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Actually, not directly audio related nor completely true, but, food for thought..
For years I have been wearing glasses with progressive lenses, for those unfamiliar, those change prescription/dioptry from top to bottom. As such they are relatively complex shapes.
Recently I acquired new glasses and new lenses that I was having problem with - even slightest off center right side vision was bad. Went back to the doctor, he checked everything he could think of and everything was OK. Prescription, lenses, distances, etc. was theoretically correct, yet I was having problem seeing toward the right side. Finally he checked the type of lenses and found out that although the manufacturer and basic lens type was the same, new glasses were "digital" - i.e. made by digitally controlled CNC machine to carve the lenses. Theoretically they should do better job in correcting the vision than the older analog type, but for some reason in my case they did not.
I am sure that DBT of my vision would prove that digital lenses are at least as goOd as analog :-)
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"One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane."
Follow Ups:
My last pair of progressive lenses I got (just a few months ago) have been the best I ever bought in terms of visual range (although the cost... yikes!)
In regard to the old analog and digital war in audio... they both suck.
There is nothing like live and the immediate emotional connection between the audience and the performer.
(Although I can do without a few thousand people in my listening room... ;-))
I guess to put it succinctly, I like well done analog and well done digital.
Happy Listening!
DeeCee
(Currently on playlist: Vanishing by Boz Scaggs from the album Dig)
Yup.
Your post's "observation" is about as accurate as saying that your last apple tasted off because of the UPC sticker on it, but certainly not as humourous as the apple comment. Stick to analog fruit...
nt
Bi-focals I suppose would be binary. I just take em off or lift them if I need to look at the small stuff. Glass only please.....
Give me rhythm or give me death!
Overall, soundwise, analogue has it over digital. But one can't beat the convenience of being able to plop a disc in the player, program it so you don't have to listen to the cuts you don't like, then kick back with your favorite adult beverage. No cartridge alignment issues and no pre-cleaning of discs almost every time they're played. It's nice to have both at your command.
Grammar: The difference between feeling your nuts, and feeling you're nuts.
A reasonable person of sorts? Effin' refreshing in this church!
We'll have to put a stop to reasonable right now!
Grammar: The difference between feeling your nuts, and feeling you're nuts.
The questions is "Do you want Perfect Sound Forever or Perfecting Music Forever?"
I think what he wants is perfect, or at least reasonably good, vision. And I've read that CNC machining is not the way to go when the ultimate in precision is needed. But I'm no expert in such things.
Spewing reasonable posts? What a heresy!
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"One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane."
Don't give up your day job.
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"One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane."
The nice thing about digital is you can have both!
CD has the best wow & flutter spec. Vinyl is higher rez than CD. Blah, blah, blah..
The proof is in the pudding.
> CD has the best wow & flutter spec.
This can be very important in some cases. The reason I got into digital in the first place was because of my sensitivity to wow & flutter. The year was 1991 and I always traveled with my cassette Walkman. However, it had so much wow & flutter that I just couldn't take it anymore, so I bought a Sony DAT Walkman for traveling.
> Vinyl is higher rez than CD. Blah, blah, blah..
I think the "blah's" have it! I discovered this to be a blatant lie as soon as I copied my first LP to DAT.
> The proof is in the pudding.
Absolutely correct! Back in 1991 I found that my 48-kHz DAT copies of vinyl sounded just like vinyl to me. I agree that most CDs don't sound as good as most vinyl records, but I suspect the reason has more to do with the inaccuracy of vinyl than with the inaccuracy of digital. Even when I copy vinyl at 44.1-kHz Redbook, the copy sounds virtually identical to vinyl to me. At 24/96, the two sound absolutely identical as far as I can tell. Therefore, you are correct: "The proof is definitely in the pudding!"
Best regards,
John Elison
What you digitally record is an analog recording played back via an analog source. Even if you employ a digitallly recorded LP you are still using an analog source for your digital recording. The REAL test is to compare original digital recordings on cd to original analog recordings on vinyl. I gotta wonder if you've ever compared two recordings of the same recording session, that is a simultaneous digital/analog recording. Its very uncommon for obvious economic reasons.I am not anti-digital, and enjoy the sound of my cd's thru my tubed cdp. But digitally recorded cd's are missing the "charged air" and "vibrancy" that I hear on records. You may claim what I prefer is pleasing distortion, but to me (and I think its safe to say many others too) the black air/space/silence in digital recordings is dead/blank whereas it is alive in analog.
