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Return of the Vinyl Album
bulled writes "NPR ran a story this morning about the comeback of vinyl. It seems that sales of new vinyl records are up about 10%; sales will approach a million this year (as against half a billion for CDs). NPR mentioned the popularity of a turntable with a USB interface — they didn't specify the brand; could be this one, or this — and speculated on other possible reasons for the resurgence. They mentioned sound quality and lack of DRM as possible causes. Sound quality can and will be debated, but DRM rates a resounding 'Duh.'"
While you may think I'm joking I note that a 30-40Kb/sec stream is more than suficient to store audio at near CD quality in real time. You can send 30-40Kb/sec over a telephone which has a small fraction of the bandwidth of a record. Thus I can actually encode about 8 simultaneous stereo streams
since audio records last about 40 minutes, 8 streams gives me 320 minutes of near CD quality music which is longer than an audio encoded CD can provide. Next up VCD on Vinyl
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The last two records I bought on vinyl (the new records by Of Montreal and M. Ward) came with a coupon for one-time download of DRM-free MP3 versions of the album tracks from the label's Web sites. So I get the big cover art and the intangible experience (they're both double albums on vinyl) but I can still play 'em on the computer without sweating over the process of digitizing vinyl.
Fact is, the vinyl version of the Of Montreal record (which is awesome) has a scratch that makes track 3 repeat the same crazy groove over and over, and it sounds intentional and much, much better than the digital version, which now seems weirdly short. And it comes with four bonus tracks, which are included in the download too but not on the CD version. Obviously some small record labels are betting big on vinyl as a way to keep people buying records, and I'm all for it.
Absolutely right. As usual when someone posts something really smart that bucks the CW my mod points are taking a tropical vacation.
Sadly, CDs are not great either, for different reasons. Where vinyl introduces the uncontrollable variables you talk about (thermal variations, electrical noise affecting the very-low-voltage signal, never-ideal disc and needle quality, dust) CDs, because of their low sampling frequency (which should have been 96kHz from the start), mangle the waveforms at high frequencies. Still, CDs come a lot closer to delivering accurate reproduction in any form of real-world use. For starters, you just can't always keep dust away from your needle...
As for amps, it has always amazed me that people *love* the ones that introduce distortion and claim the accurate ones are "cold" and "technical." It's not the amp's job to be warm and emotional; it's the musician's. I run away from any component that advertises "warm" or "musical" sound; those are code words for distortion.
My own setup consists of various digital sources playing through a big Class D amp into speakers with poly cone woofer/midrange and planar tweeters. Everyone complains the sound is too cold. But it's dead-accurate with test signals and I can actually hear the detail in my recordings, not just "warmth" that may make me feel good but isn't there.
Have you seen and heard a DJ with vinyls? I mean, a real DJ, someone who mixes. I was peacefully sipping some malt liquor at a random electro industrial bar on a slow day. It was probably in the middle of the week; I recall that we were no more than five in the place. An electro industrial bar is not a place where you expect a skillful DJ. You expect a DJ knowledgable in the latest trends with a huge collection of obscure music that he had from download^W import from Germany or something like that. Songs go one after the other and there is some effort to keep that BPM constant and to make the transition beat-into-beat. I thought that this was the essence of mixing. Then, out of nowhere, came this rave DJ. He was actually a former electro industrial DJ who was visiting his former workplace. And he made a set.
I don't know how to describe the experience. He started a hard song on the CD player (Funker Vogt I think) then he attacked the turntable. He started with a Depeche Mode vinyls, and I hear you scream at the idea of eletro pop being mixed with Funker Vogt, but what he did was brilliant. He jumped on the EQ and isolated the good baseline so typical of Depeche Mode and gently blended it into the hard stuff, just the baseline. A moment later the vinyl was doing backflips over his head; he wanted to plug in voice sample that was on the other side. It was almost instantaneous, he waved his hand over the EQ, the voice sample played, the vinyl flipped again and we were back with the baseline. We assume that vinyls have poor seek time but, in the hand of an expert, a vinyl will seeks much faster than a CD. The DJ continued his dance, mixing in some elements of trance and goa, building an elecro industrial song out of other songs from a wide repertoire of electronic music. When he left, he was not the resident DJ after all, nothing was the same anymore.
I had discover that mixing was in fact a form of composition but it was all gone. I now pay attention to the work of the DJ. The DJ is an artist an his medium is extremely expressive. A good DJ will keep the dancefloor full but only a greet DJ will coerce people into dehydration and renal failure. When I see a DJ lifting the dusty cover of the turntable, I know that I'm in for a good show. I keep the ear open and I enjoy this rare skill that the CD almost killed.
When you said near CD-quality, you weren't thinking of 8 track tapes were you?
Let's try the math again. First many digital radio stations use ABBAcast or something like it for near-CD quality at 33 to 40Kbs. Even if it's not CD quality it's certainly higher quality that anything that came off the vinyl in the first place. But let's ignore that and incorrectly assume we need 128kb/sec and see how the math comes out.
Audio modems don't actually use the full spectrum of the phone. last I looked they used about 3Khz. Now a vinyl record has a lot of bandwidth. the main limit on the bandwidth is the needles voltage/amplitude response falls off. That's why you equalize them. (which is why your stereo has a different input jack for phono than for tapes) You can only equalize then so far and get a decent sounding thing but you could push this much further if you went to a an analog coding scheme other than amplitude modulation. (hey that's what modems do! how about that).
So just to have some numbers lets make some up that are not completely crazy. Lets say we could push audio signal recovery out to 30Khz. So that gives us ten 3khz wide modem channels. And since the record is stereo that gives 20 total channels.
20*56kb/sec = 1060 kb/sec
1060kb/sec
Hey! that's what I claimed to begin with. I claimed I could fit about 8 cd quality channels (and here we mean 128Kb/sec) on a Vinyl record.
But wait! that's actually a gross underestimate. What determines the bits per second on a modem. it's a combination of two things, bandwidth and signal to noise. A vinyl record has enormously better signal to noise than a telephone. So the number of bits pers second my vinyl can support is vastly higher than the phone.
the shannon capacity scales as:
Bandwidth * log_2 (1 + SNR)
(where SNR is the singal to noise ratio in power)
to if I had 128 times better SNR on a record then that's about 8 times more bits per second.
So you see my Digital Vinyl smokes your CD.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.