Bill, what has happened to 7 -9 and is that speaker that's taken her place ???.
Carl...Sorry about that!! I got seriously worried when people thought it was me ! So, thinking I might get arrested, decided it was time for a new avatar!
A Martin Logan Vantage seemed the ideal choice. It's not quite as good looking as Jeri but sounds ok!
"To recap CD isn't perfect, but for the most part a great improvement on vinyl, and 33 was a great improvement on 78, and that was a great improvement on 'cylinders' no doubt SACD is a great improvement on standard CD, but I do believe that so many other factors have to be near perfect for the differences to be audible"
In the nicest possible way, we may have to agree to disagree on the merits of CD over Vinyl. The test of a good product is it's longevity. If they do come up with a viable successor I will be giving it every chance just as I did when CD was first introduced. On that particular occasion, my wife ("Goldenears") and I went along to the local dealer, excited to hear the new technology. In a like for like comparison (CD album vs Vinyl equivalent) the demo was a complete disaster for CD. The placebo didn't work !!! The expression on my wife's face (like she had just eaten a turd) said it all. The dealer was full of excuses for the medium but we weren't falling for it. All of my subsequent A-B's confirmed my earlier feelings. I even remember the amp the dealer used. They were Albarry Monoblocks coupled to a pair of B&W floorstanders - the first seen with the little dalek-like swivel tweeter on top. I get the feeling that not enough people bothered to do such a comparison. (See my next post for the "cost irony")
In the early 90s a Dundee Uni Professor did an in-depth study to discover why CD was inferior to Vinyl. I've got it tucked away somewhere. If I find the Paper I'll pass it on...
Several years back I got a call from a young German friend of mine. He and his wife were contemplating the purchase of a £1300 CD player to replace his bog standard one. Now Michael had been a keen enthusiast from his college days back in Germany, and had enjoyed a part time job with a Specialist Hifi retailer so he knew the business and the importance of auditioning. Anyway, the Dealer lent him the player and he called me over for the demo, to decide "to purchase or not to purchase."
The player, which I will call "Brand X" to avoid offence, because it really is a well received player and "multiple group test award winner", was carefully placed in pride of place on the spiked top shelf of the multi-stage platform. Clearly it was an improvement on his cheap CD player but the real reason was to perform an A-B with his turntable. I will name the turntable, a Linn Basik because no-one is likely to be offended by what comes next. Michael played a couple of live albums for which he had equivalent CDs and what astonished us both was the way the turntable held it's own against far more expensive opposition (Michael quoted £250 for the Basik).
The outrage on his face said it all. To quote his exact words "I lavish effort setting up "Brand X" on an isolated platform while my £250 turntable, not even set up properly or levelled, was operated from it's storage shelf in the corner, and is embarassing this new "state of the art" £1300 CD player!
On the day I didn't have to say anything at all. I didn't get the chance! He didn't buy "Brand X" but returned it from whence it came.
Michael's experience echoes similar A-Bs that I've done.
OK Bill, no personally CD technology was based on what would sound as good or better than vinyl. remember many vinyl discs at the time were mastered in the digital domain. The digital masters were similar to CD quality, so why not issue the digital master That is what the CD was. Now correct me if I am wrong, the original digital master is that, the master, so tell me, can cutting it to vinyl improve it?
In terms of longevity then I admit the CD has not been around as long as 33RPM vinyl, but then neither has been around as long as cylinder players, so what is the relevance.
Or offering it 'as is' surly must be better, the process of creating a vinyl print is very complicated, I know someone who was a master at it, crucial factors like how 'out of phase is the base' etc. determined the cuts that had to be made to get a recording into vinyl in the first place.
Maybe you and her indoors missed the point, much as you liked vinyl, it was not actually that good or accurate, and CD was not to your liking, but that is maybe that you don't actually like 'accurate'
O.K. if you like the 'wooly inpresise' sound of vinyl then so be it, but don't confuse 'reproduced quality' with 'personal preference' as these are different things.
One point I have stressed on this site before is that reproduction is only hearing what the producer intended, that is what reproduction is all about. Now if we don't like that then play a different album, find an album you like. A good system is only there to portray every album to it's best.
I have worked in pro audio studios for my entire career; studios that have undertaken almost every kind of recording, broadcast and post production work that you can imagine and probably quite a few that you cannot.
From the time before the CD medium became ubiquitous, I offer one observation that seemed trivial at the time but, with the benefit of hindsight, now provides a useful insight. Whenever visitors to the various studios were present their comments, almost without exception, were based on a perception that the sound was "harsh". The first time you hear this comment, it's quite disturbing. But discussions with colleagues revealed that this view seemed widespread amongst those who were not used to "studio sound".
