Think you must have been living on another planet for the last 30 years...
Dac/streamer - not as involving as vinyl
- Thread starter The Bish
- Start date
Think you must have been living on another planet for the last 30 years...
Chris81
pfm Member
And I think you take your opinion too seriously.
Purité Audio
Trade: Purite Audio
You have to accept that they are different and get the best out of each.
Keith
Keith
Tw99
source last
And I think you take your opinion too seriously.
Bloke who sells expensive analogue audiophile products for a living in "slags off digital shocker"
k90tour
pfm Member
I have always had a vinyl is best opinion. Even when I wasn't using one. Currently a Technics SL1200G or a Meridian 808 CD player. On just about everything, the vinyl sounds more lifelike. Listening to violin music, I can hear how the sound was made with the vinyl. The CD is good, very exact and in some ways, easier to listen to because there isn't as much to listen to.
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I played on vinyl The marriage of Figaro, Colin Davis conducting. Sounded good and very typically vinyl. The same evening, I dug out a CD of the same recorded back in 1961 with Ferenc Fricsay conducting. I have to say, the recording was fabulous. Maybe not the realism of the vinyl but I could get into the characters more easily. If every CD was like that, I could happily ditch the vinyl.
I have made a mental note to check out recording of the same team.
But it's not like that. The other day I pulled out a really old record of Eugene Goossens conducting the LSO - Rachmaninov Symphonic Dances. The sleeve was tatty and considering Goossens died in 1960 or so, this must have been really old. But behind the crackles, it was fantastic.
So, I guess it all depends on what's on the disc, be it vinyl or digital.
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I played on vinyl The marriage of Figaro, Colin Davis conducting. Sounded good and very typically vinyl. The same evening, I dug out a CD of the same recorded back in 1961 with Ferenc Fricsay conducting. I have to say, the recording was fabulous. Maybe not the realism of the vinyl but I could get into the characters more easily. If every CD was like that, I could happily ditch the vinyl.
I have made a mental note to check out recording of the same team.
But it's not like that. The other day I pulled out a really old record of Eugene Goossens conducting the LSO - Rachmaninov Symphonic Dances. The sleeve was tatty and considering Goossens died in 1960 or so, this must have been really old. But behind the crackles, it was fantastic.
So, I guess it all depends on what's on the disc, be it vinyl or digital.
And I think you take your opinion too seriously.
Well I would have thought that inevitable seeing as I am involved in the industry on a day to day basis, practically 24/7...
Bloke who sells expensive analogue audiophile products for a living in "slags off digital shocker"
Read my post. I didn't slag off digital. I said "I am not saying digital can't be good, but it doesn't provide the convincing result that analogue does". I sell music servers from Innuos and Novafidelity. I also manufacture 2 very good DACs. But I know which format provides the most natural sound.
FWIW I just bought in the last month about 20 CD's, as I can put them on my server, my iMac/iPhone/iPad/iPods etc and play my music around the house and in my cars.
Gervais Cote
Predator
Obviously, no consensus here.........
To make it beneficial for all of us, can the non-turntable guys tell us what they use as a source and DAC and think they sound great ?
This way, we will be able to give it a try and see if it’s good enough for our personal taste.
I actually use a Marantz CD 6006 as transport and a SMSL M500 as a DAC and the sound is very good but the high notes of cymbals sounds too digital/non organic for my taste.
To make it beneficial for all of us, can the non-turntable guys tell us what they use as a source and DAC and think they sound great ?
This way, we will be able to give it a try and see if it’s good enough for our personal taste.
I actually use a Marantz CD 6006 as transport and a SMSL M500 as a DAC and the sound is very good but the high notes of cymbals sounds too digital/non organic for my taste.
Chris81
pfm Member
I have problems when people (especially manufacturers, distributors, dealers) tell others that their subjective opinion is a fact. At least your post has that impression on me. If you don't mean it that way, I would appreciate when you would write something like "to my ears, in my eyes, IM(H)O when you make such statements.
I listen with valves and high efficient speakers but wouldn't claim that this is the most natural sound. To me some valve amplifiers can sound more natural but I doubt they are necessarily when looking on the topic with a objektiv view.
@Gervais Cote : Sugden Dac-4, no streamer only a little PC. To me streamers aren't worth the money. But I must admit that I'm a no snake-oil / hifi voodoo guy.
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So what?
Del monaco
Del Monaco
‘Sugden Dac-4, no streamer only a little PC. To me streamers aren't worth the money. But I must admit that I'm a no snake-oil / hifi voodoo guy.’
