Sorry I've not been in a position to reply further for the last 2 days...
Pluto said :"Bill - I haven't the time or inclination to attempt to move the mountain of your faith in vinyl..."Charming.......For someone who wasn't even privy to the conversation that preceded it...this looks like unparalleled rudeness to the untrained/unfamiliar eye....... ...................You ended that post with (and don't worry I'm coming back to the other rubbish....)"...You might love your vinyl, but don’t ever try to kid me into believing that it’s the best option"......................................Like I said...you weren't even party to that (concluded) conversation so when did you change your name to John Fisher !!!!?????........................................................If it wasn't for the fact that I'm already acquainted with you and excuse you for this, "Newbies" might get the wrong idea about you.....or think you need a lesson in Phatic Communication Continuing the debate, and to gratify your tendency to start an argument in an empty room John, I always laugh when you pathetically claim the opposition's response is subjectivism. Since he's here, lets analyse Pluto's post - which you thought was so non-subjective..................................Para 1, Nothing technical, reminiscing about locomotives etc = anecdotal/subjectivePara 2, Concluding that the Pressing Plant were mostly right that the Test pressing was a true reflection of the master tape - but still anecdotal/subjective.Para 3, Talking about a bloke in a room = anecdotal/subjectivePara 4, Visit to the pub = anecdotal/subjectivePara 5, Talking about that bloke again but this time trying to guess his job = anecdotal/subjectivePara 6, "My manager told me not to do this because he doesn't like it" etc = anecdotal/subjectivePara 7, Sony PCM1610 was poor 1630 was better (really enjoyed that) = mainly anecdotal/subjective...but I don't really care about the 1610/1630 since it has nothing to do with analogue !!Yes indeed John....nothing subjective there mate - good call. (Continued....)
All of this....plus Pluto's implied belief that his ears are any better than the guy's on the shop floor, that somehow he and you can recognise the sound of a bell, a human voice, or a musical instrument better than anyone merely underlines your hypocrisy. Recent tests have confirmed that your ears are at the bottom of the heap when it comes to discrimination - whether you play with sugar or not. Chances are the reason one of our good friends hasn't been around recently is that he's weary of re-affirming this proven fact to you.....(that wasn't a subjective view by the way - please see the hard evidence in AVR Blind Test results).........................................................................................I think you started denying this genuine hard evidence of your own hearing inadequacies when you discovered sugar................................... You are hardly convincing anyone here John so give it up (!!!)................................................... Coming back to my earlier "WHERE's THE BEEF?" question. The bottom line with audio components is what it finally sounds like when used with optimal equipment by the End Users? John's equipment is evidently not optimal enough as he appears to disagree with the industry in general when it comes to final evaluations of the product. An instant example of this is the latest edition of "What Hifi Sound & Vision" I bought the other day. I don't generally buy mags unless there is good reason. (The reason it was purchased was for the purpose of getting hard tabular data on DVD Recorders). While I was leafing through I just happened to notice an Award for a budget £60 phono stage. I'll quote word-for-word : "Vinyl's superior timing and detail will be evident...."...................Continued..................
This review opinion is typical of the general market acceptance and awareness of the superiority of analogue to CD which has existed for many years.......With music, TIMING is everything. There is no escaping it...and repeatedly enagaging in what I would describe as "Soap Box " rants such as John is now quite famous for will do nothing to alter either that or my own long held perceptions of analogue and CD. (So tough luck there Pluto - for someone completely disinterested and "devoid of time to waste on Plebes" you certainly had a jolly good try !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! )................................................................Not to put too strong a point on it, Electrostatic loudspeakers are capable of revealing SPATIAL and TIMING clues which are largely lost with conventional drivers. First thing you notice is that they try to "stage" everything in an intelligible way - maintaining the relationships between instruments and their "recorded" environment and even the sounds within the body of the instrument itself. Voices seem to hang in space with genuine palpability, unencumbered by the boxiness of enclosed transducers. These qualities allow electrostatics to even more convincingly highlight the gulf between Analogue & CD within my own system and it is this which reinforces my support for the Format, not anecdotal "evidence" such as Pluto has just offered......or any other form of "evidence". Thus when you John start using superlatives about a format which I know and recognise as inferior I can afford myself a chuckle or 2 at the naivety with which you make these pronunciations, littered with what for you has become your somewhat cliched "standard description" of what "good hifi sounds like"........... (For the CD enthusiasts this doesn't mean that CD is utterly incapable in this regard, just that good analogue is audibly better and more coherent....) ..............................................................................I am happy to return and repeat that vinyl is superior as often as you wish on this Thread in response to any inflammatory outburst that you care to offer....The one certain Truth is that you lost this argument a long time ago (roughly 20 years to be precise).............................................................(Keep that Soap Box handy - you'll need it...and in extremis...there's always Hyde Park....)..As for the beleaguered guys in the plant/pressing room Pluto...they will be relieved and pleased to know that time has proved they were right all along!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (Big cheer goes up among former shop floor colleagues......)Great debating with the two of you as always....Kind regards......................Bill.
