Hi guys, long time no see

H

Han

New member
I as reading a closed thread, Miroslav got me back to HR. A closed thread about analog and digital. I've been reading this kind of debates for more than ten years now and I'm done.

I am a studio owner and an audiofiel, moderator on a hi fi forum and I know all about it. We did a number of ABX tests, double blind tests and one of them was testing the vinyl record of DSOTM by Pink Floyd, which contains frequencies of 76 khz.

So some 25 people with hi end setups at home were in my studio and we had a Thorens recordplayer, a 24/192 convertor and a 16/44.1 convertor set up. Output levels calibrated within 0.1 dB and there we went.

There was a moment when somebody said: this is the recordplayer for sure. Wrong, it was the 16/44.1 convertor. So the conclusion is that no one of these +/- 25 audiofiel peeps was able to hear any difference.

For instance: I have an analog board of 3.20 m wide with a couple of hundreds of the same knobs in the same places. If you look at that surface and you look some 0.5 meter further for a while, you will get another picture. It seems that an extra dimension comes up. You know this is nonsense because the board doesn't change, but you will see it.

It's the brain that's doing it, the eyes are camera's. The ears are microphones, the brains makes the sound out of it and that's the problem.

I do record fully analog, to a 2" machine and I'll tell you why: because if a vocalist begins to scream very loud into the microphone, the VU meter will reach the red numbers, but you won't have any problem at all. And I like to see the reels spinning and I like to have the big board in front of me, with the nearfields on the bridge and the lava lamps.

:facepalm:
 
This is exactly where I'm at as well. I've realized that it's the brain and the eyes doing it and it's not what I'm really hearing.

The brain is a powerful thing. I think everyone should watch Ethan Winer's youtube video "audio myth workshop." The effects the brain can create are very real. You can easily fool yourself into thinking you hear something if you know what to listen for. And it's not even really an illusion, because your brain really does interpret the data differently.

How many people have spent minutes adjusting the EQ on a track to perfection only to realize that they were turning the knob on the wrong channel? It's the same phenomenon.
 
Double Blind tests don't reveal anything though -- for the very reason you both describe: the mind will play tricks on itself. The difference is far too subtle and cosmic to tell with this test.

Do you guys want to know the real, legimately true reason I record analog? Because I feel that it captures energy and ghosts that cannot be captured digitally. I have proven this to myself with my own subjective tests. This has to do with a direct transfer of energy via magnets and electricity. With digital, the energy cannot get through.
 
Hey Han!!! :cool:

Nice to see you back.
I was hoping I could get you to drop back in again....so we can talk about the Otari MX-80 and other tape/analog pleasures.
Han and I go back about 10 years now from some other BBS sites.


Han said:
I do record fully analog, to a 2" machine and I'll tell you why: because if a vocalist begins to scream very loud into the microphone, the VU meter will reach the red numbers, but you won't have any problem at all. And I like to see the reels spinning and I like to have the big board in front of me, with the nearfields on the bridge and the lava lamps.
Click to expand...

Yup...same thing. Love the board in front of me, the reels spinning, and the real "warmth" of the gear...aka, electricity and heat....not to mention the smell of all those electrons and whatnot. Then there's the whole touch & feel thing.

If you put a reel of tape on a deck (especially with the bigger 2" tapes and decks), and it sits on there for a bit, the smell of the tape fills the room...it actually smells a lot like fresh dollar bills (probably to signify your tape and gear money going up in smoke ;) ).
Then there's the smell of tube amps, the heat hits the wood cabinets on some, and it's a nice odor.
I have a Carr Hammerhead with EL34 tubes that will fill up my entire studio with the smell of fresh pine after it;s been on for awhile.
Not to mention my old Hammond organ....there's something about the oil used for the tone wheels, that is to me better than many perfumes. I would turn it on for about an hours before a session, and when I come back into the studio...it's filled with that smell.

So yeah...a lot of great awakening of the senses when working with analog gear that you just don't get from a mouse and an LCD screen. Though sometimes the keyboard smells like yesterdays lunch! :D
 
lonewhitefly said:
Sure, a microphone is analog but it's not a storage medium.
Click to expand...

But it's possible to design a pure analog recording and playback system that does not use magnetic induction at any stage. For example, electrostatic microphones, piezoelectric speakers, analog optical media.

I suppose we still need a motor to turn the disc . . .
 