They are worth it when you pay less than £40.
They are worth it when you pay less than £40.
uncl_nigel
pfm Member
Not really a "digital guy" as I happily run both digital and analogue, and find both satisfying/involving/fun/revealing (choose your favorite)
My sight precludes car-ownership so I have two nice cars' worth of hifi
- dCS Rossini streamer/DAC and external clock fed by ROON running on my does-everything iMac with files on a couple of 2Tb external drives (+backups, of course)
- SME 20/2 with mk3 power supply and V arm, Grado Sonata mk2, Aesthetix Rhea Signature phono stage (the cart is probably the weak link here but does the job)
Timcat
pfm Member
Don't get me wrong, I certainly prefer listening to some works on vinyl, particularly older analogue recordings that have not been "remastered", but given that pretty much every recording made in the last 30 years or so was originally recored on digital equipment, digital should be closer to the original for these recordings. It may be that the digital files released on CD or via streaming have been mastered differently to the vinyl equivalents. If so, I can see why this leads to the vinyl version sounding better, but for these more recent recordings, digital has the potential, at least, to be more faithful to the original, I would have thought.
The Bish
pfm Member
It's a good point - I have the EQ pretty well calibrated now to have a fairly subtle impact on reducing peaks in the low frequencies and on some types of music it sounds excellent, especially in bringing vocals forward, but then on certain other tracks it can appear to take away a bit of the dynamism of the sound as you describe although this is much reduced now I've been less aggressive with the EQ. I bought the DAC specifically for the EQ but could live without it I think, may well have a look at getting a home demo of one of the other DACs listed upstream to see if I prefer the sound.
To the original what? Original (master?) recording, or original live sound?
There is an awful lot to understand to understand what is happening in all of the steps involved, and I don't understand that much at all, but, a record carries an analogue track, irrespective of what steps were involved between the live event(s) and that record groove.
That said, I do not accept that it is impossible that that analogue groove cannot be a better representation of the live event(s) than what many? all? all-digital systems can achieve. At the mind-numbingly simplistic level, if all the steps in making that groove are, in total, "more faithful" to the original live sound, than the steps in producing a CD, with the right replay gear, the record is capable of sounding most like the original live sound.
Not well explained, but hopefully well enough to make sense?
duckworp
pfm Member
Tony is absolutely spot on here. My old job was running the back-catalogue of EMI. Most of our 'new' releases were remastered albums. The quality of remastering is varied, but on the whole the unwritten idea of remastering is to make older music sound better on devices which today's listeners use - on earbuds and in-car, it is not to make music sound better on decent Hi-Fi systems. In fact, the result of compressing the remaster to make it more 'modern' and to fit with the way consumers listen to music these days, often makes it sound worse on good Hi-Fi. Streaming services use this most recent remaster. Your vinyl, unless bought new recently, is probably from the original LP master. These two masters will likely sound vastly different. The digital file will likely be more compressed, loud, possibly tiring to listen to, and my lack subtle dynamics.
If you want to compare your vinyl to digital reproduction on titles from the pre-digital era the best way is to source a non-remastered CD and then compare. Vinyl and CD are often remarkably similar sounding when you do this.
if you are not listening to older music which has been remastered, but you are listening to 21st century music (or 90s even) then the vinyl will have been mastered from a digital file. Some Mastering engineers sometimes tweak the mastering of the vinyl with a little less compression, but it won't be much if they do it at all. So the differences you are hearing on these more recent albums will likely be down to distortion that your vinyl set-up is producing. In this instance the digital file is the original source and the vinyl is an attempt to reproduce it.
Purité Audio
Trade: Purite Audio
How did you arrive at the filter parameters, did you measure with REW and use it’s EQ feature?
Keith
The Bish
pfm Member
I did use REW with a UMIK-1 and get a starter for ten view of filters using the EQ feature, and then tweaked around with them.
wylton
Naim and Mana member
I have an Auralic Aries mini with linear psu & I think it's a great little thing; for me, a much better solution than the PC/NAS based set up I had before. I find that the SQ from it varies more than any other source, due mostly to the variations in file type and bit rate I guess. I don't expect it to be as good as my turntables, but the SQ from them is variable too, so you're never really comparing like with like. I personally couldn't live with a streamer as my only source, but it’s a great way to get into new music that has no physical release. Ultimately, I don’t get the same emotional connection to the music as I do from vinyl.