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Richard Jernigan -> RE: PDL says you dont need to study ! (Nov. 12 2013 15:07:36)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: aeolus
quote:
The present quality of good digital recording far exceeds that of the best LPs
By what measure? In the old days of High Fidelity Magazine they had an engineer who tested equipment scientifically and he would conclude his assessment by saying from the reading he got on his equipment the unit should sound good or words to that effect.
How do you judge quality in music reproduction?
By listening to it.
In the first couple of years after the introduction of the CD, all the players I listened to sounded bad. The usual "scientific" measurements didn't reveal the reason. Then someone stumbled across a major cause of the trouble. The digital clock recovered by the players suffered from "jitter". There were minute variations in its frequency--the rate at which digital samples were clocked into the digital-to-analog converter. Crucially, these timing variations were correlated to the amplitude of the sound. This resulted in a highly audible form of distortion that no one had thought to measure previously. Once this was corrected--in some players--things started to sound better. Now clock jitter is routinely listed among the specs of good CD players. In my system the digital-to-analog converter clocks the CD transport. This is the other way around from most inexpensive players. It costs more to implement.
I cited Nyquist's theorem to refute the cliche that "chopping the music up into samples" somehow ruins it. It doesn't. Poor implementation of digital technology can ruin things, just as a poorly adjusted cutting lathe or bad gain riding can ruin an LP.
Furthermore, I might like the sound of your LP player better than the sound of your CD player. But I'm pretty sure I will like the sound of my CD player, on a good CD, better than I will like your LP player. I started listening to LPs when they first came out, and I still do, often with great pleasure.
"Scientific" measurements--at least the ones quoted in hi-fi magazines--fail quite audibly to predict the sound of a system. Anyone who plays an instrument or listens to live music can tell you that recorded music never sounds like the real thing. The best systems are just less distracting. Given the necessarily subjective evaluation of hi-fi gear, opinions will vary.
When I decided to spend some money on a high end system I listened to a variety of players over a period of a couple of years, using CDs I was familiar with and a pair of Stax electrostatic headphones, the cleanest transducers I have heard. One thing struck me forcefully. There are lots of very expensive CD players, costing thousands of dollars, that sound really, really terrible.
I finally found three CD players that I liked, and one that was pretty good. The pretty good one was a Sony that cost about $500. The three that I liked were a good deal more expensive. The high price was not due to some super-exotic technology. It was due to the small production runs, relative to the cost of design and development. The technology was conventional, just intelligently employed.
Word length-16 bits, 24 bits, ad infinitum-is another widely misunderstood parameter. How many bits you need depends upon the signal-to-noise ratio of the system. Properly dithered 16-bit sampling covers a dynamic range of 96 dB. Quoted values for the dynamic range of human hearing fall in the area of 100-114 dB. But to hear the faintest sounds the human has to be in an isolated anechoic chamber. The noise level of the average household is high enough to cut out the lower end of human perception. And the dynamic range of the great bulk of music is far less than 100 dB.
Some of the best sounding recorded reproduction I have heard doesn't use 24 bits or more. It uses only one bit. Each sample is either 1 or O. That's it, 1 or 0. But the sample rate is really high. Look up Sony's Direct-Stream-Digital system, used on SACDs.
Sorry for the OT. I can't get very interested in the flamenco vs. classical "debate". When I was a kid trumpet player I played in the Washington Summer Symphony, some jazz groups, and I had my own dance band. I caught flack from three different directions.
Get over it.
RNJ
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