Ripping from Vinyl, Simplified

An anonymous reader writes "In a short article at linmagau.org John Murray brings Gramofile to our attention, just the thing to help you bring all those LPs in the cupboard into your MP3 collection. One more example of the analog hole in action, I guess ;)" It may not be CEDAR, but it sounds like a lot of utility for a 76kB program.

Comments

Why do this?

[Michael's a Jerk!]

Just remember - a new record will sound far, far better then a CD.

Records only get crappy after much use. If they could make them out of a more robust material, I'd be first in line to buy.

Re:Why do this?

[3.5 stripes]

Not really.

Only to audiophiles who use worthless and unquantifiable terms like "warmth" and "roundness".

A good quality cd in a good quality system is more than adequate for any normal human being who doesn't base their life's worth on the amount of vacuum (sp) tubes in their living room.

Re:Why do this?

[Michael's a Jerk!]

Only to audiophiles who use worthless and unquantifiable terms like "warmth" and "roundness".

Those guys are wankers - but valves do have a different sound. When valve amps clip, they have a nicer sound then transistor amps. This is thought to be caused by a more 'rounded' curve, caused by even order harmonics. see this page for more information.


A good quality cd in a good quality system is more than adequate for any normal human being who doesn't base their life's worth on the amount of vacuum (sp) tubes in their living room.

Remember when 256 colour graphics cards came out? I bet you thought 'Wow! I'll never need more then those'. When high colour came out 'This is great - more won't make a difference, since the eye can't see any more'. as technology improved, so did our desire for more quality.

Re:Why do this?

[Mr Smidge]

I cant' get to the article, so I'm not sure what quite makes this utility so special..

I'm an avid vinyl fan, and the only music I ever buy seems to be on 12", so when I want to listen to the music on my PC, the ripping process for me often takes about 30 minutes for the entire vinyl.

I rip both the brand new records I get and the old ones, and with the proper tools to clean up the audio, there's very little degradation from crappy records (for anybody interested, I use CoolEdit 2000).

If they could make them out of a more robust material, I'd be first in line to buy.

Vinyls are in fact made from a more robust plastic than they used to be a few decades ago. They're reasonably durable (obviously nothing compared to that of a CD), but do indeed get bashed about in their lifetime.

Re:Why do this?

[inaeldi]

Ok, there's something here I don't understand. Aren't records made from digital sources? Aren't CDs digital sources?

I've listened to both brand new records and brand new CDs. The only conclusion I could draw is that records sound like crap on the bass (relatively speaking).

Re:Why do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just remember - A new record with Britney Spears will sound far, far worse than a classic, out-of-print one with Carusoe.

It's a matter of CONSERVATION. Not "Hey, I can rip crap..."

Re:Why do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, unless they are made from an analouge source, you know, like a good ole' analouge mastertape or, heck, even a direct to disc recording.

Re:Why do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

the best recordings come from the late 60s and early 70s classical and some easy-listening type stuff (the soundtrack to the film 'Casino Royale' is said to be a stomper).

this partly due to the quality of the recording equipment, and also the regularly used more and better vinyl (now the use old recycled stuff and about half as much). also other reasons, such as the tricks engineers got up to later on gradually ruined the art of recording.

everything you buy now is recorded on nasty equip, mixed and compressed horribly by the engineers, and if vinyl, pressed onto about 1/2 a gram of old car-tyres.

there are exceptions, such as sony's direct digital and some direct-to-disk 'audiophile' shit.

Re:Why do this?

[Mr Smidge]

Records are pressed from master pressings, metal discs that make the grooves on each bit of PVC they want to make into a vinyl.

The master pressing can be made from maybe a high quality tape (also analogue), or maybe a digital source with a very high sample rate / sample depth. So not necessarily made from a digital source.

Re:Why do this?

[zcat_NZ]

Gramofile is special because it's useful, small, free, and open source.

What is does is;

Record a whole side at a time

Apply some filtering to remove clicks and pops

Find the gaps between tracks for you, and split the final tracks into individual files.

Not sure why you can't just go read the article; It loaded fine for me just now.

Re:Why do this?

[LizardKing]

Aren't records made from digital sources?

Depends. Many studios still use magnetic tape, although others use Pro-Tools and their ilk for everything. Once the multi track recordings are done, then the mastering might be to magnetic tape, DAT or Exabyte (amongst others). Then comes the mastering at the pressing plant, which is where any recording will go digital (if it's being pressed onto CD) at the glass mastering stage. Vinyl mastering produces a die, and this is still an "analog" process.

And yes, bass frequencies are limited on vinyl, I remember an early acid house track called "Oochy Koochy" which had such a massive kick sound that it trashed the mastering studios cutting head, something they weren't insured for. That reminds me - I'll have to extract that record from my brothers grubby mitts next time I see him ...

Chris

Re:Why do this?

[cpoch]

Almost all music is mastered in the digital domain today. Even the music that you can still buy on vinyl. Professional audio editing is much easier using nonlinear editing tools, which are all digital. If you don't think the sound of the CD is up to par with other sources, maybe you need the newer formats of SACD or DVD-A. Personally, I can hear the difference between those formats and standard CD, but the difference is minimal. I'd rather have a 5.1 channel format than a higher sampling rate.

Re:Why do this?

[fruey]

One of the reasons that LPs have a different sound is to do with the mastering process. The lower frequencies (bass) cannot be mastered at full volume and cut onto a record, because they'd cause the grooves to be too wide and literally make the needle jump out of the groove. So, the bass frequencies are attenuated or reduced in order to get "as much sound" in the grooves as possible (referred to as pre-emphasis). Then, the levels are all set to as high as they will go while bearing in mind that a groove will be wider as amplitude increases, so if a side of a record is going to be over 20 minutes or so long, then the grooves need to be narrower to fit all the tracks on one side, so the levels are adjusted accordingly.

Now, the equalisation curve was specified by our good friends, the RIAA... all amplifiers that have a "Phono" input use an RIAA EQ curve in the pre-amp stage to boost/reduce the frequencies to get back to a flat response that should sound like the studio mix off the (pre vinyl mastering) master tape.

Often these days all mastering is done at a flat EQ curve, because CDs can handle this, and then mastering happens *again* for the vinyl stage. It used to be the other way round, so early CDs were replaced with "digitally remastered" cuts - Brothers in Arms, Pink Floyd catalogue, that sort of stuff - and had a sound that was more faithful to the original, pristine LPs without sounding "tinny" like the first released CDs.

Digital to Analogue converters and preamps are so good these days that there is little difference between vinyl and CD. A lot of the "warmth" that supposed audiophiles go on about is probably "rumble" anyway (that is, the 50 or 60Hz drone that comes from the platter's electric motor and is passed to the needle, and other artifacts created by the rotation of the record in slightly less than perfect circles, etc).

What I like about LPs is the bigger artwork, the physical effort required to play a recording, and the soothing 33 and one third RPM of the disc as it spins on my old JVC turntable. Also, records which are well kept - as they generally are in my collection - sound pretty good too. However, they're not *better* than CDs. Just different. Old analogue stuff has afficionados everywhere, but please stop bleating that it's because it's better. It's just different.

One interesting argument though - a big thing in digital audio is to keep a fully digital path all the way to the very last, then have a top D to A converter right in the amp and straight to the speakers, some people even sending a digital feed to speakers which have reference D to A converters or even some system to use the digital signal to generate an analogue wave which goes beyond normal D to A electronics (can't remember too much about that, Google around if you feel so inclined). With my vinyl setup, however, I have a signal path that is fully analogue, and no need of a DtoA stage at all ;-) - although I do have solid state electronics in the system... which old wind up 78rpm players didn't have. I bet some people claimed they sounded better than the newer 33rpm records with electric motors and all that, too.

Re:Why do this?

[ch-chuck]

People, at least the more picky hi-fi ones, used to buy a record, and 1st thing record it onto open reel tape, file the record away and listen to the tape.

BION I found a 78, yes, a shellack 78rpm disk in my collection that sounds like it's never been played. it's a shame the song basically stinks but the 1st time I put it on it stood out from all the rest for sheer lack of surface noise, and it sounds damn good.

Re:Why do this?

[n3k5]

Aren't records made from digital sources?

Sure, all of them! (kind of)

Aren't CDs digital sources?

But of course!

And aren't all digital sources the exact same?

Naturellement, that's the very definition of 'digital'! All that talk about bitrates, samplerates, bit depth, channels, DACs and codecs is pure poppycock, intended to confuse pure customers and talk them into upgrading from the perfectly good record players they bought from their pocket money as a child!

Re:Why do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

If your LPs are getting worn that rapidly, it could mean that:

1. Your turntable is crappy (spend a couple of hundred dollars fer chrissake).

2. Your turntable is not configured correctly in the arm/pickup/tracking department. Really, extremly fine tolerances are involved, and you should get a professional to set it up.

LPs...decades of use...bla bla.

Re:Why do this?

[AlecC]

Long, long ago, I set up a really cheap and crappy stereo system in a really perfect room - the library of a stately home. The wallw sere lined with books - acoustically absorbing but not dead. The wall behind was coverd with curtains. teh room was large (say 50 ft by 40) and exactly symmetrical, and with a sofa at the optimum listening position.

This cheap stereo system (high street retailers cheapest "got everything" model) sounded absolutely marvellous. Like kit costing fity times as much.

Ever since then, I have been of the opinion that it is not worth spending a fortune on hi-fi kit if you intend to install it in a room in which you intend to Have a Life. The necessary compromises to live in a room - particularly if you share with other people - will cancel out all the advantages of super-duper kit. If you are prepared to set up a special listeneing room, it might be worth investing in this kit. Until then, buy more music or more beer.

Re:Why do this?

[chefren]

A cheap portable radio seems to be adequate for most people. That still doesn't change that many people like the vinyl sound better than they like the cd dound.

Re:Why do this?

[Derwen]

A lot of the "warmth" that supposed audiophiles go on about is probably "rumble" anyway (that is, the 50 or 60Hz drone that comes from the platter's electric motor and is passed to the needle, and other artifacts created by the rotation of the record in slightly less than perfect circles, etc).

This wouldn't produce 'warmth', but pitch variation :o(
The best thing about good analogue recordings is the 'air' around the instruments. The soi-disant clean sound of solo string instruments on many CDs bears little resemblance to the sound of a real instrument in a real space.

...although I do have solid state electronics in the system... which old wind up 78rpm players didn't have. I bet some people claimed they sounded better than the newer 33rpm records with electric motors and all that, too.

It is unlikely that such a claim would be made. However early 78s benefit from predating the adoption of microphones (circa 1927?) - and voice recordings of this era certainly benefit, as you can hear on the CD rereleases ;-P
- Derwen

Re:Why do this?

[ketamine-bp]

I agree with you for most part, yet please do note that different people may have different taste on music and different requirements in music, that is, you may well be satisified with 40-15kHz, but many may not even be satisified with 20-20kHz, like me, Well, I still demand the harmonics.

Moreover, different speakers do have different response to different sources, I believe that you will changge your mind saying 'absolutely marvellous' if you try listen to more hi-fi models, for example, alchemist amp with a marantz cdplayer, etc.

Re:Why do this?

[McWilde]

some people even sending a digital feed to speakers which have reference D to A converters

Best is to have a digital crossover filter and then two DACs to feed two amps per speaker. One for the woofer, one for the tweeter. This will minimize phase problems in your speaker. Some studio monitor speakers do just that.
You could extend to three- or four-way systems, but that's overkill.

Re:Why do this?

[swb]

You're so right.

Another impossible-to-live-with arrangement that I found made for excellent sound out of a pair of cheap speakers was hanging them from the the pipes in my basement room ceiling with some twine.

I can only guess that the lack of mechanical connection between the speakers and a hard surface allowed for better bass resonance.

I think the basement helped as well, since the ceiling was some kind of cheap cardboard-like material (harder than cardboard, softer than masonite) and the fact that that the floor was carpeting over concrete. The walls were paneling over foam board on concrete.

I eventually added two home-made subs and some surround speakers and haven't had a stereo setup that sounded that good since, in spite of spending more money.

Re:Why do this?

[admbws]

Mod parent up, parent is quite correct.

Turntables on the top of cheap stereos usually have cartridges with diamond stylii, that (being one of the hardest substances on Earth) will naturally damage the record as it plays. All good carts will have sapphire stylii, which are much nicer to the record.

Generally most good cartridges/stylii have a recommended weight of 3-4g. It is very important to make sure the weight does not exceed the recommended weight, or you'll end up damaging your records and wearing down your stylus unneccesarily - you should read your turntables' instructions on how to change the weight on the tone arm.

Re:Why do this?

[VCAGuy]

When valve amps clip, they have a nicer sound then transistor amps.

I agree with you 100% there. Over these past few years, I've mixed on full analog, solid-state, and digital audio boards. Analogs (like a certain Trident) are my favorite for rock because when they clip, you don't get hit by it.
Solid-state boards are what I grew up with, so the clip isn't that bad...but not nearly as "nice as analog." The new digital boards suck in this regard--when they clip, they clip, generally leaving the technician (usually me) screaming "gaaaaa..."

Re:Why do this?

[PerlGuru]

As a former lighting tech, bravo!

One of my favorite in the book.

Re:Why do this?

[panxerox]

Hmmm... so if you have the money to have a good room buy a cheap kit... so if you have the money for a good kit get a cheap room. Images of millionaires staying at motel 6 with 100lbs of stereo equipment.

Re:Why do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who modded this up ? It's a nasty troll.

There is no subjective measurement of "better". If on the other hand, you're talking about real measurements such as signal-to-noise ratio or harmonic distortion, then in any test ever performed, CD beats LP hands down.

Of course, the people who make these kinds of pronouncements don't know how an LP is mastered - they don't know for example that huge amounts of bass and treble need to be cut out of the master recording - not to speak of RIAA equalization - before a playable LP can be produced.

Re:Why do this?

[solidox]

yeah, the 'warmth' that the audiophiles talk about is the inability to reproduce the correct stuff, vinyl tends to make some of the high freqs disappear, much like running the sound thru a lowpass filter.
vinyl is lossy, much like mp3.. u pretty much can't store analog sound in a lossless medium.
while vinyl can sound better (in the same way that pressing the loudness button on my amp makes it sound better) than digital, when talking about quality being how acurate to the original it is then digital wins.

and just how would a vinyl do a square wave?

Re:Why do this?

[fruey]

The best thing about good analogue recordings is the 'air' around the instruments. The soi-disant clean sound of solo string instruments on many CDs bears little resemblance to the sound of a real instrument in a real space.

Interesting point... in fact, it's probably the noise in the recording that helps. Some of the noise that is maybe removed or lost in recordings is breathing sounds and natural air movement, and also just plain hiss can add to a recording of stringed instruments by interacting with the harmonics and all that

...although I do have solid state electronics in the system... which old wind up 78rpm players didn't have. I bet some people claimed they sounded better than the newer 33rpm records with electric motors and all that, too. It is unlikely that such a claim would be made.

Yeah good point. I was being a bit sarcastic, but I'm sure there were some people who just preferred the ritual of windup and the horn and all that... just out of habit. I should not, however, have used the word "sounded better" in that phrase.

Re:Why do this?

[CausticWindow]

Ah.. Oochy Koochy. Nice track by Baby Ford of Rephlex fame.

Doesn't sound quite as fresh anymore though. And the bassline is quite trashy sounding in all the mp3's I found when searching for it now.

Re:Why do this?

[cybercuzco]

Is this why they stopped producing anything more than millions of colors sometime in the mid 90's?

Re:Why do this?

[lukpac]

Just remember - a new record will sound far, far better then a CD.

Personally I don't agree with that, at least in terms of comparing the mediums. Ie, if the CD and LP are done in the same way (which they usually aren't), I'd take the CD. More thoughts on this below.

Records only get crappy after much use. If they could make them out of a more robust material, I'd be first in line to buy.

Actually, if you've got a good cartridge/stylus that can faithfully track everything, wear should be pretty minimal. It's when you use too light of a tracking force and use a cartridge that can't track at all that damage starts to show up. Instead of following the groove walls, the stylus will literally jump over some, chipping them away in the process.

My personal feelings on LP are as follows. I have no particular love for the LP medium in and of itself. It's a pain to set up, even new pressings will usually have to clicks and pops (used pressings almost certainly will, at the very least), and personally I don't hear much/any difference between an original and a CD-R copy. All of that said, however, there are still things that:

1) are only available on LP
2) simply sound better on LP

I think 1 is pretty easy to figure out. In the case of 2, it's not so much that the medium is superior, but rather that whoever cut the LP did a better job of things than whoever cut the CD.

Let's take The Beatles for example. All copies of the stereo mix of I Want To Hold Your Hand sound harsh/shrill on CD. On the other hand, I've got some German LPs with the song that sound amazing. It still sounds amazing when I transfer it to CD-R. It's less in the medium and more in the mastering.

As far as programs like CEDAR and NoNoise go, I despise them. Well, let me clarify. I've got no problems with simple click/pop removal. You're only touching those samples that actually have clicks in them, and it's not too hard to interpolate what should be there. With noise reduction, on the other hand, you're modifying the entire audio spectrum. Like it or not, there's no way to remove hiss without removing some of the music. Sure, you get something that's "clean", but you also get something that's sterile and unnatural, at best. At worst you get garbage (and there are plenty of garbage CDs out there).

Hiss isn't that bad, folks. Other than making sure they are using the best possible tapes, engineers should just leave it alone.

I also take issue with comments saying that early CDs were somehow substandard. Sure, many early CDs weren't very good. But some were great. In fact, some albums sound better in their original CD incarnations than they do on any "remastered" CD. I dare anyone to find a better sounding Mamas & Papas CD than "16 of Their Greatest Hits", which came out in 1986. As with LP vs. CD, it has much less to do with "upgrades in technology" and much more to do with the mastering.

Re:Why do this?

[alienw]

Remember, "scientific" measurements only go so far. "Warmth" may not be quantifiable (yet), but only because not enough research has been done in the area of psychoacoustics. I am sure that 10 years down the road, we may very well find out what exactly is responsible for it.

For example, when transistor amps came out in the 60s, everyone thought they would sound far better than tubes because they did not produce as much distortion (on the analyzer, at least). That turned out to be extremely wrong. The early transistor amps may not have produced as much distortion, but they sounded far worse than tube amps. It was later found out that this occurred due to intermodulation distortion, a particularly nasty-sounding type of distortion.

I will not agree that a CD is "more than adequate". That's like saying that 640K of RAM, 256 colors, or 56Kbps is more than anyone will ever need. A CD is mastered to an extremely shitty set of parameters. 44KHz is not enough to go up to even 22KHz (and humans can hear that rather well), and 16 bits is not nearly enough for a wide dynamic range. Remember, this technology was designed in the early 80s and was supposed to be cheap even then. Even the audio industry is now switching to new formats, such as SACD and DVD Audio.

Unlike records, you can't extract any "extra" quality from the CD. It's digitized, and you can't get what's not already on the disc. With LPs, better equipment makes a world of difference. With CDs, a better transport will at best reduce jitter but will not improve the quality significantly. That's why audiophiles prefer LPs -- that's currently the only way to get better-than-CD sound.

Finally, please listen to a truly good-quality audio system (no, I don't mean a trashy Bose or Infinity 5.1) at least once in your lifetime before posting such idiotic comments. You would be surprised.

Re:Why do this?

[dvoosten]

I am sure that 10 years down the road, we may very well find out what exactly is responsible for it.

We know exactly what is responsible for it, in the same way we know why tube amplifiers generally sound nicer then solid state amplifiers. I was explained a couple of time already in this discussion. It has to do with filtering and the production of harmonics. Ofcourse we don't know exactly why some harmonics sound "nice", but we do know which.
Now don't let it be claimed that I am pissing on analog stuff here. I myself have invested a shitload of money on a tube guitar amp, so I acknowledge that they sound good. However, they sound good because their imperfections happens to overlap with what we like.
44KHz is not enough to go up to even 22KHz
Nyquist dissagrees with you, i believe.
(and humans can hear that rather well)
Most humans don't go beyond 18kHz once they are over 30 years old.
You do have a point however that a lot of research is being done on higher dynamic ranges and higher sampling frequenties, but as I understand it, this is mostly because higher sampling rates seem to work better with more then stereo sound (5.1 and stuff).

Finally, please listen to a truly good-quality audio system (no, I don't mean a trashy Bose or Infinity 5.1) at least once in your lifetime before posting such idiotic comments. You would be surprised.
I think this is a pretty cheap remark. I someone claims you spend to much money on audio equipment you just claim that someone with cheaper equipment would never understand. This is a load of bs. I have listened to quite a few pretty damn good audio systems. I noticed that if the record player is expensive enough (an order of magnitude more expensive then the cd player) I won't hear the difference.

Re:Why do this?

[Enahs]

Only to audiophiles who use worthless and unquantifiable terms like "warmth" and "roundness".

Amazing, isn't it? "Audiophiles" value poorer frequency response and poorer reproduction quality over anything else--and they pay good money to do it!

I can get poor-quality sound out of some pretty cheap equipment. :D

Re:Why do this?

[krog]

hey, at least us drummers can make it to 4 (or 8, if we can start from 5)!

Re:Why do this?

[donweel]

Here is one supply:
http://www.simplyvinyl.com/
There are others.
However I know these to be good. Available in 180 grams.

Re:Why do this?

[dmaxwell]

Those guys are wankers - but valves do have a different sound. When valve amps clip, they have a nicer sound then transistor amps. This is thought to be caused by a more 'rounded' curve, caused by even order harmonics. see this page for more information.

Ok, so a tube amp sounds more pleasant when operated out of spec. The real problem is that headroom is expensive. A well designed tube amp that isn't clipping isn't going to sound any different from a well designed transistor amp. By well designed, I mean it has highly linear response from around 10Hz all the way up to 20Khz under a variety of inputs and listening levels. Even a cheapy amp can sound good if the volume is moderate and it's hooked up to good speakers.

This is the basis of gag that's been played on audiophiles numerous times. A cheap amp is EQed to an expensive amp with pink noise and a spectrum analyzer at low volume. They'll sound nearly identical as long as no one touches the volume knob. You then hide the cheap kit behind the expensive kit and laugh at them as they ooh and ahh. Of course, the mystical excuses will flow freely once the "Golden Ears" realize they've been had.

The point is that a good amp (of either tube or transistor design) shows it's quality when it's cranked. If it's clipping then you need to back off. The tube amp is just more forgiving to the listener who likes to turn it up to "11". This is a subtle point often lost on teenagers and college boys. High wattage speakers and amps aren't intended to be operated at "11" to win bigger uh equipment contests. They're intended to be louder without distortion. A 200W-RMS amp designed for wide headroom in a fairly small room is more expensive than a 500W-peak crank-em-up-contest amp for a reason.

On the other hand, I have no argument with guitar players who insist on tube amps or least a tube preamp stage. Some guitar preamps are even designed to exaggerate tube distortion. Sound production is an entirely different beast from sound re-production.

Re:Why do this?

[Ed Drone]

Hmmm... I thought only guitarists drove valves to clipping stage. I thought the whole point of those audiophile amps was to use the part of the spectrum that had the least distortion to play your LPs. So a 100-watt amp would nearly destroy your hearing at about 10 watts, but that 10-watt area was where the curve was flat, with no distortion.

I know that the designers of those audiophile amps were seeking the opposite of what users of guitar amps were seeking, leading to considerable misunderstanding in the early days of rock guitar, since amp designers were amp designers. It wasn't until enough guitarists asked for amps that would clip that the designers "got it" and made valves that work that way. And it's also why early transistor guitar amps were so shunned -- when driven to clip, they sounded for shit.

Now, I don't know if valve audiophile amps provide better sound than solid state ones -- I know there are those who say "yes" and those who say "hogwash" -- but I doubt it's because the amps are driven to clipping stage.

Ed

Re:Why do this?

[Computer!]

