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In Reply to: Re: not just digital, either posted by mls-stl on May 6, 2007 at 06:38:32:
When I hear a great performance via poor vinyl playback, it sounds like a great performance and a bad recording. When I hear a great performance via poor digital playback, it sounds like a mediocre performance and a decent recording.
Follow Ups:
Not sure I follow; how could you know if it was a great performance if it only sounds like a "decent recording" of a "mediocre performance"?However, I've long thought that everyone listens for different things when they listen to music in much the same way that we have different favorites when it comes to food, art, beauty or any of the other aesthetic pursuits. I think we are hearing different things.
"Not sure I follow; how could you know if it was a great performance if it only sounds like a 'decent recording' of a 'mediocre performance'?"A good question.....
The sonic degradation of poor digital playback, in my opinion, affects how one perceives the performance, to where it seems a lot worse than it actually was. Where with poor analog playback, it is much easier listen through the bad playback to the great performance.
Or to say this yet another way, if I only heard the 1970 Szell Tokyo Sibelius 2nd Symphony via digitized playback, I would have thought it was a vastly-overrated performance. For the performance seems "dull" and "boring" via digitized playback. But this same performance, which I recorded from FM broadcast to a VHS tape, it's as hair-raising and emotionally exhausting a work as any recorded performance I've ever heard.
I now greatly prefer digital playback to analog, but in my case I simply don't LET a bad recording affect how I view the performance. I've heard TONS of shitty recordings, on both analog and digital--my colection has more than a few of them--but I still listen to many of them on a frequent basis. The lack of sound quality is a pretty minor concern to me where that's concerned. I'll take a great performance and bad sound quality over the converse every time. As far as why analog has this perceived quality of letting one "see" through a bad recording . . . well, this debate could rage on forever. I believe, after owning and hearing too many turntables to list, that analog playback has certain euphonic, "softening" distortions that many people find pleasing and that allow them to enjoy imperfect recordings. To each their own. I'll stick with my digital rig.
I'm not questioning people's choices in playback, I'm just trying to raise the awareness that people may mis-perceive the performance due to digitization.Note that I personally listen to exclusively CDs while in CA, and 90 percent CDs while I'm in AZ. (It would be much lower if I wasn't fortunate to find decent CD playback.) We're all in this together.
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