Steven Hirsch wrote:
> MdntTrain wrote:
>>> Cool.  I grew up with audio and have it in my blood.  My late father, 
>>> Julian
>>> Hirsch, was a well known audio reviewer and technical writer.  After 
>>> years of
>>> striving for the utmost accuracy in analog reproduction, I think he 
>>> would have
>>> found it somewhat upsetting to see devices using lossy compression 
>>> (e.g. iPod,
>>> MP3 players, etc.) take over so much of the market.
>>
>> Wouldn't he have also found it upsetting for you to copy your vinyl to
>> CD?   That's also a lossy process, and I can definitely hear the
>> difference between CD and vinyl.   The only CD that sounds decent is
>> SACD.
 >
> He had no qualms about CDs.  The issue of "digital sound" with CDs is 
> starting to verge on religous issues or possibly something as serious as 
> vi vs. emacs :-).  I'll stay away from the discussion of whether or not 
> it's lossy.

Any digitization is lossy if its quantization error is in excess of the
noise floor of the analog input.  The real question, then, is what is
the noise floor of typical material played from a vinyl recording in
comparison to 16-bit PCM?  I'm sure there are religious positions on
that.  ;-)

I would be much more interested in double-blind comparisons, to
avoid the effect of beliefs on the data.

Since you are sampling at 96kHz, then there is at least 2x oversampling,
which should reduce the effects of quantization noise by about sqrt(2),
or about the equivalent of getting another half bit in sample size.

>> Digital sound is so grating on my ears, that I archive from vinyl to
>> VHS HiFi.   Now THAT sounds good!
> 
> How is VHS HiFi not digital?  Granted, it may not use PCM encoding (ISTR 
> it's delta-encoding), but there's still an ADAC transformation of some 
> sort.

No, VHS and Beta Hi-Fi are FM modulated carriers, and are fully analog
(though you can always make arguments depending on modulation index
and the demodulation technology).

So the issue is really SNR--which is generally quite good for FM.

-michael

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