What stereo(s) do you listen to? What do you want? - Page 7

Artisan Fan can't handle the truth!!!

ohoh.. the Truth has arrived and butthurtz to follow.. Danger AF Danger..

I don't think I know this poster.

I'm hurt RJ

Very funny. Don't you have some hard evidence to contradict?

No, it doesn't. It can't. It doesn't have the physical capability to do so. Vinyl has a lower dynamic range, signal-to-noise ratio, poorer frequency response, and poorer channel separation. Any audible sound that vinyl could reproduce, a 16/44 CD could also reproduce.

Better imaging, soundstage, etc. can all be gotten through euphonic enhancements as well as recording more information. Just because it's more enjoyable doesn't necessarily mean there's more information there. I can just as easily point you to records whose mastertapes sound awful, and things were changed or left out to make the final product sound better. Going back to LP, there are well-known physical mechanisms to enhance many of these qualities. For example, LP encodes the two channels as L+R and L-R (sum and difference of the left and right channels). There is a frequency-dependent enhancement of the L-R signal that happens with LP for many physical reasons, and this is a well-known way to enhance soundstaging. There are many other physical effects of LP that are intrinsic to its inherent physical structure that do other things to the sound. Some are euphonic while others sound bad. If you believe in Occam's razor, it would seem to me that the easiest answer for LP's sounding better are the effects of these enhancements rather than something more exotic like suprasonic response or jitter or whatever the audiophile bugbear of the month is. Since you haven't had the curiousity to ask me what I think digital's failings are, I'll lay it out for you. It's the opposite of analog and LP: generally, digital distortions always sound bad, and it's fairly easy to screw up digital, especially for people who are coming from an analog mindset. This includes the engineers who are making equipment as well as the people using it. It doesn't help that it's so easy to use digital audio tools these days either, and you now have people who are using cheap, badly-designed programs and equipment, and they generally don't know what they're doing. Word truncation is still a problem --- Windows didn't get a proper audio mixer until Vista. And if you read the Benchmark Wiki on how to properly set up your computer to send out just bit-accurate samples, it's still a big issue that's not well-understood. Analog was expensive, and people who use it tend to care more about sound than the masses of digital users today. I'm not surprised that people like that have higher production values simply because they care more about the final product. --Andre

Hi Andre, sorry I haven't had time to appropriately answer some of your previous comments about statements I made. Hopefully there will be time to respond. I think your most recent post sums up a lot of things very nicely. This is so true. I can't tell you how many times I've been involved on a musical projects where the ultimate justification for using digital recording was simply for convenience or to save money. Examples: --If someone is making a car commercial, say, they want to be able to edit and edit, since every second has to count. The ability to edit and spew stuff out quickly for the clients is much more highly prized than sound quality or musical performance (think how much a second of advertising time on the Super Bowl costs!) --or, maybe the band can't play with consistent rhythm, or the singer can't sing in tune. Rather than take lessons and practice, most musicians in the studio would rather just have the computer fix or "enhance" their performance. A studio engineer told me the joke, "What do you say to the band that is recording on protools (digital recording software) that has an extremely bad take?" "Come on in! We'll fix it the mix!" I've see people spend hours trying to fix a wretched performance with cheap computer software. Studios tend to like it, because it runs up the bill. This kind of attitude definitely affects the overall quality of digital recordings. There are rare artists that value sound who would like to use analog recoding equipment, but are often not allowed to for financial or logistical reasons. These days it is about as practical and unusual to make a purely analog recording as it is to visit an overseas tailor and get a bespoke outfit made.

You know an amp I have always wanted but never gotten around to buying is:



I've had friends with them and they are great when bridged into monoblocks. I've almost bought one at least six times in the last 20 years, but just never pulled the trigger. Maybe I will this year.

What's so great about it?

I just always found them nifty. They are only about 1ft square, 200 a channel or 400 bridged. A pair of them pumps it out pretty well. I just have always thought they were neat. Very portable too due to size, so a great party amp.