Future of Audio

I just got a new USB turntable to convert some of my parents vinyls to CD. Meanwhile, while I'm capturing the recordings through the turntable's USB output, I'm listening to all these vinyls on my stereo through it's analog output. Simply put, the sound is amazing. The high frequencies are beautifully rounded off and clear; everything is full-bodied and everything has a lot of presence. This is something you just can't get from a CD or MP3. Audio sampled at 44.1 KHz starts to fall apart at 5 KHz. MP3's quality is even worse. The quality just doesn't compare.

There are some draw backs though. Vinyls are quite fragile and easily damaged. Pops and cracks are a common place. They are large and unwieldy, without any shot at portability. Despite it's incredible sound, it's not quite the ideal medium.

So what's the solution? The sound quality of vinyls with the durability and portability of CDs, does it exist? By way of digital audio there are two options: PCM and DSD. PCM is the way digital music on CDs are sampled. We can increase the sampling rate into triple digits, say 192 KHz. Bluray disc can handle high sampling rates, but still takes a lot of processing power to make it happen. DSD isn't sampled the way that PCM, and for that it sounds fantastic. This is closer to analog that any other option (some say it sounds even better). Super Audio CDs (SACD) can playback DSD. The problem is with the way it's sampled, It's pain to edit and tweak in the studio. It's not supported very much in the professional world.

Do we have a solution? Not yet.