I'm not saying getting your spine readjusted doesn't feel good, but don't think your fooling anyone claiming that it will actually fix anything either, because it flat out wont.
I'm not so sure about that. My dad, now retired, got a back injury while working and was off the job for quite a while. His medical doctor told him that surgery was his only recourse, and the surgery was risky and could make it worse but without it he might not be able to work again. Two weeks after seeing a chiropractor he was pain-free and back on the job. AFAIK he never had to go back to the chiropractor.
I was x-rayed in a hospital after an auto accident, and the radiologist, looking at the pictures, said "you have arthritis". I said "I know, when are you guys going to find a cure?" His reply was "the money's in treatment, there's no money in cures." At least there's naproxin sodium (sigh)
The "curing cancer with chiropracty" is just plain bullshit, and it's that kind of bullshit that gives chiropracty a bad name. Hmmm, I wonder if I should see a chiropractor about my arthritis? I've never been to a chiropractor.
Read Asimov's Foundation and Earth. He has people from the planet Solaris with a power like that, and it was explained satisfactorily in the book. That's one thing I always liked about his writing, he always explained away the parts that needed a suspension of disbelief; faster than light travel, for example.
Another thing I like about his fiction is that he was a real scientist, a PhD in biochemistry who did cancer research while on the faculty of Boston University.
I like Terry Pratchett because he explains stuff that needs suspension of disbelief in a way that makes the suspension of disbelief unnecessary because the explanation is so ludicrous... and also, he's funny as hell ("He realized that he was not only not the sharpest knife in the drawer, he might even be a spoon).
Or perhaps someone would have the absolutely boring ability to change their eye color.
That mutation has already happened, although I don't know of anyone who can do it at will. My eyes are like that -- My daughter Patty says that when they were kids they could tell what kind of mood I was in by the color of my hazel eyes. Patty inherited that from me, but her mother's brown eyes as well. Patty's is really kind of spooky, her irises turn almost red when she's angry. But it's not voluntary, and I have no idea if it's a benefit or a hindrance, it "just is"
Patty was also born with only one kidney. That's definitely a bad mutation (1 in 1000 people are born with one kidney). She tells her friends "I'm a mutant and my dad's a cyborg!"; I have a CrystaLens implant in my left eye that gives me a sort of super power -- my eyesight in that eye is better than 20/20 from one foot away to infinity, and I'm 59 years old. Hooray for technology!
Sadly, no. I think it caught on because 1) folks don't know that "in the cloud" means "on somebody else's server" and 2) OSES is almost as stupid sounding, and "On somebody else's server" is too cumbersome.
Not all mutations are harmful. We wouldn't have evolved big brains and intelligence without genetic mutation.
This is probably bad news for my daughter Patty, who was born with only one kidney, as she found out after a CAT scan. She tells people "I'm a mutant and my dad's a cyborg!" I guess she can still say that, even though everybody's a mutant and most geezers my age have some sort of implanted devices in them these days.
You may be right, but I'm not so sure. When OS/2 first came out, the motto was "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". Now it's "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft". MS is entrenched in the business and government worlds and has been for decades, while OS/2 was mostly just toyed with for a short time.
Plus, almost every desktop computer made has Windows factory-installed. Only a tiny percentage of home PCs are used for serious aming. Then there are other programs, like TurboTax, that have no Linux equivalent.
As a kubuntu user, though, I hope you're right and I'm wrong.
Wow and flutter are analog tape distortions. Wow is caused by a stretched tape, flutter is caused by wrinkles in the tape or defects in the capstain roller. I heard a similar distortion in some music from a local radio station that seems to be an error in the DAC -- there is no distortion in frequency as there is on an analog tape, just in the speed of the music. Don't know what causes it/ There is a similar distortion in some turntables with belt driven platters.
There was often also bleed-through; a reverse echo of the first few notes before the song started. It was caused by a strong signal on thin tape magnetizing the next layer on the spool.
If ultrasonic frequencies causing audible interferences exist in the studio then the audible tones will be recorded and survive downsampling to 44.
It's impossible for a sample at 44ksps to have ultrasonic frequencies, even if frequencies above 20jHz weren't filtered out; the Nyquist limit prohibits it. As I said, anything above the Nyquist limit becomes noise. The filter is applied at the master, not on your CD player.
