if a digital recording actually used all the dynamic range it was capable of, it wouldn’t be listenable in a home system because the loud passages would blow you out of the room if you had it turned up loud enough to hear the soft passages. and well done recordings on vinyl have all the dynamic range needed to sound real. The cost of getting there and the volume of access to songs and albums at this level have never been better, and I encourage you to enjoy your system this way as much as humanly possible. Giving a true, digital facsimile of the analog master tape to your 300-watt amp, 32-bit DAC, killer floorstanding speakers, and beefy subwoofer is the direct route to musical heaven. It was supposed to be upgraded to HD, but I’ve been told that this plan got foiled, which is truly a shame. Pandora’s weakness is their MP3-like, low resolution delivery. You can explore wild musical ideas and find songs and/or artists that you may have never known existed but you really dig. You don’t have to be part of the process, but if you are the playlist gets better and better all the time. The quality of these playlists is far better than I ever dreamed possible. With that little metadata Pandora can, unlike Amazon, Spotify, and so many others, create a playlist for you that is remarkably in tune.Ĭall it artificial intelligence or just good programming, but the concept that you can, with the press of the + or – button, build an entire, bespoke playlist that can open you up to new music is nothing short of amazing. Let’s say your favorite song is “Super Freak” by Rick James and you like “Kiss” by Prince.
So, why should audiophiles take Pandora seriously? One reason and one reason alone: Pandora’s algorithm is simply better than any other streaming platform. They were led to the altar of high-resolution audio but insiders tell me they simply blew the opportunity. Pandora was recently bought by the parent of Sirius-XM radio, basically off the junk heap. Shouldn’t this transformational access to music lure new music lovers to the world of high-performance music as the iPod did years ago thanks to the incredible convenience and portability? Many of these recordings stream into your high-performance audiophile system at such a low cost, yet at such a high level of fidelity, that you really have the musical world as your oyster. Qobuz, Tidal, and now Amazon Music all offer, for about the price of one new Compact Disc, access to damn-near every album ever recorded. But then again, you’ve likely heard all of these arguments already from me.
Moreover, going analog in terms of vinyl leaves you with at best 65 dB of dynamic range, which is half of what you would need to faithfully reproduce, say, the snap of a hard-hit snare drum.īeyond dynamics, you have the issue of that “warmth,” which is just a euphemism for harmonic distortion. Why did you just invest $10,000 in that Audio Research or Mark Levinson stereo preamp then feed it a high distortion source? It’s like fueling your new Ferrari 812 with 50 octane fuel. That is just fact for a post-factual world. Almost nobody has access to first-generation analog master tape, nor do they have the tape machines to play back the now-degrading magnetic tape. Those are all good arguments.īut if you want to hear the music as it was likely recorded, whether on two-inch analog master tape or straight to a disc, you want to listen to it on digital HD formats. Yes, it is how the artist/producer/engineer wanted us to listen to the album. I’ve said it many times before, but vinyl mostly sucks. You can see this reflected in the fact that streaming HD files is somehow seen as not as good as crappy vinyl by some (although certainly not all) of the old guard. One thing that boggles my mind about audiophiles is how the hobby tends to support old technologies over new ones. Twitter Facebook Email Print LinkedIn Pinterest SMS WhatsApp