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A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

washingtonpost.com

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

#81

Post by kazinator »

kstrauser wrote: post #57
kazinator wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 100% fine for someone to say that they subjectively prefer the sound quality of a record player to a CD It's not intellectually fine, only fine in the sense that it's well within the bounds of free speech.

I subjectively prefer to add sriracha to my burrito. That's intellectually fine. It doesn't make it an objectively better burrito.

Yes, because the sriracha can be confirmed to exist.

If you say that waving your hand over the shriracha while murmuring a magic incantation makes it taste better, then that may not be so intellectually fine any more.

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

#82

Post by mav88 »

allears wrote: post #45

People who claim CDs have more dynamic range than analog are missing the point. Think of it in terms of graphics. 8 bit graphics can represent totally black, or totally white. That's a complete dynamic range. But it's the in-between shades that require more bits to specify. It's the same with audio. It's not how soft or how loud a recording can get. It's the subtle shades of variation. 16 bits is pretty good, but not…

16-bit 44kHz is fine for playback and stair stepping does not exist:

https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

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

#84

Post by tptacek »

In 2021, on the MoFi page, about their one-step process:

MFSL engineers begin with the original master tapes and meticulously cut a set of lacquers.

Today:

MFSL engineers begin with the original master recordings, painstakingly transfer them to DSD 256, and meticulously cut a set of lacquers.

Meanwhile, Michael Fremer, "the dean of audiophile writing":

I’ve now spoken to someone who would know and who confirmed, out of necessity off the record for now, that in 2018 Mobile Fidelity cut lacquers using analog master tapes (not copies). Will speculative click bait YouTube videos claiming otherwise be taken down after reading this?

(A bunch of this is in the article, I just think the quotes are kind of funny).

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

#85

Post by mturmon »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #66
doix wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's been many years since I looked at this stuff, but the reason for higher sample rate isn't to do with humans being able to hear over 20khz. If you sample at 44khz you need a high pass filter at 22khz to avoid aliasing. Since that's pretty close to 20khz, it needs a pretty sharp drop off. Having a filter with a sharp drop off can introduce artifacts. With 96khz sampling rate, you don't need as a sharp drop off…

[ EDIT: contents of this post were factually incorrect. What Kazinator wrote in response is correct, and I don't want to leave incorrect ideas floating around. ]

This explanation loses me at "infinity per dB" ... and I'm an EE. I think you're trying to cover too much ground here, it's really confusing to try to understand what you mean.

I believe the comment you're responding to is talking about the analog filter that is needed to avoid aliasing -- as the first words of your comment correctly note/explain.

And in particular, the original comment seems to be noting the phase distortion (in frequencies near the cutoff) that analog brick-wall filters will cause. This has been a design contention for decades, really, ever since the CD format was introduced.

It's a big design space, with options for gentler analog filters, followed by very fast digital sampling, and further tricks with filtering in the digital domain, where you don't have to worry about getting great capacitors, etc.

It may be out-of-scope to lay all that out in one paragraph!

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

#86

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

thih9 wrote: post #63

> “These people who claim they have golden ears and can hear the difference between analog and digital, well, it turns out you couldn’t.” But was there an album without DSD to compare to and hear the difference? I guess most people heard just the album with DSD (that admittedly sounded great). What would happen if there was also a One Press version without DSD? Would people with “golden ears” be able to recognize it…

Almost nothing has ever been recorded and released using only DSD. Why not? Most fundamentally because you can't edit DSD data, it has to be converted to PCM format first. This means it can only be used for live takes, with nothing done except topping & tailing the recording.

There are are few "ultra-audiophile" recordings that have been made this way, but so few of them that the question of whether it's better or audibly different is almsot irrelevant.

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

#87

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

allears wrote: post #45

People who claim CDs have more dynamic range than analog are missing the point. Think of it in terms of graphics. 8 bit graphics can represent totally black, or totally white. That's a complete dynamic range. But it's the in-between shades that require more bits to specify. It's the same with audio. It's not how soft or how loud a recording can get. It's the subtle shades of variation. 16 bits is pretty good, but not…

No. A CD audio recording can contain literally all the information in the audio spectrum with enough dynamic range to capture human breathing and a jet flyover simultaneously.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist–Shannon_sampling_theor...

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

#88

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

radicaldreamer wrote: post #59
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #35

Seems like now that it's out in the open, there'd be a lucrative market in selling the DSDs directly, rather than waiting until it goes to the labels or vendors to re-rip the vinyl remasters into FLAC/MP3?

There is a market for DSD albums: https://www.nativedsd.com/ I can see why people would be angry about the deception, but DSD is probably the highest fidelity audio anyone has ever heard (with the right equipment). Audiophiles should be celebrating a situation in which we today can listen to albums in higher fidelity than anyone except those who were around when they were being recorded... and that quality is accessi…

You can't edit DSD data in any conventional sense. This makes the use of fully DSD recordings rather limited in more or less any style of recorded music.

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

#89

Post by Nav_Panel »

cammikebrown wrote: post #30
kstrauser wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That whole line of thinking just blows me away. It's possible to accurately sample and reproduce any vinyl recording in the digital realm. It's absolutely not possible to accurately record every digital recording onto vinyl. For instance, it's not hard at all to make bass so loud that it causes the needle to leap out of the track, or treble so high that the needle can't accurately track the high frequency vibrations.…

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…

Yep. This is why I like buying original 80s CDs where they just chucked the master tape onto a digital disk, rather than post-2000 reissues where they slap a limiter on the master and jack it up +8 dB.

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

#90

Post by cool_dude85 »

djbusby wrote: post #64
kstrauser wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. Boost the mids on your EQ and you're halfway there.

What's the other half? Magic in the amp-circuit?

Thousand dollar rocks and crystals to place around your room.
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