And yes, a cheap turntable with a heavy arm will ruin the high frequencies. Some tone arms weighed as much as 25 grams, but high end turntables are all less than a gram. My old Dual weighed in at a quarter gram. And yes, lateral forces, especially on turntables without anti-skate or poorly performing anti-skate will degrade separation. IIRC it was the late sixties before turntables had anti-skate technology.
It's completely unnecessary. Wasting your phone's limited storage on unneeded apps is just stupid. Why would someone download an app before they'd be willing to visit a web page? That makes no sense whatever.
But that's not what you originally said - you proposed that it takes a special amp to enjoy an LP when the amp is far from the weak link.
If it seemed like I was saying that, my communication skills were poor, although forty years ago all electronics were inferior to today's and the amp did make a difference, but nearly so much as your speakers (still the weak link) and turntable.
Wow and flutter (jitter is different, you get that with digital sound sometimes) were a problem with affordable turntables, but a good $300 Dual or even Panasonic didn't have that problem. But that was the point of the comment -- with analog, price mattered. With digital, not so much.
As to durability, that's just not so. Sure, you couldn't play frizbee with one and expect it to not pop and skip, but I have LPs that are 45 years old and still have little noise. I have had a LOT of completely unreadable CDs that were well cared for but became entirely unplayable. That is actually one of the disadvantages of some digital media -- if your LP gets scratched it wll pop and if scratched badly will skip, if a CD or DVD gets scratched it won't play at all. A weak analog TV signal was noisy but watchable, the same digital signal won't play at all.
As to non-linear frequency response, I think you misunderstand the RIAA equalization curve. Low frequencies were attenuated when recorded and strengthened on playback, but what came out of the speakers was a flat response. However, very cheap turntables with ceramic cartriges did have non-linear response, but we're talking about the very lowest end here, record players you bought for your small children.
A 15kHz square wave can not exist after filtering content below CD's Nyquest
Bingo! LPs have no Nyquist limit; Nyquist only applies to digital sound.
...more importantly can not exist period on an LP
Simply not true. I've seen recordings of such waves displayed on oscilloscopes (the class I took was in 1976, well before the digital age) and I assure you they were indeed not only possible but were common.
If audible tones are affected by supersonic harmonics they were affected in the studio and said effects were recorded.
Again, that was part of the point. They were in fact recorded in analog. With CD's 44k sampling rate, the highest possible frequency you can record is 22kHz, and they filter out everything above 20kHz to remove the noise that attempting to record above the Nyquist rate introduces.
The speakers I bought in Thailand (USAF, very high end stuff and very low prices) had what they called "super-tweeters" in addition to tweeters. The speakers had a rated response of 20Hz to 30kHz. The super-tweeter's response was 18kHz to 30kHz (four way speakers with six drivers in each enclosure, fifteen inch woofers).
If we are talking supersonic harmonics designed to interfere on playback, ones which did not exist during recording
This was used for what they called "quadrophonics" back then and we call "surround sound" now. The rear channels were modulated with a 40kHz tone, mixed with the front channels, and demodulated on playback. Without the ability to record a 40kHz tone on an LP, quadraphonic LPs would have been impossible.
Not only did the cuts not help, they increased the defecit and should be immedially raised to pre-Bush levels. The idea that "giving tax breaks to the rich increases employment" is incredibly retarded. The rich man isn't going to hire more workers because you lowered his taxes, he's only going to hire more workers if he needs them, and the only reason to need more workers is if he can sell more than he can produce. Give the poor and middle calss more money and they'll put it right back into the economy causing a ripple effect. Give it to a rich man and he'll stick it in the "gasoline futures" mattress and actually harm the economy.
The rich are paying far too little in tax, the poor are paying too much. I'm taxed about right, even though if I had a few more bucks I'd buy more toys.
True, except the real difference is, if my house gets broken into only my stuff gets stolen, If a bank gets broken into, everybody's money gets stolen. The bank needs a whole lot better security than my house does (my house was just broken into a couple of months ago, they opened the back door with a pry bar). A rich man needs good security on his house, a poor man needs none at all. If I have nothing to steal, I have no worries about security.
