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A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

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

#321

Post by palimpsests »

btown wrote: post #113
cammikebrown wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s really funny about this is that although CDs objectively can present a greater dynamic range, the loudness wars have created a lot of highly compressed CDs that do sound worse than a lot of vinyl, where it often seems that more cars is taken with mastering because of the limitations of the medium. Additionally, a lot of early 80s albums sound better on vinyl because digital mastering wasn’t as good then. It is…

> it often seems that more cars is taken with mastering I know this was a typo, but tools like https://shop.audified.com/products/mixchecker (with a literal "sedan" button) and articles like https://ask.audio/articles/the-final-mix-using-your-car are sadly indicative of the emphasis in modern mastering on sounding good on car speakers - which is the entire problem in a nutshell.

modern mastering does not optimize fidelity in a car at the expense of other modes of listening, and these articles do not indicate as such.

modern mastering does take into account a highly popular listening environment, to ensure that the mix sounds good there as well.

the second article you posted is talking about using a car as one of several environments in which to test a mix. because it’s a “known” reference in a real-world environment (your ears are used to listening to mastered music on a car stereo).

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

#322

Post by dreamcompiler »

112233 wrote: post #319
dreamcompiler wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The input of every competent ADC process is always a well-designed multipole lowpass analog filter below the Nyquist frequency, so yes. EDIT: This also applies to sigma-delta sampling. Although there you can often get away with a simpler single-pole input filter.

So you could claim to be able to reconstruct output of that filter. Which still is not the case — you cannot have signal to be both aperiodic and band-limited: either in time domain or in frequency domain signal will be periodic. So no real (that is, finite) signal satisfies requirements of Nyquist theorem. Not only that, your DAC needs to have infinite lookahead to reproduce the same input that was passed to ADC.

Okay you're saying mathematical perfection is not achievable in the real world. Fine.

It doesn't matter.

What matters is that with a digital signal processing chain you essentially have a knob you can turn to approach mathematical perfection as closely as you wish, at least until you reach the point where the inherent limitations of your analog components begin to matter. And that point is far, far beyond where human hearing can tell the difference.

But with analog signal processing you reach the limitations of analog componentry much quicker, while you are still well within the noticeable range of some humans to tell the difference. This is because the entire chain is analog and thus no part of the chain is immune to information loss or added noise. With a digital chain, only the ADC and DAC stages require high quality analog componentry. Everything in between is pure math.

Neither process is capable of overall mathematical perfection, but digital can approach it much more closely than analog.

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

#323

Post by 112233 »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #322
112233 wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you could claim to be able to reconstruct output of that filter. Which still is not the case — you cannot have signal to be both aperiodic and band-limited: either in time domain or in frequency domain signal will be periodic. So no real (that is, finite) signal satisfies requirements of Nyquist theorem. Not only that, your DAC needs to have infinite lookahead to reproduce the same input that was passed to ADC.

Okay you're saying mathematical perfection is not achievable in the real world. Fine. It doesn't matter. What matters is that with a digital signal processing chain you essentially have a knob you can turn to approach mathematical perfection as closely as you wish, at least until you reach the point where the inherent limitations of your analog components begin to matter. And that point is far, far beyond where human…

Absolutely agree. Even more, once you are in digital, you can have actual mathematical perfection, that is reproducible and does not degrade with time.

I just seem to take issue when Nyquist is getting inwoked. That is a purely mathematical result. It is sufficient (and I think required, too) to plug source into ADC+DAC, measure the output and show that the difference is insignificant. And much less than, say, with tape.

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

#324

Post by apohn »

toast0 wrote: post #231
jamiek88 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there’s deffo something to that. Hence the cassette revival for those of us of a certain vintage.

I think I'm in the right vintage for that, but did cassettes ever sound good? I could get nostalgic for the sound (especially fast forward/reverse, which is lovely), and I probably never had good equipment, but tapes were always kind of warbly for me. I had access to older records too, which could sound good when there wasn't too much hissing and popping and they weren't skipping. Some records were maybe off balance?…

>I think I'm in the right vintage for that, but did cassettes ever sound good?

