The Steel Guitar Forum

<SMALL>and do not consider "warmth" distortion but rather the "clinical" sound of CD as a reflection of using bits and bitstreams, rather than audio frequencies as a way to process sound.</SMALL>

There's a reason I think that the "warmth" of an LP is really distortion (not in the pejorative sense of the word). Due to the sampling frequency, it's the highs that really have the potential to "suffer" (due to their own distortion of being combined with a digital smoothing filter at the output stage) on CD's. Now, most humans can't hear above about 20 khz anyway. And many people (esp. musicians or frequent concert-goers) have significant reduction in their hearing in the high-frequency range.

So, when people like that say that LP's are "warmer", it can't be something in the high-end (since they can't hear it without their own ears applying a signifcant filter anyway). And what's left in the mids and lows just isn't affected nearly as much in the output of digital music data. (Yes, it IS being affected, because it's being smoothed).

So, I guess, it's proper to say that LP's have their own distortion, and CD's have their's, too. If you like the sound, you prefer to call it "warmth" rather than "distortion", though

I still think that running a CD back through some sort of tube amp would bring back most of the "warmth". I wonder how some double-blind tests would fair with such a contest? LP vs. CD through tubes. The problem is, the scratches and pops of the LP would be a dead give-away, so no truly blind test could be done.

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The Unofficial Photographer of The Wilkinsons

David, you're right about a tube preamp warming up a digital signal, but the main problem with that is that you're using something further down the audio chain to correct a flawed signal. That is the heart of the Linn turntable argument; nothing in the chain will correct a faulty signal, so one should put as much effort into the various parts of the turntable (base, tonearm, cartridge) as possible so that the siganl is cleaner as it moves through the rest of the signal processing chain. No matter what is done to a digital siganl, it's still a digital signal.

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Ron Plichta, former headbanger and PSG player in training.

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