What did this actually mean? In the pre-CD era, almost certainly, it implied that the listening public were not used to the comparatively large amounts of HF that seemed right in the studio but were almost certainly destined to become "softened" by a few generations of analogue tape post-production followed by the process of vinyl mastering and manufacture. The sound of a microgroove vinyl record is completely unlike that heard in the studio session that gave birth to it.
Indeed, complete musical genres have since originated that exploited the ability of the CD medium to handle as much level at 40Hz as it could at 400Hz or 14kHz. While the subsequent adoption of alternative variations of the vinyl medium (such as the 12" single) went some way towards addressing these limitations, few would deny that CD was the way forward.
What I do know is that the Red Book CD is far more capable of bringing the sound created by the record producer directly to the home in a way that vinyl could only dream of. I would be the first one to say that the 12" when made with virgin vinyl is pretty damn good, but is of course limited to 8 or 10 minutes running time. The more you tend towards microgroove, the more the standard (and entirely predictable) problems of vinyl start to emerge.
There is also the problem of CD mastering. In the vinyl days, mastering was the operation of transferring the analogue tape to lacquer in the most optimum manner given the very real limitations of the medium. The skill was a weird mixture of audio, electronic and mechanical engineering and the best mastering engineers were in very high demand. At the same time, record producers were very well aware of what would be done in mastering and worked in a complementary way that would, hopefully, make the end result as good as possible.
It is undeniable that the arrival of CD brought three massive problems related to mastering. First, some of the early AD converters were awful and I am sure that this alone was largely responsible for much of CD's early poor reception. Second, the producers' reliance that certain rough edges would be knocked off during vinyl mastering & manufacture was now misplaced and third, many world-famous mastering shops had to completely re-invent their game and frequently did so, badly, often under the malign influence of the record companies. Indeed, the need for mastering in the CD era has been frequently called into question. I would argue that with the rise of "home recording" (or shall we say, recording in a less professional environment than the hugely expensive studios of the seventies and eighties), the need for professional mastering to once again knock off the rough edges is possibly greater than ever, but that's for another day.
No I hope that mine is not merely a "romantic view" of analogue. The sound is characterised as appearing more, rather than less precise than CD, offering more insight into the performance rather than less, and presenting more realism rather than less. This is the benefit of good analogue which is undeniably a more refined process than CD, now coming to the end of a somewhat shorter development lifecycle. Perhaps my CD replay equipment is lacking and I need a £7K machine (but all this serves to do is further illustrate the point - and having heard the £33K DCS 3-box rig it reinforces the strength of analogue's argument not diminishes it).
Trouble is that even were I to buy a £10K machine my problems would hardly be over - check out the Andromeda, hailed by some as the best Red Book CD player in world. What catches the eye is that lovely 16-bit 1KHz crossover distorted undithered squarewave. It gets worse as you go upwards in f....
Dithering seems to be the name of the game for Digital addicts !
I noted you said earlier "digital recordings in force since the 70s" - not an exact quote - are you certain ? The earliest sony PCM machines first appeared in 1982 and were probably not widely used until a wee bit later? At first I thought the 70s was a typo and you meant the 90s? The majority of my vinyl is 1970s or pre-mid 80s. Over the years I've noted a great deal of dispute over A vs D mastering. You will probably remember that anyone who was around at the time of CD's introduction was aware that digital mastering had started to pervade the analogue market? Unsurprisingly, analogue customers focussed their attention on the sonic differences between "pure Analogue LPs" and those which featured a digital recorder (or more recently a digital Lathe). They are undeniably chalk-and-cheese. The digital ones were instantly identifiable by the enthusiasts (not as in"good" identifiable, but "bad")
Studios : By definition A-D and D-A conversion capabilities must be superior to your average domestic setup? One possible explanation is that those dubious benefits are inherited by the Analogue consumer and may help to account for reasons why many even preferred the sound of digitally mastered LPs to their CD equivalents on their home setups? Just an idea....
Lets face it, as you've prophecised, all of the above formats will disappear in time and be replaced (hopefully) by something better, but meantime, no-one is kidding me that CD is the answer!
Yours is specialist viewpoint, and an interesting one at that, but let me ask you this : for every recording engineer who echoes your view, why is there another recording engineer who says exactly the opposite and describes digital sound as sterile and characterless?
To quote the words of the legendary Neil Young... "The anonymous wall of digital sound..."
I'll leave the Studio specialists to argue that one out between themselves.
A final thought on the matter : If CD is trying to "sell" music to me, then it's doing a p*ss poor job!
