I grew up listening to a McIntosh receiver and tube amp.
My dad would play his Spike Jones 78s on a Garrard turntable hooked up to it. My step mom still has all that stuff...
It sounded good, but I don't know how much difference my ears could really sense. The tube radio in his '55 Chevy Bel Air was nothing to write home about. ;-)
And there was always the pops and crackles on the records... :-/
You're right about THD, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find those numbers at all on most of the consumer stereo equipment these days (especially on speakers with built-in amplifiers).
Most of the time I love digital recordings (I hate tape hiss and the like), but the "ch" sounds (and similar) are horribly, horribly distorted in most MP3s. It's painful to my ears. The default EQ settings on old iPods were horrible and made it much worse.
The mathematics is pretty compelling that sampling at 2x the highest frequency should be "good enough", but there's something that's not quite right in the implementation.
And don't get me started on digital video. Our cable company (Cox) only provides the BBC World Service channel at ~ 720i, and even then it's horribly compressed (don't try to watch reports on sports or you'll get sick from the horrible pixellation). Watching it on YouTube TV is a revelation. And as bad as Cox is about that, Spectrum (nee TimeWarner) in NC is worse. There should be FCC or independent standards about guaranteed digital bandwidth for video so that people have some idea of what they're getting for their gigantic cable bills.
/soapbox
Cheers,
Scott.
It sounded good, but I don't know how much difference my ears could really sense. The tube radio in his '55 Chevy Bel Air was nothing to write home about. ;-)
And there was always the pops and crackles on the records... :-/
You're right about THD, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find those numbers at all on most of the consumer stereo equipment these days (especially on speakers with built-in amplifiers).
Most of the time I love digital recordings (I hate tape hiss and the like), but the "ch" sounds (and similar) are horribly, horribly distorted in most MP3s. It's painful to my ears. The default EQ settings on old iPods were horrible and made it much worse.
The mathematics is pretty compelling that sampling at 2x the highest frequency should be "good enough", but there's something that's not quite right in the implementation.
And don't get me started on digital video. Our cable company (Cox) only provides the BBC World Service channel at ~ 720i, and even then it's horribly compressed (don't try to watch reports on sports or you'll get sick from the horrible pixellation). Watching it on YouTube TV is a revelation. And as bad as Cox is about that, Spectrum (nee TimeWarner) in NC is worse. There should be FCC or independent standards about guaranteed digital bandwidth for video so that people have some idea of what they're getting for their gigantic cable bills.
/soapbox
Cheers,
Scott.