CD v.s LP - When comming from the same MASTER

Well Pabelson, from real life listening sessions, LP has always produced superior soundstaging AND bass separation. While from a technical standpoint, what you say about suming the deep bass on an LP maybe true, but below roughly 80hz bass is non-directional, so having true stereo bass all the way down to 20hz is just academic, maybe good for the technician in the studio, but with less real life applicability than made out to be.

Take the Telarc digital recording of the Cleveland Symphonic Winds conducted by Frederick Fennell - Holst suite No.1 and 2. On the LP the bass drums hits are definitely on the far L back of the soundstage, and they do go deep, maybe not down to 20hz, but certainly below 40hz, enough to shake my floor and sofa. And the bass isn't the one note type of bass, but its quick, well-defined and full of impact.

Now I also have the Telarc CD version of this excellent recording, and let me assure you, the LP version sounds significantly better, its not funny.

Pabelson, actually the real impact of sampling at a higher frequency is not to extend the frequency response, but to make the implimentation of the anti-aliasing filter simpler, so that a filter with less passband ripple and less phase error can be used.

I agree with you that extra high frequencies above 20kHz do not make a difference.

I think this goes to the heart of your arguments ... in THEORY redbook CD is perfectly capable of producing perfect sound. Provided there is no jitter, the ADCs and DACs are perfectly linear, and most importantly, that you can implement a perfect brick wall anti-aliasing filter in the frequency domain, which creates the sin(x)/x function in the time domain to perfectly reproduce the analog waveform from the train of samples.

It is in the implementation that the CD playback falls short.

I agree with you that vinyl is a deeply flawed format, and I personally think that vinyl and CD replay are roughly on a par, with different deficiencies. I suspect that those who prefer vinyl are in some way more bothered by the distortions caused by the deficiencies in real-world digital recording and playback caused by timing jitter, non-linear DACs and ADCs and approximations to the brick-wall filter.

That vinyl should be considered "accurate" by the same people who argue endlessly about how different cartridges can sound at different tracking weights, how different tonearms sound with a different counterweights is equally ludicrous. But vinyl does have moments where it sounds more real than CDs, so I guess I kind of like the distortion introduced by the medium.

This is a great topic, and something to seriously think about for anyone who is interested in getting into vinyl. Nowdays it seems like the analog 1/2" master is becoming extinct, so therefore it seems logical to think with an LP copy of even a hi rez 24/192 source would only ever sound possibly as good as the SACD or DVD audio of that same source. This is a very thought provoking topic, unless you already have a nice colletion of vinyl or are interested only in picking up older stuff why would you bother with vinyl playback at all.

I think the point missed here is the fact that regardless of which format (digital or analog) the master is recorded, the mix down to the end user takes a VERY different path, depending on which format were talking about.

If the event must begin as digital, I sill prefer high resolution digital converted directly to analog by the mastering lab. The conversion is one step and there is no deliberate "lossy" re sampling as with Redbook and SACD.

I have thousands of LP's, most are analog source. Music released in the last decade are all over the place in terms of what the recording studio used. I suspect the latest releases such as Alison Krauss (one of my favorites) was recorded to a hard drive rather than tape. That particular recording is the work of Doug Sax, so likely the master to analog was done in the most direct way possible.

I have no doubt that any one of us with the master digital hard drive (or tape) in our own system, would hear performance above and beyond anything we have ever experienced.

The argument comes from differences in opinion as to what quality REMAINS after Sony and similar vendors convert that original digital format DOWN to comply with Redbook or SACD standards.

In my opinion, the studio conversion from the best available digital format, direct to analog is still the best representation of the original event. This is the shortest path to analog that we all experience when we listen.

Cmk: I mentioned summing bass as an example of the alterations (distortions, if you will) necessary to cut a vinyl record. I agree that it is not audibly significant in most cases. By the way, the reason bass often sounds directional is because we aren't listening to pure tones, and sonic components that are higher in frequency can provide directional cues. It also helps to know that back left is usually where the bass drum is.