I have been lucky enough to have been involved with a group of serious hi fi users and building extraordinary turntables was one of our main passions.
 
I still have a turntable from that era. (which was the 70's by the way so it goes to show how amazing things were as far back as then)
 
I have a serious turntable fitted with a serious arm, head-shell and cartridge. (Shure V15 type III, probably the finest cartridge ever made, period!) Everything effects the sound. The platter, arm, (The best arm was the SME made by the Brits. I can balance my arm so it is floating and blow a puff of air from across the room and 5 seconds later the arm will swing slowly into the centre! Most arms would not even respond. The Brits got the bearing resistance down to the lowest of levels) the head-shell and the pickup of course. To top that off I have an RIAA preamp which cost $1000 back then. So we are probably looking at 4 to 5K in turntable expense (back then) (Note a $1000 RIAA equaliser sounds like nothing on earth!)
 
The finest vinyl ever produced are the records that Sheffield lab made in the 80's where the output from the mixer fed the cutting lathe direct. So this means total live performances direct to the lathe. So the whole tape recording system that is normally in between the musicians and the lathe is gone! (when you hear this you realise how bad tape actually is. It compromises the signal just so much it is hard to believe. But many musicians would have a problem with it though. It means perfect takes in one go! Just like the very old days.)
 
How does it all sound. Well ridiculous is a word that comes to mind. Many of you would have never heard this or ever will for that matter. It is so good you would just not believe it. Jaw dropping comes to mind as well. And I have done this listening on the very finest amps and speakers ever made as well. And in very controlled environments. One of the albums is a Dave Grusin album with Ron Carter on bass and Harvey Mason on drums. The drums sound so transient and fast it is unbelievable.  The bass is earth shattering so saying that bass cannot be captured on vinyl is rubbish. So yes when the finest vinyl is played on the finest turntable money can buy it is quite a different experience. Trust me on that. It is just unfortunate that no one gets to hear it very often.
 
Drew is also right in one sense there are still some limitations with even the best vinyl playback setup but up at this level it is quite a different story though.
 
Dark Side of the Moon also sounds incredible on my system as well. Even with the tape being used it is still jaw dropping. With a turntable like this too on Dark Side for example even today on my copy there is no noise and not one click or plop! There will always be the groove wall noise but Shure got it well down with its ellipitial stylus.

So, compared to that setup (which is obviously out of reach to all but a select few individuals), how close are the digital mediums?  
 
What do you think is necessary to replicate a performance to levels beyond what a human can hear?  24/96?  Better filters before (or after) the AD conversion? 
 
Oh, and for grins, how close to that experience do you feel is the standard 16/44.1 (assuming a good recording)?  80%?  90%?

Well craig a great question and I was going to say something about digital.
 
Firstly I have done an experiment where we compared that turntable setup to that same signal being bottlenecked through a 16 bit/44.1K conversion (eg A to D and D to A again) and no one could tell the difference!
 
I feel that the best digital recordings even on a standard CD can go better than this again! The transient performance of digital is better again and there is no noise. Plus we get all the multi tracking possibilities as well which is great.

A few years ago a friend of ours came to me with a request.  Her dad was terminally ill with cancer and was dying.  He wanted to listen to music in his final months so she bought him a $10,000 hi fi setup.  He also had a bunch of 78's and had not heard them for about 50 years or so.  She asked me if I could transfer them to CD and I agreed of course.
 
I borrowed a gramophone to do it.  The gramophone is just the best way to play 78's.  It was a nice machine with a large horn etc.  So I setup a decent mike and started the process and it was all going quite well.  The spring broke during the transfer.  (this is what you wind up!) In Australia there is only one guy who repairs and refurbishes gramophone springs.  There is a waiting list of like a year or so!  He pushed me to the top of the pile and did mine in a few days and for only $50.
 
On a gramophone the stylus is connected to the centre of a diaphragm which sits above it about 1 1/2" or so.  This is called the sound box or reproducer.  It is normally enclosed and you cannot get to it easily.  What you are hearing is this diaphragm normally except the sound travels down a series of pipes and up into the horn which amplifies it.
 