" I would be the first one to say that the 12" when made with virgin vinyl is pretty damn good, but is of course limited to 8 or 10 minutes running time
Bill, I will answer that one for Pluto, when he mentioned 12", this was normally a special cut, done at 45RPM, I believe originally for the disco market, but did improve the 'bottom end', and ran for longer than a 45 single of the day.
However no vinyl recording can extend response to 0Hz. nor record 'out of phase bass', very rarly can it record the sound of a bell accuratly, but CD can. Listen to 'Tubular Bells' on vinyl and I think you may agree!
Unfortunately I feel a little 'piggy in the middle' here, as I purchased one of the first CD players around, Marantz 14 bit as I remember, being so proud of my new position in the Hi Fi fraternity, I missed a major point. That was that I actually stopped listening for hours on end, in fact I lost interest in Hi Fi even though the CD was clean, no background, no scratches etc. the overall effect was to lose interest.
At the time I never connected the two, however in 2007 with the class 'T' amp suddenly all that 'fullness' and 'warmth' returned and all from a £15 Tesco player, so maybe the loss of interest was more down to transistor power amps as to the CD itself. Only a year earlier I used a Radford STA100 valve amp.
Re: the line "digital recordings in force since the 70s" I don't remember stating that but my first digitally mastered vinyl was in 1981, again it sounded bright, clean, but was tiring to listen to.
Why I don't know, but it's almost as though some other changes were going on in the Hi Fi game at the time that appeared to pin point the CD as the cause. At the show last year, all I heard from vinyl was background noise and scratches, very little of the 'fat' warm' sound I have here. For a full understanding of how I got to the class 'T' result please read the article.
I understand John. Thought it would be something like that.
Yes, I very much echo your observations on listener fatigue and it sounds like your system is now well sorted, allowing you to listen for prolonged periods. When it gets to that stage when we forget to eat, drink, sleep, & visit the convenience, we've arrived !
CD bass to 0Hz : True. A lot of reviewers commonly have a quick squint at the CD to check how well the vinyl is coping at the low end of the spectrum. CD does have a couple of good points (!)
Your experiences with the Radford vs modern SS amps places you in the unlikely position of poacher-turned-gamekeeper! I too have been surprised at the ascendancy (and the sheer proliferation) of valve usage even in CD players.
On Class "T" - thanks for that, I'll check the article listing....
Yes, I very much echo your observations on listener fatigue and it sounds like your system is now well sorted, allowing you to listen for prolonged periods. When it gets to that stage when we forget to eat, drink, sleep, & visit the convenience, we've arrived!
That is exactly the situation now, so much that if the neighbours don't kick up, the only reminder of time is daylight, and at this time of the year that is quite late, I still drink but the Brew does keep you going.
IMO there are sound 'excuse the pun' reasons for valve amps perceived superiority, but that is not because valves are inherently better amplifiers but more that their crossover characteristics are somewhat smoother, in all other aspects they are less capable. Like the CD one irksome characteristic makes all others immaterial and the irksome one dominates, however in a twenty year retrospect I would say that CD is overall an improvement.
When a couple of years ago I purchased a turntable I must admit I was surprised at how good the results were, but the crackles did get me down, I guess with really clean new disks that would not be a problem.
Have yet to try vinyl and class 'T' together, maybe a new milestone.
"Have yet to try vinyl and class 'T' together, maybe a new milestone."
Go for it, John !
I've always hankered after the sound of a well designed valve amp, but my conscience has always got the better of me as they are as environmentally friendly as a plastics factory in the middle of a rainforest!
Some helpful info on the "crackles" thing - it's not a problem with a good turntable. I managed to find one album that had severe contamination/damage which crackled, out of an entire collection. As far as routine scratches are concerned this is very much a turntable suspension and possibly even a cartridge problem. A well optimised suspended sub-chassis should render noise largely unnoticeable and certain cartridge profiles reach beyond superficial scratches into the lower part of the groove.
Also the duration of a scratch 1 thou across may only represent 1/36000 sec i.e. you shouldn't notice it because it's too fast, but poor mechanicals (and as you say, amplifier inputs) can appear to "stretch the pulse" making it's annoyance value seem much greater than it should be. This is what afflicted much of the general public - making Philips clever marketing so potent...a pity, but there is a lot to admire in Philip's brainchild....
I've never cleaned any of my 30-40 yr old albums. Some have been played 300 times, but sound like new (in strict terms they are not new but sound as good) so if you have stacks of LPs in the attic they may not be the lost cause people expect...
