Can digital listening be better than analogue?

The starting point for all musical listening is the recorded material. This is what I call one of the five pillars of an ensemble necessary for successful listening. 

I'm venturing into a very hot topic in the audiophile community, because ever since the advent of the Compact Disc in 1982, purists have always claimed that the analogue medium, such as vinyl, was the best. At the time, they were right! This remains a relevant debate even today as different approaches to digital coding now preserve the original nuances. So it's a qualified yes!!!

In the past, all recordings were made in analogue form, i.e. the slightest vibrations of the sounds were "printed" as they were on magnetic tape (excluding the phonograph era). This way of recording preserved the slightest nuance of sound as long as the equipment was able to do so.

The downside was that these shades were exposed to the slightest external interference which degraded their quality and added a good deal of unwanted noise. The speed of the tape or disc during playback added another layer of unwanted variation. It wasn't perfect, but it was the best we had...

Then came the computer language which made it possible to codify all this beautiful sound. Now noise, interference and variations in the velocity of the medium were a thing of the past. Sounds perfect, doesn't it?

Yes!

But there is a but... Mythical Abbey Road studio (Beatles, Pink Floyd) 

Computers were not always what they are now, just remember the famous anecdote that we went to the moon with the help of a computer hundreds of times less powerful than a simple smartphone today. Luck played a big part at the time. Today, Spacex manages to land rocket stages without a hitch, which shows that technology is advancing everywhere!

For the record industry, in 1982, the fruit was simply not ripe...

Thus, to store a single music album, one had to have (and still has today) up to 50 gigabytes of information. Considering that the Compact Disc format only had 0.74 gigabytes, sacrifices had to be made if one really wanted to offer a new musical medium that was more compact than the famous 12-inch disc...

The solution was what we call "digital compression", i.e. a lot of information and "texture" of the music was left out in order to fit into a smaller format. Thus was born the CD with no surface noise, with a constant and perfect speed of the musical flow and absolute impermeability to interference. On the other hand, the nuances so important to the appreciation of the artist's work were lost.

To help you understand the importance of nuances, imagine replacing a glass of wine with a glass of grape juice mixed with alcohol! It tastes like grapes and it makes you dizzy, but it's not WINE! Same thing for the CD, once the nuances are removed, we have the desired effect, i.e. a sound, but it is only an approximation which leaves us thirsty...

Consequently, you may be wondering what happened to the original recordings of everything we've been listening to for the last 40 years? If the CDs are not more faithful have we lost the special essence of those precious recordings?

The good news is that at the recording studio level, when going digital, the industry chose to preserve the richness of these precious recordings by not using any compression in the recording of the masters by using PCM.

From these richly detailed files, the record companies then reduced the amount of information to fit on a CD (compression), however in their archive vaults, the source will have been preserved intact and unaltered... Audio archive.

In this day and age, with the advent of a more demanding consumer, a new way of consuming music content has emerged. Since acquiring large amounts of memory has become easy and affordable, record companies have adapted and now offer music in uncompressed format for purchase, which can be listened to via a digital to analogue converter (DAC).

These converters can be found both in our latest audio equipment and in the form of software included in computers and mobile devices. The result is an unprecedented level of precision that, with the help of good quality equipment, makes you feel like you're in a studio or concert hall with your favourite artists. If you haven't experienced high fidelity on Hi-Rez files, come by the shop, you'll be surprised!

 What are the variables of digital recording?

To simplify, there are two main variables to consider:

Resolution and sampling.

(1) The resolution.

It consists of the number of possible sound variants available to reproduce a nuanced sound. The greater the number of nuances, the more truth there is in the ear. This is expressed in bits. 16 to 24 will be the contemporary standard with, experimentally, the value of 32 bits.

As a bonus, this greater accuracy will eliminate errors that can result in audible background noise in the softest passages. The 16-bit will allow a signal-to-noise ratio of 96 dB, which is acceptable, while the 24-bit will increase this to 144 dB, making very soft passages of the music perfectly perceptible without residual noise. 

