What now sounds best, analog or digital? Not so long ago few audiophiles would even have asked the question. A considerable proportion of audiophiles would have rejected the notion that digital could ever compete with the magic of analog. Another considerable proportion would have associated vinyl with floor tiles rather than recordings. Vinyl, as we now call long-playing records, has made a major comeback, but then digital has not exactly stood still either. So…what’s better? I mean today, right now? This would be a short column if I could answer with a single word. Unfortunately — or perhaps fortunately — things aren’t so simple. When I tell my colleagues that an equipment review is going to be done entirely with vinyl, there are smiles all around. We still love analog, and perhaps you do too. We’re glad that the LP is enjoying a resurgence. But we’re not blind. Or deaf either. There were in fact good reasons for the recording industry to move to digital. The first, and the least valid in my view, was that it was new and shiny and hi-tech, and might reverse the near collapse of record sales in the early 80’s. Yes, you read that right…record sales began to collapse a decade and a half before the Internet really got going. A better argument was convenience. The CD was smaller and easier to manipulate than an LP, and although “perfect sound forever” was a crock, the CD at least appeared to be less vulnerable to mishandling. Nor could you mishandle the laser the way you might the phono cartridge, since a machine did the handling for you. If you didn’t like the song you heard, pressing a button would whisk you to the next one. For record producers, digital had its advantages too. In the age of multitrack pop music recording, with endless track bounce-downs, deterioration of sound with generations of copying was a problem. Digital would solve that. True, there was a hard edge to digital that 82 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY <strong>Magazine</strong> State of the Art by Gerard Rejskind drove producers around the bend, and they would discreetly go back to their beloved analog tape machines, just so their ears would stop bleeding, but they would avoid pointing that out. But that was in the early days of digital, when the typical “16-bit” player would actually have only 14 bits of resolution, and the crudest of filters would be inserted into both recording and playback chain to avoid aliasing. The CD still uses the same amount of data — a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz and 16-bit words — but both recording and playback equipment is vastly better. What’s more, we’re no longer stuck with the (relatively) low-resolution system launched all those years ago by Philips and Sony. The first system-wide improvement to digital was HDCD, co-invented by Keith O. Johnson of Reference Recordings (HDCD was later bought by Microsoft, which recognized that it was a way to push more data through a narrow pipeline, exactly what Microsoft was trying to do on the Internet). Then came the DVD, which was a movie format, but STATE OF THE ART: THE BOOK Get the 258-page book containing the State of the Art columns from the first 60 issues of UHF, with all-new introductions. See page 6. whose standard included the ability of playing back files with 24-bit words and 96 kHz sampling rate. Following that was a failed standard called DVD-Audio, which attempted to add surround sound to the mix. Sony and Philips, which were still collecting royalties on the CD, tried to continue their run with the Super Audio Compact Disc (SACD). Sony pushed it, but then lost interest. Does it suffer from ADD? And don’t get me started on Blu-ray! In the meantime sales of music were shifting more and more to the Internet. Though iTunes, the leader in Net music sales, offers only compressed music, a number of companies offer downloadable files with 24 bits and either 88.2 or 96 kHz. You can buy for your home a converter that can handle files with a sampling rate of 192 or even 384 kHz. Such files don’t yet exist, but you can see where we’re headed. So what’s better? Today? Right now? Vinyl records sound better than they ever have before, because the equipment for playing them is immensely superior. That’s true even if you don’t have the funds for the kind of gear we have at UHF. We know more about what a turntable and arm should or should not do, and a good modern cartridge can play parts of a groove that has never been touched before. At very low level the LP is handicapped by its higher noise level, but it has nearly infinite resolution even at those very low levels. That’s where the perceived warmth of the LP comes from. But as the resolution of digital increases, its low-level performance does too. The dynamics of the highresolution digital recording can now rival those of the LP. We’ve gotten to the point where even the 1982 Red Book CD standard sounds better than we had ever expected. By comparison, though, the LP is leagues ahead, even if reproducing it well is costly. As for the new high-density digital files, they have the potential to equal the LP. The ultimate victory may be years away, but that’s because there’s still a lot of work to do.
Why do UHF readers start reading their magazines at the back? Countless readers have confirmed it over the years: when they get their hands on the latest issue of UHF, they open it to the last page. The reason all of them mention: Gerard Rejskind’s last-page column, State of the Art. Since the magazine’s founding, the column has grappled with the major questions of high end audio. It has been acclaimed by readers around the world. Now, the columns from the first 60 issues of UHF are brought together into one book. Each is exactly as it was originally published, and each is accompanied by a new introduction. Order your copy today: $18.95 in Canada or the US, C$32 elsewhere in the world, air mail included.
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No. 91 CAN $6.49 / US $7.69 ANALOG
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Issue No. 91 Cover story: It’s sm
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DOG-EARED MAGAZINES ARE WRONG! And
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I was quite impressed with Paul Ber
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the original models — true? I can
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TAVES did, however, run into a prob
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seemed as if the music was elevated
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singers use that. And it’s the fi
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Music and memory Is there such a th
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sion. The dead time could be used t
- Page 31 and 32: The people at Reference Recordings
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- Page 35 and 36: weight.” But the piano nonetheles
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- Page 41 and 42: THE ACOUSTIC COLLECTION: This is th
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- Page 47 and 48: speakers like those is not what the
- Page 49 and 50: to the Red Book CD standard. The na
- Page 51 and 52: Music was evident. “I picked up t
- Page 53 and 54: INTERCONNECTS ATLAS NAVIGATOR Oxyge
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- Page 57 and 58: ed pepper to its music. Felix Hell
- Page 59 and 60: We Get Requests (CD) An amazing 196
- Page 61 and 62: There is lots of nostalgia in pop m
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