There you go again, as was stated on a Moody Blues album, (and as you say, amplifier inputs) Come on Bill I never said that, however I do agree that a bad preamp can 'streach' the scratches and make them audibly worse. I have actually visited Philips (Eindhoven) at their headquarters and I was very impressed by the original thinking there.
Back to the issue, I still believe CD recordings to be better than anything else, I am not saying that they are perfect, but only better, and look forward to hearing SACD or some other hi res system.
Re: I've always hankered after the sound of a well designed valve amp, but my conscience has always got the better of me as they are as environmentally friendly as a plastics factory in the middle of a rainforest's!
Take a look at the technology that goes into transistor production, particularly power transistors, I think you will find valves relatively 'friendly'.
Sorry don't understand, valves are not really environmentally bad, now you are comparing a 'standard' light bulb to a low energy one, here the environmental issues are enormous, on the other hand if you really want to see the future of lighting then take a look at www.ceravision.com, in five years time the CFL and other low energy bulbs will be 'old hat', even LEDs will have a hard time competing with microwave sources.
"however in 2007 with the class 'T' amp suddenly all that 'fullness' and 'warmth' returned"
Sorry about that John, I second guessed the above was a reference to the Class T amp input handling the dynamics of the CD player's output signal better as inadequate headroom has been known to aggravate CDs "hard/metallic" sound...my misunderstanding.
"Take a look at the technology that goes into transistor production, particularly power transistors, I think you will find valves relatively 'friendly'."
What I was thinking there when I wrote that was not so much the manufacturing carbon footprint but the quiescent power consumption. It's a lot - especially when there's a pre-amp and 2 monoblocks! Yikes!
(I did consider "energy saving bulb factory" though )
Ceravision : Anything that doesn't use mercury (like these) gets my emphatic thumbs up !!
New fluorescents are more dangerous than Used as the mercury is still "free" inside while the used ones tend to concentrate/accumulate theirs in the coating...
for every recording engineer who echoes your view, why is there another recording engineer who says exactly the opposite and describes digital sound as sterile and characterless?
I agree! Put me at the head of the queue of people who love the sound of a kick drum driven into slight analogue tape saturation, and so on with many other instruments and voices even.
But to compare the ability of analogue to distort (sometimes nicely) when the going gets hot, with the sterility of digital recording is bit like comparing a cream cake with lentil soup and arguing that both are nutritious!
For many years, the master recorder was a weak link in the classical music recording chain. Unlike their pop comrades who loved the cuddly warm saturation of analogue tape, classical engineers required their recorders to be transparent. In music with large dynamics this was nearly impossible in the era of analogue recording and the battle between tape hiss and saturation was never-ending. The arrival of Dolby A helped a bit, thankfully. But nervous breakdowns amongst those whose trade was recording live classical music were common – it only had to get a bit quieter or a bit louder than expected and all bets were off. One chap I worked with would run a second recorder with 6dB less gain than the main machine, an approach which rescued a very expensive session that the producer thought lost due to the distortion at one point on the main master. It's the ability to do tricks like that which make or break careers in the business.
The arrival of decent 16 bit digital recorders was a godsend because 30-odd dB of usable dynamic range turned into 50-odd dB. With the 24 bit recorders we have now, much of the art of live real-time control has been lost (except by live broadcast mixers) as there is enough spare at either end to cope with nearly anything. And the nice thing about those recorders is that they ARE sterile. They reproduce what is fed in – no more, no less.
It is entirely true that analogue multi-track is frequently preferred as a production tool because of the vices that people adore. Much money is spent on software that claims to reproduce the analogue flaws we know and love, in the digital domain.
But it is generally desirable that delivery to the end user should be in a form that renders the work as accurately as possible. Some folks believe that their home audio system is a bit like a musical instrument, hence the love of the types of distortion that some claim are "warm" and "musical". I want home hi-fi that is "the closest approach to the original sound".
OK Bill, now an important point you make here is headroom. the headroom of a CD is apsoluty known it cannot be greater than a full byte, so it is known as a voltage and cannot be exceeded, in the same way vinyl reproduction and indeed FM radio has clearly defined maximum output levels, these for many reasons can never be exceeded.
OK on the quiescent current of a valve amp, but for the most part less than the trendy 'spotlights' in the listening room, often consuming 700W of power, whether it's two mono-blocks or a stereo amp the consumption is pretty similar, class 'A' maybe four times as much, class 'B' about normal, class 'T' so little that I can run my amp from a 12V 1.2AH battery for many hours, like twelve.
IMO class 'T', 'D' or 'Z' is the future of audio as all these techniques remove the crossover anomalies and these IMO are what created the 'transistor' sound.
