[Steven Sullivan]

In rec.audio.tech Peter Larsen wrote:
David Looser wrote:

"Peter Larsen" wrote in message
...

David Looser wrote:

Surely the screen image of the audio editor package is good enough.

But you don't get to see that until *after* you've made the
recording!!!

Bad choice of software then.

You have *predictive* software? Just like the lifts in "Hitch-Hiker"
it knows what's going to happen *before* it happens? I'm amazed, does
this software also predict the numbers for next weeks lottery?

You DO realize that you are quabling about the possibility of inter-sample
overs in DA conversion of a file that is recorded at 96 kHz sample rate with
2 full bits of headroom above the audio signal to make room for the clicks.
Those large clicks are later removed. The file is eventually as previously
suggested by me normalized to -2.5 dB ref. full scale.

You don't need to record at 96 to capture the clicks sufficiently for them to be located later
by software. 44.1 is quite sufficient.

[Arny Krueger]

"Steven Sullivan" wrote in message

In rec.audio.tech Arny Krueger wrote:
"Steven Sullivan" wrote in message

In rec.audio.tech Arny Krueger wrote:
"Steven Sullivan" wrote in message


Are you sure Audition shows you when you're generating
intersample overs?

Yes.

In fact I just pulled CE 2.1 up on this computer I'm
typing one and made a few instesample overs by hand,
just to be zillion-times sure.

How? And what did it show?

A line going up to FS and disappearing for a while, and then a line starting
at FS and going down. Something like it for -FS.

Audition Help includes this warning

"If you're planning to put normalized audio on CD, you
might want to normalize the waveforms
to no more than 96% as some audio compact disc players
have problems accurately reproducing bits that have been
processed to 100% (maximum) amplitude."

I've been saying as much on RAP for years.

And when I've normalize a music track to 0dBFS, I've
never seen the Audition peak meter go
into the +0 zone. So I assumed that its peak meter does
not model reconstructed output.

It indicates it, when it exists.

[Arny Krueger]

"Peter Larsen" wrote in message

Arny Krueger wrote:

However, a great amount of wisdom has forced itself into
my life when I did subject recording certain choices to
DBTs.

DBT's are good at large differences.

...and any difference that is audible.

It is also an
excellent point to make that a difference by definition
is not a major difference if it doesn't show up in a DBT.

If it doesn't show up in a DBT then it is not audible.

It is also extremely worthwhile to remember the
differences in tonality and imaging caused by moving a
main pair 2 inches ....

Which I interpret as showing the futility of obsessing over small
differences.

[Peter Larsen[_2_]]

Steven Sullivan wrote:

In rec.audio.tech Peter Larsen wrote:
Steven Sullivan wrote:

If you record the output of the grammophone/cart/pre, you are
capturing whatever the grammaphone is 'hearing' from the
loudspeakers.

That would be an incompetent thing to do, it is indeed one of the
many errors I too have made, but it is is not new knowledge.

? How do *you* digitize an LP, if not from the analog output?

Or are you just saying that when you do, you make sure there is not
acoustic feedback from nearby loudspeakers to the turntable?

Indeed. It is that coloration that some of the vinyl enthusiasts miss. Other
just enjoy the larger actually produced dynamic range on vinyl.

-S

Kind regards

Peter Larsen

[Steven Sullivan]

In rec.audio.tech Peter Larsen wrote:
Steven Sullivan wrote:

In rec.audio.tech Peter Larsen wrote:
Steven Sullivan wrote:

If you record the output of the grammophone/cart/pre, you are
capturing whatever the grammaphone is 'hearing' from the
loudspeakers.

That would be an incompetent thing to do, it is indeed one of the
many errors I too have made, but it is is not new knowledge.

? How do *you* digitize an LP, if not from the analog output?

Or are you just saying that when you do, you make sure there is not
acoustic feedback from nearby loudspeakers to the turntable?

