When is digital going to get the soul of music?

Kijanki, as you no doubt are aware, every digital processer is totally different, so it is impossible to generalize about all of the different designs. I see, re-reading my post, that that was not worded very well, and was too broad a generalization. Many designers do in fact cut off many of these supposedly inaudible frequencies, however, considering them extraneous. And even in the very best products, the processing itself has unintended effects that they have yet to figure out. Many believe that it is not ultimately possible to take sound, turn it into ones and zeros, change it back again, and have it come out the same. Without turning this into a very boring technical discussion, two common examples are harmonic overtones being removed, and the disappearance of the sense of the surrounding air. Digital processing, again very generally speaking, tends to take away, or at any rate cloud the differences between the timbres of individual instruments (especially acoustic instruments), and also tends to blur the soundstage, making it harder to determine exactly where the instruments are located in the original space. This accounts for why many people find digital sound sterile or fake. The very best digital is getting better at presenting a three-dimensional space, but it is incredibly difficult for digital to do this, and they are still working on it. Analog does all of these things with ease. And I am a little surprised no one has mentioned the jitter factor, which is a huge degradation in sound quality, and which even the very best products you mentioned with 24 bit/96kHz sampling have failed to eliminate entirely. I think I've said enough on the subject, I hope that was more clear.

An absolutely excellent post Learsfool.

I was not aware that digital had these inherent flaws. I always thought that given sufficient sampling rate, it would eventually sound like analog.

I have quite a few LP's pressed from digital masters and some of them do very well, sounding as much like analog masters as not.

I'm saying this, assuming Alison Krauss, "live" (2002) and Radiohead, "Kid A" would be samples of digital masters. I cannot imagine either would be analog considering when they were recorded.

I have some recordings, ECM in particular that sound digital, even though they are LP's. The one's that come to mind are older stuff from the 1980's.

This is why I made the claim that a great digital master converted to analog at the studio and pressed as an LP can be wonderful.

Learsfool - everything depends on the quality of processing. It does not remove high or any other frequencies (it can be easily proved) but suffers on details of conversion. It might be, I hope, one day possible, to get perfect quality of digital master at home. It is getting better and better. Jitter you mentioned is just noise in time domain and now is effectively removed in some DACs. There is also another type of jitter - one in A/D processing and that one cannot be removed. A lot of older recording were transfered to digital media for storage with poor A/D clock and jitter stays forever unless analog recording still exists somewhere.

I probably don't have as good ears as yours because top quality gear and great SACD recording would make me very happy. One compromise I agree on is practicality of digital media while the other is my limited budget. I don't want to invest now a lot of money in analog - it's just to late for me and my priorities are quite different now than 20 years ago. I have long way to go in audio from where I am now and when I get "there" technology will improve greatly, I'm sure.

I do believe that the highest frequencies that can be heard are the hardest to get right regardless of the technical approach used (digital versus analog). This is because small errors in reproduction are more significant in relation to the high frequency harmonics at that range, so people who can hear in that range are more likely to notice the distortion if present.

When I have an audible issue with a particular CD recording in terms of noise or distortion, its usually in the upper range of frequencies that I can actually hear.

The only artifact I hear regularly that bothers me is slight tonal variations in long passages in orchestral CDs that should not vary much in pitch but in fact do sound sometimes like an audible high frequency warble that impacts the purity of the sound of the instrument. Passages by string sections in orchestral works are the common culprit. Even this does not occur in all CD recordings, the better ones are usually pretty good, but I so suspect they might be improved yet with a different player or DAC that is clearly designed to reduce jitter. I am looking into that.

OTher than this, I believe most other aspects of digital sound that people tend to not like is more due to personal taste than technical issues, which is fine, because that's what its all about. Chose your high quality tubes or SS and speakers here as needed to get the sound you like.

Mapman, Out of curiosity, this 'pitch warble' you are hearing, is this from an analog source remastered to digital or was it a digital recording in the first place? One of my few dis-satisfactions with vinyl was related to constant pitch, even with TT's that had excellent wow and flutter spec's. I assume it might have been sourced to the recording processs as well as playback. Interestingly, amoungst my complaints about digital, maintaining pitch is not one of them.