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Propeller Head Plaza Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics. |
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Propeller Head Plaza Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics. |
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In Reply to: RE: "it is not a belief, it is an indisputable fact that digital has superior resolution to vinyl." posted by Ugly on May 19, 2009 at 14:08:25:
Resolution depends on the signal to noise ratio of a system. Unfortunately, it is not possible to measure the signal to noise ratio without specifying the bandwidth. With more bandwidth there will be more noise. The faulty analysis on the Hydrogen Audio thread was based on signal to noise ratio without taking into account bandwidth. This is wrong on its face. (If you take an engineering course on "signals and systems" this will be explained in detail— possibly more than you may want to hear.)
Another way to look at it is that the analysis was one dimensional. It compared the side to side motion of a record groove that corresponded to one step of a digital signal, and concluded that a single atom was much larger than this motion. However, this analysis ignored the second dimension along the record grove. In the time between two successive digital samples the turntable rotated and an immense number of atoms passed under the tip of the stylus. The motion of the stylus and hence the signal generated by the cartridge depends on the average effect of all of these atoms. The simplistic Hydrogen Audio analysis ignored this entire dimension.
The fact of the matter is that a clean, well made LP has about 70 db of signal to noise ratio in the audio band. A properly dithered 44/16 recording starts out with 96 db (16 bit), loses about 6 db for dither (to avoid distortion) and then loses about 20 more db (RMS vs peak for typical clean audio, e.g. acoustic music). So a clean LP and a properly made CD have roughly the same signal to noise ratio. With good equipment and a good recording, the LP has a bandwidth of 25 kHz or possibly a bit more, but a CD is chopped off at 22050 Hz. Thus, in the ideal world the LP has more resolution. At least before the first spec of dirt or scratch hits it, and assuming no bearing noise in the turntable, etc... A good implementation of either technology will kill a bad implementation of the other, so I am not going to take a stand as to which is better in practice.
At some level, however, a good implementation of hi-res digital will almost certainly beat LP sound. I believe people are getting good results digitizing LPs using 192 kHz/24 bit PCM or DSD 64x.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
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Follow Ups
- RE: "it is not a belief, it is an indisputable fact that digital has superior resolution to vinyl." - Tony Lauck 05/19/0918:01:37 05/19/09 (3)
- RE: "it is not a belief, it is an indisputable fact that digital has superior resolution to vinyl." - Ugly 18:36:44 05/19/09 (2)
- LP S/N ratio - mls-stl 20:09:42 05/19/09 (0)
- RE: "it is not a belief, it is an indisputable fact that digital has superior resolution to vinyl." - Tony Lauck 19:20:13 05/19/09 (0)
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