[lbo-talk] Re: Say BYE BYE to VINYL!

[Wojtek Sokolowski]

Johns Thronton:
> In a similar experiment in my home I took two recordings that were
> identical in that they were both recordings of the same orchestra playing
> the same pieces at the same time. The Philip Glass Ensemble with
> Koyaanisqatsi and Beethoven's 9th in D minor, op. 125 with Daniel
Barenboim
> conducting the Berliner Staatsoper. Both were in CD format and in DVD-A
> format from the same recording session. Speakers were identical and
> placement was the same. With both pieces being played back simultaneously
I
> switched back and forth from the two sources. The only variables were the
> formats of the recordings and the players themselves. I have yet to find
> anyone who could not hear the difference and pick which format was being
> listened to. To correct for the possible variable of any differences

My understanding of digital recording or music, or pictures, is that quality
depends pretty much on an arbitrary decision that balances the amount of
information (i.e. file size) and the quality of sound or image.  If a
decision is made to lower the amount information, e.g. to cram more stuff on
a single disk or a memory card, the quality will invariable suffer.  My
understand of the CD and DVD format is that CD has much lower capacity to
hold information in is thus more prone for decisions sacrificing quality for
volume .

So what you were observing were probably differences due an executive
decision to use one CD disk at the expense of slightly lower sound quality
instead of two to have better sound quality.  

Evidently, you did not control for that variable.  To do so, you would have
to compare two media that uses highest possible in each medium quality.  

Furthermore, there are clear technical differences between analog (vinyl)
and digital recordings which are likely to result in discernible differences
in sound quality.  However, it is possible to emulate the analog quality
using the digital recording (e.g. by electronic filters), but it is not
possible to emulate the quality of the digital recording using analog
recording.  This is so, because digital recording contains more informatio0n
than analog recording, so one can drop some of the digital detail to but one
cannot make up for detail that is absent from the source.  Only gurus of
privatization can claim geting something out of nothing.

Wojtek