27 Dec
2012
27 Dec
'12
1:36 p.m.
On Mon, 2012-12-24 at 10:45 +0100, Florian Paul Schmidt wrote:
On 12/24/2012 10:12 AM, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
Friends and I made tests with best studio equipment available, but we
never made double blind tests, those tests were blind tests or they were
completely not blind.
It's possible to get the same results with analog and digital equipment
and only to get the wanted colouration.
For home studios analog has got the better colouration, regarding to
tape saturation, you can't control neither digital nor analog
colouration for a home studio.
Tubes don't need to colourize the sound. Other than Neumann, the Brauner
VM1 e.g. doesn't cut sound by path filters, the sound quality of the VM1
is caused by the capsule, that's why not all microphones do sound equal,
some have colouration, others don't colourize the sound. If somebody
ordered a stereo pair of the VM1, Mr. Brauner and I selected the
microphones without doing blind tests, without measurements, just by
singing and speaking into the microphone. If you have experiences in
listening, this is easy to do, at least no customer ever was
unsatisfied. For guitar amps there's colourisation, because the amps are
build this way, e.g. by using Celestion speakers.
That a lot of tube equipment does colour the sound that much is
regarding to bad tubes and bad circuits.
I guess there are several articles from Mr. Brauner in the VDT-Magazin,
however, he also has his knowledge from books, such as Winfried
Knobloch's "Röhrentechnik ganz modern", Pflaum Verlag München, ISBN
3-7905-0660-5. Unfortunately it was stopped to continue knowledge about
tubes around 15 years ago by e.g. Elektor-Verlag, but they provided some
good books about tube circuits. I guess they even stopped to sell
Horowitz/Hill "The Art Of Electronics" ("Die Hohe Schule Der
Elektronik").
It's often written that digital should be better regarding to the
"neutral" sound quality, but I recognized that the knowledge about
discrete analog circuits is gone. There are studios that still record
analog, they don't use samples, but provide Melotrons and other gear.
So using digital and than using samples that emulate Melotrons, Moogs
etc., to add a saturation plug etc. never ever will sound as good as an
analog production using a Meltron, Moogs etc. and a tape recorder.
People often claim that digital should sound better, more neutral, but
than they try to get all kinds of emulations. To "produce sound" we want
colouration. It's possible to use professional analog gear, to get no
colouration, but we want colouration.
2 Cents,
Ralf
On Mon, 2012-12-24 at 09:59 +0100, Ralf Mardorf
wrote:
Psychoacoustics are a very interesting and highly complex field :D Some
people love vinyl (which is also a bandlimited medium, sice the record
is non rigid and the needle has a non zero mass and some other reasons,
too) because it sounds "better" to them. That has nothing to do with
whether a vinyl record represents a signal more faithfully than a CD and
a good D/A converter.
I play guitar as my main instrument. I like tube amps better than most
transistor amps simply for the reason that they add something to the
signal (all these complex non linear components working together to
produce something very pleasant to me). A simple transistor amp is
measurably so much more faithful in amplifying my guitar's pickup
outputs than a tube amp of the same complexity. The imperfections in
this case are not undesirable, but rather they are experimented with and
fully embraced by musicians (and audiences)..
The same argument can be made for analogue equipment in the recording
and production domain. Tube mic preamps, analogue circuits in mixing
boards, etc.. And there's nothing wrong with that at all :D
Some people really like the imperfections introduced by a vinyl playback
chain.
Here's a little thought experiment: Get the best available digital
recording and playback chain, and make a great recording of your vinyl
player's output for some vinyl records (preferably some that you are not
familiar with). Now make a double blind test between direct playback
from vinyl and the digital recordings of the vinyl. My hypothesis is
that you cannot discriminate between the two in such a way that you'll
find the direct vinyl playback better than the digital recording of the
vinyl (in a statistically significant fashion). Or even reliably
discriminate which is which (i.e. which comes directly from vinyl and
which from the recording).
Now do it the other way around: Take some digital masters of albums and
cut vinyl records from then. Now do a double blind test. My hypothesis
is that you will be able to discriminate the vinyl from the digital
playback for the simple reason that the vinyl cutting and playback chain
introduces loads of imperfections that will be clearly audible. You
might prefer the sound of the vinyl in a sense similar to a guitar
player preferring the sound of a tube amp over some transistor amp. But
that doesn't tell us anything about the faithfulness of reproduction. If
you like the vinyl cut of the albums better than you simply like the
artefacts and imperfections.
Analogue equipment has its place and knowing when to use it and when not
and being clear about the reasons is a good thing. Claiming that
analogue equipment is better in audio reproduction is just simply wrong
as a blanket statement.. but there's no data loss
Oops, might
be considered as "misinformation". My apologize that English
isn't my native language ;).
Yes, there's data loss for records too ;). But usually there are no gaps
etc. for a record that isn't broken into pieces.
Btw. analog is coming back, for studio productions and for consumers.