Rediscovering the Joy of Digital?

As far as high priced analog, it has been my own personal experience that you can definitely better CD with good analog, but you have to spend much more to do so. I realize this may have to do with poor matching, or bad synergy, so this is not to be taken as an absolute statement. I have a relatively entry level turntable setup: Rega P2 with RB250 arm and Grado silver cartridge. I bought it used for $350 bucks. In the same system I have a Sony SCD-CE775 that I bought used for 175 bucks.

The Sony at least matches the Rega as far as redbook playback goes. Of course it is recording sensitive, but more CDs sounds better than LPs sound better.

My brother has a no holds barred Teres setup that sounds glorious; there are recordings that sound better on my SCD-1, but more recordings sound better on his TT than recording that sound better on my CD player. However his turntable setup cost a helluva lot more than my CD player.

Now if you compare SACD to the vinyl, there is no comparison at the same price point. I couldn't tell you whether a 10k digital SACD setup sounds better than a 10k TT rig, because I have never heard a 10k digital setup. But I do know that at the entry level of both, SACD sounds better. My cheap little Sony playing back SACD surely has some glare, ill defined bass and lightened highs, but those weaknesses are not as pronounced as the weaknesses in my TT.
But I do know that my 3k SACD play rivals my brother's 13k TT setup. It may not be better, but it is damn close. 10k is a lot to pay for something that is only sometimes marginally better.

I realize software is another issue altogether, but I am just talking about analog prices here.

Has anyone else noticed this, or am I just goofy?

Just the other day I was doing some comparitive listening to recordings I own in both formats, in order to help get a handle on some analog upgrades I've added recently. On some disks, the LP wins, on others, the CD. Some were about even, with strengths on both sides. There are certain advantages that CD always enjoys, but these hardly equal universal superiority for the format. All in all, mastering quality takes the cake - it is far more determinative than which format. IMO, both vinyl and CD are inherently compromised formats from the sonic standpoint, and if all we were concerned about was obtaining best sound - no holds barred - then we'd all be listening to reel-to-reel.

Zaikesman, I am listening to reel-to-reel and I have a small collection of prerecorded tapes that I cherish. When I started listening to the tapes on a decent machine, I was shaking my head thinking about all the money I had spent on my TT gear. But frankly, all my sources sound quite good and there are variations in the recording quality of R2R tapes too (not to mention losses from just sitting around for decades). But it's too bad that the R2R format fell out of favor because with today's advances, better parts, and improved tape formulations they could make machines that would have unbelievably great performance. It's unfortunate that most people value convenience of operation to quality of sound -- the general population, anyway.

Newbee, that's a good point that the CD skipping could be a transport-related problem. I'll check into that.

It's very hard and probably misleading to make comparisons between CD, SACD and vinyl versions of the same music. Mastering engineers commonly tweak with EQ and compression/limiting to better match the strenghts of each medium. It's virtually impossible to know for a fact that the source material used is exactly identical.

I agree wholeheartedly with Zaikesman's and Plato's comments about R2R.

Yes Plato, the everlasting problem with R2R - aside from its particular brand of impermanence, which is in actuality likely no worse in its way than the real-world impermanence of LP's (and who knows? maybe even CD's) - was always its lack of commercial success as a prerecorded medium. It may have blossomed in this capacity if not for the upstart cassette (and really, the 8-track too, at the time), since it was once quite popular as *the* home-recording format, and obviously the possibility of superior fidelity was always there.

I don't play R2R and haven't since I was a teenager - the only machine I owned wasn't even very good, and I never owned any prerecorded tapes - but anybody who's been exposed to properly maintained studio-quality machines running at 15 or 30 ips realizes that the prevelant consumer formats, while they may be convenient, are like but toys in comparision.

Audiophiles tend to forget this, and equate analog with vinyl, whereas the LP has no monopoly on the claim. And it's intrinsically true that analog disk/electro-mechanical cutter and pick-up technology can never fully impress/recover all the information into/from the grooves that is available on the analog mastertape, while introducing a heaping helping of added distortions and noise along the way.

If/when digital recording processes ever improve to the point where engineers agree that they can capture/preserve enough original event information to render the analog mastertape definitely second-class (we might be close now, but we might be closer tomorrow - time has a way of reevaluating these things), then possible consumer digital media at least hold the theoretical promise of being able to transmit virtually all of that digital mastertape information, uncontaminated, directly to our playback systems in a convenient format - something LP's could never do vis-a-vis the analog mastertape.

But stop salivating guys: Despite the above rant - and come what may - my record collection ain't never going anywhere... :-)