Tír Na HiFi

I no longer have the capacity to help with that request, Simon! But I agree that mastering is a very important issue. In the early days of CD lots of analogue recordings were rematered as digital and some of it was not done very well at all. I was listening recently to Karajan's recording of Mahler 4



and I thought it sounded rather thin and flat. My DAC gives a display of the sampling rate and number of bits active and I noticed that this CD had only 15 bits active. Normally of course, 16 are active (the display usually only shows 44.1/16 or 44.1/0 (between tracks) on CD material), but this seems to have been remastered with 15 bits: I imagine this accounts at least partly for the lifeless sound.

On the other hand I recently got this CD of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing Mahler



(from three different LPs released in the early 60s) and the sound is staggeringly good. [edit]It was remastered and released this year: DG's engineers have got a lot better at digital remastering in the last 30 years.[/edit]


I wonder if a lot of the bad press that CD got in the early days was due to poor quality remasters of analogue material? And could DG please remaster that Mahler 4 again, please?

Diapason wrote:... set me up with a turntable and phono stage to surpass my Wadia 581SE.

here ye go http://readeroffers.irishtimes.com/i-cc ... IC-CENTRE/ <runs for the hills>

Thanks for that, Ivor. How many pieces of hifi equipment can be called "truly stunning"...? It says it in the description, so...

Ciaran, I definitely think that's a factor in the initial response to digital. It seems clear that the early days left a lot to be desired, partly through lack of effort (I suspect) and partly due to the fact that engineers just weren't used to dealing with digital. Without all that euphonic even-order distortion they were used to, things almost certainly needed to be recorded a little differently. Of course, what many people don't realise is that a lot of vinyl of recent (i.e. last 30) years has had digital somewhere in the chain anyway, either at recording or mixing stages.

[Rant that everyone here has heard from me before]
Ultimately, it's the claim that digital sounds "bad" because it "chops stuff up" whereas analogue sounds "good" because it's "continuous" that I have the biggest problem with. Take the surface of a magnetic tape for example. Tape is and was the medium of choice for recording and editing a huge amount of vinyl released over the years, and die-hard analogophiles will tell you it sounds better because it's analogue and therefore continuous. There's nothing continuous about the surface of magnetic tape. It's covered in a ferromagnetic powder and each of those tiny pieces of powder is magnetised at the recording stage. The music is, therefore, chopped up. Sure enough, when you run a tape head back over the material, you get an analogue signal out again, but the same is true at the output of a DAC. Certainly, the process of getting there is very different, but on some level at least, the music is chopped up at the storage stage, and recombined at the playing stage. If I feel like being really obtuse, I might point out that at the atomic level there's nothing continuous anyway, so true analogue NEVER exists. Now, maybe digital could be improved by higher bit rates and all that, maybe not, but the often-heard viewpoint that digital can never be as good because it's not continuous makes me want to gouge somebody's eyes out with a pick-axe. Well not really, but you get the idea.
[/Rant that everyone here has heard from me before]

Can you tell I'm bored at work today?

Heres the truth..... its all about the implementation.

A really good TT with matching arm, cart and phonostage will of course sound wonderful. Whether it is down to a particular characteristic of the distortion of the playback chain, or recording processes or something else.... well I don't know. For whatever reason it sounds really really good. Possibly the best TTs were made in the late 70s and 80s.... right about 30 years after records really took off.

However, a really good digital set up can also sound incredible. I will admit that a thing that attracted people for years and years was the convenience of CDs, and also files. And yes, there were some good sounding players. But those who fell into camp "A" above never got to like the CDs. Likely this is due to a whole raft of factors, with sonics, emotions, memory etc all playing a part. I will contend though that digital playback (both CD and file) have made huge jumps in very recent years, really to the point where they are very close to very good vinyl set ups. I am no expert in the digital domain (or any!) but I do know that a huge number of players out there simply use the datasheet example circuit. No optimisation, no experimentation, and no tuning by ear. Just bang it all together as quickly an easily as possible. Its amazing it sounded as good as it did. And where are we now? Right about 30 years after the introduction of CDs....

However, there is one thing...... the cost of a good vinyl set up IMHO way surpasses that needed for a good CD setup....


Now to Mr. Rollins..... a lot of artists are coming out with this stuff of late. A good part of it is "coolness". As Inda would say, "getting down with the young people". But another part is a harking back to a time when they weren't ripped off as much - you couldn't copy and share an LP quite as handy as a CD!

Digital technology has made great strides to deliver a series of numbers to be read by a laser to emit that which is doing its damnedest to replicate its analog and sonically superior master. There are some very good CD players out there that sound incredible. I recommend the Rega Isis valve version, but even that cannot capture the full-bloom soundscape of your turntable interacting with an LP or single. Mr. Rollins...