Quote Originally Posted by tube fan
I've been hearing the same story (it's getting better) ever since digital disgraced the "high" end audio scene. I repeat: NO ONE, either salesman, or customer, thought that digital could come close to analogue in realism. Only a very few defended ss over tubes, but NO ONE defended digital. I repeat: at one room I heard several, ever higher digital formats of Bill Evans' "Waltz for Debby". But when I got them to play my Acoustics Sounds' analogue vinyl version, EVERYONE admitted that digital was still far behind. There are countless purely analogue vinyl records out there, and, unless I actually hear good digital, I see no reason to switch.
The digital you heard at that show was 16bit digital, that is all they had there. And what SACD's they had were played through players that transcoded the DSD stream to PCM, which is the worst way to handle SACD. There were ZERO demonstrations of high resolution audio done right - and the only one that had any high resolution recordings done right was me. When you have nothing legitimate to compare too, it is easy to make the argument that vinyl sounded better. Another thing is there were far more tube based amps at this show than SS, and most of them were in the larger rooms where the sound could stretch its legs sort of speak. This show was more tailored to vinyl and tubes than any show I have ever been to. I think CES is better at having more of a variety of both high end digital and analog, and high end tubes and SS.

Another quote from the latest Stereophile: "When you played records, you wanted to hear more records," said Malcolm jones, the jazz writer from Newsweek, unaware that the analogue archnid was about to pounce. "There was just something in there that made you want to keep putting another disc on the turntable. And when you play digital, that's not there."
He was referring to 16bit digital, and we are now at 24 and 32 bit digital. It looks to me like the older guys are slow to move on.

"My famous quote," sayeth Sir Fremer the Shy, "back in 1983, was that digital preserves music the way formaldehyde preserves frogs. You kill it amd it lasts forever."
1993 was seventeen years ago... Do you really think that digital technology has stood still for that long?

Also, there is this: TTT could not hear the clear superiority of tape copies of masters in the Evolution Acoustics room. I spent a large portion of the three days in that room, marveling at the pure realism of the sound when the tapes were playing. It was like being at the musical event. When they switched to their high end digital system (a Playback Designs MPS-5-Reference SCAD/CD Player with 24/192 input, $15,000), the sound was a little better than average. If you could not hear the difference (again, EVERYONE in the room when I was there could clearly hear a HUGE difference), you should get your hearing checked!
They played plain old 16bit digital or DSD transcoded to PCM on that rig, hardly a way to present SACD. And finally, I know that reel to reel tape sounds better than most digital, we actually agree on this.

Tube Fan, you really need to get out and hear DXD based recordings. You probably won't give up either tubes or vinyl after listening to it(you are much too emotionally tied to both), but at least it will reset your notions of the current state of the art in digital, instead of you hanging on to a thirty year old memory.

I am beginning to get a clearer picture of why some wax nostalgic over tubes and vinyl, they are very emotionally attached to it. When you are this emotionally attached to something, you psychologically block out everything else(including what sounds better) to maintain that psychological connection. (now putting on my RE coat) Those of us that do not have that connection, don't really "marry" ourselves that closely to any format unless it has a sonic superiority over a previous format. When the next better sounding format comes along, we move on to that. We progress, and are not inclined to wax nostalgic over something when something better comes along. I am also beginning to think there is an age component to this as well.