Compared to CDs? Definitely not! Not to mention how many people listened to homemade mixtapes and copies, which made the audio quality even worse.

Did they sound good enough that you could dance, relax, have a good time, be consoled when you were unhappy, or whatever people did with music? Absolutely.

Even when CDs did eventually come out, I far preferred a WalkMan to a Discman. I could put a Walkman in one pocket and a cassette in the other. That wasn't easy with CDs.

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

#325

Post by sneak »

jamiek88 wrote: post #318
macintux wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a few songs ripped from CDs over the years that I’ll be very unhappy to lose if iTunes Match ever goes away, since I’ve lost the CDs and as far as I know they simply aren’t online. Such a great service.

Same. A couple of the cds ‘rusted’ and no longer play. Others lost in moves etc. I hope we get plenty of warning before they axe it. Imagine that being a google service?!

If your Apple ID gets accidentally suspended because of a false positive from the "can't turn it off" clientside CP local file scanning that Apple is planning to roll out to all of our devices, you won't get any warning.

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

#326

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

thih9 wrote: post #275
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The "distress" from the audiophile community in this case was that DSD formed a part of the signal chain from the original analog (magnetic tape) masters to their newly printed vinyl. They wanted a signal chain that was completely analog.

Then, alongside that, is the belief by a slightly different set of audiophiles that DSD is the best digital format there is, and that recordings made only with DSD is as good as you can get (possibly, for some of them, better than pure analog).

The difficulty with the 2nd group's belief is that there are very few recordings that exist which are pure DSD, and their beliefs about PCM mean that a DSD+PCM process is inherently flawed. Consequently, establishing the superiority of pure DSD is somewhat irrelevant, when there's almost nothing you can listen to that is produced that way.

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

#327

Post by jamiek88 »

apohn wrote: post #324
toast0 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I'm in the right vintage for that, but did cassettes ever sound good? I could get nostalgic for the sound (especially fast forward/reverse, which is lovely), and I probably never had good equipment, but tapes were always kind of warbly for me. I had access to older records too, which could sound good when there wasn't too much hissing and popping and they weren't skipping. Some records were maybe off balance?…

>I think I'm in the right vintage for that, but did cassettes ever sound good? Compared to CDs? Definitely not! Not to mention how many people listened to homemade mixtapes and copies, which made the audio quality even worse. Did they sound good enough that you could dance, relax, have a good time, be consoled when you were unhappy, or whatever people did with music? Absolutely. Even when CDs did eventually come out,…

Yep plus early ‘discman’ didn’t have anti skip and battery life was terrible.

Cassettes we’re easy to remix, record, share.

The physical mixtape was a cultural touchstone of romance and friendship for a while there.

So yeah, I guess ‘good enough’.

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

#328

Post by jamiek88 »

sneak wrote: post #325
jamiek88 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. A couple of the cds ‘rusted’ and no longer play. Others lost in moves etc. I hope we get plenty of warning before they axe it. Imagine that being a google service?!

If your Apple ID gets accidentally suspended because of a false positive from the "can't turn it off" clientside CP local file scanning that Apple is planning to roll out to all of our devices, you won't get any warning.

You mean the hash search.

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

#329

Post by macintux »

sneak wrote: post #325
jamiek88 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. A couple of the cds ‘rusted’ and no longer play. Others lost in moves etc. I hope we get plenty of warning before they axe it. Imagine that being a google service?!

If your Apple ID gets accidentally suspended because of a false positive from the "can't turn it off" clientside CP local file scanning that Apple is planning to roll out to all of our devices, you won't get any warning.

Can we not flog this dead horse?

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

#330

Post by akaij »

creakingstairs wrote: post #232
peanut_worm wrote: post #176

Audiophiles are funny. I remember seeing some guy on the internet was selling expensive “sound crystals” that you would put near your stereo that would make the sound “warmer” or “clearer”.

Someone shared this link last time there was a thread about audiophiles. This person claims their custom memcpy makes the sound better. https://www.audioasylum.com/forums/pcaudio/messages/11/11997...

Thank you for this! Made my day :)
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