Denial acknowledged. And I'm still waiting.
You are well known to live in strong denial of the proven fact of the sighted listening effect and its dominant character. You have endlessly over-argued your denial of this fact in other threads.
Sure. It's only in my tag line for people like you who can't remember.
It is less widely known, but also evidenced, that your denial is rooted in your professional need (or preference actually: it would be possible but time-consuming to do it blind) to rely on sighted listening in making adjudications on sound quality.
You truly have no idea what you are talking about, either in terms of your inferences about professional post sound, or in ever.... ONCE...correctly characterizing my position or arguments.
This explains your denial...your bias. It also diminishes your credibility on the topic of the magnitude of the sighted listening effect. I don't expect you to ever flip on this point...it relates to your sense of professional credibility...but it limits your objectivity. I accept that you will continue to do this, but readers may benefit from my explaining why.
Strawmen unite!
You don't deal with nuance well. We get it.
Link...again. I just wish it was blind. But you personally ought to respect it sighted, given what you just wrote, yet again.
So, you've posted a link that supports what I and others have been arguing? Is that what you meant to do?
From the link:
"We get the test vinyl pressings and play them on our "high quality properly set up turntable". Ultimately we get pressings we approve. Do they sound good? They sound great. We compare the new pressings to the original pressings and EQ'd cutting masters. Do they sound the same? Close, but no. I'll not attempt to list the dozens of possible reasons why.
Then we compare the CD test pressings to our CD 44.1 kHz 16 bit master files. Do they sound the same? Very much so.
We compare the CD to the vinyl. Do they both sound good? Yes, we've done our job as best we can. Do they sound the same? No. How could they? Apples vs. oranges."
Like taking words out of my mouth in describing what I've heard. Vinyl can sound surprisingly great, and even pretty close with a good pressing to the digital version (though never the same).
What are you arguing against...again?
Just admit that it is objectively known to be sonically distinguishable
Where in the world have I ever argued they weren't sonically distinguishable? Why would you possibly need me to "admit" that? I even re-iterated this in the very post you are replying to. This is bizarre.
and inferior, even with the most pristine and perfect vinyl in the link above.
It's impossible to give you what you want...because you don't do nuance.
Of course there will be aspects in which the digital version, in the comparison you suggest, will be superior, under a certain criteria for "superior" (e.g. extended highs, lows, dynamics, lack of noise artifacts, etc). But it will of course depend on which records one is comparing, in terms of whether there will in fact be significant difference in the highs, the dynamics, the bass, etc. On some tracks it may be negligible. If you pick a track that is the very worst case for vinyl, in terms of it's liabilities, it will be more obvious. But of course such recording quality varies among albums, hence the advantages for digital will vary, sometimes larger differences than other. That's the friggin' point people keep repeating. It therefore makes sense to say digital is across the board superior as the technical medium in terms of it's capabilities, but in actual day to day use, that superiority is variable, and sometimes negligible in some comparisons.
So even if you are dying to get someone to admit digital is "superior" the question remains....HOW superior? Since you are talking about an AUDIBLE assesment...that gets in to subjective territory. If we listen to a digital vs vinyl track and you say "the superiority of the digital is Very Large" and I report "I don't find the difference so large, in fact it seems pretty small"...who is right? Am I ignoring BIG DIFFERENCES or are you, like an obsessive audiophile, making a Mountain Out Of A Molehill? Would putting it on a number scale help? Those numbers will just reflect our personal difference on the issue. I've been giving my assesment having compared the mediums many times. Your personal assessment doesn't automatically trump someone else's.
See, you just aren't going to be satisfied unless someone totally agrees with you, without bringing up mitigating nuances....but life is messier than you'll admit of.
Here, as usual, you do your best to undermine the opinion of anyone liking or preferring vinyl:
Maybe even encourage others to join you, like I have.
Toole happily admits what you won't: “In LP mastering, the changes are substantial: mono bass, dynamic compression, rolled-off highs near the center of the disc, and so forth to cope with the limitations of the medium.”
Toole also explains how repeated exposure to LP sound over time results in LP-specific perceptual masking coming into play. This is why LP lovers, even in this thread, insist they hear no problematic artefacts or distortions —they are in a manner hypnotised to the point where they bite into an onion and think “mmm, apple”— whereas when a non-hypnotised audiophile with critical faculties intact comes across vinyl, there is a good chance they will not like all the icky artefacts that they are not perceptually masking out. “Auditory masking is a natural perceptual phenomenon…it has assisted our musical enjoyment by suppressing audience noises during live performances and, over several decades, by rendering LPs more pleasurable. If we talk here about compressing data, it would be fair to say that LPs perform “data expansion,” adding unmusical information in the form of crosstalk, noise, and distortions of many kinds. More comes off of the LP than was in the original master tape. However, because of those very same masking phenomena that allow perceptual data reduction systems to work, the noises and distortions are perceptually attenuated. So successful is this perceptual noise and distortion reduction, that good LPs played on good systems can still sound impressive.” Well, at least to the long-term LP listener.
1. If we take all that for granted, it suggests the artifacts aren't that big a deal, perceptually, right? Who gets to adjudicate how significant the artifacts are for the listener? If you had never listened to vinyl and a record was played for you, and a couple ticks and pops were heard at the start...would that be devastating to you the listener in terms of rating the quality? Why doesn't this work in reverse - someone may be over-sensitized to certain artifacts. This comes out as a wash, it seems to me.
but...
2. The above doesn't do a good job explaining why tons of guests, almost all of whom do not listen to records and are not "desensitized" to vinyl artifacts, are blown away listening to vinyl on my system.
3. I'm exposed to digital sound just as much as LPs. Rather than only listening to records, you'd think constantly switching between sources would actually expose the differences, make one aware, right? And, have you not noticed a number of people on ASR have said that vinyl artifacts always annoyed them and it's why so many were grateful when CDs arrived?
You are stretching, as usual, Newman.
I feel humbly welcomed to your club!
If I can't get myself to resist being pulled in to more strawman-filled conversations with you, I may welcome you in to another club (first member too!).
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