Some good news on Blu Ray Audio

I did say probably, meaning I believe it has potential to be much bigger. Providing that the same care and attention is given to the creation of content as is now (in it's audiophile state) given to vinyl. When the music industry thought it could flog us all CD's they quickly stopped cringe about vinyl just like they now think they can forget about CD's and concentrate on making the 30 second preview of a song the loudest one...

I honestly believe that if the content is right then hi-res digital via either download or Blu-ray would topple vinyl as it would retain the convenience factor. For most vinyl is a faff that they don't really want, sure some love it and always will, but they are a minority.

CD's are in decline, but still amount to a huge amount of sales and are largely still the only way to get a lossless version of most music regardless of mastering quality.

Have just gotten hold of the Queen A Night At The Opera BRA and whilst the good news is that they have included the 2005 5.1 audio from the excellent DVD-A, the bad news is that the stereo master comes from the 2011 compressed remasters.... In other words no more effort has been put into the release other then to simply put together the latest version of what they have as the latest is always best right?

Apart from investing in some decent young bands again, the record industry need to get their marketing folks out of this self created paranoia that people will only buy a version of a song on iTunes etc if it's louder than others... Its absurd. With songs there is usuallly only one version of a song, you either like it or you don't. You don't think, ooooh I like this song but then not download it simply because it might sound a bit quieter than some completely different song... It's incompetent YTS pseudo science that should stay in one of those annoying Pepsi ads.

Fine, compress mp3, iTunes etc tracks for people who buy & listen on the go, it kind of works in a noisy environment if you're too lady to use the volume control or other settings, but then let CD and other higher quality delivery streams have a non-compressed master... If you're going to promote a new hi-res format then do it properly. We're not stupid, and these days it's easy to spot.

 

Vinyl is a niche market that's growing, but it will never reach anything like a major sector again. However, Blu ray will not 'topple' it. You are talking two different markets, one is for those who enjoy the whole vinyl thing, and like to relax with a decent analogue source, the other is for another niche, those who want quality Digital Audio. The latter has never been a big market for the reasons discussed.

Although there is a cross over between the two markets, if you read around, one doesn't take precedent over the other. I certainly wouldn't ditch vinyl for Blu Ray, and doubt many (any?) other dedicated vinyl listeners would. It's not us they need to be aiming at, it's a new, wider market, hence the UM advertising campaign trying to get out there and reach new customers.

And there lies the problem. What new market?

The vast majority are happy with CD and MP3. As I've said, the quality issue doesn't arise with either, as the ad men did their job too well. It's Digital therefore it's good. Why would they take up an expensive medium with limited titles, the majority of which are aimed at, well, old farts like me?

The issue of new artists taking up Blu Ray audio is another ball game altogether. How many new acts release their material on vinyl? Not many, although dance acts tend to. How many release on Hires audio, virtually nil. In fact you can count on one hand the number of recent acts that release on hires. Hires digital is aimed squarely at the older market, and that's limited it since day one. Nothing has changed with Blu Ray.

How do you convince artists to take up a medium that to them isn't going to sell to their audience? Do you seriously see teenagers queueing up to but blu ray versions of the latest Toy Band? Or Dance act? No, nor do I.

Once again, the record producers took the wrong line and ran with it. Instead of driving the new medium at new acts and trying to get artists hooked on it from day one, they are concentrating on re-hashing old albums, and cashing in on the same tired titles for the umpteenth time. Or is that because, actually, they know what they are doing? They know what the market is, it will continue to be a very limited one, and they simply can't be bothered to push the medium on newer acts who know their customers oh, so well.

I had high hopes for Blu Ray Audio, but the same old tactics are being rolled out again, and those hopes are fading fast.

 

I stumbled across this thread and was amazed at some of the comments about CD being rubbish and 24/88 and beyond needed for high quality reproduction. This is simply not true as 16/44 is more than adequate. The 16 bits offers 96dB resolution (aka signal to noise or dynamic range) and the 44.1 KHz sampling frequency offers a frequency response all the way up to 22KHz.

