Paul,
First we can't hear digital, only analog. So everything we hear, is analog whether it's sourced from analog or digital encoding. Second, digital is superior in the time domain. There are no speed variations, wow & flutter, etc, etc. with "digital", as there is with pure analog formats.
"Objectively", digital is superior. As noted a thousand times, "subjectively", another story entirely. Now it's simply preference. No "best", "better", etc, etc....except the the beholder. I've heard analog sound "better" than digital...and vice versa. Our preferences are just that.
cheers
AJ
Comments (all IMO):
First Bold: Of course all we hear is analog. I am not at all sure why you are mentioning this. I thought the discussion was about a storage format for the replay of music. I am simply describing the implication of converting these formats to analog for listening.
Second Bold: In digital, once the notes are reconstructed they are indeed played in a very precise time domain, I agree completely; but this is not relevant and not what I am talking about. It is in the reconstruction process from bits to notes , particularly in PCM, where I believe digital is less natural because of imperfect time domain reconstruction.
As such, TT speed variation is a completely different concept from the
femto second time domain requirements for digital note reconstruction, so again, you are missing my point.
In the time domain, if all digital is superior to analog are you arguing the clocks in digital don't matter? Surely you acknowledge the better the clocks the more analog the sound from digital will be???
Third Bold: This statement is too broad. Digital is objectively superior to analog only in the measurements to which you ascribe value which also happen to be the ones easily measured (distortion, dynamic range, noise floor etc, etc. ). If you could measure the imperfection of note reconstruction down to the femto second you would see that the best digital can ever hope to be is equal to analog in the time domain and until the perfect clock is developed that will never be the case.
This failure is what creates the perturbations that people experience when listening to digital that do not exist in analog. This is often manifest in less of an ability to relax. The development of high 5 figure clocks in SOTA dacs is all about the pursuit of optimum time domain to mitigate this issue.
Some time listen to a single manufacturers line of dacs from the slowest clock to the fastest and note what changes. IMO that change is a smoothness and naturalness that gets closer and closer to analog but not quite their. It is fun. I did it with MSB stuff.
I will agree that maybe you are listening to a dac that does time domain better than MSB and when you include your objective measurements showing digital's superiority in noise floor, dynamic range, distortion etc. you may prefer digital. But to make a blanket statement that digital is "objectively superior to analog" IMO just means you don't know what to measure.
) in analog encoding and playback are much larger than "digital" (which of course must be converted). By any objective measure.