Two Turntables and a Laser Beam

Caution by Yarn · 2000-02-12 00:23 · Score: 2

Either make sure that your amp has a *proper* phono input or that the table has filtered output, otherwise you'll get uncompensated phono output which sounds 'thin'.

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-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent

Re:Caution by Yarn · 2000-02-13 00:22 · Score: 2

I was just saying that because I know someone who got a turntable and was going around saying "its really shitty, i dont know why i bothered" until i plugged it into my amp :)

CD is generally better, but there's something about a slowly spinning disk :)

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-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Re:Caution by alhaz · 2000-02-12 01:30 · Score: 2

Oh relax, haven't you ever heard of a phono preamp?

If you don't suffer from audiophilia, you can get a reasonable one for under $20.

(I feel blessed that my ears are crude enough to forgive most forms of electrical noise in recordings, my music habit would be a lot more expensive otherwise)

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Decent turntable for < $200 ? by ryder · 2000-02-11 23:03 · Score: 2

Slightly off topic, but I'm looking to add a turntable to my home stereo system. Any brands or anything I should be looking for? You can't walk into a store and buy these things anymore either, so where are they sold?

Thanks

Re:Decent turntable for < $200 ? by MillMan · 2000-02-12 09:45 · Score: 2

If you want to get a good turntable, you have to pay up around 500 dollars, for a deck like the technics 1200. This is the deck that almost all DJ's use. It is driven by magnets instead of a belt. It looks cool as hell too.

I have a cheap 120 dollar sony turntable. I bought it about 2 years ago and it works great. I use it for my small collection of techno that I have on vinyl. To me it sounds almost as good as my cd's. I got it at best buy as well, most larger electronics stores actually still keep 1 or 2 models in stock.

Basically you're looking at spending about 90 - 140 dollars for my cheap turntable which works well enough, or you have to spend at least 400 dollars to get a good DJ style turntable. There are also "audiophile" type decks for up to 10k, but you wouldn't want those....I think its funny that they even exist :)
Re:Decent turntable for < $200 ? by swordgeek · 2000-02-12 00:15 · Score: 2

Wander into a high-end audio store (the ones that have $$$$$ vacuum tube monoblocks!) and tell 'em you're looking for a low end turntable. They'll probably point you in the direction of a Rega or the likes. (lovely tables)

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LP versus CD by mosch · 2000-02-12 12:06 · Score: 2

I found one of you vinyl snobs among my coworkers and I did a test. The test was 'can you tell the difference between vinyl played on a technics SL1200M3D and vinyl played on a technics SL1200M3D , piped through an Apogee PSX-100 and written out digitall onto tape on a Tascam DA-38'. The answer was that no, they couldn't. Which leads me to believe that my idea is right, that people who like vinyl, don't like vinyl. They like the warm, distorted sound that vinyl afficianados seem to adore. I admit though, I cheated a bit, and did do the digital recording at 24/96. Tube amps? They add tons of distortion... it just happens to be pleasing distortion. My personal opinion is that if the artist wanted the vinyl sound, they would've made a final pass after mastering which would consist solely of playing a vinyl version of the mastered record and recording it digitally.
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LP versus CD by mosch · 2000-02-12 12:08 · Score: 2

I found one of you vinyl snobs among my coworkers and I did a test. The test was 'can you tell the difference between vinyl played on a technics SL1200M3D and vinyl played on a technics SL1200M3D , piped through an Apogee PSX-100 and written out digitall onto tape on a Tascam DA-38'.

The answer was that no, they couldn't. Which leads me to believe that my idea is right, that people who like vinyl, don't like vinyl. They like the warm, distorted sound that vinyl afficianados seem to adore. I admit though, I cheated a bit, and did do the digital recording at 24/96. And I'll also give you that a $500 turntable isn't exactly comparable to the digital side of my setup.

Tube amps? Records? They add tons of distortion... it just happens to be pleasing distortion. My personal opinion is that if the artist wanted the vinyl sound, they would've made a final pass after mastering which would consist solely of playing a vinyl version of the mastered record and recording it digitally.

(sorry about the double post. should've previewed)
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Audiophile 'high end' tables use belts. by Wakko+Warner · 2000-02-12 11:05 · Score: 2

Reduces the rumble. Direct-drive tables (yes, this includes the 1200s, of which I have a pair and would not trade for anything) introduce a lot of rumble and low-frequency noise. Expensive belt-drive decks (which are usually heavy as hell and take an awful long time to spin up) have little to no rumble problems, leading to a cleaner sound. The SL-1200 is definitely not an audiophile deck. But that's not what it's made for.