Ha, I've sold my big Hammond and 122 Leslie. It was never used lately because it doesn't have a sustain pedal and the possibility of transposing. Cheers to the young generation.

The smell of fresh tape alone is reason enough to record analog. The problem is that my electricity bill is between € 500 and 600 per month. But it's a nice studio with hi end analog gear and a Jaguar XJ6 (1969) and a Citroen DS from 1972 in the lounge.

I love studio's like that.

Oh, and it has 60 most classic mics in the safe, very nice as well and an Otari MX870 always works, like a Volkswagen Beetle. It starts up in the morning and works like a charm day in day out since 1998.

If I have a problem it's always something digital. :D
 
Jon Stoppable said:
But it's possible to design a pure analog recording and playback system that does not use magnetic induction at any stage. For example, electrostatic microphones, piezoelectric speakers, analog optical media.

I suppose we still need a motor to turn the disc . . .
Click to expand...

I wouldn't be able to comment on such a recording setup as I have never used anything like this. I'm not talking about theories, I am talking about experience.
 
Well I don't think electrostatic microphones and piezoelectric speakers are very theoretical; they are rather common. The question is can they record and reproduce the phenomenon to which you refer? Once a signal is induced into a circuit, that signal should remain unless altered.

By the same token, a signal transduced into a circuit via electromagnetic induction should also remain unless altered.

But I've never heard anyone claim that a signal that can be transduced by a moving-coil microphone cannot be transduced by a condenser microphone. Such signal may have a mechanical characteristic, but that can be introduced at a later stage (the reverse operation cannot be accomplished easily). Microphone designers try pretty hard to keep EMI out of their products in the first place with shielding, humbucking coils, common mode rejection, etc.
 
Jon Stoppable said:
Well I don't think electrostatic microphones and piezoelectric speakers are very theoretical; they are rather common. The question is can they record and reproduce the phenomenon to which you refer? Once a signal is induced into a circuit, that signal should remain unless altered.

By the same token, a signal transduced into a circuit via electromagnetic induction should also remain unless altered.

But I've never heard anyone claim that a signal that can be transduced by a moving-coil microphone cannot be transduced by a condenser microphone. Such signal may have a mechanical characteristic, but that can be introduced at a later stage (the reverse operation cannot be accomplished easily). Microphone designers try pretty hard to keep EMI out of their products in the first place with shielding, humbucking coils, common mode rejection, etc.
Click to expand...

In theory, I don't see why an analog optical recorder and electro-static microphones would not be able to capture similar energy. However, I do not have the capability to try this myself. Not sure how large a role magnets play in my experience, but my experience is limited to magnetic analog recording. I'm not talking about microphones and speakers in any case, I'm talking about the recording medium.

And I'm hip to your game /// attempting to disguise yourself behind a psuedonym.
 
Not a pseudonym, Jon is my actual name.

Cool if it's not magnets, so you could go condenser mic-->amplifier-->non-moving-coil headphones monitoring live and hear it?
 
Well often the ghosthunters go looking for EM fields, that I know. It's not hard to capture that in an audio recording; it's just that the usual goal is to keep stray EMF out of an audio signal. The difficulty is we'd want to exclude the EMI from obviously man-made sources like good ol' 50/60Hz hum and its zillion harmonics. So we'd probably have to move to a very remote location. Then we'd be left with natural or supernatural sources.

There was an interesting thread here . . . somewhere . . . about VLF interference from military signals. Can't get away from everything I suppose.
 
Han, these kind of focused listening tests have been done to death for many years and no matter what conclusion they reach (and they all reach different ones) they’re not the right approach. That is, the fundamental survey method is flawed.

I’ve seen many of these over the years, all reaching different conclusions. I know it seems intuitive to get a room full of people and do A/B listening tests, or A/B/C listening tests, depending on how many formats you want to compare.

Again, I maintain that while some believe we can solve the issue once and for all by setting up laboratory environments to conduct experiments, this is simply not the case. When we do this we are ignoring the real-world evidence all around us... people in their day-to-day environments we’ve been able to observe for decades. Not only do individuals come right out and report that they hear differences in their natural listening environments, but in addition the world has changed its listening habits due to the technology. We can observe changes in how certain types of music is received, which correlates to technology changes. Not all genres suffer equally. For some music the recording format doesn’t matter as much and some not at all, but that’s because the music isn’t worth recording in the first place.

