The London Lounge

One of the hobbies I have is to listen to quality vintage audio equipment made around the '50 and the '60: I'm referring to the golden era of the amplifiers like Leak, Radford, Quad fitted with vintage tubes. There is something magical when in a dark listening room you only see the lights of the audio bulbs and music brighs you somewhere travelling through space and time. Someone else is sharing this feelings here?

Dear Andrea,

I share the same passion, although in my case it also extends to modern high end equipment. But you are absolutely right, an old tube amplifier with teh appropriate loudspeakers can be magic indeed. But some contemporary producers try to emulate the same quality. Jadis, the great French producer, and some small Japanese houses (like Audionote) comes to mind.
May I ask what system do you have?
South

Except of the old Radford monos everything was built by me. By the way I only play vinyl...

Hail! (My first post -yippee).

My local radio station conducted an experiment earlier this week in which they played a vinyl record and compared it to a current digital recording of the same song. Listeners were asked to telephone in and say which they thought 'was better...'

What I drew from the responses was that many younger people have a different understanding of what is meant by the words 'better' or 'clearer' to what I still take to be standard English. Although one ought to suppose that since everyone listening in was in any case listening to the digital broadcast equipment, and that there is the additional fact of whatever type of equipment one is listening through - nevertheless, it was obvious that the vinyl recordings were not the same as the present day digital ones.

Although no longer a professional scientist, I think I am still correct in saying that sound in reality is not made up of 'O's' and '1's and that analogue is much more faithful to the living experience because all natural sound is a blended wave.

And to show that I am by no means stuck in the past, I listen to all kinds of music and I have an attraction towards electro-trance progessional such as Benz and MD, Trentemoller and 4 Strings...

There is no question but that analogue recording and playback is closer to real life sound; it is a question of subjective taste to a large extent whether tube sound is preferred - I favour it anyway.

Some current vogue music is dependent on the digital signal generation to derive its particular personality and I do like certain kinds of that as well. But digital is not 'better.' It can eliminate some noises, and that is all.
Regards, J.A.

Welcome, JA!

I commend you for pointing out that without an external standard of comparison (presumably an acoustic or electronic source unmediated by anything other than air) your radio station's experiment cannot establish a "better" (that is, more accurate or faithful) method of recording/playback, only a personal preference among two samples that, as you point out, are both compromised by the quality of the station's playback gear, the digital transmission chain, and the limitations of the listener's radio receiving set.

While your analogue/digital comparison has the appeal of common sense, in reality the mechanical and engineering challenges of capturing, preserving, and retrieving an analogue waveform on analogue tape and then vinyl are immense, and mean that analogue recording and playback chains introduce their own sets of additive and subtractive distortions (and noise, as you say) that are different from, and not necessarily "better" than, those introduced by good digital chains.

It is certainly true that early proponents of "perfect sound forever" had, to put it politely, not yet learned to hear the distortions of early CD playback in which the sources of distortion that caused it to fall short of even the limited theoretical resolution of the Red Book standard were novel (things like clock jitter and brick-wall reconstruction filter algorithms). The best analogue twenty-five years ago was infinitely superior to the best digital. Today things have changed dramatically, and on a current top-notch playback system, even a Red Book CD mastered at high resolution and with appropriate noise shaping to increase perceived resolution can sound as "good" as the best vinyl. The best examples of each approach, like the best tube vs. solid state amplification, sound the most similar, since they are the most neutral and transparent.

We also have a lot more information now about the psycho-perceptual effects of different kinds of distortion, and skilled producers and recording engineers will often deliberately "color" their products by running them through specific devices (microphones, recorders, preamps, mixers, etc.) that have known distortion profiles (e.g., high percentage of added second-order harmonic distortion with low odd- and higher-order harmonics will add warmth and "richness"). They have always done this with their choices of mikes for frequency-response profiles and so on, but now it includes digital gear and happens at an altogether more sophisticated level. Similarly, in the listening-room end of the playback chain, many factors in system setup and room characteristics can completely swamp or mask distortions attributable solely to the medium. For instance, a given recording will sound not only better but strikingly different when heard on increasingly revealing systems because the perceptual effects of that recording's particular distortion profile combined with those of each system can vary dramatically. The crude version of this is '60s pop music mixed (and compressed and EQ'd) to be heard on a car radio, which can sound very strange on an audiophile system.

I look forward to being able to obtain more and decent repertoire in truly high-resolution digital formats, which will probably mean downloading or streaming data files to run through my system, along with my records and CDs. This technology is moving fast and not yet stable enough for me to invest in, but it probably won't be long. I think most people have never heard a truly high-resolution digital master played back through state-of-the-art amplification; it can be truly breathtaking.

The larger problem is that most people today are conditioned to listening to music via lossy-compressed MP3 files, and think of that as digital sound. The lack of concern for fidelity--and interest in music that most benefits from it--in the broad listening public has nearly killed an industry. One can only hope that as bandwidth becomes cheap and plentiful, marketers will re-introduce an emphasis on sound quality (let's hope Neil Young lives so long) as a differentiator and reignite a race to the top.

I listen to and value good music, well reproduced, in any format. I own shaded dog, Classic Record reissue, and bitstream CD versions of many of the RCA Living Stereo classics, and enjoy each for its merits, along with London bluebacks, old Connoisseur Society recordings and many others, including new and offbeat recordings. Gavin Black, the harpsichordist, is a friend, and in a former life (when I reviewed early music recordings for The Absolute Sound) I had the chance to hear him perform live on the reproduction Ruckers instrument built for Gabe Wiener's PGM label, in the church in which he and it were subsequently recorded for PGM. I also had a chance to hear some of Gabe's digital masters which, even at that time ('96) were quite remarkable--his early death was a great loss both to music and to the advancement of digital audio engineering. Within the last couple of years I've had the chance to hear some of Peter McGrath's higher-res masters on Balanced Audio amplification nearly identical to my own. I've heard many other performers and programs where I could make similar comparisons between live and CD sound in familiar spaces--Waverly Consort, Les Arts Florissants, The Harp Consort, Tallis Scholars, the Philadelpia ensembles Philomel and Piffaro, and so on.

That I still listen to vinyl is not a slur on digital, but a testament to the astonishing maturity and craftsmanship of the electromechanical technology embodied in good analogue gear.

I'm not a big fan of comparing toys; my kit is VPI, BAT tubes, von Schweikert, Shunyata, and a room with fortunate geometry and a wall of bookcases with books staggered to approximate a Schroder diffusor between the speakers. It costs less than a house, but it's good enough to listen very critically to source material when I need to, and to provide tremendous pleasure all the time. (Except in the summer, when it's too hot to run the power amps.)

Cheers!