- A.P.
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It's been done before. by farrellj · 2000-02-12 02:03 · Score: 2

I believe Bang & Olafson (sp?) had one in the mid to late '80s.

It is nice tech for people who have archives of old records, like Canada's CBC radio archives, and the US's Smithsonian (sp?). As well, some older bands that have wanted to put our CDs of their material have sometimes found that their original masters are either missing, or have deteriorated too much from time/improper storage etc. A facinating story is that of the Canadian Band, FM. Their masters had gone missing and they had to remaster from a virgin vinyl copy of their first album, Black Noise. Luckily, CBC, the label they were on had a nifty piece of technolgy called "No Noise" , that will digitally edit out unwanted noise. It's funny that there are two of these units in Canada, one owned by the CBC with their vast archives of recordings, and the RCMP.

FM did a test pressing of the remasterd CD, and one of the members brought it over to his friends house to try out. This guy was a big time audiophile. Had speakers suspended from the ceiling and everything. In between the cuts, the band member noticed that the woofers of the speakers were going in and out between the tracks, audio wise imperceptable, but quite dramatic with the woofers. He was horrified, they might have goofed up the No Noise session! He asked his audiophile friend what he thought it might be...his friend something to the effect that if they hadn't been playing a CD, he might have though it was turntable rumble!

You can now get the CD in Canada, and order it elsewhere. Without the turntable rumble.

ttyl
Farrell
Lo-Grade Audiphile
Fan of the band FM

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Actually, this is a common oversight. by Chris+Johnson · 2000-02-12 05:44 · Score: 2

People always focus on the tiny detail, as if the important thing with analog was to retrieve detail that is below the digital noise floor. This is a losing game. Analog noise ends up being just as bad.

What _isn't_ usually noticed (surprisingly) is the more logical purpose for those huge cables and absurd slew rates and amperage levels- the _big_ transients. Get a whole horn section to raise the hairs on the back of your neck with a FFF line- or for that matter get the whole orchestra going, or for that matter early Who, with those incredibly strong saturated compressed vocals (very 'tubey' sounding) and LOUD guitars and LOUD drums. You'll have loads of transients stuffed into the music that go way beyond what you can pack into 'polite' digital playback at 44.1/16, especially when the digital equipment designers continue screwing it up by anally plastering HF-rolloff capacitors all over everything to eat the tiny negligible hiss that the transistors and analog opamps produce.

When put onto a record, these naturally stress the cutting lathe, but that's why cutting lathes went from 100 to 500 to kilowatt amplifiers that fed off 440 volt lines etc ad nauseam. When placed on a record surface, these are not tiny dustlike details that get scrubbed off with the first play. They are fscking big walls of material that tend to fling the needle physically into the next groove and cause skips. When they don't, you get vinyl playback that has the kind of energy and aggression and life that LPophiles talk about.

A realworld example sure to appeal to CmdrTaco's heart: The Who's album Live At Leeds was released with a label that said in big scrawly letters, "CRACKLING NOISES OK- DO NOT CORRECT". When played on a high end turntable, do you in fact get crackly noises? No, you get the Who, live. It's the same as orchestral recordings breaking up at FFF and fancy cartridges that don't break up at those modulation levels.

Obviously, no matter how abused the LPs get, you continue to have those energy peaks undiminished. They outlast all the other sounds, and they are exactly what you don't get with current digital media- hence the audiophiles. This provides us sound engineer types a very interesting and exciting challenge. How do we translate this into the digital domain? I've found that multiband compression and physically modifiying the digital recorders to be the best bet. In particular, it's impossible to both get most of the energy and also suppress all the noise of the analog parts. You have to treat the circuits as if they were high end analog circuits even if the opamps are kind of cheap, and get rid of 'total hiss elimination' caps. Often this gives you the proper presentation, and in the cases where things become too bright and edgy, inductive resistance (easily got by those digital noise filters- ferrite chokes, in other words) is a hell of a lot better for the sound than ringy little ceramic chips to ground.