John...
PS on the energy saving bulb front, we are no where near the answer here, despite what the government wants to do they are so ill informed and backward that they want to change the law with no real knowledge of what is going on. The humble incandescent bulb is really not that bad, after all it does give out some heat that is maybe usable, it has no undesirable chemicals in it's construction, it has no 'diposal' problems, and it does have a perfect 'power factor' one of the few points that almost no one understands, particularly 'greenpeace' and world governments.
Pluto, very interesting stuff ! Did you ever use DBX (Pink Floyd's favourite)?
I've always been an amateur recording enthusiast. My dad had at least 3 open reels in the house at any one time, and I tried to be more "up-to-date" with various cassette decks but the last was a DT600 Nakamichi. True, noise reduction offered difficult choices. In the end I tended to disable Dolby and took advantage of the superior s/n ratio (and favourable time constant) of high energy cobalt doped ferrics like TDK Super Avilyn.
SA was quiet, highly polished material, and kinder to the soft permalloy tape heads than chromium dioxide (The active filter that Dolby represented I found to be slightly disruptive to the original sound.)
Good tip about the offset copying (don't tell them or they'll all be doing it).
One thing that rankles (not just me but a common criticism - and not of you personally) is the tendency to cram into the top 2db - which often appears to give CD even less range not only than 92db but even the inadequacies of analogue dynamic range. By doing this some producers really are trying to make analogue look good by being CD's worst enemy?
On Vinyl, the spirit of what I'm trying to get across is that the software has a wealth of musical info in it, and if anyone still has this stuff, for goodness sake don't throw it away! I've already recommended 3 CD titles to Carl in a previous life, so I am not against the medium by any means, vinyl just offers more satisfaction to me, and will continue to do so. In fact, after the closure of many CD stores in Berwick St, I would counsel widespread support of CD otherwise we may have no music industry to celebrate at all !
Sorry Bill, I have no comprehension of your post here, are you replying to me or to Pluto?
As I remember DBX was a compression system from the 70s, and exactly what is the spirit you are trying to get across. What exactly is 'musical info' and how bad is 92d, a whole lot better than any vinyl system!
What exactly are you saying here?
Confused I am. You mention I'm trying to get across is that the software has a wealth of musical info in it, so is software now regarded as musical data?
and I've already recommended 3 CD titles to Carl in a previous life so prey where are you at, in one breath you support CD but saying vinyl is more satisfying.
Sorry mate but I'm not from your planet, you appear not to know where your coming from or where you are going.
Pluto, very interesting stuff ! Did you ever use DBX (Pink Floyd's favourite)?
I've always been an amateur recording enthusiast. My dad had at least 3 open reels in the house at any one time, and I tried to be more "up-to-date" with various cassette decks but the last was a DT600 Nakamichi. True, noise reduction offered difficult choices. In the end I tended to disable Dolby and took advantage of the superior s/n ratio (and favourable time constant) of high energy cobalt doped ferrics like TDK Super Avilyn.
SA was quiet, highly polished material, and kinder to the soft permalloy tape heads than chromium dioxide (The active filter that Dolby represented I found to be slightly disruptive to the original sound.)
Good tip about the offset copying (don't tell them or they'll all be doing it).
One thing that rankles (not just me but a common criticism - and not of you personally) is the tendency to cram into the top 2db - which often appears to give CD even less range not only than 92db but even the inadequacies of analogue dynamic range. By doing this some producers really are trying to make analogue look good by being CD's worst enemy?
On Vinyl, the spirit of what I'm trying to get across is that the software has a wealth of musical info in it, and if anyone still has this stuff, for goodness sake don't throw it away! I've already recommended 3 CD titles to Carl in a previous life, so I am not against the medium by any means, vinyl just offers more satisfaction to me, and will continue to do so. In fact, after the closure of many CD stores in Berwick St, I would counsel widespread support of CD otherwise we may have no music industry to celebrate at all !
Kind regards, Bill.
Spot on Bill. I really can't understand those that have chucked away all their vinyl. I think that over use of the rose coloured glasses when talking about vinyl is a bit too common though because in my experience there are very many poor quality pressings, many even off centre so badly that they wow noticeably and some so overcut that they distort on sibilants on whatever equipment you use. I blame joe public for not rejecting them. A friend on mine owned a record shop and had a batch of Rod Stewart's Sailing album (ugh) that were so off centre they sounded awful. It was a big seller so not having time to order more he sold them expecting to get a few back. Not one was returned.
You're right about CDs, too many are pointlessly becoming more and more compressed and louder and louder. Why?????
