bdarrenyeats wrote: > > > Also there are historical shenanigans with cheap and/or poor ADCs which > have caused measurable issues in a great many recordings. >
Attempts to measure this or validate it with DBTs have come up empty. In general, the legacy ADCs were both very good and very expensive. For example, in the early 70s I worked in grad school with a digital interface that was used to connect a EIA 680 hybrid computer with an IBM 1130 digital computer. It was typical of the best precision conversion hardware of the day. At its core it was a 320,000 samples/second 16 bit ADC/DAC pair, with an analog multiplexer that allowed dividing it among up to 8 different concurrent channels. It was based on a resistive ladder, and has +/- 1 LSB precision. It cost a half-million dollars. It was a catalog, off-the-shelf item. If you could proffer the purchase order credibly, in due time they delivered. In about the same time, I was part of this DBT of a piece of digital gear http://djcarlst.provide.net/abx_digi.htm. The critical evaluation by over 20 experienced audiophiles and some of the best recording engineers in the city was that there was no audible difference. My recollection that additional listening tests involving non-musical signals that generally taxed the capabilities of analog tape also passed through it blamelessly. It ran in the low 5-figure range. Back in the early days of digital audio (pre-CD), there were some questionable ADCs, perhaps most commonly accused would be the conversion subsystem of the 3M digital recorder. Read about it here: http://www.mixonline.com/news/news-products/1978-3m-digital-audio-mastering-system/377974 . Note that in the day, with all its faults, it was judged by leading professionals to be superior to 15-30 ips, half track analog recording on the best tape stock, which was the previous high standard for quality work. A recording that was mastered on it, "Bop Until You Drop" by Ry Cooder is often cited as an objectionable recording which analog bigots blame on the 3M mastering. I have an early CD of this song, and it stands head and shoulders above most recordings of the day. Many consider it to be an exemplary work. In the face of a controversy like this, resolving it in favor of analog bigotry seems unwise. > > So I think the argument descends to audibility. Realistically, it can't > be won with digital perfection. > Mentioning digital perfection seems like an excluded middle argument. Perfection is always an impossible goal in the real world, but between the realistic constraints on recording acoustic events and the limitations of the human ear, sonically blameless performance involving digital has been possible for almost half a century, and is currently available for walking around money. For example my M-Audio Microtrack is a stand alone recording system including balanced mic inputs with phantom power. It is now about 8 years old and in its lossless modes, and is sonically blameless. I think its performance can be duplicated today with modern hardware for less than $100. In the day it sold for not much more than twice that. I believe that today sonically transparent DAC chips run about $1, and a USB DAC with sonically blameless performance for line-level outputs can be had for under $10. Many of the esoteric formats that people buy overprice hardware to play either have negligible recorded software to play, or any works that are available using them can be circumvented by simply buying the same work from the same source in a mainstream format. IOW, people seem to be inventing technically unwarranted recording formats to sell overpriced DACs. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ arnyk's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=64365 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=106935 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