Increasing the sample rate simply extends the available frequency response - that's it as more samples do not make the sample of the sound waves any more accurate. Who here can hear beyond 22KHz? I certainly cannot. There is potential benefit in increasing the bits to widen the available signal to noise but how many amplifiers have a significantly higher signal to noise ratio to even make use of this? And how many recordings actually get anywhere near 100 dB full dynamic range let alone 144dB (24bit)?! And of course to even hear it you'd have to play it at seriously deafening sound pressure levels.

A bad recording will sound bad as MP3, CD or HD format. We should be lobbying record companies for better quality recordings leaving the dynamic range intact rather than chasing more bits and samples.

 

Please don't peddle this argument. It's long been dismissed as a smoke screen. What you can hear above 'x' db is irrelevant as to why you use 24/96 and above to record and playback. 16/44 is. as pointed out elsewhere, the lowest common denominator in Digital Audio, and recording engineers do not use it any more as it cannot record the audio spectrum as accurately as 24/96. It has nothing to do with 'what amplifiers can do', or how much you can hear beyond 22khz.

If you bother to look around, one of the said engineers has demonstrated, using images of recorded sound, just how much of a difference there is. Add in the staircase wave form a CD player produces using 16bit technology and the amount of noise it has to remove (which re-appear as Digital artefacts - unless you use aggressive brickwall filtering) as a result, it's a miracle CD is listenable at all. Using 24bit filters and a 24/96 waveform you don't get the widely stepped waveform of a CD player.

16/44 was all they had available at the time (in the early 80's), no more, no less.

On the last point, there I'd have to agree. Sadly it's a battle we won't win. The same engineers have been battling the industry for years to stop masters being brickwalled and failed.

 

Here we have two examples of filtering to remove audible artefacts. The lower the threshold the greater the chance of 'ringing' (artefacts) becoming audible. Note that the example used is 48khz, not 44, yet even here the hearing threshold is close to the Nyquist filter. The 'room for transition' area is where you have headroom for increasing the filter and moving ringing further out of the audible range. At 48khz there is none, at 96khz plenty. The 48khz filter also has a steep cutoff meaning the chance of artefacts becoming audible is much greater.

As I said, it's isn't as simple as 'you can't hear above 22khz' or '16 bits is adequate'.


There are so many issues with CD audio we don't have time, or the space, to cover them all...

 

I'm sorry but the 22KHz is not 'just cut off' causing ringing; filters are applied above the hearing threshold so it is really as simple as that. Can you hear above 20KHz?

Take a look at this video Xiph.Org Video Presentations: Digital Show & Tell by a sound engineer explaining just why 16/44 is more than adequate and chasing ever increasing bits and samples is utterly pointless. And there's some further reading http://www.lavryengineering.com/pdfs/lavry-white-paper-the_optimal_sample_rate_for_quality_audio.pdf and http://lavryengineering.com/pdfs/lavry-sampling-theory.pdf

 

No-one said it was...

Seen all of those and they've all been discredited. Long ago.

There is a strong correlation between those who don't want to promote Hi resolution Audio and the CD marketing business... It's not worth arguing the other way around, as CD is multi million dollar enterprise while hi res audio is a niche market.

Hence they've been discredited.

I can produce plenty of documents by respectable engineers and Audio companies who argue the complete opposite, but what's the point? It's a no win argument. Oh, and unless you are one of the big three CD manufacturers.

As someone who worked with the CD producers, I would only say one thing; 'ever feel you've been cheated'? (with thanks to John Lydon).

 

Source: Sony Audio.

The steeply stepped waveform of the CD is extremely difficult to filter back into an accurate representation of the analogue form. This is because all those blocks contain digital noise, and to move these out of the audio spectrum is more difficult using lower bit rates and, as above, leaves noise within the Audio spectrum. With a 24bit waveform, there is still work to do, but it requires none of the hard filtering and re-sampling a 16 bit form does thus keeping noise out of the audio spectrum. It's simple really, which, once sampled, is closer to the analogue?

But why am I bothering...

 

Yep why are you bothering? Waveforms are not recreated with those steps you show!! Did you actually watch the video?

Please point me to the plethora of those discrediting what I posted.

 

For me, I come at it from a different perspective.

I do most of my listening on my walkperson or while I'm cooking, on the kitchen set up.

So for me, the argument isn't whether it's possible for others to hear a difference in optimal conditions on great kit. It's whether I can hear a difference in those situations, and I can't.

