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Post subject: Re: Analog Vs. Digital
Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2014 9:05 am
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cvilleira wrote:
As i have said many times, Vinyl sounds better then these overly compressed junk Cd's. Sadly many young people have never had the pleasure of hearing it.



Agreed.

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Post subject: Re: Analog Vs. Digital
Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2014 10:00 am
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cvilleira wrote:
As i have said many times, Vinyl sounds better then these overly compressed junk Cd's. Sadly many young people have never had the pleasure of hearing it.

Oh, there is some crappy vinyl out there too. And modern record players without a decent RIAA stage either. The combination is as bad as MP3s.


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Post subject: Re: Analog Vs. Digital
Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2014 1:24 pm
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I guess that I'm analog all around.

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Post subject: Re: Analog Vs. Digital
Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2014 1:29 pm
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"Overly compressed CDs"? :lol: The earlier CDs didn't sound the best, but it was mainly that the recording that was put on the CD wasn't the best to begin with.

A CD is just the media that stores a recording. There is nothing about the media that compresses the recording. Put a crappy recording on a CD and it will sound crappy. Put a good recording on a CD it will sound good. :wink:

What a drag it is trying to listen to records in the car or while mowing the lawn. :lol:

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Post subject: Re: Analog Vs. Digital
Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2014 1:40 pm
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Despite my preference for CD, I sold my CD players about 7 years ago, and moved it all onto hard drive as I was sick of running out of shelf space for my cd collection..

That being said, the quality differences sway in favour of CD, however to all ears the quality differences are not detectable.


strings10927 wrote:
shimmilou wrote:
[Once the sound is put through speakers, it's analog, which is what BMW-KTM related.

what if they are digital speakers with a digital audio interface? Like this:

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I like the way consumer electronics companies use jargon here- 'Digital audio interface' all cd, DVD, blueray disc etc.. Have them. That's what they are, reading information from the disc optically with a laser, transferring that data to an interface that converts to analogue so that you can hear it from the speakers. Nothing special, all stereos/DVD players & home theatres have them, to name a few.

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Post subject: Re: Analog Vs. Digital
Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2014 1:47 pm
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I have noticed that most new HD TVs don't have standard analog audio outputs anymore (the red and white RCAs). That can make using older audio systems more difficult.

There are some reasonably priced D2A converters.

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Post subject: Re: Analog Vs. Digital
Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2014 4:45 pm
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Blertles wrote:
transferring that data to an interface that converts to analogue so that you can hear it from the speakers.


right - transferring data, as in digital. Digital Audio refers to how the recording is stored, not how it's played back.

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Post subject: Re: Analog Vs. Digital
Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2014 8:03 pm
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strings10927 wrote:
BMW-KTM wrote:
There is no such thing as digital music.

MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface

I programmed this MIDI file in Finale, a computer program. All the instrument 'voices' are digital, and can be changed by just selecting a different 'instrument'. There's just nothing analog about anything involved in making this:



I've heard good and bad of both, but this is a great
MIDI sequence that you got tracked here! 8)

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Post subject: Re: Analog Vs. Digital
Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2014 8:42 pm
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strings10927 wrote:
There's just nothing analog about anything involved in making this:
And then the speakers, whether you call them digital or not, converts the signal, whether analogue or not, into sound which is analogue.

For those who say the thread has been hijacked, I was merely correctly pointing out there is no such thing as digital music as was proposed by the OP.

JimRussellMills30! wrote:
Which camp do you fall in, analog music (vinyl, tube amp) or digital music (CD, xxxxx-xxxxx xxx DVD), or somewhere in between? :?:


As far as which I prefer, CD or vinyl, they both have their pros and cons. Digital recording has a much wider possible dynamic range than vinyl because there are no physical limitations in its ability to differentiate between the low and high volumes within a piece of music. When the recording media simply records numerical values it does not matter to the media what that numerical value is. The number 4 writes to the disk as easily as the number 15,000. It's just a number. The media doesn't care what the number is. That brings up the question of why someone would accuse CDs of having more compression than vinyl when in reality little if any compression is needed for digital recording. If compression is used it would most likely be used as an effect as there is no actual need of it for the recording media. Many CDs boast much quieter quiet sections and much louder loud sections within the same piece of music than can be physically reproduced with vinyl. Vinyl does require some compression if there are large changes in dynamics with a passage. Because it is a physical media it has limitations in that regard. Score one for digital. Vinyl on the other hand is already analogue so the signal waves it generates are complete curves with no missing areas. Digital recordings are "stepped" like a staircase, almost universally at a frequency of 44.1 kHz meaning that at the typical audible (audio means sound BTW, not a method of recording) upper limit of 20 kHz there would be roughly two steps per complete wave. At those frequencies and at anything approaching those frequencies the digital distortion is quite significant. The staircase is less noticeable to the human ear at low frequencies but it does still exist. I would hypothesize this may be the reason some speakers are labelled as "digital"? Perhaps they have extra damping to smoothen out the staircase? I don't know. A "digital speaker" in my mind is an oxymoron as all sound is analogue and speakers generate sound. Score one for analogue. Digital is noisier. When I say noisier, I mean in terms of the quality of the sound. I am not referring the audible artifacts sometimes found on analogue recording media.

For those who are having difficulty wrapping their mind around this it can be illuminating to consider the digital photograph for the purpose of analogy. As cameras and recording media become cheaper you keep seeing the megapixel rating of cameras going up. That is called resolution. The higher the resolution the smaller the digital "dot" on the overall photograph. What digital cameras do is to take the light that imprints the sensor and divide it all up into little squares. Each square is then analyzed for colour, hue, saturation, brightness, etc. and it is all averaged and the entire area represented by the square (pixel) is written to memory as a single value. If you were to take that tiny square and blow it up 1,000 times in real life (i.e.: not digitally) there would be revealed a great deal of variation in colour, hue, saturation and brightness. For example, imagine a diagonal line running across a photograph, let's say a close-up of a tennis ball landing on the court. The pic is being used after the fact to determine if the ball landed inside or outside the line. If we blow that pic up enough the edges of that diagonal line will eventually become a fuzzy looking staircase. In reality the line is a straight line but the close-up depicts it as a staircase. Taking a magnifying glass to examine the actual line may very well reveal imperfections in its straightness but it will absolutely NOT show up as a staircase. That staircase is digital distortion within the pic. The reason camera resolutions keep getting higher is that people demand to be able to blow their pics up without seeing the distortion.

The same is true in digital recordings. Digital recordings do not use any complex mathematics. It's just counting and nothing more. They do not analyze a signal and calculate what the curve of that wave should look like. There is no calculation involved. The sound is "sampled". Many thousands of times each second the real analogue sound is captured and averaged digitally into one number. There were thousands of fine sonic nuances within that tiny fraction of time that were all rolled up into one single numerical value. The human brain can detect these aberrations.

For quality of sound, for the audiophile who insists on only the best of the best, chose vinyl. Ensuring of coursed that all due care and attention is made to preserve the condition of the vinyl because it scratches easily creating the artifacts I mentioned. For compactness and ease of portability and for use on the computer or the iPod, digital is the way to go. Digital would be a lot less noisy if the format were flexible like it is with photography. The sampling rate is pretty much universally locked in at 44.1 kHz limiting it to a given noise level ... until the next new format is introduced, possibly at a higher resolution.

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Post subject: Re: Analog Vs. Digital
Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2014 10:00 pm
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I like tube amps, but I don't like their prices. The cynic in me sees the tube/solid state amplifier pricing scheme as just another two-tier marketing strategy.

I gave away my vinyl back in the '90s. The whole reason for switching to CDs was because of the amazing increase in fidelity. I find the whole retro-vinyl movement perplexing. Records sounded great - for a while. But they slowly wore down over time. CDs work just fine for me, and they are portable and you can push a button to get the track you want.

Most modern CD players oversample by interpolating in between the data values. For example, eight-fold sampling can increase the sampling rate up to 352.8 kHz. Some CD players actually use as high an oversampling rate as 384-fold. Needless to say, that kind of oversampling greatly reduces the aliasing that occurs at the higher frequencies.

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Post subject: Re: Analog Vs. Digital
Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2014 6:42 am
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strings10927 wrote:
BMW-KTM wrote:
There is no such thing as digital music.

MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface

I programmed this MIDI file in Finale, a computer program. All the instrument 'voices' are digital, and can be changed by just selecting a different 'instrument'. There's just nothing analog about anything involved in making this:



Exactly what i would expect to hear, sitting in the waiting room awaiting a root canal .... :wink:

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Post subject: Re: Analog Vs. Digital
Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2014 6:54 am
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Miami Mike wrote:
I've heard good and bad of both, but this is a great MIDI sequence that you got tracked here! 8)

Thanks Mike! It was a labor for sure, but it's so cool to listen back to these after all the work is done.

BMW-KTM wrote:
strings10927 wrote:
There's just nothing analog about anything involved in making this:
And then the speakers, whether you call them digital or not, converts the signal, whether analogue or not, into sound which is analogue.

again, Beemer, the term 'Digital Music' refers to how the music was stored, not how it's played back.

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Post subject: Re: Analog Vs. Digital
Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2014 7:06 am
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Amp wise, it will always be a small wattage tube amp.. One of my 1st amps was / still is my early 60's Magnatone Classic 410 ( it's actually an accordion amp ) which after many years of faithful service is in for a long overdue health check. A couple of Fender Reverbs here and there, more recently a Brown and Tan HRD, loved the sound but wasn't all that thrilled about the distortion settings. Fine for playing Van Halen, Lynch but just not quite there for R/B...
Just bought a Pro Junior III, was able to play it once back home for a few hours...
Using 2 MIM Strats. One with SCN's and the other, a 98 standard Strat. ( not sure what it is really, just fairly standard ) Also straight into the amp, no peripherals, I have not used pedals for years and have always preferred Amp-cord-guitar....

I've also had Craig's and various other solid state amps, none ever lasted very long or pretty much were relegated to the storage site.... For my ears, recently having used a G-deck, the digital amps fall short of the mark.... They just do not have the same warmth of sound ( best way to describe without getting technical ) as tube amps, but especially a small ( 15 watt ) tube amp pushed to overdrive....
As far as the new addition ( Pro Junior III ) nice Fender has done quite well on this one, although I also just sampled a Blues Deluxe tweed and that will be the next mid wattage amp for me..

CD's are great if well engineered, but alas as far as vinyl ....
" What Once Was, Will Never Be " as much of the music is unavailable in digital format...
On this it depends was I enjoy both, which of course is all played try high end Nakamichi and Technics audio equipment....
:wink: :lol: 8) :shock: :? :idea: :?: :arrow: :arrow:

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Post subject: Re: Analog Vs. Digital
Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2014 4:18 pm
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shimmilou wrote:
"Overly compressed CDs"? :lol: The earlier CDs didn't sound the best, but it was mainly that the recording that was put on the CD wasn't the best to begin with.

A CD is just the media that stores a recording. There is nothing about the media that compresses the recording. Put a crappy recording on a CD and it will sound crappy. Put a good recording on a CD it will sound good. :wink:

What a drag it is trying to listen to records in the car or while mowing the lawn. :lol:

Who in a Car listens to CD's anymore? :shock: New Car manufactures are starting to not even include them in vehicles. Some of the new models already don't offer them, Mazda is getting ready to stop having them in the next year or two. Audio players and streaming technology have killed the CD, it's todays Beta tape,VHS and 8-track, Cassette, Movie DVD.

I have not wasted a dime on a CD in years but I still buy Vinyl for the house and often record on a reel to reel multi tracks that are very old.

Once CD's are gone that will never come back but Vinyl never went completely away. Audio purist saw to that.

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Post subject: Re: Analog Vs. Digital
Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2014 6:02 pm
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Yeah, I still like to listen to CDs at home, I have a large collection. I have a couple of MP3 players, iPod and Creative, that I like to use when on the go. I do have a CD player in my car, but usually plug the MP3 players into the jack on the stereo. I have around 10,000 songs on each MP3 player, and no way I am going to carry that many CDs around. :o

I know what you mean about the CDs, just look at how the selection at Best Buy shrank from a huge selection to practically nothing. But, I don't think that CDs will disappear, too many people still use them and have huge collections, so there will probably be a good used market for a long time. If people still use vinyl and 8 tracks, I think CDs will stick around even longer.

I bet that some of the older members here still have some wax tubes and aluminum tubes, and think that they are the best. :lol:

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