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General Asylum General audio topics that don't fit into specific categories. |
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In Reply to: There is an inevitable degradation from multiple mechanical/optical translations posted by Bambi B on January 30, 2007 at 10:26:19:
If you read the title of my post, it's ends with a question mark- I'm wondering why there is so much attention given to the mechanical/optical refinement of CD players.That may well be, but what I was actually responding to had no question marks. It was a wholly declarative statement.
If the mass market player of 20 years ago is just fine and error-free then why does an Accuphase CDP cost $11,000- and weigh 20 lbs and have so much attention to vibration damping?You'll have to ask Accuphase that question. But unless the transport and electronics in that $11,000 CD player is worse than what was used in cheap mass market CD players of 20 years ago, it's not for getting more information off the disc.
It's always interesting to me that when digital came out the disks cost twice as much as LPs, the players were expensive, then the players became simulataneously much cheaper and as expensive as a turntable. A way was found to make a CDP cost as much or more than the turntable it replaced. Look at the suspension and chassis of an Oracle CDP and tell me the mechanical aspects are not important- if everything was solved 20 years ago!I can't speak for the reasons behind Oracle's suspension. You'll have to ask Oracle. All I can say is that cheap, mass-market CD players of 20 years ago had no problems accurately retrieving all of the data off CDs in reasonably good shape.
And there is also the concept that each tranlation to and from media adds problems. Actual sound is analogue- there is no such thing as digital sound, digitial is a translation for storage purposes. Typically the first translation is onto tape or hard drive- magnetic/mechanical, then the information has to be converted placed on an optical disk- translation 2, and then retrieved mechanically/optically translation 3, then converted elctronically to an analogue signal trans.n4, amplified trans.n5, and converted electro- mechanically into sound by the speakers translation 6. It would seem to me that if all the mechanical/optical translations could be eliminated it would then allow more concentration purely on the conversion to and from digital.Except that all those translations up to and including reading the data off the disc before D/A conversion can trivally be done without losing any of the data and has been done for quite some time now. So I see no excuse why one can't simply concentrate on the A/D and D/A process.
Certainly, an all analogue chain has considerable problems- and even greater dependence on sorting it mechanically- but there is not also the important translation into and out of digital.Sure.
This is why when I record onto hard drive and playback - actually from RAM memory, it sounds much better than when I make a CD-R- I'm cutting out some of the translations and it's the optical and mechanical ones. The conversion of a wave to a series of very tiny steps- my analogy is the aliasing of digital photographs- simply must have an aural effect- and for me it's often a lessening of natural sounding timbre and a sense of compression an dloss of transparency- or perhaps loss of "air" is better.Great. I'm just saying that whatever the reason for your experience, it's not because you're not getting all the information off the disc.
Certainly digital is improving and I've heard some very convincing sound from digital media, the most notable being Ray Kimber's IsoMike- which I heard reproduced directly from the same HD recorder that recorded it and not from a CD, thereby removing those mechanical/optical elements. And, IsoMike is four channel with ingenious attention to relative phase that recreates space in a way I think must be restoring natural timbre by the 4- "semi-discrete" (if that's a term) signals filling in transient information by being 3 dimensionally phase coherent. I would dearly love to hear an all-analogue version of IsoMike for comparison.Great. All I'm saying is that those mechanical/optical elements don't have any problem accurately retrieving all the information off the disc.
The problem is insurmountable really, as there is simply no such thing as digital sound- only a digital signal.The problem is insurmountable? You haven't shown that there is a problem with respect to retrieving all the information off a disc.
And a digital signal is an deconstruction/reconstruction approximation- not strictly speaking waves but "stairways" going up and down that the persistance of hearing smooths out- like the persistance of vision that makes a movie appear continuous while it's actually black 50% of the time. Digital is like the frames of a movie- they have to be strung together- and properly timed- to create the impression of natural sound.Um, no, it's not like that at all. What comes out of the D/A converter is a continuous analogue signal. You need to research this a bit further beyond the grossly oversimplified "explanations" of digital audio that are out there.
The use of mechanical/optical translations in the chain must be adding components that are distancing the reproduced sound from natural -analogue- sound.No, it mustn't be. Again, retrieving all of the information accurately has been routine for many years. If there's any problems it must ultimately lay at the feet of the conversion from analogue to digital and/or the conversion from digital to analuge.
se
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- Re: There is an inevitable degradation from multiple mechanical/optical translations - Steve Eddy 19:20:18 01/30/07 (0)
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