But I love my music as much as anyone.

Steve W

 

What the hell are you talking about? No really. Those are the analogue waveform, a 16 bit waveform and a 24 bit waveform, and yes the latter pair are exactly how a DAC recreates the waveform before oversampling and filtering.

That post finally proved you are wasting my time. Bye.

Pecker, agree totally. The quality of sound is relative to the situation. I don't listen to high bit wave or flac when using a walkman or in the car. What's the point? Unless you have super high end headphones with serious noise cancelling, or a luxury car. In the kitchen I have the telly on in the background as the sonic's are rubbish.

In the room I use for HiFi though it matters. I have owned mind numblingly expensive CD players and never got anywhere near what I can get from my TT in terms of reproduction. It's only since Hires players came along I started enjoying Digital Audio consistently. The next move is to do what Windhoeks done and install a top quality DAC between computer and HiFi. Then I can stop having to use discs so often.

 

Why is the Lavry pdf pointless? Because after spouting all that guff, Lavry now make - yup, 24/192 DAC's (DA11 for example). Strange considering in 2004 they said it was a waste of time to do so..

 

It really irritates me when people come on these forums speaking utter nonsense pretending that they have some huge authority on a subject that they clearly (not to themselves obviously) have no real knowledge of.

'That was discredited', 'digital noise makes it very hard to recreate..', - utter nonsense plus not actually answering any questions and posting face palms just to emphasise that you must be correct.

I really must point out for others (not for you cos you know better obviously) that those staircase samples do not exist in real life. Samples are simply points in time - the staircase does not exist but people are admittedly confused by this this representation and think that seeing a chart with smaller stairs must be better. In real life The DAC takes the sample points and recreates the sound wave perfectly (like joining dot to dot if you like) back to it's analogue state - there is absolutely no staircase effect. Any frequency upto 22KHz can be perfectly reproduced at 44, higher sample rates do NOT make it any more accurate.

I encourage others to take time to read a bit more and even convert some of their most treasured 24/96 (or higher) to 16/44 or even 14/44 (replay gained if you can) and then ABX them.

My original points stand and in summary:

1. There is little music utilising a dynamic range of more than 96dB.

2. Most recordings have little energy above 20KHz. And how many can hear above 20KHz anyway?

3. Most amplifiers have a s/n ratio of around 100dB. To fully realise even this you would need to play at 120dB (to be above ambient room noise).

4. HD tracks are selling HD versions of albums for £18 that can sound identical on CD. The record companies must be laughing their socks off at the audiophools.

Finally, I'm not saying don't by high res as sometimes these are the best versions

 

I don't want to get involved with the disagreement here, but feel I need to correct a couple of points in the previous post.

The Digital to Analogue Converter is feed with a series of values (44,100 times a second) each of which make it set it's output to that value. Theoretically this would look like the "staircase" that Overkill posted, but filtering "smoothes out" this "staircase" to make it closer to the original sampled waveform.

However "steeper" filtering, trying to reach -100dB by 22kHz (Overkill's 1st Graph) will produce far worse artefacts & phase shifts than a "softer" filter which only needs to reach -100dB by 48kHz (Overkill's 2nd Graph)

A 22.05kHz sinewave will only be sampled at two points per cycle. With a theroectically perfect filter (note: there is no such thing as) an identical sinewave can be re-created.

But if you now shift the original 22.05kHz sinewave forward 90° (qualter of a cycle) the filtered DAC output can only be the same phase as the previous 22.05kHz sinewave as the 22.05kHz can only be reproduced to the nearest 180° (half of a cycle). Phase distortion has been introduced.

Even a 11.025kHz sinewave could only be reproduced to the nearest 90° (qualter of a cycle) and a 5.5125kHz sinewave could only be reproduced to the nearest 45° (eighth of a cycle).

Next consider a 21kHz sinewave. This will also be sampled at close to two points per cycle, however these two points will move/drift over time, giving a digital signal that looks more like a 22.05kHz waveform of varying amplitude. Again distortion.

