Retrotech, Revitalized

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More than 300,000 vintage 78 rpm records have been digitized and are available on the Internet Archive.

Musical accompaniment for this post from Gordon Lightfoot.

3 thoughts on “Retrotech, Revitalized”

  2. Oh well. I’m sure the 78s are fine digitized but as a fairly serious audiophile I am often disappointed in what so many think is just fine, records that have been digitally remastered.

    I buy digitally mastered records if the original was digitally recorded, or I can get the music no other way. But I have made it my practise to buy Original Pressings of records recorded with an all analog chain if at all possible. Some of those are very wonderful indeed.

    I have a rather good digital chain for my music, but I was a fool and went the extra mile. Now my analog chain crushes my digital chain to an amusing extent. I will leave it there but if anyone is interested, I have been fooling with my stereo for a very long time.

  3. Oh well. Some info for you all. A digital recording is a set of samples, in whatever length word and sample rate that is chosen. So a CD, or Redbook Audio as a PCM file derived from a CD, is a 16 bit word sampled at 44.1k/s. A high res file, there are really no discs for these, although some DSD discs do exist, is a 24 bit word usually sampled at 96k/s but can be 192k/s and even higher.

    So as one friend in the industry said: Yes we throw away most of the signal then make records with what’s left. he hates digital, and has produced some of the best sounding records there are.

    The digital is perfect crowd insists there is no way you can hear the difference as their god Nyquist has explained that sampling at twice the maximum frequency sampled, is all you need for perfect reproduction. This is obviously not true for many of us.

    Now an observation by Ortophon a cartridge manufacturer is revealing:

    “The displacement of a 10Khz signal, 50db below a peak of 10 cm/sec, displaces only 0.005 microns. This is only 50 times the diameter of some small hydrocarbon molecules.

    The scale is almost impossible to grasp intuitively, but a cartridge can trace it, and the signal when amplified, can easily be heard.”

    Some calculations, not made by me, show if you look at this as steps, the stepped resolution is some 100 – 200 times that of a 24 bit word.

    This is why I spent an obscene amount of money on my analog chain. It is marvellous, and my favourite place is in front of my speakers.

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