"vinyl is lossy, much like mp3.. u pretty much can't store analog sound in a lossless medium"

Huh? Says who? Vinyl is an analog recording. Terms like "loss" don't apply. If anything, the space between the sample points in a digital recording is "lost", whereas a new vinyl record with a new needle is as perfect a recording as you're going to find. The difference is not just audible, it's palpable.

and just how would a vinyl do a square wave?

Who cares?

Re:Why do this?

[ahacop@wmuc.umd.edu]

You are basically right. Most CDs/Records made today are recorded digitally and/or mastered digitally. So, it makes little sense to put them on in an analog format like a vinyl LP and suggest that that format sounds better than the digital CD.

If the recording and mastering process stays completely in the analog domain -- THEN the vinyl of the recording MIGHT be better than the CD. Depending on who you talk to of course...

Re:Why do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoa! You are so full of shit!

Let me ask you this:
How would a CD do a square wave of 44.1 khz?

Re:Why do this?

[Computer!]

"If anything, the space between the sample points in a digital recording is "lost", whereas a new vinyl record with a new needle is as perfect a recording as you're going to find. "

Just read the rest of this thread, and the above statement is totally untrue. Sorry 'bout that.

Doesn't mean I'll be giving up records any time soon, though.

Re:Why do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, recorded digitally and/or mastered digitally in 24bits and 96khz.

Re:Why do this?

[BrokenHalo]

I would be the first to agree that there is an awful lot of fudging and outright wank when it comes to high-fidelity reproduction terminology, and I am also one of the many who are steadily moving their collection to CD (not mp3 or even ogg).

But we should remember that the original sounds are not a digital signal, they are in fact a complex collection of analogue signals.

Ultimately, anyone who really cares about the issue (and who has the requisite financial wherewithal) can check it out by comparison of a top-quality turntable with an equivalent CD player with a good combination of amp and speakers. Nobody will notice much difference with any music produced electronically, but with acoustic instruments and voices, there can be a marked difference in fidelity. I'm not going to get into silly definitions like "warmth", though, since that may in fact be applying different values to the initial signal, which although they might be easy on the ear do not qualify as faithful reproduction.

Re:Why do this?

[PD]

That's exactly right. And a new VHS tape will also look far far better than a DVD.

Re:Why do this?

[antiMStroll]

Ahhhhh, thanks for clearing that up. It's all based on well-documented, highly technical 'ad hominem' parameters, and not in any inherent differences in reproduction. BTW, that's the first time in almost three decades of interest in sound reproduction that I've ever seen people berated for using the 'useless' term "warmth". Another highly moderated Slashdot first!

Re:Why do this?

[guynorton]

I've got a system based round a highend turntable and why? Is it because I am an audiophile tosser?

No. Simply because it sounds fantastic. If music is reproduced as close to the original performance as possible, then the detail, and dynamics and passion that led to its creation can be felt more. I can lose myself in the music, feel it more, and that is after all why I listen to music, to feel, to live. If that makes me an audiophile tosser then thats what I am happy to be.

By the way, it aint just subjective poppycock like 'warmth' and 'roundness' that back me up.
There are many reasons (based in science and logic) why vinyl is superior to CD.

Regards

Re:Why do this?

[BrokenHalo]

Vinyls are in fact made from a more robust plastic than they used to be a few decades ago

When they're made at all. However; I've got quite a few early vinyl calssical recordings (pre-1955) from a variety of labels which have stood up to wear very well indeed, while many recordings from the 1980s are effectively worn out. This is where the contactless forms of sound reproduction, of course, have the edge.

Re:Why do this?

[AndrewHowe]

It's not designed to do that. It's designed to have a response up to 20kHz. For that you need to sample at twice the frequency, i.e. 40kHz. Then you need a filter to stop aliasing. No filter has an infinitely steep cutoff, so you need to sample a bit quicker - hence 44.1kHz. Unfortunately because the filter is not perfect, some high frequencies remain, and are reflected back down the spectrum. OK, so CD is not perfect.
But tell me, what does vinyl do with a 44.1kHz sqare wave?

Re:Why do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Calling people wankers is being as bad as "those guys" yourself. A decent analogue set up will easily match if not beat many digital systems. Some of the best sounding media I have are some 180gram vinyl german jazz reissues remastered totally in analogue. The CDs versions are comparitively fuzzy sounding. Its obvious when you hear it. Still I have a few hundred CD and several thousand albums and I much prefer vinyl not just because of the sound quality but also the objects themselves are so much nicer. I can't get emotionally involved with a tiny CD. They are so dull.... yes emotions... thats what music is about right. I enjoy having a vinyl fetish.
Still CDs like MP3 are great for the car or listening to at work on the PC CD-ROM. And yeah some CDs sound great too....

Re:Why do this?

[Derwen]

... in fact, it's probably the noise in the recording that helps. Some of the noise that is maybe removed or lost in recordings is breathing sounds and natural air movement, and also just plain hiss can add to a recording of stringed instruments by interacting with the harmonics and all that

That sounds plausible, if not acceptable ;-)
All I know is that to my (average) ears, vinyl sounds better than 16-bit CD, where 'better' equates to sounding like being in a concert hall or a room with a bunch of instruments.
I accept that this may not be relevant for electric instruments - and certainly has no relevance to portable music (that's another debate, for those who've owned a Sony WMD6C ;^).
I have no axe to grind on behalf of vinyl - I gave up hoping the CD would go away long ago ;-/

- Derwen

Re:Why do this?

[taugenix]

Yeah, the audiophile experience is a bit if a wank. I don't see how one can justify hundreds of dollars per foot of speaker wire.

But regarding clipping, I'm not sure clipping while listening to a Bach solo violin partita is desirable. I was under the impression that clipping is desirable for wanking guitar players.

I believe the difference between listening to analogically produced music versus digitally produced music has to do with the way information is stored and how it hits the ears.

Analog recording/playback is done via a continuous stream of 'data' while digital recording/playback consists of 'bits' of data. During playback, the ear is stressed by the 'break' between each 'bit' in a digitally reproduced recording, an effect similar to the 'chopping' sound of a helicopter or a Harley with straight pipes, obviously on a completely different scale. The ear is less stressed by the continuous stream produced by analog recordings, resulting in what for many is a more pleasurable listening experience.

However, the human ear varies in sensitivity from individual to individual, and the phenomenon described above is generally imperceptible in the same way that frequencies beyond the human range of hearing are, but, like those frequencies, the effect is still there, resulting in subjective descriptions of the listening experience as 'warm' or 'round'.

A lot of this is obviously theoretical, and the listening experience is highly subjective, so it ultimately gets down to 'whatever blows your hair back'...assuming one has hair.

Re:Why do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do this? Because some of use have thousands of LPs, and we've been waiting for an easy way to transfer them to a more convenient medium.

The audiophile 'analog-vs-digital sound' debate is a different issue.

Re:Why do this?

[AndrewHowe]

Nyquist dissagrees with you, i believe.

While Nyquist gives us 22.05kHz for the highest sampleable frequency, this is not the frequency response of a CD player. The problem is with aliasing. I haven't got time to go into the details, which get a bit mathematical (and to be honest it's a while since I've thought about it). Basically, though, a frequency f above the Nyquist limit Fs will get sampled as if it has frequency Fs-f. This is bad, mmkay, so it's necessary to filter out all of those high frequencies before sampling. What you want is for anything above Fs to be filtered, and everything below it to be unchanged. Unfortunately that's not possible to do with real filters so they start at about 20kHz.
There are all sorts of phase problems too.

Re:Why do this?

[Mr. No Skills]

I think that even though audiophiles try to avoid clipping, the point is that if you run it loud enough the amp may eventually clip and you want that clip as soft as possible. So, the audiophile will by as large an amp as they can afford to keep it running well below the clipping stage. They purchase 1500 watt amps, while the guitarist blows your ears out with a 50 watt amp.

It's funny how this thread quickly blew into the never-ending tube-vs-solid state debate. Especially since the difference between audiophile gear and consumer gear is so much smaller than it was 25 years ago.

Re:Why do this?

[AndrewHowe]

But you weren't even at the original performance. How do you know how close it is?

If there are "many reasons (based in science and logic) why vinyl is superior to CD", then you could at least have offered one of them. I'm particularly intrigued to know what logic has to tell us about audio fidelity.

Re:Why do this?

[Cromac]

What have you been waiting for? It's not like it's difficult to do. My 60 year old non computer geek, accountant father figured out how to convert records to MP3 two years ago.

Re:Why do this?

[Abcd1234]

Analog recording/playback is done via a continuous stream of 'data' while digital recording/playback consists of 'bits' of data. During playback, the ear is stressed by the 'break' between each 'bit' in a digitally reproduced recording,

Sorry, but this theory of yours is totally wrong. The whole point of a DA converter is to take a digital signal and convert it into a SMOOTH analog signal. There is no "break", as you describe it, because the DAs whole job is to reproduce a smooth waveform by interpolating between samples to generate the final signal. So, in the end, what you hear is a digitally reproduced "stream of 'data'", as you put it, which attempts to be a very close approximation of the original signal.

Re:Why do this?

[RealAlaskan]

"Warmth" may not be quantifiable (yet), ... we may very well find out what exactly is responsible for it.

I suspect that we will find that ``warmth'' translates to something like: ``That sounds like the crappy, distorting, thermally-noisy tube stereo I paid six months income for back in 1955.''

44KHz is not enough to go up to even 22KHz (and humans can hear that rather well)...

I'm sure that some humans can. Back when I was fixing monitors, I was popular with the secretaries because I was the only male who could hear up to about 20kc. When they said that their monitor was squealing at them (vibration in the flyback transformer; squeeze some RTV silicon between the laminations), I could often hear it, faintly. Some women and a few men will be able to hear above 20kc. I doubt that having music run significantly higher than 21kc will be an audible and meaningful difference to one in a million.

16 bits is not nearly enough for a wide dynamic range.

Well, those 16 bit CD's already run from so quiet I can't hear it in a quiet room to much louder than I want to hear. That'll do for a lot of us.

Unlike records, you can't extract any "extra" quality from the CD. It's digitized, and you can't get what's not already on the disc.

That sounds a little odd. You're saying that with appropriate signal processing, you can make the record ``sound better'' than the vibrations encoded there? Why can't you similarly massage the digitized data? What is on the vinyl which isn't on the CD?

That's why audiophiles prefer LPs -- that's currently the only way to get better-than-CD sound.

I'm afraid that this will sound rude, but I can't think of a better way to say it: this sounds like audio voodoo. It sounds like ``LP is better than CD because it has all the old, familiar bugger-ups left in.''

Finally, please listen to a truly good-quality audio system ...

I had an electrical engineer friend who was an audiophile, and had a special listening area with very high end equipment. It sounded like a trashy dorm room system to me. His ears may have been better than mine, but when we listened to the output of a signal generator, I could hear higher notes at lower amplitude than he could. That suggests to me that ``psychoacoustics'' may have a strong component of snobbery.

Re:Why do this?

[chiph]

Like the other poster said, Dire Straits Brothers in Arms was one of the very first CDs to be sold as "DDD" (Digital recording, Digital Mastering, and Digital Transfer), and the sound quality was outstanding.

I still have the early edition (1985 or so) of Pink Floyd The Wall, and honestly, listening to it via headphones is pretty painful. OTOH, my Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab release of Rush Moving Pictures is excellent -- even though it's also analog (I can really hear Neil on drums, whereas in the plebian aluminum release he's way off in the muddy background). A lot depends on the care with which the CD was produced. Many of the early CD releases suffered from the "shovelware" effect as the format took off.

Chip H.

Re:Why do this?

[bobrk]

Often these days all mastering is done at a flat EQ curve, because CDs can handle this, and then mastering happens *again* for the vinyl stage. It used to be the other way round, so early CDs were replaced with "digitally remastered" cuts - Brothers in Arms, Pink Floyd catalogue, that sort of stuff - and had a sound that was more faithful to the original, pristine LPs without sounding "tinny" like the first released CDs.

This sounds a bit odd. Are you saying that early CD's didn't take into account the equalization curve? I find that hard to believe.

Re:Why do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep... The way a system sounds is 20% amplifier, 10% speaker cabinets, 5% speakers and 65% room.

You put a best buy special in the right environment and it sounds fabulous.

Put a top of the line polk system in an empty room with parallel walls and floor/ceiling with no carpet, and it will sound like ass.

If you spent some money on a top of the line system, and put it in said library, you would literally be blown away by how good it sounds.

l8,
AC
(studiophile)

Re:Why do this?

[ncc74656]

However; I've got quite a few early vinyl calssical recordings (pre-1955) from a variety of labels which have stood up to wear very well indeed, while many recordings from the 1980s are effectively worn out.

Are you sure those older recordings were pressed in vinyl? 78s were usually made with a harder material (shellac?) that could stand up to the significant tracking force (ounces instead of grams) of a wind-up record player that used a big horn instead of an amplifier. If you tried playing a newer record on one of those it would (1) sound like the Chipmunks on crack and (2) be ruined after one play...assuming the fat needle didn't just slide all over the surface.

Re:Why do this?

[chiph]

Yes - a lack of experience with the new format caused the recording engineers to mis-apply the EQ curve to master tapes destined to be stamped out as CDs. This was in the early 80's (The Sony CDP-101, worlds first consumer CD player, came out in 1983 -- still have mine!). Things got straightened out by 1988 or so.

Chip H.

Re:Why do this?

[operagost]

Have much trouble with Dave Brubeck or Rush charts? Or 1930s Boogie-Woogie?

Re:Why do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

"But tell me, what does vinyl do with a 44.1kHz sqare wave?"

It makes it sound like the unlistenable crap that it is. We're not talking about laboratory data acquisition here, we're talking about music .

Re:Why do this?

[jonbrewer]

a big thing in digital audio is to keep a fully digital path all the way to the very last, then have a top D to A converter right in the amp and straight to the speakers

This is an exceptionally good idea if you use your computer as a music box. I had no idea how much degradation was going on until I bought a cheap Maya 5.1 sound card ($40USD) with optical S/PDIF out and used fiber to connect my PC and receiver. The difference between my SB card with analog out and the Maya card w/ optical out is night and day in terms of sound quality, and I attribute much of that to the lack of noise, and the rest to the superior D/A converters in my receiver.

Re:Why do this?

[StarFace]

Not to be pedantic, but even 24bpp has fewer colours than the eye can see. A practical example of this is setting up Photoshop in the Lab colourspace, and then drawing a gradient from black to a primary the width of the screen and noting the "banding" that appears. If you work with digital media all of the time, you can notice the limitations in more complex images as well.

Actually, in some cases the software can handle more colour depth than you can view on any digital output devices. It requires a lot of care, since you cannot see what you are doing, but when you output to devices that can handle it, you get better results that do not look "digital."

Re:Why do this?

[operagost]

Any good LP ripping utility is useful because turntables work really poorly in the car. I was cruising along at 4 MPH the other day and accidentally rolled over a pebble. Scratched my favorite copy of the Brandenburg Concerto #3!

Re:Why do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of the "warmth" that supposed audiophiles go on about is probably "rumble" anyway (that is, the 50 or 60Hz drone that comes from the platter's electric motor and is passed to the needle, and other artifacts created by the rotation of the record in slightly less than perfect circles, etc).

My Linn does not "rumble."

Re:Why do this?

[operagost]

You have to hook up a turntable to either a special Phono input on your receiver or to a phono preamp, not to the Aux imputs. Vinyl is mastered with something called the (warning, evil acronym) RIAA curve. This curve lowers the bass frequencies and boosts the high end. When played back, the curve is reversed. This keeps the needle in track and reduces surface noise.

Re:Why do this?

[operagost]

The vinyl might still be better because the master recording was downsampled. Most digital recordings are made at 96 KHz/24 bit, while CDs are still 44.1/16 bit. Tech like Sony's SBM helps, but whenever you downsample you have to throw out some information.

Re:Why do this?

[Knuckles]

They're reasonably durable (obviously nothing compared to that of a CD)

Of my several 100 LPs I can still play every single one (granted, some do have clicks&pops). Of my ~ 100 CDs (which I handle as I did my LPs - carefully) at least 5 have degraded to the point of not being able to be played completely. Some have developed holes in the medium, you can literally see through if you hold them up against the light. Don't tell me anything about CD durability. If you ask me, it's all a plot by the RIAA to force me to pay the license fees more than once (only half joking)

Re:Why do this?

[cloude000]

The reason records sound better is simple. The range of frequencies they are capable of playing is much larger than that of CD's. And although these may not be in the ranges we can hear, they are in the ranges we can FEEL. I think is what is meant by "warmth" and "roundness". The ranges you can feel aren't too important, but make a world of difference for the low end - especially for old jazz recordings when an upright bass was used. An upright bass doesn't make much noise at all, but can fill a room with sound. You don't hear the bass so much as you feel it.

Re:Why do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

warmth = EVEN ORDER freq harmonics, rather than odd order harmonics. A scope can show this efffect quiteclearly.

op-amps suck. tubes are much better for mammals eras.

'Aboslute Sound' magazine was vindicated in the 1990s when they finally proved that digiatal op-amps have ODD HARMONICS and tubes have even order harmonics... it has nothing to do with clipping or silly words like "warmth"

TUBES sound better becasue they sound like the REAL PERFORMANCE to any mammals ears.

Plus there's the high end to consider...

You can buy stero needles with dual transformers on the head that use the second transformer for frequencies of 32khz which ARE on most records recorded suing analog technologies.

I have such a record needle. I should store it in nitrogen when not used because the fine wires are corroding, but its only one year old at this point.

Cds suck. Records have more high-frequency range. Females during 3 weeks per month, and most children can all hear frequencies in excess of a damned digitally cuttoff cd (44.1 Khz sample rate = 22,500 hertz only!!) Records yeild those frequencies with ease... especially if created using all analog gear at all stages.

records may lack a little deep bass, but few types of music need such tremble except electronica or "drum and bass".

Re:Why do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

I call bullshit: sapphire is nearly as hard as diamond. Why would vynil be damaged by diamond while saphire other is "much nicer" to the record?

Re:Why do this?

[side_two]

What? qualitative terms like "warmth" are verboten. one must only use quantitative terms to describe what is essentially a qualitative and aesthetic experience? it's only to the extent that the quantitative produces something of quality that it's worth anything. Oh, FYI...as for budget concerns regarding turntable-vinyl vs. CD format, the j. tull "benefit" vinyl LP i just picked up for $1 and played on my $400 turntable/cartridge deck just kicked the crap out of my $14 CD played on a $2K Naim cd player, qualitatively speaking, that is. cheers!

Re:Why do this?

[SN74S181]

"44KHz is not enough to go up to even 22KHz"
Nyquist dissagrees with you, i believe

I guess as long as you're just listening to 22 KHz triangle or sawtooth waves, you're fine. Don't try to listen to any instrument that produces harmonically complex high notes.

Re:Why do this?

[SN74S181]

I'd rather have a 5.1 channel format than a higher sampling rate.

For some people 'effect' is the important thing, and all sorts of wizzy-whoo can make a 5.1 channel format sound 'better.'

For other people, high fidelity of reproduction is what's important, and by definition a 5.1 system is irrelevant and probably adds distortion, unless the original microphone placement at the recording session was set up with microphones placed in a '5.1 pattern.' Much of the world's great recordings of music was recorded and mixed for a two-speaker stereo sound system. You can't just 'mix and reformulate' for whatever new fad in speaker placement is popular, at least not without inherently reducing the fidelity of playback.

That said, it's all a compromise, since every recording is uniquely recorded and mixed. But whiz-bang trendy gear just makes the stereo salesman's boat payment. Get a good two channel integrated amplifier and a pair of speakers and place them properly in your listening room for quality stereo playback.

Re:Why do this?

[Mike610544]

A CD is mastered to an extremely shitty set of parameters. 44KHz is not enough to go up to even 22KHz (and humans can hear that rather well), and 16 bits is not nearly enough for a wide dynamic range.

1.) CD's have a sampling rate of 44.1 Khz (not 44.)
2.) Only young children can hear 20K; No human hears 22K
3.) 16 bits ~= 96db dynamic range (covers sound pressure levels of everything from someone whispering from a few feet away to a gunshot at ~1 meter.)

Re:Why do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Vinyl is an analog recording. Terms like "loss" don't apply.

Really. I guess that's why a third-generation analog tape copy sounds just as good as the original. Because there's no loss.

You don't have a clue about what you're talking about.

Re:Why do this?

[prockcore]

, I believe that you will changge your mind saying 'absolutely marvellous' if you try listen to more hi-fi models, for example, alchemist amp with a marantz cdplayer, etc.

I think you're dead on. Many of the people who are like "you can't tell the difference" say that because they've never been exposed to a good system.

When I was younger, every 3 years I would go to get my prescription updated.
Every 3 years I would swear up and down that my prescription hasn't changed, and I can still see just fine.
Every 3 years I would get new glasses and be amazed at how much better I can see, and how I was practically blind before.

Sure the music sounds great to you now, but when you finally hear a good system, you'll wonder how you ever thought the old system was "good" let alone "great".

Re:Why do this?

[bobrk]

Huh. My first CDs were purchased around '86 or so, and they sound perfect to me.

Re:Why do this?

[antiMStroll]

Pink noise and spectrum analyzer? Why not tones and and a meter, which are more accurate for this purpose (and what mega-$$$ test gear such as the Audio Precision suite uses, and yes, IANEngineer)? Because it doesn't sound as mod-worthy as making shit up out of whole cloth as the above post did.

But please, point me to proper scientific references, because you are debating science, regarding these 'gags'.

Re:Why do this?

[ak_hepcat]

Q: "Why do sound techs say 'check 1, 2'?"

A: The 'O' in One checks for low-frequency rumbling.
The 'T' in Two checks for high-frequency feedback, but not as well as the 'S'ibilance, and 'P'op checks.

Besides, everybody knows that the sound techs don't know how to count -- they're just repeating words that the singers use.

Re:Why do this?

[klez23]

That sounds a little odd. You're saying that with appropriate signal processing, you can make the record ``sound better'' than the vibrations encoded there? Why can't you similarly massage the digitized data? What is on the vinyl which isn't on the CD?

It's not that "with appropriate signal processing" the record improves, it's that there's almost infinite room to improve the playback equipment, & thereby produce a better unprocessed signal. A cheap CD player can get a lot of the right bits in the right places, but the problem is there's information missing "between the bits."

Since vinyl has a much more "natural" representation of sound (I'm speaking physically, in that the grooves are mathematically quite similar to the air pressure fluctuations of sound), there's less of a tendency to lose information. If anything, the main complaint with vinyl (& all analog media) is what gets added, such as hiss, pops, &c.

Re:Why do this?

[klez23]

Only young children can hear 20K; No human hears 22K

Not true. Even people who can't hear a pure 22kHz tone can often hear the difference when you have two samples, one with 22kHz as an overtone, the other with the 22kHz filtered out (or not generated, if it's a digitally-produced sample). & of course that's the stuff we're trying to record, natural instruments with real overtones, not pure sine waves at various frequencies.

Re:Why do this?

[carlos_benj]

hey, at least us drummers can make it to 4 (or 8, if we can start from 5)!

How can you tell a drummer is knocking on your front door?

A: He can't keep a steady beat and doesn't know when to come in....

Re:Why do this?

[colmore]

I don't own any $1000+ equipment, but I can definitely hear a difference between vinyl and CD.

It is especially clear on recordings that feature a small number of accoustic instruments and human voice. There's no reason to listen to techno on vinyl, but Bob Dylan sounds a lot better.

And yes it isn't an issue of fidelity or anything like that. "Warmpth" might be unquantifiable, but you know it when you hear it.

Also there's something intellectually pleasing about an entirely analogue recording and playback process. Vocal cord vibrates air vibrates microphone diaphram makes electric wave form makes magnetic waveform makes waveform in vinyl vibrates needle makes electric waveform vibrates speaker vibrates air vibrates eardrum. The process is broken by a digital encoding process. It's nice if you're silly and sentimental and after 120 years still view recorded sound as somewhat miraculous.

Re:Why do this?

[dmaxwell]

Pink noise and spectrum analyzer? Why not tones and and a meter, which are more accurate for this purpose (and what mega-$$$ test gear such as the Audio Precision suite uses, and yes, IANEngineer)? Because it doesn't sound as mod-worthy as making shit up out of whole cloth as the above post did.

