The Economist on audio ...

[Grahame]

Audio recording | Hear the difference | The Economist

But in the hands of experts, the best analogue and digital systems are virtually indistinguishable. Warmth can be dialed into digital circuitry. Clarity, spaciousness and purity of tone can be produced by top-end analogue amplifiers.

Stuck with equipment that’s less than ideal, it’s no surprise that the vast majority of purists on either side of the tube-versus-transistor divide have their prejudices confirmed. And so the religious audio wars rage on.

Heresy?

Check out the comments. I liked this one.

I have never listened to a valve amplifier. It's a peculiarly American high end hangup in my opinion.

[aardvark baguette]

[Sherwood]

Oh, The Economist, how I adore you. Can you imagine any other current events publication producing such a thoughtful piece on analog vs. digital/SS? Least of all an article that only endorses a product that's been out of production for 30 years?

Great magazine. I'm keeping my subscription.

[deepak]

Vinyl, tubes, electrostats that's my mantra.

[Torpedo]

They seem to be stuck in the prejudiced notion that second and in general even harmonics produce warmth and fuller body on the sound. That's false or in the least not completely true -in any case not the absolute truth I'm afraid-. I read an old paper some time ago (sorry I can't give the reference) presented at the AES showing that no distortion is perceived as better sounding and more natural than ANY kind of distortion, but that if you introduced distortion then it sounded better when being of even order.

I've found myself that very good tube gear and very good SS one tends to sound very very alike, and that very good digital systems can be very analogue sounding, though I'm not sure that completely indistinguishable from good analogue. The question IMO is more what kind of sound makes you enjoy the most, than trying to set a standard of absolute sound or what should be the right one.

Modern digital recordings of commercial music sound like crap, probably not for the use of digital gear to master them, but for the huge amount of compression used. On the right digital system some of the first CD releases which weren't compressed nor remastered, sound damn good to me.

[hungrych]

Don't they have something more important to write about?

[Sherwood]

No harm in a little cheese now and again. They're doing their day job pretty well.