Peanut butter and jelly?

I like brussels sprouts

Really? OK, I'll keep an open mind and ask you how you came up with this??

Pretty Simple

Cassette decks are been made with specs for freq resp. from below 17Hz to beyond 25 kHz

Now tell me the specs of a CD machine that beats that?

"dolph"

CD's frequency resopnse: 5 - 22,000HZ (ruler flat), dynamic range: 90 db
SACD frequency resonse: all the way out to 100,000HZ, with a dynamic range of 120 db.

I'd like to think that you're just pulling our legs here, and that all of this stuff about the "superiority" of a long dismissed format is in jest, but your posts are far too mean spirited.

A well-engineered CD can sound absolutely amazing (and, I agree that not all CD's are well engineered), but a well engineered SACD is the best thing available - anywhere. I recently purchased a number of SACD's, including Telarc's latest with Paavo Jarvi performing Mussorsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition," orchestrated by Maurice Ravel. I've got numerous recordings of this piece (including an SACD remaster of Telarc's original Soundstream recording), but none come remotely close to the absolutely phenomenal sound of this disc. And, despite what you believe (or at least, claim to believe) NO cassette (nor even an R2R) could possibly handle the dynamic range of this outstanding recording.

A couple of interesting articles about this topic.

Artists Fight for New Hi-Fi Formats:

From Rolling Stone mag and The New York Times.

I dont know a lot about whether a cd sounds better than a cassette deck, but I do remember dolf saying what is quoted above.

I would concur on literally no professional knowledge at all, that a professional reel to reel could equal or maybe better most anything out there, It makes sense to me because music was recorded on them.

I think all the components in a system make determining factor of what sounds good to a person. Any super high quality deck, be it CD, SACD, REEL to REEL, CASSETTE DECK can sound great. And different with a small change such as different IC's.

on another note, Its hard to read tone when it comes to peoples writing, lets try to remember to keep our opinions, opinions, and personal attacks out of the forum. lets keep it Civil.

elroy

First of all.

Let's clarify it from the start:
You are a #### ( * edited by admin *) talking down to people participating in this thread only due to differ in opinion.
And not only only once..................you did it several times.

Second:
You know NADA about this subject.

Actually you should have kept your big mouth shut from the beginning.

Redbook format, the standard behind the CD, is by nature limited to a frequency response from 20Hz to 20kHz. Some Claim it's up to 22,05 kHz

Make your own search if you want.
Here are a few links:

http://tripatlas.com/Red_Book_(audio_CD_st...nical%20details

http://www.discusgroup.com/red_book_audio_cd_standard.htm

http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/R...chnical_details

So the on the bottom line I advice you to keep a very low profile and CLIMB BACK UNDER STONE FROM WHERE YOU CAME.

You can get back to debate with me when you grow up and get money from those who raised you (not very good job done there) and you can afford anything better than an iPod.

"dolph"

Nice. Very nice.

smile!

I'm sorry this thread has turned into something other than it was intended- an interesting discussion on a new format offered by Sony.


Please try to keep it civil, and note, under no circumstances, is foul language allowed.



A kind and friendly reminder from your kind and friendly moderator.

I understand DOC Bottlehead is spearheading the R2R project, and put on a wonderful demonstration at this years VSAC. I believe these reels were not far removed from the original masters, and some may have been the ORM recording.

With that being said there are practical limitations with the consumer tape machine. Especially cassettes. I would venture to guess that all consumer tape players were used to record from another source, ie...records.....other tapes....or at a later date CD's. So we are making a copy of a format that in theory is only a copy of the original consumer source material.

Now there may have been some cassettes that were sourced from the original master, such as ones offered from Mobile Fidelity, but this is an exception to the rule. Pre-recorded cassettes were terrible.

Finally, consumer cassette machines were rarely ever properly set up. Motor speed, head alignment, even bias for a particular tape were left at factory settings, which changed after break in. I worked as a sales person at a stereo store during my college years. One service we offered was to properly set up cassette decks that were purchased from us. we carried some upper line machines, Kyocera, Tandberg, the ZX line from TEAC, adn custom ordered TASCAM.

we made recordings off a TASCAM with TDK metal case tapes. Turntable was a high quality Thorens with an Ortofon MC 2000 cartridge. Actually a group buy was made of a sealed MSFL UHQR of Dark Side of the Moon. Everyone got tapes made of it, and the owner(who paid the most) kept the record. They were good tapes, but not quite as good as the original MSFL record.

Cassettes can sound good, with a HUGE investment of money, but I severly doubt their superiority.

Actually this is all kind of silly. Most people can't hear the limits of redbook CD.

More of the sound quality depends on the quality of the recording such as mikes, placement, pre-amplification, mixing baords, and what not. The current method of commerical recording is a bit of a travesty. That is my opinion of why so much music sounds mediocre these days.

