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Re: Respectful question

Posted by longtimequadowner (A) on July 13, 2005 at 14:20:17

In Reply to: Re: Respectful question posted by SgtKarj on July 13, 2005 at 13:36:33:

You are absolutely right - and it frustrates me to no end - they ARE playing CD's. In fact, a couple of stations now advertise constantly that they are "now broadcasting in digital HD (high definition) sound".

Furthermore, I have seen a few threads on the vinyl asylum that marvel at the fact that when they record their turntable to a CD using (among others) the Alesis Masterlink 9600 recorder (which I also have), and play back the CD of their turntable, it sounds close to if not almost indistinguishable from the original vinyl source! That recently begged the question - are recording engineers purposefully creating the "digital" sound we hear on CD's as if that were a good thing??? The answer is clearly "yes".

On one such vinyl asylum thread recently, one fellow answered that the vinyl medium inherently limits recording engineers from committing such atrocities - for example he said, if you were to record a square wave onto a record and play it back, the result would come out as very "rounded" - you just can't expect a mecanical stylus to crash up and down in a perfect square wave and reproduce it perfectly. With CD's on the other hand, limited only my their sampling rate and associated Nyuist's theorums, can perfectly recreate that square wave in all it's crashing glory. This really rang true to me because the only speakers that can perfectly reproduce a square wave are electrostats - in fact, I think quad or one of their resellers used to advertise that in the 1980's - showing the reproduced square wave as part of the ad. This is not to fan flames - but if you have a box speaker, you will have that square wave softened significantly compared to an electrostat. So too if you have a lot of tubes - when use my classic 10 tube triode pre and my two 5 tube monoblock power amps, things get a lot better but not good enough - and then it just dumbs down my tuner to the point where it's pure syrup. Forget it!

So in spite of the fact they're playing CD's, something happens when it's all broadcast through FM - and it's not just compression and detail exaggeration because there are uncompressed stations out there, often university stations and the like, and the sound is large, fluid, liquid, smooth, and still tonally very vivid - almost startling often times - producing a large singular picture of the entire musical event unlike any digital I hear. Totally mesmerizing even within the limitations of FM.

Similar to the discussions going on in the vinyl asylum, I also record FM to my Alesis 9600 and when I play it back, it too is almost indistinguisable - an analog sound I only hear when I record it myself. I frequently have a great time listening to albums on FM (the local classic rock station plays a classic album "side" every night) and invariably when I go to the store and buy the CD, I'm horribly disappointed - just awful. BUT, if I record that album side from the tuner and play it back, I'm in pure "analog" heaven, and from FM you hear Pink Floyd, Beatles, Hendrix, Who, Boston as I'm sure the artist intended. ESP Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon, Wish you were here, Animals, the Wall - unbelievable on FM, there is soooooo much in there. And don't even get me started on 98.9 Smooth Jazz from Seattle - my god - waves of rippling beauty flow across the room and crash into the walls!

This is what I hope the Burwen Bobcat system achieves, presumably without the compression which Mark Levinson (who personally answered my email!!!) mentioned - no loss of dynamics necessary, because I mentioned I'd happily lose the excessive dynamics. In spite of the megabuck systems he's accustomed to, he was nice enough to say I had a "very nice system there" - a true gentleman!

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