Some of these hacks, though, are like your borrowing my car, and leaving it running with the doors unlocked and the key in the ignition in a bad neighborhood. When I say "where's my car???" You (the corporation holding my data... er, car) shrug and say "why should I care? It wasn't MY car!"
Rather than "more fluff than substance" I'd say is a misuse of technology by the technologically clueless. There is no reason to need an app to have your phone be able to see a web page, you simply have to write the web page using plain HTML. And an app to call from your PHONE is just retarded.
That's the thing -- CDs are capable of a far greater dynamic range, but the studios don't use it. Not only does digital enable a level of crappy mastering that wasn't possible before, I believe they just don't give a damn these days. Maybe because they don't have to, I don't know.
Well mastered LPs could be loud and have tons of bass, but you couldn't fit as much music on an LP like that. The Beatles managed to fit more than a CD's worth of music (White Album) on two LPs by attenuating the bass. I'd rather they'd just left "Revolution #9 off.
Cream's "Wheels of Fire" had that skipping problem you mention, as did Steppenwolf's first album. It was just bad engineering. But I don't remember very many like that, those two are the only ones that come to mind.
Listen to Van Halen's first album on a high-end system and you'd swear they were in your living room. In fact, once when I moved the new neighbors saw us moving guitars and such in, when we were done we put my brand new Van Halen LP that had just come out that day and cranked it to 9. The next day when I met the neighbors they said "wow, man, your band kicks ASS!"
I simply don't believe the 20db separation figure -- the last song on Led Zeppelin 3 has a singer and a guitar, with the singer on one channel and guitar on the other. Turn the balance all the way over and you don't hear the singer at all, turn it the other way and you don't hear the guitar. It depends on the electronics, of course -- you have both channels in the up and down movement, one channel in the sideways movement (or vice versa, I don't remember which), and the left channel (or was it the right? Been a long time...) was fed in phase with the both channels channel to excise it. If it's a little out of phase your separation will suffer. Again, in the analog days, your equipment mattered a lot more.
As to tubes vs transistors, tubes don't really sound better (or "warmer" as some say), except in a live guitar performance when the amp is cranked to distortion levels. Look at an oscilloscope trace and you'll see the square wave produced by the overdriven tube amp has rounded corners, while the overdriven transistors are almost perfect square waves. Because of this, a lot of guitar players play into a low power tube amp, with a microphone in front of the tube amp feeding a more powerful transistor amp.
Actually your speakers/phones are the weakest link and always have been, although your inputs (turntable or tape deck) were almost as much a weak link. These days cheap amps are good enough; as I said, the prices have dropped while the quality has skyrocketed. Back in the old days about the only way to get good amps was to build them yourself, using math and oscilloscopes to ensure flat response (I had a friend who built a VERY good amp like that).
LPs have the advantage of a better frequency response and lack of aliasing. Frequency response on LPs is so good that the rear channels in a quadraphonic (surround sound) LP are carried on a 40kHz carrier wave. The carrier wave was twice the frequency you can hold on a CD. LP's main disadvantage is noise.
Aliasing comes into play in very high frequencies; you only have three samples in a 15kHz tone, so there's no way to diecern the difference between a square wave, sawtooth wave, or sine wave at higher frequencies, and I believe that audible tones are affected by supersonic harmonics (but I know of no studies proving or disproving it).
If CDs were sampled at ten times the rate they are now, LPs wouldn't hold a candle to them.
How would they tell whather or not it "had a valid license"? (I put that in quotes becuse I don't license music, I buy CDs). It isn't illegal to rip my CDs and store them on my hard drive or play them on an MP3 player, and the numbers burned into a copied CD are exactly the same numbers as the numbers on the factory CD it was copied from.
And I have a boatload of analog music, both LPs and CDs, that I sample and burn on CDs. There's nothing illegal or immoral about that -- I paid for the LPs and cassettes and the use of the content already. And some CDs that were originally recorded in analog and remastered for CD sound like utter crap; a Led Zeppelin Presence CD burned from an unscratched LP sampled from a high end turntable will have better frequency response, separation, and dynamics (especially the dynamics) despite the fact that CDs are capable of superior dynamics and separation than LPs. The guy from the band Boston really blasted the digital mix of their first album, last I heard he was re-mixing it. The CD of that album is REALLY short on dynamics, which seem to be completely missing on today's music (ironic since CDs are capable of better dynamics than analog).
