Fender turntable.

[tegs07]

38 minutes ago, Doctor J said:

I'm not sure I'd agree being crudely misinformed is any better than being entirely oblivious on any topic, to be honest

I just accept being crudely misinformed on a whole range subjects. Brighter sparks than me can fully comprehend the internal combustion engine, nuclear physics etc. Even in my own career there are areas where I just know the bare essentials. There is just too much information to learn and too many rabbit holes to go down. Even in the digital example you then need to look at compression, 64 vs 32 bit, codecs, bus technology, RAM, cache, buffering and on and on.  No one person can really understand every detail of that stuff.

Edited September 25, 2021 by tegs07

[Leonard Smalls]

25 minutes ago, tegs07 said:

Even in the digital example you then need to look at compression

 

And most important for digital playback, have the edges of the cd been highlighted green? CD also sounds appallingly unnatural unless you've put Shakti Stones on the CD player - you need to absorb that stray EMI! But the single best thing you can do to extract the most from cd playback is to buy an INTELLIGENT BOX

😎

[JottoSW1]

2 hours ago, Leonard Smalls said:

 

And most important for digital playback, have the edges of the cd been highlighted green? CD also sounds appallingly unnatural unless you've put Shakti Stones on the CD player - you need to absorb that stray EMI! But the single best thing you can do to extract the most from cd playback is to buy an INTELLIGENT BOX

😎

Ho ho, someone recalls the inimitable Peter Belt and his pseudo science.

[Leonard Smalls]

7 minutes ago, JottoSW1 said:

Peter Belt

Machina Dynamica make his tweaks look relatively sane!

[JottoSW1]

1 minute ago, Leonard Smalls said:

Machina Dynamica make his tweaks look relatively sane!

Apparently Belt was a nice fellow, heard his widow was keeping the cult alive last time I looked.

Machina Dynamics is a new name to me, would Google furnish me some giggles?

[Leonard Smalls]

43 minutes ago, JottoSW1 said:

Machina Dynamica

Their website appears to be dead so not sure if they still exist... But my post above has a link to the MD Intelligent Box review by Henk and Marja at what is known as Six Loons.

It's Quantum. So it's very clever!

[JottoSW1]

1 minute ago, Leonard Smalls said:

Their website appears to be dead so not sure if they still exist... But my post above has a link to the MD Intelligent Box review by Henk and Marja at what is known as Six Loons.

It's Quantum. So it's very clever!

No strings attached ???

[zbd1960]

I used to take hi-fi seriously, but gradually lost interest with the development of the powdered-unicorn-horn-will-improve-the-sound mob got control in the mid 90s.

 

The issue in the vinyl days was that good well set-up hi-fi was very good. That wasn't what most people had - most people had poor quality kit and the turntables were often the weakest part of the sound chain.

 

I had a lot of problems with early digital - it was awful. The sound quality was horrible, early CDs were excruciatingly bad (I'm talking classical here was that was all I listened to back then). It was if all the knowledge and experience gained from Decca and BBC sound engineers in the 50s and 60s was chucked in the bin.

 

The standard set for CD with its 44khz sampling rate was poor. It was the limit of what technology could do in the early 80s and it just wasn't good enough for decent hi-fi reproduction.

 

Back then, I bought a Linn Sondek LP12 in 1983. Over the next few years I tried many CD players and none were as good as my LP12. Some of the issues were the dire recordings with the mikes on top of the instruments to get 'up real and close' "Hear every detail" marketing blurbs were all the rage. Recordings were often extremely bright. It was ghastly. 

 

Slowly, recording engineers re-learnt how to record and guess what - readopted the techniques of the 50s and 60s and the recording sounded better. 

 

I did buy CD players, purely because classical labels stopped making new LPs very quickly - about 1985 or 86 or so. It wasn't until I bought my Naim CD player in 1999 that I felt I had a CD player that gave me a sound that was as good as my LP12.

 

I still have the LP12 and it was recently serviced and it still sounds very good. Yes, vinyl has many inherent limitations, but digital isn't de facto better just because it's digital. Digital ought to be better. Recordings have improved a lot since those early days and the technology has improved a lot as well.

 

The advantage to the average consumer is that even a fairly cheap digital system will be much better than a cheap badly set-up analogue system. That is why CDs took off so quickly.    