Of course this is the opinion of a barnyard animal. Want another one? Check with the cows, sheep, or ducks. Never trust the chickens. They are just looking for a way to trip you and peck you to death.

Regards
Mister Pig

You've hit the nail squarely on the head there. Most of my listening is to classical music, and many of the discs I own are on the Telarc label - a company who consistently turns out outstanding discs not only with excellent sonics, but fine performances as well.

Telarc has a few duds in their lineup, but those are rare occurances. If anyone wants to hear how a Telarc-mastered recording of rock music sounds, the closest thing to that is a terrific disc of theirs called, "California Dreamin'" by a group called Papa Doo Run Run, who sound amazingly like the Beach Boys. Once the first few notes are played, most listeners (at least those I've observed at various Consumer Electronics Shows in the past where this disc was played) drop their jaws to the ground.

I've often stated my preference for digital recording, but I must preface that, as you did in your post, that everything else has to be in order first. Hooking up two mikes to a digital tape recorder and hitting "Start" just doesn't cut it, and many a popular redbook CD sounds as if that's the route that was taken. I own a good number of redbook CD's that sound flat out awful.

I brought up the SACD in my initial post in this thread because I believe that yet another format with an "improved" CD is not only unnecessary, but simply cannot live up to the potential of an SACD. Given a sampling rate of 2.8 million times a second, and a dynamic range of 120 db, the warm sound of an SACD is something to behold. If anyone doubts that, just get your hands on the newest Telarc release of "Pictures at an Exhibition," or the BIS SACD of Beethoven's 9th. Those two SACD's are the best sounding source material I have in my entire collection of LP's, CD's or SACD's and are the standard by which I'll be measuring all others.

And if I was responsible for this thread turning so ugly, I apologize to all here (with one obvious exception, of course!).

C'mon man, everybody knows witch one is responsible for this kind of rumble and bad behavior. To be perfectly honest with you guys i'm starting to get sick of this...
One time was bad enough...two times is one time too much!





Well, i have my opinion about this topic too. I've been disapointed for a long time with the cd's quality...Here's what i think of this:

Noise is analog's biggest weakness. Its other great weakness is that when you make a copy, the copy degrades. With a digital recording, all you are copying is an incredibly large number from one computer to another. Each copy is identical to the copy it was copied from.

With analog, each copy of a recording is a completely "new" recording. It cannot have equal frequency response, nor can it have less noise, or a wider dynamic range.

The analog media most people are accustomed to are the vinyl LP, cassette, and there are actually a few eight tracks still around. Eight track should have been superior to cassette, as it has twice the transport speed of cassette.

But it wasn't. Play a cassette and an eight track side by side, and the cassette consistantly outperformed the eight track. Why? Because the record companies saw the eight track as for cars with their abysmal acoustics (much worse in the 70s than with modern cars), and the cassette for homes, with their superior acoustics and (at the time) superior speakers.

Home made eight tracks recorded from LPs often were superior to the factory produced cassettes. But with non-home made tapes, cassette ruled, despite what should have been its technical shortcomings.

Pink Floyd "fired" their first record label because the master to their third album sounded "muddy," presumably because the tape heads either had not been properly cleaned, were worn, or the studio's acoustics sucked. Certainly Dark Side of the Moon had none of these problems, and went on to be the best selling album of all time, still on the charts thirty years later!

Analog suffers greatly from lack of cash. With a digital recording, even the cheapest CD player sounds good if played through good speakers. Not so with analog. With analog, the more you pay for a piece of equipment, the better it will sound. A cheap turntable will have "rumble"- the rumbling of the platter's bearings. It won't sound clear, and likely will have the bass attenuated to minimize the rumble, and the treble attenuated because it will sound tinny without the bass. Likewise, a cheap cassette player may have a very severely limited frequency response and still have an annoyingly audible hiss.

In music, "dynamics" is the variation in sound volume. Probably the one piece of music with the most profound dynamics is the 1812 Overture, simply because it uses cannon as a musical instrument. Few stereos are powerful enough to reproduce the cannon accurately, and no recording medium yet devised has the dynamic range to do this piece justice. Not that it matters- if you fired a real cannon in your living room, you would not hear anything at all for quite some time. Certainly you would not hear another note of the performance, bacause of the ringing in your ears.

The fact is, even cassettes have a wide enough dynamic range that the entire range is seldom (if ever) used in a musical recording. CDs have a superior dynamic range than LPs, which have a better dynamic range than cassettes. Even so, many CDs that were remastered from analog media (like the aformentioned Beatles album) have even less dynamics than their original LP! A good example of this is Led Zepplin's Presence.

Why should this be? Presumably because you can always turn it up, or even buy a more powerful amplifier. Some studios use only half of the CDs dynamic range, or even less. I bought a CD of classical music that was so wimpy I decided to make a "corrected" copy, ripping to .wav and normalizing it.