I just don't see how they could tell if it was legal or not.
However, I personally see no use for iCloud; I have wifi, bluetooth, and cables so interdevice operability isn't a problem. I just can't see paying to have someone else store my digits when on-site storage is so cheap.
The nice thing about digital sound is that you no longer need such expensive equipment (except your speakers/headphones). That's good for us normal folks who don't have mountains of cash, bad for audiophiles. In the analog world, the more you spent, the better it sounded. A $500 turntable sounded far more lifelike than a $50 turntable. With digital, there's no audible difference between a $500 CD changer and a $20 CD player. High quality amplifiers have gotten so cheap that what used to be a $2,000 amp now is more like $50 (like all electronics; an IBM PC with no hard drive, 4 mz chip and 64k memory was $5,000. A twenty five inch TV cost $600 in 1976, these days you can get a 42 inch high definition flat screen for less).
An LP on a high end turntable through an amp with less than 1 db of distortion or noise played through a pair of four-way enclosures with eighteen inch woofers, a pair of different sized squawkers, a tweeter and a supertweeter will fool you into thinking it's a live performance; that's what hifi (high fidelity) means. It will sound better than the same record in CD format (provided the original studio tapes were analog).
However, with a low end (more affordable) system, the CD will always sound better than an LP. The low end turntable will lack bass, since it will be attenuated to reduce rumble, and will lack treble to make up for the lack of bass. It may also have speed slightly off and may even have a tiny bit of flutter (but you usually only get flutter from tape). It will also introduce distortion and may not have very good separation. Cheap CD players, on the other hand, send the same numbers to the DAC as as an expensive one, and until it reaches the analog DAC the cable the signal runs through doesn't matter at all; it either works or doesn't.
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You've posted in this discussion so your mod points are no good here.
I think your grand canyon analogy is flawed. It took millions of years for the grand canyon to form, and nobody would have noticed it happening.
In art they're called "happy accidents". In science, more important than "Eureka!" is "Hmmm, that's strange..."
How far would physics be if that apple hadn't fallen on Newton's head?
Only three things are required. Love God, love people, and accept Christ as your savior. Now, there are a lot more steps in some other religions...
I'm not saying getting your spine readjusted doesn't feel good, but don't think your fooling anyone claiming that it will actually fix anything either, because it flat out wont.
I'm not so sure about that. My dad, now retired, got a back injury while working and was off the job for quite a while. His medical doctor told him that surgery was his only recourse, and the surgery was risky and could make it worse but without it he might not be able to work again. Two weeks after seeing a chiropractor he was pain-free and back on the job. AFAIK he never had to go back to the chiropractor.
I was x-rayed in a hospital after an auto accident, and the radiologist, looking at the pictures, said "you have arthritis". I said "I know, when are you guys going to find a cure?" His reply was "the money's in treatment, there's no money in cures." At least there's naproxin sodium (sigh)
The "curing cancer with chiropracty" is just plain bullshit, and it's that kind of bullshit that gives chiropracty a bad name. Hmmm, I wonder if I should see a chiropractor about my arthritis? I've never been to a chiropractor.
Read Asimov's Foundation and Earth. He has people from the planet Solaris with a power like that, and it was explained satisfactorily in the book. That's one thing I always liked about his writing, he always explained away the parts that needed a suspension of disbelief; faster than light travel, for example.
Another thing I like about his fiction is that he was a real scientist, a PhD in biochemistry who did cancer research while on the faculty of Boston University.
I like Terry Pratchett because he explains stuff that needs suspension of disbelief in a way that makes the suspension of disbelief unnecessary because the explanation is so ludicrous... and also, he's funny as hell ("He realized that he was not only not the sharpest knife in the drawer, he might even be a spoon).
Or perhaps someone would have the absolutely boring ability to change their eye color.
That mutation has already happened, although I don't know of anyone who can do it at will. My eyes are like that -- My daughter Patty says that when they were kids they could tell what kind of mood I was in by the color of my hazel eyes. Patty inherited that from me, but her mother's brown eyes as well. Patty's is really kind of spooky, her irises turn almost red when she's angry. But it's not voluntary, and I have no idea if it's a benefit or a hindrance, it "just is"
Patty was also born with only one kidney. That's definitely a bad mutation (1 in 1000 people are born with one kidney). She tells her friends "I'm a mutant and my dad's a cyborg!"; I have a CrystaLens implant in my left eye that gives me a sort of super power -- my eyesight in that eye is better than 20/20 from one foot away to infinity, and I'm 59 years old. Hooray for technology!
