<p>There are real differences between the formats, some of which may be discernible, others not. One of the complaints with CD’s (that has come down to MP3 and other digital formats ) is coldness, that often boils down to issues like white noise, present in analog recording media like records or for example, in a tube amplifier, that aren’t present in digital formats. The other issue is that with digital recording, they do ‘cleanup’ on the sound, to take out ‘noise’, but in the process it also affects the music (and with digital formats, they also employ lossy compression as well). Digital recording also tends to clip off at a certain frequency range that might add to this. </p>
<p>Vinyl in one sense has an edge, and that is that when you play an album on vinyl, the process is totally analog, the needle is vibrating, that creates an electrical signature the amplified picks up and strengthens, that in turn will drive a speaker to vibrate. CD’s and digital recordings take an analog signal, convert it to digital (A to D), process the sounds, lays it out as digital sound format files. When you play it, the player reads the digital format, and converts it to an analog output, and those steps change the sound fundamentally…</p>
<p>One of the problems with comparisons is that people get conditioned to certain sounds. They have done studies with young people, who have grow up with MP3/AAC and so forth, and tested them with low quality MP3 (not 256 bit) against high quality formats, the kids for the most part preferred the lower quality MP3’s, primarily because that is what they were used to. </p>
<p>It also depends on the kind of music, dance music or pop music relies a lot less on purity of sound, especially given they tend to be played at loud volumes. It is different with something like classical music, where overtones, though we cannot hear them, are important, and what distinguishes the sound often are the overtone series for a particular chord or sound. I have listened to the same classical recording on vinyl, on CD, on standard MP3/AAC, on 24 bit wave file recording, and it sounds different to me, and I don’t have a particularly discerning ear. </p>
<p>I also suspect some of the problems are the way they actually record the music, too, these days, where getting stuff out fast and with record companies trying to do things as cheaply as possible, I wonder how much of it is degraded recording, rather than the formats…</p>
<p>Now to be really funny, we have old 78 recordings done of classical music, I am talking when recording was literally all analog, where a single microphone was used and the ‘recording’ was a vibrating needle scribing a master disk, and in many ways I prefer those recordings to what was done once they went to electronic recording onto tape using multiple channels, etc. I have one recording from somewhere around 1919 with Mischa Ellman and Enrico Caruso, and for something done the way it was recorded back then, it has amazing sound. </p>
I agree that a/b/x testing is not PERFECT… it’s the only tool we have to try and eliminate expectation bias. Expectation bias is a FAR bigger issue than anything else in audio when it comes to comparing. Mr. Anstendig is welcome to his own opinion (I didn’t read the article). But I don’t believe there is much controversy around a/b/x testing except in the audiophile community. In the scientific community, I’m not aware of any such controversy. As you might also expect… I put more credence in the scientific community than the community that brought us $500 power cables and $5000 interconnects. :)</p>