On Wed, 17 Jul 2002, Per-Olof Karlsson wrote:
A good hifi setup produces a soundstage which is more or less seamless. This is what people mean when they claim "the speakers disappear".
I've never thought of it that way before. An interesting way of viewing things - the speakers are like a portal between a stage in the past and your room in the present, through which sound travels. Neat, but I wouldn't consider it a useful analogy for other than recorded "live" performances.
I also like it when music is mastered direct to CD because it eliminates the annoyances that come with live performances - environmental noise, crowd noise, and mistakes.
Aww, you've missed the whole point of live music! Ambience!
I don't like live music. Mainly because it introduces imperfections in the music due to local environmental factors, and it prevents covering up mistakes by the musicians; live implies imperfect music.
I find this hard to believe, and I lack access to the equipment to test it. What we need is to hook a good spectrum analyser up to a vinyl system and a digital system and see which one more accurately reproduces the sound from the studio.
I've never been a fan of measurements. I find them totally irrelevant actually. You know, it's quite simple to produce for instance an amplifier that measures virtually perfectly but sounds totally awful.
Well, that pretty much puts an end to the debate then. You're being totally subjective, which means that what sounds good to you sounds good to you, but doesn't necessarily sound good to others. To be fair, I and everyone else also have these subjective opinions. But a real judgement on the relative merits of CD versus vinyl, or more generally analog versus digital, can only be made using measuring equipment, which doesn't have opinions of its own. I still think that CDs produce the better sound. More generally, I think that CD technology has brought a vast improvement in sound quality over vinyl to the general (ie, non-audiophile but still caring) population.
Personally I'm only interested in what I hear, not if I have a harmonic distorsion of 0.012% or not :)
Same here, until someone starts saying vinyl is better than CD, or analog is better than digital. Then scientific comparisons must be made.
I don't think that digital mixing stuff will replace it though. It's just a hunch I've got.
You may be right, but if so I'll bet it's because of traditionalist feelings held by many DJs.
Digital clocks are highly accurate - to better accuracy than humans can detect. I can't imagine the source of the problem you're referring to, since everything in a digital system should be driven by a crystal oscillator, and all lags in the system should be constant.
In theory yes, but not in practice. If all clocks were running perfectly there wouldn't be much of a market for CD-players and DAC upgrades :) Most of the sound improvement comes from jitter reduction.
There is no market for player and DAC upgrades, so far as I'm aware. I've never heard of anyone selling anything like that. If there is such a market, it must exist to take advantage of those who are easily deluded into hearing things. I approve of milking suckers. :)
There is also at least one source of timing problems in a vinyl system: The motor. No electric motor keeps its speed perfectly. A feedback system is used to verify its speed and make adjustments as needed. Can't you hear that happening?
Yes, that is correct. The difference is that it's running at a fixed RPM so any delays are constant.
My point was that it's NOT running at a fixed RPM. It's always making little adjustments.
Jitter tends to be totally random. As you're also saying, a motor can be tuned!
You know, I've never heard this jitter thing. I've played regular audio CDs as well as different types of CDRs on different players, and I've never heard anything that could be described as jitter. What does it sound like?
well, I've seen many CDs that don't last more than 10 years before they become unplayable (and they were not mistreated in any way),
Unplayable how? I've seen CDRs degrade over time due to their chemical nature, but silver mass-produced audio CDs have actual holes in their media layer that should last more than a few decades.
so the longevity of them seem to be quite questionable. I've got lots of vinyl from the 50s and 60s and they play just great even today.
I've been very disappointed with my vinyl losing its high frequencies due to physical contact with the needle and the sleeve, and due to the impossibility of eliminating all dust. It creates a reluctance to play them, due to a desire to preserve them.
Um, those songs don't exactly push any system to its limits. In fact, I'd say that they contain mainly sounds that a cheap analog system is capable of reproducing reasonably well.
Hell yes they do! In general, the simpler a sound appears to be, the harder it is to reproduce.
Nonsense. Well, depending on what you mean by simple. I take that to mean lacking high frequencies, which early KW appears to.
Try encoding Kraftwerk in VBR MP3 for instance - it'll use a LOT of bitrate even for the simplest songs..
No debate there; it takes a lot of bits to get decent sound from an MP3. More than the standard allows, in fact. That said, MP3 is by far the most convenient format yet. I've encoded my entire CD collection and bought a portable player so I can take my music to work and school with me. Music makes life worth living!
Heh. "Good". Expensive. Whereas a typical CD player sounds better than a typical vinyl system. If I had money to spend on a stereo system, the first think I'd buy would be good *speakers*; they're what really makes a difference. Actually, good earphones are even better; less air between the wire and the ear.
Again, air is GOOD.
I think I'm referring to a different kind of air than you. You mean acoustic properties of the environment, and I mean the stuff we breathe. If I could, I'd plug the speaker wires directly into my brain to avoid having the sound pass through imperfect speakers and air molecules. Let's make the music electronic all the way from instrument to audience! :)
but it does so in a more "natural" way, e.g. not so aggressively. What does that mean?
This is pretty hard to explain.
A natural sounding system in my book, is a system where I can sit down and listen to something, and I'm not realizing I'm listening to a recording. It's those times where you just forget all about it and find yourself deeply immerged into the performance.
An aggressive system, or artificial, may sound great, but it doesn't sound natural. I mean that, sure, it may be exquisitely clear and blah blah but I can immediately hear that it's a recording I'm listening to. It's not presented to my ears as a live performance in front of me, but rather music coming from a pair of speakers. The difference is huge, really.
Ah, I get you. I prefer the "aggressive" option. I consider "natural" in the sense of live performance to be a crude, imperfect approximation to a recording. Apparently you consider a recording to be a crude, imperfect approximation to a performance. Hi, other side of the fence! :) -- /* Soleil */