Bitzie first impressions

Nuance_Ember wrote: The thing with vinyl is that it always has the POTENTIAL to surpass CD, because the closest thing possible to natural sound is analogue reproduction. So vinyl is able to be higher fidelity than the CD but it might not be, depending on how well the playback medium is made and how well the work is mastered.

I contend this simply is not true. At least not from a technical point of view. Digital has the potential to capture and reproduce the most correct tone compared to an original. Then, how a person subjectively cognizing music is something else. And jitter in digital is a kind of distortion which maybe could be said to be more troublesome and bad sounding for the human ear than the (much higher level of) distortion in vinyl.

As a matter of fact. Normally - when I compare CD:s with Vinyl - I find I prefer the sound from CD. But I agree, many CD:s are the victims of poor mastering.

Well I've had the Bitzie on loan from Jon for a few days now and I thought I should check-in. I'm no expert like many on here, so don't expect detailed technicalities, but I'll try and describe my impressions. For reference, my music tastes include things like Rush, AC/DC, Foo Fighters as well as some other less rocky stuff.

The Bitzie arrived at work where I quite often listen to music just to drown out the rest of the office. The source files were reasonably high bitrate MP3s with a cheap pair of Sennheiser HD200 headphones. Certainly not a high quality setup, but the Bitzie was calling me and I wanted to try it out as soon as possible.

Edited by AlieN - 25 Mar 2013 at 8:37pm

It is quite amazing that vinyl is actually capable of sounding as good as it does.

From an engineering standpoint and if discovered today it would seem like a joke, but it was invented by Edison in 1877 - that's 136 years ago!

I did an article here: http://www.gspaudio.co.uk/all-about-the-phono-preamp.htm and if you click the RIAA Equalisation tab you may get at what I'm trying to say.

Then if you take a look at the great article by Kevin Gray (which I'm always harping on about) and also look around that site at the mastering process, I think you'll also find it almost Heath Robinson and wonder just how it can sound so good today.

Like most things, it could have been improved even further but something came along to prevent it. Some call it progress and some call it 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater'.

The dynamic range of vinyl works like this: being analogue the noise floor is not 'opaque' - it's 'translucent' and depending on your 'polaroids' (the vinyl front end including phono stage) sounds can be heard below it - where in digital there is nothing below it. Then beyond the normal 5cm/sec velocity (which produces the voltage output from the cartridge) it can go as high as 25cm/sec, or in decibel terms, plus 14dB.

Using IEC A weighted noise measurement it has a basic 75dB dynamic range onto which you can add the plus 14dB making it nearly 90dB, and then the sound below the noise floor which could take it near 100dB.

OK, that's not the 120dB 24 bit can boast, but there is the other difference that at the 'surface' of the output it can vary by fractions of a decibel whereas with digital the step is a full 6dB. That's 'normalised' by successive sampling that tricks the ear into believing the step isn't there, but it's a trick whereas vinyl isn't.

The challenge for me is to make digital sound as good. That challenge was presented to me by various members here (in a kindly way) and I'm hoping my first digital offering is doing that.

The results in so far regarding the Bitzie seem to be saying that I may be getting there.

Digital could undoubtedly handle the extra information, the question (or so it seems to me) is whether there will ever be sufficient commercial interest in creating the technology to support such things, when the vast majority seem to be happy to listen to low bit-rate MP3s through low quality hardware.