Wouldn't you call converting an analogue signal in to digital wihich involves sampling and compression spoiling ?
No, I wouldn't and
yes I would!
I'll be honest, and say that
I am not a perfectionist, on top of the fact that age and misuse has made any attention to the upper figure of speaker/headphone/etc frequency ranges sadly useless anyway, but I am confident that some of our members, who put hours of work into digital archiving, will get results that will be
very challenging to the best of ears. They will be looking for the lowest noise floor and the biggest possible dynamic range; they may well be considering factors that are beyond their hearing*; they will certainly not be
compressing in the audio-engineering sense of the word, and nor will they be compressing in the
lossy sense for file storage.
Venkat? Any experience? Anyone else with good ears, good equipment, and direct experience of critical listening to the result of digitising vinyl?
Even so, I've mentioned that I am not happy with my current results! But the problem, I am fairly certain, is at the
phono-pre-amp stage: an analogue, not a digital problem. That is: I am not happy with what I am
hearing, regardless of whether or not I am [digitally] recording it.
I don't use an ordinary ADC. I progressed, as quickly as I could afford, from built-in audio, to add-in card, to a more expensive add-in card, to a pro-manufacturer card. As I have mentioned often, with regard to PC analogue-out, this card, at a fraction of the price, put my 600-GBP Cyrus CD player in the shade. Of course, this is a digital/digital comparison: it is not direct evidence in the D/A controversy. You can easily find
my particular prejudices... however unfair it may be, I'll never buy a soundblaster card because of how awful they were
decades ago, and I am deeply suspicious of the word "Audiophile" printed on the box, because the pro manufacturers/buyers just aren't interested in labels like that.
Much of what you say involves huge assumptions, both regarding the recording of the music in the first place, and regarding what
might happen if we shift it to a different media.
I think we should
try to recognise subjectivity, and our own prejudices, although I freely admit that success in that will always be limited (errr... subectively recognizing our subjectivity?
). Even having recognised, we are still free to enjoy. I enjoy owning something that says
RME or
Echo on the box rather than
Creative or
Asus. I recognise that much of that may be prejudice on my part ... but it is also part of my personal buying/ownership pleasure, and I do not have to give that up!
I don't know if I will ever move my CD collection to hard disk. I'm too lazy --- although, of course, it would be a mere copy exercise compared to digitising vinyl. Despite being a keen member of the site, frankly, I prefer my music in the concert hall, and don't listen
that much at home. Still, I am doing something today, with the music that I do have on hdd, that can't be done with vinyl: sending a copy on a portable disk to be kept elsewhere
Since (1) Ordinary ADC wont do the job (2) and If you love vinyls both points you have agreed upon, then why not give it a shot ?
Since we are
not talking about using ordinary ADCs ... suggest that, sometime, you give it a shot! You might be pleasantly surprised, and you also might consider it, if not as a day-to-day listening medium, as a backup archive of the fragile physical medium.
I would never
think of suggesting that you should give up your vinyl experience.
It's very like another discussion: somebody was saying they would like to move to Linux, but for this that and the other reason, could not. My answer was that they do not have
move to Linux, but can invite it to move in next door, and get all the experience they need or want. The digital/analogue question is equally not black and white, nor right or wrong.
We started off with speaker cables, and have travelled, backwards through the system from there, to a spirited conversation on
sources! hyeah:
*I have considered a couple of things like this. eg "reversing out" the noise that is present in "silence" --- but it is inaudible anyway, unless amplified by a
huge amount, and doing the same to the between-tracks rumble that I sometimes hear, but, again, it is inaudible during the music. There's another of Ethan Winer's on-line articles, where he demonstrates, with samples, how a horrible noise is easily masked by music. He then progressively increases the level of the noise, so we can find out when it does become audible. Whilst this may vary for different people, it is still a very reality-based approach to audio. I find that very instructive.
.
