If George Carlin was still with us I'm sure he would have lots of funny things to say about our little hobby.
Very fun/likeable man.
If George Carlin was still with us I'm sure he would have lots of funny things to say about our little hobby.
this is those little 1's and 0's you know. lasers. digital readouts. sliding trays. no grooves or musty cardboard.
if you can handle all that stuff then yes, please come and give us some mono vinyl when appropriate for cultural balance.
Andy was telling me that Sony is going to release this on Crystal Disc - if so, then we can compare to LP. I'm sure MikeL or jazdoc will have a first pressing, and may be the tape even? Will someone here buy it?
View attachment 11372
Andy was telling me that Sony is going to release this on Crystal Disc - if so, then we can compare to LP. I'm sure MikeL or jazdoc will have a first pressing, and may be the tape even? Will someone here buy it?
View attachment 11372
If George Carlin was still with us I'm sure he would have lots of funny things to say about our little hobby.
George Carlin meets the Audiophile If an particular amplifier sounds better than the rest, why don't they just clone the dang thing ? Ever notice that anyone playing louder music than you is an idiot, but anyone playing lower than you is an audiophile? Why do people burn in their amplifiers to improve the sound? How do electrons know that you want better sound and not worse? Does a tone deaf audiophile say the amplifier sounds bright after regaining his hearing ? Or was the amplifier an innocent victim ? How come nobody says "It sounds bad" after doing a major equipment upgrade ? How does an amplifier know if the music is a complex music passage and it needs to take extra care to please you? Last night I played a blank CD at full blast. The audiophile next door went nuts. If 4 out of 5 audiophiles suffers from psychoacoustics .... does that mean that one enjoys it? |
not for $1600
Actually, it's nothing new. Robert Harley reviewed one in 2009:
http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/the-2000-cd-made-from-glass-1/
Note that the pit- and land-length variations were not great enough to be interpreted incorrectly; a binary “one” was never mistaken for binary “zero.” The datastreams were identical after decoding.
I once pressed a CD optical engineer at Philips on this question and came away with the distinct impression that he understood the mechanism by which discs with identical datastreams sounded different, but wouldn’t publicly admit the phenomenon (for obvious reasons). The engineer gave me knowing smile and a wink, repeating the party line that CDs were incapable of analog-like variability in sound quality. If anyone knew the answer to this mystery it would be Philips; it contributed the optical aspects to the CD format (Sony developed the error correction, integrated circuit design, and hardware manufacturing processes, broadly speaking).
My reaction to this sort of thing is that it's almost an insult to the people who originally came up with the whole idea of digital recording, and the engineers who implemented the elegant systems that make the integrity of the data *completely* independent of the 'quality' of the medium. The very earliest CD players did it: the DAC clocked by a crystal, and the mechanism slaved to it, the data buffered, so that a cheap plastic disc and flimsy mechanism were, and are, absolutely identical in performance to a gold plated glass disc and 300 kg 'transport'. To question it, is to embrace ignorance and superstition, and to reject a truly beautiful idea.
Sourced from what?
Rather than just making a connection between price and quality, or suggesting laborious listening tests (just have a beer instead and listen to some music ), why don't people here take some time to study how a CD player works? Can they find a flaw in the system that a glass disc (with literally better quality 1s and 0s) could solve? If all you can find is something to do with extra work for the digital circuitry to do so it must be something to do with ground noise and the power supply etc. suggest how this could affect the sound without being measurable. And then, think of unconventional ways to measure it so you can convince everyone else, or think of ways to fix the problem. Listening 'tests' won't solve anything.
But this is very basic stuff and we're not even talking about fast logic and cutting edge data rates, so that's what I mean about it being almost an "insult" to the designers of digital audio equipment. They had already thought of the 'analogue' side of the CD long before Mr Crystal Disc, and had built an elegant mechanism to remove it from the equation. From the outset, CD players effectively employed the 'asynchronous mode' that is now used in the best audio DACs. If you can spot a flaw in the existing system, suggest a way to fix it without relying on voodoo and a $1600 gold plated glass disc!
Andy was telling me that Sony is going to release this on Crystal Disc - if so, then we can compare to LP. I'm sure MikeL or jazdoc will have a first pressing, and may be the tape even? Will someone here buy it?
View attachment 11372
This bears repeating. Gentlemen, when you run your tests at Mike's room, get an innocent bystander to change the discs behind your backs or behind a curtain. Do not allow him to speak other than to say "A." "B." Make sure he is out of sight of the participants. If you can't find exactly the same source material on conventional CD, rip it and burn it. Compare them many times. Let the man behind the curtain keep score.
I wouldn't spend much time on the vinyl until you're done with the serious testing, personally. That difference should be pretty obvious.
Tim
Not the case. The link between CD transport and DAC is synchronous for the vast majority of DACs, and always has been. The clock in the transport provides the master clock to the dac. Your description of the digital signal path is at best an oversimplification of one out of many possible architectures.
I don't want this thread to decend into that discussion.
I do promise to do blind testing for sure if you show up.
The K2HD is the way to go IMHO the SACD was a huge disappointment.and I have the Hybrid SACD (I cannot remember how good it sounds it's been so long since I listened to it).