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Post by Martin John Butler on Sept 6, 2022 15:29:06 GMT -6
I listen digitally for work, but listen to vinyl exclusively for pleasure. You can debate all day how technical specs "prove" vinyl isn't better. You can say we've fallen in love with those particular distortions, or something similar.
Without getting into a debate I'll simply say that my experience of listening to an analogue vinyl pressing and a digital version is that for whatever reason you want to make up, the vinyl sound makes me feel connected to the artist, where the digital one either makes me listen or ignore, but almost never respond emotionally.
Of course few people on the planet would know the difference if they were listening to a high quality DSD processed vinyl record, but I bet if there was a proper way to compare the best analogue only version to a DSD processed one, you'd hear something different.
What Mobile Fidelity did was disgusting.
Bringing this bask to pro audio.. I listed to UAD's digital pedals and from what I could tell from online demos, they sound like the plug-in version of the thing, not an analogue version.
Digital is brilliant in many ways, but I don't write off analogue because of that.
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Post by EmRR on Sept 6, 2022 16:06:00 GMT -6
And the lawsuits have begun... www.stereogum.com/2197131/audiophile-label-mofi-sued-for-using-digital-in-all-analog-vinyl-reissues/news/--------- Since nobody had accused MoFi of making records that sound thin or flimsy, the issue with the company’s processes seems to be almost philosophical. In that lawsuit, the lawyers for the accuser claim that the scarcity of all-analog reissues is part of the appeal of MoFi’s marketing: “Original recording tapes age, so only a limited number of analog recordings can be produced. When defendant began using a digital mastering process in its records as opposed to purely analog, it inherently produced less valuable records — because the records were no longer of limited quantity and were not as close to the studio recording — yet still charged the higher price.”That asshole is maybe close enough to me I could go kick his ass......what a dick with nothing better to do......probably a lawyer able to file such crap. Very skeptical injury can be proven.....there's plenty of original all analog vinyl available for sale for the back to the future crowd. What a willfully ignorant fantasy for the consumer to believe. Uh, nope! Good luck parsing every single mechanical manufacturing process out of that for an impossible comparison. You can take 2 different Bob Ludwig cuts from 1972, following the same instructions on the same equipment, and hear a difference......
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Post by yewtreemagic on Sept 6, 2022 16:33:41 GMT -6
From the OP's link:
"Since nobody had accused MoFi of making records that sound thin or flimsy, the issue with the company’s processes seems to be almost philosophical."
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Post by jeremygillespie on Sept 6, 2022 16:42:05 GMT -6
I couldn’t hear the difference and now I’m pissed!!! Hahahaha - what nonsense.
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Post by gosart on Sept 6, 2022 19:31:30 GMT -6
How could a dsd that has been pressed to vinyl possibly be better than listening to the dsd itself?
Thinking of it that way I'd be quite miffed if I had bought one of these forgeries.
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Post by Martin John Butler on Sept 6, 2022 22:33:02 GMT -6
"Better" can be interpreted many ways. Perhaps something in the vinyl production process makes it different in a pleasing way.
Welcome to the forum gosart.
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Post by gosart on Sept 8, 2022 14:50:23 GMT -6
Thank you Martin, this forum has been a great resource for me for years. There's so much knowledge here and a shocking lack of useless bickering. I keep expecting it to go south one of these years because how can such a good thing ever last on the internet? But it just keeps being excellent. Many, many thanks to everyone who makes this forum what it is.
Like most of us in this industry I've spent way too much time engaging with musicians and audiophiles in the debate over weather audio reproduction should be as technically accurate as possible, or can be improved by being deliberately colored in a musical way in the recording process. In my experience many audiophiles and classical musicians reject outright the idea that any derivation from "accuracy" can be a positive thing for a recording. Yet in practice when I play them stereo mic'd recordings of string quartets, piano etc. they nearly always prefer the ones done on my Twin Flicks preamp over any of my high end transformerless preamps. Transformers have that way of making things sound and feel more like you're in the room with the musicians, and many listeners pick up on that without necessarily knowing where it comes from. I tell them that inevitably music doesn't come out of speakers in the same way that it comes out of instruments or mouths, and some effort will always have to be made to make the recorded experience compensate for that. That's where the art of engineering comes in.