"...correctly reproduced CD has all the musical nuances, all the emotion and is every bit as good as vinyl but does not degrade on every playing, does not attract pops and crackles and does reproduce bass down to tens of Hertz and a full level top end to 20KHz, some of the bass extension I heard on this recording and many others I have never heard on vinyl equally so some of the 'bright highs' I have also never heard on vinyl, your comments welcome."
My comments pleasingly given........
John, when I read this stuff you write I sometimes wonder what exactly you've been listening to...
Consider a 40 year old LP. The first play I ever heard 30-40 years ago and the most recent play (perhaps hundreds of plays later), are indistinguishable from each other What kind of equipment have you been using man !!!????
On the subject of bass & treble, you really need to get the sugar out of your ears mate, as these factors are both vastly preferable with analogue. All the bass-heads I know who switched to vinyl prefer it...and since general detail is superior treble is a no-brainer with vinyl.
Hi Bill, a difficult couple of 'overs' to reply to but I will try all the same. Much as you dismiss my sugar test it does differentiate the ability to hear very small changes in pitch, but agreed that is all. Maybe my experiences with vinyl have not been as good as yours but even at the show with demonstrators using some of the best available I did hear speed differences (pitch) and crackles and even hum on one recording however that is only my personal experience.....
Now you stated 'Vinyl's superior timing and detail will be evident....', did that statement come from your personal experience, no, it came from a review, a review incidentally that is out to sell equipment.
But the mother of them all, the science, the CD is a designer product not the result of many years 'fine tweaking' an old technology. What Pluto has said I'm sure is true, that many bands and musicians do not particularly appreciate what ends up on vinyl but it is the best that can be done and many of the recording techniques used in the 70/80s were in fact digital anyway.
Note I am not 'closed' to any discussion as I have had some unexplainable sonic delights and here's one, on driving to work one day I played a cassette recorded from a CD, in the car it had me 'emotionally moved' I could not wait to get home and hear the original CD on my Quad ESLs that I had at the time. To my great disappointment it did nothing for me, so what can we conclude from this little experience, unfortunately only one thing, and that is that accuracy of reproduction does not guarantee emotion and that could be part of the answer and could explain some of the love for vinyl. Believe it or not, I am not out to disagree with anyone but only to try and discover the reasons why we hear the way we do.... John... Back on the soap box.
As we are into a serious discussion about vinyl a question comes to mind, why was the 12" single introduced? And another, if recording down to 10Hz is possible on CD but not on vinyl does that not give it an edge, if recording full level at 10KHz on CD does that not give it an edge, this is simply not possible on vinyl due to the RIAA eq curve and that was based on normal classical recordings at the time, but now with synthesized sound almost anything is possible so the recording media has to handle it and CD does. In answer to the timing question think 'timing = speed' and again a CD is crystal locked so will normally be close to perfect. Now your turn on the soap box, tell me what format will come out better in the future, say ten years from now, will it be:
A] A new vinyl system running at 100 RPM such that it can capture those lower frequencies but only has a playing time of about ten mins.
B] A new digital format, maybe 24 bit 96Khz sample rate, a system that maybe only 1% of the population would hear as better.
The future for high quality sound is something like This In ten years new CDs will be all but finished, sacd and dvda are already dead , Vinyl will survive but will be specialist and very expensive only used by people that love the ritual of playing an LP as much as the music itself .
The biggest missed opportunity was the demise of dvda the logical successor to CDs it is a crying shame.
Still with the right Upsampling CD player CD still sounds very good to me, but one thing people overlook is the need for a good quality analogue output stage after D/A conversion there are so many expensive CD players that use off the shelf cheap op amps totally destroying the sound in the analogue section of the player !
Hi Electro, a very interesting product, shame it did not also come with a massive hard drive to store all one's tracks and make the computer connection redundant during the play session.
'The biggest missed opportunity was the demise of dvda the logical successor to CDs it is a crying shame.'
Yes right it did look like the next logical step, however the bit about 'cheap op amps' I don't quite agree on as even a 60p op amp is pretty good and for a couple of quid many of the best are availiable, however one bone of contention is why should the signal ever be analogue, after all with DSP techniques it could stay in the digital domain right up until the speaker. Class 'D' PWM and all that, is that not a way forward?
The main advantage of a machine like this is you can download a copy of the original digital master recording directly from Linn Records in 24/192 or higher. See LinnRecords .
You can't get any higher resolution than a copy of the original master.
They probably don't fit a hard drive because it will be connected to your computer to download the music anyway and your collection of Cd's will be stored on the computer hard drive as well.
Thanks mate, but like you say standard CD quality is not that bad. Now I think many perceived differences are simply combinations that did not work well together, lets look at a few:-
Valve and vinyl, yes always was historically the best, but note the word WAS
Vinyl and class 'B' sounds pretty good and better than most.
CD and class 'B' did not quite 'cut the mustard' whatever that means but you know what I mean.
Later generation CD masters and class ‘T’, well now we are in a different ball game, one that in my opinion sounds better than all previous.
As you say the CD is capable of really good reproduction given that the rest of the system is good, no offence simply my opinion.
.......For someone who wasn't even privy to the conversation that preceded it...this looks like unparalleled rudeness to the untrained/unfamiliar eye....... 
