New decade, end of the CD?

Okay, so now I'm a little more awake.

Sean Trane wrote: Hadn't seen this until today...   You'd told me it would take a while for you to get prepared, so I did not check this thread back until this morning   - thought#1, you could've chosen a better album than this symphonic-sludge Mozart-wanabe as your test material (>> just kidding!!!, but I recently made the effort to see if RJ Godffrey & Co would be less annoying to my eardrums live , but no such luck) >> but more seriously, I'd tend to say that the new remastered versions tend to annul all kinds of technical deffiencies of poor (read lower-priced) hi-fi systems by skewing around seriously with the EQ-ing and all kinds of un-orthodox twiddlings (but tio be fair, most new remasteres are much better-sounding than the first generations of ten years ago)   The tests i'd made in the early 80's and early 90's were done with vinyls and first generation cds, which were often better sounding than most of the first generations remasters of the late-90's and early-00's     Sooo if I could eventually convince you to start over and redo the test by digitilizing and "mono-talizing" a vinyl or first generation cd... Of course, I'm not doubting for a second that you did this honestly with a new remaster, but it could skew the validity of the test for the reasons stated above   regards   H

http://www.stereophile.com/content/tim-de-paravicini-king-tubes-page-2


Tim de Pavaricini on CD:

"When CD arrived in the 1980s, Tim de Paravicini was among the first to explain the shortcomings of the new format's sound quality by pointing out that existing analog media were superior when analyzed in terms of sampling rate. He argued then that a digital medium would need a much higher sample rate than 44.1kHz (and a higher bit rate than 16) to match the resolution of analog tape or vinyl. I asked him to explain this again.

"Well, the quick nutshell of it all is this. An analog microphone we all understand, and a valve or transistor amplifier is linear in its working range. On a vinyl record, when you are cutting an acetate, there is no modulation or chopping it up—you are down to the molecular level of the acetate to store that information. It's a totally random but very minute-resolution storage system.

"When it comes to digital, it's how to operate it, how many bits we devote to it, and the sampling frequency, as to how we store that information. The original digital system of CD, with 16 bits and 44.1kHz sampling, was what the mathematicians deemed to be the minimum acceptable to human hearing for so-called hi-fi. They never looked at all the artifacts and all the problems. And they never did enough analysis of the human hearing mechanism to realize that we don't stop hearing at 20kHz—people can discern and detect sound up to 45kHz. We have, as I say to people, an equivalent risetime of 11 microseconds in the hearing mechanism. And the ability to resolve detail in those digital systems wasn't quite good enough."



Edited by oliverstoned - June 19 2011 at 14:14

 wrong thread  

Edited by Dean - June 19 2011 at 17:27

Read it before, not impressed then, not now.

I've not read this thread through, but I made a Bandcamp account, and I am very happy with it thus far.  CDs I still like shopping for, but they'll be gone in 10-15 years.

Epignosis wrote: I've not read this thread through, but I made a Bandcamp account, and I am very happy with it thus far.  CDs I still like shopping for, but they'll be gone in 10-15 years.

I'm 48.  I have a collection of nearly 1500 CDs.  My LP collection has been pared down to 170.  In 10-15 years I won't have any more LPs added, but I will most likely have more CDs, probably doubling the amount by then.  I do expect digital music files to surpass CDs in sales in the next 10-15.  There will need to be some way of making them more equivalent to the hard copy experience.  On screen booklets with album art and lyrics would need to be there at a minimum for me to start to switch to that medium.  I also expect that at some point the recorded music format may become something that comes with holographically projected art and lyrics that you can call up from a small portable player.  That may be beyond 10-15.  I do expect the capacity of players to become so big that I could carry around my collection in lossless format and there to be some type of headphones that will allow you to hear it that way.


Edited by Slartibartfast - June 20 2011 at 07:40

^ And the battle continues ... 

^ That's why I am buying up all the vinyl I can find that I want to listen to. Right now I am replicating CD's I own, if I can find it on vinyl. In some cases I am finding excellent copies of 180gram audiophile vinyl for cheap.

Sean Trane wrote: Negoba wrote: I've purchased 3 CDs in the last month, but that's rare, and I obtain anywhere from 5-15 albums in digital form monthly. I still can't give the gift of an electronic CD, I need something tangible.   But now with FLAC and sufficient storage and transfer rates, there is just less and less need for the CD. Most of us are buying 320 kbps mp3s now and every blind test I've seen has shown that both musicians and audiophiles cannot reliably distinguish CD from mp3 above 256.       I'd like to suggest tat you speak for yourself (you're NOT most of us, and neither am I; but at least I don't have the pretention to speak in "most of us' name"),   and since you live in Big Muddy, that you extract the mud and crud out of your ears and the difference  should indeed become evident to you!!