[DH wrote such a great piece that it is worth quoting
whole in my response, without edits - and I'm going to
break my rule against "top-posting" to add a couple of
brief comments to this long piece, here...;-]

Great piece!
BTW, I remember when those studio monitors were
often dreadful, rough, colored Altec or JBL monsters,
often valued for their ability to exaggerate faults,
not for their accuracy... Fortunately, many studios
now use truly wonderful monitors that do fairly
represent in sound the electrical signal fed to
them...

On Tue, 10 Dec 2002 04:55:09 GMT, dhaynie@jersey.net (Dave Haynie) wrote:
>On 9 Dec 2002 07:38:19 -0800, sorry_no_email@yahoo.com
>(BrianEWilliams) wrote:
>>dhaynie@jersey.net (Dave Haynie) wrote in message news:<3ddb16da.1094009632@news.jersey.net>...
>>> On 16 Nov 2002 18:52:10 -0800, sorry_no_email@yahoo.com
>>> (BrianEWilliams) wrote:

>>Dave,
>>
>>Sorry for the brutal snip, but I do need to respond. Is your basic
>>point that my ears should hear something different than they do?

>My point is that for decades, recording engineers struggled to get
>anything even remotely close to what they heard in the studio out on
>LP. Given the layer after layer of noise, tape effects (wow, flutter,
>saturation), and the heinous mess that is LP compression and EQ, the
>results were harsh.
>
>When digital came along, you could deliver to the consumer something
>very, very close to what you heard in the studio. Which is precisely
>why so many recording studios jumped in with digital recording and
>mastering, even in the early days of CD. Alan Parsons wrote an
>excellent article on this for EQ magazine some years back -- I'd love
>to post it for the folks here, but I can't locate it online.
>
>Now, hey, if your ears can't hear the way the all that compression
>puts holes in your bass, don't let me ruin your pleasure. If you'd
>like to think the LP is going all kinds of supersonic on you, rather
>than physically kicking off at 24-25kHz or so, don't let facts get in
>the way of what you think you hear. But if you're actually trying to
>hear what they heard in the studio, listen to a CD. That sound is not
>on an LP.
>
>And at least, these days, chances are pretty good the LP you can buy
>is digitally recorded and mastered, so at least, what you can
>reproduce on LP, you can reproduce without the rest of the analog FX
>chain getting in the way. Of course, on studio gear, you're at least
>96kHz and 24-bit these days, well beyond the capacity of LP or CD (and
>half the maximum data rate of DVD-Audio).

>> but that doesn't change the simple fact that I like the sound of LP's better
>>than CD's. If that bothers you, it is not my problem.

>It doesn't bother me in the least, as long as you're not presenting
>inaccurate information in the defense of that preference. And, it
>might suprise you coming from me, but "preference of LP" is an easily
>defensible position. For one, and while some deny it, audiophile types
>don't pursue accurate sound reproduction. If you all did, you'd be
>listening on studio monitors through $20 speaker cables. What you guys
>are after, generally, is your preception of the best sounding audio.
>That's very, very different than going after the most accurate
>sounding audio. Simply put, the later is science and engineering, the
>former may be art, and it's often pseudoscience. But I'm not going to
>tell you you're wrong about what you like -- that's a fool's mission.
>
>And it's well evidenced that much of the sounds we all like are based
>on the sounds we've experienced over the years. For example, the
>reason they still used analog tape in the studios, here and there, in
>the 90s, and sell DSP effects to simulate analog tape today, is the
>simple fact that much of the music we all grew up with, independent of
>genre, had analog tape effects. Same ideas as tube amps -- you can
>argue whether they distort better/less/more/worse/differently than
>BiPolar or FET amps, but it's pretty clear most of us grew up
>listening to music recorded on, sometimes even played through, tube
>amps. The sound you get that way is part of the musical language,
>regardless of how it came about, or some absolute set of merits.

>>When I said no human mind could understand the digital conversion
>>process, I should have said that no one could understand what impact
>>it would have on the neuro-acoustical perception of the sound.

>Closer, but still no guitar. This is very well understood; they
>understood it well back when I studied electronics, computers, and
>cognative psychology in college.
>
>One of the problems here is, in fact, misunderstanding of what digital
>recording really does. Some novices think, for example, that turning
>your sound into bits plays back as a clever series of square waves: on
>or off. Nothing could be further from the truth. Sound is composed of
>fundamental sine waves, nothing more or less. A pure monophonic note
>is always a sine wave, much as a laser produces light of a single
>frequency. When you add complexity, you're adding multiple frequencies
>all summing together. A perfect square wave, on the other hand, simply
>doesn't exist -- it would take summing of infinite frequencies. Of
>course, you can get arbitrarily close -- the fast clocks that runs
>around in CPUs these days have slew rates of a few picoseconds, but
>they're still not perfect squares.
>
>One problem is that EVERY diagram I've seen, showing digital audio to
>novices, shows the whole sampling of the audio wave, turning it into
>numbers, turning it back into audio. But it's always shown in the time
>dimension, so they can't really explain why there aren't "holes" in
>the resulting new waveform. This, I suspect, because most novices
>have't studied Fourier transforms, and thus don't have the basis to
>understand that the sampling is also taking place in the frequency
>domain, and the only "holes" you actually have are expressed by the
>Nyquist frequency -- the "holes" are only present if you attempt to
>sample or play back anything above said frequency. If you record a
>perfect sine wave at 20kHz and play it back on a CD, you get back your
>perfect sine wave (well, within the limits of your record/playback
>gear to not muck it all up with noise). If ou record a
>perfect-for-all-intents square wave at 20kHz, and play it back on a
>CD, you get something damn close to a perfect since wave back, if you
>filtered correctly.
>
>So I guess I'm saying, while you're original contention wasn't
>correct, it wasn't totally off the mark -- many people do not
>understand what digital audio does. Everyone, more or less,
>understands what an LP does, if not the specifics of how they do it
>all, down at the low-level. Kind of like the dawn of broadcast: radio
>was pretty easy to understand. Film as well. Most people in the USA
>don't really understand how televions work. Or digital cameras. Or
>computers. Or DVD players.
>
>This is a very, very good thing, for engineers such as myself ;-).
>Keeps us employeed, occasionally even for "The Big Bucks", and fills
>regular folk with awe and wonder about what we know.
>
>Dave Haynie | Chief Toady, Frog Pond Media Consulting
>dhaynie@jersey.net| "The weather is here, I wish you were beautiful" - J.Buffett