Now I will agree that >95% of the population are probably incapable of hearing these distortions (and an even larger proportion of the population wouldn't care, even if they could hear them) and therefore CD is adequate for the majority. But that doesn't mean that Hi-Res (96kHz/192kHz) doesn't give a higher quality reproduction for those that want it.

However I would say that overloud mastering (which is common on the majority of new releases) has a far, far bigger effect on perceived sound quality.

 

wow all this KHZ talk goes over my head, but we seem to be straying from the topic of this thread, regardless of the merits and mastering. lets get back to talking about the bluray audio releases and the quality of those!

 

I do get that but my point is who can hear above 20KHz as you also point out yourself?

I also fully appreciate that sometimes the HD version is the better version but this is nearly always because it comes from a better master.

And the dynamic range? Do we really need 144dB - 24 bits? Most new recordings have their dynamic range so horribly squashed anyway.

As others do I check the DR database as that gives a far better indication of a albums sound quality compared to how many bits and samples it has.

I'll take a 16/44 with a DR14 as a good indication that it will sound very good.

HB

 

But the whole point is that artefacts and phase distortions do end up in the audiable range.

Agreed. I would rather have a 16/44 CD mastered at a sensible level with a good dynamic range, than a crushed/compressed/clipped Hi-Res file.

Quite right. I'll get back in my hole.

 

Where and at what level? Can you actually hear this? Have you tried converted a hi-res file to 16/44 and ABX'd? If you can honestly hear any difference then I'll bow out gracefully!

That's enough from me. Enjoy the music and forget chasing ever larger bits and samples!

 

Utter drivel.

The underlined part is some of the worst rubbish I have ever read on here, and that's saying something. The staircase waveform is exactly how the wave appears before oversampling takes place, according to every Audio manufacturer and Digital expert I have every seen. Those wave images were taken from Sonys own website, so you are effectively saying a respected manufacturer of Digital equipment and the co creator of Compact Disc is wrong?

Wow!

I bow to your mighty wisdom oh great one...

Yes sampling takes place along a time line, the graph shows that! However, those points are not (yet) an accurate representation of the waveform. It has to go through two more stages before that happens. Yet, you don't seem to grasp that...

"One limitation results from the approximations required to encode the real amplitude of the
signal into a discrete value. In reality, the signal always lies between two consecutive levels.
This causes noise in the digital domain and the limits dynamic range; with more bits, you have
better amplitude precision and an equivalent increase in dynamic range. Another limitation is
the sampling frequency. With a higher sampling frequency, you have more samples of the
signal in one timeframe. This extends the available bandwidth of the system. Imagine a
decrease in the size of the steps as the amplitude resolution (number of bits) increases and/or
sampling frequency increases. A finer staircase shape (less jagged appearance) allows the use
of a simpler reconstruction filter, which is directly related to sound quality. The less effect the
filter needs to have, the less it affects sound quality. In more scientific terms, the sampling
frequency dictates the highest possible frequency the system can reproduce. Nyquist has
demonstrated the mathematical law which states that a sampling system can reproduce
frequencies of up to half the sampling frequency. The system has to filter out all frequencies
above half the sampling frequency, which is where unwanted artifacts of the digitized signal
(the staircase) reside. The audio CD has a specified bandwidth ceiling of 20kHz, leaving a small
gap between that upper frequency and half the sampling rate which is 22.05kHz. The filter
must be very steep (high order) to remove information above 22.05kHz but still leaving
information under 20kHz. Such a filter was developed at the inception of CD playback and was
named the “brickwall filter”. This filter had a terrible impact on sound quality." Moon Audio.

Note the word 'staircase'. Again, it seems you know more than Moon Audio!


Your attempt to discredit anyone who doesn't agree with you just keeps digging you deeper. Keep going, it's getting funnier with each post!

 

You are correct sir, and I apologise! Got the Amy Winehouse release, and well wasn't that impressed. Nice album, just not realised that well in Blu Ray.

 

Eric Clapton Give Me Strength 5CD/1-Blu-Ray Audio, Excellent, I highly recommend it

Eric Clapton Give Me Strength 5CD/1-Blu-Ray Audio-Elusive Disc

 

Groan. I'm not trying to discredit anyone but do get irritated by patronising people dismissing things without actually answering questions asked.