Re:Actually, this is a common oversight. by Chris+Johnson · 2000-02-12 11:11 · Score: 2

Not exactly. The difference is in the recording technology itself- 44.1/16 is simply not adequate though it _is_ possible to do heavy postprocessing to synthesize what the wave might have been- this is what kilobuck D/A converters like the Wadia do, and can make quite a difference.
The difference is _also_ in the pre/post stages, for instance it doesn't matter how nice your data is if you just run it through J. Random Op-Amp. It's very very common to find extremely crap parts in these supposedly perfect digital devices, and this limits them unfairly. Rotten cheap little op-amps, pathetic coupling caps to save costs- I've bought a _recording_ deck of fairly high end pretensions, an Alesis LX-20 ADAT, and while it does 24 bit recording, and while digital is in theory quite capable of dealing with bass _very_ nicely indeed, this recorder nevertheless has pathetic 47uf coupling caps on the channel outs. This says that they designed to be 3db down at maybe 30hz- they designed out the capacity for clean accurate subsonic information that digital HAS. I'll be rewiring it, probably with 100uf which will at least take the low end down closer to 10hz or so. This will also clean up boominess in the low bass, as when you near such a cutoff you end up getting a certain amount of accentuation- a unit with 47uf cutoffs might 'thunder' pretty impressively but lowering the cutoff frequency produces a cleaner and more responsive sound in those frequency ranges, less muddy. Translates in sonic terms to a touch less sub-bass but going deeper, bass that is markedly clearer and less prone to get in the way of other musical information.
So essentially it's _both_. Yes, digital audio at CD levels is substantially lacking, but on the other hand most of the equipment makes it sound even worse than it is. I'm a rock guy, not really a classical music person, and I know that I've been able to get rid of a _lot_ of the 'polite, sterile, thin' qualities of digital audio by just treating the players and recorders like they were instruments, and tweaking things like the highs. To some extent you really can give the hardware itself more life and energy by letting the digital outputs come through the analog opamps and circuitry as unimpeded as possible. This does also include allowing the noise floor to have normal op-amp noise, transistor hiss. It's not even intrusive, but attempts to completely obliterate this normal circuit noise inevitably also take a major toll on the music.

Audio is not _that_ bandlimited by Chris+Johnson · 2000-02-12 06:13 · Score: 2

Honestly, what a silly notion.

You start running into _serious_ problems when you treat the band as strictly what the human ear can pick up. Apart from the fact that subsonics are picked up by the inner ear and supersonics can be sensed though not heard through bone conduction, the trouble is that you get cancellation effects and distortions depending on how you roll off the extremes of the band. This is a nightmarish problem for CD audio, as it must put a _really_ steep filter above 22K if not still lower- a brick wall filter that is about as bad as you can get for causing interactions with lower frequencies. Personally, I prefer to start rolling off a lot lower but a lot more smoothly, but that's just me.

As for the sawtooth, I'm afraid that's the reality. Look, if you take the input signal a bit higher, you start getting a subharmonic through the sampling which can be almost as loud as the sampled frequency! You surely are not suggesting that nearly 100% additive distortion is perfect reconstruction? Try sampling a 44.09 wave at 44.1, obviously you get nothing but the subharmonic. Now try sampling a _22.045_ wave, which technically is supposed to be within the band. Begin to see the problem? The same subharmonic distortions are still affecting you, even within the band. For fun, consider how this affects (less and less) frequencies at 11.0225, 5.51125, and 2.755625K. Each time you're basically halving the distortion- so the interference goes from about 100% at 44.09K to 50% to 25% to 12.5% to 6.25% interference at 2.755625K. But wait, a tone at 2K should be perfect! No, more like a tone at _2.75625K_ (note 756 instead of 7556) will be entirely free of subharmonic distortion sampled at 44.1K, and a tone at 2.755625 is a pathological worst case for that sampling rate w.r.t subharmonic distortions. So be sure not to let your musicians play that frequency ;)

If you think I'm making this up you should study harder. _Everything_ has its limits, and digital recording is interesting because with it, you can really rigorously quantify exactly what and where the limits are. The ones who told you it was perfect reconstruction were not scientists, they were corporate marketers attempting to replace the LP in popular media with the CD. Sure worked, didn't it? Even got many people believing the mathematically, provably wrong claims of no distortion. To me, _SIX!_ percent subharmonic interference in a pathological worst case frequency at a mere 2K or so is pretty damn distorted, frankly. Don't know about you. Maybe I just try harder to overcome this stuff rather than wishing it away...

