Turntable out of storage!

[Nick]

James, I apologise for bringing humour to your thread, I think it was misplaced.

I must have missed that post

snigger

[Ali Tait]

I believe Vic uses one of those Puffin phonos.

[Dave the bass]

I believe Vic uses one of those Puffin phonos.

Oi!

Language!

[Ali Tait]

[Max N]

Just to add another veil of confusion. I “prefer” the sound of vinyl. In my system the phonostage goes into the ADC, from where it goes through the DSP and them out to the power amps for each driver in my active system. I prefer the bigger soundstage and more bottom end presence vinyl gives, less clinical. Technically it shouldn’t be better as it’s going through a ADC limited to 96K, plus more stages of messing around with the signal. My digital is all CD’s converted to flac files so I suppose low resolution in comparison as will all be red book 44k.
The best phonostage I have ever heard, at a show, was some jfet microphone amps..using JRivers to added the RIAA de-emphasise curves, they had obviously sorted the phase issues out in the digital domain too. Obviously other wizardry could have been at play to make it appeal, which is easy in the digital domain to apply.

Interesting the latest phonostage from Shannon Parks who has given us lots of Valve preamps in the past, the Puffin a departure is it does the de-emphasise in the digital domain http://parksaudiollc.com/. Even more to shock audiophiles it has tone controls added too.
So back to my original statement. What is it about the sound we prefer and can it be added to digital to make it sound similar to our liking. Similar to what the top level DSP preamps now do adding a “ valve amp mode” function.

If anyone fancies trying out Riaa in dsp, then a good place to start is a secondhand audio interface like a focusrite or something. Anything with mic preamps built in. The (discontinued) forte sounds better than the Scarlett range. I think the sapphire range uses the same mic preamps as the forte.

[JamesD]

Ed - no problem at all - I liked your comment as with vinyl I think I am hearing the musical performance and with digital I'm hearing the equipment... ones real, the others sterile...

OK that is overstating it somewhat but it contains the essence of truth - with digital I had almost stopped listening to classical music and over the last two days it has been almost non stop classical music and I have been moved to laughter at some of the wit in the performance and to tears in some of the deeply sad pieces. I love Mahler but I hadn't listen to his music in years - now it seems to be every other record...

I don't understand it - as Nick says - digital is so good technically how does one improve it? What can you do to make it better? On the other hand vinyl is full of limitations and measurable faults; how can you tolerate its imperfections? All I know is that I love listening to music through the medium of vinyl records...

Maybe I can go a little further than that in analysing the "vinyl sound" - not to an answer, a conclusion but a direction for exploration maybe... Its been mentioned in this thread that vinyl playback can be digitised but still maintain the vinyl magic - at least to some degree and I agree with that. My son replaced his digitally sourced music with vinyl rips, where he could, as the vinyl sounds more like real performances of the music. He did this at my instigation about 12 years ago when I gave him an Awia direct drive turntable to listen to vinyl copies of his music, where I had them... part of getting him away from mp3's and it worked - sort off, in that he ripped the vinyl to mp3's as they kept enough of the vinyl magic to sound more like music than the digital all the way through mp3s. SO vinyl adds to the sense of musical performance - maybe enhances the performance of the music... this is likely tied up with a psychoacoustic effect and so very hard to discover what to measure... Whatever it is - its magic and I love it ... it also gives us so many things to improve and play with that it keeps all parts of the hobby happy

[Max N]

If anyone fancies trying out Riaa in dsp, then a good place to start is a secondhand audio interface like a focusrite or something. Anything with mic preamps built in. The (discontinued) forte sounds better than the Scarlett range. I think the sapphire range uses the same mic preamps as the forte.

Hi James/all - apologies, I'm not trying ti hi-jack this thread, but I had a worrying thought in bed last night. If using mic preamps of any form for vinyl playback, presumably we should disable the 40v phantom power circuit? I'm guessing it might damage a cartridge if accidentally switched on?