Indeed. It is that coloration that some of the vinyl enthusiasts miss. Other
just enjoy the larger actually produced dynamic range on vinyl.

Vinyl does not 'actually produce' a larger dynamic range, unless the CD's dynamic range has
been intentionally reduced.


___
-S
"As human beings, we understand the world through simile, analogy,
metaphor, narrative and, sometimes, claymation." - B. Mason

[Peter Larsen[_2_]]

Steven Sullivan wrote:

Indeed. It is that coloration that some of the vinyl enthusiasts
miss. Other just enjoy the larger actually produced dynamic range on
vinyl.

Vinyl does not 'actually produce' a larger dynamic range, unless the
CD's dynamic range has been intentionally reduced.

Dataset of actual dynamic range on selected vinyl records and cd's has been
made available, but didn't pass the requirements for an AES paper, probably
because it was too long and because I tried to cover too much ground in one
paper with too many illustrations.

A subset was in these and nearby newsgroups as I recall things and the
lot was on my website until I felt it referred to without any
source-reference
pointing at it being provided by the author of another paper.

Anyway ... The producers produced the larger dynamic range when they
produced the records. A lot of vinyl sounds better than a lot of digital
because it is plain better sound engineering. Digital ought to sound best,
but THE LOUDNESS RACE HAS RUINED IT.

The simple issue is that the number of multiband-compressors pr. incompetent
operator has gone up drastically.


Kind regards

Peter Larsen

[Arny Krueger]

"Steven Sullivan" wrote in message

In rec.audio.tech Peter Larsen
wrote:
Steven Sullivan wrote:

In rec.audio.tech Peter Larsen
wrote:
Steven Sullivan wrote:

If you record the output of the grammophone/cart/pre,
you are capturing whatever the grammaphone is
'hearing' from the loudspeakers.

That would be an incompetent thing to do, it is indeed
one of the many errors I too have made, but it is is
not new knowledge.

? How do *you* digitize an LP, if not from the analog
output?

Or are you just saying that when you do, you make sure
there is not acoustic feedback from nearby loudspeakers
to the turntable?

Indeed. It is that coloration that some of the vinyl
enthusiasts miss. Other just enjoy the larger actually
produced dynamic range on vinyl.

Vinyl does not 'actually produce' a larger dynamic range,
unless the CD's dynamic range has been intentionally
reduced.

Agreed. However the natural dynamic range of many musical performances is
within the dynamic range of either. One of the properties of the human ear
can lead to the mistaken perception that vinyl has a wider dynamic range -
vinyl's nonlinear distortion rises rapidly beyond a certain modest level,
and distorted music tends to sound louder than undistorted music. Of course,
the nonlinear distortion in digital is identically zero at any point below
clipping.

[Arny Krueger]

"Peter Larsen" wrote in message

Steven Sullivan wrote:

Indeed. It is that coloration that some of the vinyl
enthusiasts miss. Other just enjoy the larger actually
produced dynamic range on vinyl.

Vinyl does not 'actually produce' a larger dynamic
range, unless the CD's dynamic range has been
intentionally reduced.

Dataset of actual dynamic range on selected vinyl records
and cd's has been made available, but didn't pass the
requirements for an AES paper, probably because it was
too long and because I tried to cover too much ground in
one paper with too many illustrations.

A subset was in these and nearby newsgroups as I recall
things and the lot was on my website until I felt it referred to without
any source-reference
pointing at it being provided by the author of another
paper.

Anyway ... The producers produced the larger dynamic
range when they produced the records. A lot of vinyl
sounds better than a lot of digital because it is plain
better sound engineering. Digital ought to sound best,
but THE LOUDNESS RACE HAS RUINED IT.

The loudness race is a matter of art and business, not science or
technological limits. Therefore it has no place in a technical discussion of
the performance of media formats. Any recordings that are altered for
business or artistic reason must be immediately excluded.

There are so many extant recordings that unless statistically significant
samples are chosen, reasonable conclusions can't be reached.