Those staircase graphs are a graphical representation of samples. The right angled stairs do not actually exist as there are no actual samples at these right angled points. They are graphical representations designed to easily show the number of sample points - not how the samples actually are. The video I posted a link to explains this far more eloquently than I can. Please take a look if you haven't done so already.

16/44 offers enough resolution for me and my ears cannot tell the difference. I do buy 24/96 but only if I'm absolutely sure that it has come from a better master than that used for the CD. I don't buy them just because they have more bits and samples.

I feel that this has become unpleasant enough and I'm sure we both have better things to do.

Over and out.

 

You posted above, read your own words, that I (and others) have posted 'utter nonsense'. I then posted examples to argue my case, you then finish with 'I get irritated by people dismissing things without actually answering questions asked'. What do you think I've been doing? I've posted graphs, links, texts to try and appease your sense of wrongdoing, yet you dismiss them (or ignore them) as if they aren't there.

As for your argument over the staircase, I'm not going to argue with someone clinging to a belief in the face of evidence produced from genuine experts in the field. I'm sorry, but arguing with Moon Audio and Sony is just arrogance of the first water. The staircase exists because that is the waveform produced by those samples before oversampling. Only after filtering does the waveform match the analogue wave. Why is this so hard to grasp?

I then pointed out that Lavry, who you quoted, have totally shifted their position on HiRes Audio and now produce 24/192 DAC's and you pointedly ignored that.

Some guy postulating online in a video does not make a convincing case as there are plenty of people out there doing the same thing on both sides, and frankly I accept no-ones argument that does that. It's just posing and talking crap at the same time.

You came to this thread determined to make a point and were not interested in any counter argument. Fine. But don't get nasty when people react to being told they are talking nonsense from the very first post!

 

OK a few examples. Your first reply dismissed reports as being discredited a long time ago. I asked you to link me to these. I asked if you could hear above 20KHz. I asked what the point of have recordings with s/n greater than 100dB.etc. If I missed your replies then I apologise.

I'm at a loss as to why you will not accept that the staircase graphs are just representations and do not show the samples as they truly are. Stair steps do not exist in the sampled signal itself (unless you create artificial samples for oversampling) and each sample is of an instant in time. Between those instants is the sound (analogue waveform) that we are sampling (or attempting to re-create). If we drew a line from the other then we would not see the sample points - a perfect sound wave would be shown instead. Clearly this is no good when trying show someone graphically which has more samples as each will appear exactly the same hence the staircase chart that is used by Sony et al. Two samples can recreate a soundwave perfectly and there is no step between the two. Sony's chart will show two bars to indicate to the viewer that there are two samples with a step but in reality there are just two samples at two points in time - there is no additional sample at the middle of the step at a right angle!

I did miss your question about DAC. Well I'm guessing that if their DACs aren't selling and/or high res music is available then they have to offer it. Supply and demand.

That guy 'posing' in a video certainly talks a lot of sense to me explaining things in layman's terms. Don't agree with him? So be it.

 

Lavrys report, unless they want to end up looking pretty stupid, has been discredited by a simple fact - they now produce 24/192 DAC's. 'Supply and demand' my sainted trousers. If you put down (in writing) that you totally disbelieve something and set out to discredit it, you look as silly as Jeremy Clarkson driving an electric car - and loving it. Something even he isn't stupid enough to do. Likewise, unless you believe in a product, don't put it on the market. Somewhere along the line Lavry have had a change of heart. If they were a mainstream Audio manufacturer I 'might' accept your theory, they aren't. They are a pro manufacturer and as such they are less susceptible to the latest trends in the market. There are manufacturers who still turn out 16/44 DAC's as they agree with you that there is no need for higher bit rates, and I respect that.

The human hearing range has not been fully determined, on average you cannot hear above a certain level. I don't know what I can hear now, I suspect at my age a lot less than the average. The S/N ratio of an amplifier is irrelevant to the issue. The only one that matters is the source.

I am equally at a loss as to why you think a perfect wave is completed by the samples across time. It isn't, and nowhere can I find anyone (credible) that says it is. I even found (on an engineering site) the staircase as a visual representation on a spectrograph. They then showed the result of filtering, and low and behold, a perfect wave.

