Digital Audio Myths - Listening on a PC

I disagree, Oliver, I love my Myryads. They extremely musical amps that suit my taste very well. But this is where we never agree. Personally I think you have fallen into the trap of becoming more obsessed with machinery than music. My advice would be to throw all the junk you spent so much money on away and try to remember why you liked this music in the first place when you heard it on lousy equipment or even on the radio. Then you might understand where you've been going wrong

Kind regards

MikeEnRegalia wrote: maidenrulez wrote: Now with guitar modeling tools you are supposed to make it sound like a MARSSHALL JCM 2000 forexample or a FENDER BASSMAN and i am pretty sure you can get a decent sound but not even close to the original stuff Don't be so sure ... these technologies are constantly improving. I bought the Line6 POD some years ago and it was clearly inferior to the "real thing". But since then a lot has changed. And my Vox ToneLab SE does a really good job at simulating the real amps - by cleverly using digital AND analog technologies. BTW: If you have some background knowledge in guitar amps you'll know Vox as one of the classic amp manufacturers of the 60's/70's (in the beginning there were Fender, Vox and Marshall). They know something about amps and vintage sounds ...

Ah i like the POD XT and i think it has hundreds of different sounds wich is all very good but compared to even the reissues of the classic fender and marshall and even vox amps(wich i dont favour that much) i aint CLOSE to the sound that say a fender super reverb 65 reissue can delivier...even the vox pedalboard wich has a real tube can not recreate fully the sound of a real fender tube amp...but currently i cant afford a proper amp yet so i am quite happy with the POD XT...and the Line6 POD did not have any amp modeling software in it surely?

Myryad MP100 pre amp and MP240 power amp

Linn LP 12 with Sumiko Blue Point MC

Musical Fidelity XLP pre amp

Marantz CD 63 SE CD player

Admittedly my speakers (pair of old RTL TDL3s) aren't up to the job and my cabling needs an uprgrade.

And I do listen to this system when I reall have time to concentrate on music, but these opportunities are very few and far between and when I do crank it up 90% of the time it's to do justice to vinyl. For casual listening I get just as much enjoyment from the so-called low end crap in my office or on my cheap and cheerful sony noise cancelling phones and i-pod.

I love having a nice system for occasional use and can add the enjoyment of good reproduction to the enjoyment of the music but ultimately I just like listening to the music. The reproduction has to be of a certain standard but once it hits the level of a half decent car stereo I'm happy enough.

In fact it amazes me that people get so obsessed about the transaparency of a system. I've heard soome very high end so-called transparent systems featuring things like Nautilus speakers, Clearaudio refererence and some pretty esoteric amps and most of the time they just made my ears hurt. I want the music to sing not teach me science.

oliverstoned wrote: It just show that most people are disapointed in hifi cause they received bad advices from sellers, who just want to sell as much as possible. You prefer music over electronics...me too. With a PC you loose half of the music and the musicality (ability of a system to let the music and the emotion flows) is Zero. What's your hifi system? i'm just curious

You're really pathetic ... a hopeless case. Can't you at least add something like "I think" or "IMO" or anything, it's really just your opinion - which I have proven to be wrong.

MikeEnRegalia wrote: ^ arcer: Check out Presto Ballet - Peace Among the Ruins. It was recorded in 2004 and they used no digital equipment whatsoever. Analog synths, analog tapes ... it sounds amazing.  Incidentally: You say that you can't hear the difference of many "emulated" sounds compared to the original. Are you talking about listening on cheap equipment or high end?It sounds a little odd that you say that they sound virtually identical and on the other hand that the digital version "kind of sucks".

I'm not saying there aren't people out there recording material on tape using analogue gear and I agree that real instruments across air sound better than anything, but merely that most modern rock music is recorded almost completely in the digital domain and therefore applying very high end gear to warm this stuff up is sort of pointless.

Sure there is a standard at which you should be reproducing music but I, for one, do not believe that you need thousands and thousands of euro worth gear to adequately reporoduce sounds that have been created in the digital domain.

And as a sometime musician I agree that there is nothing quite like the trouser-flapping experience of plugging in a good guitar into a good valve amp, turning the thing all the way up, hitting a powerchord and revelling in all that natural saturation but as far as recording goes, in the context of a full mix, I can't hear any difference between a real amp and a modelled version - particularly Native Instruments whose models are stunningly real. I don't think I ever said the digital versions suck. I actually think they are fantastic and give me a sonic armoury I could never have dreamed of owning in hardware form.

I reckon you can reproduce music to a very high standard on a PC using high quality MP3s, a good soundcard and some decent monitors. Many people record albums to a high standard on such tools, why should listening to the same music be any different.

Put it this way, and here I'm echoing something James Lee said earlier in the thread, I have a 5,000+ euro system in my living room that hardly ever gets used anymore, except for vinyl. I'm more than happy listening to 192 bit rate MP3s in my office on my adequate Alesis monitors and Audigy soundcard or on my i-pod in the car.

It should be about the music not the medium.

^ arcer:

1. Check out Presto Ballet - Peace Among the Ruins. It was recorded in 2004 and they used no digital equipment whatsoever. Analog synths, analog tapes ... it sounds amazing. 
2. Incidentally: You say that you can't hear the difference of many "emulated" sounds compared to the original. Are you talking about listening on cheap equipment or high end?
   
   It sounds a little odd that you say that they sound virtually identical and on the other hand that the digital version "kind of sucks".

maidenrulez wrote: arcer wrote: Most modern rock music is recorded wholly in the digital domain. The guitar tones are modelled and plugged straight into a soundcard, the keyboard tones are modelled analogue synths, the drums are loops, the processing is all digital, the reverbs are convolution models. The vocals are pitch corrected digitally. Hardly anything recorded these days has not been slapped through half a dozen digital process to give it more 'life', 'warmth', 'bounce', 'depth'... whatever. And most of this is done inside the very PC or Mac that everyone is saying cannot reporoduce music accurately. The "modern" bands i listen to uses non of these effects not even guitar modeling...the old stuff is still the best stuff

The question is: IF (for the sake of this discussion) the modelled sounds are as good as the original, so that you can't even tell them apart when listening on a good system ... are they not equal then?

 Many people complain about Presto Ballet for instance, saying that all that digital recording, Pro Tools etc. is messing up the sound and makes it sterile ... they don't even know that none of these tools were used. Today when a recording sounds crystal clear and just perfect, everyone automatically assumes that it has been digitally "enhanced" ... that isn't so.