A relation of mine once met Bob Carver in the 70s and when he figured that he wasn't a Golden Ear tweak he showed him such a setup...at an electronics show well attended by tweaks. They did indeed ooh and ahh over the equivalent of a $100 Radio Shack amp. Of course, they thought it was $15,000 tube amp. Carver wanted to test something he starting to realize about so-called "Golden Ear" audiophiles. That is the genesis of my knowledge of this gag. No, it was not "made up". Secondly, by "spectrum analyzer" I was referring to the piece of kit that used to test radio and audio equipment under repair, not the cheezy bargraph device on flashy stereo equipment. The reason for pink noise is that it gives a continous curve on the display of the analyzer. That way, the effect of tweaking the EQ can be seen across the device's entire bandpass. Tones will not get you as close with a continous display of the amp's response. Thirdly, my relation later became a salesman of high end stereo equipment and had a tweak co-worker. He pulled the same stunt on him with the same results. If a "Golden Ear" thinks it's expensive uber gear and it doesn't blatantly sound like crap then yes they'll rave on and on about it like an Absolute Sound review.

Re:Why do this?

[jetmarc]

> Even the audio industry is now switching to new formats, such as SACD and DVD Audio.

I don't see that the audio industry cares about quality. If they did, they wouldn't
produce so many TOP40 CDDAs with clipping.

They care about revenue, and selling the same stuff again (on different physical media)
is is a good way to produce revenue. That's IMHO why they promote SACD and DVD-Audio.

Marc

Re:Why do this?

[Ataru]

you would literally be blown away

I do not think that word means what you think it means.

- Inigo Montoya

Re:Why do this?

[ajs318]

Pink noise and spectrum analyzer? Why not tones and and a meter, which are more accurate for this purpose

Because if you use tones, then you have to do several tests; but if you use a noise source with a known frequency envelope, you can effectively do several tests at once. If you're tweaking the controls in real time, it can save quite a bit of time - the sliders on a graphic equaliser affect *bands*, not spot frequencies. It depends on the analyser having a much longer time constant than any of the individual frequencies in the noise signal, but this is generally true. Obviously the narrower the bandwidth (as opposed to the span!) on the spectrum analyser, the more accurate the result; a continuous display would be the best.

Re:Why do this?

[phliar]

This whole article is complete bullshit. You are free to think whatever you want, but saying that everyone should believe your mumbo-jumbo unless they have audiophile equipment -- crap.

Unless you're comparing fifteen-year old listening to carefully mastered vinyl in a quiet environment, to thirty year old listening to a crappy CD on a cheapo boom-box in an average living room... for the same amount of money and care, CDs are much better than vinyl.

Re:Why do this?

[VCAGuy]

How do you get a drummer off your front porch?

A: Pay him for the pizza.

Re:Why do this?

[Ataru]

Well, yes and no. "Digital", in the context of sound recording, means that:
* The signal is sampled, so is no longer continuous in time;
* The signal is quantized, so it is no longer continuous in value;
* The resulting set of values is stored as a bunch of numbers.
Now "digital" only really means the last one, but we can stretch it a bit if we know the context.
In reverse, a digital to analogue converter converts numbers to "values", usually in the form of a voltage. That's all a DA converter has to do, and it's all it does (ideally, but it will have a non-flat frequency response, so there's some inherent, but unwanted, "smoothing" built in). The output from the DA converter is not especially "smooth", it only changes when you give it a new number.
In the context of digital sound reproduction, we would also like to undo the effects of the other two steps - the sampling and the quantization. Well, bad news, there's nothing we can do directly, because information was thrown away. The only thing we can do is minimize the nasty side effects of aliasing in time and value (amplitude if you like).
That's not really the job of the DA converter, it's that of the numbers->waveform reproduction system, of which the DA converter is an important part.
Now you talk about "interpolating between samples". Well there are a number of ways to interpolate between discrete values. Some of the resulting curves are "smooth", some actually pass through the values, and some are better approximations of the original signal, for a given metric.
What we want with audio is to interpolate in such a way as to minimize the extra frequencies created by temporal aliasing. So basically we bung a filter in.
Having said that, I think vinyl boys are nutters. I'm just nitpicking a bit because I used to be really into signal processing.

Re:Why do this?

[scharkalvin]

Some LP's used high tech cutters for special needs. Telarc digitally mastered their production of the 1812 overture featuring real cannon and church bells. They went overboard trying to capture the full dynamic range of the cannon report. The groves of the record that contain the cannon are spaced wider than the quiet passages of the recording. Even so, it took a VERY good tone arm / cartridge combo to track the cannon blasts. The tone arm would do a damped 'dance' as it tracked those groves (with low frequencies down BELOW 20 hz). If your turntable equipment wasn't up to the challange it WOULD skip groves. BTW while playing the final movement at any good level of volume the grile cloth (held on by velcro) on my speakers would 'pop off' one at a time as the cannon fired first on the left, then the right!
AND if you thought the LP was awsome, you should hear the CD!.

Re:Why do this?

[lukpac]

Please mod the parent down, it is anything but "informative".

Turntables on the top of cheap stereos usually have cartridges with diamond stylii, that (being one of the hardest substances on Earth) will naturally damage the record as it plays. All good carts will have sapphire stylii, which are much nicer to the record.

Generally most good cartridges/stylii have a recommended weight of 3-4g.

Sapphire is anything but "nicer" to a record. In fact, because it begins to wear down so quickly, you're *much* more likely to damage your records with a sapphire stylus than you are with a diamond. That's probably why just about *all* cartridges come with diamond styli today.

Also, good cartridges will track somewhere between 0.8 and 2 grams. Something that tracks at 3-4g is most likely cheap junk.

Re:Why do this?

[antiMStroll]

The request was for a scientific reference, an anecdote proves nothing. The only people who knew Bob Carver's name in the seventies were audiophile tweaks. Bob was a designer at Phase Linear until the closing years of the decade, not becoming a known brand name until the eighties. He later went on to create some of the standard-bearing designs of their time in the hi-end tweak industry, such as the Sunfire amps, so to classify him as 'not tweak' is patently incorrect. He always has been.

By spectrum analyzer, I was referring to the concept, not the implementation. Even speaker designers left spectrum analyzers behind decades ago. They are not used, and never have been used, in the design of electronics because of their complexity and poor resolution. And yes, I do this stuff for a living. Pink noise and spectrum analyzers are primarily the domain of cheezy home hifi nowadays. In the electronics world the most common kit, as previously stated, is made by Audio Precision. It's a computer driven fully automated system which uses discrete tones for 95% of it's measurements. MLSSA dominates in speaker design, a method using a short, known psuedo-random noise burst and performing a time domain transforms on the result. Even such an advanced measurement device as this isn't of much use for electronic design.

I would have a talk with your relative.

Re:Why do this?

[Oscar_Wilde]

I will not agree that a CD is "more than adequate"

The poster you're picking on was talking about normal people in normal situations.

For most people, a CD is more than adequate. Just walk into any loungeroom and start spouting "frequency, blah, blah. Psyco accoustics, blah, blah." and see just how much people care. CDs are easier to handle and that alone means that for most people (i.e. those who dont feel like being hyper carful or have children about the house) they will sound better. I'm much happier cleaning jam off a CD than off a record.

Maybe in 10 years time we'll know for sure that records can/do sound better than CDs. I'll put money on most people not giving a rats ass.

Dont be so damned elitist in future, it gives geeks a bad name.

Re:Why do this?

[cathouse]

The distortion inherent to transistor amps was 'crossover notch distortion' and was a result of the non-linearity as the amp circuit shifted from the '+' to the'-' of an audio wave.

Re:Why do this?

[Bush Pig]

This one used to piss my middle son off (he played drums at the time).

Q: What has three legs and an arsehole?
A: A drumstool.
Boom,boom!

Re:Why do this?

[Bush Pig]

> It is especially clear on recordings that feature a small number of accoustic instruments and human voice. There's no reason to listen to techno on vinyl, but Bob Dylan sounds a lot better.

Bullshit. I've got a couple of Dylan's recordings on both, and I can't tell the difference (except for the surface noise). Of course, my 52 year old ears aren't as good as they used to be, but my sons can't tell the difference, either.

Re:Why do this?

[BrokenHalo]

These are 33+1/3 RPM records. Yes, I know about the old 78s (bakelite, or something like that?) and these are not those. There's a world of difference between 1950s and 1930s recordings.

Re:Why do this?

[alienw]

That sounds a little odd. You're saying that with appropriate signal processing, you can make the record ``sound better'' than the vibrations encoded there? Why can't you similarly massage the digitized data? What is on the vinyl which isn't on the CD?

Vinyl is analog. The resolution is limited only by the material it's made out of and by your equipment. Therefore, expensive playback equipment can extract much more out of the record than can its cheap counterpart, since the resolution of the vinyl is not artificially limited. Therefore, you can get a more and more out of a record with progressively more expensive equipment. Hell, if you wanted to, you could use a laser instead of a needle to read the information on the disc and possibly get better precision.

This is not true for a CD. A CD is just a bunch of bits, and even a very cheap CD-ROM will read them correctly. There's tons of error-correcting code and stuff, so you are virtually guaranteed to get all the data off the disc. After that, you can't do much with the signal to get more precision -- that's all you have.

If it helps, consider enlarging a small photograph and a small GIF file. What do you think would enlarge better? You can't make a 1280x1024 picture out of 320x200 without making it look worse -- the resolution is fixed. You can blow up a real photograph to almost any size with little loss of quality because the resolution is nearly infinite.

Also, please realize that listening to a signal generator is not a legitimate way to evaluate an audio system.

Re:Why do this?

[alienw]

In that case, why would they improve the quality so drastically? They could have just re-packaged it, or added other trashy content (like video). Also, why does every review of an SACD player that I've seen claim better quality? Sure, it's a way to generate revenue, but it's also a recognition that the CD format is hopelessly outdated. If you still don't believe me, look at a music catalog. You'd be hard-pressed to find gear that does not work at 24 bits, 96 KHz.

Re:Why do this?

[alienw]

Unless you're comparing fifteen-year old listening to carefully mastered vinyl in a quiet environment, to thirty year old listening to a crappy CD on a cheapo boom-box in an average living room... for the same amount of money and care, CDs are much better than vinyl.

I agree. CDs give you more bang for the buck. They don't give you the same sound. It just depends on what your priorities are. My post was mostly a rebuttal for various bullshit pushers, not a cost/benefit analysis.

Re:Why do this?

[alienw]

Actually, there was a LOT of various types of distortion in the first transistor equpiment. Both the components themselves and the circuits they were in were quite horrible.

Re:Why do this?

[alienw]

I was not saying that everyone should use vinyl records. In 10 years, most people will probably be using a more modern, DVD-based format. 24 bits/96 KHz IS enough for all intents and purposes. Let's just hope they don't fuck it up with watermarks and copy protection garbage.

Re:Why do this?

[Bush Pig]

I must concede I prefer my vinyl copy of "Hot Rats' to a CD I recently heard of it. The CD atually sounds better acoustically, I just don't like the re-mix Zappa did.

Re:Why do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not incorrect, cartridges designed for DJing always track at 3-4g.

Re:Why do this?

[mixmasta]

Yes... That's because your brain normalizes to whatever input it receives. e.g. we watched VHS for years, no?

Re:Why do this?

[solidox]

it wouldn't, as the maximum frequency is 22.050hz.
as the ear can't hear above around 20khz, this is fine.
the point i was making is that i would imagine a vinyl needle would shit itself if it encountered a high amp, low freq square wave. a cd however, would handle it fine.

Re:Why do this?

[solidox]

the vasty majority of music (whatever genre) has digital involved at some point in the production process, usually during mastering.
if i buy a piece of music that i like (various electronica), chances are more than likely that it's been produced at 44.1khz, 16bit stereo. so i stick my cd in and i'm getting essentially a studio copy, and will be excactly the same as the original (unless it's been buggered about by the labels engineers before pressing).
if i buy that music on vinyl, there will be loss of quality. it may or may not sound better on vinyl, but the quality is still degraded.

sound stored on an analog medium is not reproducable excactly, just as if someone sings or drums, they will never achieve that excact same sound.
so while sticking some analog sound onto a cd may be lossy, sticking it on vinyl is just as lossy but in a diffrent way.

Re:Why do this?

[Chris Johnson]

"One of the reasons that LPs have a different sound is to do with the mastering process. The lower frequencies (bass) cannot be mastered at full volume and cut onto a record, because they'd cause the grooves to be too wide and literally make the needle jump out of the groove."

You're slightly confusing the RIAA equalization with elliptical filtering like on Neumann lathes- the RIAA equalization curve is more about attentuating surface noise. The elliptical filtering reduces out-of-phase bass content for the reason you mention.

"A lot of the "warmth" that supposed audiophiles go on about is probably "rumble" anyway (that is, the 50 or 60Hz drone that comes from the platter's electric motor and is passed to the needle, and other artifacts created by the rotation of the record in slightly less than perfect circles, etc)."

No no- rumble and noise isn't warmth, not even slightly. Part of the warmth of records is thanks to inconsistent noise floor amplitude- you have loads of noise at 30 hz or so, but the upper octaves are relatively very quiet, and the noise characteristic is strikingly intermittent (crackle) rather than uniform/continuous. You can hear past crackle, though it annoys- it doesn't have the capacity to mask that uniform noisefloors have, because it IS intermittent.

The other factor to warmth is shared by analog desks, and analog tape machines (combine all that with vinyl mastering and you have lots of it). It is simply nonlinearity- it turns out that purely mathematically accurate summing is sonically undesirable and sounds hard, sterile, and unconvincing. That's a common complaint with digital mixers. I suspect this is thanks to the fact that ordinary air is not perfectly linear either- it attenuates, and compresses, and it seems that people tend to enjoy hearing in their music nonlinearities similar to what would be heard through a large amount (50-100 feet) of air from a loud signal source.

So on the one hand to get 'analog magic tone' you have to really get rid of the tiny but annoying digital flaws, like quantization artifacts and the very dense and obnoxious plain-dither noise floor (which is removable through noise shaping and interaction with the D/A's reconstruction filter). Then, once you have an absolutely pure but over-sterile sound, you have to go after some of the excess energy that wouldn't be present in live music (heard at a distance) or LP. _Then_ you end up with a CD that sounds as warm and involving as the best records.

But just chasing 'accuracy' won't do it, because you'll talk yourself into giving up WAY too early, while your sound is still sound-blaster level. :)

Re:Why do this?

[Chris Johnson]

I think I've quantified warmth (have posted on this in another post). Combination of resolution and specific nonlinearities that mimic the behavior of air (which is itself nonlinear). Exaggerating the nonlinearity properly gives you warmth, and quite a lot of analog recording media have the right kind of nonlinearities.

I don't agree that CDs are so inadequate- it's possible to get lots of warmth out of them, and this is an old analog snob mastering tweak saying this. However, the fact is, most of what you've heard is wretched- and most of the people arguing with you couldn't engineer their way out of a wet paper bag- and in fact going for utter perfect distortionless accuracy won't get you all the way there either.

Be of good cheer. Things will get better for the CD. You can't do THAT much with the playback (though you can do a fair amount) but you would be astonished to realize how much it's possible to do with the data. Digital is so malleable. Simply sampling something is laughably primitive by today's standards- state of the art is more along the lines of 64-bit floating point math and processing, diabolically cunning wordlength reduction algorithms (MegaBitMax, and my MBM-inspired stuff), and digitally modeled transfer function irregularities (Crane Song HEDD)

I do open source versions of that kind of stuff, trust that I know what I'm talking about. I could master a CD for you and _make_ it sound as analog as you wanted, given reasonably good resolution for the input files.

Re:Why do this?

[fruey]

You're slightly confusing the RIAA equalization with elliptical filtering like on Neumann lathes- the RIAA equalization curve is more about attentuating surface noise. The elliptical filtering reduces out-of-phase bass content for the reason you mention.

I have read from several sources, and the logic seems right to me, that RIAA equalisation helps amplitude issues. Maybe you're right about surface noise, do you have any references? I'd be keen to read up on that.

No no- rumble and noise isn't warmth, not even slightly.

Another post in this thread seems to disagree, having played an identical CD track twice, in a blind test, adding vinyl noise (just a sample of hiss, cracks, pops and hum) to the track. Warmth is a subjective thing.

From personal experience, having ripped several of my old Beatles LPs and some classic Manitas de Plata and such, the "warmth" is somewhat conveyed on my ripped vinyl CDs. I just remove big clicks and pops and maximise volume, doing no noise reduction. They sound different than some of the remastered CDs I have of certain tracks on the albums, for sure.

As for "digital flaws" and all that, really we're reaching into good and bad DtoA territory. But I agree that digital this that and the other doesn't a great sound make. Adding excessive compression in all the latest pop rubbish, and you end up with CDs that sound just awful.

Re:Why do this?

[jetmarc]

> If you still don't believe me

Actually, I have no doubt that the new formats offer better quality, and that
audiophiles can distinguish them from the old formats. My impression however
is that the music industry is neither audiophile nor out to improve the world.
They produce what they think will sell best, no matter if it is of good sound
quality or bad sound quality. They point out that the new formats are better,
because this may attract new buyers. And people are used to pay higher prices
for newer/better formats than for the "same old stuff" they always had. In my
opinion this is the driving motor for the music industry to develop and promote
new formats. The higher quality is a side-effect, a necessary one to achieve
the set goals, but not the primary incentive of doing it.

Re:Why do this?

[WoeTooHice]

DJ cartridges aren't exactly quality cartridges.

They are made to track even when a gallon of beer is poured out over the record, but that's about it.

Re:Why do this?

[Hognoxious]

Q: What do you call a man who hangs around with musicians?
A: A drummer.

Re:Why do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

... it's that there's almost infinite room to improve the playback equipment ...

So, the reason that audiophiles like vinyl is that they can tinker and spend money and upstage one another?

Since vinyl has a much more "natural" representation of sound (I'm speaking physically, in that the grooves are mathematically quite similar to the air pressure fluctuations of sound), there's less of a tendency to lose information.

Sorry, sounds ridiculous to me.

I thought the correct way of ripping a vinyl was

[tamnir]

to scan it?

Other possibility

[mirko]

I personnally enjoyed the way this guy rips vinyls: by scanning them !

Re:Other possibility

[inaeldi]

Yeah, but did you hear the ripped mp3? You can barely tell what it is.

Re:Other possibility

[Derwen]

Yeah, but did you hear the ripped mp3? You can barely tell what it is.

Back before CDs came along, a UK childrens TV programme (Blue Peter) had on a guest who could 'read' the music between the grooves.
The presenters handed him a bunch of LPs (with the labels covered) and he proceded to correctly hum or sing all of the tunes on them.
Try doing that with your HD full of MP3s ;-P

- Derwen

In Your Cupboard?

[krystal_blade]

just the thing to help you bring all those LPs in the cupboard

Did I somehow miss something when I was growing up? Other than the occasional "Loose Plate", or "Little Platter" I've never seen any kind of LP in someone's cupboards.

(And I check... I'm weird like that.)

Not really hip on this whole LP scene, I guess. Can someone shed some light on this?

krystal_blade

Re:In Your Cupboard?

[B1ackDragon]

LP's can sound incredible, especially new ones (you might be suprised by how many bands you like produce LP's, go check out eBay or half.com). Also, they're just more fun to play, and have a "different", usually discribed as warmer, sound.

I think the goal here though is to save those old Pink Floyd/The Who records you still want to play every other day, but don't want to wear out from constant use. And who wants to go out and buy a whole new set of CD's?

Re:In Your Cupboard?

[B1ackDragon]

Ok, scratch that. Er, no pun intended there. I just did a quick check of half.com and couldn't easily find much vinyl. But I know ebay has some, and if you live in a much populated area check out used record stores. I've seen from Rage Against the Machine to Nirvana to System of a Down to Radiohead to NIN to Portished to AFI to ... all on vinyl.

Re:In Your Cupboard?

[krystal_blade]

It's just the whole storing them in the cupboard thing that's got me...

I mean, on a bad hangover day, I might just wind up piling on some eggs and bacon on top of ole Pink Floyd, and that just wouldn't do...

(It would probably make the eggs taste bad...)

krystal_blade

Re:In Your Cupboard?

[B1ackDragon]

Ha! As everyone knows, Pink Floyd makes every experiance better.

In so much as breakfast is an "experiance", I think your milage may vary.

Re:In Your Cupboard?

[tolan-b]

i have over 300 lps, all bought since 1995. have you not noticed 'dance music' (i think it's called electronica in the states, both are shit names). 99% of house, jungle, breakbeat, drum & bass, techno, trance, booty bass etc etc etc is released on vinyl first for djs.

with the advent of tools like final scratch, people are starting to switch, which means that there's a hell of a lot of vinyl to rip. Also, there's a lot of rare tunes, dubplates and white labels that have been deleted, and are only available on vinyl.

Re:In Your Cupboard?

[Latent IT]

Well, of course. Most DJ's still use vinyl...

Well, I've met one or two who really love the final scratch. So much so, it's a little freaky, actually.

Re:In Your Cupboard?

[zakezuke]

Vinyl is highly reccomended if you have kids as far as demonstrating how sound works. You really don't get that positive feedback system, nor can you use a catas needle in a styrophome mug to demonstrate the whole gramaphone concept. Ok, this will definatly cause your record to degrade.

Dispite the fact that I was born in the 70s... I only recently gained an apprication for vinyl. As a kid, when I bought records, it was cause I didn't have a tape player, and I treeted my vinyl poorly. I went with cassettes cause they were so much more portable, I could play them on my TI-99/4a data recorder, and they didn't get damaged too much if I didn't put them back in their cases.

But I was missing something actually. Amazingly enough vinyl is actually a really good standard. Part of my prejustice was the fact that I was a kid and was listening to the stuff on my folks record player, some wooden cabinate deal with cheepo tv tweaters, stereo that was screwy from date of purchace, and an 8track that the program button was screwy. And plus the fact that all the records I had at the time were hand me downs from family members, played to death.

When CDs came out, I was instently impressed... vast sound improvement vs cassettes I noticed right off the bat, no background hiss, and vs the vinyl players *I've experenced* no background 60 cycle hum. So I went for one of those, I was older and could afford one, at first a simple boom box, eventualy a dedicate amp and a multi-disk changer with remote, and then I had something resembling a servicable sound system.

While I'm not a true audiophile, there are those who believe that vinyl is a superior standard to CD. Recent experiments have show me personaly that it's good, it's pretty damn good. If you are lucky enough to have a decent turntable, with a decent cartrage, a new needle, proper alignment, and kick ass wires that don't pickup that annoying 60 cycle hum that most turn tables seem to be a victim of, they sound great, in fact, they do kick ass. Wether or not they have a more natural sound due to the fact that they are analog and have more descrete values between their max and minium range, or if the better cartrage / styluses pickup more noise giving it a warmer feel rather then accurate, I don't know.

Before I get too off the mark, it's reasonable to believe that an analog vinyl record can more accuratly produce natural sounds due to it's analog nature, that whole issue with descrete values in the human percieved range is easy enough to believe. I've never seen it personaly, but i'm willing to believe this. However, in order to achive maxium effect, you need a virgin pressing, virgin record, kick ass turn table, etc... etc... and ya know... I am not going to spend that sorta money on a sound system, nor am I going to spend hours tweeking with my stylus alignment. Forget that. CDs sound pretty damn good, mp3s at a high enough bitrate are adquate for portable audio. Even an old goodwill CD-rom drive will proved *great* audio at sub $20.00.

So to answer your question, no you are not weird like that. While some will argue that the vinyl standard is superior in quality, you can't argue about the entry level cost of CD vs vinyl. CD provides damn good sound for few bucks. CDs are damn cheep to produce dispite the phohographs simple technology to extract sounds from a disk.

But now we are getting stanards for digital audio that more then double the sample rate and 33% the bit width... it would be interesting to see how phonophiles feel about sound quality vs ye old snap crackle hiss humm.

