Format wars: How the compact disc endures and the myth of the vinyl revival.

The Library of Congress Wants to Destroy Your Old CDs (for Science)

 Proclivities wrote: 
Maybe thats what it looks like a few days after its spilled on a carpet and it has time to mold up...

 DaveInVA wrote: 
A little off-topic for this thread, but I wonder why they would have named an orange-flavored soft-drink "Green Spot".

 Proclivities wrote: 
The console in that pic probably belonged to the owner of the company and the models were probably his kids.

 DaveInVA wrote: 
Nice.

 Proclivities wrote: 
Oh, and thats a Baird Emerson "Wondergram" from around 1960...
 

 Proclivities wrote: 
As McIntosh was a high end manufacturer there were several companies building their stuff into custom cabinets for people with the bucks. The Thorens TD-124 was considered an audiophool grade table at the time and was available with a factory arm or a blank board so you could mount the arm of your choice on it (most ended up with Shure SME 3009 arms on them). These tables are much sought after today and get stupid money on Flea-Bay.

Here is a better pic of the turntable:

 

 DaveInVA wrote: 
Would the tuner and pre-amp have been available together in a console like that back then?  It's an interesting looking turntable - it looks like the base is made of metal.

 Proclivities wrote: 
A McIntosh C20 pre-amp, McIntosh MR67 Tuner and a Thorens TD-124 Turntable. Owned them all years ago.

 Beaker wrote: 
My favorite is still the super duper fantastic signal integrity digital cables.  I get so tired of seeing. those half digits in the binary stream. 

 black321 wrote: 
Think that's bad?  How about a $1000 IEC power cable that uses, of all things, litz wire!?!

I'd have no problem outfitting a transcription turntable with silver litz wire from the cartridge to the phono preamp.  But what kind of fool would pay extra to allow in frequencies other than the 60VAC that's the only acceptable "signal" for wall power.  What a scam!

 black321 wrote: 
Sorry to burst your bubble, but that's simply not true.  Although the physical "analog" realm offers infinite data points in theory, it's a long way from theory and reality.

First off, there are hard and fast quantum limits, laws of nature that no mortal can break.  That alone busts the premise of that argument.  At a practical level, there are cost and technological limits to the tools that make the equipment that records and plays records.  Ditto for the tape recording equipment that typically plays a very large role in modern music, which spends a lot of time in the studio before it ever sees a disk mastering lab.  On the production side the equipment is built to tolerances that are deemed to exceed the hearing capacity of most people, but still meets price points that allow profits to be made by the studios, labels and artists.  The "high-end" sector of the consumer audio industry likes to pretend that the pursuit of perfection is a valid, even noble goal.  The truth is that it's nothing more than marketing hype.  Pouring money into fancy (and hideously expensive) playback equipment cannot extract what is not there.  There is nothing that's substantively better than pro audio gear.

Dragging a diamond stylus through an undulating groove in vinyl leads to an inevitable result: lost vinyl.  And lost vinyl means lost music content.  So the truth is that vinyl records lose information quite rapidly.  Take care of a CD, and it will lose no information.  When it comes to longer wavelengths, CDDA is a hands-down winner.  44.1k/16 exceeds the limits of human hearing by a substantial margin.  In contrast, vinyl records rely on kludges like RIAA filters to squash bass notes into the allotted space on the disk, and the skill of the mastering engineer to make the best compromise to fit the most music in a fixed area.  At the other end of the audio spectrum, the size of the lathe cutting head and the playback stylus place physical limitations on high frequency information.  And because of that friction, the HF is the first to go.


Again, sorry but no.  A good DAC is certainly one of the best audiophile investments (second only to loudspeakers) around.  But they cannot create new data.  I'm guessing that you're referring to so-called "oversampling" DACs that have become commonplace these days.  In fact this modulation scheme is used to improve on the physical limitations of 1st generation DACs that relied on "brick wall" analog filters to remove ultrasonic artifacts that come with D-A conversion regardless of the storage medium.

