Tyler Durden[SMTP:camera_lumina@hotmail.com] wrote:

Nobody wrote...

"There is a loss of quality if you go through an analog stage. Real and wannabe audiophiles will prefer the real thing, pure and undiluted by a reconversion phase. These are the people who are already swallowing the marketing line that the CD bandwidth limit of 22KHz is too low for good fidelity, despite being higher than they can hear."

I'm in that category. And as someone who basically grew up in Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera, I trust my ears (I saw the opera Wozzeck twice

by the time I was 17).

There are engineering reasons for this that I'm willing to discuss, though

the discussion will be tedious for engineers, and impossible to understand

for non-engineers. Far easier will be for you to go and listen to a CD player that can upsample standard CD to 24bits/196kHz. The difference is not by any means subtle.

As an audiophile (Krell+Levinson+Thiel gear at home), I definitely don't want to grab an analog signal. Doing that the signal is sure to retain characteristics of the extracting gear. But the vast majority of P2P kids won't care one iota that their file was analog for half a second.

-TD

I'll ditto that - my brother is an extremist audiophile - he writes reviews for the high-end stuff (google "Mike Trei"). Many (by no means all) top end audophiles prefer all-analog equipment, and direct-cut vinyl records (ie, the master disk was cut directly at the performance, without a magtape master). I've listened to some of this stuff, and it just blows digital away. The general attitude is that while low-end digital beats low-end analog, high-end analog beats high-end digital. Digital places a distinct floor on how bad the quality can be, but it also puts a ceiling on it. The data capacity of a vinyl groove is a lot higher than a CD pit-track, but you need very good equipment to use it. While the ear can't hear above 22KHz, signal above that *can* effect the perceived sound, by heterodyne effects. For example, if you play a single tone of 28KHz, or a single tone of 30 KHz, you can't hear them. Play them together, however, and you *can* hear a beat frequency of 2KHz. Peter Trei