16 replies to this topic

[doober]

Well analogue signals would be great if it weren't for reality Unfortunately things aren't perfect and any system will have some noise introduced into it, or just not be of sufficient fidelity to record audio to the full degree that humans can percieve.

Digital systems break things down into distinct samples at intervals of *sufficient* frequency that we record what we need to reproduce the audio signal faithfully (for our purposes). Noise resistance and controllability of digital systems means that they can be designed to be far superior than clunky mechanical methods like turntables (OK it's not that bad but if LPs held more information than CD's we'd all have turntables hooked up to our computers now wouldn't we?). The most basic feature is that noise has to be greater than a certain threshold to corrupt digital data whereas, in real life, analogue information is ALWAYS corrupted or distorted to some amount since some noise is always present.

You don't actually have little squarish waves coming out of your CD player either There's a bit of simple theory behind it but the 5 second version of it is that although the recorded signal is quantized (ie. blocky ), some well designed analogue filtering on the output removes that and leaves us with the original signal.

Uhh yeah, i guess we need a website with some diagrams here, it's harder to explain in simple terms than i thought

DVD audio isn't necessarily better either, in fact in most cases it's worse. It depends on what you call DVD audio really, if it's the soundtrack of a movie on DVD for example then it's compressed, similar to an MP3 (not normally compressed as much though).
However, DVDs are still digital medium (digital is digital), their increased capacity can mean that they could be used to store raw audio at more bits/sample, at a higher frequency (although i don't know why) or in more channels but that's about it - nothing that can't be done on a (slightly modified) regular CD.

[audible]

i highly doubt that too many members here have ever heard a decent turntable. a brand called lynn was pretty much the doyen of all turntables for many years along with other brands such as rotel and mac. these sort of turntables had to be mounted on a special wall bracket that bolted to the wall and came with a seperate pre amp to convert from 100 to 500 mv output. purists usually considered amps built in line converters as pos.
you can still buy these i think from the purist shops, i think their about 3 grand plus. thats a lot of dough to play vinyl on i reckon!