[BigRedX]

12 minutes ago, zbd1960 said:

The advantage to the average consumer is that even a fairly cheap digital system will be much better than a cheap badly set-up analogue system.

 

This is the most important thing anyone has said in this thread so far.

[tegs07]

16 minutes ago, zbd1960 said:

The advantage to the average consumer is that even a fairly cheap digital system will be much better than a cheap badly set-up analogue system. That is why CDs took off so quickly.  

It’s also light and compact. I inherited a NAD system years ago. It was amazing but weighed a ton and took up a lot of room. Then add in all the vinyl and an entire room is taken up. Not many people have that luxury and sadly I didn’t a bit later on so it all had to go including much of the vinyl but it sounded incredible and I would have loved to be able to hang onto it. 

Edited September 25, 2021 by tegs07

[BigRedX]

On 25/09/2021 at 07:54, tegs07 said:

 

 

What a waste of time posting an image that is so wrong and takes up an inordinate amount of room to say so.

 

If you really believe that is shown on there you need a hearing test.

[tegs07]

11 minutes ago, BigRedX said:

 

What a waste of time posting an image that is so wrong and takes up an inordinate amount of room to say so.

 

If you really believe that is shown on there you need a hearing test.

Your correct people would be far more interested in a ten page essay on Quantization and Timing Jitter.

[BigRedX]

30 minutes ago, tegs07 said:

Your correct people would be far more interested in a ten page essay on Quantization and Timing Jitter.

 

Except that it has got very little to do with Quantisation and Timing Jitter and a lot more to do with the fact that no electronic device can jump between two different voltage states instantaneously, so all those hard steps get turned back into smooth curves due to the nature of physics.

 

There. I managed to say it in two lines with no need for an over-large and inaccurate diagram.

[tegs07]

It’s a little more complex than that. I worked for several years in digital broadcast and also had the privilege of working with some excellent old school broadcast engineers. There are pros and cons of analog vs digital that could span pages and bore the pants off even the most committed.
My take on the matter is digital has made broadcast cheaper, more efficient and the quality of audio is so good that for most people and most purposes it’s usage is a no-brainier.

That said if I was a serious Classical or Jazz buff with more money than sense I would be after Vinyl and the mother of all Hi-Fi systems.

[BigRedX]

Yes all those other factors have an effect but the main one is the slew of the digital to analogue converter makes the curve virtually smooth again. Plus the fact that your crude illustration neatly avoids showing that, for CD quality audio, peak-to-peak there are 65,536 vertical steps and 41,100 horizontal steps for ever second making each of those absolutely tiny in the first place.

 

Having spent years of my musical "career" struggling to overcome the limitations of analogue systems - the budget ones are terrible, and the good ones require constant maintenance to get the best performance out of them - for all the supposed benefits of analogue audio they can't beat the convenience of digital. IMO both systems have drawbacks when it come to audio fidelity, but for appropriately prepared (mastered) audio I'll take 16bit 44.1kHz or better digital, over any analogue system every time.

 

If you were really serious about analogue audio you'd be looking at high-speed 1/2" 2-track tape with Dolby A NR on a properly calibrated playback system over any vinyl reproduction.

 

For me, so long as the delivery system is not noticeably intruding on the audio signal, I'd rather just listen to the music rather than worry about the format it comes on.

[Leonard Smalls]

1 hour ago, BigRedX said:

Dolby A NR

A? We never used Dolby A after about 1991, wot with Dolby SR (not S!) being that bit better! I used to have a Revox PR99 and an SR unit - problem was that at 30ips even 10" tape reels didn't last very long...

[taunton-hobbit]

[BigRedX]

TBH once your tape speed goes to 15ips and the track width 1/4" you don't really need NR. 

 

And 30ips speed brings its own new set of audio artefacts (IIRC the speed of the tape starts to interact with the bias frequency and not in a good way). 

 

In the end everything is compromise. Improve in one area and you can often make it worse in another.

[Dan Dare]

On 25/09/2021 at 14:13, zbd1960 said:

 

The advantage to the average consumer is that even a fairly cheap digital system will be much better than a cheap badly set-up analogue system. That is why CDs took off so quickly.  

