and the premier artists are now demanding analog recordings.

And we have better DAC than ever.

And my vinyl outperforms EVERY cd I have.

I will admit I am a renaissance man in every sense of the word, but I told ya' so.

Digital ain't still "right." Will it ever be?

I'm talking long hair sh*t and I am talking Cheap Trick and every thing in between.

I love the fact that I have been able to buy cds of Delta Blues that I listened to on scratched up 78s - but for Christ's sake if it ain't a re-release of something out of print let's have it available as an analog release.

Tonight I'm listening to Tanya Tucker on cd - I went into my stack and pulled outand it the vinyl and the vinyl just sounds so..oooooo much richer. It ain't just Tanya, it's everything.

one thing with vinyl is all the different levels of pressings and masterings. i've heard lots of vinyl that sounds mega-fantastic, and i've heard lots where the sound was nothing more than benign. i've also heard the same kinds of variance in cd's, but with much less regularity. for me cd's seem to be more consistent in delivering a level of quality sound.

I concur with dingus.
Sometimes i even have a better sound on a good ripped mp3 than on some vinyl or cd. There's a lot of crap pressings out there.

I too am a strong supporter of digital audio. While CD's have always had the potential to demolish vinyl, they rarely did in the past with engineers more interested in just making them loud, and completely disregading the dynamic range capability of digital audio, amongst other of its benefits. Telarc is one of the very few labels that concentrated on making the best sounding discs they could, constantly advancing digital recording techniques over the years.

CD players too have improved significantly over the past 25 years, especially with the advent of SACD. At first, few SACD players did a decent job with redbook CD's, until the Marantz SA-8001 came along. I bought mine primariy on the reviews it received for regular, redbook CD playback, and regarded its SACD capability as frosting on the cake. Boy, was I wrong! A well engineered SACD will knock your socks off, offering far greater dynamic range, at least another octave of bass, and a far deeper and better defined soundstage when compared to the CD layer on the same disc.

I won't deny that digital audio initially sounded thin, brittle and with little of the musical "air" quality vinyl setups offer. All of that has changed now with the better CD and/or SACD units out there. And, of course, there's the completely silent background, total lack of "snap/crackle/pop," and the almost indestructibility of a silver, shiny disc as opposed to an LP.

The Marantz SA-8001 sells for $900. While that's hardly chump change, it's actually a good deal less than the first generation CD players of years ago, and it also received a Stereophile "Class-A" Recommendation - not exactly small praise. I find it hard to believe how good most of my CD's now sound, and how much better they do in the few cases in which I have duplicates when comparing them to LP's.

Both vinyl and digital can be wonderful, but my vote still goes for the latter.

s

If the only criteria is quality (or potential quality) of the source, then the obvious choice is a top quality Reel to Reel, and good copies made from the original master tapes. However, there is a limited amount of source material available, and it's very expensive.

I listen to both vinyl and CD's and enjoy both media, but someday I'd love to get a nice Reel to Reel.

I still use my Teac X-7 open reel deck quite a bit. My mother bought it new at the PX for me thirty years ago.

It is getting a little harder to buy tape than it used to be though.

I would say that if you find one, or an X-10 buy it.

To be fair to digital, compression and limiting did sneak in as it was needed to ensure you didn't hit zero in the meters or all hell broke lose in nasty distortion, then you had to master again in the digital domain, so again more compression and limiting. Digital was a new ball of wax, no tape saturation on recordings that made gave us the sound we craved, compression gave the track recording a bit of the tape saturation sound. With digital recorders you are aiming for around -6db on the meters as the optimum gain level for signal to noise ratio, so you don't have a lot of headroom to play with.

It (digital/compression/limiting) created a whole new 'wall of sound' type of music that is still selling. A 2 channel live recording without compression (pretty hard to do it without 'limiting'), can sound amazing in digital on certain types of music.

I like vinyl for all the great music that never made it to cd, I like digital for all the music that came after vinyl. I've owned more reel to reels than I can remember, most were great, but the signal to noise ratio and crosstalk specs where still never as good as digital, without noise reduction, which is just a filtered compression expansion scheme and sucked the life out of music in other ways.

Some of best analog recorders and playback devices for 2 channel is the trusty old stereo VCR, which for ages now you can get basically for free.

Ian

In fact, the first digital audio systems were built around VCRs. 44.1 khz was chosen as a sample rate because it worked well with them.

One other thing in facvor of digital is that digital devices usually require less maintenance than analog equipment. The electrical characteristics of most circuit elements change with time and temperature, and minor changes slowly degrade the performance of analog circuits.
Many analog systems are mechanical in nature (R2R for instance), and simple wear can soon cause problems.

In addition, digitally encoded information is more durable than analog information, again because circuits are responding only to the presence or absence of something rather than to the precise characteristics of anything. Also, it is possible to design digital systems so that they can actually reconstruct missing or incorrect data. You can hear every little imperfection on an LP, but minor damage is not audible with a CD.