Another Variation on the DAC Question

[Mr. Widget]

So no I don't think there is some unknown unmeasured digital artifact. This idea was further strengthened years later when I had an ADC and could record LPs on turntables. You didn't lose the LP sound it was correctly captured by digital recording. So there is no artifact of digital messing that up.

Ok, if we run with that as the working hypothesis, then those studio guys who run their signal through a tube line stage or vintage processor of some sort or other to add "warmth" are onto something.

Look, the whole idea that we want to hear the microphone feed in our living rooms is bunk. The control room doesn't sound like the concert or the other side of the glass during the session so why should our listening room. What we want is something that makes us excited. We want something that sounds like it "could be" the concert or what the musicians intended.

 

[Blumlein 88]

Ok, if we run with that as the working hypothesis, then those studio guys who run their signal through a tube line stage or vintage processor of some sort or other to add "warmth" are onto something.

Look, the whole idea that we want to hear the microphone feed in our living rooms is bunk. The control room doesn't sound like the concert or the other side of the glass during the session so why should our listening room. What we want is something that makes us excited. We want something that sounds like it "could be" the concert or what the musicians intended.

What we can strive for is to hear the mastertape or master files accurately. If the guys making that got it right, then we can hear that in our homes. Whether it is a purist recording or a heavily processed one.

 

[Mr. Widget]

What we can strive for is to hear the mastertape or master files accurately. If the guys making that got it right, then we can hear that in our homes. Whether it is a purist recording or a heavily processed one.

Sure, understood.

That has been my goal since I bought my first cassette deck... knowing well that I couldn't get close, but today we have access to 24 bit 192KHz files that should be as close to the master file as conceivably necessary. However most of us will never be in the mastering suite with the engineers, and our room and speakers will never match that experience.

We can have systems that are very similar to those in the mastering suite and some of us can even have technically superior systems, but the performance will probably never be indistinguishable from that playback so our goal of maximum transparency is still an illusion. We are no more correct than the guy with the smily face graphic EQ who is happy with his system.

 

[Jim Shaw]

Sure, but my recollection of my Magnavox branded Phillips player was not that there was any noticeable noise, distortion, or frequency emphasis/deficiency... it was simply that it sounded different from what I expected.

As has been suggested here and elsewhere at ASR, either the decades of analog playback trained me (and probably others) to expect a certain sonic character which was missing, or there is an as yet unmeasured characteristic that would explain this unexpected and undesired difference.

It's easy to make measurements, harder to make relevant measurements, and harder still to make them calibrated and repeatable. But it is really, really difficult to correlate measurements to what they mean to almost anyone listening to everything from a violin concerto to Led Zepellin to rap.

A noise level of -108 dBa might mean little to most listeners, but what about the tinkerer who presses stop, turns up the gain, and holds his ear to the tweeter? And then writes troll-speak here, declaring a component to be abject junk.

<smile>