Question for Sylvia: Splitting AV output

But needs to be kept clean as the tarnish film that can form is not such a good conductor.

Trevor.

**Of course. Up until a few months ago, I might had disregarded the opinions as nonsense. When a client dropped a 23 year old Marantz CD player in for service, I took the time to carefully listen to it, compared to my late model Harman Kardon. My heart sank, within a few seconds of listening to the Marantz. The HK was not in the same league. I assumed, as you do, that the printed specs tell me all I need to know. **And again, SOME digital systems are capable of exceptionally fine performance. It depends on the system. **Perhaps you failed to read what I wrote.

I had access to the same tapes that the vinyl and the CD was made from. The music was Neil Diamond's Hot August Night. It was recorded on analogue tape. The tape I used was a second generation master, stored by EMI in their vaults. It was the same tape used to manufacture CDs.

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Trevor Wilson www.rageaudio.com.au

And an "analog" tape recording is only "quantised" to the magentic particle size anyway, and "sampled" at the high frequency bias rate! :-) Not that an audiophool would understand that irony.

Trevor.

Right, "sounds better" is purely an opinion everyone gets to make for themselves.

And I have no problem with that, only that they never admit is is purely their subjective opinion, and find the need to argue some absolute superiority when there demonstrably is none.

Trevor.

Sure is, that's why everyone uses solid state now :-)

Trevor.

I'd be more charitable than that, they have an *opinion* it sounds better

*to them* and get to spend their money however they want. Those who simply want to make a statement usually do it with an expensive car (or a rare one like your example) expensive jewlery, expensive clothes etc.

Trevor.

As are any remaining HF signals on vinyl and tape. Fortunately we now have high sample rate digital if you really want to record those ultrasonic alarms.

Trevor.

**Typical bias frequencies lie about 110kHz for most tape systems. A frequency which is well in excess of a 16/44 digital system. According to Nyquist, that tells us a theoretical maximum frequency response in excess of 50kHz. Well past 16/44 digital.

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Trevor Wilson www.rageaudio.com.au

**Silver easily forms a silver sulphide, which is highly conductive. Silver oxide does not form easily. In any case, the reason for using silver lies with it's ability to be thickly and robustly plated on high current connectors. Something RF engineers have known for decades.

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Trevor Wilson www.rageaudio.com.au

**I was being a little flippant. The vast majority own such products as a statement. SOME listeners use such equipment for valid reasons. They may include:

• The use of loudspeakers that have been 'voiced' to be used with certain amplifiers.

• The use of loudspeakers whose impedance characteristic is such that the vast majority of solid state amplifiers cannot deal with it. Like this:
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**Or this:

That POS costs a cool $250k and sounds about as good as the output stage in my TV set. Not quite as much power though.

Or this POS:

Same output stage that you can find in a TV set. It'll set you back several grand.

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Trevor Wilson www.rageaudio.com.au

Nope, never assume that. I never assume it is easy to audibly compare items by simply swapping one for the other without carefully controlled test conditions either.

Of course. The real benefit for most people is even a cheap CD player will outperform a turntable costing many mutiples of it's price, and while some CD's are badly mastered, finding vinyl that is *not* badly manufactured is a far harder ask :-(

No, the CD cannot be better than an analog master tape it came from, BUT it can easily be better than a vinyl copy (or worse if the mastering is bad enough), AND it can be far better if properly recorded digitally in the first place. Your test proved nothing other than your opinion of the different samples you used for comparison.

Which were all different after mastering for the different mediums as I said.

So you don't understand that there are different processes involved in getting a tape to vinyl or CD? The differences are easily measured, no need for aural guessing games other than to establish personal preference of the changes induced.

Trevor.

The original argument was sampling and quantisation didn't exist in analog recording, not that the sample rate may be higher, or in fact lower than the

24/192 systems readily availble these days.

Trevor.

Exactly, they are far better for RF use than audio, so that's where you usually find them.

Trevor.

It won't set *me* back anything! I sure that buy that sort of crap.

Trevor.

Silly argument, everyone uses solid state because it is cheaper, easier to transport etc, nothing to do with tonal qualities, the vast majority do not carry on about little nuances of reproduction,extremely few carry on like wine snobs in their field.

Yep, and a dozen other benefits.

Yep, don't want to add any "tonal qualities"

Yep, happy to listen to the music, not (mass)debate endlessly about personal preferences.

Trevor.

to

of

musical

and

transistor/mosfet amps then

Why would we? THD figures are rather meaningless. That they're easy to measure and quote don't mean they're meaningfull.

That's a craaazy-looking impedance graph.

**It is pretty nasty, but certainly not unusual for many electrostatic loudspeakers. The original Quad ESL57 possessed an impedance curve at low frequencies that went extremely low indeed.

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Trevor Wilson www.rageaudio.com.au