 80-100 serious audiophiles, I know none with a
100% tube-vinyl system in operation. Indeed, I personally have as much if
not more tube-vinyl equipment in operation as any of them. With all that is
written about tubes and vinyl, I wonder who is it that actually has all this
stuff?


Prove it.

Arny said



Agreed. Vinyl is noisy and can be very ugly-sounding. The best tubed
equipment is sonically indistinguishable from SS.


CDs can sound awful. and the best tube stuff sounds different than SS.


Arny said


CDs versus vinyl is no contest - digital wins.


If the vinyl rig sucks like yours, yes.


Arny said


Tubes is IME like SS with
more hassle.


Your experience with tubes is what? What tube equipment have you lived with and
listened to for extended periods of time? The truth please.

Arny said



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.



Nonsnense.

"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
...
"Robert Morein" wrote in message


"Jacob Kramer" wrote in message
om...

Some of you might wish to contribute to this discussion, which I
think could benefit from it:



http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=...t=0&ti d=137&
mode=thread&cid=6791612

A buddy of mine has some good tube stuff, and some good vinyl to go
along with it.

While I personally know maybe 80-100 serious audiophiles, I know none with
a
100% tube-vinyl system in operation. Indeed, I personally have as much if
not more tube-vinyl equipment in operation as any of them. With all that
is
written about tubes and vinyl, I wonder who is it that actually has all
this
stuff?

I listen to it, but never with envy.

Agreed. Vinyl is noisy and can be very ugly-sounding. The best tubed
equipment is sonically indistinguishable from SS.

I have never heard any which was sonically indistinguishable from the best
solid state.
They are always loose on the bottom, and the high distortion above 10 kHz is
readily detectable.

To me, good solid state and good CDs are better.

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

On Fri, 29 Aug 2003 15:38:17 -0400, "Robert Morein"
wrote:


"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
...
"Robert Morein" wrote in message


"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
...

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.

Thank you.

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 diaphragms vetted by laser
inferometry and
upsampling DACs, which allow construction of low pass filters with
less phase shift

This is a mixed bag of things, some of which are accepted practice, and
some
of which generally show up as tweaks that have no known audible benefits.
Interestingly enough, they all seem to pertain to power amps and
loudspeakers, neither of which relate to most personal audio.

True on the last point only, but I'm speaking in terms of the interests of
people on this group, who if measured by posts, have a greater interest in
uncompromised solutions.
My own answer to portable audio is a set of Koss ESP-950 phones. Yet even
these aren't quite as good as Stax Lambda Pros.

Try taking these on the train.

g
As far as the validity of the list, I stand by all of them.
The P3/a is a phenomenon

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.

--

Jacob Kramer

"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...

"Jacob Kramer" wrote in message


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).

Kramer why are you expecting us to do your homework for you? Doesn't your
computer support cut and paste?

Do you mean this comment?

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=76095&cid=6791981

"Vinyl does sound better than a CD. You can't can't make sweeping
generalizations without having first the oppurtunity to listen to both
formats. Truncated 16 bit digital, even when played with the best of CD
players and/or DAC's (Mark Levinson. Classe Audio, etc) is audibly inferior
to the vinyl disc."

IMO its the standard "vinyl sounds better" OSAF, with 16 bits mentioned
gratuitously.


Has anyone ever ABXed vinyl and a 16-bit recording of
vinyl? (With so many remastering vinyl, I thought perhaps someone
had.)

People who have been visiting my PCABX web site have been doing something
IMO far more meaningful than that for years. They've been comparing 24/96
LIVE recordings to the same recordings downsampled as low as 16/22!
http://www.pcabx.com/technical/sample_rates/index.htm . Yup, you can clearly
hear the effects of downsampling to 16/22, but by the time you get up to
16/44 nobody hears nuttin'.

FWIW I always transcribe vinyl to 24/96 before downsampling it to 16/44 for
burning to CD. It's overkill but buys me headroom so that level setting
during transcription isn't that critical.

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.

The test is easy to do. Just transcribe vinyl at 24/96 and then downsample
it. Then compare the original 24/96 track to the downsampled version of it.

Arny Krueger a écrit :

FWIW I always transcribe vinyl to 24/96 before downsampling it to 16/44 for
burning to CD. It's overkill but buys me headroom so that level setting
during transcription isn't that critical.


I do the same because I think that the .wav cure (crack removal, noise
reduction...) I use to apply via Soundforge 5 plugins will be more
precise and/or less destructive. After cure I obviously downsampling to
16/44.
No technical or esthetical analyse just an intuitive and "superstitious
" way of working.

Lionel