From: gilchr@ee.ualberta.ca (Andrew Gilchrist)
Newsgroups: rec.audio
Subject: Re: A Golden-Ear perspective on CD players.
Keywords: flame bait, CD accuracy
Date: 7 Apr 92 05:42:21 GMT
Organization: University Of Alberta, Edmonton Canada

>He can't get net news, so don't bother trying to flame him by posting.
Wouldn't dream of it.
>		  Buying a Compact Disk Player
>			Adam N. Rosenberg

>    The Physics of the CD start off pretty simply.  Each second is
>divided into 44000 samples with 16 bits per sample for each of two
>stereo channels.  (The 16 bits are mathematically derived from 28
>bits on the disk itself to make the error rate essentially zero.)
>That means that frequency response starts at zero and runs as close
>to 22000 Hz as you are willing to pay for.  While getting to 12000 Hz
>is pretty easy, getting anything over 18000 Hz requires some fancy
>filtering and lots of computing power.  There are some pretty nice
>sounding cassette decks with no response over 16000 Hz, so this isn't
So far, all goes well.
>necessarily bad news.  The problem is that while analog errors are
>harmonic and musically unobtrusive, errors made in extracting high
>frequency information from not-too-much-higher sampling rates are
>dissonant like somebody hitting a frying pan everytime the music gets
>loud.  The same percentage distortion is much more grating on CD.
While not necessarily true, it can be so.

>    And depending on how awful you can stand your music, you can have
>as close to 90 dB dynamic range as you like.  At the 90 dB level
>claimed by many CD advocates, the lowest level is just one bit and
>there is only a rasping sound to tell you that something is playing.
>If you insist on telephone quality, then you have 60 dB left for your
>so-called dynamic range.  And a phonograph record 60 dB below its
>maximum usable signal sounds a lot better than a telephone.
This is crap.  Telephone signals are severely band-limited. This is why
it sounds bad.(~200-3500 Hz only))

>    This is not an issue of noise.  After all, a CD has no noise
>while analog media are inherently noisy.  This is merely how quiet
This, of course, is not true.  The digitally encoded signal is simply
immune to amplitude noise, unlike the analog signal.

>can a signal get and still sound musical.  Analog signals can be far
>below noise levels and still be acceptable while the digital lower
>limit is a signal floor rather than a noise level.
Come down from planet nine. If your SNR is below unity, you won't hear
music, no matter WHAT the reproductions system.

>    So what should we expect of CD technology.  First, we expect
>perfect reproduceability.  Every CD player should sound the same and
>the mastering and mixing process should not degrade signal quality no
>matter how many generations of duplication are involved.  Second, we
>expect no noise and clean sound.  And third, we expect low level crud
>that gets worse as engineers try to get full audio bandwidth or
>dynamic range comparable to a phonograph record.
Clever, but stupid.

[lots of boring stuff deleted for sanity's sake]

>    At this point the lightbulb began to glow.  What I heard from the
>Wadia is better than 44000 samples at 16 bits ought to sound based on
>my intuition.  And the more expensive Micromega would appeal to every
>listening test an "audiophile" would use!  If there aren't enough
>data on the CD, then maybe these players are being engineered to find
>the "most musical" waveform that fits the bits.  Let us divide the
>world of sound into musical sounds such as violins, vocals, and
>woodwinds and noise sounds such as chainsaws, jackhammers, and
>dentist drills.  While my phonograph might provide equally good
Yeah, maybe.
>reproduction of music and noise, maybe these players are being
>engineered to play musical sounds for all possible CDs.  Micromega
>probably fiddled with electrical parameters in their expensive unit
>to improve bass, treble, imaging, and detail for musical sounds.
>The CD sound is, in some philosophical sense, engineered rather than
>reproduced!
How wonderfully inane, in some philosophical sense.

[more excellent tidbits excised]
>"bits is bits."  Folks have measured the transports and found the
>error rates close enough to zero not to matter.  If two identical bit
>streams sound different, and they really do, then the two things
>being compared are not truly digital but rather are quantized analog
>signals.  And all the other "digital" hype is up for grabs as well!
WHAT THE HELL IS THIS GUY TRYING TO SAY? Of course they are quantized
analog signals! So what? What is his point?

>    I heard a Rotel transport with Proceed converter that a friend of
>mine bought.  Finally Mel Schilling (of Music and Sound fame) played
>me his MAS transport and Arthur converter which, for $2000 was as
>good as the $5000 Wadia system I heard.  He also showed me the added
>value of a mat on top of the CD.  The sonic improvement using the mat
>was staggering.  This further supports my claim that the CD is really
>quantized analog signal rather than any form of digital.  Further,
Oh god, here we are again.
[niggly bits about batteries vs. power supplies terminated]

>analog front ends, it is quiet.  The only noise left when it's
>playing is a 15 Hertz throb that goes away when I put the cat
>outside. 
Is this here to see if anyone will take it seriously?
Is this yet another poor satire?

[more stuff gone]
>    In summary, I've been able to salvage decent sound out of the CD
>for only a couple of thousand dollars.  In the process I've learned
>much about the audible differences between CD players.  They are as
>subject to "tweak-audiophile" phenomena as turntables, preamps, tape
>decks, interconnect cables, amplifiers, speaker wire, and speakers.
I've never really heard a tape deck tweak (except for cleaning and de-
magnetizing the heads, but that is not really a fringe-tweak, since the
owners' manuals all say to do this).

>By that I mean that everything matters:  the mat, the digital cable,
>the power supply, and anything else you can think of.  The claims of
Like the cat, I suppose.
>digital reproduceability and digital invulnerability may be horse
>manure, but those willing to spend the money can get decent sound out
>of the CD technology.


Aside from the pseudo-technical crap at the beginning, this isvery much
like every other anti-digital rant I've seen. Please spare us.  This is not
so much directed at this particular author, but to others who might want to
post a similar article.
If you think LP's are inherently superior to CD's, fine. If you think that
digital=evil, fine. Keep it short like this:

I think that for some mystical technical reason which engineers can't possibly
understand, my Linn turntable/tonearm/cartridge with lead-acid batteries
instead of dirty house power into a cheap 12 Volt PS sounds better than
any CD player that will ever be made for under $10000 US.
But I bought this KoOl Wadia converter and a Krell CD transport for five
grand, and it sounds okay. Almost as good as my phonograph recorded on
half-inch tape and copied to a C-60 tape and played on my Sparkomatic
car deck.

See how simple? Less than ten lines! 
People won't even have to press 'n'!
Please spare us all the tedious pseudo-scientific/technical explanations
about how CD is evil unless you actually know what you are talking
about. Otherwise "CD=evil, evil->bad sound, therefore CD=bad sound, QED" will
do fine to keep everyone abreast of your belief structures.

Feel free to say what it is about LP recordings that "sound better" to you,
but be warned, we all already know "warm", "less grating", "more musical",
and some others I can't be bothered to catalog right now.


Please stop me before I kill again.
Newsgroups: rec.audio