Back on topic, I agree that there is something we don't understand and can't yet measure about vinyl (and reel-to-reel?) compared to CD. I have a new DAC (RME ADI-2 DAC fs) which allows me to switch between different filters. What is clear to me is that none of the filters do everything right. The conventional filters don't get transients quite right. The NOS filter does a better job with transients but slightly smears sibilants and hi-hats, bells, triangles etc. But if the 'steep filter vs aliasing problem' was the whole story, then up-sampling should solve it? By moving the spurious signals to a higher frequency and allowing gentler filters?
Of course, it is also possible that, having read the technical description of the filters on offer, I have decided how they should sound, and I'm then imagining the differences.....
Also, this does nothing to explain why your son's vinyl rips sound better than CDs of the same music.
Maybe we could use that technique that is sometimes used to check for bit-perfect ripping? I think it's something like 'invert the polarity of one version and subtract'. Might the signal that remains tell us something about the differences between the vinyl rips and all-digital?

BTW, this is not to knock the RME DAC, I'm really enjoying it. I'll start a separate thread about the system I am building around it.

[steve s]

I put a shelf up for record player months ago,
6 months later theres a pile of cds on it and the record players are in the other room not connected.

[vinylnvalves]

I put a shelf up for record player months ago,
6 months later theres a pile of cds on it and the record players are in the other room not connected.

CD’s sound good though your amps because of the excessive distortion

[steve s]

I put a shelf up for record player months ago,
6 months later theres a pile of cds on it and the record players are in the other room not connected.

CD’s sound good though your amps because of the excessive distortion

I accept that .. but why is my records sound poor in comparison
Double the distortion ?

[Nick]

presumably we should disable the 40v phantom power circuit?

As long as the cartridge is wired between the -ve and +ve pin on the XLR it shouldn't matter as the voltage (I believe) is between signal(s) and ground.

I think it's something like 'invert the polarity of one version and subtract

I just formed a cryptographic check sum of the numbers and compared them.

Not sure how much we could do for vinyl against CD, the continuous speed variation of vinyl would be the first problem, we know that there is preprocessing done before the cutting to do things like summing bass. Also we will not be able to know if the same source was used. Then there is the EQ accuracy. All in all I thin vinyl is too broken to allow that sort of comparison. I doubt you could compare the same recording played twice without getting distracted by the number of differences.

To add to the confusion I have been listening to a lot of R3 FM and there is some of it in there as well, even knowing that most of the sources behind the transmission are digital.

[Nick]

I accept that .. but why is my records sound poor in comparison

I found that which is what led me to building solid state amps. I think the problem with vinyl via SET's (in particular) is that there is a lot of LF signal that consumes all the available flux on the output transformer leading to varying washes of intermod driven by the non audible signal. A rumble filter might help things, but would also break the bass phase. A DSP rumble filter might work better, and or summing to mono below some frequency.

[Ant]

I put a shelf up for record player months ago,
6 months later theres a pile of cds on it and the record players are in the other room not connected.

CD’s sound good though your amps because of the excessive distortion

I accept that .. but why is my records sound poor in comparison
Double the distortion ?

Possibly setup, possibly cart. Or possibly a million other things
Which deck are you using these days steve?

[steve s]

I prefer td124/ frs64s, but u have quite a few more, 301/ sme 3012
Oracle /frs64s, 301/ decca pro
And a boat load of lencos

[vinylnvalves]

The summing of low frequencies is something I can easily implement with the DSP, however the challenge as Nick says will be getting the same mix in both mediums. Maybe in some of these collectors box sets where you LP’s and CD’s together, there maybe some credible A to B comparisons.
As I stated I am liking currently how my turntable sounds with a different arm on it, the rock albums I haven’t played for a while because they sounded boring with the zeta and mechanic tonearms come to life with the unipivot. It’s horses for courses as the detail you only notice when playing simpler music isn’t quite as refined.