Vinyl advocates are well-known for their apparently unintentional
cherry-picking of samples.

Besides, commercial recordings are not laboratory tools for evaluating
recording formats.

It would be reasonable to have an all-star team of vinyl cutting experts do
their best posssible job of cutting a mutually-agreed-upon test file on
carefully-selected and hand-tuned vinyl cutting equipment.

We should compare that to a CD burned by a modestly-skilled middle school
student on a 19.95 CD ROM drive.

It's easy to predict that the middle-school student will confound the
vinyl-cutting experts after the unbiased evaluations of the performance of
the two disks is finished.

The simple issue is that the number of
multiband-compressors pr. incompetent operator has gone
up drastically.

That is about art and business, not science and technology.

The better a recording medium is, the more susceptible it is to abuse
because it is simply more responsive to the needs and preferences of the
person doing the production work.

[Eiron]

Arny Krueger wrote:

and distorted music tends to sound louder than undistorted music.

Which is why electrostatic speakers are louder than they sound.
Quad erat demonstrandum. :-)

--
Eiron.

[Peter Larsen[_2_]]

Steven Sullivan wrote:

Indeed. It is that coloration that some of the vinyl enthusiasts
miss. Other just enjoy the larger actually produced dynamic range on
vinyl.

Vinyl does not 'actually produce' a larger dynamic range, unless the
CD's dynamic range has been intentionally reduced.

Correct. CD's tend to be mastered for less dynamic range than what was used
on vinyl. In my opinion that is the single most important cause of the cd's
being experienced as having inferior sound quality by listeners who compare
with actual concerts.

-S


Kind regards

Peter Larsen

[David Looser]

"Steven Sullivan" wrote in message
...
In rec.audio.tech David Looser wrote:

I would be astonished if anyone could tell the difference between an
original 24-bit digitisation and a 16-bit one when digitising vinyl.

You must not visit 'audiophile' forums much. Such claims are routine
-- as is the claim that neither digitization will sound as good as the
vinyl. They';re never backed up with anything like hard evidence, of
course
but they're not at all uncommon. So if you ever feel like being thus
astonished,
or perhaps depressed, visit audioasylum.com or stevehoffman.tv


I try not to. I can only take so much of people obsessing over the
improvement in sound quality they get by replacing the mains leads with
silver-plated wire, or changing the make of GZ32 rectifier used, or some
other minor (but usually expensive) alteration.

IMO if a difference doesn't show up in a DBT it doesn't exist, whatever the
audiophiles may claim. But if you've just bought an expensive new gizmo of
course it's going to sound better *to you*.

I'm no longer astonished at the claims made in such forums, but it would be
straightforward to mount a DBT of CD transfers from vinyl made using 16 and
24 bit ADCs (everything else identical of course, including ADC
architecture). If the DBT showed a clear preference for the 24-bit version I
would be astonished, and withdraw my comments.

David.

[Silk]

On Wed, 12 Dec 2007 10:14:24 +0000, tony sayer wrote:

In article , Arny Krueger

One of the finest MM cartridges ever made still costs less than $100.

Which is please?...

AT95E or even a Linn rebadged one in the form of the K9 if you really
must pay more ;-)

[Eiron]

Silk wrote:
On Wed, 12 Dec 2007 10:14:24 +0000, tony sayer wrote:

In article , Arny Krueger

One of the finest MM cartridges ever made still costs less than $100.
Which is please?...

AT95E or even a Linn rebadged one in the form of the K9 if you really
must pay more ;-)

How does that compare to Arny's favourite, the Shure M97xE?

--
Eiron.

[Silk]

On Sun, 16 Dec 2007 13:38:43 +0000, Eiron wrote:

Silk wrote:
On Wed, 12 Dec 2007 10:14:24 +0000, tony sayer wrote:

In article , Arny
Krueger

One of the finest MM cartridges ever made still costs less than $100.
Which is please?...