Re:In Your Cupboard?

[plumby]

Why would you put eggs or bacon in your cupboards? Is this some kind of US/UK english thing? I have loads of records in a cupboard in my computer room.

Re:In Your Cupboard?

[Rick.C]

If you look in a cupboard in the U.S. you are likely to find ... CUPS! Cupboards are found in kitchens. Those same structures, when installed in other rooms, are called cabinets.

I keep my bacon and eggs in the fridge (short for "Fridgidaire" [sp?]) so they stay cold.

Re:In Your Cupboard?

[sydb]

One presumes Alan has taken a trip.

Re:In Your Cupboard?

[sydb]

I'm obliged to point out that in the UK, cupboards refer to those kitchen storage units, and also to storage units everywhere else.

Particularly common is the "cupboard under the stairs" or the "airing cupboard" where electric immersion heaters can often be found.

These are by no means restricted to the containment of cups.

Those clothing storage units that things hang in are called wardrobes. The thing with drawers is called a chest.

The word cabinet is generally restricted to the phrase "display cabinet" and includes those old glass-fronted storage units containing your mother's finest china and so on. The other common use of the word cabinet is in reference to a tradesmans storage unit, where he might keep his planes and rasps on different shelves.

Isn't the English language strange?

Re:In Your Cupboard?

[Anonymous Coward]

>Before I get too off the mark, it's reasonable to
>believe that an analog vinyl record can more
>accuratly produce natural sounds due to it's analog
>nature, that whole issue with descrete values in
>the human percieved range is easy enough to
>believe. I've never seen it personaly, but i'm
>willing to believe this.

Then wait until you see this, digital output is not a stepwise signal. it is rounded off using analog filters. Only it's accuracy is limited
(expressed in bits, or signal to noise ratio).

Lp's typically have an snr of 70 dB.
cd's above 90 dB.
bandwidth of an lp is about 17kHz.
cd's aproximately the same. (Nyquist only
says what's impossible, it does not say
that 20 kHz is possible, and how much the amplitude change is)

it is safe to say that using cd's you can reproduce sound more faithfully.
This is different than saying cd's sound better,
that's just a matter of taste.

Re:In Your Cupboard?

[AttillaTheNun]

Vinyl isn't better - just different. Try the following some time: rip a vinyl recording to digital (using the best turntable, A/D converter, etc - it won't matter). Then, compare it to the ripped file from a CD. Take a look at the waveforms and you'll see that the vinyl is much more compressed (there is much less dynamic range). "Warmth" aside, which one of these waves do you think more closely resembles the actual studio master? As mentioned in previous posts - vinyl masters undergo all kinds of butchering (EQ, compression, etc) in order to fit the medium without sounding like shit or jumping the needle. Many early CD issues of back catalogues were utter crap (hence the criticism of their harsh sound) because the vinyl masters were used as the source instead of going back and remastering from the original tapes. Vinyl masters are EQed quite differently from the original masters to compensate for the non-linear response of the medium.

Re:In Your Cupboard?

[plumby]

fridge (short for "Fridgidaire" [sp?])

I think you'll find it's short for refrigerator. Frigidaire is a brand name of a company that makes refrigerators.

Re:In Your Cupboard?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes vinyl is excellent if you have good hardware and take care of everything. I DJ and of course have a home setup with Technics 1200s (I use Shure M44G cartridges which are really damn good) and some of my records, especially ones within the last few years, some of them sound extremely crisp, you would have a hard time telling it was vinyl. Vinyl has a lot of "air" sound to it, it is just really smooth sounding after you've heard it through a decent setup.

Re:In Your Cupboard?

[ncc74656]

Those clothing storage units that things hang in are called wardrobes.

...as distinguished from closets, which the Brits don't seem to have discovered yet. (We brought a couple of wardrobes back from there...I think my parents have them in the garage now, as that's the only part of the house where they're needed. Now that I think about it, I don't think the house in Germany had closets either...maybe the lack of closets is a European thing.)

Re:In Your Cupboard?

[n1ckmrt]

Great post, but vinal can be just as cheap. I bought a second hand B&O turntable for less than 20$. It sounds excelent and looks fantatic (there is one permenantly in the design mueseum in london.) When I moved I broke the needle and had to try to get a replacement, the cartridge/needle I had been using was 500$ new! So turntables can be cheap as well!

Re:In Your Cupboard?

[Bush Pig]

Actually, I think they discovered water closets a ways back.

Re:In Your Cupboard?

[ncc74656]

Actually, I think they discovered water closets a ways back.

...otherwise known as toilets. Those aren't the closets of which I wrote. A closet is built into a wall (usually in a bedroom, though you can have them in hallways, bathrooms, etc.), usually has a door (sliding or hinged) on it, and usually has a bar for hanging stuff and a shelf for boxes and other stuff that can be stacked. If it's attached to a kitchen or is used mainly to store food, it's a pantry...otherwise, it's a closet. Sometimes it's just big enough to hold some clothes, while some others are big enough that you can walk around inside them. I've seen bedroom closets that were larger than the entire bedroom I had in England (a dinky 8x8' cube).

Re:In Your Cupboard?

[Hognoxious]

The other common use of the word cabinet is in reference to a tradesmans storage unit, where he might keep his planes and rasps

... and files. Would that make it a filing cabinet?

Re:Amazing new tech!

[Michael's a Jerk!]

Most people know how to connect line out to line in - but there are other issues. RIAA filtering (No, it's not evil - google it), wow and flutter filtering, among others.

You can't just hook line out to line in and expect a decent result. You need some decent software as well. this guy makes a living doing decent conversions. If it was truly as easy as you say, he'd be out of business.

Finally

[Highlordexecutioner]

I can get the Ethel Merman Disco Album and the Beatle Barkers Album

Re:Finally

[Lumpy]

I can get the Ethel Merman Disco Album and the Beatle Barkers Album

lightweight....

only a real audiophile has the holy grail of albums....

Leonard Nemoy's album... Nothing beat's hearing ol' spock ripping out "Proud Mary"...

Re:Finally

[Highlordexecutioner]

I would rather spare myself from that.

Although it would be better than Pat Boones rendition of Smoke on the Water.

Re:Finally

[chegosaurus]

fuck that mainstream shit! Give me "Sado/Maso Disco" or give me nothing!

Re:Finally

[dietlein]

Leonard Nemoy's album... Nothing beat's hearing ol' spock ripping out "Proud Mary"...

I think Spock singing the Bilbo Baggins song is much better than "Proud Mary"...

Download it here.

Re:Finally

[Hognoxious]

Although it would be better than Pat Boones rendition of Smoke on the Water.

I nearly drove off the road when I heard that the first time, I laughed so much. It is actually a good album, because it's so bad.

Re:Amazing new tech!

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of us actually know what gramofile does.

uhm...

[216pi]

... sorry, but what is a 'LP'? and what is venyl?

Re:uhm...

[REBloomfield]

er... it stands for Long Play. and they're those big 12" disks that music comes on. ah, my precious heavy metal collection :)

Request for Name Change...

[evilviper]

One more example of the analog hole in action, I guess ;)

I don't want to sound picky, but I REALLY think we need a new name to replace "analog hole". Something about it just doesn't sound right.

Re:Request for Name Change...

[soliaus]

One more example of the analog hole in action, I guess ;)

I believe it is now known as the "Anal. Hole".
my trolliness scares me...

Re:Request for Name Change...

[CowboyBob500]

Spiral Scratch?

The title of an old fanzine *cough* years ago. I always thought it described it perfectly.

Bob

Re:Request for Name Change...

[Anonymous Coward]

/me waits for the inevitable goatse link :)

Re:Request for Name Change...

[Anonymous Coward]

Anal Ogg Hole ?

Re:Request for Name Change...

[mbourgon]

No, it's somewhat fitting. Because without it, the RIAA would f*ck you over.

Re:Request for Name Change...

[DickBreath]

Analog is only a "hole" or loophole, or hole in the fence if you are trying to protect content.

We should stop speaking in their language.

Analog is a technology.

Re:Request for Name Change...

[gfody]

Ana('s) Log-hole!

Analog Hole?

[krystal_blade]

Is that some kind of exploit people use when you bend over?

A real "breech" of security, eh?

Nothing quite like being caught with your pants down...

I got it... That's where the whole "Ripping" comes from... Although the "vinyl" thing might be a bit too kinky... not to mention sweaty...

krystal_blade

MP3 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

> bring all those LPs in the cupboard into your MP3 collection

So the most difficult part will be to convert all those MP3 to Ogg after ripping

Digital

[billy_troll]

if you want better quality when you are recording vinyl, a high end pro turntable such as Numark ttx1, (http://www.ttx1.com/) stanton str8-150 (http://www.stantonmagnetics.com/alpha44/tt_str8-1 50.asp) does onboard digital, so you can get digital straight out into your computer. better than your onboard soundcard. (although you need a digital in....)

Re:Digital

[iainl]

Really?

Now, maybe I'm missing something, but why would any audiophile take an analogue signal off your precious vinyl and convert it to digital on the way to the amp, only to convert it back again. You might as well have those nice pre-digitized from the masters CDs to start with.

Unless, by "high end pro" you mean for DJs, of either the broadcast of performance kind. I can see why being able to play back vinyl to an optical out would be useful there. Which is fair enough, and will probably give you the best digital copy for your time as well as minimal inconvenience should you be needing to do so.

Personally, I just record vinyl to minidisc, as thats easy, and actually better than CD for portability (the main reason why I'd record a record in the first place).

Re:Digital

[LordLucless]

What the hell is trollish abot this?

Is some moderator on an ego trip or what?

Re:Digital

[zakezuke]

Is some moderator on an ego trip or what?

I agree... I mean the thread concept is a software application to record vinyl. I would *think* that a reference to the following links...

http://www.ttx1.com/ stanton str8-150
http://www.stantonmagnetics.com/alpha44/ tt_str8-1 50.asp .... would be informative my self, given the nature of the software product is vinyl ripping, why ever both ripping if you have a budget for a digital turn table. Hell, some of these pro units sample at 96kHz at 24bit though I'm too lazy to see the specs on these units this billy person reccomended.

And to respond to the question why would anyone bother play analog, to digital, only to be converted back to analog... one common issue with turn tables it the fact that the phono level output, even on some pro units, is so low that you get hum hiss and distortion from the very equipment you use to produce sound sound. Also the simple fact of it is many PA systems are going digital for this reason. It makes sence as CD a popular standard is digital, why screw around with conversion.

Now, doesn't do me much good as pro units are damn costly, i'll stick with my analog player. I'm not trying to impress anyone, just want to hear the music.

Re:Digital

[Lumpy]

does onboard digital, so you can get digital straight out into your computer. better than your onboard soundcard.

as soon as you can show me ANY home audio "digital" anything that can beat my Santa-Cruz in recording an analog signal to digital, I'll be amazed. NOTHING other than a $1000.00 pro recording sound card can beat it.

and yes, I do have the full testing results to prove it.


HERE

(Note, the origional website seems to be down... so the google cache will have to do until it comes back...)

Re:Digital

[D iz a n k Meister]

MiniDisc kicks ass. But why, oh why, did Sony cripple the file transfer capabilities???

It is my understanding that the only way to get an uncompressed audio file on to a minidisc is by recording it yourself. All files transfered from a CD through the provided software to the minidisc will be compressed.

So why can't I transfer any uncompressed audio files directly from the minidisc to the hard drive? They obviously cannot be unauthorized copies -- they're my recordings.

Re:Digital

[Lovepump]

Maybe I'm telling you something you alerady know, but those decks you mention are for DJ's. We often speed up or slow down tunes, to beat-match two tunes together. However, if you speed up a tune, greatly, you can easily end up chipmunking the vocals. The samplers in these decks compensate for this, and keep the vocals at the same pitch even though they are playing much faster.

A friend of mine uses them, and rates them greatly. I personally have never used them, as all of my DJ'ing is done with CD's and is mainly trance, so I don't have much of a vocals problem to deal with.

They do look sexy though, don't they! :)

Re:Digital

[morgus morphus]

well, minidisc always stores your recording in a compressed (ATRAC) format so what do you expect? ;)

What always amuses me is the number of people who claim to hate mp3 but love Minidisc... odd ;)

Re:Digital

[iainl]

"What always amuses me is the number of people who claim to hate mp3 but love Minidisc... odd ;)"

I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm like that because I prefer the sound of Minidisc. Its a cliché, but the lossy method used by Atrac is less hard on my ears than the flangey, scratchy noises that you get with mp3 loss.

More importantly, I only use Minidisc for my Walkman and for recording stuff off the radio. So absolute sound quality (one it reaches "good enough", which 128kbs mp3 isn't) is less important to me than the fact that a handful of discs is more convenient than hooking up a solid-state mp3 Walkman to a PC every time I want to change the music on there (and solid state mp3 players don't normally hold more than half an album's worth of music at 128kbs, which is stupid). Hard disk mp3 players like the Rio unit are larger than my minidisc player, and unless its the stupendously expensive iPod look horrible in any case.

Listening to music via my PC is fairly pointless - sound quality doesn't matter much when you've got a blimmin' great fan running in any case. I could also use my XBox which can not only rip CDs to its hard drive, but has a quieter fan than my PC and also does a far better job of a 5.1 surround mix than my amp's dsp modes.

mp3's only advantage is the ability to send it over the internet, which isn't something I do, so its not so much horrible as superfluous to my requirements.

Re:Digital

[billy_troll]

i think you may have the wrong end of the stick. i dont doubt that your soundcard is good- but this isn't home audio, the turntables are aimed at professional music users (venues, recording studios DJs, etc) doing onboard a-d on the turntable is a good thing because: 1- it removes the need for a RIAA preamp to condition the signals so that the levels are right. (although some turntables have line out now) 2- no matter what you say, there is going to be less noise a-d'ing offboard, and it reduces signal noise brought on by cables. oh, and these beauties cost at least $1000 each...... HTH

Re:Digital

[Anonymous Coward]

DURRR! formatting might help!
i think you may have the wrong end of the stick.

i dont doubt that your soundcard is good- but this isn't home audio, the turntables are aimed at professional music users (venues, recording studios DJs, etc) doing onboard a-d on the turntable is a good thing because:

1- it removes the need for a RIAA preamp to condition the signals so that the levels are right. (although some turntables have line out now)
2- no matter what you say, there is going to be less noise a-d'ing offboard, and it reduces signal noise brought on by cables.

oh, and these beauties cost at least $1000 each...... HTH

What I found Interesting....

[SkArcher]

was the results of the poll linked from the left hand side of the page. These indicate that the vast majority of people want either Hard copy of music only, or freebies only - indicating very little interest in Pay-per-Play and other forms of chargeable online music.

The results of the poll can be found here

Weird

[Kieckerjan]

> though it's interesting to note that even now
> some indie bands (notably the White Stripes with
> their recent Elephant album) are still releasing
> stuff on vinyl.

This sentence strikes me as slightly weird: why would I buy the latest White Stripes on vinyl if I was intending to convert it into mp3? Maybe because of the artwork? *shrugs*

Cool record btw, although De Stijl remains their best.

Re:Weird

[iainl]

Why buy something on vinyl when you want an mp3 version?

Probably because you're like me in that you like having vinyl for playing at home in the living room, but its not such a great band that you're prepared to give them double the cash for a CD or Mindisc as well just to be able to listen to it while you're on the move. My car just doesn't have a 6-disc LP changer, oddly enough.

Of course, there are times that I end up doing just that. The new Blur just had to be bought in the lovely book CD, normal CD for the other artwork and the gatefold double vinyl as well for instance, and I'll end up with every format that the new Radiohead comes out in too.

Re:Weird

[Derwen]

The new Blur just had to be bought in the lovely book CD, normal CD for the other artwork and the gatefold double vinyl as well for instance, and I'll end up with every format that the new Radiohead comes out in too.

I'll bet the RIAA just loves you :^)

Re:Weird

[iainl]

Well, yeah, I do go a little overboard for my favorite bands. I just love the packaging as well as the music, really.

Besides, there comes a point where you're buying enough copies of the genuine album that you absolutely refuse to feel guilty about having the odd live bootleg as well. They get enough of my cash off the proper releases to be able to cope with me occasionally owning things they don't want to release properly as well.

Re:Weird

[Derwen]

Well, yeah, I do go a little overboard for my favorite bands. I just love the packaging as well as the music, really.

It's funny how over and above the music itself, the LP gave an ideal 'package' - with its covers, sleeve notes and booklets, that people now miss as much as the sound. The CD-sized booklets that feature the libretto in 4 different languages per view that come with discs now are depressing to behold and a pain to use :-(

Besides, there comes a point where you're buying enough copies of the genuine album that you absolutely refuse to feel guilty about having the odd live bootleg as well. They get enough of my cash off the proper releases to be able to cope with me occasionally owning things they don't want to release properly as well.

Sorry, you're far to well-balanced and sensible to be on /. ;-P

- Derwen

Re:Weird

[Anonymous Coward]

Many a band still realease their albums via vinyl. The White Stripes get mention here because they sent out promo copies of "Elephant" on vinyl only, in an attempt to curb pre-release file sharing.

It didn't do much good. Maybe they should have send out glued-shut CD players like Pearl Jam.

Re:Weird

[Computer!]

I bet they just hate me.

When I'm not downloading mp3s, I'm buying records. Used records.

Re:Wow

[soliaus]

Have you not heard? OSX runs on open source. So HAH.

Re:Amazing new tech!

[The Blue Meanie]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's NOT as simple as line-out to line-in. Phonograph signal levels are notably lower than "standard" line-levels, such as CD, and require a pre-amp of some sort.

Holy crap!!!!

[teqron]

I have about 120 of those things in my cupboard. Hell I even have the turntables to put them on. Guess being a dj does have some advantage.

Re:Holy crap!!!!

[BasilBibi]

I know this guy in South London who from an early age ran 'clubs' and insisted that the DJs bring him copies of their play lists. He has over 350,000 12 inch singles that pretty much chart the entire dance era. Can you imagine browsing his collection. It fills the walls of three medium sized rooms!

Re:I thought the correct way of ripping a vinyl wa

[Kieckerjan]

Duh.. The other way around would be a much cooler hack, because it would be even more useless: software to convert an mp3 into a huge PNG of a well worn record, that plays just fine when fed back into this guys software.

iMic and Final Vinyl

[Davidge]

A similar, but non-linux solution is to use the extremely useful Griffon Technology iMic (USB audio) and their software, Final Vinyl on MacOS X (not everyone runs x86 hardware).

F.V. allows you to rip to wav or aiff and allows you to split tracks based on cue marks. It includes built in RIAA filtering and auto or manual gain and equalisation.

You just plug the iMic into you USB port on your Mac, plug the turntable directly into the iMic's input socket (well, ok, with an RCA to 3.5mm plug adapter), setup your preferred gain in F.V. and off you go.

Re:iMic and Final Vinyl

[djmurdoch]

The iMic also works with PCs. I use it on a laptop that doesn't have stereo input.

The software I like is Wave Repair (for Windows). Lots of control over your repairs.

Re:iMic and Final Vinyl

[Anonymous Coward]

If I had any mod points I'd mod you up. Thanks for posting this; I've been looking for some sort of analog ripping solution for my iBook for months. There's a guy in the area who has a Friday and Saturday night radio show where he plays (mostly unavailable) blues, R&B and soul records from the past 70 years or so. Now I can start recording his show and making my own...

Re:iMic and Final Vinyl

[commodoresloat]

I downloaded this and have been checking it out. Pretty cool, but to my knowledge OS X still lacks a good basic recording program that has the tools I've been looking for. I spin vinyl, and I plug my mixer directly into iMic. Final Vinyl would be perfect if it had automatic start/stop.... I don't want to have to worry about mouseclicks when I am on the decks. Until then any recording sessions require me to boot into OS 9 and run Coaster, which is great, but only runs on 9 (won't work on Classic either). I haven't used this just to rip vinyl, but if those are your needs and you don't mind OS 9 then it is perfect. Set the auto-start/stop recording and it will just record songs to separate files. When there is a version of Coaster for OS X my life will truly be complete.

The Need For a Long Patch Cord

[tres3]

This could actually be the program that gets me to dig out the hundred plus albums and my old turn-table from storage and start to work. Now I either need a really long patch cord or I'll have to find one of those old Radio-Shack pre-amps that allows you to hook up a turn-table to a standard Line-In plug. The impendance is not the same on a decent turn-table as it is on other things that you plug into stereos (like CD players, tape decks, etc.) and if I remember correctly you can barely hear the music without one. Hell, I'm not even sure that my current pre-amp (my system has seperate components: pre-amp, tuner, and three power amps for the front, center, and rear speakers) in the other room (yes I'm too lazy to get up and check right now) has a Phono connection. I know finding one of the old pre-amps from Radio Shack is probably out of the question - does anyone else remember the little black boxes with RCA in and RCA out jacks, a screw terminal for the ground wire that also comes out of turn-tables and a power cord? They didn't even have any knobs or switches!!! If I can't find my old one and my current system doesn't have a Phono in then I'll have to find an old stereo at Goodwill to plug the turn-table into. If my component pre-amp does then how much sound quality will I lose with a 30 foot patch cord? I've never plugged my computer and stereo together. How many other Slashdotters are going to have to figure out some creative wiring to make this work? For that matter how many other Slashdotters still have vinyl? I wonder if this trip down memory lane will induce any flashbacks! ;-)

Re:The Need For a Long Patch Cord

[fruey]

http://www.paia.com/riaa.htm

There ya go... see my post further up for more info

Re:The Need For a Long Patch Cord

[lateralus]

I buy at least as much vinyl as I do CDs. I used Baudline to tune the setup before creating a digital representation of the music on my hard disk in the form of an OGG file.

I have a number of artists; old and new on heavy vinyl. Stunning.

Try this interesting experiment. Play a CD and a vinyl record of the exact same track into Baudline's spectrum analyzer and notice the average DB across the high frequencies. Doing so with Fugazi's "End Hits" album showed me that the CD cuts off above 16Khz while the vinyl continues to reproduce the signal up to 20khz.

Most people can't hear above 16Khz but such signals create harmonics that extent down into the audible range.

Re:The Need For a Long Patch Cord

[James Youngman]

I know finding one of the old pre-amps from Radio Shack is probably out of the question - does anyone else remember the little black boxes with RCA in and RCA out jacks, a screw terminal for the ground wire that also comes out of turn-tables and a power cord?

I always use one with my amp, because it's better than the phono stage in my amp. They're called "phono stages" or "phono amplifiers" usually.

The one I use is a Musical Fidelity X-LPS, which I find works very well. You can plug it into your amplifier (which is how I use it for normal listening) and then connect your PC to the tape or MD output jacks of the amp to do the recording, or you could do it the other way and plug the X-LPS line-level outputs directly into the PC (I do it this way).

The critical thing when using Gramofile is to get the recording level right (this is the "igain" control in your audio mixer). If you get it wrong, you will saturate the A/D converter's input. This only needs to happen very occasionally to ruin the recording, and it normally happens at sractches. However, Gramofile, while it does a good job with scratches generally, can't deal so effectively with the aftereffects of saturating the soundcard's input (you tend to get a kind of echo of the crackle). So, even if it tells you that "0.0%" of the samples were at full-scale, check the actual number of full-scale samples.

The best way to do this in my opinion is to launch the ReZound audio editor. This will colour-code the full-scale regions of the sample file, enabling you to identify at a glance if you need to re-record.

Lastly, I suppose this is a rather obvious point, but the result of doing this will never be as good as the results you get listening to the original record. You can only lose information, not recover it. So, if you really care about those LPs, invest in a good turntable and cartridge! This doesn't have to be so expensive. I bought a second-hand LP12 earlier this year for less than 1/3 the price of a new one (obviously to do justice to it I will need to get a much better sound card than the one that comes on my PC's motherboard).

Re:The Need For a Long Patch Cord

[BigBadBri]

If you've got a portable Minidisc, you could try using it as a preamp.

I just put the turntable signal into the microphone input, and take the signal from the line out.

I do have to set the MD to record, and then press pause, but it's cheaper than getting a preamp as well...