One night a I had a dream to stick a pickup right on the small diaphragm above the stylus.  I have one of those little Ibanez contact pickups which is small and has some Blutack on it.  Small enough to fit right on there.  And in this case this diaphragm was exposed and was missing some sort of cover etc..
 
I nearly fell off my sat when I heard the signal.  It was magnificent.  OK not much above about 6 K or so for sure but from that point down it was perfect and I mean perfect.  Beautiful mids and lows, tons of detail, everything just sounded a million times better than the horn.  So I transferred the rest that way and re did the stuff I started with the horn.
 
I have an Andrews Sisters record with Bing Crosby and a big band and it sounds ridiculous.  Magnificent comes to mind.  Also I have Elvis 'Dont be Cruel' as well.  He overlapped some 78's and 45's I think for a little while.  Even this sounds incredible.  Big punchy drums, great guitars and bass and vocals of course.  The classical music sounds stellar.
 
It shows that even then they were getting the sound into the groove very well indeed.  The gramophone was the weakest link, not the record itself.
 
After he died they gave me the 78's.  I returned the gramophone after the transfer but have been looking for one ever since.  When I do find it I will buy it and I have a whole bunch of records to play on it too.  And yes I think I will do the mod and put the pickup in there too with an output on the back!
 
 
 

Jeff Evans
The finest vinyl ever produced are the records that Sheffield lab made in the 80's where the output from the mixer fed the cutting lathe direct. So this means total live performances direct to the lathe. So the whole tape recording system that is normally in between the musicians and the lathe is gone! (when you hear this you realise how bad tape actually is. It compromises the signal just so much it is hard to believe. But many musicians would have a problem with it though. It means perfect takes in one go! Just like the very old days.)
 
How does it all sound. Well ridiculous is a word that comes to mind. Many of you would have never heard this or ever will for that matter. It is so good you would just not believe it. Jaw dropping comes to mind as well. And I have done this listening on the very finest amps and speakers ever made as well. And in very controlled environments. One of the albums is a Dave Grusin album with Ron Carter on bass and Harvey Mason on drums. The drums sound so transient and fast it is unbelievable.  The bass is earth shattering so saying that bass cannot be captured on vinyl is rubbish. So yes when the finest vinyl is played on the finest turntable money can buy it is quite a different experience. Trust me on that. It is just unfortunate that no one gets to hear it very often.

A great nostalgia trigger Jeff. I still have the Master Disc Dave Grusin album, "Discovered Again" (also features Lee Ritenour on guitar). I had to dig it out. Mint shape! I got into these master recording back then. Can't say I had the ultimate audio system but it was decent. The master recordings were nice.  I still have my Philips 312 'touch sensitive' turntable, and it works. I really don't use the system at the moment, but my hopeful plan is to have a good audio listening room after we someday move, and lay it out for a better audiophile listening environment.
 
While digging out the Dave Grusin I also encountered Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab Master Recordings of "City To City" - Gerry Rafferty, "Crime Of The Century" - Supertramp, and "Year Of The Cat" - Al Stewart. Just holding these albums again is a treat. Man, I am glad I did not listen to my wife who has told me for years that albums are dead. They just take up space. Get rid of them. Granted, the 21st century is conducive to digital medium based on its convenience. But there sure was a joy going to record stores and flipping through albums looking for something new. And saving your money in the quest to upgrade to better components.    

Thanks Ken. Intersting thing too was they only pressed a very limited number of albums from each master cut disc. So there is only a finite number of them out there.
 
I heard a rumour they got them in a did another take and the solos are different of course but not sure on that.  It certainly is not obvious though from the Sheffield site. That whole album is just testiment to the talent on there and the fact they played it all live.
 
Another great track is 'Samba Song' on one of Chick Corea's early albums too. It's all live and possibly features the best Steve Gadd drum solo of all time on it. It is very hard to believe he actually played that!
 
I have got 'Year of the Cat' too and it just defies reality in terms of how good vinyl sounds especially on that turntable of mine.
 
I dragged out George Benson's Breezin yesterday and was fairly amazed as well. They did most of that album live too.
 