My experience as a recording musician also tells me that digital recordings do not match the realistic timbres and full harmonic pallette achieved by analog recordings, especially when the whole process - recording, mixing, mastering - is done in digital. I have a number of recordings of my own groups - some digitally recorded/mixed (including my two most recent cd's, which certainly are NOT poorly recorded/mixed), and some recorded/mixed in analog. It ain't hard to tell the difference, and I prefer the analog recordings even when using cassette as the playback medium.
I think each recording/mixing medium has its advantages. But if given a choice based strictly on *sound quality* as opposed to ease of editing and economic considerations, I'd never record or mix in digital again, and would release only LP's. Bear in mind that I'm not in the "digital sucks" camp.
Edits: 02/28/14
"My experience as a recording musician also tells me that digital recordings do not match the realistic timbres and full harmonic pallette achieved by analog recordings,"
As a recording engineer I have recorded to an ATR 102 (30ips) and 24/96 at the same time and the playback from the ATR sounds, to me, much more like the live mic feeds did than the playback of the digital.
To me, that's the comparison that needs to be made. Not digital compared to analog (CD vs. LP) but analog compared to the live mic feeds and then digital vs. the live mic feeds.
And it's not about which one "sounds better" (whatever the hell that means). It's about which one sounds more like the original (live mic feeds).
Tre'
Have Fun and Enjoy the Music
"Still Working the Problem"
As a recording engineer I have recorded to an ATR 102 (30ips) and 24/96 at the same time and the playback from the ATR sounds, to me, much more like the live mic feeds did than the playback of the digital.
It's a shame E. Brad Meyer didn't make this obvious determination with his Rube Goldberg-esque "proof" that SACD is indistinguishable from Redbook. :)
By your own criterion, with which I agree BTW, you obviously have an inferior digital recorder. It doesn't matter how much it cost and whether it is a professional machine, if it can't duplicate the sound of a live microphone feed, it is obviously inferior.
Best regards,
John Elison
nt
The sound of analog that you prefer is entirely due to harmonic and IM distortion as well as frequency and phase distortion. You can prove this to yourself by making high-resolution digital recordings of your prized analog masters. Unless you are using an inferior digital recorder, you will find they sound the same.
Yes, I have compared digital Redbook recordings made with a digital tape recorder to direct-to-discc LPs of the same performance. Sheffield Lab made at least four of them. They sound very similar, but the LPs are more pleasing because of their inherent distortions. Again, I have proven this to myself by making high-resolution 24/96 digital recordings of the direct-to-disc LPs and they sound identical to the LPs.
Best regards,
John Elison
Then how come a certain individual was able to correctly distinguish vinyl vs. a digital copy made by YOU on the recorder YOU chose 9 out of 10 times?
To me, the term distortion has inherently bad connotations. I grew up with Hendrix, the Who, etc. and that is what comes to mind when I hear the word. Really, not too pleasing. Maybe we could refer to the almost suconsciously sensed vibratory anomalies in analogue playback as "enhancement", or "audio Xanax" (lol)
"When the demon is at your door, in the mornin' it won't be there no more"
Steely Dan
Edits: 02/28/14
Off topic, I know...
However, since the OP was about glasses...and most of us use them, I wager, I have enjoyed reading along with my "vinyls", and have become more educated about music as a result, which becomes helpful in searching for new music. Just an LP bonus. I would have to put on 2 pair to read from a CD jacket!
"When the demon is at your door, in the mornin' it won't be there no more"
Steely Dan
I use a magnifying glass! ;-)
http://www.audioasylum.com/audio/vinyl/messages/107/1074364.
Never trust an Atom, they Make Up everything!
Digital audio suffers from digital resolution as much as digital video does. If you will suffer through a story with me...When HD TV was first starting service on DirecTV there was only three channels. I can't recall the other two but the main channel was HD Net owned by Dallas Mavericks owner, Mark Cuban.
Back at the advent of HD TV there was a scramble for HD material to be broadcast. The problem of digital resolution raised its ugly head immediately. Since Standard Definition TV digital video was recorded at a specific resolution there was no content available to "fill in" the greater resolution required by 1080i (the highest resolution at the time).
The first HD TV broadcasts were largely travel shows. It was in everyones best interest to re-record their travel videos in HD to prompt possible visitors to want to come and visit their country, state or whatever. There were lots of travel videos initially shot on HD.
