I saw the segment. Imo kinda short for any meaningful information.

I saw it too... Kinda sucked. But there wasn't that much time as sasaudio points out. Good studios though have a tendancy to have good equipment. And good recording engineers will know how to use it. So it was no wonder they could barely hear a difference. Not to mention in both cases they were probably listening to a master recording (or one below). Now take the same people and listen to a well setup system (nothing too extravagant mind you) and then show the difference between vinyl, cd, sacd and then mp3 (or mp4) at 128 or 192kbps and they should be able to tell the difference...

And if they can't, shoot 'em

Jeff

Well, guess I failed the test...couldn't tell analog from digital. Time for me to head over to ---Mart and buy that $79.99 surround sound system and be happy.

They have improved over the last 10 years ya know. $79 today was maybe a 4500 years ago? That's cus of improvements in DIGITAL, and making chips cheaper and better. How come analog isn't progressing, oh, cus' it's obsolete. Inefficient, and just play wrong. Even teh Analog laserdisc was obsolete in only a few years, once DVD was coming....Could you ever have HDTV if teh broadcast stayed analog....nope

A key element missing in this test is how that content is actually delivered to the living room. The subjects were listening to studio masters in analog and digital formats, not LP's or CD's. The comment by the digital guru at the end of the clip where he states that they have moved on from CD's and see computer files as the future is spot on. The bits on a digital studio master can be exactly delivered to the living room on a variety of formats (DVD-A, SACD, Dolby TrueHD, DTS HD, downloaded file). I doubt even Mikey Fremer would suggest that an LP contains an exact copy of all the content of an analog studio master.

Wanna bet, MF with certainly keep on beating the dead vinyl. Maybe tehr eis even teh next step above SACD/DSD. now that would be sumptin'. It just keeps getting better and better, cheaper and cheaper. Yeah, let's keep spinning 33 /1/3 plastic....yupper, that's really improving. $100,000 worth od DIGITAL stuff is a studio!!! When Tascam can offer RETAIL a DSD recorder for well under $2,000, studio stuff must be sumptin'. Some peopel are just stuck in the past, and just keep thinking, it was better. Wonder if he drives a 1967 Pontiac Grand Prix too? Yeah, weren't they something? It had that hi fi AM, with REAR Speaker!!! DSD + !!! Cool. Snap crackle pop, oh, I gotta go clean my record again.

Quote:
Some peopel are just stuck in the past, and just keep thinking, it was better.

While other people keep dreaming about the future.

The show focused too much on the analog vs digital issue and did not take into account the quality used in recording either format. Either format done well will provide excellent results.

My question too is what format was the comparison delivered to the listeners? Was it switched between analog and digital masters?

Then later, one of the recording engineers says that there is software that makes the digital recording sound like it was made through an analog console. If that's possible and necessary to do, then there is a difference in the sound between analog and digital - he just said so!

Some mastering engineers run their digital mix through a high quality analog summing mixer as the last step, simply to improve the sound.

I've always found this interesting.

Hmmmm....

Any pro recording engineers in this forum that can comment on this?

Odd, isn't it.

The latest discussion I saw on this is whether it was necessary to send the stems through the mixer or whether sending the final two-channel mix trough was sufficient.