Do all media produce a similar soundstage, i.e. CD/ ripp, DSD, vinyl?

Absolutely not.

Tape wins. Tape offers the most realistic and liveliest soundstage. I will say this until I am blue in the face.

I may not have a Kronos or an Airforce One but I have a very quiet MT10 sitting on HRS M3X isolation mounted with a Clearaudio Goldfinger Statement into Furutech Silver Arrows and C1000T Telefunken ECC803S phono stage.

The best vinyl on this setup is sublime. Many envy the dynamic range of a Goldfinger Statement, but it is not a 15ips 2nd or 3rd generation master tape copy being played back on a Studer with A820 trafoless outputs into a line stage powered by the same tubes.

Tape is not the quietest, it is not the blackest but despite that limitation, nothing, not even DSD can rival the depth perception of the best tape recordings compared to any other format today IMO.

Ask me again in 5 years time.
 
I believe that digital is now coming very close, if not surpassing tape. A DAC design properly, using the ES9018 chip, Femto clock, being feed through good cabling and going through a Recovery unit will give tape as run for it's money. Of course a well done DSD is important in my opinion. DSD 64 is great with lots of choices, DSD 128 is excellent but with more limited choices... but holy cow.... I have a Jazz at the Pawnshop Late Night in DSD 256... I can't believe tape could surpass this....

The idea is these current generation DACs can duplicate tape, but also be black.... :) ....completely quite! (or so it is claimed by many reviewers)
 
from what I have heard in recent weeks, digital has a ways to go, but close. Having heard music through a Berkley Reference Dac, an out of this world turntable (Kronos) and a R2R, to me tape barely edges the turntable depending on music. Like anything, its the sum of the whole as it all has to work together including the quality of the music. Without good music the rest is just, hit or miss.
 
My understanding [a friend that is a sound engineer] is that mastering is done uniquely for each medium: Vinyl, Tape, CD, Digital, etc. When I listen to Vinyl and then play the CD and downloaded digital file [not the copied CD file] - they each sound a bit different. All are fantastic and it is kewl to experience the various differences. A positive experience. IMHO what sounds better is a personal decision/taste.
 
The recording and mastering path matters most for whichever medium the catalogue ends up on. Nothing worse than a hot digital recording. Common nowadays.

I have many great sounding CDs and look forward to the MDA1000 DAC for this purpose!
 
For DSD the DAC chip also matters, standard off-the-shelve chips do not yield the performance of a custom FPGA as designed by Meitner, Playback Designs (Koch) or Merging.


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