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In Reply to: Re: Technical question about vinyl posted by macaque on December 11, 2002 at 10:27:31:
Sorry, analog system noise levels are far, far above the ultimate imposed by molecular dimensions of vinyl or lattice dimensions of diamond, and even far above the thermal noise limit of the pickup.If you don't like the sound of your CD player, then get a new CD player and enjoy all the music encoded on your discs as well as the treasures in your vinyl library.
Follow Ups:
I realise noise is always a big issue in any of this stuff, and yes analog systems do suffer from a lot of it. I was just trying to draw the analogy of analog to digital without considering such things. Any good digital system will also have a lot of noise.One of the major differences though is that digital systems introduce noise that is correlated to the actual signal (due to quantization of the sample amplitudes) and correlated noise in the clocking also creates a non-random type noise. This may explain the qualitative differences people hear bewteen analog and digital. Granted most turntable produce an inner groove distortion which can be quite annoying as well. And wow/flutter of the platter can also contribute to correlated noise, especially with servo controlled motors.
I am not giving up on CDs... I have too much invested in them. I find that even big clicks or pops in vinyl don't ruin the illusion of the music - I assume because they are completely uncorrlated to the music your brain treats them as separate sounds. "Hey, someone is popping popcorn on my speakers" but it doesn't ruin the illusion of an orchestra playing in my room. Crappy CD players do ruin the illulsion of the orchestra playing in my room - even with 110dB S/N ratio. Why is that?
I'm not qualified to evaluate your statements about correlated noise, but you may be right about the reason some people do not like digital sound.In my experience, those who claim to hate all digital simply do not like the sound of the particular CD playback equipment they own. Even if it is very expensive, based on what I've heard when visiting them, I have to agree with them. There are better and worse CD players just like in everything else. I have and enjoy the Wadia 861. It has a very strong analog output stage, which IMHO contributes to its good performance. Crappy CD players have crappy output stages and power supplies contaminated with correlated and noncorrelated digital grunge. Did you ever experiment with the Radio Shack CD3400? That device demonstrated clearly how a well-regulated supply could clean up the sound.
The WOW distortion from playback of LPs with off-center holes makes it impossible for me to believe there is a real performance going on in the room, regardless of how well the pickup and phono stage reproduce the sound. This distortion is very annoying to me, and I hear it on most LPs. I'm sure I had been trained to ignore it back in the days before CDs, just as I'm sure I'm well trained now to ignore whatever correlated noise the Redbook CD playback method produces, even with good equipment.
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