Re:Audio is not _that_ bandlimited by CausticPuppy · 2000-02-12 08:00 · Score: 2

Thank you!
I was about to spend a couple hours doing research to back up my claims which I simply and "intuitively" knew to be true.
The engineers are correct in that you don't lose any INFORMATION in a signal if you sample at at least twice its frequency. However, that doesn't account for the, uh, "extra" information that's added. When transmitting data across a wire, you don't really need to worry about subharmonic distortion. But as I said in another post... there's more to reproducing the original sound than signal theory suggests.
I take it you're a musician?

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Isn't the wavelength of light too long for this? by Paul+Crowley · 2000-02-12 18:45 · Score: 2

Hang on. A 12in record has a couple of inches inside for the label, so let's say 5in ~= 120mm radius of playable vinyl. One side might play for, say, 25 mins; at 33 1/3 RPM that means about 800 grooves have to fit in that space, so each groove is about 0.15 mm wide. Clearly the groove can't wiggle by more than 0.15 mm, and probably much less - let's be generous and say 100 um (microns). Reading that with, say, 100nm light, you get a resolution of 100 um /100nm = 1000 - ie you can distinguish 1000 different displacements. That doesn't compare well to the resolution of a CD player - 65,536 possible displacements.

I'm not an expert on this stuff, and my math may be screwy - but this doesn't check out on my calculator...
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Don't trust by bjk4 · 2000-02-11 22:28 · Score: 2

I wouldn't mark this as a very good purchase. We now have CD players (lasers included) for about $30. Not $30k. I can appreciate the cost of compact lasers 10 years ago, but things have changed and things are cheaper now. I think the company should consider modernizing its lineup before charging such outrageous prices.

Besides, it looks like a late 80s product (I'm thinking USR plastic type.) If it looked and acted like one of those uber-cool minidisc players, then I'd be interested.

-B

Re:Don't trust by Mister+Attack · 2000-02-12 01:09 · Score: 2

We now have CD players (lasers included) for about $30.
I think you miss the point. Vinyl, IMHO, gives a much better, smoother, richer sound than does digital. CD's are great and all, but they really can't compare to the sound of a well-mastered vinyl record played on a top-quality turntable. The whole reason CDs are more popular than vinyl is that a cheap CD player sounds 10 times better than a cheap record player. But a really excellent record player sounds at least 10 times better than a really excellent CD player. It's a tradeoff. I, for one, would definitely buy one of these if I had the extra $30k lying around. Maybe Hemos wants to buy one for me? come on Hemos, support a starving college student:)!
As for your point about the cost of compact lasers, it's well taken, but the cost of this unit is most likely _not_ in the lasers. There's a whole load of signal processing equipment that's required to turn the (I'm assuming) Doppler shift detected in the reflected light into sound.
In short: Yes, you could buy a CD player that will give you decent sound for $30. But keep in mind that you won't even come _close_ to the quality of a really, really good record player. And if this unit is all they promised, which seems reasonable, then the cost of a really, really good record player just dropped by an order of magnitude.
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Not really... by YuppieScum · 2000-02-11 22:23 · Score: 2

It actually looks like it's been around for ages...

The copyright notice on the bottom of the FAQ is dated 1997, and one of testimonials says

<I>"The after-sales service of ELP is perfect. Although I had a failure on LT in 1990, I am fully satisfied with the LT."</I>

Maybe they just need to hire a better publicity manager...

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Is there an icon for RETRO topics? by Morgaine · 2000-02-12 01:16 · Score: 2

The lego one doesn't hint at the subject matter at all.

Or perhaps a music or hifi or A/V icon would be more appropriate, ie. to avoid offending those who don't think vinyl is a retro topic, particularly scratching DJs.

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"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra

Turntables for archival reproduction by Morgaine · 2000-02-12 01:28 · Score: 2

That's a good point which I hadn't considered before. Yes, there must be quite a few such uses for turntables yet.

However, the MAJOR use of new turntables (by numbers sold) is still by DJs, whether you like them or not. :-)

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"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra

Re:Turntables for archival reproduction by Morgaine · 2000-02-13 08:59 · Score: 2

You may be right, but as none of the people that I know with top-end audiophile systems rate their turntables anymore, I extrapolated that it was a rare affliction. Maybe my acquaintances aren't typical. Maybe yours aren't. Who knows?!

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"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra

Re:Top 5% of old stories by Ed+Avis · 2000-02-11 22:38 · Score: 2

I believe such a system has been tried before, marketed on the grounds of less wear and tear as well as sound quality. IIRC the problem is that without a needle making physical contact, there is no way to get dirt out of the grooves of your record.