It's not ideal, but it's probably as good as Radio Shack kit...

Re:The Need For a Long Patch Cord

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using this to rip lp's for about year now:

http://www.lpripper.com/

A windows product, but a *very* nice visual interface for splitting the tracks, one you'll appreciate if you're doing a couple hundred albums of the kind of music where silence doesn't always mark track breaks (like Pink Floyd or scottish pibroch).

Re:The Need For a Long Patch Cord

[Anonymous Coward]

I also use baudline for a little signal analysis.

It is a cool tool, even if it is only distributed in binary form. I notice that there was a new release in April 2003.

I also live and die by gnuplot.. You can generate reference waves, capture them and then plot them against your reference source to compare. This type of analysis showed just how piss poor the MP3 encoding on the Nomad III player/recorder is (I returned it - the software was junk).

Re:The Need For a Long Patch Cord

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder, however, if those signal components you observe off of the vinyl are actually part of the original recording or rather noise created by the needle dragging through the vinyl or some other noise artifact created by the analog vinyl fabrication process. As you said, most people can't hear above 16Khz -- so chances are you can't either. The fact that these sounds show up on your spectrum analyzer perhaps isn't good enough proof that this is part of the original recording. Perhaps it's some kind of distortion. As you've said, although inaudible, these frequencies create harmonics that have an effect on lower frequencies.

Maybe this whole "warmth" thing people associate with vinyl is just really harmonics created by the needle & vinyl noise artifacts after all.

Just my two cents.

I always find it interesting that people that most frequently like to use terms like "warmth" and "headroom" almost without exception have never studied that fundamentals of signal analysis (Nyquist, Fourier, etc.).

Sure vacuum tubes produce a more "warm" sound -- those damned things run pretty hot.

Re:The Need For a Long Patch Cord

[steveg]

Not even close.

The amplification part is not nearly as important as the equalization part. LPs have some serious frequency alteration going on in the recording process, with the expectation that the phono stage of your amplifier will be backing that out. If you don't do that, you'll get sound, but it won't sound at all like it's supposed to.

If you want it to sound like it was recorded (correct bass, etc.) you have to have a *phono* preamp, not just a preamp. If that doesn't matter to you, then knock yourself out...

Re:The Need For a Long Patch Cord

[phliar]

Most people can't hear above 16Khz but such signals create harmonics that extent down into the audible range.

Sorry, harmonics go up, not down. You can claim that the higher frequencies "somehow" add in to the experience and make for better listening, but you can't use fake science or math to back it up.

I listen to a lot of vinyl, and absolutely believe that good vinyl sounds amazingly good, better than most people know (because they've only heard crap). However a good CD sounds even better. (The dynamic range -- wow!) However, to experience these levels you need not just good vinyl and CDs and expensive hardware, but also a quiet room. Most listening environments are so noisy it doesn't really make much of a difference.

Re:The Need For a Long Patch Cord

[lateralus]

Sorry, harmonics go up, not down. You can claim that the higher frequencies "somehow" add in to the experience and make for better listening, but you can't use fake science or math to back it up.

Harmonic frequency: "Any acoustic frequency that is an integral multiple of the fundamental frequency". "Any" would include lower as well as higher frequencies all which are harmonics of the the fundamental frequency even if they were not produced by it. If they were produced by the high frequency they would be vanishingly small.

BTW any scientific theory that is not falsifiable is not real science. This is why psychoanalysis is not a science.

Re:The Need For a Long Patch Cord

[KenSeymour]

Which integer do you multiply a frequency by to get a lower frequency?

I'm just curious.

Re:The Need For a Long Patch Cord

[lateralus]

Main Entry: integer Pronunciation: 'in-ti-j&r Function: noun Etymology: Latin, adjective, whole, entire -- more at ENTIRE Date: 1571 1 : any of the natural numbers, the negatives of these numbers, or zero.

Seems you will go to any lengths to try and prove that a pile of bits contain more information than a continous audio signal.

It;s really simple. Vinyl is capable of making more waves of pressure move through the air. These little waves cause objects (including your ear) to resonate.

They also interfere with lower frequency waves of air. Integers like 2 do not interfere with intergers like 4. A 2hz wave WILL interfere with a 4hz wave. The number 2 does not have amplitude or phase, a wave of air does, albiet reletive to the observer or another wave.

As much as I'd like to regress into relearning wave theory again this will be my last post on the subject. I will give you the honor of having the last word.

I will also go back to my books about harmonics since you have managed to cast the shadow of doubt in my mind. I'll have to re-read the bit about multiplying a positive number by 0 NOT making the number smaller. This of course has nothing to do with little waves of air.

Re:The Need For a Long Patch Cord

[commodoresloat]

Not to start a vinyl flamewar, BUT... Good, clean vinyl, coupled with a good needle, sounds better to me than CD. I'm no sound expert and I don't feel my hearing is especially sensitive; but I am a DJ and I listen to both formats. I have sync'd the same song on CD and vinyl in a good listening environment as an experiment, so I can easily go back and forth between the two to hear differences. Vinyl sounds slightly better to me, and everyone I've done this experiment for has agreed with me.

Now, the good needle part of this is essential. I did this experiment with both Shure M-447s and Ortofons, which are typical higher-end DJ cartridges; there are better sounding cartridges for the high end home user. In any case, if you are comparing CD to vinyl on old needles or on your old Radio Shack all-in-one stereo from the early 80s, the comparison is not fair.

Re:The Need For a Long Patch Cord

[phliar]

I actually prefer vinyl.

Good, clean vinyl, coupled with a good needle, sounds better to me than CD.

Pretty much what I'm saying too: it's not the case that all experiences of listening to CDs are better than all LPs. They overlap -- a lot. I agree that good vinyl on a good turntable, with good speakers in a quiet room is fantastic. A poorly mastered CD on the same setup would be disappointing. But get an equivalent CD, well recorded and mastered -- it's my opinion that the CD is going to be better. I don't want to make an unfair comparison of crappy cartridges with a high-end CD player.

I listen to jazz. (I play the trumpet.) I listen to a lot of vinyl, and I know how wonderful it is. I think a CD can be better, but really, the difference is not huge. Far more important to get good speakers and listening room than worry about CD vs. LP.

One factor that's important for me, and why I like vinyl more than CDs: I like the experience. Since I have to get up and flip the side or put something else on every fifteen or twenty minutes, I end up sitting on the floor, surrounded by records, listening and reading the liner notes; completely immersed. With a CD, there's one hour of music ahead and it's easy to get distracted.

Re:The Need For a Long Patch Cord

[Bush Pig]

Actually, although "warmth" is meaningless drivel, the term "headroom" has a real, technical, meaning (discussed at great length above by a number of correspondants). It's to do with how much capacity your amplifier has to deal with high-amplitude transients from its current volume setting without clipping or requiring a limiter.

Re:The Need For a Long Patch Cord

[Bush Pig]

Well ... some harmonics (notably those produced by percussion instruments such as drums and bells) aren't integral multiple of the fundamental frequency.

Re:Amazing new tech!

[Technician]

A good quality 70's or 80's vintage receiver will do the trick taking care of the low level and RIAA equalization. Most have a magnetic cartridge phono input and will provide line out to the record jacks for the tape deck. If you have the turntable, you also have the receiver don't you?
Unless you need to do lots of scratch and pop filtering, CDex is a great program for ripping both CD's and Vinyl. Under tools, use Record. It works great.

So what?

[n3k5]

Just remember - a new record will sound far, far better then a CD.

A digital file with a high enough bitrate will also sound far, far better than a CD, no matter how old it is. Just remember -- you don't have to restrict yourself to 44.1KHz, 16bit on-board sound. In fact, many people buy good soundcards for the sole purpose of digitising their records the very first time they play them back, to have a non-degrading copy before using them for DJing or just normal playback.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

and how do you propose you obtain this super high bitrate digital file ? you cannot create what doesnt exist, upsampling and the like is a waste of time if you are ripping from CD

Re:So what?

[rudiger]

you totally missed his point. he is referring to digitizing records (read: LPs), and not limiting one's self to the 44.1KHz, 16bit or whatever standard of CDs

Re:So what?

[kinnell]

you don't have to restrict yourself to 44.1KHz

Actually even 44.1kHz is overkill for audio recordings. The highest frequency that someone with excellent hearing can pick up is closer to 14kHz. CDs are capable of digitising frequencies up to ~22kHz. Increasing the bandwidth of the recording will not make it sound any better at all.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm... I think he means a 44.1Khz sampling rate, not the maximum frequency. 44,100 16 bit samples per second.

Re:So what?

[aziraphale]

Well, the usual rough figure quoted for top-end of human hearing is 20KHz, and vinyl addicts will go on about harmonics as well, but you're ignoring the crucial importance of stereo

44.1KHz gives you two 22.05KHz sampling channels, i.e., CD stereo.

Re:So what?

[proj_2501]

CDs have 44100 32-bit samples per second (16 bits per channel). What you describe would only be able to reproduce frequencies up to 11kHz, and that just plain sucks.

Re:So what?

[aziraphale]

well, there's a complex relationship between sampling frequency, and the maximum reproducible frequency. Imagine a 44 KHz wave, and sample its magnitude 44000 times a second (digital recording is more or less a case of grabbing a number representing the sound pressure at each sample point). You'll end up taking a sample at the same pint on the waveform every cycle, and you'll lose the waveform shape completely. Now, sample a 22KHz waveform at the same rate, and you'll find yourself picking up alternating sample values. You'll have a crude approximation of the waveform. The fidelity of the digital recording to the original waveform obviously improves as the frequency drops.

Re:So what?

[kinnell]

The reason that CDs are sampled at 44.1kHz is because to sample a signal, you have to use a sample rate greater than twice the maximum frequency of the signal being sampled. It has nothing to do with stereo. Both stereo channels have to be sampled at this rate, or you end up with 2 11MHz signals which will sound bad to just about anyone. The point is that increasing the sampling rate will not increase the sound quality, because you can't hear the extra frequencies that you are recording. This also applies to harmonics.

Re:So what?

[admbws]

With all due respect, you are completely wrong.

Hertz (Hz) is a unit that in all practicalities measures "times per second".

The number 44.1kHz used to signify sample rate means that the sound is sampled 44,100 times per second. It has nothing to do with frequency of the sound - which is how many sound waves per second.

You should read the HowStuffWorks question, Is the sound on vinyl records better than on CDs or DVDs?.

Re:So what?

[n3k5]

you totally missed his point. he is referring to digitizing records (read: LPs), and not limiting one's self to the 44.1KHz, 16bit or whatever standard of CDs

You could hardly be more wrong; you missed my point. He really referred to digitising LPs and not limiting oneself to sample rates which are standard for CDs and cheap sound cards, but in a way that implied that every digital rip would go onto a CD-Audio and could never be of higher quality. I just pointed out that this implication is totally wrong.

Re:So what?

[aziraphale]

> 11kHz, and that just plain sucks.

Indeed. As does my brain on zero caffeine. Halved the wrong number. See another of my replies on this thread for some demonstration that I do know something about audio sampling :)

Re:So what?

[miskatonic alumnus]

Actually, 44,100 has everything to do with the frequency of the sound. Do you think that value was chosen at random? Increasing the sampling rate gives (at least) two results: 1) Increasing the maximum reproducible frequency and 2) Increasing resolution. As for 1, consider this: Suppose you want to save some space, and digitize a song at 10 Hz. There is no way that that frequency can reproduce a 400 Hz tone. Get it? Bump bump bump.

Re:So what?

[clifyt]

Any you just discribed why we use 44khz. Have ya ever looked at Nyquest? Ya double the rate of sampling to get an accurate response. Meaning that a human that has had their ears perfectly trained, had the right genes, and just came out of an ear cleaning session can hear a 22khz (and seldomly -- just a bit higher).

Then again, what happens in pratice is to be debated. High quality FFTs show that 44khz with most consumer crap aliases at the high end...thus you have folks claiming 96khz is MUCH better -- why? Because with larger headroom, you can get much cleaner recordings of the material up to 22khz because physically, the cheap stuff doesn't have to be much better than the 44khz stuff, it just has to start aliasing a little later.

On quality equipment with great ADDA filters and DSP, 44khz is more than you need. My Kurzweil K2600 outputs at 44khz and local engineers are convinced its MUCH higher. It also costs 3x what most synths do :P

BUT if you could make something with cheaper materials and not worry about the quality control as much because you knew that no one was going to hear it, why not? So folks started in with 96khz which can actually be made rather cheaply (ya pick up the MAudio Audiophile 2496 for around $150 or less) and while it doesn't have as good of materials as some of the rest, the technology renders the problems out of the human range of hearing, whilst a consumer level card at 44khz would DEFINATELY have to deal with a lot more quality control to get to the same level.

So -- yeah 44khz is all one really needs to accurately reflect sound under ideal circumstances. As this isn't going to happen for most consumers, doubling the frequency again will flaten out the spectrum for you a lot more at a cheaper cost.

Personally, I'm sticking with my 48khz equipment...it sounds great and I had to pay for that quality...I just need to get some stickers slapped on them that claim to have been moded for greater range and no one would know the difference :-)

Re:So what?

[tzanger]

Both stereo channels have to be sampled at this rate, or you end up with 2 11MHz signals which will sound bad to just about anyone.

OK I know that harmonics can play into the overall sound by beating with each other, but I would be hard-pressed to believe that there is enough energy in the harmonic content of any musical instrument (voice or otherwise) up around 11MHz. Hell I bet there's nothing of significance above 50 or 60kHz.

Yes, there is a tongue-in-cheek here...

Re:So what?

[Sunda666]

not THAT complex... acording to Nyquist,

2 x maximum fequency reproducible without distortion == sample rate.

thats why you always lowpass before digitizing, if not the harmonics
would bite your ass.

cheers.

Re:So what?

[alanh]

That HowStuffWorks article is wrong. It completely ignores the reconstruction filter in CD/DVD or D/A converter. Any well engineered D/A system will capture ALL of the information up to 1/2 the Nyquist frequency assuming you don't exceed the dynamic range. The reconstruction filter turns the stairstep output into a smooth analog representation and is a necessary step in any good D/A.

Even though PCM is limited to 65536 discrete steps, this amounts to over 90 Db of dynamic range in a properly dithered recording. Although a record does have a continous representation, it is limited to something on the order of 50-60 Db of dynamic range because of background noise and the physical limitations of the vinyl, the cutter, and the playback medium.

Continuous does not equal infinite!

Re:So what?

[h2odragon]

14kHz? not so. more like 25kHz. A person with normal hearing can usually discern 20kHz. Many people can't immediately tell a difference between 15k and 20kHz tones, but given a few tries they can tell that they're different even if they couldn't say which was higher.

Re:So what?

[alanh]

> 1/2 the Nyquist frequency

I mean:

Up to the Nyquist frequency (i.e. 1/2 the sampling rate).

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're missing the point moron, the post he was responding to had the sample rate confused with the physical wavelength of the sound (aka the frequency). He was just informing the previous poster that 44.1 refers to sample rate and not the audible frequency.

Genius...

Re:So what?

[Snork Asaurus]

I think that one of the reasons that many consumers of popular music do not appreciate the inherent (potential) audio superiority of the CD medium versus the LP is that the industry has been negating the advantages of increased dynamic range by compressing everything to death and even allowing clipping to occur. I've posted these before, but they're a worthwhile read:

The Death of Dynamic Range

CD "Hypercompression" Caught in the Act

I'm old enough to give this to you first hand: When CD's first came out, few would argue that they sounded better than LP's in terms of frequency response and dynamic range. The again, the North American record industry had been doing a lousy job mastering and manufacturing LP's ("cut the quality, we need profits!"), which gave rise to: 1) people who would pay for (costly, but superior) European pressings and (more costly, but even better) Japanese pressings of a given LP; 2)special high quality re-mastering outfits like Mobile Fidelity and Sheffield Lab that produced sonically superior remastered LP's on higher quality (i.e., less noisy) vinyl that sold for more money.

There almost seems to be a lather, rinse, repeat cycle going on with CD's.

Re:So what?

[Reziac]

Got any advice on what sound card and recording software? I've got mainly vinyl LPs (very few CDs) and considering their age, the next time they go on a turntable, I want it to be for the purpose of making a digital recording (with minimal loss of sound quality). That'll get archived, tho a conversion to MP3 is good enough for everyday.

My ear can tell vinyl-to-MP3 files from CD-to-MP3. The vinyl-origin files have better richness even at the same bitrate.

Re:So what?

[Reziac]

Ignoring the confusion over who posted what [g] there's really no reason you couldn't do a full-data rip from vinyl, then burn that data as a music CD with no compression and no clipping. You might only get one or two songs on a CD, but if the main object is preserving the complete data, so what? CDRs are cheap. Vinyl is often irreplaceable.

BTW, the fact that even the best CD audio mastering still loses data (as compared to vinyl or studio-quality tape) is why Brian Wilson wants to re-release all the Beach Boys CDs as music DVDs.

Re:So what?

[miskatonic alumnus]

Learn some physics! He said the sampling rate has nothing to do with the frequency of the sound. And, like I said, it does. What's so hard to understand about that? Of course it's hard to take someone seriously who resorts to name-calling. If my statement was erroneous, correct me. Otherwise, shut the fuck up, COWARD! (Not that I'm calling names, but that's how you posted.)

Re:So what?

[carlos_benj]

I had to read your post several times before I comprehended it fully. I'm still kind of fuzzy about "normal hearing". It's darn distracting having to listen to the pixels refresh on my monitor....

Re:So what?

[inaeldi]

Welcome to Central Industrial. We ARE the future.

Completely off-topic, but that's an awesome song.

Re:So what?

[Chris Johnson]

You can't take rumble 50 db down and say from that, that nobody can hear high frequency overtones 50 db down. It's not a uniform noise floor by any stretch of the imagination (besides, Fletcher-Munson will tell you that you'll have a hard time hearing 30 hz content that low even if it was just 30 db down)

Records have a very complicated, non-uniform, non-continuous noise characteristic that could have been invented just to be heard through- if you had to pick a place to put a -50 db background noise you couldn't do better than to put it in the bottom octave, and intermittent crackles are annoying but continuous uniform noise is far more opaque.

Good call on the reconstruction filter, though- you can actually exploit that to deliver way better than 90 db dynamic range on CD. Once I made a wordlength reduction that could return signals accurately at -150 db off 16 bit... as long as they were subsonic, because the noise-floor was radically tilted and burned lots of error energy way in the extreme highs. Tuned properly it could hit -150 or -160 db down around 20 hz.

I ended up going with a different approach inspired by the output behavior of Alexey Lukin's MegaBitMax dither, and doctoring it so it released error energy in tiny intermittent bursts, very like vinyl noise actually :)

Re:So what?

[Hognoxious]

You're the moron. How is being half of a number totally unrelated to it? Seems a pretty direct relationship to me.

I did

[Konster]

I did this last November using a trial edition of Sound Forge and their lp restoral plug in.

It took a few hours' worth of fiddling (even with the plug in), but I finally constructed a digitized version of a recording made in the late 40's and it sounded excellent, save for the last disk which had an off center hole. It had varying pitch, which I was still able to tone down a bit.

The rest of the lps in the collection were in very good condition, but still had poor sound attributed to its 50+ year age.

I am unfamiliar with the results that the professionals produce, but even a simple trial version of Sound Forge can work wonders on old LP's for merely the cost of electricity and a blank cd.

Re:I did

[Two99Point80]

...save for the last disk which had an off center hole. It had varying pitch, which I was still able to tone down a bit.

If the center spindle of the turntable is removable, position the record so that the pressing is centered. It's easy to check this visually by spinning the record fast with the turntable switched off.

This'll also help with the occasional record which is pressed off-center.

Re:I did

[Col. Klink (retired)]

> he last disk which had an off center hole.

Was this by any chance a recording of the Folksmen?

Re:I did

[Anonymous Coward]

which had an off center hole.

Man, if ever I saw a comment just begging for a goatse.cx link...

Re:Amazing new tech!

[Davidge]

You can't just hook line out to line in and expect a decent result. You need some decent software as well. this guy makes a living doing decent conversions. If it was truly as easy as you say, he'd be out of business.

Well he sure as hell doesn't make a living from Web Design, that site is just plain aweful.

Next Illegal Project: How to Rip FM Radio

[ch-chuck]

Be sure to give your vinyl a good cleaning, that often helps tremendously. I just use warm soapy water and a new, clean toothbrush, and try not to get the label wet. Esp the ones you pick up at the Salvation Army store usually need crap cleaned out of the grooves.

Re:Next Illegal Project: How to Rip FM Radio

[Anonymous Coward]

And then rinse with distilled water (available at most grovery stores) - esp if you have well or hard water.

A friend has a reverse osmosis (RO) water maker. That would make the final rise easy.

Medium reliability

[sh0rtie]

At least my vinyl will be playable in 100 years, can we say the same about harddrives and compact discs ?

personally when i buy music it will always be on vinyl, i get a fairly robust product,no DRM, great artwork and will last with good care forever
(having already 20,000 from 20years of dj'ing might sway my opinion somewhat ;)

Re:Medium reliability

[shunnicutt]

Whoa. Down, boy. Isn't the point of this software that you can rip you vinyl to a digital file, thus having both formats to enjoy? I don't know about you, but I love having music on my iPod.

My take on this software (since I can't read the article) isn't that mp3's are better than vinyl. It's that if you have vinyl, you can make mp3's.

Reliability? Since you have vinyl records, you're in an excellent position to rip them to mp3 and see which is still around in 100 years. Not arguing for one or the other, just saying it would be an interesting experiment. Besides, aren't backups great?

As for DRM, I agree with you. However, redbook cd's are also what I call "future-proof". So long as a mechanism exists to play them, nobody can tell me what I can do with them, Congress willing and the creek don't rise.

Re:Medium reliability

[sh0rtie]

don't get me wrong im all for using mp3 as a backup for the vinyl but doesn't software like this does encourage the user to replace the wax for the mp3 ?, in some peoples eyes if i have a digi copy there is no need for me to keep the vinyl any longer therefore discarding a potentially more reliable medium for a less reliable one (if CD rot ,magnetic reliability) etc is

using both ie backing up the vinyl onto mp3 so i do not need to wear out the vinyl is a great idea but alas i fear people will choose to replace rather than backup

interestingly enough the BBC have had trouble with videodiscs where the technology has become so old they cannot read them, lets hope the same doesnt happen to MP3

Re:Medium reliability

[Scooter]

You're probably right, but once you have the data in digital format, the reliability of the media is not so important - just make sure you shift it to new media before the old wears out.

Re:Medium reliability

[jgerman]

hope the same doesnt happen to MP3

Errr, it can't. We're not talking about formats here. You have the same exact problem when dealing with records. The information stored on those in a particular format as well. The problem is the medium, not the message.

Given that, if you're looking for duration, then store your music in whatever format you choose on something more durable than records, but more accessible than cd's. Something like a cartridge with pins. At that point regardless of whether technology moves on or not, you'll always be able to dump the data as long as you know what the pins are.

Re:Amazing new tech!

[zakezuke]

Ya know I don't know of the details my self, but in short you are correct. For those of us with vintage amplifiers, we have phono jacks in order to amplify the input we get from the magnetic turntable cartrage. I would *think* phono level output is similar to microphone in some aspect, but would need to research the issue.

{side note, i've heard reference to 1v line level, and reference to the empeg using either 1v for stereo output, and 4v for quad output, but really don't have any clue}

There are exceptions to this rule, many turntables made now a days offer line level output by default, bassicly assuming that your recently purchaced amp doesn't have phono level inputs, which is a safe bet. Audio technica is among one company who produdes such an animal.

As far as getting a good phono preamp, well I don't know what's good to be honest. I'm just using mine on my "made in the 80's when quality started to decline" amp.

In theory radioshack (I refer to them only cause they did support vinyl till like last year or so) offered a serviceable pre-amp for like the $20 range to give you some idea about the entry level costs if you have an existing traditional turn table.

Re:Amazing new tech!