It was so aliased I threw it away, and contented myself with the weak original. Until I could buy a better performance (and recording) of the piece (Swan Lake, IIRC).

Just beccause one technology is inherently superior to another in one way or another does not in fact ensure that an application of that technology is superior.

The CD's format has two distinct disadvantages to both cassette and LP, caused by the same shortcoming- its sample rate and to a lesser extent, using only two bytes of resolution per sample.

This was forced by the technology of the time when digital recording was first starting. In the late 1970s when digital recording was born, 44 k samples per second was the best the equipment of the time could do. It was deemed "good enough," since the labels "golden ears" (humans with hearing well above average) didn't hear any noise and the sound of aliasing was something they had never encountered. They knew what hiss sounded like. They knew what a "muddy" recording sounded like. They knew what harmonic distortion sounded like. They knew what clipping sounded like. But aliasing was new, and they didn't hear it- because they could not possibly listen for it, as they listened for the above mentioned distortions they knew.

At a CD's 44 ksps sample rate, the very highest frequency it can reproduce at all is 22 khz. This is well above human hearing- but here, the model fails. Because its 22 khz frequency response is not an undistorted response.

With a 28 ips analog reel to reel, you can record a dog whistle with no distortion, and transfer it to LP, also with no distortion. In fact, these two technologies had become so good, with a frequency response so high, that they introduced "quadrphonics," or four channel stereo, in the early 1970s. It was a complete flop, since let's say, a $300 stereo sounded much better than a $300 quadrophonics system. You needed four of everything for quadrophonics, as opposed to two with stereo.

So, with only two sides of a groove in a record, how did they get four channels?

In a stereo record, the up and down motions of the stylis (needle) translate into both channels of the stereo signal. This way an older, monophonic record player could still play a stereo record without losing half the signal.

The right channel comes from the side to side motions of the needle. To get the left channel, the right channel is mixed out of phase with the combined channels, cancelling itself out in that signal, which becomes the left channel.

With quadrophonics, the rear two channels were modulated with a 44khz tone and mixed with the other two signals, then demodulated at the turntable. This illustration is important to highlight the incredible frequency response of the 28 ips reel to reel and the vinyl record. These incredible frequency responses are completely undistorted. Were the supersonic carrier and the signal it carried distorted, when demodulated it would have sounded terrible. In fact, had you enough cash to afford a good quadrophonic setup, you would not have heard any difference in quality between the front channels and the rear channels.

By contrast, at high frequencies, CDs do very badly indeed. The best cassettes were capable of reaching 18khz without distortion, and even modest, affordable cassette players reached 16khz. If you had both the vinyl and the cassette (many people bought two copies of a piece, an LP for home and a cassette or 8-track for the car) you could hear the difference in the responses of cassette and vinyl. They were very striking, and it didn't take an audiophile to hear them.

By contrast, a CD doesn't even hit 15khz without horrible distortion. A 15khz tone recorded on a CD has only three samples per cycle!

A sine wave curves up, then descends past the zero point, then curves back up to the zero point where it starts a new wave. A square wave goes straight up vertically, shoots horizontally, then straight down to its negative, where it repeats in reverse. A sawtooth wave goes up at a 45 degree angle, then back down at a 45 degree angle to the negative crest, then back up to the zero point.

A guitar player's "fuzz box" converts the complex sine waves coming out of his instrument into a sawtooth wave, or a square wave. Most fuzz boxes have a switch to select sawtooth or square.

At only three samples per crest, there is no difference whatever between a sine wave, a sawtooth wave, or a square wave. And a sine wave that sounds identical to a sawtoth wave is horribly distorted.

Also a CD that was produced from an analog master will have the worst of both worlds, both analog media's more limited dynamic range and its noise, coupled by the CD's abysmal frequency response.

When CDs first came out, LPs had been mastered from digital tape for a few years. These CDs must be superior to their LP bretheren, since these LPs will have all the noise of analog, with none of LP's superior frequency response.

But remastered CDs made from an analog master is a completely different thing. Like the early digitally mastered LPs, they are the worst of both worlds.

But six hundred bucks difference??? Personally, the two euro LPs I find in the used record shops are good enough for me.

As to the aformentioned Presence CD, it lacks presence. The original LP was recorded at the cutting edge, pushing the limits of the recording technology of the time - and analog recording was at its zenith. When it was remastered for CD, the highest frequency harmonics had to be attenuated to remove the aliasing. This made the bass sound too dynamic, so it was attenuated as well. And, puzzlingly, even the dynamics were reduced; I haven't a clue why.

Dolph. i responded to your issues with this thread via our earlier email exchange. obviously that wasnt good enough for you. so after me warning you to not engage any further in this vein, and having other mods issue public warnings to keep things civil, you still couldnt help yourself from issuing a retaliatory rant.

as this is the second instance where you have been engaged in personal attacks against other forum members, consider this a final warning against future behavior.