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-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com

Big Bucks and No Brains by A+nonymous+Coward · 2000-02-11 22:55 · Score: 2

Many years ago I stumbled across a magazine called (I think) High End. Amazing fun. People who built $250,000 listening rooms, people who would not even have light dimmers in their house because someone might use it and disrupt their listening pleasure, mono tube amps and vinyl players only (no radio; no CDs; not even tape, IIRC), people who bitched because they couldn't get Con Edison to give them two transformers at the power pole.

In other words, people with way more money than brains.

Basically they claim to have golden ears which are not satisfied with any recordings except live to master to vinyl. These idiots spent tens of thousands of dollars just for a stylus, not to mention more tens of thousands for the tone arm and huge block of granite for a base.

I might allow that the very first listening of a vinyl record might seem better than a CD, but not the 2nd or subsequent ones. So that's why the laser turntable -- no mechanical wear.

But this only applies if there's no dust on the vinyl, which explains the emphasis on its vacuum cleaner. I doubt that's really good enough. I often wondered, reading those couple of High End issues, how much it would have cost these suckers to build a clean room for their collection, with rubber gloves to access the vinyl and place it on the turntable.

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Infuriate left and right

Big ears with nothing between by A+nonymous+Coward · 2000-02-12 05:03 · Score: 2

I don't doubt you can hear a difference. But you do not hear The One And Only True Sound. I do not believe that the mechanical mastering and playback process is that good. I do not believe you can hear .004% distortion or whatever the figures are for current amps. And I do not believe that the speakers are so good that the amp distortion is even discernible. If there really were such a thing as The One And Only True Sound, there would be only One True Speaker.

What I sneer at is idiots who waste money on concrete bunkers, separate pole transformers, etc, when the wear of each playback makes the next one worse, and when all that money could have gone into a filtered container for all that vinyl, so it would sound better the tenth time than the dirty one sounds the second time. I suppose the ultimate is to record direct to vinyl (could you get even a hundred copies for each recording?) and one playback, then toss it out and buy another. When you get to that level, you'd be better off hiring the artists in the first place and skip the damned one-shot recording. Is there any point in having a playback room of better quality than the recording studio, or the concert hall?

The point of a recording is to get a wider audience, in both time and space. A recording which is only good for one playback because the playback wears it out is pretty useless in my book.

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Infuriate left and right

Re:Big ears with nothing between by A+nonymous+Coward · 2000-02-12 19:50 · Score: 2

Check all your facts again, starting with being an AC. I ain't. Read carefully. Then read what I said in the message again. Carefully. You do NOT hear the One True Sound just because you play vinyl. You simply hear The Vinyl Sound, modified by the recording setup, modified by your playback setup. It is NOT the One True Sound. Only the original performance is The One True Sound.

A recording is meant to distribute the sound in time and space, so more people can hear a performance, and hear it when they want, and more than once. Vinyl wears out. The closest vinyl will get to The One True Sound is the first playback, and then only a direct to disk with limited copies. Your second playback will not sound as good as the first. And if this is how you want to listen to a performance, and you have the bucks, then you also have the bucks to simply hire the artist for a live performance.

Any playback, vinyl or CD, goes thru so many imperfect steps, and depends on speakers which don't even come close to The One True Sound, that if you like fancy schmancy playback methods, it's because you like that sound, NOT because that sound is closer to The One True Sound.

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Infuriate left and right

Re:Hang on to your 1200s by redled · 2000-02-12 01:53 · Score: 2

It's not analogue?

"despite its CD-like design, the ELP is still a 100% analog device as far as the signal path is concerned."

This product is _not_ for Vinyl DJs. It is _not_ for CD DJs. It is _not_ for people who want to digitize thier vinyl collection. It _is_ for people who love to listen to their vinyl, and wish to cause as little wear as possible while doing so. It _is_ for libraries, museums and other historical institutions who wish to preserve a piece of musical history, again without causing damage. In the audiophile community, where many consider their collection of vinyl irreplacable and priceless, the ELP is a bargain.

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"Insert witty quote here."

Re:Muy Nifty! by Mr.+Piccolo · 2000-02-12 01:25 · Score: 2

Just search Freshmeat for TerminatorX. Same type of thing.

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Re:so is it digital or analog? by mindstrm · 2000-02-12 03:49 · Score: 2

Actually, not at all..
There is not necessarily any need to go digital.

Remember Video Disc? those big 2 sided suckers? They were read with a laser... and were completely analog (digital audio tracks did come later, and are now standard). The video was all analog....
it was via modulated beam.

