hps' heresey or blasphemy on analoge
- Thread starter Gregadd
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Greg,
Nothing new, but very interesting however. I have said similar things about the high energy extended bandwidth finales of Shostakovitch symphonies in LPs - I prefer them in CD format when listened with SOTA digital equipment than in the final groves of an LP.
IMHO, the key sentence of HP is "But let it be said that there are nuances, in terms of tonal complexities that the digits don’t and still can’t get, but they aren’t key to this kind of music."
I have always said that there is an inverse relationship between digital and analog: Digital has zero problem producing the highest dynamics. I can produce a single sample at 1 and the rest at zero and have a perfect impulse. Such a thing simply does not exist in any analog nature in life. Indeed, you are starring at it right now as you read this text. The text is crisp because we can create a black dot next to a white one in digital as represented by what you are reading. If this were a camera, or analog display, the edges would lose their sharp edges, the text would get soft and fidelity would get lost. The equiv. in audio doesn't quite work that way because we filter the output of a DAC but still, the DAC has no problem producing its high amplitudes.
Analog is the reverse. It has a harder time the stronger the signal. Tapes saturate and LP groves simply can't have step functions in them.
On the other hand, digital systems have hardest time (relatively speaking to their full amplitude representation) to represent smallest signals. If an analog voltage is equiv to just 1 bit of its resolution, by definition it lacks the resolution to resolve it further. Analog has no such restriction. This is in theory of course. Analog has lots of noise and we have ways of converting the distortion in digital into noise when resolution gets low (dither).
But at the absolute, the concepts above hold. I am glad to see HP's letter subjectively confirm this aspect of digital. It can analytically be shown that this aspect is superior to analog. Signal to noise ratio, etc. all point to this.
What gets complicated is the distortion profile. Analog has tons of it but it also manages to hide a lot of it. Digital has less of it but it has lesser ability to hide it....
Analog is the reverse. It has a harder time the stronger the signal. Tapes saturate and LP groves simply can't have step functions in them.
On the other hand, digital systems have hardest time (relatively speaking to their full amplitude representation) to represent smallest signals. If an analog voltage is equiv to just 1 bit of its resolution, by definition it lacks the resolution to resolve it further. Analog has no such restriction. This is in theory of course. Analog has lots of noise and we have ways of converting the distortion in digital into noise when resolution gets low (dither).
But at the absolute, the concepts above hold. I am glad to see HP's letter subjectively confirm this aspect of digital. It can analytically be shown that this aspect is superior to analog. Signal to noise ratio, etc. all point to this.
What gets complicated is the distortion profile. Analog has tons of it but it also manages to hide a lot of it. Digital has less of it but it has lesser ability to hide it....
Hi
This is sure to raise the analog vs digital debate once more with the previsible consequences of people talking past each other ... The reality is that digital has been showign that ability for a while: that of being extremely transparent to the source. It is a disturbing even distressing point for many. Denial quickly sets in, once confronted with the fact. Many here have repeatedly maintained that if you don't know which is which it is impossible in many cases to distinguish analog recordings from their digital copies. This will not close the debate. On the contrary. THe most interesting part is that we have only skimmed the digital surface as illustrated by the very interestin and educatinve DSD vs PCM thread on WBF.. Digital is in its infancy and it is already exceedingly good ... What will the digital future bring?
This is sure to raise the analog vs digital debate once more with the previsible consequences of people talking past each other ... The reality is that digital has been showign that ability for a while: that of being extremely transparent to the source. It is a disturbing even distressing point for many. Denial quickly sets in, once confronted with the fact. Many here have repeatedly maintained that if you don't know which is which it is impossible in many cases to distinguish analog recordings from their digital copies. This will not close the debate. On the contrary. THe most interesting part is that we have only skimmed the digital surface as illustrated by the very interestin and educatinve DSD vs PCM thread on WBF.. Digital is in its infancy and it is already exceedingly good ... What will the digital future bring?
I have quite a few of the original Mercury Living Presence LPs that I bought back in the day, not necessarily first pressings, but the 'real' ones, not later reissues, Golden Imports or other versions. The mono Starker Dvorak with Kol Nidre, etc. was always one of my favorites, some of the brass ones always seemed too strident on my older Quad systems, the Shoenberg/Webern/Berg one was pretty good, but musically hard to cosy up to; on my current system, these records sound much better, perhaps it is the ability of the horn system to replicate the dynamics better, and for some reason, these records don't sound as biting as they did when I used to play them on what I considered to be a more euphonic system. Sort of counter-intuitive. Granted, my turntable/phono section has improved since the 1980's. (and my hearing has probably degraded).
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I just hope it's sooner rather than later and by that my emphasis is on availability of interesting titles. Unfortunately, that would take the entire music industry to make that push. Given that downloading is the way now that physical media which can be transported anytime anywhere without regard for broadband infrastructure and cost effective subscriptions. I say sell Hi-rez in sticks or drives. They could grow the market NOW instead of waiting for more fiber to be laid down and prices to go down. When I was in Hawaii last with a 24mbps connection it took 13 hours to download a single album from 2L. Screw that.
Is this a tempest in a teapot? Uncompressed, scaled dynamics has always been one of the things that digital has always done better than analog, one of the original selling points. It led to a lot of systems being re-configured to handle the large volume swings, and then schemes to re-compress the music again for car and home audio listening. A lot of systems could not do either the pianissimo or the fortississimo very well, as it turned out.
It is always nice when you can re-cycle the obvious and make it sound like something new.
It is always nice when you can re-cycle the obvious and make it sound like something new.
Not because of the connection, though; a 24 mbps connection will download over 10 GB (big B) per hour. That's well over 2 hrs of 24/192 stereo.
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