Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 367 posts

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#271

Post by yobbo »

naikrovek wrote: post #253
Night_Thastus wrote: post #248

"In the world of audiophiles — where provenance is everything and the quest is to get as close to the sound of an album’s original recording as possible — digital is considered almost unholy." Out of context of the rest of the article, this is total nonsense. While some in the audiophile scene like going analog, none of them debate against the truth that objectively , vinyl is far lower quality. Vinyl doesn't have ne…

if your DAC is a DAC, truly (that is not a high bar) then the audio that comes out of it is a perfect reproduction of the audio that went into the ADC that produced the digital audio, provided it is a true ADC (also not a high bar at all). Nyquist theory proves it. The Ogg people have a fantastic video explaining this. Technology Connections on YouTube has a video about it as well (the Ogg video explains things bette…

Audiophiles sometimes claim they can hear artefacts of the "low" sample rate 44.1 kHz, and only 16 bit samples.

Nowadays there exists audio files recorded in up to 96 kHz with 24 bit samples.

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#272

Post by [deleted] »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #143
thih9 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Almost nothing has ever been recorded and released using only DSD. I don’t understand; I was talking about an album without DSD. Why are you referring to albums produced with only DSD?

My point was tha an album with DSD (only) is so rare that asking about a comparison to album without DSD is a little strange. Almost all albums are produced with digital technology that is not DSD, even the ones that include DSD.

[deleted]

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#273

Post by Tao3300 »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #251
Tao3300 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cymbals always sound like bubbling shit in mp3.

MP3 is not monolithic, and has changed drastically since it was released. You're going to get a pretty terrible experience with MP3 128kbps, whereas modern variable bit rate schemes can actually be quite decent. Personally I prefer to always go lossless, but for most people on most systems, the difference isn't noticeable. (Moreso the better the system gets, ofc)

> Personally I prefer to always go lossless

Oh? Why's that?

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#274

Post by bayindirh »

Tsiklon wrote: post #211
kstrauser wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a real thing, to be sure. The Loudness Wars have completely ruined any number of otherwise decent recordings. The worst I ever heard was Dropkick Murphys's "The Meanest of Times" which had the dynamic range of an air conditioner in Phoenix. Still, you can always take a great analog recording, pipe it into a good ADC, and listen to that sample forever without degradation. I think almost everything can play FLAC…

Metallica's Death Magnetic was another truly dreadful example of the loudness war - Thankfully a better mastered release came out in 2015. I've just got my hands on this release and comparing it against my original copy it is a night and day improvement - especially on "All Nightmare Long".

Yeah, the first release was pure clipping, no music. I remember listening to it and saying? “Did all we wait for this? C’mon”.

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#275

Post by thih9 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #143
thih9 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Almost nothing has ever been recorded and released using only DSD. I don’t understand; I was talking about an album without DSD. Why are you referring to albums produced with only DSD?

My point was tha an album with DSD (only) is so rare that asking about a comparison to album without DSD is a little strange. Almost all albums are produced with digital technology that is not DSD, even the ones that include DSD.

I still don’t get it. Why does it matter here whether DSD is rare or not?

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#276

Post by dieselgate »

Cool article, wasn’t familiar with MoFi or them being a small shop based in Sebastopol.

Interesting context as this seems very appropriate for the current times. As a society we are increasingly facing the digitization of basically everything.

I’m not an audiophile but like vinyl when possible, too bad “purer” all analog recordings are so “difficult” to produce. But hey these recordings are pretty old and maybe we should just be glad with what we have. (Obviously false/misleading advertising is lame but at least the MoFi staff was honest)

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#278

Post by zw123456 »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #248

"In the world of audiophiles — where provenance is everything and the quest is to get as close to the sound of an album’s original recording as possible — digital is considered almost unholy." Out of context of the rest of the article, this is total nonsense. While some in the audiophile scene like going analog, none of them debate against the truth that objectively , vinyl is far lower quality. Vinyl doesn't have ne…

I agree completely. I have a large collection of original shellac 78's some as early as 1930's as well as true vinyl LP's from 1970's. They all sound terrible, what make them cool and collectable is the originality, not some magical thing about them being on shellac or vinyl. The new digital sound quality is far superior, hands down. Buying a reissue vinyl is a waste of money IMO.

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#279

Post by quickthrower2 »

naikrovek wrote: post #253
Night_Thastus wrote: post #248

"In the world of audiophiles — where provenance is everything and the quest is to get as close to the sound of an album’s original recording as possible — digital is considered almost unholy." Out of context of the rest of the article, this is total nonsense. While some in the audiophile scene like going analog, none of them debate against the truth that objectively , vinyl is far lower quality. Vinyl doesn't have ne…

if your DAC is a DAC, truly (that is not a high bar) then the audio that comes out of it is a perfect reproduction of the audio that went into the ADC that produced the digital audio, provided it is a true ADC (also not a high bar at all). Nyquist theory proves it. The Ogg people have a fantastic video explaining this. Technology Connections on YouTube has a video about it as well (the Ogg video explains things bette…

This is trivially correct if you assume:

Perfect reproduction means error less than some threshold e.

“True” means has enough sampling frequency and accuracy to ensure the error threshold is less than e.

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#280

Post by quickthrower2 »

ben7799 wrote: post #117

Audiophile is full of nonsense but one of the more hilarious ones in something like this where the goal is "no digital" is it's been a long time since you could guarantee there was no digital going on between the instrument and the master. They talk about Thriller a lot. Is it possible to have a completely analog copy of Thriller if it turned out a guitar went through a digital rack unit or a digital synthesizer was…

Reminds me of the home espresso world. Just get a good grinder, scales and a half decent machine.

No need for a 20 step process where you are raking the coffee, levelling it off with another widget before tamping, checking the stream with a bottomless filter, etc. etc. and all that jazz.

Post reply on HN