"Since 16-bit words are used, there are 65,536 possible values (216).
When the analog signal is recreated using a digital filter followed by a digital-to-analog
converter (DAC), found inside every CD Player, all of these encoded numerical values are
restored to their original amplitudes with respect to the time axis, recreating a signal with a
staircase shape; each step’s limit corresponds to the finite value in time and amplitude of the
encoded digital signal. This signal is then sent to a reconstruction filter that “smoothes” out the
staircase shaped signal, creating an output signal without all the jagged steps. This result is an
analog signal, which should closely resemble that of the original analog signal." Moon Audio

Note the words 'staircase shaped signal'. Not graph, not representation.

Again, are you saying Moon Audio are wrong?

There are plenty of videos out there that 'sound like they are talking a lot of sense' in particular if they are saying what you want to hear.

If you don't think Hires is for you and 16/44 is better as you can't hear any difference, and you'd said that to start with, there is no case for an argument. You are fully entitled to hold that belief and I have no right to tell you any different. However, the opposite holds also holds true. There are a lot of people on here who enjoy Hires Audio, have lost faith in CD, and have every right to say so and why.

I'm sorry you can't see that.

 

Please - truce.

Let's agree to disagree on the staircase thing. Yes the filters effectively fill in the gaps so same end result.

Re-reading through these posts on a Friday evening after a hard week at work (like all of us I'm sure) I can see I did overreact to some of your posts. Whilst perhaps a little antagonistic they certainly did not merit my comment of 'utter nonsense'. For that I am sorry and I deserved the digs back.

Hi Res tracks are of course technically superior (although they do have issues of their own that are not really mentioned here). The overall point that I was trying (and failed) to make was that 16/44 is already on the limit of most people's systems and hearing.

I'm not normally obnoxious here (honestly!) and hope we can converse in future posts where we cross.

HB

 

Happy to agree to disagree.

I won't comment on 16/44 and what people can hear thing as it's an argument that's circular, and it's been done to death here and elsewhere.

As you'll see on other posts I'm not bowled over by any medium. I prefer vinyl as it gives me the most of what. That's not to say in the future a Digital medium will not replace it in that respect. I have issues with HDtracks, and I've been a critic of their bad habit of not giving lineage of the mastering and sources they use. I am not easily impressed when it comes to re-issued vinyl, SACD and DVD-A never mind CD. I would agree totally with one of your earlier comments that just because something is in hires doesn't mean it's automatically better. In particular if it's just an upsampled redbook wave from a poor quality master (Hi HDtracks). Good mastering, solid engineering, and a lack of post mastering tinkering by record companies is critical in getting a decent version of anything.

In a way, rather sadly, as a former HiFi salesman, and seller of High End gear at one point, I am a highly critical listener of all recordings I hear no matter how they are delivered.

No problem at all. There is no-one on the Music forum I am not happy to converse with.

A difference of opinion does not an enemy make.

 

Thank you.

My love of Hi-Fi began in the early 80's just before I became a teenager. My Dad was into his Hi-Fi at the time and he started me off with a Leak amp, Tuner and speakers along with a Technics cassette deck. I added a Dual 505 and my vinyl collection began. My Dad was friends with one of the original founders of Rega (Tony Relph - the RE in Rega) who left to start his own company building Magnum amplifiers. I think he was also involved with Michell as well as I remember that he had very early versions of the GyroDec at his house partnered with his amps and some huge Spendor (I think) speakers. The sound just blew me away - the power and clarity was amazing and my love affair with Hi-Fi took off.

Forward into the late 80's and CD had arrived with so many promises of that elusive perfect sound. It didn't quite happen and didn't sound quite right at the time did it? Cold sounding was an apt description. I think that this was mainly due to the poor DACs around at the time along with some poor mastering thrown in for good measure . Move forward into the 90's and the DACs were much, much better and CDs actually started to sound good! Then the record industry decided to start mastering louder and louder and the CDs sounded worse than ever and the Hi-Fi machine began to turn its back on the format.

Before I realised that the record companies were now compressing recordings I began to fall out of love with Hi-Fi as I just was not enjoying listening to music any more but it was kept alive by moving into home cinema too. I bought so many re-mastered versions of this that and the other in the 00's and now feel completely ripped off by the record companies. Fast forward to now in the digital era devoid of CD transports it so easy to measure the DR and refer to websites such as the DR database along with sites like this to get a good feel for whether something will sound good.