[Anonymous Coward]

RIAA filtering? Thats what a phono-stage is for! You use the line signal from that, not from the 'table itself!

You're off topic

[n3k5]

and how do you propose you obtain this super high bitrate digital file ? you cannot create what doesnt exist, upsampling and the like is a waste of time if you are ripping from CD

And another one who's compelled to start babbling about CDs upon reading about ripping records. Look, my parent said if a record's audio quality is higher than a CDs, there's no point in ripping it to CD. I merely reminded him that you don't have to put your rip on a CD-Audio. Absolutely no one was talking about ripping from CD.

Another worthwhile program

[SIGBUS]

Last fall, I used "Gnome Wave Cleaner to clean up the sound from a bunch of LP's that I had recorded. I was quite happy with the results.

Re:Amazing new tech!

[cscx]

This is good. And as you can see, it's no $20 pre-amp.

Oops

[SIGBUS]

That link for GWC should be here.

What I do...

[Tronster]

I DJ on both vinyl and CD, but prefer spinning CDs. The problem is that all the "good tracks" can still only be purchased on vinyl.

After reading the Tom's Hardware guide on the TerraTec DMX 6 Fire I knew that would be the next sound card to purchase. It has a phono-in as two RCA jacks, and comes with decent* software to clean up scratchy vinyl (*- Yet doesn't clean up RIAA filter artifacts. See below.)

Ripping vinyl is not intuitive though. I made a few rips via Sound Forge and wondered why all my bass wasn't coming through. The card had on-board RIAA filtering, which caused other problems. The solution: Download the RIAA Direct-X plug-in and run the filter on the WAV after it has been captured.

The RIAA filter itself works most of the time, but about one in every 6 records I rip, the filter creates very loud, 1 to 2 sample, "popping" artifacts, that need to be manually removed. I don't know if it's the filter itself or the implementation...either way I just wish it wasn't it didn't have that effect.

Once that is done, normalize to a good level and you're done. The process takes about 20-45 minutes per record. It's a pain, but spinning the end result on CDJ-1000 makes it all worth it.
--

Re:I thought the correct way of ripping a vinyl wa

[LNN]

Duh.. The other way around would be a much cooler hack, because it would be even more useless: software to convert an mp3 into a huge PNG of a well worn record, that plays just fine when fed back into this guys software.

Yeah, that sounds like a cool project for the first few days of the summer! Thanks for giving me the idea!

Interestin

[sebi]

I would like to check out the page, but the Slashdot effect was faster. I actually went back to buying records instead of CDs a while ago. With all the copy protection schemes on new CDs I have to rip them via line in anyway. With a record it's basically the same amount of work, but I don't support copy protected discs this way.

A nice side effect is that buying music became fun again. Browsing records and then putting them on the store's listening turntable is somehow a nicer experience than pressing a couple of buttons on a CD player. I now have a couple of albums that I didn't buy because of copy protection and couldn't be happier. Of course CDs are easier to handle, and there is none of the static and other little noises you can get with a record. But for me music never was about the highest possible sound quality.

Re:Interestin

[bheading]

But a typical vinyl album is never the highest possible sound quality either. Read some of the highly informative contributions earlier. It is not simply a matter of recording the final work and dumping it onto LP for mastering. You have to cut out large chunks of the sound so that a playable LP can be cut, and so that the stylus will actually stay in the groove. You also have to use different levels of equalization depending on whether you're at a part of the music which is near to the centre of the vinyl or near to the outside edge as the angle that the stylus hits the groove is different. And the more music you include on the vinyl, the more sound has to get cut out.

I have nothing against people who have a preference for the "vinyl sound", as long as they are aware that what they are getting is a dim shadow of the final recorded work, which sounds far removed from what was actually recorded on the final master tape in the studio. The intermediate master used to create the LPs is considerably compromised (indeed it was these compromised LPs that were used to press the first CDs - that is why so many of them had to be "remastered" to eliminate the compromise stage). Ask any LP cutting engineer about what he/she has to do to the master tape before it can be used to press an LP. *sigh* I guess there'll always be the rustic-fashionable people out there who will try to claim that dragging a carefully calibrated polished needle endlessly through molded vinyl is "better" than an optical micrometer-precision laser pickup system.

BTW it's very silly to complain about the copy protection on CDs in this context. If you're happy enough to copy vinyl, you can similarly dub CDs simply by hooking your recording device to the analogue output of the CD player.

Re:Interestin

[sebi]

Did you even read what I posted originally?

I said:
Of course CDs are easier to handle, and there is none of the static and other little noises you can get with a record. But for me music never was about the highest possible sound quality.

You react by writing two paragraphs, trying to refute some claims I never even made in the first place. I believe everything you said about vinyl records, and never claimed otherwise. I don't care about the best possible sound. I care about music. And that is what I said originally.

Then you continue with this little gem:
BTW it's very silly to complain about the copy protection on CDs in this context. If you're happy enough to copy vinyl, you can similarly dub CDs simply by hooking your recording device to the analogue output of the CD player.

I don't know about you, but I have been faithfully ripping every new CD I bought to MP3 for years. Then the music industry decided that I no longer should be able to do that comfortably. By copy protecting the CDs they force me to record the analogue signal via the line in of my computer. The exact same technique I have to use If I want to rip from vinyl. The difference is one of personal philosophy. I decided not to buy crippled media and therefore went back to vinyl. Silly? If you say so,

Re:Why do this? Brothers in Arms

[Anonymous Coward]

Brothers in Arms WAS digitally mastered. Wasn't that it's original claim to fame? (Aside from being a great album) It was the first to go all digital from recording to CD...

Or am I out to lunch?

There's still music that's vinyl only.

[phaxkolumbo]

There's lots of (quality) music released today that's released only on vinyl. DIY punk/noise, techno, electro and house, to name a few.

Personally (as a wannabe-DJ) I buy vinyl instead of CD (as a form of protest?), and preferably from small labels. And I've got a collection really old 7" artifacts and oddities. It's a big plus to get the tracks in mp3 (or ogg), for archival and sharing purposes (which I almost consider the same). After all, one day, you might not find a working turntable anymore...

Yes, I believe it's okay to share stuff that's limited to 500 pressings, sold out and almost impossible to find. There are actually labels that release their music on vinyl and free mp3 download.

The point of this post? Not really any, just wanted to let you know what this software might be used for.

Re:There's still music that's vinyl only.

[zakezuke]

The point of this post? Not really any, just wanted to let you know what this software might be used for

Chances are, the software would be used by people who own vinyl, but don't want to deal with the fact that the media is bulky, the player is bulky, and the simple mater of the media degrading with each use. Not to speak of those who own vinyl who would enjoy getting it on CD to play in their car, rather like we did back in the 1980's with cassettes in the car.

As far as rare stuff... chances are it's ok with the artist, but it's best to ask first. Usually if there is no more comercial value in pressing new copies, they usually are most hip to the idea, but often require you put their contact info in the file tags.

Re:There's still music that's vinyl only.

[Hao Wu]

There are actually labels that release their music on vinyl and free mp3 download.

Such as........ I love techno, but I'm sick of buying only John Digweed, Crystal Method, etc, on CDs. I love those guys, but I'd like a little variety, at a price I can afford. And though I believe in digital, I think vinyl is fun to play as well.

Re:There's still music that's vinyl only.

[radish]

The vast majority of decent house/trance/prog stuff never comes out on CD, or if it does it's (literally) a year or more later. There are loads of small (and some not so small) labels churning out fantastic music on 12", and they're simply not moving to CD becuase their audience (primarily DJs) want vinyl.

Re:There's still music that's vinyl only.

[Reziac]

In your collection of 7" oldies, you don't happen to have one by a "Christy" (sp?) which sounds a lot like the classic version of "Summertime" but more downbeat? I don't remember the title, only that it's of pre-1970s vintage and might have been a private no-label pressing.

Speaking both as one-time DJ and listener, I definitely prefer the richer *sound* of vinyl. Young'uns can argue the virtues of CDs all they want, but they just don't know what they're missing.

I was a skeptic too...

[Anonymous Coward]

But a few months back I cleaned the thick dust off the turntable and played some records, and they sound much better than CDs. At least it sure seemed that way to me.

-- ac at home

What's this "ripping directly"

[mrselfdestrukt]

I don't understand your concept of ripping directly to PC. All my music I rip using a kareoke machine, 10 friends and a microphone and Windows recorder. The quality just never comes out the same as the original.
Wow.Your idea is phenomenal!

Any other solutions for linux?

[jopet]

Are there any alternatives for linux that help you digitize the LP, adapt the gain, split into individual tracks and keep some order? And while I am asking - are there any linux MP3 players that let you adjust speed and pitch?

Re:Any other solutions for linux?

[admbws]

are there any linux MP3 players that let you adjust speed and pitch?

Yes, AlsaPlayer.

Re:Any other solutions for linux?

[admbws]

If you fancy DJing using your computer, DBmix is looking rather good now, though personally I find it rather tedious compared to my trusty Technics turntables - but that's just my opinion.

Re:Any other solutions for linux?

[dmaxwell]

Another poster already mentioned Gnome Wave Cleaner. I intend to try it out myself but it looks pretty complete for this purpose. I've also been playing with a sound editor called rezound.

The Noatun player for KDE has a nifty plugin that gives you sliders for speed and pitch on playback. It's loads of fun.

Does anyone know of any alternatives?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used gramofile quite a bit but find it a bit clunky.

What I want is to be able to chop half an album into separate mp3s with correct id3 tags with the minimum of hassle. My concern is with convenience; if I want to listen to my vynl recordings at the highest quality, I'll play the record and sit in exactly the right place relative to the speakers, but I want to listen to them on the train, I need them in mp3 format on my iPod. So I'm interested in a pleasant UI round something that chops up tracks.

My ideal program would let you record an album-side, specify how many tracks there should be, check the gaps it guesses at are the right ones and tries to find other gaps when you reject the ones it finds. Ideally it would then let you fill in the id3 stuff. Gramofile is almost there, but not quite.

Radio Shack Pre-Amps

[Vic]

I bought one of those Radio Shack pre-amps a couple of years ago. It was about $40 Canadian, I think. I little expensive for what it is, but ohwell.... I *had* to have my turntable hooked up, and I didn't want to spend hundreds on one of the fancy pre-amps either.

Oh...the Radio Shack pre-amps now use a 9V battery, which is somewhat annoying if you forget to turn it off after using it. Battery drainage...

Cheers,
Vic

Re:Radio Shack Pre-Amps

[Bush Pig]

I once built a little pre-amp as an impedance-matcher so I could plug a decent low-impedance microphone into my guitar amp - it had a (non-adjustable) gain of about 1000000:1. It still works, and it makes a _dandy_ fuzz-box.

analog

[vistic]

People will pay for what sounds the most comfortable to their ears.

People all have a certain type of music that sounds the best to their ears and is the most comfortable to listen to... likewise, people have a certain type of audio gear that is most comfortable.

For me, I prefer using my analog vacuum tube amp (an Antique Sound Labs MG-SI15DT with Svetlana KT88 power tubes and Electro-Harmonix 12AX7 preamp tubes... if you're interested). It sounds much different than my Sony receiver... anyone can tell there is a difference. However, whether or not it is better is a completely personal matter. To me it is better. Different tubes even will accentuate different parts of the music. Different speakers will produce different ranges differently.

As far as media goes... I'm fine playing back CDs and MP3s... I do have records (some are brand new), and they're fine and good... but to me the main benefit of records is just how enjoyable it is to take it out of the sleeve and gently place it down on the turntable... place the needle on the track you want... and watch it spin.

Just use the Terapin MCR-TX3300

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought the Terapin MCR-TX3300 MP3 recorder that (in one step) takes the entire vinyl album and converts it to MP3s directly to CD. It's the only deck I could find out there that goes from analogue to MP3 on to CD in on step. You can fit 12 hours of MP3s on a single CD. I didn't take long to convert my 100 or so albums to about 10 CDs. Check it out ... http://www.terapintech.com/fea_mcr.html

Word.

Great news for Jazz

[moc.tfosorcimgllib]

This is great news. Now we just need to get people with older record collections to rip them to MP3 so we can properly archive music before it's lost forever.
Just think of all the music produced in the 20's, 30's and 40's that was never remastered and released on CD. Big Band Swing, Jazz, Blue Grass, tons of music that still has a copyright on it (thank you disney), but the copyright owner doesn't want to keep current in their catalog (too expensive). Get this music out on Kazaa, and introduce yourself to a generation of music that is slowly being lost.

Re:Great news for Jazz

[Aetrix]

I agree - And old friend, has over 10,000 VERY unique albums dating back to the first pressings of vinyl. (He's been collecting AVIDLY since he was a child - he's in his 80s now.) Through him I learned that the first vinyl was actually pressed into the medium LIVE (Not drums of wax, actual vinyl). The artist would play, and that unique original recording would go onto the disk. If he wanted to make 10,000 albums to distribute, he would have to perform the song 10,000 times! There's albums of these types of albums that are worth $50 and others that are worth thousands of dollars - just because someone sneezed in the background, or the artist did something unique or original in that individual recording.

I highly agree in saving very old recordings. Frankly, I think they're much better than the "digitally remastered" versions (Read: Guido shot first).

Re:Great news for Jazz

[Reziac]

I have to agree on all counts. What I've heard that's been "digitally remastered" has invariably lost ambiance and depth.

And it would be a criminal loss of music history to FAIL to save whatever old wax and original vinyl can still be salvaged. I know some years back there was a project to extract old wax-cylindar blues recordings to modern media, and it had uncovered all sorts of amazing old recordings. Ray Pratt played a lot of 'em on his blues history show on KGLT-FM, which is how I first became aware they existed.

Re:Great news for Jazz

[kstumpf]

Becaue CD production has gotten so cheap, a staggering amount of jazz is being remastered from the original recordings and reissued on CD lately. Alot of it hasn't been available since the original vinyl release. Even better, alot of previously unheard tunes (and alternate takes) are being included on reissues that were part of the original session but were eliminated due to space limitations of vinyl. I think reissues are alot more important than people ripping their home vinyl collections. Purchasing reissues supports jazz, and encourages more reissues.

Re:Great news for Jazz

[srw]

I heard a few years ago about a project to "stereoize" some of these old recordings. Apparently, they would often record multiple records at once with multiple recording machines. (so no, 10000 copies != 10000 performances) This project was attempting to find multiple copies of the same performance, but recorded from different positions in the room. They would then use one recording as left and the other as right. Voila... stereo recordings from before the days of stereo.

ripvinyl

[woogieoogieboogie]

I have used this Rip Vinyl with much success on audio tapes and it works pretty much the same with lp's. You can also use EZ-CD Creator's SoundStream to record from cassette or lp.

fuck, sorry, ignore that

[n3k5]

I'm terribly sorry for the posting above, I saw my comment had a new reply and thought it was the parent above, which really was a reply to another reply of an Anonymous Coward, which was below my threshold, so I thought ...

Anyway, what I really would've had to write was: "You could hardly be more right, you totally got my point." :-)

Arrgh, I should change my settings so something like that can't happen.

Not the Issue

[mr.nicholas]

As the husband of a techno DJ who owns literally hundreds of 12"s and who wishes I had most of them in MP3 format for my own pleasure, I have to say that a good noise reduction/filtering application is NOT what would make vinyl ripping "simplified."

The issue isn't what you do with it after it's been recorded, but the hassle/time expenditure of actually pulling out the record, cueing it up, ripping one side, flipping it and ripping the other side.

*THAT'S* where coming from 12" is a pain in the ass. Once it's on my HD, I can manipulate them through the scripting languages of various high-end sound editors en masse.

When you get a robot that can pull a record and physically rip it for me, give me a call.

ESIA suit to follow

[TheLoneGundam]

Notice: the Emotional State Institute of America intends to file suit against the developers of Gramofone, and against Slashdot, and any owners and/or users of such software, for copyright infringement. It is piracy to copy Limbic Property without paying for it. Limbic Property is every bit as protected by law as Intellectual Property. LP is the core of the nation's dating, contraceptive, wedding, divorce, boxing, mediation, and law industries. Allowing unfettered copying of LP will result in chaos, loss of jobs, loneliness, depression, anger, and violence. LP thieves should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the.... what? Not _that_ LP? Long-Playing? um.... never mind.

Compare...

[poptones]

Elvis Costello "Watchin' The Detectives" on LP vs. the same track (hell, that whole album) on CD.

There simply ain't no comparison; the album was recorded on an old 8 track in his garage before the record company made him "clean it up a bit for release." Then, when they made the CD, they "cleaned it up" even more (this time without any input at all from Elvis). It ain't even a close race - vinyl wins start to finish. In comparison to the album, listening to the CD is like trying to view the mona lisa through a shower door.

Not saying it's ALWAYS best (hell, I don't even buy CDs anymore - most of my collecion is HBR MP3 with a few APEs thrown in) but sometimes there's no other avenue. I rotate what few LPs I have left as wall art; try finding impLOG's "Holland Tunnel Dive" (Ooooh, what a ride...) on CD. Or Tex and the Horseheads. Or...

Re:Compare...

[iainl]

Re: Watching The Detectives.

Its like loads of things out there, a different mix to the other format. Its an exception rather than the rule with vanilla albums that its audibly different these days (unless you want to talk the myriad of ruined Beatles CD releases), but I do agree with you. Cleaning up Elvis (Costello or Presley, though I prefer the former) is missing the point.

This rears its ugly head most on films, though. The number of times I've heard the old "DTS is better than Dolby or SDDS" argument simply because the instance they are using is of a film where the DTS print has a different, "better" mix on it, rather than the compression or delivery methods being different is too high to bother counting.

Otherwise, the DTS DVD of Saving Private Ryan wouldn't sound better than the DD DVD but worse than the DD Laserdisc, for example.

Re:Amazing new tech!

[Splat]

I rip my thriftstore vinyl to MP3's for fun in just the matter you describe:

Garrard Turntable -> Kenwood KR-2090 (Flea Market, $15) -> SB Live Line-In -> Cooledit Pro -> RazorLame.

A basic noise-removal filter in Cooledit (highlight what should be silence, it'll remove that throughout), save as WAV.

It makes perfectly playable MP3s that sound better then most of the crap you find floating around on Kazaa which has been sampled off a Fisher Price tape recorder into a pair of dollar-store headphones doubling as an emergency microphone.

Viva la Vinyl!

Been there - Done that

[Anonymous Coward]

In 1999, I wrote an article on how to do this and improve the quality (dynamic range and pop elimination). Its an old article but many albums actually sound better from the CD/MP3 than they do from the turntable.

http://www.banjo.com/Articles/CD-Vinyl.html

Audiophiles : pedantic idiots

[stud9920]

IIRC, in the 1970s, a guy set up a solid state amp, and put a filter with the same characteristic as the a tube in the line.

Double blind tests revealed audiophiles couldn't make the difference.

The system sold very poorly, until the guy had another idea : he put dummy tubes in the system. The system then sold much much better.

Offtopic, but can a native english speaker tell me why exactly semiconductor devices are also called "solid state" devices ?.

Re:Audiophiles : pedantic idiots

[alkali]

Offtopic, but can a native english speaker tell me why exactly semiconductor devices are also called "solid state" devices?

I am advised that it is because the electrons flow through solid material (as opposed to a vacuum tube) and there are no moving parts.

Re:Audiophiles : pedantic idiots

[mysticgoat]

Offtopic, but can a native english speaker tell me why exactly semiconductor devices are also called "solid state" devices ?.

The term dates back to the 1960's when transistor radios were first developed. As the signal in a tube radio is processed from the radio spectrum to the audio output at the speaker, there are physical gaps within the tubes where the signal is transferred to radiant energy and sent across a vacuum that is a few millimeters wide. But in a "solid state" radio, the signal remains in solid materials-- wires, semiconductors, etc, for its entire processing.

At the time, the breakthrough of solid state technology was not seen as a matter of quality, but of reliability and portability. A portable tube radio required a car battery or portable generator, a case that would withstand the bumps of travel, spare tubes, and the tools and know-how to do tube replacements in the field. So a hundred pounds or more of delicate equipment to lug around, plus someone trained as the "radio operator". But a solid state transistor radio needed only a pocketful of nine volt batteries and a spare radio if you had to have back-up. Total weight less than a tenth of that of the tube option, and no special training required. Even fishermen in rowboats could now keep up with weather reports. It was a pretty big deal at the time.

I wouldn't say your query was off-topic. I think questions about the words used in a discussion are generally germane to that discussion.

Of course your inquiry did lead to this pedantic reply. But slashdot does no modding down for pedantry-baiting!

pedantically yours...

Re:Audiophiles : pedantic idiots

[stud9920]

So "solid-state" is as ridiculous as the French calling a radio "un transistor" ?

Re:Audiophiles : pedantic idiots

[aaribaud]

Well, at least we french use a noun, whereas your 'radio' is not even a noun, only a prefix.

Hey, *you* started it.

Re:Audiophiles : pedantic idiots

[mysticgoat]

So "solid-state" is as ridiculous as the French calling a radio "un transistor" ?

Uh, well, one is french and the other is english. They are different. And I'm not sure what you mean by "ridiculous".

"Solid state" has come into english pretty much in the same way that "astronaut" or "record player" did. Those aren't ridiculous. Languages need new words for new concepts, and putting new words together out of old ones has always seemed to work pretty well.

I read once that the chinese term for "astronaut" translates into english as "super fire bird man"-- perhaps someone who speaks chinese could verify that. If it's true, then chinese has a more powerfully poetic name for that occupation than english does.

In english, "solid state" implies an immunity to damage from bumps and jarrings. i expect that is one of the reasons the term caught on.

I think now we are off topic.

Re:Audiophiles : pedantic idiots

[imadork]

Indeed, if there was a (-1, pedantic) mod, I'd be banned from here quite a while ago!

Re:Audiophiles : pedantic idiots

[Anonymous Coward]

So "solid-state" is as ridiculous as the French calling a radio "un transistor" ?

Nothing is as ridiculous as the French.

Re:Audiophiles : pedantic idiots

[stud9920]

Yeah, nowadays you can make them swallow anything... WMDs in Iraq ? How naive...

Re:Audiophiles : pedantic idiots

[Anonymous Coward]

No, no. The French may Wipe My Derriere wherever they choose.

thrift store, baby!

[Erris]

Forget the long chords and just buy an old amp. I'm using a system that my grandparents left that no one else wanted. It sits under the phono in my office next to a computer I use for sound stuff. It's nice to have a better amp and keep the heat out of my computers too. There are plenty of these types of amps in thrift stores and any system with a working amp has a working phono in.

great site

[Anonymous Coward]

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: mysql_connect() in /home/misskim/public_html/linmagau.org/pnadodb/dri vers/adodb-mysql.inc.php on line 170

gramofile updates and automation

[C R Johnson]

There are updated versions of gramofile with new and improved filters available here.
my own project, xmcd2make abuses the make program to automate gramofile and the mundane and redundant file naming and encoding tasks using xmcd files from freedb.org.
There is a HOWTO as well

Longevity of analogue recordings

[Sporkinum]

Don't forget the golden record that was attached to the Voyager space probes. That puppy will be drifting through space for a long time. I don't know of any digital media that would last the millenia that the record would. Not that it would have anything at all to do with the current topic..

How informative...

[Kadagan AU]

what an article... since it may get slashdotted, here's the whole text as I saw it...

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: mysql_connect() in /home/misskim/public_html/linmagau.org/pnadodb/dri vers/adodb-mysql.inc.php on line 170

Re:How informative...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what you get when you use a POS O.S. database engine base on your web site. 25 simultaneous hits and all the memory in the world isn't enough for it :(

*ahem*

[tolan-b]

next post down? :p

on b3ta they call it mindpiss ;)

visually scan LP

[obtuse]

Now I have to go try that with a couple of my albums.

I wonder if he could see the music, or if he had something like a sharpened fingernail or perhaps a grain of sand on a fingertip. That might be an easier way to do that trick, but hopefully it wasn't just a trick.

I once cut a drinking straw off at an angle, and dropped the point into the groove of one of my records to play it at a very low volume (and Lo-Fi.)