HD Net also wanted to broadcast some regular TV shows and movies. TV shows were a problem because networks switched to video tape long ago and that tape had a finite digital resolution. The answer back then was to dig a bit deeper and choose older TV shows recorded on film.
Yep, old analog film had the resolution already built in to be up-converted to HD TV. The first regular TV show broadcast on HD Net, was Hogan's Heros. Because all the more recent TV shows were on SD TV video tape their up conversion was not a good use of HD TV bandwidth.
Of course they could be up converted but looking at a SD TV show on HD is not a great experience nor a good way to sell the public on more expensive TV hardware for some new fangled service called HD TV.
Movies was an easier up convert due to the movie industry's reliance on film and the large catalog of content waiting to be converted to HD video tape. There were a lot of movies on early HD TV service.
Like video, audio has resolution issues that mostly show their ugly teeth in the upper frequency range. Fortunately there is relatively little content at or around 20kHz nor can many people hear a pure 20kHz sine wave. That's the reason that Redbook audio does as well as it has.
Yes, all that is required to reproduce a sine wave is two samples but music is not a pure sinewave and it has lots of complex info to be dealt with. Redbook audio misses some of that information.
Higher sampling rate PCM audio and DSD audio more closely approximates analog audio but remember these are samples of the analog waveform so there is always a chance, however slight it may be, that a sample will miss some relevant content. The word "sampling" should alert anyone who is considering digital audio before they take the plunge from analog.
Before anyone chimes in to point out the problems with analog audio, I do not, for one second, try to fool myself that analog audio does not have issues. Many of these issues are fixed by digital audio but at a price.
The question is whether you are willing to pay the price for the hardware to do analog justice and are willing to pay the price of the reduced convenience that analog audio puts on its users. Playing back digital audio is a lot easier but I personally think that, done properly, analog will always be superior to digital audio.
Thats a easy bet because the KISS principal supports that view. You have to start with analog and any conversion and reconversion just complicates the effort.
Ed
We don't shush around here!
Life is analog...digital is just samples thereof
Edits: 02/28/14
Anyone who thinks anything has "infinite resolution" is ignoring basic physics.
Mark Kelly
When I first tried polycarbonite, and 'thin' lenses.I couldn't focus on things clearly even though the prescription was correct. Now I specify CR39 which has the least color aberation.Color aberation is a prism effect whereas colors shift slightly (like green to the right and pinks to the left). A good test for color aberation is to look at a full moon and notice the right and left hand edges.
I miss glass lenses for their optical properties even though they are heavy. In Tijuana you can get one millimeter thick lenses for reading....the best. Here in the upper US the FDA requires 2mm (or is it three...I cant remember).Also I hear that quartz lenses are good and from Germany you can get some special formula glass for a premium price.
I, most of the time wear my RGP contacts that beat everything else except ultimate comfort.
It's not always available, depending on the outlet I visit. But I *hate* looking through plastic.
big j.
"... only a very few individuals understand as yet that personal salvation is a contradiction in terms."
Oh please!
Why I am not surprised? Hm, maybe the shear number of your nonsensical posts has to something do with it.
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"One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane."
> Oh please!
My feelings, exactly! ;-)
I'm getting old and out of touch, please tell me what the original poster's
parallel can tell us about the stale analog vs. digital debate or the sordid objective vs. subjective palaver?
Absolutely nothing!
change your moniker
ET
systems equipment list in your profile here! lol :)
every other week he probably puts a 180g super audiophile remaster blah ... tries to get psyched ... this time finally I'll get it ... and then a nearly imperceivable tick goes by and he's cracked, the thrill is gone ... but it probably looks cool.
Never trust an Atom, they Make Up everything!
...although I think that I need a better phono stage!
Later Gator,
Dave
it ate tubes like crazy, so i sold it.
Must be Bose noise-reducing headphones driven by a Yugo car stereo.
Edits: 02/27/14
.
Never trust an Atom, they Make Up everything!
yeeeeeah....and he fully acknowledges that in his opening sentence:"Actually, not directly audio related nor completely true, but, food for thought.."
*btw....i spent the morning at the eye doctor's office trying to yet again (third time) re-do my prescription for reading/computer glasses....and then spent the afternoon at costco resubmitting the new prescription. i wonder how they're carving the lenses, cuz i'm having a helluva time with getting glasses (i keep getting nauseous/dizzy with each new prescription). maybe i should insist on analogue!
Edits: 02/27/14
Maybe the winky in the subject line is an indicator he was just kidding the OP and overly sensitive readers may want to beware. Don't know. That's how I read it.
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