On the other hand many genres have mutated based solely on the impact the recording format has had on the sound. This cannot be observed in a laboratory, but rather with scientific disciplines that study human behavior by observing societies over time. Much of this belongs in the realm of anthropology and the behavioral sciences. Fields of study dealing with sensory perception and psychoacoustics are also essential.

I know your motives are good, but Han, no one is going to present yet another listening test and put this issue to rest and you shouldn’t settle for that. It’s all been tried many times. What needs to happen is for people to take a step back and examine the issue from new angles that may be largely unfamiliar to them. Just when you think it’s time to give up on this whole phenomenon, it’s really time to come to the realization that the methodology people have been relying on is inadequate. We haven’t even begun to think circumspectly about all the aspects involved. On the contrary, most people are stuck in a rut, presenting the same flawed arguments over and over.

You may be done and that could be for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is being tired of the discussion or just being tired with other priorities that take all your time.

As for me I’ve just begun because my predictions over the years of the demise of high fidelity music recording/reproduction have come true. How do we stop the bleeding in the music industry? That is the question that should matter to everyone now. We’re not even comparing analog to high resolution digital anymore because the masses have chosen lossy compressed formats… because music doesn’t mater like it once did. I saw that coming as the hi-fi bar was lowered time and again, year after year. It was inevitable, and now here we are, just where I said we’d be. The public did not go from CD to better formats like DVD audio or SACD (Super Audio CD). They went to a typical listening environment that consists of iPods, ear buds or crappy computer speakers and mp3 with music butchered and compressed to hell with about 6 dB of dynamic range if you’re lucky. The slippery slope has only gotten slippery and we’re only falling faster… just as I said would happen as early as 1999.

Analog has only become more important in the last ten years. The differences between our former concepts of high fidelity music and the newer inferior concepts have only become greater.
 
Beck, the masses are listening to mp3 on crappy gear, but there are people who spend a fortune on hi fi gear. Loudspeakercable, 8 meter for 34.000 euro, an interconnect for 13.400 euro, a 2*35 watt tube amp for 60.000 euro and I really don't care what people do with their money, that's not my problem.

Bus as a moderator on a hi fi forum that has absolutely no connection with commercial sourses, not a single adver on the forum, I must react on people who claim that an inexpensive interconnect sound much worse than a hi end one that costs 1500 euro.

So we investigate by organizing a double blind test and I know the problems, but it's the best we have. A studio engineer with trained ears knows that when you're in te mix process, there comes a time when it sounds crap. So you go to the relaxroom for a break, a cup of coffee, tea or/and a puff of tabacco and after half an hour you go back to the controlromm, start playback and it sounds completely different than half an hour before.

There was a guy who said (on the forums) that a hi end amp sounds a mile better than a cheap Sony amp and if you can't hear that you neeed to see the doctor to look at your ears, talking about a cliché. So we invited him to make that true and organised a meeting in my studio.

We bought a cheap Sony amp for 170 euro, 2*70 watt and we borrowed a € 33.000 amp from the importer who was so kind to take the risk. We phoned the B&W importer and he sent me two B&W 801D's, 118 kg each and a costprize of € 16.000.

We calibrated both amps so that the Sony wouldn't get into red clipping figures, because the other amp was 2*500 watt. The latter amp of € 33.000 had a problem, 10% distortion and we called the importer to ask him for opening the amp an that was okay. It turned out there was a wire misconnected and we have fixed that. We calibrated both amps and did the ABX test.

There were only two people who could hold both amps apart bij ear and one of them was a certain studio owner called Han. The difference in sound not hearable, but the Sony was better in its fase behaviour. The snare of the vocalist could be pointed in the middle of the stereo image and stood still. When the expensive amp was playing the snare seemed to move a little.

Talking about fase: audiophile people often talk about better sound, more black between the notes, more 'microdetail' and a wider stereo image. And the stereo image should be exactly like it was done while mixing. An amp must amplify and not make a wider stereo image by spoiling its fase behaviour. So the wider stereo image is the result of a bad designed amp.

Analog/digital: modern hi end digital is very good these days and almost no one can hear any difference between a 2" tape and 24/192 and I doubt that I can hear a difference in a blind test. But I know that when I record to 2" tape, I don't have any problem with making a wide and deep stereo image, while I have problems when recording to PT HD8. Two tracks in 24/69 is no problem, but 32 tracks is. The sound becomes flat and narrow and I do have a theory about that:

A two inch machine had heads tha are 24 small electromagnets with a very small gap. When you record to tape. everything is 'drawed' into the particles anw when you push playback, everything comes back to the playbackhead in exactly the same relation to eachother within the time domain, nothing has moved.