Those poor sound engineers back in the 90's who were around during the transition of sensibly mastered levels to the 'make it louder' ones. It must have been soul destroying to hear their work ruined.

Now? Well I'm enjoying good music again both new and old. For the older stuff I try to hunt down second hand CDs that I know are of great quality rather than the crap remasters. The problem with newer recordings is that even most of the original masters have probably had too much compression applied (which of course can never be properly restored) so there are no real alternative versions. However, I do think that the record companies are beginning to realise that there is a niche market for better sounding music and releasing it digitally - albeit at a premium. Or perhaps it is due to the boom in vinyl where people believe it has far better SQ than the CD (they can sound better but not because it is a better format - just better executed with less compression [IMO - I do NOT wish to start a war on this!]) so we end up with 24/96 masters meant for vinyl being made available digitally with a much better dynamic range than the standard red book CD version. Now those I'm happy with!

 

My love affair with Audio started in the 70's. I had access to some reasonable Garrad stuff, and then in the 80's my uncle (who owned his own business) bought a HiFi system to match his wealth - Audio Research Pre/power, Oracle Delphi and Kef 104's. At that point I realised what HiFi really was.

By the time I went into working in the industry I was thoroughly disillusioned with vinyl. and deeply impressed with the new(ish) scratch and pop free medium. Fast forward to when I left the trade and I owned a high end TT and a high end CD player, but I rarely used the latter. The day to day exposure to CD and it's shortcomings, which I have never got around despite wasting a fortune on increasingly expensive players, switched me off for good. The limitations of the medium and it's inability to reproduce music as I wanted it ended my relationship with Digital - at that point. I would argue, as did the HiFi companies at the time, it wasn't the DAC's that improved, they haven't, if anything 1bit tech was a step backward, but the shaping techniques they were using to cynically create a more 'analogue' sound.

In other words CD didn't improve it's actual reproduction of the analogue, they just tailored it to sound less clinical. I won't name, names (because he'd kill me! ), but a certain famous companies head rep put it at the time 'it sounds just like a TT now' when referring to his companies breakthrough CD player.

It didn't, but you know what I mean.

Ironically, the Digital revolution gave the TT manufacturers a well deserved kick up the rear. Since the dawn of the CD age, the World of Analogue has undergone it's own revolution. The engineering has improved TT's, tonearms, and cartridges beyond the recognition of anyone who had a crummy 1970's, early 1980's deck. Unlike CD, the laws of diminishing return do not apply to TT's. The more you spend the better it gets, as the engineering and tolerances keep on getting finer. The only limits are common sense, your wallet and of course, your ears.

CD players though, well, I've heard five figure efforts, and I wouldn't trade them for my miserly £2,000+ affair. When it comes to Digital I'm a Hires man, and my next buy will be a high end DAC to run between the PC and HiFi.

I would (IMO) argue analogue is better, it is able to reproduce sound in a way CD never has and never will. But, as you say, it's not worth going down that road! Again, as it's been done to death.

One thing I would say, is check carefully those 'original' CD pressings. Some are very good no doubt, 'but', at the time the record companies were throwing the new medium out as fast as possible and using whatever master came to hand. There are famous examples of dodgy masters, even cheap tt's being used to master early CD's. Some Led Zep early pressings have the channels reversed... If I was a serious CD buyer, I would be hunting down Japanese CD's from that era, not UK or USA pressings, unless the lineage was crystal clear.

Have fun, and thanks for the potted history. It's always interesting reading how people got into Audio.

 

We really are at polar opposites regarding what's better digital or analogue? - and I do respect that!

This thread has prompted me to do a little more in depth reading on digital audio. I do have a 'fairly' good grasp of how digital audio works (sampling, bit rates, Nyquist etc.) but I'm going to order some reading material on this (Signals and Systems for Dummies perhaps?) so that I do not leave myself so cruelly exposed due to poorly worded explanations in future!

Just one final question if I may? Thanks for the tip on the Japanese pressings but why is it that they get better UK & US masters to press their CDs from? Seems very unfair considering they will have come from the UK and US!