Here's the deal. LPs actually DO sound better, but only because it's a write once, it is what it is medium and there's not a bunch on 0's and 1's doing gymnastics in the converters building on/off simulacra as the waveforms are processed. It's not "warmer". It's simply doing what it was told in linear time.

Same thing with tubes. Tubes are NOT "warm" or any of that horsesh*t. The reason valves sound better is the same reason. It is the most linear amplification device on earth. Period. Electrons moving in a vacuum between two grids. There's no "tube color". What your hearing is the sound of no color at all. No switching noise, no on/of malarkey, no slew rates.

A well tweaked tube rig (no overdrive / properly biased) and a turntable with really good speakers will absolutely floor you with detail because there's no big fat rush. No "cheaper, smaller" dictum. Just big, fat, honking electricity hoovers pushing power in a linear manner, constantly, waiting for the signal to hitch a ride.

If you don't give a sh*, cool, but that's why this stuff is so expensive. It does what it's supposed to do. Reproduce the waveforms etched into the recording absolutely without color or additive goo. And 12,000.00 speaker wire is absolute malarkey, as is most audiophile voodoo.

MadSkillz: BooBoo23: bunner: Here's the deal. LPs actually DO sound better.... Reproduce the waveforms etched into the recording absolutely without color or additive goo. And 12,000.00 speaker wire is absolute malarkey, as is most audiophile voodoo.

All of this.

Yes, LPs sound better because of all the dropped low and high end that could never make it into the recording.

The RIAA curve actually solved quite a bit of that. I admit, if you gots ta have dat bass slapping the living sh*t out of your floorboard joist spaces, as I often do, it's a limited medium. If you want plain old flat out "that's what the producer signed off on verbatim" fidelity, it's the jazz.

Short version, 44.1/16 is dog droppings.

In Canada, milk comes in bags.

In America, soldiers come home in bags.

Coincidence?

/Lick my Last Post

b2theory: You can replicate the old tube system or design whatever you consider to be perfect.

No, you can create a simulacrum of it. Replete with switching noise. There's a reason that the recording industry is being told to buy digital algorithms of the stuff it was told to throw away.

You may think I'm talking out of my arse, and that's certainly your privilege, but I mixed a few records, here and there, and tracked some live concerts from rock to classical and mixed a few (thousand) live shows and I know one thing.

A simulacrum will always be nothing more.

Yes there's good converters. I prefer none, when possible. Petition the RIAA to abandon 44.1/16 and it will help.

SJKebab: bunner: Here's the deal. LPs actually DO sound better, but only because it's a write once, it is what it is medium and there's not a bunch on 0's and 1's doing gymnastics in the converters building on/off simulacra as the waveforms are processed. adding a flavour of distortion that I find pleasing. It's not "warmer". It's simply doing what it was told in linear time based on the characteristics of the system as a whole as considered as a filter.

Fixed.

No, actually, you're just trying to be clever and put words in my mouth. You blew it. Please pack up your projector, and move along.

Oh, and as far as "pleasing distortion" I'l take a well mastered LP on a well designed system in a well designed room over any HOLYSWEETMOTHEROFSH*TTHISTHINGISSMASHEDTO0dBFANDTHENSOME crunchy, airless CD.

SJKebab: it's for this reason that I consider the whole argument to be bollocks. Great equipment will sound great. shiat equipment will sound shiat. No need to turn it into an analog vs digital argument at all.

I agree about the recording chain artifacts. But that's the beauty of recording things. You can choose your tools and battleground Most great recordings are, like most great films, utter artifice or very little artifice. Analogue, to me, DOES sound better especially as far as dynamics. But, mostly for classical, folk and jazz and documentary type recordings. For hip hop, balls to the wall rock and most MIDIpop stuff, yeah. Digital is useful. However, 44.1/16 is still bollocks, as well.

Sgygus: SJKebab: No need to turn it into an analog vs digital argument at all.

Even on my mediocre equipment, LPs sound amazingly better. If only they weren't such a pain in the ass.

It's odd how, over the last twenty years, and I do it too, we've come to equate things that have weight and take up space to a pain in the ass.

Sgygus: , LPs are from a time that moved at a slower pace.

Amen.

GreenAdder: [i.imgur.com image 640x480]

No problem at all. : ) There's a reason that pristine vinyl is going for 16.99 to 70.00 a pop and .mp3's are 99¢ if you can get it.

SJKebab: LP record vs digital playback of the same song with a DSP representation of the LP player/LP/needle combo

Yeah! Then we can get a hi-res paint by number Mona Lisa and go to the Louvre. Simulacra. Is there anything they can do?

Ever noticed there's people who collect things and say "I GOT 9287045987298 MOAR THAN U!" and people who use things?

SJKebab: Similarly, the LP has a certain "warmth" to it,

Actually, no. It doesn't. It's twitchy, easily ruined and needs an expensive styles to play back on a regular basis accurately. It is, however, not a digital raster of representational maths. Digital is video. Vinyl, and really good tape, is film. There's no "warmth" any more than there's a thing called "tube warmth". Tubes are simply completely linear devices. As is vinyl and film.

GreenAdder: Yes, because LPs would be more expensive and rarer, and therefore people who prefer such things are better than everyone else.

You know, there's a lot of dipwads putting Armor All on their Shun Mook Mpingos who think that way. But, umm, no. I no more want a perfect mock up of a Lamborghini than I want a mock up of "the vinyl experience". Would you?

queezyweezel: What's the average voltage for home audio?

There isn't one, if you mean the A/C voltage level out to the drivers. Constant variance unless it's mastered to -.03 dBF.

SJKebab: Eh. Semantics. Replace the word "warmth" with "somethingness" if it makes you feel better. It doesn't change the nature of my argument.

Not so much semantics as debunking bad nomenclature. Models are models. I never liked the sound of calculators. It's all subjective. I always feel like digital sound in a corner on a shelf instead of taking up the room. Subjective, subjective.

I might add that a lot of the 45's on the old school Motown and STAX Records stuff, BRILLIANT catalogues, were smashed stupid and sounded like ass but 45's were the .mp3 of their day.