Mr. P writes:
The Myth of Vinyl is just that, and I grew up on Vinyl and had a huge collection. I would never buy a CD! Never, ever, then I heard a top-end Sony SA7ES player with a CD of an LP I had, I went back and forth at the hi-fi store and I could not hear a difference in fact the CD sounded better on the bottom end and dynamics and dead black background, I sold my Vinyl collection at the peak of value and went all CD and today 1,500 and counting, and I would still enjoy LP’s if I had them, so zip against that format, but the best, no way on earth, if any format changes the sound is TT setup, what arm, cartridge, mat, TT support, all change what come to the speakers, does not make it not enjoyable but hearing the LP like it was intended, that a myth also, we are so far removed and vinyl even more so. But the goal is to enjoy our system and if Vinyl melts your butter then go for it. One thing the CD format did and we should all be happy for was the release of old titles and artists that had not been released in many years, you give big dollars at record conventions to find a copy of the titles and then released them again. Also saving music from decaying analog tape to the digital format for future generations to enjoy, all recording companies have done this, so new vinyl for the most part comes from a digital master copy of the best source they could find and this does not mean they found the master tape that could long gone, recorded over or lost or damaged so badly they have to use another source perhaps a backup copy or worse, then they use digital tools to make a decent recording out of it. The old MoFi Beatles box set from the late ’70s was taken from the master tapes, already showing tape breakdown issues, with some distortion, tape hiss, etc and those tapes were 10-15 years old only. Think analog tape from the 1950s says what shape would they be in today so 70 years later. Thank God for Digital.
Vinyl it seems has a sonic ‘comfort zone’ as one commentator put it.
DSD or PCM has the massive advantage of being able to handle ridiculous dynamic range and frequency capture but it is understandable that this will show up warts and all in older recordings and that fact some folk find unacceptable.
There are companies doing excellent transfers from very old tapes in DSD and DXD (PCM at 352.8/24 bit). If the tape has suffered serious damage and needs restoration a DXD transfer makes more sense as digital restoration can be accomplished.
John D writes:
The questioner talks about conversion of 44.1/16bit to DSD512 then back to PCM;
why on earth would anyone want to do that?
Conversion of any PCM rate to DSD would appear to be an advantage if the DAC being used is a sigma/delta based one as the conversion is simpler for the DAC. Your own DAC’s do this don’t they? – that is convert all incoming signal to DSD?
BL writes:
An interesting fact about Sony sacd players of yore,at least the higher end models,was that they converted cd data to DSD.Where as a lot of so called sacd players from other manufacturers would convert the original dsd data and output as PCM.
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