The computer has to calculate every sound, every track and that costs time. Besides that the computer can't calculate 10:3 because the result will be 3.333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333 and so on, through the whole universe and back, but it remains 3. So it will stop somewhere and many of these stops will affect the sound.

I will be back.
 
Beck said:
As for me I’ve just begun because my predictions over the years of the demise of high fidelity music recording/reproduction have come true. How do we stop the bleeding in the music industry? That is the question that should matter to everyone now. We’re not even comparing analog to high resolution digital anymore because the masses have chosen lossy compressed formats… because music doesn’t mater like it once did. I saw that coming as the hi-fi bar was lowered time and again, year after year. It was inevitable, and now here we are, just where I said we’d be. The public did not go from CD to better formats like DVD audio or SACD (Super Audio CD). They went to a typical listening environment that consists of iPods, ear buds or crappy computer speakers and mp3 with music butchered and compressed to hell with about 6 dB of dynamic range if you’re lucky. The slippery slope has only gotten slippery and we’re only falling faster… just as I said would happen as early as 1999.

Analog has only become more important in the last ten years. The differences between our former concepts of high fidelity music and the newer inferior concepts have only become greater.
Click to expand...

I must say I have to respectfully disagree with this. People began listening to a lower-fi medium well before digital ever hatched: First this was 8-tracks, and then it was cassettes. Now I love my cassettes as much as anyone, and I continue to record some projects to my 424 MKIII by choice, but no one can debate the fact that the frequency response and fidelity on them is nothing compared to vinyl.

I grew up in the seventies, and I remember the semi-transition from vinyl to 8-tracks, which was soon followed by a more comprehensive transition to cassettes. I was one of those young punks at that time (14 or so), and none of my friends listened to vinyl anymore. Everyone had cassettes. Of course, there were still some people listening to vinyl, but the everyday listener (though quite avid and quite the hungry consumer) was listening to the compromised sound of the cassettes in favor of its portability. Vinyl albums became something that some people's parents listened to. But even my father, who was a lover of music, jumped on the bandwagon and bought the four-piece hi-fi system of the day (receiver/amp, cassette deck, graphic EQ, and turntable). Eventually, our vinyl collection found a home in a bottom cabinet somewhere, and the cassette collection continued to grow.

The point is, though, that the youth of that time were almost all listening to cassettes, just as almost all of the youth today are listening to mp3s.

I certainly don't like what digital has done to the music industry, but to imply that audio quality was of paramount concern until digital showed up is simply not correct.
 
Yep. And even before that most peoples' turntables were total crap and their speakers weren't much better. And hey, AM radio! Somehow music got worse after FM radio got popular, go figure . . .

Audiophiles have always been and will always be a tiny minority. High quality sound is way more affordable now than ever but people just don't care. It's just something fun for a few of us to argue about.

In related news . . . I . . . managed to blow out both of my tweeters :o (that should *not* have happened given the power level, I guess even Scandanavians lie sometimes :mad:) so I am listening to woofers at the moment. I should at least pop 'em open and bypass the crossovers because the woofers are capable of 5kHz or so . . . but I haven't bothered yet. I'm actually enjoying it a bit.

I don't agree that digital has done something to the music industry. Idiots in the music industry have done something to audio quality. Unless you are talking piracy; I am just talking bad production.
 
You can blow away a 100 watt driver with a 10 watt amp. It's even much easier to blow it with a 10 watt amp than with a 500 watt amp.

Great thoughts though in this thread. I came to a hi fi forum by accident where a moderator recommended an SM57 as a hi end microphone. So I gave him some response and not much later I was asked to become a moderator there. I entered a world that was completely new to me.

There are guys who honestly believe that a power cord of some 1.5 m will couse a hudge difference in sound quality and the joke is that the sound will always be better but never worse. Interesting when you think of the power which comes from the generator via copper wires with a length of hundreds of kilometres, 380.000 volts and that last 1.5 meter makes the difference.

I found out that audiophiles are nice people, but the strong believers are almost always non technical guys. Very interesting world.
 
Sure, if you clip the amp. The amp was nowhere near clipping. It was rather odd, actually, but when I rebuild I'm sticking in some circuit protection this time :(
 
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