Sadly, no. I think it caught on because 1) folks don't know that "in the cloud" means "on somebody else's server" and 2) OSES is almost as stupid sounding, and "On somebody else's server" is too cumbersome.
Well, that's what Miocrosoft means when it comes to security concerns -- they're concerned that it will loosen their stranglehold on the market.
Not all mutations are harmful. We wouldn't have evolved big brains and intelligence without genetic mutation.
This is probably bad news for my daughter Patty, who was born with only one kidney, as she found out after a CAT scan. She tells people "I'm a mutant and my dad's a cyborg!" I guess she can still say that, even though everybody's a mutant and most geezers my age have some sort of implanted devices in them these days.
You may be right, but I'm not so sure. When OS/2 first came out, the motto was "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". Now it's "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft". MS is entrenched in the business and government worlds and has been for decades, while OS/2 was mostly just toyed with for a short time.
Plus, almost every desktop computer made has Windows factory-installed. Only a tiny percentage of home PCs are used for serious aming. Then there are other programs, like TurboTax, that have no Linux equivalent.
As a kubuntu user, though, I hope you're right and I'm wrong.
Wow and flutter are analog tape distortions. Wow is caused by a stretched tape, flutter is caused by wrinkles in the tape or defects in the capstain roller. I heard a similar distortion in some music from a local radio station that seems to be an error in the DAC -- there is no distortion in frequency as there is on an analog tape, just in the speed of the music. Don't know what causes it/ There is a similar distortion in some turntables with belt driven platters.
There was often also bleed-through; a reverse echo of the first few notes before the song started. It was caused by a strong signal on thin tape magnetizing the next layer on the spool.
If ultrasonic frequencies causing audible interferences exist in the studio then the audible tones will be recorded and survive downsampling to 44.
It's impossible for a sample at 44ksps to have ultrasonic frequencies, even if frequencies above 20jHz weren't filtered out; the Nyquist limit prohibits it. As I said, anything above the Nyquist limit becomes noise. The filter is applied at the master, not on your CD player.
And yes, a cheap turntable with a heavy arm will ruin the high frequencies. Some tone arms weighed as much as 25 grams, but high end turntables are all less than a gram. My old Dual weighed in at a quarter gram. And yes, lateral forces, especially on turntables without anti-skate or poorly performing anti-skate will degrade separation. IIRC it was the late sixties before turntables had anti-skate technology.
I think you missed his <sarcasm> tag...
All he'll find is shark poop.
It's completely unnecessary. Wasting your phone's limited storage on unneeded apps is just stupid. Why would someone download an app before they'd be willing to visit a web page? That makes no sense whatever.
But that's not what you originally said - you proposed that it takes a special amp to enjoy an LP when the amp is far from the weak link.
If it seemed like I was saying that, my communication skills were poor, although forty years ago all electronics were inferior to today's and the amp did make a difference, but nearly so much as your speakers (still the weak link) and turntable.
Wow and flutter (jitter is different, you get that with digital sound sometimes) were a problem with affordable turntables, but a good $300 Dual or even Panasonic didn't have that problem. But that was the point of the comment -- with analog, price mattered. With digital, not so much.
As to durability, that's just not so. Sure, you couldn't play frizbee with one and expect it to not pop and skip, but I have LPs that are 45 years old and still have little noise. I have had a LOT of completely unreadable CDs that were well cared for but became entirely unplayable. That is actually one of the disadvantages of some digital media -- if your LP gets scratched it wll pop and if scratched badly will skip, if a CD or DVD gets scratched it won't play at all. A weak analog TV signal was noisy but watchable, the same digital signal won't play at all.
As to non-linear frequency response, I think you misunderstand the RIAA equalization curve. Low frequencies were attenuated when recorded and strengthened on playback, but what came out of the speakers was a flat response. However, very cheap turntables with ceramic cartriges did have non-linear response, but we're talking about the very lowest end here, record players you bought for your small children.