AT95E or even a Linn rebadged one in the form of the K9 if you really
must pay more ;-)

How does that compare to Arny's favourite, the Shure M97xE?

I've no idea. I just know, having owned and used many, that the AT95 and
clones sound very good for the price. I particularly liked the Linn K9
(named because of its uncanny resemblance to Dr Who's robot dog) because
it came in a very tasteful grey and had a nice Linn logo on the front;-)

[Steven Sullivan]

In rec.audio.tech Arny Krueger wrote:
"Steven Sullivan" wrote in message

In rec.audio.tech Peter Larsen
wrote:
Steven Sullivan wrote:

In rec.audio.tech Peter Larsen
wrote:
Steven Sullivan wrote:

If you record the output of the grammophone/cart/pre,
you are capturing whatever the grammaphone is
'hearing' from the loudspeakers.

That would be an incompetent thing to do, it is indeed
one of the many errors I too have made, but it is is
not new knowledge.

? How do *you* digitize an LP, if not from the analog
output?

Or are you just saying that when you do, you make sure
there is not acoustic feedback from nearby loudspeakers
to the turntable?

Indeed. It is that coloration that some of the vinyl
enthusiasts miss. Other just enjoy the larger actually
produced dynamic range on vinyl.

Vinyl does not 'actually produce' a larger dynamic range,
unless the CD's dynamic range has been intentionally
reduced.

Agreed. However the natural dynamic range of many musical performances is
within the dynamic range of either. One of the properties of the human ear
can lead to the mistaken perception that vinyl has a wider dynamic range -
vinyl's nonlinear distortion rises rapidly beyond a certain modest level,
and distorted music tends to sound louder than undistorted music. Of course,
the nonlinear distortion in digital is identically zero at any point below
clipping.

A euphonic illusion of wider dynamic range is not the same as 'actual'
dynamic range, of course. And as a format, CD offers a wider actual
dynamic range than LP.

Offering, and providing in practice, are two different things, and if
mixers and mastering engineers *choose* to limit the dynamic range on CD,
that's not a deficit of the format.

I trust everyone here understands that at this late date.



___
-S
"As human beings, we understand the world through simile, analogy,
metaphor, narrative and, sometimes, claymation." - B. Mason

[Steven Sullivan]

In rec.audio.tech Peter Larsen wrote:
Steven Sullivan wrote:

Indeed. It is that coloration that some of the vinyl enthusiasts
miss. Other just enjoy the larger actually produced dynamic range on
vinyl.

Vinyl does not 'actually produce' a larger dynamic range, unless the
CD's dynamic range has been intentionally reduced.

Correct. CD's tend to be mastered for less dynamic range than what was used
on vinyl.

True for pop and rock, less so for jazz, much less so for classical.

Classical music recording has always set the standard for 'high fidelity'
sound. And there, the benefits of CD are still most apparent.



___
-S
"As human beings, we understand the world through simile, analogy,
metaphor, narrative and, sometimes, claymation." - B. Mason

[Steven Sullivan]

In rec.audio.tech David Looser wrote:
"Steven Sullivan" wrote in message
...
In rec.audio.tech David Looser wrote:

I would be astonished if anyone could tell the difference between an
original 24-bit digitisation and a 16-bit one when digitising vinyl.

You must not visit 'audiophile' forums much. Such claims are routine
-- as is the claim that neither digitization will sound as good as the
vinyl. They';re never backed up with anything like hard evidence, of
course
but they're not at all uncommon. So if you ever feel like being thus
astonished,
or perhaps depressed, visit audioasylum.com or stevehoffman.tv


I try not to. I can only take so much of people obsessing over the
improvement in sound quality they get by replacing the mains leads with
silver-plated wire, or changing the make of GZ32 rectifier used, or some
other minor (but usually expensive) alteration.

IMO if a difference doesn't show up in a DBT it doesn't exist, whatever the
audiophiles may claim. But if you've just bought an expensive new gizmo of
course it's going to sound better *to you*.