Why is no-one producing no-contact turntables with semiconductor lasers? Is it just that vinyl is too small a market now?

Re:visually scan LP

[lukpac]

Why is no-one producing no-contact turntables with semiconductor lasers?

They are:

http://www.elpj.com/welcome.html

Re:visually scan LP

[Derwen]

Why is no-one producing no-contact turntables with semiconductor lasers? Is it just that vinyl is too small a market now?

Finial used to do one, but it now seems to have been bought up by a Japanese company, and is still available.
I just found an interesting page on it here.

Interestingly gramophone technology has made its way into CD transports - see here and here.
- Derwen

Deja vu

[ader]

I haven't been able to read the article due to slashdotting but I used gramofile over a year ago to rip some cassette audio, based on the info in James Tappin's article.

Ade_
/

blind test

[zakezuke]

This is a bit off the topic... but only a touch.

Basicly I was getting annoyed at some audiophile dj friends of mine. Ones who will quote stats and specifics yet not really give you a decent answer to the question, "does this sound good".

What I did was I was demonstrating turn table vs CD. I actually had a few things that were made most recently, like pearl jam for example. What I did was I played the CD, and when I told them I was playing the vinyl, I secretly replaced the sound they usually hear with literaly what I filtered out of an entirely diffrent album. I call the track crack pop fizzle and hum.

And sure enough... I was told that the second play, with the added snap pop crackle and 60 cycle hum was indeed had a warmer feel to it, and was the superior recording.

Needless to say after revieling to them that it was a wave file with just vinyl noise, otherwise it was the same thing.

While I appricate a good audio file who can put terms too annoying aspects of my sound setup that I can't place my finger on... I have little tolerance for idiots who are making a judgement based on feeling. I'll be the first to agree that a CD's clean sound may sound artifical to ears who were raised listening to vinyl. So the solution for this market is clear, create a turntable noise generator and those few vinyl psuddo-elitists will be happy.

This is not to say that there are not people out there who trully have an ear to pickup the diffrences between analog and something sampled 44.1kHz. But should you be bothered with such folk, do your own blind test and see what happens.

Re:blind test

[Computer!]

I have little tolerance for idiots who are making a judgement based on feeling.

Especially when it comes to something as objective and easily quantifiable as listening pleasure. I bet you're a great lay.

Re:blind test

[sharph]

the point of loving vinyl is not sound quality (although I prefer it to CD,) but the geeky idea that the sound is stored physically, and played back mechanicly, which means that a CDR with added turntable noize, humming, etc won't satisfy us "vinyl psuddo-elitists"

you're friends were obviously choosing turntables over cds because you told them you were playing the turntable sample, however 60 cycle humms (and other low frequencys) could warm up the sounds.

but if you are hearing 60 cycle humms while listening to vinyl, either it was put there by the person who created the music, or something is grounded when it shouldn't be.

as much as i love vinal, i'll admit it has its flaws. it does snap crakle and pop sometimes, more on the old stuff than the new, and only when you dont take care of your records. you can't take vinyl with you like an OGG player (boo mp3!)

i don't think digital audio will replace analog audio, or vice versa.

Re:blind test

[zakezuke]

CDR with added ...... noize... won't satisfy "vinyl psuddo-elitists"

Don't get me wrong, there are vinyl elitists who actually do hear a diffrence above and beyond the flaws. Quite a few of them. If I must put a term to it it would be habituation of the flaws, and when they are missing people feel as if there is something missing and they can't put their finger on it. Also another aspect about being human is a study of how the brain processes sound information. It's not like we don't have the equipment in our bodies to process this information, just the brain tends to fill in the empty spaces as part of our perception, and we have to account for most of the stimili we are exposed to is filtered out.

but if you are hearing 60 cycle humms while listening to vinyl, either it was put there by the person who created the music, or something is grounded when it shouldn't be.

I've heard that theory too, groud loops.

Actually I recently invested in a turntable that doesn't suffer from the same flaw. It is a Realistic Lab-400, from what I understand it was considered top of the line in 1978/1979 when radioshack actually sold really decent audio equipment. For me it was a $4.00 investment in the turntable, $20.00 investment in the stylus. The nice thing about vinyl not being the norm anymore is the fact that you tend to see pretty good turn tables at goodwill.

In theory one needs to ground the turnturn table to prevent interfearance from local magnetic sources, but at the same time, one needs to prevent ground loops. This is also another part of the vinyl experence.

In the case of the 60cycle hum I typicaly hear... I feel this is direct interfearance caused by power cord to the turn table being picked up by the magnetic cartrage, rather then a ground loop. While i'm not a trained audiophile, I tend to notice among many turn tables hearing the noise of it powering up.

i don't think digital audio will replace analog audio, or vice versa.

Well that's the thing... i hope it doesn't. I prefer CD for a number of reasons, and prefer OGG and Mp3 as well. But part of the hip aspect to vinyl is the really low level of technology required for playback. The highest tech piece of my turn table is the magnetic cartrage, but edison's invention in the first place only required a horn atached to a needle.

Re:blind test

[commodoresloat]

I just posted a second ago about this experiment that I have tried for comparing the sound. By listening to the exact same song and switching back and forth between media, you can make your own judgement about which sounds better. Try it yourself if you want to make an informed and unbiased judgement about what sounds better to you rather than just doing it to trick your friends.

Re:blind test

[sbszine]

I've found that when I have the same recording on both vinyl and CD, there's no hard and fast rule as to which will sound better. I think it probably depends on the mastering, actually.

I prefer vinyl as a format because (on good quality decks) you get more physical control over playback. Also, vinyl and turntables seem to last longer than CDs and CD players. Vinyl gets cueburn and occasionally scratches, but CDs are more inclined to skip crazily, and the scratches that CDs get usually ruin the whole disc.

Re:blind test

[zakezuke]

When I was a kid, I had vinyl, we're talking the sub 7year old kid had to move cross country. At the time, had no tape player, and the 8-track player was screwy, so at the time vinyl for me, a kid, was the only choice.

Well.. moving cross country the heat of the u-hall got to the vinyl and warped the vast majority of it. Most sad as I had a copy of the Grease sound track that I loved.

Now, I honestly don't know how CDs would stack up to that sorta enviroment, summer time cross country move in a tin box. it would be interesting to see actually. But it would seem to me assuming you have decent CD cases that they are either less likely to experence this issue, or more likely to become warped but in a consistent way. I have tested a few CD-Rs on top of the roof and left them direct sunlight for 3 months with no ill effects, but i'll have reproduce mid-western heat on a tin roof to make fair contrast.

----------

Regarding skippage, my background is biased. I took poor care of the records I had as a kid, they skipped often. I do not have that same issue with CDs one the whole, but this depends on the player. I have a JVC multi disk player going on probally 10 or 15 years old now, multi disk model. It was a scratch and dent deal, friend didn't want to pay to get it repared so I picked it up for free, don't ask me how it worked out, I was expecting to pay the diagnostic fee and get a parts list of what it needed, but no fee and the parts came with it, go figure. I have few problems with skips due to normal wear. I can't say it's never skipped, but when it has, i've used windex on the CD and that cleared the issue right up. Your milage will vary.

[on a side note, was dating a lass who used a boom box with a vertical mount CD player. Skipped like mad. She never noticed it though, guess CD skips are less garish then vinyl ones :P ]

Dispite it's age, it never ever had any issues reading any CD-r I tossed at it (don't know about cd-rw).

I don't have a fair contrast for a turntable, haven't owned one for as long as a CD player, but i'm willing to believe that turntables typicaly would outlast most consumer grade CD players. This $4.00 one I picked up at a used shop is circa 1979 and is great.

Re:blind test

[sbszine]

Hmmm, interesting.

I'm using Technics 1200 decks and Denon 2000F CD players -- DJ/radio stuff. Decent sound quality and very good reliability, and nothing skips on either of them under any circumstances (although clicks and scratches are audiable).

When I play records and CDs on other people's gear, I find the CDs skip way more. Perhaps this is because CD players are more complex than turntables, or perhaps it's because most peoples turntables are from a time before 'planned obselesence'.

Though I prefer turntables, the Denon CD players did save my ass on one occasion when someone spilt a beer into the pitch control of one of my 1200s...

Jitter

[Anonymous Coward]

One reason CDs got a bad rap with audiophiles is that a lot of the early ones had too much jitter - the recording term for a digital clock that varies its interval a bit. This gives the resulting sound a flat quality. To this day, one of the biggest differences between low-end and high-end digital recording gear is the quality of the clock. Once the sound is digitized, it's all the same whether you use expensive gear or a desktop computer...but screw up the initial A-D conversion, and nothing can help you.

you're half right

[krog]

Audiophiles will give up a little reproduction quality for a more pleasing tone; the sweetest pure-triode rigs on the market yield about 6% total harmonic distortion (as opposed to <0.05% on the best solid-state amps).

But you can tear the Watt Puppies out of their cold, dead hands. Frequency response is everything; audiophiles like it even and wide.

OId news!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is nothing new and exciting... there have been apps like this for years now, at least on the Mac OS.

Any tutorial for the filters?

[tindur]

There are some filters included in the program. What should I do to learn how use them?

Re:Any tutorial for the filters?

[Anonymous Coward]

GramoFile Filters:

• Conditional Median I : works well on pops and clicks, tends not to introduce unpleasant artifacts.
• Conditional Median II : designed to work better than the first version, but often introduces distortion in horn sections and an occasional suprious pop, but with the right choice of music, it works well.
• Conditional Median IIF : Fast Fourier Xform version of II, it works in the frequency domain (the others work in the time domain). Very similar to II, not quite as good on some music. Depending on the music it can work well.

So you see, it depends. Grammofile requires a lot of trial and error to achieve best results. The 3 filters which I've mentioned are the main ones of interest. I find myself falling back on CM-I when CM-II and CM-IIF fail me. None of these filters work particularly well on music with a lot of brass -- coronet, trombone, etc. The waveforms of brass instruments fool GramoFile filters and the results can be very unpleasant distortion.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

uh.....so what?

MP3-LP

[Rutje]

What if we made some MP3-LP's?
Would we get that nice sound also??

DMCA

[mattsucks]

Doesn't this make linmagau.org guilty of distribution of Gramophile, a DMCA-violating tool? After all, clicks and pops and scratches sound like copy protection to _me_ ....

Ripping DGG and Archive, Columbia recordings

[ratfynk]

With the recent economic/cultural decline in Symphonic music societies and the lack of good corporate and government support for our musical cultural heritage. Open Source software for this purpose is becoming all the more crucial.

Who will become the corporate owners of the rights to most of the Thomas Beacham, George Szell, Stravinsky, Bernstien, Glen Gould and similar great recordings? A monetary capital based nuthouse crap game will be what happens. Recent economic history is an indication to the nature of things in North American style corporate finance. Recording/entertainment giants like Sony are in dire financial straits and on very shakey ground.

To whom will they sell the digital rights to gain capital? Some Microsoft, or the likes, shake and bake instant billionaire? 'I certainly hope not', or have they already?

Can we trust them to preserve this important resource for our children, or is there anybody sane left with the means who cares?

Scary stuff and definately possible.

I can picture a day when obtaining a recording of this caliber will require a Palladium based computer and huge bank account! Fortunately I still own some well cared for LPs of these wonderful things. They are getting really hard to find in cd/music stores, or even order any more.

If you remember and are old enough, some of the great company labels of the 1950s-60s-70s were;
London-Angle, DGG Archive, Columbia, Philips, Telarc, etc etc.

I personally have never ripped or stolen by download then burned anything yet, or even ripped my LPs OR cds. I am now slowly becoming convinced that this might be the only solution for a sane and ethical classical music lover!

I agree with the others saying vinyl sounds better

[Anonymous Coward]

but not just because I'm a serious audiophile.

For one thing, there's a lot of great music out there that's only available on vinyl. For another, used records are inexpensive compared to CDs and often can be restored to like new condition using a good record cleaning machine - anyone with a decent size record collection should have one, IMO.

I listen to both CD and records, the former often as a matter of convenience, the latter when I want to hear more of the music such as when I'm doing serious listening. Any halfway decent turntable setup blows away a lot of digital gear, in my experience. Most other people I know with ultra high end audio systems (over $100k) see things the same way, but it doesn't take that kind of system to show the differences.

Re:Other - laser turn tables & other things

[jackb_guppy]

Laser Turn Table and a review

or Make CD sound like vinyl

Cut the audiophile elitist crap.

[fmaxwell]

Just remember - a new record will sound far, far better then a CD.

What utter, absolute, audiophile-elitist bull.

I've got a Linn turntable, arm, and cartridge (sold for about $1k when new). It's feeding a PS Audio phono preamp with switch-selectable input capacitance and impedence. That's a pretty decent vinyl playing setup and I can tell you that, even when listening to something like Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab recordings, that LPs sound significantly inferior to CDs.

LPs, even when played through the finest equipment, have distortion that's more than an order of magnitude worse than CDs. It can be measured and shown. You get overshoot both from the mastering and from the playback caused by the fact that the styli have mass. The turntable acts as a microphone, picking up vibration from the air and the floor, feeding it back through the cartridge as well as feeding vibration from its own motor back through (you probably call that "warmth"). The noise floor of vinyl is horrendous with "silent" lead-in grooves being anything but silent. The dynamic range of vinyl, due to the noise floor combined with physical limitations of phono cartridges, is extremely limited compared to CD.

If you prefer the sound of LP to CD, then it is because you find the distortion and noise of LPs appealing. Period.

Re:Cut the audiophile elitist crap.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your records played on an LP 12 (at least a Valhalla'd one with an Ittok arm) shouldn't sound as bad as you describe.

The biggest advance, for me, in playing LPs has been the use of a vacuum record cleaning machine. Even on brand new records a wash and vacuum (of mold release agents - I think - in the case of new LPs) seems to audibly lower the noise floor allowing more detail in - interestingly - the mid-range. And, for pawn-shop finds (often the only way to get a particular LP) a record cleaning machine can be a disc-saver.

Another big help in my system was putting the LP-12 on a table that is small, light, rigid and spiked to the floor.

Re:Cut the audiophile elitist crap.

[fmaxwell]

Your records played on an LP 12 (at least a Valhalla'd one with an Ittok arm) shouldn't sound as bad as you describe.

Regardless of the arm, cartridge, table, etc., there are physical limitations to vinyl that manifest themselves in the music. CDs, while not perfect by any means, are far superior to vinyl in when it comes to distortion, noise, and dynamic range. LPs are also cut for the masses. Engineers can't cut an LP that can only be tracked by high-end audiophile equipment. It's not that LPs sound that bad, it's just that, by comparison, CDs sound far better.

The biggest advance, for me, in playing LPs has been the use of a vacuum record cleaning machine. Even on brand new records a wash and vacuum (of mold release agents - I think - in the case of new LPs) seems to audibly lower the noise floor allowing more detail in - interestingly - the mid-range. And, for pawn-shop finds (often the only way to get a particular LP) a record cleaning machine can be a disc-saver.

Agreed that they can work miracles, but I tend to stay away from used vinyl unless it's bought straight from a fellow audiophile. I don't want to find my precious stylus is slogging its way through some toxic waste that was not soap & water soluble.

Another big help in my system was putting the LP-12 on a table that is small, light, rigid and spiked to the floor.

The how-to-mount-it question is an interesting one. Conical spikes are very tightly coupled at the point, but at the large base, their coupling is limited by the square inch area of the base. If airborne vibrations are doing you in, coupling the turtable to the floor sounds like a great idea. If the vibrations causing you more grief come through the floor, then coupling to the floor is not a great idea. Have you tried putting the table on an extremely heavy table with Sorbothane feet? The heavier table will tend, due to mass, to be less susceptible to vibration and Sorbothane will dissipate vibration (as heat).

Dude... HEADPHONES!

[metamatic]

It's very worthwhile investing in good hi-fi equipment if you listen on headphones, as many (if not most) audiophiles do.

You certainly can get a worthwhile improvement from spending moderately serious amounts on equipment, but you're right in a way--the place to spend the money isn't always obvious, and a lot of expensive kit is wank that's beaten handily by stuff a fraction of the price.

For example, you can spend $1000 on a set of incredible audiophile speakers... or you can spend $300 on a pair of good headphones and a headphone amp. Unlike with speakers, you can put an audiophile headphone system in a shared apartment and not have to compromise. In fact, you can build a portable headphone listening setup that'll sound better than anything with speakers that you might plausibly set up in the communal living room.

Even cheap equipment can often be improved greatly by add-ons. I just upgraded to some Sennheisers for my Sony Walkman, and the difference is incredible. I have a better headphone amp on the way too...

Last time I auditioned CD players, one thing that surprised me was the amount of difference in sound quality in half a dozen big-name players at around the same price. If you're serious about sound quality, you really have to audition the stuff.

Re:Dude... HEADPHONES!

[CaptainStormfield]

On this note, can anyone recommend a good, *portable*, (and preferably inexpensive) headphone amp with crossfeed (or just a good headphone crossfeed that doesn't do any amplification)? I'd love to have one to hook up to my portable MP3 player to reduce listening fatigue.

Re:Dude... HEADPHONES!

[SN74S181]

bzzzt! you said 'MP3' there.

Re:Dude... HEADPHONES!

[neurocutie]

While I agree with some of what you say, the missing point is that headphones do not recreate an accurate soundstage -- all the cues from your pinna are missing. The "soundstage" you get is in between your ears, not natural at all... So if the goal is to recreate the full aspects of a live performance, headphones simply can't... Headphone also do not reproduce the visceral aspects of sound... the feeling of a bass drum for example, requires more than just perfect response down to 20hz...

Re:Dude... HEADPHONES!

[metamatic]

Actually, given a binaural recording, headphones will reproduce the soundstage more accurately than loudspeakers in most rooms. The problem is that for some strange reason the industry continues with stereo rather than binaural, in spite of the majority of listening being on headphones. (Consider all those personal stereo systems.)

A headphone amp with a good crossover circuit will also largely get rid of soundstage issues.

As for visceral sound, you could always wear headphones and connect a subwoofer. I have at least one album that recommends that combination in the sleeve notes...

Bit mapping!

[metamatic]

It's also a good idea to digitize at higher resolution and sampling rate, do all the signal processing you need to, and then make an intelligent decision about how to squeeze the information into 44.1kHz 16 bit audio. That's one of the processes that has drastically improved the quality of CD mastering in recent years.

It's analogous to creating your web artwork at (say) 150dpi, or using a vector illustration program, and then downsampling the final image to 72 dpi and adding a touch of sharpening.

phono preamp circuits

[reimda]

As has been mentioned elsewhere, if you're going to record LPs on your computer you have to pipe your record player's outputs through a phono preamp. You can use an old stereo with a phono input or a discrete phono preamp.

I've been looking into making a discrete preamp for a while. There are many circuits available on the web, some more complicated and some more simple.

My first try is going to be the second one on this page. Interesting note: It looks like maxim thought it was good enough to copy in their application note.

Prejustice?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think oppressed people are complaining about too much justice too soon.

The word is "prejudice" because they instead feel that they are being judged too soon.

Good speakers

[leonbrooks]

I pick up good-quality old speakers from the side of the road on council rubbish-chuck-out days. Even with a crappy amp they sound great. For example, my computer uses a pair of same wired to an amp out of (still in, actually, but not wired to) an AUD$10 set of powered speakers.

A neighbour in Paraburdoo decades ago used to get unbelievable volume and quality out of home-made speakers built from (I kid you not) concrete and lined with conveyor-belt rubber. He drove them with a massive 6 watt amplifier. (-:

Re:Good speakers

[SN74S181]

I guess it depends on your defintion of 'volume' and 'quality.'

To a high fidelity enthusiast, 'quality' isn't defined as 'it makes my rock music sound good', it's defined as a flat frequency response curve. So that all sorts of music sound real played through the system, particularly difficult things like acousic piano or orchestral music.

If you primarily listen to 'rock' music there's nothing 'real' there to matter. Electric guitar only sounds good if there's distortion harmonics in the mix.

Re:Good speakers

[swb]

Back when I was into building speakers, there were a number of designs that emphasized using really dense materials or unusual shapes.

Sonotubing (the cardboard tubes shoved into the ground to make concrete footings) was one, others suggested pentagonal shapes, and I think a more "doable" project was using MDF for the box, with some advocating lining the inside of the MDF box with Buildrite for its energy absorbancy.

Re:Good speakers

[Bush Pig]

Some years ago, I got a faily good stereo system - the works, an amp, tuner, turntable, tape deck and speakers - I already had a reasonably good CD player. It doesn't sound too bad. However, the speakers and cabinets I inherited from my father (aging 10" twin-cones in a prted box) look like shit, but sound a million dollars ($AU, of course) compared to the spiffy 4-cone, crossoverred cabinets that came with the stereo. My mum keeps nagging me about how crappy they look, but the sound's the thing, and she only has to look at them when she visits.

Clippy

[leonbrooks]

I see you're overdriving your amplifier. Would you like me to
[ clip horribly ] [ clip mushily ] [ catch fire ] [ blow a filament ]

The soft clipping effect can be obtained in most amplifiers with a single FET and a few resistors - cunningly wired - per channel. In real valve amps with valve rectifiers in the PSU, the clipping was so soft it was almost compression. Adding the correct hum, noise and slow turn-on is harder. Power consumption and heat is just a matter of wiring thumping great resistors across the power rails. (-:

Is Vinyl better than CD?

[Toshito]

The answer is right here:

Is the sound on vinyl records better than on CDs or DVDs?

Re:Is Vinyl better than CD?

[sharph]

"A vinyl record has a groove carved into it that mirrors the original sound's waveform. This means that no information is lost."

That is very wrong...

Audio is often transferred to a digital medium before being put on vinyl nowdays, and even then, before being cut into a master, the sound must be processed to prevent weird things from happening when you play/press the record.

Re:Is Vinyl better than CD?

[Toshito]

Actually, a lot of audiophile grade records are direct to disc. No digital step, no analog tape mixing... see: Direct to disc

Anyway, this article is a good way to show how the CD's resolution is quite limited, compared to the original analog waveform. And it shows that new digital format are much more closer to the original.

warmth is well defined

[chocolatetrumpet]

Warmth is pretty easy to define.

Don't quote me on the numbers, it's been a while - but "warm" is simply when the high frequencies decay at least 60 ms faster than the lows. Then, it is "warm."

Yum.

Re:Why do this? -retard only 256 levels of red pas

[Anonymous Coward]

Re:Why do this? -retard only 256 levels of red past a 256 color card.

a video card that is a 256 color card can show 256 levels of red on a tube.

a "million of color " card can only show 256 levels of red on a tube.

you know nothing.

If a person only cared about red a thousands of color card shows LESS levels of red thatn a 256 color card.

Those are engineering facts.

Worse though are LCD screens. All of them, even 2 thousand dollar screens from apple, show only 64 levels of red.... WORSE than a 256 color card on a tube!

To see this effect the data has to be moving though... such as skin tone on porn animations.

Why? becuase of "color averaging"

All lcd screens have 64 or 32 levels or red maximum per "scan" but they combine 4 different scanns every one seventh of a second or so.

staitc pictures will seem to have about 256 levels of red. but high speed animations lack it.

stick to tubes.

and by the way, I had awesome color cards in june 1986 that had true 8 bit DACs on each gun (10 bit clipped to 8 real levels) and good cables and a good soney tube. I though back in 1987 that in 10 or 20 years they might FINALLY have more then 256 levels of red so that I could draw a non-ditherred ramp on a wide screen and not see the damned colorbanding.

Its been coming up to twenty years and still only 256 OR LESS red levels.

All because of non-discriminating idiots like you that do not understand physics or color technologies in mobern products.

people still think that you can buy digital cameras with more color resolution than 35 millimeter film. and you CANNOT because all cameras, even the 6 thousand dollar ones have less than 2 thousnad pixels across of RED.

yup less than 2 thousand pixels of red across by far!!!

its true! even the "10 megapixel camerals..." they have twice as many green recepttors for night sooting and the other pixels are divided up for the other two. There are some cameras that have multilayer pixels, but they are 5,000 list and take 9 seconds per phot and are less than 2 thousnad pixels across as well.

