Hey Ian,  The SPAARS code you describe was definitely used to describe the disc production chain.  You mentioned microphones being analog, but the code was never meant to account for transducers.  After all, at the end of the day, a digital disc has to be played back over an amplifier and speakers, which are also analog.

I don’t think now that a digital or analog designation at any of the three stages of the code necessarily implies better or worse fidelity overall.  Some multitrack analog recorders using Dolby SR can outperform a digital multitrack machine overall.  But maybe mixdown on a half-track open reel machine might add noise and grittiness, and using a digital workstation might be better.

All else being equal, I think there can never be a case for a lacquer cutting master being superior to a CD stamping process.  With a CD, the sub-master contents are just transferred across without any special considerations, except perhaps downsampling a high resolution master to 44.1 KHz 16-bit audio.  For the record cutter, an RIAA frequency curve is applied to lower the bass amplitude and raise high frequency content.  This allows the upper frequencies to be placed above the noise floor of a record when the disc is pressed.  Lower bass volume stops the cutter from chewing up disc room, by keeping the grooves narrowed.  Then at home, your phono preamp reverses that RIAA curve back to a flat response.  Ideally, you should get back from the LP what was fed into the disc cutter.

Where the problems lie are in three areas.  First, peak limiting has to be applied so that dynamic bursts in level don’t go beyond a certain point, and the resulting grooves are no longer able to be tracked reliably by a stylus.  Next to further save room on the side, bass frequencies below 120 Hz are cancelled to mono, and although bass is less directional, that is still technically a compromise.  But thirdly, and the most damning to the fidelity of the resulting LP, the inner tracks need to be carefully levelled and spaced out, because the groove curvature becomes sharper and harder to track.  This is where “end of side distortion” comes from, and it’s pretty much an unavoidable part of LP playback.  Some phono cartridges exhibit the inner grove sibilance better or worse than others, but it’s there.

This is not to say that resulting LPs never sound better than their CD counterparts.  I’d say Thirller and many Steely Dan LPs outperform their digital brethren.  It’s just to say that LP manufacturing involves compromises.

Chrisphen wrote:

I was told a while back that when record companies started cranking out 'copy-protected' discs in the aughts, the discs no longer conformed to the CD standard, and they had to remove the Philips "Compact Disc digital audio" branding from the package.

No idea if it's actually true, but I would not be surprised.

 
Not 100% sure about that but when the Dual Disc was created (which had both a CD layer and an SACD layer), the logo was not included on those releases.

RadioActive wrote:

 
Haaaaaaaaaa!  Terrible! 😂😂😂