The antique tech shortage that hurts the vinyl boom

And I even understand those reasons. I just like it better when people distinguish between their own emotional reasons and objective facts.

I prefer to tune my guitar with a tuning fork. My cell phone can run those guitar tuner apps just fine, and the only reason to stick to the analog method is that I like it better.

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There’s a third option and it has to do with how our brains interpret the sounds we perceive and our expectations about certain sounds. Example:

Optical effects and psycho acoustic effects have on thing in common, they’re the way our brain makes sense of visual and auditory stimuli.
Psycho acoustic effects are well known and used in audio production to create a final impression on the listener. You do in fact hear things that aren’t there and sometimes, you don’t hear things that are really there. They’re deliberately placed to cause the sensations you mention.

Psycho acoustics is fun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoacoustics

Heh, I tune to the A 447.5 harmonica our lead guy plays :smile:

Kinda funny story, our fiddle player brought in a new tuner one day. It had accidently be calibrated to A 435 (she swears it was a ‘butt calibration’). That was a fun warmup song.

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Absolutely, but if such an effect was recorded on the master and then you make a digital and an analog copy and play them both back, you are going to get the same effect on both playbacks.

I don’t want to impress some false dichotomy on the discussion but I don’t think that this third option you’ve suggested is actually related to the fact that some people think analog has an ineffable quality that digital does not re-create. But I do think it’s an interesting topic nonetheless.

That’s not “objective” by any definition.

This thread is relevant:

As is this article, which I knew I had seen linked from the BBS before

http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

I'll plug a recent paper, Audibility of a CD-Standard A/D/A Loop Inserted into High-Resolution Audio Playback, done by local folks here at the Boston Audio Society.

Unfortunately, downloading the full paper requires an AES membership. However it's been discussed widely in articles and on forums, with the authors joining in. Here's a few links:

This paper presented listeners with a choice between high-rate DVD-A/SACD content, chosen by high-definition audio advocates to show off high-def's superiority, and that same content resampled on the spot down to 16-bit / 44.1kHz Compact Disc rate. The listeners were challenged to identify any difference whatsoever between the two using an ABX methodology. BAS conducted the test using high-end professional equipment in noise-isolated studio listening environments with both amateur and trained professional listeners.

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Pull quote:

Of course you can trust your ears. It’s brains that are gullible. I don’t mean that flippantly; as human beings, we’re all wired that way.

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Actually, the relevant part is that your brain can fool you into believing that analog has such an ineffable quality.

And with that I’ve had my say :smile:

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I disagree. What I said is an objective, testable statement.

“If you prefer X, you can X, but if you can prefer Y, you cannot Y” is equivalent to “X is possible and Y is not possible”. So, I have made two statements:

  • A CD can accurately reproduce the sound of any vinyl record
  • Vinyl records can not, in general, reproduce the sound of all CDs.

And whether or not the sound is accurately reproduced can be tested in double-blind trials.

As I haven’t done those trials myself, I consider it possible that my statement is objectively wrong. Which wouldn’t make it any less objective.

Forgive a non-native speaker of English here, but don’t ineffable qualities tend to be those qualities that don’t actually exist in a physically real way? Such as, the added “meaning” given to a sound, a place or an act by our knowledge of things that have nothing at all to do with the physical sound.
Why would I want to listen to a live transmission of the Vienna New Year’s Concert rather than a recording of the preview performance from December 30th? I am sure there is no objective difference in the quality of the music performed. If people didn’t tell me, I wouldn’t know. Still, the choice is clear for me.

The existence of opinions is obvious. That these prejudices hold up under blind peer-reviewed studies is factually incorrect.

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Well… English isn’t my native language either so there’s that :wink: . But I’m pretty sure in this case we are using ineffable to mean “Hard to put into words but still an important part of the experience”.

And I do agree with Dacree that there is an ineffable quality at play here, I’ve only argued that this quality has more to do with people’s expectations of the medium than anything arising from the medium itself. I’ve argued that music is made to make you feel an emotional response and that this in itself accounts for the response people get to music. Knowing something is “digital” or “analog” only colours* our perception of the experience of sound.

[size=10]*BTW. I meant to use colours instead of colors, just because English is not my native language doesn’t mean I can’t wield it with a deadly Kung Fu grip when so inclined.[/size]

If its not the same performance then I’m sure there could possibly be objective, measurable differences in the performance. As to the quality of that performance? You’d have to hear both to determine if it makes a difference to you.
Even then that difference could be subjective, maybe you were in a better mood when you listened to the first performance or if you listen to the performance back to back and there’s a difference in volume, you’re more likely to prefer the louder version.

We point to these differences in perception as that hard to describe thing that makes music personally meaningful. Yes, you can make objective statements like the ones in your post, but then these tell you nothing about how you experience an event.

I’m temped to write a really long post about how the fidelity of recording and playback mediums are objectively irrelevant for music (Specifically for music) as a way to address how they are subjectively meaningful. Maybe I’ll come back to this later when I’ve got some time to spare.

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You know, I don’t even understand what is being argued anymore.

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Records are more harmonically “danceable” and anyone who doesn’t use audiophile Ethernet cables has been educated stupid by government and schools.

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i think you will find audiophile token ring running ipx/spx is a superior format for vinyl setups.

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The BNC connectors are a big part of this system, don’t forget them.

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Perhaps you’re thinking of DenonLink, which isn’t ethernet–it just looks like it to someone who sees the RJ-45 connectors, and assumes all sorts of things about packets, error correction, grounding, ans so on.

IIRC, the Denonlink player came with a cable, I’m not sure why Denon decided to make a luxury version. Possibly it was the suspicion that cable snobs wouldn’t buy Denon’s expensive premamps and sacd players if they couldn’t source an outrageously priced cable. HDMI has probably supplanted that anyway.

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I wish this were a joke.

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Yeah. But the original $499 “ethernet cable”,

was designed to carry multichannel digital audio, with no error correction. Better than connecting multiple analog cables and forgoing digital crossovers and the like, but other hand, shielded cables were a must.

http://www.avsforum.com/forum/18-dvd-players-standard-def/670506-anyone-knows-denon-link-cable-pinout.html

Of course, once ethernet–actual ethernet, with packets and stuff-- became established in home audio-- a bluray player, an appleTV and so on all connect to a router using ethernet cables, the usual scam companies decided “we can make cables too”.

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It is all such a scam.

Sure, I don’t buy the cheapest cable, I buy ones I like the look of. For my alternate vinyl setup I think I spent… $25 total on cabling? And there is probably $19 worth of copper in those hefty things.

This little guy, while only tubes for the preamp, sounds spectacular. And that amazon price is way, way higher than I paid.

ETA

Linkynoworky. Quinpu A3.