When is digital going to get the soul of music?

Relating capturing the soul of the music to sound quality is only relevant to audiophiles.

Young ears, for instance, are, in general, oblivious to the digital artifacts that some audiophiles find so offensive, unless the young person in question has trained his ears to hear these artifacts and judge them to be objectionable.

Sophisticated musicians, not rock, hiphop, etc., must train their ears to be able to play proper pitch, tone, etc. To other people, this practice will interfere with your finding the soul of the music.

Most people my age can probably recall being lost in the music coming out of a cheap AM radio with a cracked speaker, blissfully singing along, dancing, or playing air guitar. Distortion measurements were probably in the 25 - 50% range, but man, did that music sound good.

I have no doubt that the golden eared, analog only, perfectionists' systems sound better than mine, way better. But I don't want to have to buy a system like that, tweak it constantly, hunt down audiophile recordings (old or new), wash them a couple of times and turn off the refrigerator and A/C to enjoy my music. If you enjoy doing all that though, it's fine with me.

I want to be able to listen past digital grunge, or analog grunge for that matter, and feel the joy or sadness or anger or whatever, expressed in the music. I need a much better system now to be able to do that than I used to, but I don't want to make it harder than it has to be because I have trained myself to be a human distortion detector.

So no offense to the Lp fans, but it is possible to get to the soul of the music by listening to cds. In many cases it may be easier.

Alberporter, I would not listen to the Denon, unless it was an APL, and then only briefly. As for Sony, or Pioneer Elite, no thank you.

In my system NOS digital reigns supreme, and I would not change it for all the vinyl rigs in the world.

Here, oversampling just ruins the signal, and makes music sound unlistenable. There should be no surprise. There is no way a device can cull distortion from a stream of complex waves without leaving damaged signal waves behind. Most systems are too dull to reveal this phenomenon.

Tomcy6, no reason we can't listen to a broken AM radio, our iPod, car radio, satellite music, Labtec computer speaker and Panasonic bedside FM.

What's wrong with having all these mediocre sources and a couple of excellent ones as well?

I own all these listed above, as well as an old Cathedral Radio that sits on my roll top desk. If you think any of those get you closer to the emotion and passion of music than a really excellent high end system, then you have not listened to the right high end system.

If it's not worth it to you, no need to be defensive. Audiogon is a high end site and you can expect some of us are pretty happy with the energy we've put into our systems and the rewards we reap from the work.

Muralman1,

Audiogon member Logenn owned the same Audio Note unit as you, it's a great sounding DAC. This is a musical DAC not hard sounding like many. In some ways you've chosen the same path I'm discussing but with better resolution than the cheap entry level CD players I mentioned.

I think you would be surprised at the acceptable level the new Pioneer Elite Blue Ray does with common CD's. Sure your rig is better but neither is up there with LP and my player was $435.00.

That's were I differ, I either want it to be as perfect as possible or not spend much money. If there was a digital that was equal to my LP rig I would pay whatever the asking price is.

Albert,

Have you ever heard the better DCS gear?

I heard a Puccini recently in a limited audition and have to say I was impressed with how vinyl like the resulting sound was.

Of course if the reference standard for you is the ultimate real vinyl sound, then I would expect that nothing else can approach it in all practicality because it isn't really vinyl no matter how similar it sounds, but in the brief audition I did, I think I would have had difficulty identifying the Puccini sound as CD.

I thought it ironic though that the Puccinni was most expensive CD playback system I had ever heard and sure enough, hey, it sounded pretty much like a good vinyl recording.

This was on a very high end VAC/VTL tube system with top of the line Nordost cabling. The speakers were Magico Minis.