A 15kHz square wave can not exist after filtering content below CD's Nyquest
Bingo! LPs have no Nyquist limit; Nyquist only applies to digital sound.
Simply not true. I've seen recordings of such waves displayed on oscilloscopes (the class I took was in 1976, well before the digital age) and I assure you they were indeed not only possible but were common.
If audible tones are affected by supersonic harmonics they were affected in the studio and said effects were recorded.
Again, that was part of the point. They were in fact recorded in analog. With CD's 44k sampling rate, the highest possible frequency you can record is 22kHz, and they filter out everything above 20kHz to remove the noise that attempting to record above the Nyquist rate introduces.
The speakers I bought in Thailand (USAF, very high end stuff and very low prices) had what they called "super-tweeters" in addition to tweeters. The speakers had a rated response of 20Hz to 30kHz. The super-tweeter's response was 18kHz to 30kHz (four way speakers with six drivers in each enclosure, fifteen inch woofers).
If we are talking supersonic harmonics designed to interfere on playback, ones which did not exist during recording
This was used for what they called "quadrophonics" back then and we call "surround sound" now. The rear channels were modulated with a 40kHz tone, mixed with the front channels, and demodulated on playback. Without the ability to record a 40kHz tone on an LP, quadraphonic LPs would have been impossible.
Not only did the cuts not help, they increased the defecit and should be immedially raised to pre-Bush levels. The idea that "giving tax breaks to the rich increases employment" is incredibly retarded. The rich man isn't going to hire more workers because you lowered his taxes, he's only going to hire more workers if he needs them, and the only reason to need more workers is if he can sell more than he can produce. Give the poor and middle calss more money and they'll put it right back into the economy causing a ripple effect. Give it to a rich man and he'll stick it in the "gasoline futures" mattress and actually harm the economy.
The rich are paying far too little in tax, the poor are paying too much. I'm taxed about right, even though if I had a few more bucks I'd buy more toys.
True, except the real difference is, if my house gets broken into only my stuff gets stolen, If a bank gets broken into, everybody's money gets stolen. The bank needs a whole lot better security than my house does (my house was just broken into a couple of months ago, they opened the back door with a pry bar). A rich man needs good security on his house, a poor man needs none at all. If I have nothing to steal, I have no worries about security.
Some of these hacks, though, are like your borrowing my car, and leaving it running with the doors unlocked and the key in the ignition in a bad neighborhood. When I say "where's my car???" You (the corporation holding my data... er, car) shrug and say "why should I care? It wasn't MY car!"
Rather than "more fluff than substance" I'd say is a misuse of technology by the technologically clueless. There is no reason to need an app to have your phone be able to see a web page, you simply have to write the web page using plain HTML. And an app to call from your PHONE is just retarded.
That's the thing -- CDs are capable of a far greater dynamic range, but the studios don't use it. Not only does digital enable a level of crappy mastering that wasn't possible before, I believe they just don't give a damn these days. Maybe because they don't have to, I don't know.
Well mastered LPs could be loud and have tons of bass, but you couldn't fit as much music on an LP like that. The Beatles managed to fit more than a CD's worth of music (White Album) on two LPs by attenuating the bass. I'd rather they'd just left "Revolution #9 off.
Cream's "Wheels of Fire" had that skipping problem you mention, as did Steppenwolf's first album. It was just bad engineering. But I don't remember very many like that, those two are the only ones that come to mind.
Listen to Van Halen's first album on a high-end system and you'd swear they were in your living room. In fact, once when I moved the new neighbors saw us moving guitars and such in, when we were done we put my brand new Van Halen LP that had just come out that day and cranked it to 9. The next day when I met the neighbors they said "wow, man, your band kicks ASS!"
I simply don't believe the 20db separation figure -- the last song on Led Zeppelin 3 has a singer and a guitar, with the singer on one channel and guitar on the other. Turn the balance all the way over and you don't hear the singer at all, turn it the other way and you don't hear the guitar. It depends on the electronics, of course -- you have both channels in the up and down movement, one channel in the sideways movement (or vice versa, I don't remember which), and the left channel (or was it the right? Been a long time...) was fed in phase with the both channels channel to excise it. If it's a little out of phase your separation will suffer. Again, in the analog days, your equipment mattered a lot more.
