ANALOG vs DIGITAL - Ultra High Fidelity Magazine

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to be one of the four horsemen of the
apocalypse, and wish their LPs could
be all-analog, as in the old days. There
were several reasons for the choice, not
all of them for the sake of convenience.
First, a cutting lathe must be able
to preview what is coming up. That’s
because, unless you’re willing to settle
for a six-minute playing time, you will
vary the groove spacing depending on
the volume. Louder passages need more
space between grooves, but that means
the lathe needs to “know” what’s coming
up.
Traditionally previewing was done by
equipping the analog playback machine
with two playback heads and a long loop
between them. The first head warned
the lathe of what was coming, and the
second drove the cutting head. This
once universal Rube Goldberg device
was retired years ago, to be replaced by
a digital delay line.
And the digital transfer offered the
opportunity to do some signal processing.
Keith had always done some
equalization on his analog tapes. He
had a written record of what EQ had
been applied originally, and the same
compensation could be applied in the
digital domain with fewer artifacts. A
little sharpening of transients was also
applied, to compensate for “edge smear”
due to aging of the tape (which Paul
Bergman called “longitudinal printing”
in the article already mentioned).
Do you still have doubts? Keith Johnson
says that modern digital signal pro-
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cessing is far superior to
the old analog methods,
and that this more than
makes up for any artifacts
from the conversion
to the very high
resolution of the digital
transfer, done with the
Pacific Microsonics
Model Two, the final
(and greatest) of Keith’s
HDCD converters.
Producer Tam Henderson,
who is RR’s
founder, added another innovation, one
that seems so obvious that you wonder
why everyone doesn’t use it. It’s all too
common for the cutting engineer, apparently
eager to get home, to begin the exit
groove before the last note has fully died
away. Tam’s innovation: wait. At the end
of the music there’s a glorious 12 to 20
seconds of glorious silence!
With the cutting lathe ready, RR
needed to find someone who could press
the disc without ruining everything.
The pressings were done at Quality
Record Pressings in Salina, Kansas, a
division of the mail-order record seller
Acoustic Sounds. QRP uses vintage
presses (since no one has made any for
many years), but rebuilds them with
modern microprocessor operation, and
accurate temperature control to avoid
overheating the vinyl and killing the
highs. QRP also has its own plating
facility, a vital step in the creation of a
quality LP.
The RR releases are on 200-gram
vinyl, and seem startlingly heavy if
you’re used to most LPs.
The Stravinsky album was
released at the same time as another
album, Dick Hyman’s From the
Age of Swing. That one really was
released on vinyl as well as HDCD.
It will be interesting to see whether,
as Keith O. Johnson says, the new
LPs sound superior to the older
“Pure Analog” ones.
The first release
The Stravinsky recording is a
good choice, because it was reviewed
most favorably, including by us, but
it was originally recorded on analog
tape. We have the HDCD version (RR-
70CD), which sounds outstanding even
without HDCD decoding, but has wonderful
dynamics when decoded. We also
have part of The Firebird on RR’s Tutti
compilation SACD (RR-906SACD).
Can vinyl top SACD?
On the evidence, yes.