The Rise of "Hybrid" Vinyl-MP3s

Khyber writes to let us know that First Word Records, a U.K.-based record label, is now selling vinyl records that come with codes that allow you to download a 320-kbit MP3 of that record's content. The article mentions another independent label, Saddle Creek, that also offers DRM-free downloads with some vinyl records. The co-founder of First Word is quoted on why they didn't DRM the download: "Making a legal, paid-for version of the file less useful than a copied or pirated one doesn't make sense."

Comments

vye....null?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is this vye..null?

Re:vye....null?

[Reverend528]

It's an ancient musical recording that is etched into a circular rock. A bird presses it's beak to the stone and rotates it, producing sound.

Re:vye....null?

[aneurysm36]

here is an illustration

Re:vye....null?

[Mr Jazzizle]

I have 2 questions about that: Why is the bird on a turtle? Also, what's the turtle standing on? :P

Re:vye....null?

[Worthless_Comments]

It's turtles all the way down.

Re:vye....null?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an ancient musical recording that is etched into a circular rock. A bird presses it's beak to the stone and rotates it, producing sound.

Ah, so that's where the "rock&roll" came from! And especially tough rocks were the beginning of the "hard rock".

Re:vye....null?

[digitrev]

You mean like him

Possibly better than CDs?

[powerpants]

If the MP3s are coming straight from the record label, maybe they could be encoded straight from the master mix, rather than a down-sampled 24-bit, 44.1kHz CD. My understanding is that CDs go up to 20 kHz (which is pretty close to the highest pitch humans can hear), but that the bit-depth is somewhat course at that range.

Is there an audio engineer around who can explain if there's much to be gained this way?

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Tuoqui]

I'm not an audio engineer but from a telecom course I took the basic idea is that you sample at twice the highest frequency (IE. 20kHz frequency would require 40k samples a second).

For the most part humans focus on the 300Hz-3.3kHz range which is why the phone companies only give you about 3k Bandwidth and sample at about 8k samples a second over POTS.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Hao Wu]

I wonder -- what is the real ability of a vinyl record to store digital data?

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a load of audiophile BS and folklore about the alleged failings of CDs, but they are the best widespread consumer audio format available.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[iangoldby]

My understanding is that CDs go up to 20 kHz ... but that the bit-depth is somewhat course at that range.

You are probably thinking of 'one-bit' (or bitstream) digital to analogue converters. (Wikipedia article.) It gets around the problem of producing 16 bits of resolution with a single bit by switching at a frequency many times that of the sampling frequency and averaging over time.

In its purest form, it would switch at 2^16, or 65536 times the CD sample frequency. If one CD sample value is 0, the DAC would be off for 65536 DAC output samples. If the CD sample value is 65535 it is on for 65536 DAC output samples. For intermediate values it is on for the given proportion of the time. In other words, the CD sample value determines the duty-cycle of the output from the DAC. The one-bit on/off output is then averaged over time. This results in a conversion with almost no non-linear distortion of the signal.

Unfortunately a frequency of 65536 * 44.1 kHz would be in the THz range, so the actual frequency that a 1 bit DAC operates at is somewhat lower. For lower frequency audio signals the averaging process is still very accurate, but it loses some accuracy for the highest frequency audio tones mostly when there are rapid transients in the high frequencies. You might refer to this as a 'coarsening of the bit-depth'.

A full 16-bit DAC doesn't suffer from this problem because each sample from the CD is converted straight into a voltage proportional to that sample value in a single step. But it is very difficult to make a completely linear 16-bit DAC, so the non-lineararity of the DAC introduces its own distortions. But these distortions do not depend on frequency as they do with a 1-bit DAC.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[lufis]

Red Book CD audio is 16-bit.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Mattintosh]

Yes. Nyquist. There's a Theorem, a Limit, and a Guy that discovered these, all by the same name.

A 44.100kHz sample rate will theoretically get you up to a 22.050kHz max frequency in the audio signal. Humans can focus on any part of the audible spectrum, but voices won't typically fall outside the 300-3300 Hz range. Thus aLaw (US) and mu-Law (outside the US, a.k.a. "uLaw", since the Greek mu looks like a u with a tail) are typically 8000 Hz sample rate, 8-bit-sample, monophonic (who has a stereo telephone?) signal when digitized.

The GP was worried that the bit depth is "coarse". This is not the case. Bit depth "distance" is constant for a given depth.

CD's are 44.1kHz, 16-bit, stereo. Always. So there are always 44100 samples per second per channel. There are always two channels (stereo, one left, one right). And each sample in each channel is always 16 bits. A 16-bit integer can represent numbers from 0-65535 (2^0-1 through 2^16-1), and since there's no need for negative numbers (this is Pulse Code Modulation, or PCM, so no, you don't need to represent a +/- of a waveform) you get the full 0-65535 swing. From there, the value is directly translatable into a DC voltage that goes to the speakers. (Most of the heavy lifting is done in the A/D phase, D/A phase is a simple value-to-DC conversion.) The change in DC voltage over time is what causes the magnets to move, which moves the speaker cones, which moves air, which moves your tympanic membrane, which blah-blah-blah... eventually you hear sound.

