In reply to:
another reminder to those "comparing speaker brands"............to choose a cd wisely
Oh, agreed! A poorly produced record will sound bad regardless of medium, though.
In reply to:
Especially bad are the original, 16 bit cd's, full of "sonic flaws", bathed in hiss, excess noise, and "dubious mastering".
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There have been vast improvements , with the re-mastering of some "classic' cd's, both with 20 and 24 bit,
All CDs are 16-bit. The "20-bit remastered" and "24-bit remastered" CDs you see are actually still just 16-bit, but they were
mastered at 20- or 24-bit. This means that, generally speaking, these remastered CDs sound better because more care was taken in the mastering process.
However, the dynamic range (which is what bitrate determines) remains the same on these remastered CDs: 96 dB. This is a problem because human hearing can extend up to 130 dB. The other shortcoming of CDs comes from the 44.1 khz sampling rate, which limits frequency response to 22 khz on the high end.
I agree that CD technology is inadequate. Fortunately, some new technologies have been developed which do a better job. HDCDs are 20-bit when played in HDCD-compatible players and are backwards-compatible with regular CDs, but are still limited to 44.1 khz. Plus, it seems that Microsoft owns the technology (ugh).
SACDs and DVD-Audio discs both go well beyond what is probably technically required to reproduce audio indistinguishable from analog. Alan did an excellent review of those two technologies in the
November 2002 Audiofile, which I recommend reading.
I'm excited to get a Universal DVD/CD/SACD/DVD-A player to try these technologies out for myself. Multi-channel audio -- which both SACD and DVD-A support -- also sounds interesting, although I'm not as enthused about that as I am about the audio quality.
But there will always be a place in my music library (and heart) for vinyl. As you pointed out, some things just won't ever be reissued in a high-quality digital format. And as bigjohn pointed out, there's something appealing about the physical process of playing a record. Plus the cover art is waaaaaay bigger.