The "oversampling"  misnomer refers to the much faster clock rates, as much as 256x the Nyquist frequency that are the key to getting inexpensive, high quality analog output.  A simple process known as interpolation can be used to create new data points to smooth out the rough edges.  But make no mistake, interpolated data points do NOT contain ANY original data.  You cannot recreate data that isn't there.


SACD was a non-starter because its 1-bit/2.8MHz storage format wasn't compatible with existing digital audio handling standards, and there was no incentive to build new gear to accommodate its native format.  It's a sound principle, but a loser in practice.  Since digital music production uses AES/EBU standard 24-bit/96kHz data paths, it only follows that using the same format for consumer playback, requiring no conversion, is the optimal way to go.  Sadly the RIAA's greed/paranoia about releasing grand master quality audio to consumers does not bode well for the long term.

 DaveInVA wrote: 

Hey, you can find some of those thousand dollar cables real cheap on audiogon.com, like this one more than 50% off:
http://www.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/cls.pl?cablintr&1315760800&/Nordost-Odin-Supreme-Reference

  I've invested a few hundred in cables, and noticed some nice nuances in performance, but seriously, $9,900, let alone $20,000 new, for a 2 meter cable?

i'm an 8-track myself

I've been into audio as long as I can remember. My Dad was am engineer in the business and had worked for companies such as Grommes and Knight etc so there was always audio gear around. In High School I worked for Fender doing warranty repair and worked for Musicraft as a repair tech while in college as well as being an engineer at 2 FM stations. Even after I got into computer engineering as a career I also ran a mobile recording studio and did sound for a couple of night clubs as a 2nd career just to help keep closer to music,
I like listening to music the most and can enjoy it about anywhere especially live. But while in my own home environment I like trying to get the best sound quality I can within reason. I have always liked designing and building some of my own equipment as well as repairing old equipment especially old studio quality recording equipment.
I believe that you can only go so far with accurate sound reproduction until you start running to limits of technology and room acoustics. At some point the price for each 1% of improvement gets algorithmically more expensive. I don't go for the snake oil stuff like $5000 speaker cables etc. I do make my own cables though and it doesn't cost much to build top notch cables. 
I prefer vinyl to CD for most serious listening. I am sad that SACD and DVD-A didn't take off as I could have accepted them as a replacement to vinyl though it would suck to have to replace the vinyl with thousands of new shiny discs. At home I don't care about the convenience factor so much and in fact for me there is something therapeutic to the ritual of the proper care and feeding of vinyl. 
I do still enjoy listening to CD's also. I also dont believe everything on vinyl is automatically better than CD or vise versa. Sometimes one is simply mastered better than the other and sometimes something I really want is only available on one or the other and not both. 
I listen to RP pretty much all day when not doing a serious listening session and enjoy it immensely even though it not what would be considered audiophile quality. It doesn't matter because the music is (generally) really good. But sometimes I like listening to music in a higher quality. Its kind of like a cheap (well maybe not that cheap) thrill but without much risk (unless I play it to loud that is). To me audio can be like getting used to finer wines and better beers, The cheap still will still get you just as drunk but its more fun for me if I enjoy the process of it also...

 islander wrote: 

Garbage in, garbage out.  The equipment is only as good as its source ultimately.  The best equipment cannot make a poorly recorded mixed or mastered effort any better.

I have chased my tail for years with half speed vinyl and other things.  As I improve the source, the equipment sounds better.

Just for S & G's, here is my remaster of a vinyl rip of Springsteen's Tunnel of Love I did a month ago.  I posted it over in the journals.

Anyway, download it and give it a listen and and remember that its source is vinyl.  Its at 320k from wav so it should still sound pretty good.

 islander wrote: 



I fall victim to that sometimes. Then again, all that tweaking is rewarding in its own way...like a surfer looking for the perfect wave...when you find the right sound for the music.