In simple terms, this is a multiplication factor of the binary code, 2 bits corresponding to 2 times 2, 3 bits to 2 X 2 X 2 = 8 possible variants, etc. So with 16 bits we get 65,536 sound variants and with 24 bits we get 16,777,216 variants. The 24 bits are definitely more precise in terms of sound, as the range is better distributed.

(2) Sampling.

It determines the number of times per second that a sound sample is taken. Again, the more times we measure our sound wave, the more accurate we will be. The minimum required will be 44,100 hertz or vibration/second while the maximum is usually 192,000 hertz for flac encoding.

Glossary of the main types of audio encoding available on the market today. 

CDDA

This is the format used in the encoding of laser or Compact Discs. With 16 bits of depth and sampling at 44.1 kHz, this is the minimum to cover the listening capacity of the human ear. The encoding loses unrecoverable nuance information once executed.

You will then understand why audiophiles are abandoning this musical format, it's a losing proposition...

FLAC

Free Lossless Audio Codec". This encoding principle allows the data to be coded and when decoded, the full range is restored without losing anything. The result will be much smoother to the ear and this with a quantity of data almost equal to that of a CD.

This type of format is the most common in the music download market. Recordings are often offered at different prices with different levels of detail. 

Without losing anything*, we will now have a greater choice of precision levels by choosing our encoding from 16 to 24 bits with sampling from 44.1kHz to 192kHz, an improvement considering that the CD did not offer this choice of resolutions as an option.

This type of file is also available for rent on the web, and is used by the paid streaming web radio stations on the market. Clearly the most popular format among serious amateurs.

The minimum = 16/44 kHz and the qualitative maximum = 24/192 kHz. *

*To be clear, when we talk about loss, we mean the disappearance of complete audio components. If you choose 16-bit 44.1 kHz flac versus 24-bit 192 kHz, you don't gain musical information, but rather the nuances of it.

MP3

It was invented to allow the space-saving encoding of music at a time when our computers and portable devices were not very powerful.

Unlike FLAC and other lossless formats, this is an irreversible audio compression format. As an example, a medium resolution MP3 file allows us to store 10 CDs on a single blank disc. We won't lie to ourselves, this is material to make you deaf!

Nevertheless, internet radio stations use it extensively on their services free... You get what you pay for, that's well known and if it's free...

DSD Direct Stream Digital

DSD is an alternative approach that considers only one bit at a time, but at a blistering sampling rate. So the decoder no longer examines a multi-note sound phrase, but rather each note one at a time at a rate of 2.8224 million times per second (MHz).

The difference in basic values is not proven in 'everyday' listening, except that the process can be so powerful in its extreme versions that it is still possible to make gains. Careful listening will make all the difference!

Speaking of extreme performance, when dealing with DSD 64, DSD 128, DSD 256, DSD 512, the number of samples in multiples compared to CD, simply stated, a DSD 512 is five hundred and twelve times faster in sampling than a CD !!!!

It can also be bought on the web, which is good for our ears...

WAVE

Wave, which is less widely used (it was developed jointly by Microsoft and IBM) gives good results. Generally, it is used in uncompressed form, which makes it bulkier. It is not widely used in commercial versions.

The rest...

Currently, there are a number of transmission/encoding methods used by internet radio. For the consumer, flac and dsd remain the tried and true and unanimously accepted by purists.

The last word.

Music files remain one of the most frequent questions asked by our shop visitors. We are facing a real revolution since the days when we listened via FM, AM, vinyl records or cassettes, all being sources of so-called analogue music. Those days seem to be gone, while today we are entertained by all kinds of wireless means, web TV or others.

With the exception of the vinyl renaissance (an article will come), it is fair to say that analogue will have had its best moments as the march down the road of progress in search of perfection never ceases.

Listening to music transmitted on high-resolution files is simply richer, more powerful and nuanced, with no interference whatsoever versus analogue. The golden rule is to consider only high resolution/sampling rates. 

I hope you enjoyed this little 101 of modern audio and hope to see you in the shop to continue the dialogue!

Stay tuned!

 - Christian.

To be followed by : Digital Audio Players and webcasting.