In the case of the dsd-sourced vinyl releases there are two things that get me. First of course is that a product should be sold as what it is. Integrity is everything, especially when something is essentially an archive of an artwork. I do a lot of work for a big art museum and in that world provenance is everything. Many museums are currently having to send antiquities from their collections back to the countries of origin because issues have come to light regarding how the items were originally obtained, often decades ago. This stuff matters. These vinyl pressings are arguably part of the high end art world and should be held to an appropriately high standard. I would argue that even if one considers them to be base consumer items they should be held to that standard too.
Second is when I spin some old vinyl it means a lot that I'm listening to audio that's never been through the AD/DA process. That's part of what makes the effort of spinning vinyl worth the trouble. Similarly when I play a gramophone it's fascinating to hear something that has never passed through a capacitor, resistor, or even one of our blessed transformers. There's a directness in the sound, a visceral connection to the music, especially in the human voice, that transcends all the surface noise and the terrible frequency response. My audiophile friends hear that on my gramophone, and more importantly non-audiophiles hear it too. Almost everyone reacts to the unique presence and immediacy that comes out of that horn, and the unique way the music fills the room. Real, all-analog vinyl has something of that immediacy as well.
All this being said I'm open to the idea that a dsd-sourced vinyl pressing could sound pretty good, if done with excellent converters and by skilled engineers. It just needs to be sold as what it is. Audiophiles and such who hold to the notion that accuracy is always better than color of any sort will need to be convinced of whatever magic is imparted to a dsd recording by pressing it to vinyl. Personally I hope there is something to that.
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Post by EmRR on Sept 8, 2022 15:27:11 GMT -6
What's being mostly ignored is that the other option besides DSD is another analog copy tape layer, labels are not handing over original masters to someone like MoFI for secondary reproduction, that's a fantasy. In my book DSD or any other high quality digital copy of an analog master is more truly an original master source than an additional tape generation can ever be. Then there's how many decades of digital delay compensation in the path for look-ahead control.....
....I'll report back if and when I EVER hear a test pressing I'm happy with......
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ericn
Temp
Balance Engineer
Posts: 15,011
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Post by ericn on Sept 9, 2022 8:31:45 GMT -6
A couple of things that I think have gotten lost in this, I will admit a Mobile Fidelity 1/2 speed remastered Beatles White album and Supertramp Crime of the Century are prized possessions and in my youth the Stones and Beatles boxes were lusted after like a 930 turbo slant nose. Todays MOFI is not that MOFI, different owners and different staff.
Now here is a question I have asked but nobody has ever really answered for me how do you monitor what your doing in a half speed mastering? Think about it everything is an octave lower and slowed down. How in the analog domain do keep the lowend under control? Suddenly everything is an octave lower, 40HZ is now 20hz! To really hear what anything you did you need to listen to test pressings.
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Post by EmRR on Sept 9, 2022 10:01:27 GMT -6
Yeah notwithstanding the monitoring gap, if it's tape the head bump is suddenly different and not as intended, custom compensating electronics? Or ignored? Another place DSD easily wins. I guess you could monitor with a real time digital pitch shift!
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Post by popmann on Sept 9, 2022 12:10:27 GMT -6
How could a dsd that has been pressed to vinyl possibly be better than listening to the dsd itself? That's actually pretty easy. First...the "DSD" in question you don't have a DAC for--and certainly not a mastering grade unit...but, also, it's completely lacking mastering. So, the viable question you could ask is "wouldn't it be as good to master all analog (which they DO) and recapture that at DSD64 for SACD and listen to THAT instead of vinyl? From a fidelity sense? Sure. Abolutely. But, that's ALSO true if the SACD is the ONLY digital conversion--ie, you are mastering directly from the master tape. ...which is where the other half of the equation of vinyl comes in. Vinyl aficionados buy gear that has "the sound they want". If we go to the above scenario--EITHER analog or digital source, their playback choices will be of FAR great effect on the sound than any source choice way back in the chain. I'd like to see the people suing Mofi for their own misunderstanding be forced to pay some MULTIPLE of Mofi's legal fees for damages.
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Post by christopher on Sept 9, 2022 18:14:21 GMT -6
You remind me that a few weeks ago a friend put on a Black Keys LP, and it struck me how well the low mids came out. I’m not sure if that was his playback system or in the disk? It DID hit me as a listener much differently, and I felt like ‘oh.. so this is how they should be heard’. I can’t say I’m a fan of BK; I’ve gone online and checked out their stuff and it just doesn’t ever speak to me. Seeing only a rotating black shiny disk, along with the sound, feels very different. I wonder if it’s true they aren’t slamming the RMS on vinyl?
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