Fantastic Forum the Original Art Bell's Midnight in the Desert and Coast to Coast AM Forum

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEUD50bq29M

Look @ some of those comments

The irony of listening to YouTube and saying how much nicer it sounds than digital seems to escape almost everyone!!

Digital cannot produce the same good sound!!

Having just completed a major project of transferring all my old 45s to digital, I can say 100% that the sound is much better than most CD releases. One of the reasons is that our ears do detect the steps in digital, while we hear an analog sound from a turntable being "smoother".

The only thing that bothers me is the younger generation are so used to low bitrate MP3, iPods and other digital devices, they often can't tell their music is flawed by digital. Not until you get in to WAV at 41 kHz do all the artifacts go away. However, on some instruments, (usually strings and piano), you can hear it.

If you find some good restoration software, it's surprising what you can do with old records.

BTW, just picked this up for $30. It was at a local radio station and was covered with coffee stains and nicotine. It's now cleaned up pretty decent, and I'm waiting on parts for it. I'm going to use it to transfer many old tapes I have from the 50s to the 70s, including some masters from Stax Studios.

VO very cool looking equipment - so retro.

Nice find for sure.

voguy wrote: Having just completed a major project of transferring all my old 45s to digital, I can say 100% that the sound is much better than most CD releases.

Ah man you should have kept your 45s,nothing beats Analogue!!

I know, Dude, but I have them all archived on a server in WAV format which keeps them as they sounded off the turntable (no compression). Plus when I transferred them, I also took out all the pops and clicks so it's like having a brand new record.

Ah..... I wonder how close it is to analogue sound?

Well over what you can hear, and probably measure with high end consumer equipment. The problem is not necessarily that it's computer based, its because of two things.

First, while MP3s are the accepted standard of portable users, the compression algorithms used by MP3 often induce serious artifacts, and subsequently alter the sound.

The second thing is that the music selling industry has a bad habit of exchanging and remastering content from compressed modes, so now we hear on a CD a record that was a MP3, converted to FLAC, then remastered to CDA. At each turn more artifacts are introduced.

If you can keep the digital process in one format, with a high rate, (41 kHz bandwidth and greater), you don't have a problem.

What the problem is for most folks is that a file like this is huge. A WAV file can be 50 megabyte, while the low bitrate MP3 on the iPod is only 5, so storage is your enemy.

I strongly urge you to use FLAC voguy, that is the only sane way to store lots of lossless music. Pretty much all my collection is FLAC now, and not from an mp3, which would indeed be quite a waste. Note it is lossless, you do not get any compression artifacts, and it can be turned back into WAV at any time with no loss of quality.

The problem is ipods don't play flac, but most good music players do. Itunes will convert on the fly when you sync if needed.

50MB file size is less cumbersome with terabyte hdds and 4GB player storage. My little ($30 two years ago) Sansa clip supports lossless formats and holds 4GB plus whatever is on the SD card. And arguably, a properly ripped CD sounds better than converted LPs. No pops to filter, dirty or worn grooves to muddy the sound, no tracking error distortions, etc. Both formats have their pluses and minuses..but digital seems to be the direction everything is moving.

Unless it's background music thru an average system, mp3s are not pleasant listening for me. Same with Spotify, Rdio, mog and other streaming music services..very poor, compressy quality..even with my tinnitus I hear the digital artifacting.

Fan wrote: The problem is ipods don't play flac, but most good music players do. Itunes will convert on the fly when you sync if needed.

Ya VLC will play FLAC quite nicely. I believe FLAC is the closest to analogue you can get..

Dude111 wrote: Ya VLC will play FLAC quite nicely. I believe FLAC is the closest to analogue you can get..

FLAC is like WAV it will simply preserve exactly the original material. If you record an LP into it you will have analog sound, a CD not so much since they apply dynamic range compression (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war). However, a FLAC from a CD will preserve the original CD's sound quality exactly (as will a WAV).

Interested to hear voguy's take on the loudness war and dynamic range compression(DRC) (which radio stations will apply to an even greater degree on already DRC'd albums).

Fan wrote: I strongly urge you to use FLAC voguy, that is the only sane way to store lots of lossless music. Pretty much all my collection is FLAC now, and not from an mp3, which would indeed be quite a waste. Note it is lossless, you do not get any compression artifacts, and it can be turned back into WAV at any time with no loss of quality.

True, but the problem with FLAC is there are no hardware decompressors/decoders that allow for the audio to be played from the file. A lot of times I fire up my home automation system and will be playing the songs out like a radio station does.

Most sound cards will play flac files, assuming that you have a player. What you can't do is stream the flac data to an audio card and allow it to decode on the fly, allowing for overlaps and crossfades.

Fan wrote: Interested to hear voguy's take on the loudness war and dynamic range compression(DRC) (which radio stations will apply to an even greater degree on already DRC'd albums).

Don't get me started.

What has happened in the music business is much of the content is being altered electronically to build up loudness, thus taking a lot of the dynamic range out of the music. Songs from the 60s to the 80s are completely ruined. Those of us that remember them in the original form, cringe when you hear the recompressed and limited versions that are out.

Part of it is the producers, but some radio stations are doing as well, especially since aps are out allowing stations to stream over smart phones.

Frankly, Fan, it really pisses me off what they are doing. It's like taking a paining like the Mona Lisa, scanning it, recoloring it, and then putting it on display saying it's just like the original.

voguy wrote: True, but the problem with FLAC is there are no hardware decompressors/decoders that allow for the audio to be played from the file. A lot of times I fire up my home automation system and will be playing the songs out like a radio station does.

Most sound cards will play flac files, assuming that you have a player. What you can't do is stream the flac data to an audio card and allow it to decode on the fly, allowing for overlaps and crossfades.

Usually you would not use hardware for this, but software... most good music player software has no issue with FLAC, winamp for instance (and winamp on my Android phone even decodes it perfectly, including seeking and all functions you would get from an mp3). I am not sure how your home system works, but I broadcast my music all over my house synchronized using MPD (http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Music_Player_Daemon_Wiki) and many of my files are in FLAC. By the time the data gets to the sound card it is decoded already by whatever music software you use.

I crossfade my FLAC, and normalize them as well for consistent volume. This is all done in the software client.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLAC

For the record, there is hardware that does FLAC, such as Sonos, Squeezebox, Onkyo, etc etc see more here http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html#hardware

I use wireready/NSI broadcast automation for my player, using (2) Delta 44 audio cards. Literally one song is playing out, with another one starting, and a voicetrack is playing over both.