It often reminds me of the “neck up” vs. “neck down” listening experience.
Very Generally -
Neck Up: You’re in your head, analyzing aspects of the Sound (often to the exclusion of the music) or simply being thrilled by the “pristine” (etc., etc.) qualities of the recording and/or reproduction. This is in no way to say that N.U. listening Can’t be Fun.
Neck Down: You forget about everything but the Music. You find yourself involuntarily moving - whether that is toe-tapping, head-bobbing, or Windmilling…or Dancin’ With My-Seh-helf or someone else ; ). You are surprised when the music ends.
The difficulty in Audiophile circles, and why we often seem to “talk past one another” is that some folks seem incapable of one or the other.
The difference between Analog-y and Digital-y may well be that the pure analog form is a continuously changing signal or wave with no sharply defined data points where the pure digital form is entirely made up of sharply defined data points and no continuous wave form. I think that’s where DSD process (and the PSA DS DAC) shines is in the number of data points is so high that we can no longer feel the difference. I have some very Analog-y sounding digital discs and files and a whole lot of digital sounding stuff too. I don’t think the media is to blame as much as the process is to blame. As an example I still love my Deep Purple Machine Head CD although it is a really crappy recording. I’m all about the neck down experience.
In a different thread Ted mentioned that we may be able to hear parts per million changes so maybe that is why the high sample rate digital (done correctly) sounds so good.
… any more than a photograph is a collection of pixels, or a flower a collection of elements. Strictly speaking they are, but it is not a very useful or revealing definition,
This is a common misconception. The reconstruction filter delivers a continuous wave form. In fact, in the limit the problem with digital is it’s too smooth - it’s bandlimited.
With a proper ADC…DAC you’ll get back exactly the bandlimited input of the ADC. There aren’t any issues of “missing peaks” or “stair steps”, etc.
The ways in which digital can fall short are often related to jitter, noise, etc. not “jaggies” nor artifacts of being quantized in time and amplitude. Jitter can bury the details that often matter and noise can do all manner of things. But with digital equipment the noise is often harsh, not white like a phono pre’s noise.
I’ve been doing that for years (and so has Michael Fremer it seems). My Vinyl days as I’ve mentioned before are done thanks to DSD and some very excellent sounding high sample rate PCM recordings.
Thanks Ted. I knew that somebody smarter than me would take the bait and correct the thought. Richard and I have these discussions regularly about how an EE and an ME look at the world differently in general.
If you look at the groove in the record that the lathe cut everything is there all at the same time but in a continuous form is the point I was trying to get across I guess.
I think that because the microphone vibration is driving the record cutting lathe that signal is a continuous “natural” process. I realize that it is not that simple in reality.
When you take the vibrations from the microphone and have to place them in a digital format then you have lost the “natural” part of the chain. I realize that the steps are very small and there may be no difference at all.
When you think of digitizing something - anything - it is a digital representation of the analog, organic, natural object and therefore cannot be 100% true to form. At least that’s the way my brain has to look at it. We digitize 3D objects on a regular basis and they are only a “reasonable facsimile” of the item being digitized when they make it to the computer. Software will smooth out the missing info and our machines will cut a pretty good rendition of the digitized piece - but it is still a digital rendition. Maybe none of this applies to the digitization of sound. I do not know the answer to that question.
Maybe you would need to take the same microphone signal and divide it equally to cut a record and make a file at the same day and time and see how they both sound?
One thing that the Analog-y systems do is add just enough flavor to the music to make the gear owner feel like it is the right tint to the music to be most Analog-y. Maybe not the truest fidelity to form but “best sounding” to his ears on his system. The same goes with Digital-y. Pick the amps, speakers, wires, room correction that you like to hear the best and is most satisfying.
It could all be BS but that is how I think about the differences in the two formats. I still like them both and as I said cant play vinyl on anything although I still have a bunch of records out in the shed.
I have wasted way too many keystrokes on this rambling reply and for that I apologize in advance.
But you are missing my point: it’s not the fact that it ever was digital that’s a problem. Given a band limited signal you can get back that exact signal, no artifacts, no noise from grain boundaries in the vinyl or mag tape, etc., no added tape bias, or hiss, etc. And with digital you’ll have more of your original signal intact (within the limits of the bandlimiting). Whether 2D or 3D if the signal is bandlimited then the digital can contain all of the information in the original signal. In the 3D world the sampling is often coarce and things like right angles are important so bandlimiting can be a constraint. In audio large excursions (impulses) are limited by the bandwidth of the analog hardware and hence are already bandlimited, digitizing them and then converting back to analog can, in theory loose nothing. Doing anything in the analog form will loose info.
I’m not claiming that typical digital systems operate perfectly, far from it, but their failures come from a different place than the digitization. They come from the analog limits of the digital hardware: noise and jitter both of which can be made better with better analog equipment.
One of the faults of digital is it allows a lot of lossless manipulation and people are tempted to do that, often those manipulations hurt the quality of the audio more than limiting yourself to the things than can be done well in analog, but that’s a problem with the temperament of the humans doing the editing, not digital vs. analog.
My only point in my first message on this thread is it’s not digitization that’s a problem: it can lose nothing with a bandlimited input. At the fundamental levels that’s the wrong place to look for problems with digital hardware vs. analog hardware.
