New decade, end of the CD?

We have, sort of -  it was a discussion on CDR write-speed that drifted off to audiophile burners at one point. Nothing has changed in that time - audiophilists can tell the difference, the rest of us cannot because there is no difference to hear.

...not really - for the analogue signal that has been digitally encoded data to become "coloured" it would have to be corrupted in the analogue domain. Since it never gets converted from digital to analogue and back to digital then any corruption of the digital signal cannot affect the analogue component. Moreover - to affect the "musical" component in the manner you describe the corruption of the analogue signal would have to occur in the frequency domain - but the digitally encoded signal is not in the frequency domain so any corruption there cannot convolve into the frequency domain when it is decoded. What you are suggesting is that a CDR that is burnt with a text copy of War and Peace for example would be decoded with spelling and grammar errors - which it evidently is not - every copy is a verbatim copy of the original, and so it is with digitally encoded analogue music since the burnt data is simply that - data.

Some supposed wine enthusiasts can't tell the difference between Chardonnay and Pinot Grigio. Blind tastings consistently out fakers all the time, and less expensive wines win all the time.

Edited by Negoba - April 06 2011 at 14:11

Negoba wrote: Some supposed wine enthusiasts can't tell the difference between Chardonnay and Pinot Grigio. Blind tastings consistently out fakers all the time, and less expensive wines win all the time.   Some of us who have done mixing and mastering and really listen to frequencies, blah blah, will tell you that the differences people claim to hear are complete BS.   I would challenge anyone to do a blind test and see if they can even tell the difference between CD and 320 mp3 quality, which is a much more significant signal alteration than we're talking about here. By the time you're down to some of the subtle differences some audiophiles claim to hear, you really should be talking about the dimensions of the room for cancellations and the materials used in the flooring. But that doesn't sell high end electronics.

Sometimes the blind tests don't tell much because on an instant comparison (ten seconds of each source) may sound the same, but on a longer term (1 minute) the ears get tired with digital because the brain has to reconstruct the missing informations.

Dean wrote: ... further more - based on what you say then a simple proof would be to burn the data onto a CDR using a PC - rip that back to the PC and repeat the process a number of times. Since you can hear degredation on one copy then the rest of us without gold-plated ears should be able to hear a difference eventually - the question then becomes "how many copies does it take before everyone (including audio analysis equipment) can see a difference from the original master copy?".

I've never said that i've gold ears. I've always said
that most people have ears good enough to hear differences i'm talking about. But i've a golden system.

"The data is identical... It's important to separate the message (the data) from the messenger (the clock).


It's all in the playback of the last disc in the chain, Paul! The "old" clock is NEVER transferred on each copy, only the data. No matter what speed you write at, there is a new writing master clock in the CD recorder that determines the spacing of the pits on the newly written CD.


But each time you copy, that clock is not transferred through the SCSI barrier of the next CD Recorder. I will have to write about this in more detail and diagram it for my readers, hopefully soon...


And each playback is a new... if the clock of the final playback is irregular, you will have jitter on the final playback of the last generation."



Source:
http://www.digido.com/audio-faq/j/jitter-on-cd.html

oliverstoned wrote: Dean wrote: Let me explain I've made a comparison on my home system pluging my Imod/Iqube portable system to my preamp Vs my "big" CD setup (drive Sonic Frontiers SFT-1 + converter Goldmund Mimesis 14 and Nordost Silver shadow digital cable) The same song played, ripped in wav on my Imod With the preamp i can switch form one source to another. It sounds very much identical in a 5 seconds comparison But if you listen longer, let's say 30 seconds, the differences begin to apear...you get tired much quicker with the Imod/Iqube source than with the big CD (i don't mean to critizice the Wolfson conversion chip).

No top-end, please, it's just a middle-end CD set up.

..and the power section!

oliverstoned wrote: ..and the power section!