...

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. Jumping in here a bit...that's the problem with music and sound...it will always be subjective. Sure, one can easily apply measurement tools to "prove" accuracy but, in the end, personal preferences, listening environments and equipment quality will be the determining factor. I'm not a fan of measurements either. They may be a good starting point for selecting equipment but there will always be a need to use one's ears make a final decision. This is the way music is created, mixed, produced and mastered - by ear, and not by specifications.

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. Measuring equipment can only measure objective accuracy. It can not measure things subjective things like "warmth", "air," "smoothness" and other factors that shape the listening experience.

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. I would somewhat agree. But CD digital audio does have many imperfections in its current format. 16 bits is simply not enough. If by some miracle we could hear Kraftwerk's more recent (i.e., digital) music in its original 24 or 32 bit format, the difference would be quite apparent on any decent sound system - with good convertors I might add! :-)

...

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 would argue that neither one is better than the other in *all* aspects. Neither format is perfect in any way.

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? Rather than attempt to answer this here, I'll point to a great article on jitter by mastering engineer Bob Katz:

http://www.digido.com/jitteressay.html I was personally referred to this page a while back by another mastering engineer who does work for Warner Brothers when I myself had questions about problems I was perceiving in working with digital audio. This essay answered many of my questions. Of course, not all people have this level of hearing sensitivity, but obviously some do.

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! I'm in complete agreement here, too. MP3 of course is not perfect, but it is quite convenient and good enough for casual listening. I've already tried MP4 and it sounds even better. I'm just waiting for it to catch on.

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! :) Actually, that could never be done. Humans can't make any sense from the meaning of a stream of 1's and 0's without some kind of analog conversion.

...

[...] And again, that is on a standard turntable with a total system cost probably under $2000.

Well, maybe one day I'll be able to afford one of these rare beasts and see for myself. That's still years off though. Again, that $2000 (probably more like $1700) was the cost of the total system (multi-disk player, cassette, etc.). The price of the turntable, amp and speakers was no more than $800 - $1000. Not super cheap, but far from the price of an expensive audiophile system (that will come later!) but I could still hear the differences in the vinyl and CD version of The Mix. The vinyl version, imperfections or not, sounded more "alive" for lack of a better word.

...

[...]And of course, mistakes in the performance have nothing to do with the recording medium! :-)

What I meant was, using electronic instruments to produce the music, and keeping the music in electronic form (preferably digital) at every stage of the process involved in getting it onto a CD. That means studio, no crowd, no microphones if possible, no environmental noise other than electrical transients which should be eliminated anyway, and mistakes edited out in the computer. OK. Now I understand what you meant.

...

Without the original studio final mixes, there would be no way of making this type of comparison accurately. Especially when one takes into account that each medium will have been mastered slightly differently.

Use an artificial reference sound designed for testing purposes then. Again, a scientific test using pink noise and a sine wave can only prove accuracy and is not very close to a real world listening experience. Not to mention the fact that you or I can never "listen" to music in the way that a scientific test would be done due to differences in acoustical environments (including headphones, shape of the ear, etc.). Having said all that, the music process these days is made up of a combination of analog and digital whether it be a digital compressor or an analog compressor. The choices of which to use is based upon a unit's *sound* and NOT simply which component is the most scientifically accurate.

I agree that the ADC and DAC are important, but I still find it hard to believe that a crystal oscillator would emit pulses with enough irregularity that it would be audible to humans. I may seem hard to believe, but it is true. There is a difference in a side by side comparison. An appropriate analogy might be like the the way a person with less than perfect eyesight might perceive things before and after lasik surgery. No problem may have been perceived for many years but all of a sudden with perfect 20/20 vision, the experience is completely different. Really, not all digital is the same as we have been led to believe.

...

Again, the kind of timing "clock" referred to in digital audio has a completely different purpose. A bad digital clock can adversly affect the quality of the signal. Its not be easily noticeable on its own, but when comparing with a convertor that has a *high* quality clock, the difference in remarkable.

Well, this is another place where some impartial measuring equipment would help settle the issue. These types of tests have already been done. And since we're talking about comparing digital to digital, the testing would be quite easy! A scientific measurement would indeed prove the affects of a bad clock in a digital convertor - or the affects of any process applied to a digital signal for that matter. Bit resolution, word clock, dithering, jitter and sampling rates are major issues in the digital audio field. And the limitations of 16 bit audio is the primary reason we now have 24 and 32 bit audio formats with tools that run at 48, 64 and 128 bit internal precision. The bad part is that to get all that back into a 16 bit CD, much digital information is lost. Weather it's perceivable or not will depend on the listener, the listening environment and the genre of music in question.

I really do enjoy listening to The Mix on vinyl more than CD. But I would truly love to have a 24-bit DVD audio version of the same album. It would put the 16 bit CD release to shame. DVD audio versions of the other releases would be a great improvement as well. Kindest regards, John Efofex - Sound of Electronics http://www.efofex.net/