Microtime - what do you think of this article?

[MrPeabody]

Because they have questions that they don't know where to go to find the answer?

The responses, if any, tend to reveal whether there is good faith or not.

I agree, there are many who show up to create controversy and basically troll, but let's not assume that everyone who does this has bad intent.

Certainly this is a valid attitude toward this kind of thing. And certainly, not everyone who posts links to silly, bogus articles is simply trolling the way that some people who do this are. Nevertheless I have not been able to keep from noticing that there is an awful lot of this kind of stuff here. I guess it comes with the territory. This one instance didn't seem to be trolling, but the article was nevertheless a stinker. One positive outcome of it was someone having provided a link to troll-audio.com.

 

[MrPeabody]

The PDF at that site has a synopsis, covers all the important points. The test attempted to make an analog disc from a digital file, then re-digitalize that LP for the DBT. A lot of effort went into the experiment, clicks and pops were digitally removed [always a dead giveaway], levels matched, many of the processes typically used to make the transfer of source to disc easier were skipped, in order to resemble the source as close as possible. Short and skinny: "Results from the listening tests suggest that for our sample population, the digitised vinyl was the least favoured of all the formats." Analog purists will, of course, say: "But digital!" Also [Mikey recently] " . . . there are many great vinyl records digitally sourced that sound better than the file from which it's made just as many records sourced from tape sound better than the tape...."accuracy" is a load of bologna." I'd use a different term aimed in a different direction myself, but it's a loser's game attempting to troll a troll. What I understand is, like it or not, the source for a modern production is digital 99.99% of the time. I do not see how a mastered digital source will sound better after the bass is summed to mono, treble is limited to reduce sibilance, dynamics are limited to fit a fat file into a small groove. Same would apply to music sourced from an analog tape.

What kills me about the "Microtime" article is citing Neil Young as some sort of expert on sound quality. If anyone is going to suffer permanent hearing damage from playing Rock 'n' Roll at volumes past the threshold of pain, it's Shakey. The market failure of Pono points to multiple bad decisions made by this "sensitive, world-acclaimed innovator". "Is that a Toblerone in your pocket . . . ?"

Even though Neil Young doesn't have a high school education (I read this as at some point), he was savvy enough not to use his own money (I wonder if he even knows how much he has) to fund Pono. It was funded through crowd sourcing, and I read somewhere that they reached the goal on the first day. This was done in spite of the market failure of various prior endeavors that were similarly based on the presumption that regular CD isn't good enough. There was ambiguity with respect to whether his gripe was with low-bit-rate MP3 or with regular CD. On various occasions he made disparaging remarks about digital audio generally. He evidently decided at some point that digital itself wasn't the root of the evil, but rather the particulars. Long may he run.

 

[BDWoody]

Nevertheless I have not been able to keep from noticing that there is an awful lot of this kind of stuff here.

Part of growth.

Think of it as Rolling admissions, where the new folks often have the same questions, based on the same media garbage they've all been reading, and there are new members every day.

That said, maybe some time figuring out a better *sticky* system to funnel much of it to would help.

 

[tmtomh]

It's the digital "stair-step" myth dressed up in a lot of verbiage and peddled by someone with a doctorate in physics.

 

[scott wurcer]

"You're the Man I Want To Share My Money With" has three grooves on side four. Also has some of the finest William S. Burroughs on disc:

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Beat me to it! I have this, at one time I had WSB saying "You can't talk like that to decent women" as my ring tone.