A 100,000 dollar Thomson Viper in 2003 can indeed take a 1920*1080 pixel photo in one siztieth of one second and send it on two cables to external drives. buit thats 100,000 bucks for a camera!!! and it has only 1920 pixels of red at 10 bits of color each.

a 35 mm still from a 40 dollar camera can record well over 2000 discrete points red side to side.

know your facts buddy.

also 'Aboslute Sound' magazine was vindicated in the 1990s when they finally proved taht digiatl op-amps have ODD HARMONICS and tubes have even order harmonics... it has nothing to do with clipping.

TUBES sound better becasue they sound like the REAL PERFORMANCE to any mammals ears.

and you can buy stero needles with dual transformers that use the second transformer for frequencies of 32khz which ARE on most records recorded suing analog technologies.

I have such a record needle. I should store it in nitrogen when not used because the fine wires are corroding, but its only one year old at this point.

cds suck records have more high-frequency range. females during 3 weeks per month, and children can all hear frequencies in excess of a damned digitally cuttoff cd (44.1 Khz sample rate = 22,500 hertz only!!)

records may lack a little deep bass, but few types of music need such tremble except electronica or "drum and bass".

people have no desire for more quality... otherwise cds would have had 48Khz sampling and color cards would have had more than 8 bit DACs and people would demand better lcd technologies for motion images featuring single colors such as red.

no one cares about fidelity except the perceptive and the educated.

vaccum tube amps are still critical in this world until a better digital op-amp is designed with even-order freq harmonics.

Re:Why do this? Audiophile HATE odd-order harmonic

[Anonymous Coward]

warmth = EVEN ORDER freq harmonics, rather than odd order harmonics. A scope can show this efffect quiteclearly.

it has nothing to do with rumble you fool.

You cannot accept that audiophiles are CORRECT and that you are wrong?

op-amps suck. tubes are much better for mammals eras.

'Aboslute Sound' magazine was vindicated in the 1990s when they finally proved that digiatal op-amps have ODD HARMONICS and tubes have even order harmonics... it has nothing to do with clipping or silly words like "warmth"

TUBES sound better becasue they sound like the REAL PERFORMANCE to any mammals ears.

Plus there's the high end to consider...

You can buy stero needles with dual transformers on the head that use the second transformer for frequencies of 32khz which ARE on most records recorded suing analog technologies.

I have such a record needle. I should store it in nitrogen when not used because the fine wires are corroding, but its only one year old at this point.

Cds suck. Records have more high-frequency range. Females during 3 weeks per month, and most children can all hear frequencies in excess of a damned digitally cuttoff cd (44.1 Khz sample rate = 22,500 hertz only!!) Records yeild those frequencies with ease... especially if created using all analog gear at all stages.

records may lack a little deep bass, but few types of music need such tremble except electronica or "drum and bass".

My son, your ignorance knows no bounds...

[Ayanami Rei]

1) Analog vs. discrete amps have nothing to do with analog vs. digital signals.

2) Digital signals when played do not have "breaks" or "steps" or any such nonsense. The information in the stream is used to drive a D/A converter, which uses specially designed filters to provide an approximation of the recorded signal to within the quantization noise floor (depending on bit depth and D/A quality), and reproducing frequencies up to half the sampling rate. Due to the imperfections in design, (both purposeful and physically unavoidable), the resulting signal is quite smooth, continous, and (should be) devoid of undesriable components.
A crappy consumer CD player or amp is often at fault for this effect, but I doubt they will "harshen" the sound with high frequencies (near or above Nyquist) as the cheap components are "loose" and inaccurate.
It'll just sound for shit.

A warm recording played back from a CD through a diligently accurate reproduction device will sound just as warm.

At the worst, the channel capacity of a CD may be to narrow, lending a somewhat less lively sound, or not enough dynamic range (if 90dB is not enough for you). So that's what SACD is for.

Cheers.

Re:My son, your ignorance knows no bounds...

[Bush Pig]

In fact, you have potentially _more_ dynamic range with a CD, as you don't have to run the sound through a limiter to avoid upsetting your cutting lathe when producing the master.

Just thinking...

[Mr. Mosty-Toasty]

Some time ago, I came up with this (stupid?) idea:

What if you would scan your records with very high resolution (say 4800dpi) and then let some yet-to-be-written program analyse the graphic file and convert it into music? i.e. spiralling along the track and detect how wide it is.

How does that sound?

I guaranatee you...

[Ayanami Rei]

that after the 20th press of a master into the substrate, the signal will no longer bear any resemblance to a 44kHz square wave, and you'll probably not be within of the original 6dB at the 2nd (or is that actually the 3rd?) harmonic.

Unless the master is made of tungsten. Christ.

a bit OT, but interesting to note...

[Ayanami Rei]

You do have a point however that a lot of research is being done on higher dynamic ranges and higher sampling frequenties, but as I understand it, this is mostly because higher sampling rates seem to work better with more then stereo sound (5.1 and stuff).

(this is me repeating something I heard awhile back, feel free to correct me if I am wrong.)
I believe you are quite right. It appears humans can hear phase difference even at frequencies above 8kHz, which at bitrates of 44.1 kHz become more difficult to resolve spatially (you get down to 6 discrete wavefront angles).
Hence a 96kHz stereo recording sounds a bit more lively, even if it sounds the same as 44.1 through a monoural speaker.

Re:a bit OT, but interesting to note...

[Chris Johnson]

mmmm- not so, at least not for D/As with a reconstruction filter. You don't have only 6 discrete wavefront angles because the reconstruction filter can reconstruct frequencies at different phases. If you don't have a reconstruction filter (some DACs don't, it's an alternate style of DAC with distinct advantages and disadvantages) then yeah, you'd have that limit.

The phase problem near 22 kHz...

[Ayanami Rei]

can be solved with a sophisticated enough upsampling DAC. By upsample, it means to fill in the detail (recreated by truncated sinc function approximations) so the simple fitler in the DAC (much lower order, operating at high bitrate now) can have enough headroom to track.
These are not uncommon in higher-end CD players (not the one in your PC, that's for sure).

That sounds redundant.

[Anonymous Coward]

So sayeth the Slashdot Search.

Re:That sounds redundant.

[Mr. Mosty-Toasty]

But that was my own idea!!! They stole it!!! Telepathy!!! Help!!!

No new software needed

[Anonymous Coward]

All you have to do is plug your turntable into the AUX IN on your sound card. Any sampling software will do. I use EAC to sample with, but software that comes with many Sound Blaster cards works well, too. I like EAC because it lets you record the whole album in one fell swoop, do any editing you may need, and insert track starts, then burn.

This is not "ripping", it is "sampling." You can't rip vinyl, you must sample. It works as well with cassette or reel to reel.

Even though you will have the worst of both worlds, analog's noise and lack of dynamic range coupled with digital's aliasing distortion and lack of harmonic range, many CDs you make yourself from vinyl will sound better than a remastered CD, because the remastering of many of these old greats was pure crap. Led Zepplin's "Presence", for instance, lacks presence in the remastered version. A home burned CD made with a good turntable and halfway decent sound card will sound better than the CD you buy from the store, although it won't be as good as the original vinyl.

Music recording reached its peak right before the introduction of digital. Nothing sounds as good as a 30 inch per second analog tape, but a vinyl record made from one comes damned close.

The last five or ten years of analog were pure shit, as the masters were digital, and gave the worst of both worlds.

-mcgrew

VinylDB like CDDB

[ThreeToe]

Not sure how useful this would be, but it seems as though there is opportunity here to build a VinylDB much like the CDDB. Of course, the problem is a little more interesting than simply thumbprinting based on number of tracks/length of tracks, since track detection depends on user preferences.

But suppose there were a standard cutoff (say, -45dB) and standard length of time (say, 1.5 seconds) that were used to detect tracks for the purposes of thumbprinting. You'd have to perform detection after RMS normalization of the audio (probably to -16dB). You'd have to detect and skip noise at the beginning. Finally, you'd have to tolerate error in matched track lengths.

In theory, I think these are surmountable problems. I just hope someone does this before I open my collection and start ripping!

Re:VinylDB like CDDB

[Anonymous Coward]

doing the same with a cd reference database would achieve the same goal. programs that work with databases from cd sources would be able to fingerprint your vinyl just fine....

you would be surprised at how little information can be used to uniquly identify a song. hell, even with a raw whistled memlody using only UP-DOWN-UP=DOWN-DOWN frequency relative notes (1 bit per note) can be done by novices, and was formalized into a a name-that-tune database.... INT HE NINETEEN SEVENTIES.

but yes... a "power-spectrum" over time using FFT or wavelets that only studies peak frequencies and their neighbors and uses taht as a fingerprint would work very well and could be decomposed into a 256 bits of information.

High Frequency Cross Over distortion

[n1ckmrt]

At high frequencys the left hand of the needle will pick up some of the signle intended for the right hand side and vice-a-versa. High frequency cross over will generate a slightly beter defined sound stage and so can sound "nicer" and may be one of subtle things people can pick up on. But it is distortion and can be recreated electronically if so desired.

gramofile a real pain

[reptyle]

I have used gramofile successfully to record a number of albums of different varieties (Bach, blues, and the soundtrack to "Decline of Western Civilization," to name a few) and I can not recommend gramofile for everything; a swiss army knife for cd --> vinyl it is NOT. I think it's a good learning tool because it makes one with a geeky, tinker's mind examine the mechanics of filtering sound digitally. I far prefer to open two windows and use a horribly convoluted variation on SOX because it saves me the interim step of separating tracks -- alt-tab allows you to start one track and end another seamlessly.

I will concede this is a personal preference on my part, not a dogmatic technical point.

Different Link...

[cribcage]

You can't just hook line out to line in and expect a decent result. You need some decent software as well. this guy [lp2cd.com] makes a living doing decent conversions. If it was truly as easy as you say, he'd be out of business.

I've never seen that site before. I have done a lot of business with Hamilton Audio/Video, however. They do great work.

Even if creating a good, noise-reduced digital recording from an LP were "easy," I still wouldn't do it myself. I don't currently own a record player. I'd have to spend a fair bit of money to get the quality equipment that Hamilton already owns. Besides which, the LPs I own that I want transferred are so old, rare, and valuable that I feel more comfortable having them played by someone who does it for a living. I wouldn't trust myself not to scratch something.

For about 50 bucks, I get a great-sounding CD, including cover art, from each LP. This is done by professionals, using high-grade equipment and software. I consider it worth my money.

crib

Jebus!!

[commodoresloat]

built in RIAA filtering

You mean they have DRM for vinyl now?

Re:Jebus!!

[trudyscousin]

Believe it or not, there once was a time when the RIAA concerned itself more with standards rather than litigation.

Re:Jebus!!

[Chris Johnson]

*snrk!*

They were useful ONCE, ya know. Back in the day, the RIAA developed uniform standards for pre-emphasis/de-emphasis curves for vinyl records. This is known as RIAA equalization, and if we didn't have it there'd be 27 different EQ curves for different records and it would have been horrible :)

Vinyl ripping - some things to consider

[maddog42]

About 18 months ago, I finished ripping my entire (350+ LPs) vinyl collection to mp3/cd. Took about 18 months to do it, as well. I used gramofile, lame, and The Art of Noise (wav editor) as the toolkit.
- Decide on a naming convention for your tracks. It will make it *much* easier to generate playlists and indexes later. I used Artist - Album - side/track [a-d][0-9] - Song Title.mp3
- Set up a couple of scripts that query you for song titles and track lengths, and then drive the conversion process. With the track lengths known, you can cue up a record and go off and do something until it's done. It's lots easier later when gramofile can't quite make up its mind about where to split a side; then fire up TAON (or another wav editor that can deal with a 200-300Mb sample file) and insert silence where appropriate. Re-run gramofile against the edited wav and it will split where you want to.
- You will want the editor as well for those skips and ticks.
- For live albums and those where songs segue into each other, with the editor you can insert silence, copy and paste a few seconds from the end of one track to the beginning of the next, and do a fade-out/fade-in with no loss of material.
- Use an audio preamplifer to boost turntable levels prior to your sound card. Either DIY (I found some schematics on the 'net) or commercial ($50 or so). Try not to have flourescent lights in the vicinity and especially no cel phones! Their emissions can get into your cabling and you will remember when so-and-so called while you were ripping Close To The Edge.
- Keep your original wav files if you can afford the storage. The one big mistake I made.
- Use a decent bit rate. I compressed everything at 160kbps and am very happy with the results; ended up with about 1Mb/minute of audio.
Have a ball. Get in touch with your old tunes (I graduated high school in '73, to place things in perspective) and enjoy. I fit my collection onto 31 CD's and dumped them all on a hard drive at work; letting XMMS shuffle through them all makes for great background.

Re:Why do this? -retard only 256 levels of red pas

[Anonymous Coward]

Child, that is the most incoherent, stupid, long, loaded with spelling mistakes and just plain wrong post EVER.
I'm guessing that you don't capitalize sentences because you have one arm in a straight-jacket? And if not, why not?

Pre-vinyl

[ivanmnemonic]

What about those _old_ records before vinyl (I think they were pressed on glass)? I wonder if they have different sound quality potentials than vinyl. Was the switch to vinyl made because it was better, or just cheeper? (and less breakable)

Why doesn't anyone distribute music like this:

[Ayanami Rei]

48 or 96 kHz, 24-bit (or 16-bit), straight from the equipment masters, on CD-R (for singles) or DAT (for LP). Who said anything about Red-Book...

The technically inclined would know what to do with a dangerous format like that.

Check my journal in a few hours, I've got a standard brewing.

I spin over 50% CD now

[Anonymous Coward]

I am now at a point, after slowly and unintentionally moving to CDs, that most of what I spin is on CDs. I don't see this trend reversing either. For psytrance at least, CDs releases are becoming very normal. I'm getting more CDs in the mail instead of white labels, too.

And this is just fine with me. As somebody who should be in the audiophile category, since I do care about the sound, I really don't have an opinion on this issue.

Maybe I should make an account some day...

Re:Amazing new tech!

[commodoresloat]

wow and flutter

Is that the pornographic version of "shock and awe"?

If someone ever mentions "warm" and "bright"...

[Anonymous Coward]

...in the same sentence when talking about a sound, disregard everything they have to say. They obviously don't know shit about audio.

"Warm" refers to a lack of higher overtones, there is no crispness or sizzling quality.

"Bright" means an abundance of high ovetones, the sound is very crisp.

You can't have a sound that's warm and bright at the same time.

Gnome Wave Cleaner

[Anonymous Coward]

I use gnome wave cleaner (gwc.sf.net) much more often. A better product, IMO.

Yeah, no shit!

[jonskerr]

That yahoo above who says terms like "warmth" and "roundness" are useless and unquantifiable. Why are they useless? Useless to you, maybe, because you're overly-analytical. If you would get off your lazy ass and actually compare how it sounds to your ear instead of just analyzing graphs and statistics you'd maybe learn something.

This is a very common problem in modern science and the entire western approach to life. People assume if there's no way to put a number on it, it doesn't exist. These boundaries between everything are as imaginary as the bigfoot, UFOs, psychic phenomena and everything else nerd typically scoff at. Pay attention to the world around you, not the screen in front of you.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

that's what

And save the music BACK to vinyl

[ksheff]

With this and a technics turntable. Well maybe..both sites say coming soon but the web page is dated 2001. It would probably be cheaper to have one of the vinyl pressing shops in Nashville make you a few.

I listen to a pretty eclectic selection...

[leonbrooks]

...and it all sounds good. Mind you, I generally don't exactly rattle the mortar out from between the bricks either.

Oh for crying out loud.

[dmaxwell]

The object was not to spend days designing some uber piece of gear with hand rolled capacitors, WW II vintage tubes, oxygen-free gold wire, a rubber chicken, some flux capacitors, and pixie dust. The idea was to make a cheap piece of kit sound reasonably like an expensive piece of kit for some impromptu market research. Incidentally, I never saw one of these sitting next to someone's spanking new $300 home theatre.

You want a scientific reference? Then google for something called the "placebo effect". It turns up in more places than medicine and I guarantee you'll find loads for many contexts. The object of the exercise was to see if hard-core audiophiles could be tricked into thinking the sound coming out of a cheap amp was being made by an expensive one. Let me spell out the gag more explicitly: El cheapo amp was behind a curtain. The audience was told it a top-secret piece of experimental gear and he asked the audience how it sounded compared to a very expensive tube amp that was in plain view. Furthermore, El Cheapo was not under a demanding load. The scheme falls apart if any of it's little knobs get tweaked or it has enough time to drift out of the calibration imposed by the EQ. The latter may slip under the radar of the typical Absolute Sound staffer if he isn't allowed to look behind the curtain. Shades of the Great and Terrible Oz! You don't need a "computer driven fully automated I'm-more-leet-than-you" piece of gear to detect gullibility.

I'll spell it out even more clearly. There was no high end design taking place. There was no actual product being marketed. The speakers in use were high-end gear at the time. It was little experiment in tweak psychology.

As for Carver marketing to tweaks, I know that. I was suggesting something more subtle: Carver knows his market the way the P.T. Barnum knew his.

Since you don't like anecdotes, I'll include another one. This one happened to me personally. I wanted to digitize some vinyl (hey! This just got back on topic!) and had no need for exceptional quality. Reasonably clean audio from vinyl in various conditions for conversion to mp3 was the object. My turntable was lacking a cartridge and the Shack (I know, I know but convienience and affordability were the objectives) was out. I go to this place called Needle-In-A-Haystack and ask what they have in stock for P-Mount tonearms. You had to ask; it was all behind a (non-glassed in) counter. The first thing he showed me went for $150, "But it's very inferior. I've got some that are barely alright for $300. You can spend even more. The more expensive it is the better it sounds." I practically ran away screaming. What's worse, I don't this guy was scamming me. That little sermon was delivered in the flat tones of the True Believer. Yes, I know quality cartridges cost a bundle but it is not generally true that "more expensive is better". I don't think one has to be ultra-leet audio engineer with a pseudo-random generator to understand things like:

The law of diminishing returns
The basic psycology of marketing
Ditto for Placebo Effect
Self Deception

And last but not least - There's a sucker born every minute.

As for my relative, you're right. He's no engineer but he's a great salesman. He had zero trouble selling the same illusion to another tweak....who was left rather speechless as my relative was cruel enough to raise the curtain and show what the speakers were really hooked up to.

I doubt you have the objectivity to carry this out but have some of your tweak friends over and see if you can fool them too.

Live Recording to CD

[stapedium]

I've been using grammofile's bplay and another little utility called wavsplit along with cdrecord to make CDs from live recordings. Gramofile's mod of bplay is nice since it has a peak level meter, and the average channels option is nice for converting a mono to recording for CD play.

The draw back is that it takes about an hour of processing for each hour of recording and there is no one tool to bring it all together.

What would be really nice would be to have a graphical front end (something like audacity) to record, split and burn the live recording. After presing the record button, you could press a TAG button to mark off where the tracks splits should be. After finishing the recording, you could edit these tag locations. Then, you press a little CD icon that splits the file into tracks based on the tags you made during the recording and burns the tracks to CD using DAO (no pauses).

Any one else have any experience or interest in a program like this?

Good to see

[leonbrooks]

My mum keeps nagging me about how crappy they look, but the sound's the thing, and she only has to look at them when she visits.

...a pragmatist. (-:

You could always stretch a sheet of black cloth over them or something.

Microsoft also has a great solution

[Baggio]

If you are lucky enough to use Windows XP, you might also consider Microsoft Plus! Digital Media Edition. I prefer WMA over MP3 anyway, but I find the benefit "add copy protection", a little puzzling. Over all, a good program for cleaning up the hiss and pop from old LPs, and porting them into the digital world with as clear a sound as possible.

Gnome Wave Cleaner for audio denoising.

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome Wave Cleaner, while not CEDAR, will do an amazing job of cleaning out audio noise from digital audio media that needs it.

Give it a whirl, if you have old vinyl or other audio that needs cleaned up.

Find it at:

http://gwc.sourceforge.net/

-- Jeff Welty

Real filters complicate Nyquist theorem

[yerricde]

"44KHz is not enough to go up to even 22KHz"
Nyquist dissagrees with you, i believe.

Really? The Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem states that any signal with bandwidth DC to f/2 Hz can be perfectly reproduced from f Hz samples. However, it's not feasible in reality to produce a signal with flat response from 0 to 22049 Hz that cuts off just before 22050 Hz. For a real signal, engineers must allow about ten percent margin between the high end of flat response and the high end of reproduction. Any improvement in sharpness of a causal filter comes at a cost of phase distortion, which is audible as ringing and chirping in transients.

Film grain

[yerricde]

You can't make a 1280x1024 picture out of 320x200 without making it look worse

Are you thinking only of the stereotypical nearest-neighbor-followed-by-sinc algorithms for enlarging images? There exist algorithms with better subjective results, such as 2xSaI and AdvanceMAME Scale2x to blow up hand-drawn images and fractal algorithms to blow up photographic images. Likewise, there is Spectral Band Replication for audio.

You can blow up a real photograph to almost any size with little loss of quality because the resolution is nearly infinite.

Film has grain too, which is why professional portrait photographers use 127mm "medium-format" film rather than 35mm film.

Re:Film grain

[Hognoxious]

Film has grain too, which is why professional portrait photographers use 127mm "medium-format" film rather than 35mm film.

I've never heard of 127mm film. There was a drop-in cartridge type called 127, I don't know if it's available these days. It certainly wasn't aimed at the professional.

Medium format film is generally 120 which is 60mm wide and has a usable length of 720mm.

Re:Film grain

[yerricde]

oops -- I was mistaken about the size of medium format. I am not a photographer, but I am aware of some of the issues such as film grain.

How to get even harmonics

[yerricde]

To get more even harmonics, make the positive side of the distortion curve subtly different from the negative side. For instance, use a push-release amp rather than a push-pull amp.

Laser record player

[RockModeNick]

I believe at least one, possibly several, units that read the grooves in records via a laser exist - they work reasonably well, the problem they face is that with the laser, the slightest spec of dust creates a terrible sound, even for specs of dust a needle would push right out of the way. If the record is perfectly clean and new, they do work though.

Cheap tiny headphone amp

[metamatic]

Funny you should ask...

I recently ordered the Xin Super Mini Amp with crossfeed. It arrived today, and I immediately tried it out with my pair of Sennheiser PXC250 noise-cancelling headphones (which, with noise cancelling off, act like a pair of PX200s. Source audio was a Sony MP3 CD Walkman with LAME-encoded MP3s, either --alt-preset standard or --r3mix.

OK, enough hardware details. Let's just say that about half an hour later, my wife wandered in to the front room to find out what I was doing still out there. The answer is that I was hearing musical details I had never heard before. The amp drives the headphones effortlessly. The crossover circuit effect is subtle, but it does indeed seem to give an open, spacious feeling to the sound, particularly on techno tracks where there's a lot of left-right fooling around.

The Sennheisers, by the way, are much better than the Bose noise cancelling headphones in sound quality, with the added advantage that they fold up and are significantly cheaper. HeadRoom rate them the best active noise cancellation headphones available as far as sound quality goes, and I can believe it--they're comparable to my regular home-listening Sennheisers. I considered some Etymotics, but experimenting with silicone earplugs left me uncomfortably sore; my ear canals seem to be rather shallow and narrow. So the Sennheisers are recommended too--but they do need a headphone amp. The Walkman can barely drive them without one.

Re:Cheap tiny headphone amp

[CaptainStormfield]

Thanks for the link -- fantastic! Exactly what I was looking for.

Did you order the model with the analog or the digital volume control?

Re:Cheap tiny headphone amp

[metamatic]

Digital. I figured I'd set it once and not adjust it much, and it would be better than having a knob sticking out (fnarr fnarr).

It does the job. If I were adjusting it regularly it'd be an utter pain, but since any portable will have a decent analog volume control...

Re:I thought the correct way of ripping a vinyl wa

[overclocker89]

What he did was to write a program that measures how deep the grooves are. The end result is terible audio quality.