Propeller Head Plaza Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics.

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Re: Technical question about vinyl

Posted by macaque (A) on December 11, 2002 at 10:27:31

In Reply to: Technical question about vinyl posted by mike_decock on November 18, 2002 at 14:58:41:

There is a fundamental difference between analog and digital which makes this an apples to oranges comparison.

That being said one often overlooked part of digital audio is that as implemented it cannot exactly recreate the original analog signal. The theory allows taking samples at discrete time intervals of a band limited signal and recreating the original analog signal exactly (sampling thereom) assuming you can make a perfect low pass filter. For all this to work the samples have to be continuous and not discrete. 16 bit quantization of the samples is the main thing preventing the realisation of a better rendition of the original signal (you would like an inifinite number of bits). I think high-res audio has the potential to sound a lot more like analog because of the bit resolution more so than the sample rate. You get 256 times closer to "continuous" samples with 24 vs 16 bits. Higher sample rates allow you build low pass filters that are not necessarily ideal but very close to ideal in the audible band. This has been exploited for a long time with oversampling.

There is no sample frequency or amplitude quantiziation in analog, except that at some point the molucules which control the movement of the stylus are discrete, in terms of digital audio you could think of the amplitude of the signal being represented by a number of bits approaching inifinity and infinitely small time sampling (allowing unlimited bandwidth).

It would be interesting to have a format which was discrete time sampled but used a stylus instead of a DAC to have a continuous "sample" level based on molecular bits. In essence, high rez digital formats are trying to emulate that type of situation in a more convenient (and less error prone) format.

That being said, I just got a Music Hall MMF-7 turntable and there is something so magnetic about the sound of vinyl I have a hard time listening to CDs now.

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