Re: Digital to Analog downloading Question ?

On Wed, 9 Apr 2008 15:31:17 -0700, Steven Sullivan wrote
(in article <ftjg3l022vt@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>):

> bob <nabob33@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> On Apr 8, 6:15 pm, Sonnova <sonn...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>> Actually, I doubt that the OP meant ANY of the negative analog
"artifacts" 
>>>  
>>> that you mentioned. When one listens THROUGH or AROUND those things
there 
>>> is
>>> a certain "alive" character to analog that many people prefer. And who
is 
>>> to
>>> say that their preferences are wrong? Wrong for you, maybe . Wrong for
many
>>> people, I'm sure.
> 
>> Agreed, absolutely.
> 
> But you aren't listening 'through and around' them.  What you are liking
> is THEIR effects on the recording.

No. That's not true. Who LIKES ticks and pops? Not me. I keep my records 
scrupulously clean and try to avoid them. Tape-hiss, OTOH, is an artifact 
that most people simply ignore. If it has an affect on the recording, then

the introduction of Dolby-A should have diminished the perceived "quality"
of 
vinyl reproduction. It didn't, it just made the records quieter. If 
noticeable wow and flutter is present on a recording I either take it back

(hard to do these days) of I don't listen to the recording.

>>> If one gets down to absolutes, there is only one absolute
>>> "right" and that is the sound of real acoustic music played in real
space.
> 
>> My sense of what "real acoustic music played in real space" sounds
>> like is based on my experiences of it, which are very different from
>> your experiences of it. So this is hardly an absolute at all.
> 
>>> The only thing that I find destructive to the sound of real music is
lossy
>>> compression.
> 
>> Seriously, you find that more destructive than, say, multiple
>> generations of analog tape? (I'll leave vinyl out of this discussion.)
>> I'd say you have a very odd notion of "the sound of real music," then.
> 
> I'd say he hasn't done any blind comparisons of good lossy encodings,
> to their lossless counterparts.

And you'd say wrong. High bit-rate MP3 is OK, but the stuff Apple (for 
instance, sells on the Apple Music Store is all 128 kbps, and if you can't

hear the musical mush THAT makes out of a recording, then you have no
right 
to call yourself an audiophile. It sounds AWFUL! BTW, "good lossy
encodings" 
is an oxymoron when your talking music download services. Ripping one's
own 
is another story, but I find that by the time I rip something at 320 kbps
or 
higher, I might as well use Apple Lossless - so I do.