🚀 go-pugleaf

      steveG - of course you are correct about the dynamic range of vinyl, which
      isn't even close to the (theoretical) 96dB of CD, but how many converters
      running at 16 bit actually give 16 bit performance?




A lot of the early ones would only manage about 14-bits at best, but that wasn't really the problem with them. They suffered from monotonicity and linearity errors, and had some huge problems with level settling, and this all conspired to produce a very nasty 'gritty' sound. This is why digital audio got the bad press it deserved at the time - not helped of course by Sony and Philips trying to insist that it was 'perfect' - when it clearly wasn't.

The advances in A-D/D-A design, which have been significant, mean that nowadays, even cheap 16-bit systems perform vastly better than they used to be, and are more than adequate for vinyl digitising and reproduction. I don't have any problem at all with the idea that vinyl itself sounded better than early digital reproduction of it, because it clearly did. But I don't think that the situation nowadays is comparable at all.