It is funny how music effects us. I was mastering an album of tracks for a friend of mine that is using it to teach Jazz improv. One of the tracks is 'Ool Yu Koo' by Dizzie Gillespie. Everytime I hear I get shivers up my spine and the hairs stand up. I don't know what it is but there is something very special about that track. There are a few versions of it too on You Tube.

craigb

What do you think is necessary to replicate a performance to levels beyond what a human can hear? 24/96? Better filters before (or after) the AD conversion?

As a playback format, 16/44.1kHz is already better than pathetic humans for the overwhelming majority of real world listening conditions. Unfortunately this is upsetting to those who wish to use audio as a means of separating themselves from the herd, but it is what it is.
 

Filters - you can look for yourself at the detailed filter responses of DAC chips on the spec sheets at any chip manufacturer's site. Typically they are excellent - almost ruler flat - below ~20 kHz. The anti-aliasing is generally designed to be good enough in the real world to put it below the noise floor caused by other factors (i.e. for noisier chips the anti-aliasing isn't as good).  So the filters are typically quite good up to ~20kHz, where they begin to roll off and allow more aliasing/imaging.

Some humans can indeed hear test tones as high as the mid 20 kHz's, but that's only for test tones played back at 100 dB SPL or more. There is also some evidence that filter ringing at high frequencies may be audible, but these are borderline cases involving steep filters and most chip makers make the filters' transition bands as wide as possible to minimize ringing. Otherwise, despite much discussion, many misunderstandings and much misinformation, there is little objective evidence that frequencies > 20kHz are audible to humans under real world listening conditions.


Bit depth -
a. How loud are you listening (in dB SPL)?
b. What's the average (RMS) level of your audio relative to 0dBFS*?
c. How far below 0dBFS is your quantization error plus dither**?

From this, you can calculate how loud the QE + dither is - in dB SPL - and compare it to your threshold of hearing, and if isn't below that you can then compare it to the noise in your listening environment.



If you don't want to do these calculations, you just need to understand that noise shaping curves are typically based in large part on the curves above for somewhere between the threshold of hearing and ~15 phon (the equal loudness contour that equals 15 dB SPL at 1kHZ) - because that's the level they expect the QE + dither to played back at in the real world. 


The shape of the noise matters, but the noise level for typical homes/offices is supposedly around 40dB SPL. A professionally soundproofed studio is supposedly around 20 dB SPL.

And if you do ABX testing, the results will match up what you'd expect from understanding the above.


*if you want to do it properly, you have to worry about weighting curves and the integration time of your dB meter, but it's only going to amount to a few dB of difference if you just want ballpark numbers here.

**you can ignore noise shaping, as the whole idea is for noise shaping to make things less audible. Based on this, you can just use -90 dBFS for the RMS level of unshaped 16 bit dither as a ballpark.

'Tis what I was thinking, but with all the turntable talk going on, I was curious!
 
Personally, the first time I ever compared a vinyl album (played on a VERY nice system) with the exact same album as a CD, was the day I immediately decided to get rid of my vinyl and start replacing them with CD's (which has naturally led to keeping only the digital media itself).  Although I do find album covers and the extra information they can convey interesting, I'm 99% about the music.
 
Gotta love progress (sometimes)! 

Jeff Evans
I have one of those little Ibanez contact pickups which is small and has some Blutack on it.  Small enough to fit right on there.  And in this case this diaphragm was exposed and was missing some sort of cover etc..
 
I nearly fell off my sat when I heard the signal.  It was magnificent.  OK not much above about 6 K or so for sure but from that point down it was perfect and I mean perfect.  Beautiful mids and lows, tons of detail, everything just sounded a million times better than the horn.

Would something like this work on an old Edison turntable circa 1920s?

Hi,
 

Jeff Evans
The finest vinyl ever produced are the records that Sheffield lab made in the 80's where the output from the mixer fed the cutting lathe direct. So this means total live performances direct to the lathe. So the whole tape recording system that is normally in between the musicians and the lathe is gone! (when you hear this you realize how bad tape actually is. It compromises the signal just so much it is hard to believe. But many musicians would have a problem with it though. It means perfect takes in one go! Just like the very old days.)
 ...

 
I was thinking that the series of LP's out of Germany on Quad (the head something or other) were the winners here. They were incredible on a great stereo with a super stylus!