 

Spot on. Vinyl can be fabulous, but you'll be hard pressed to see the benefits on a budget. For the average person, who doesn't have the time, money or inclination to chase the audio dragon, digital gives better results conveniently and relatively cheaply.

 

Horses for courses. For some, hi-fi is a hobby. Nowt wrong with that. However, people who claim one playback method is inherently superior to another are all as bad as each other.

[leroydiamond]

28 minutes ago, Dan Dare said:

 

Spot on. Vinyl can be fabulous, but you'll be hard pressed to see the benefits on a budget. For the average person, who doesn't have the time, money or inclination to chase the audio dragon, digital gives better results conveniently and relatively cheaply.

 

Horses for courses. For some, hi-fi is a hobby. Nowt wrong with that. However, people who claim one playback method is inherently superior to another are all as bad as each other.

Up to earlier this year, my Clearaudio TT and Primare CD 32 player served me very well and cost pretty much the same, when I purchased them. One could out do the other, depending on the mastering of the album that was being played. Both digital and Vinyl are welcome in my world.

[BigRedX]

28 minutes ago, Dan Dare said:

Horses for courses. For some, hi-fi is a hobby. Nowt wrong with that. However, people who claim one playback method is inherently superior to another are all as bad as each other.

 

The problem with any kind of serious HiFi is that most of the supposed advantages are entirely wiped out by the way that anything since 1990 was actually recorded.

 

It would do most "HiFi buffs" a world of good to actually have a look at a typical recording studio and see just how many 100s of metres of very ordinary cable the average audio signal passes through. Add to that the fact that most processing occurs either in the digital domain inside the computer or an a external device that is probably full of tightly-packed surface-mounted components.

 

They would be far better off spending money on some basic acoustic treatment for their listening space instead of the diminishing returns of ever-more expensive and esoteric playback devices (and goes for both analogue and digital systems).

[tegs07]

10 minutes ago, BigRedX said:

he problem with any kind of serious HiFi is that most of the supposed advantages are entirely wiped out by the way that anything since 1990 was actually recorded.

This is true but most of the real anoraks I have met that had the means and obsession to get serious about this rarely listen to anyone who isn’t already dead! They are generally fans of Jazz  and Classical music and in my experience tend to obsess about particular periods of these genre’s.

Edited September 27, 2021 by tegs07

[skidder652003]

On 23/09/2021 at 17:05, SteveXFR said:

 

Judging by what Trace Elliot make these days it'll be a crap lump of plastic from China but it'll be green. 

Hi Karate?

[Dan Dare]

On 27/09/2021 at 15:02, BigRedX said:

 

The problem with any kind of serious HiFi is that most of the supposed advantages are entirely wiped out by the way that anything since 1990 was actually recorded.

 

It would do most "HiFi buffs" a world of good to actually have a look at a typical recording studio and see just how many 100s of metres of very ordinary cable the average audio signal passes through. Add to that the fact that most processing occurs either in the digital domain inside the computer or an a external device that is probably full of tightly-packed surface-mounted components.

 

They would be far better off spending money on some basic acoustic treatment for their listening space instead of the diminishing returns of ever-more expensive and esoteric playback devices (and goes for both analogue and digital systems).

 

Maybe. The starting point is the recording, not how it was made. Obviously, one cannot make up for anything lacking or present in the recording - CD, vinyl or whatever - itself. The idea of hi-fi is to reproduce whatever is on there, good or bad, analogue or digital, as accurately as possible. Some don't actually like it when they can hear too much - key rattle on woodwind instruments, background noise in studios, musicians breathing, dodgy edits (all of which I've heard on recordings played on good quality equipment), etc, but it's all part of the performance.

 

I agree that some acoustic treatment helps, too.

[BigRedX]

How a recording is made is important because it will to some extent dictate how obvious (or not) all these extraneous sounds are. 

 

I don't think that the more expensive and esoteric HiFi does simply reproduce the audio signal as accurately as possible. If it did there would be no place for vinyl since it places a load of compromises upon the recorded audio simply to work as a delivery medium. Also a HiFi would have no controls other than volume and there would only be a single make of each component available because once each device has been made to affect the signal as little as possible there would be no need for any others.

 

However what HiFi really does is to colour the audio signal in a way that each manufacturer considers to be pleasing while denying the fact that there is any colouration going on.