There is no reason an analog circuit cannot be built do accomplish whatever a DSP can accomplish; it's just simpler and more flexible to use a DSP.

Re:Big bucks by garver · 2000-02-11 22:37 · Score: 2

I won't argue that they definitely have a niche product here, but I can think of a few reasons to buy one:

You have tons of old LPs that haven't been released on CD.
You are really damned rich and what the difference between $13,000 and $200 doesn't seem that much to you.
And in a more lucrative vein, buy one of these and start a media transfer service. People bring their old LPs to you, you give them bright shiny Audio CDs. I'm not sure what the legal ramifications are here, but I think media transfer is OK for your own use, especially if the new media format is not available. This is similar to MP3s; makeing an MP3 is not illegal (although the RIAA would like to make it so), it is distributing it that is illegal. (Note, I'm in the US, don't know what other countries are like.)

Nevertheless, this is very cool, old meets new. And I wouldn't be surprised to see vinyl revatalized a bit (only a bit). The high cost of these is probably because they don't expect to sell many. They have to recoup their dev. costs.

Re:so is it digital or analog? by wass · 2000-02-11 22:35 · Score: 2

I think you're missing alot of points here. Firstly you write:
It's read with a laser, so it must go through digital processing.
Where does laser reading imply digital processing? THe optical input they're using to read the laser is most probably a photodiode, which would give an analog waveform. Granted, they're using 5 lasers probably to get a better picture of the "grooves" which seems to hint at some fancy DSP, but just using a laser in no means automatically implies "digital".

This would seem to undermine the goal of listening to vinyl - that is, to avoid the "noise" that some audiophiles feel is added through digital processing.
Ummmm, that's not why I listen to vinyl (I'm maybe semi audiophile). As far as I know, very vew albums are released not on Vinyl, most that are released are aimed for DJ's and spinners. I listen to vinyl because I'm into ALOT of the funky soul jazz from the 60's and 70's, much of which is very obscure and they'll never release the albums onto CD (probably because they'll sell 5 copies, one of which would be to me, but still not very profitable for them. Sucks...) If I could get most of this stuff on CD, I'd definitely go for it. In fact, once I get off my arse, I've got plans to lay out a decent analog-digital front-end for my computer such that I can sample the songs off my records onto MP3. THis leads me to the next point...

Seems like not much more than an expensive toy (obviously) to show your friends rather than a realistic audiophile piece.
You're missing one point here. While CD's and DAT's are digital, and employ some sort of error-correcting methodology, records are inherently analog. And every time you play the record, you damage it slightly (ultimately governed by quantum physics - you can't measure a system without changing it). In CD's, at least you've got some hysteresis between 0's and 1's, but with a record every time you play that track the needle drags in the groove and rubs it down a little. Just listen to a record track that's been played a hundred times or so, it can sound horrible, even if care was used with good sharp needles. That's why this laser system is pretty cool, because you don't need much contact with the record, so this won't be an issue. Also much harder to scratch now that you've removed the needle altogether.

Finally, I've not heard the arguments about DSP adding to the noise, can anyone comment on the validity of this? As far as I know, once the analog waveform has been sampled (which is where most limitations are introduced), they use 24 or 32 bit wide DSP's to avoid introducing any noticable errors through the processing stages. Then at the Digital-Analog stage, the choice of output filter can affect the waveform too. But I didn't think the DSP was too much to blame.

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Analog IS better than digital by CausticPuppy · 2000-02-12 01:53 · Score: 2

I agree -- analog is better quality than digital, in theory, because a digital signal is only an approximation of the original analog source. Think about what "analog" means. You store a signal on one medium that is a direct analog of the recorded signal.
However, with digital, you're taking repeated samples, and approximating each sample to the nearest quantized level determined by the bit depth. So you lose some quality converting to digital.
And then you lose some more when going from digital back to analog, which you HAVE to do with sound or you can't hear it.
You can build an purely analog sound system that introduces less noise than digital. The big advantage digital has is the ability to make exact reproductions, with no loss from generation to generation.
That doesn't change the fact that you can't make a true 10khz sine wave on a CD (roughly 4 sample points per cycle, and you actually have a sawtooth wave that phases in and out w/ the sample rate).
To get the best of both worlds for audio, you need to go digital with a very high sample rate (96kHz) at 24-bit depth. That way you have a much better digital approximation of an analog signal.