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I hate to break it to you but even the founder of Linn couldn't tell the difference between vinyl and something ran through a digital processor.

http://www.bostonaudiosociety....

1) It's a fallacy that we don't hear sounds above 22Khz. You can say that the average listener does not notice frequencies that high, but, and it's a big but, we 'hear' (feel the sound waves) with our whole body, especially with our sensorial organs and our brain.

Evidence, please? There is some evidence that we can hear higher frequencies if they are conducted directly into the bones of our inner ear, but there's NO evidence that we can hear anything that high through the air. We're limited to what our eardrums pick up.

Nyquist is about discrete integration, as an approximation of a continuos (proximal to lineal between samples) function, that has nothing to do with continuos (no sampling based) processing.

You obviously don't understand sampling theory. Sampling a sine wave at the Nyquist limit or above will let you reconstruct the original continuous wave - subject to quantization error, of course, which is really pretty insignificant at 16 bits or higher.

So I am sorry but discrete systems destroys information by design.

Analog to digital is a by design destructive transformation. analog to analog does not have to be a destructive, it can be made destructive or not.

Bullshit. Analog to analog is ALWAYS destructive; a copy of a copy will always degrade in quality. Even the original first recording is never a perfect copy of the input.

Then my answer is: if digital is BEYOND what the analog pàrts can notice, just show me a single CD that in your opinion has a quality level above good recorded vinil, I will buy-it and listen to it carefully, but after years of hearing music (I have hundreds of LPs and a no small numbers of CDs) I would be VERY HAPPY to learn that CDs can be made to sound as good as good LPs. That's not my dayly experience.

I never said anything about CDs, dipshit. CDs are not the upper limit of digital - I'm talking about high-end digital, which surpasses the frequency response, noise floor, and dynamic range of your pathetic home stereo. Unless your 'dayly experience' includes listening on professional studio equipment, you haven't heard what digital can do.

Read this if you think analog is always superior: http://www.bostonaudiosociety.org/bas_speaker/abx_testing2.htm

Well, the evidence suggests that the difference between CD-quality audio and DVD-A/SACD audio is imperceptible.

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=57406
http://www.bostonaudiosociety.org/explanation.htm

I think you're erroneously conflating the Nyquist theorem with the limitations of human hearing, but that's a separate matter.

You're right, there's a missing context.

I remember seeing the original hype around the knobs. At the time, there were in fact claims being made that the beech knobs, and the specific way they were made, had a notable impact on the quality of the sound your sound system outputted. Ah, found the link:

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They are custom made with beech wood and bronze where the bronze is used as the insert to mount to the stem of the volume pot. The beech wood is coated several times with C37 lacquer for best sound as pointed out by Dieter Ennemoser. How can this make a difference??? Well, hearing is believing as we always say. The sound becomes much more open and free flowing with a nice improvement in resolution. Dynamics are better and overall naturalness is improved. Here is a test for all you Silver Rock owners. Try removing the bakelite knobs and listen. You will be shocked by this! The signature knobs will have an even greater effect really amazing! The point here is the micro vibrations created by the volume pots and knobs find their way into the delicate signal path and cause degradation (Bad vibrations equal bad sound). With the signature knobs micro vibrations from the C37 concept of wood, bronze and the lacquer itself compensate for the volume pots and provide (Good Vibrations) our ear/brain combination like to hear way better sound!!"
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See http://www.bostonaudiosociety.org/past_pres_msg/06-11_pres_msg.htm

It's actually pretty difficult to accurately test headphone sound levels because the sound level will depend on the volume of air in the ear canal (for ear buds) or under the cup (for over-ear headphones) as well as the leakage around the head phone. This is dependant on the size of the ear and the pressure of the head band on the head (for over-ear headphones). There's a reason why artificial ears and dummy heads cost thousands of dollars.

Mead Killion (founder of Etymotic Research) gave a talk in Boston recently, and he announced a product similar to what you are proposing, and it should go to market soon. Basically, it's a box that goes between the audio player and the headphones, it measures the voltage of the headphone output, and determines safe and unsafe levels. Rather than measuring SPL levels from the headphones directly, the unit will be factory programed with the output levels from various DAP/headphone combinations (determined using lab measurements) so it can map the voltage to the appropriate level.

[Dr. Killion also gave everyone at the talk a free pair of ER-6's, but that was just icing on the cake :) ]

Do an ABX test (http://www.bostonaudiosociety.org/bas_speaker/abx _testing.htm) comparing a MP3 extracted with EAC and encoded with Lame 3.93 --alt preset standard and a wav file.
Come back to me with the results.
I think you will be suprised.
99% of the population can't tell a difference.

http://www.chrismyden.com/nuke/modules.php?op=modl oad&name=Elite_DAE&file=painless for an easy guide.

MP3s are not only smaller, they work on portables, and they have great metadata.
Regardless of your decision regarding encoding or not - EAC is a must for a quality extraction!