IF an audiophile makes a claim of a certain difference, and then cannot
pass a DBT, then I consider it unlikely that he actually heard one.

As DBTs are scientific measures, with results analysed in terms of
probability, they never 'prove' in the vernacular sense, that no
difference could possibly exist. Science doesn't require that level of
'proof' anyway, to draw a reasonable conclusion. But 'audiophile' tend to
misconstrue this to mean that it's still likely that someone else could
hear a difference. IN fact, we don't know whether it's *likely*. We just
know that it is not ruled out. There is a huge difference there, one that
audiophiles gloss over when they criticize DBTs (and science
generally)--which they do with mind-numbing regularity on such forums.


I'm no longer astonished at the claims made in such forums, but it would be
straightforward to mount a DBT of CD transfers from vinyl made using 16 and
24 bit ADCs (everything else identical of course, including ADC
architecture). If the DBT showed a clear preference for the 24-bit version I
would be astonished, and withdraw my comments.

IIRC Bob Katz , a highly tech-savvy mastering engineer, has done REdbook
vs hi-rez rate comparisons with subjects in the engineering community, and
found that any differences were down to filters, not the rates themselves.
More recently, E. Brad Meyer and David Moran in JAES published results of
a long term, multi-subject, multi-gear blind comparison of SACD vs SACD
downconverted to Redbook rates, and found that even 'golden ear' listeners
cannot tell the difference, unless playback levels are very high.



___
-S
"As human beings, we understand the world through simile, analogy,
metaphor, narrative and, sometimes, claymation." - B. Mason

[Arny Krueger]

"Eiron" wrote in message

Silk wrote:
On Wed, 12 Dec 2007 10:14:24 +0000, tony sayer wrote:

In article
, Arny
Krueger

One of the finest MM cartridges ever made still costs
less than $100. Which is please?...

AT95E or even a Linn rebadged one in the form of the K9
if you really must pay more ;-)

How does that compare to Arny's favourite, the Shure
M97xE?

For the record, the M97xE is not my favorite, the V15-VxMR was.

[why bother]

"tony sayer" wrote in message
...
In article , Arny Krueger

This is a UK froop, the last poster we want in here is
Arny Krueger, whatever the subject, no matter the
thread evolution AK will eventually resort to his
cyberstalking of John Aitkinson, and Arny's ******** about
ABX and his highly dubious contentions...yawn.
If you're placing any credibilty in Arny's opnions or views
then go ask him in the froops he haunts, he's not wanted
here in the land of the sane and knowledgeable.

[Adrian]

On Dec 11 2007, 10:37*am, "Arny Krueger" wrote:
"Richard Crowley" wrote in message







"Dave W." *wrote ...
*Adrian*wrote:
This past weekend I copied three albums. *The signal is
clean but not strong. *I have the gain on theUSBPhono
turned to the max.

If, as you say, the signal is clean, then as long as you
have it digitised there is no problem.

Lets review the bidding....

* *Low-output MC cartridge feeding an inexpensive RIAA
phono preamp designed for MC.
* *Gain on the preamp "turned to the max".
* *Signal is "clean but not strong"
Therefore, by definition, the captured signal is NOT
"clean" after amplifying it (plus the noise) to the
nominal level.

Agreed.

Of course,Adriancould decide that it is good enough
for his purposes, and that is fine. *But conventional
wisdom would suggest that the solution might be...
1) Use a conventional MM cartridge
2) Use a step-up transformer or pre-pre-amp for MC
3) Use a preamp designed for MC.

I'd vote for solution number 1, more specificially this cartridge:

http://www.amazon.com/Shure-M97xE-Hi...etic-Cartridge...

Cheapest way out and solves more problems.

Solution implemented. The results, to quote Pop Larkin are "Perfick",
or at least somewhat as close as we ever get to perfect in the world
of audio reproduction. :-)

Many thanks

Adrian