Thanks for breaking it down into terms that even a simpleton like me can understand. I appreciate your help as always.
Now how would you personally describe Analog-y and Digital-y? It would be interesting to hear how your expertise tilts those terms one way or the other.
I never thought about the mixing bench / engineer adding his or her flavor to the dish either
I’ve heard pretty convincing demos with different groups (one time a pianist another time a trio (drum, sax?, ?)) where you could listen live and then walk down the hall to hear the music being played back after having been digitized (with DSD) and converted back to analog. There are differences brought about by recording (whether analog or digital) since there are only so many mics and so many speakers, etc. but the character of the sound was the same, whether it was live or not wasn’t at all obvious with your eyes closed. Note that neither sounded like recordings you buy. Hearing master tapes and/or master DSD recordings is amazing and far from what we have at home.
Personally I’ve noticed that people tend to play analog back at higher levels than digital and say “See, analog is better.” I don’t hear it that way with a good digital system that’s playing back at the same level: needle drops can sound pretty darned good. I understand how this comes about: In the past most digital systems I heard weren’t pleasant to listen to at those high levels, but they are getting much better these days.
An ironic thing is that the DSD recordings I’ve heard of live performances are truer to the original performance that the results you get after being released on vinyl, CD or SACD. There are steps along the way to consumer releases that modify the sound and the steps/paths are almost always different from media to media.
I wonder what the file size / format is on the DSD recording and if the size / format could be maintained somehow even if it took on a different file type / playback program? Would the final playback sound “better”? Technically you are not limited to the amount of info in the file except by the current media processing and playback limits.
Indeed, the problem is not the method of recording - digital really does produce the same as its input within a specified bandwidth, assuming a perfect implementation.
It’s the implementation that’s the issue (most often on the analogue end of things), but it’s often next to impossible for us as end user to be able to make a meaningful direct comparison without having control of the source selection and mastering, apart from the one mentioned exception of taking a really good vinyl master and then digitising it with the very best kit available, and comparing input to output.
Our argument is with the recording industry, not the equipment designers
.
Reading the Neil Young/Feel The Music Book. I started a Topic here if anyone has had a chance to read it yet. Ties into all the discussions here I think.
Digitizing an analogue signal does introduce quantization noise. There are noise shaping techniques, which I once briefly understood, which can move this noise out of the audible region. If I look at spectrograms of 24/96 PCM I can generally see a band at about 70-80khz which I believe is shaped quantization noise. It is at very low volume and so far above the conventionally accepted limitations of human hearing that it is unlikely to have any perceptible effect.
Yes, I could have worded things more carefully, but I was talking about the limits of what can be done and better hardware can lower the quantization noise in digital below than the inherent noise in the necessary analog parts of any recording process (e.g. resistor noise) and is usually much lower than tape hiss, noise from the grains in vinyl, etc. (Which can also be lowered by better hardware.) DSD moves the quantization noise much higher than the audio band (tho DSD64 is right on the edge, DSD128 and DSD256 can do better than 24 bit PCM quantization noise over the audio band.)
I’ve yet to find the definitive explanation why, but DSD can (depending on design) match and exceed analog in ways that PCM, even at 24/352khz cannot. I’ve heard things like the temporal resolution of standard sample rates is too low, filters are too sharp too cheaply designed, not great low level linearity, too much noise from complex electronic components, all being responsible for the harder, more flat, and sometimes grainy sound of PCM.
To my ears, DSD is where digital and analog comparisons become less relevant because it just sounds exactly like the source. Beyond that discussions about “analog” qualities are mostly about added distortion or bass.
Many years ago I already heard self made CD recordings of an audio genius which didn’t pass the usual stages consumer media go through. They sounded miles superior to anything on disc I heard so far, even if they were standard resolution.
It seems high end vinyl releases (e.g. a 45 RPM Acousticsounds recording) at least are quite near the lacquer…Steve Hoffman published such a comparison on his forum and reported it quite on one level. This for sure is different with inferior vinyl releases.
An assumption could be, that during the long denied losses within the digital manufacturing process of consumer media (remember the story of lossless digital copying), the problems introduced (don’t know if it’s jitter, noise, whatever) are more seriously affecting the sound (affecting timing, ambience, openness) than those problems introduced into a vinyl manufacturing process (which just seems to put a kind of more or less strong haze on the performance).
If this makes sense or not, the part of your statement, that the digital production process is responsible for a noticeable degradation is also a statement of some leading digital/vinyl mastering engineers.
I guess the high end R2R listeners would probably originate their opinion of a superiority of early tape copies with a less lossy production process of those tapes, too.
An interesting article within one of Cookies mailings.
It among others tells that digital conversion (external, not within a DAC) is more harmful than an add. analog step when releasing a 16/44 recording on SACD (not sure why this should be done), that it’s harmful when having to downconvert a higher resolution recording for release on CD (and how maths plays a role in order to choose the better recording resolution for that purpose as also Ted often mentions this maths influence) and that an analog step inbetween an otherwise pure digital processing can even improve the sound quality (the 2xHD label also does so generally). Interesting, as this also limits dynamic range to the one of tape…seems to play a lesser role?