As to tubes vs transistors, tubes don't really sound better (or "warmer" as some say), except in a live guitar performance when the amp is cranked to distortion levels. Look at an oscilloscope trace and you'll see the square wave produced by the overdriven tube amp has rounded corners, while the overdriven transistors are almost perfect square waves. Because of this, a lot of guitar players play into a low power tube amp, with a microphone in front of the tube amp feeding a more powerful transistor amp.
Actually your speakers/phones are the weakest link and always have been, although your inputs (turntable or tape deck) were almost as much a weak link. These days cheap amps are good enough; as I said, the prices have dropped while the quality has skyrocketed. Back in the old days about the only way to get good amps was to build them yourself, using math and oscilloscopes to ensure flat response (I had a friend who built a VERY good amp like that).
LPs have the advantage of a better frequency response and lack of aliasing. Frequency response on LPs is so good that the rear channels in a quadraphonic (surround sound) LP are carried on a 40kHz carrier wave. The carrier wave was twice the frequency you can hold on a CD. LP's main disadvantage is noise.
Aliasing comes into play in very high frequencies; you only have three samples in a 15kHz tone, so there's no way to diecern the difference between a square wave, sawtooth wave, or sine wave at higher frequencies, and I believe that audible tones are affected by supersonic harmonics (but I know of no studies proving or disproving it).
If CDs were sampled at ten times the rate they are now, LPs wouldn't hold a candle to them.
That's why I said "before the signal gets to the DAC".
How would they tell whather or not it "had a valid license"? (I put that in quotes becuse I don't license music, I buy CDs). It isn't illegal to rip my CDs and store them on my hard drive or play them on an MP3 player, and the numbers burned into a copied CD are exactly the same numbers as the numbers on the factory CD it was copied from.
And I have a boatload of analog music, both LPs and CDs, that I sample and burn on CDs. There's nothing illegal or immoral about that -- I paid for the LPs and cassettes and the use of the content already. And some CDs that were originally recorded in analog and remastered for CD sound like utter crap; a Led Zeppelin Presence CD burned from an unscratched LP sampled from a high end turntable will have better frequency response, separation, and dynamics (especially the dynamics) despite the fact that CDs are capable of superior dynamics and separation than LPs. The guy from the band Boston really blasted the digital mix of their first album, last I heard he was re-mixing it. The CD of that album is REALLY short on dynamics, which seem to be completely missing on today's music (ironic since CDs are capable of better dynamics than analog).
I just don't see how they could tell if it was legal or not.
However, I personally see no use for iCloud; I have wifi, bluetooth, and cables so interdevice operability isn't a problem. I just can't see paying to have someone else store my digits when on-site storage is so cheap.
The nice thing about digital sound is that you no longer need such expensive equipment (except your speakers/headphones). That's good for us normal folks who don't have mountains of cash, bad for audiophiles. In the analog world, the more you spent, the better it sounded. A $500 turntable sounded far more lifelike than a $50 turntable. With digital, there's no audible difference between a $500 CD changer and a $20 CD player. High quality amplifiers have gotten so cheap that what used to be a $2,000 amp now is more like $50 (like all electronics; an IBM PC with no hard drive, 4 mz chip and 64k memory was $5,000. A twenty five inch TV cost $600 in 1976, these days you can get a 42 inch high definition flat screen for less).
An LP on a high end turntable through an amp with less than 1 db of distortion or noise played through a pair of four-way enclosures with eighteen inch woofers, a pair of different sized squawkers, a tweeter and a supertweeter will fool you into thinking it's a live performance; that's what hifi (high fidelity) means. It will sound better than the same record in CD format (provided the original studio tapes were analog).
However, with a low end (more affordable) system, the CD will always sound better than an LP. The low end turntable will lack bass, since it will be attenuated to reduce rumble, and will lack treble to make up for the lack of bass. It may also have speed slightly off and may even have a tiny bit of flutter (but you usually only get flutter from tape). It will also introduce distortion and may not have very good separation. Cheap CD players, on the other hand, send the same numbers to the DAC as as an expensive one, and until it reaches the analog DAC the cable the signal runs through doesn't matter at all; it either works or doesn't.
I'd say a "wanna be audiophile" is someone who wishes he could afford a better sounding stereo.