mister natural

yeah, I'm not here either . . .

. . . there's a dirty joke in there somewhere . . . In the past, I've cut a very short piece of guitar string & laid that underneath the played string to lift

Only have one acoustic that's served me well for +/- 30 years Gurian JM C series http://s235.photobucket.com/albums/e...t=P1000333.jpg

FS : Sennheiser HD535 audiophile headphones - mint I've had these beauties for several years & have hardly used them - very lightweight, comfortable for extended monitoring, very flat & accurate response $100 shipped to 48 states

It's brilliant to read these very talented engineers arguing over what constitutes quality. Let me interject a couple of analogies . . . I drive two different cars. If the weather is nice; I jump into my '97 VW cabriolet beat-up & slightly rusty convertible to take to work. Think I paid $1500. for the car(plus some repairs) couple of years ago. It gets me to work reliably, runs easily at the posted legal speed limit and gives me a smile to drive it. I also drive an Audi A8. It's also reliably, runs easily at the speed limit and gives me a smil-ey face. Analogy here is : get the job done & make music My job is as a wine importer/distributor. I taste professionally 1000s of wines every year. I'm certified as both a sommelier and as a wine educator. I can tell the difference between a $5. bottle and a $50. bottle - 100% of the time. I can tell which is which just by the nose; don't even have to taste them - I'd double-blind that all day long. The difference between a $50. bottle and a $500. bottle however, is a bit more tricky(not that I've tasted a lot of $500. bottles . . . let's call it $200. bottles :=) The qualitative difference is so subtle - perhaps a remarkably talented winemaker made the $50. one and a stodgy-old knucklehead made the $200. one within a weak vintage. I really can't tell(within type) a great wine from another great or greater wine. They are both so good, it beomes a matter of preference or personality. Statistically significant double blind here won't work - I'd be simply guessing against this fine a distinction. Analogy here is : once a certain minimum level of quality is reached; you're splitting hairs Ethan's suggestion is that the level of quality to start splitting these AD/DA hairs is $100. per channel & that may be about right for 99% of the consumer market. I'd really recommend you buy a cheap converter and spend the difference on $50. bottles of Cabernet ! :=)

I normally use 44.1, but at 24-bit. +1 most will tell you that this the way to go some people can hear the difference 44.1 vs 48k - my classicly-trained ears can't. I can hear 16 bit vs 24 bit, however and most can

I think Purple 2 has some really fat free vst sound

The Bat Cave - how my wife refers to it . . .

Shure Beta 57a very versatile

I so love my korg k-61P : I think on closeout, I spent ~ 100. bones It also has 24 preset audio key tones, most of which sound pretty darn good with reverb & chorus efx. big upgrade over my old m-audio ox

I'm with PeriDot . . . SM beta 57a

Guys, I realize that I'm kicking the hornet's nest here. No offense meant . . . 1. I don't believe that "tube warmth" is any good at amplifying anything but an electric guitar. Those amps are deliberately designed to sound colored, not accurate. Tubes used anywhere else in the signal chain are wasted opportunities for clean fidelity & better sounding instruments 2. While older 16bit recordings sounded less than perfect, the latest versions of digital recording will always sound cleaner and more accurate than tape. Even at wide dynamic range. 3. The ear has real difficulty discerning differences less than 2db between sources. The statistics get REAL fuzzy, real fast for MOST listeners. My conceit wants me to believe that, as a trained musician, I can hear differences less than that but I wouldn't want to test for meaningful statistical numbers on it . . . The thread linking the senses (all of them) to the monkey brain are VERY thin. Very open to suggestion and interpretation. If we are in a museum and I say to you, "look at how Picasso uses blue in this painting", what color do you see ? "Tubes sound more musical than SS" is the same sort of prejudicial suggestion. Thaass all I'm sayin' . . .

true, but that reconstruction is also an idealization based on summing up many sinc functions which extend to infinity in both the positive and negative time directions and thus cannot exactly be achieved in reality. So we get a very close approximation of the original uhhhh . . . OK . . . prolly gonna offend someone here but I have to say; If anyone believes the above mumbo-jumbo et al. including the chatter about soft-knee compression emulation, even-order harmonic distortion as somehow a pleasant sound or, um Huxley's theory of Utopia, I've got a really nice bridge to sell you . . . It IS pretty straightforward Dean; differences of +/- 2db are audible. Anything beneath that isn't math at all (OP was asking about science/math). Differences less than 2db are speculation and (IMHO) nothing but kool-aid peace, E

Nope Warmth, along with the whole "tubes sound so superior to solid state" - audio koolaid that everyone has swallowed as being reality