So there's no need to worry. Nothing gets coarse. Nothing loses fidelity. Nothing loses audible quality. This is why vinyl fanatics get laughed at by people who know how and why digital audio works. The limits of even now-mundane CD audio are far above the possible limits of even hypothetically perfect human hearing. Nobody can hear 22kHz. Nothing below 22kHz is misrepresented in CD-quality audio. For mastering work, where effects will be applied later, higher quality recordings are wonderful, since you can guarantee that it will stay high-quality when downsampled to CD-quality, but other than that (and "economies of scale" where better parts are just as cheap to produce), there's no need for anything better.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Anonymous Coward]

That "300Hz-3.3kHz range" is for human vocals, sufficient for a phone conversation but our hearing covers 20 to 20k Hz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_%28sense%29# Hearing_in_humans). POTS sampling at 8k per second is therefore acceptable for a voice circuit but to record music or arbitrary sound you need a much higher sampling rate, for example 44kHz for audio CDs.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[zippthorne]

But this doesn't have anything to do with the failings of CDs, but rather the failings of MP3s encoded from CDs. And how they relate to MP3s encoded from a source upstream of whatever downdsampling process is used to create the CDs themselves.

There is no doubt that a 320 kps MP3 encoded from a superior source to CD could potentially be superior to a 320 kps MP3 encoded from CD. The question is whether this is noticeable, and indeed, whether the MP3 in question could have higher fidelity than the uncompressed CD.

It is certainly possible to compare and make qualitative judgments even without being able to hear the difference, especially if you have the source material. All you have to do is use the MP3 or CD-audio file to reconstruct the original waveform using the best algorithm available and calculate the least-squares difference.

There are plenty of products where knowing one is technically better than the other despite being practically indistinguishable has sentimental value to the consumer.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Anonymous Coward]

IAAE.

CDs are 16-bit, 44.1kHz.
24-bits gives you a higher dynamic range (per sample, 44.1 being the samples per second). The higher the sampling frequency, the greater the frequency range (Nyquist frequency http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist_frequency).
That is why CDs are 44.1, because humans supposedly only hear up to ~20kHz.

MP3 is a lossy format, I don't think there would be much to gain.
Although, I've never tried to encode an MP3 from a 24-bit source and not sure if that is even possible.

It would be awesome though if they sent you a data CD with the masters in WAV format.

(Those damn images, I can't read the words)

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[PitaBred]

The problem is that with vinyl, you are required to sanely mix their tracks, whereas with a CD you can blow out everything with no repercussion. On vinyl if you do that, you wind up with the needle skipping. It sounds better than a CD simply because of the physical limitations of the medium. Which wouldn't be an issue if "artists" didn't think blindly that louder is better, period.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[[Marvin]]

Actually, the max. frequency that can be sampled is 22kHz, not 22.050kHz - what the Nyquist theorem states is that in order to construct a signal accuately, you need to sample at twice the maximum frequency + a little more, because then you can also deduct the phase of the original signal.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your explanation is spot-on and deserves to be modded up. However, I do have a question for you regarding your "laughing at vinyl fanatics" comment that I've never seen addressed. The question is the relationship of harmonic overtones. It's well known that certain confluences of sound react with each other and produce further sounds. Even though these typically fall outside the range of human hearing, we are still able to sense and feel them. How does the quantization and digitization of analog waveforms affect the reproducibility of these harmonics?

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[c_fel]

You're right. But still, the higher sampling frequency, the better it sounds, even when it's over 40kHz. It's because two near frequencies form a beat frequency that is the difference between these two frequencies. So even if you reproduce two frequencies that are not audible by humans, their beat frequency often can be eared.

But you have to have a very high fidelity sound system to reproduce these frequencies, so for most consumers, the sampling frequency of a CD is Okay.

It is also true that for most people, the problem with CDs is more with the quantization level. Actually we have to induce white noise at the encoding step, to be sure to reduce the quantization noise that is very, very disturbing for the ear. Analog doesn't have this quantization noise, but still, it has to be played in a very high fidelity system to be superior to CD quality.

Anyway, sound is personal, hey ?

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[gEvil (beta)]

Which wouldn't be an issue if "artists" didn't think blindly that louder is better, period.

It's often not the artist that makes this decision. Rather, it's whoever does the mastering that decides this. Sure, the label and artist sign off on it, but remember that the artist's ears are usually pretty shot from playing live music day in and day out. And the label doesn't want to have to pay to have it done again.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[maxume]

If we are quibbling, the theorem is about the reconstruction, not the sampling.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[PitaBred]

Whatever the reason, it still happens, and is a problem.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Anonymous Coward]

we are still able to sense and feel them

That's the part that will get you laughed at.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[zippthorne]

That's a problem with vinyl? sounds like a feature to me.

With MP3 (or at least, with some unnamed but still lossy compressive scheme) it's possible to have your cake and eat it, too. You can specify the base volume level, and have your loud monstrosity, but with no skipping (as in the album) or loss of fidelity (as in the CD).

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody, a big hand for Captain Obvious! *cheers and applause*

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Look, if you're going to make up justifications for using vinyl, make them more convincing. Much of the theory about human hearing is based on the assumption that the ear acts as a linear system. If the ear were a linear system there is no way it'd be possible for "certain confluences of sound react with each other and produce further sounds". In linear systems harmonics at different frequencies simply add, there is no possible 'interaction' that can happen between them.

But nonlinear systems are quite different. The classic example is soliton waves. When two of these meet, they don't simply combine additively. In particular, different harmonics don't necessarily pass straight through each other and its quite possible for two very high frequency signals to interact and produce a low frequency signal in the result. And of course there really is no reason to expect the ear to remain close to a linear system, even ordinary sound waves in air become nonlinear if the sound is loud enough.

So if you want to sound convincing, talking about nonlinearity is your best bet. I can guarantee that 90% of the engineers you talk to won't have a sensible response because they've never studied nonlinear signal processing, and they'll be less likely to laugh at you.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[PitaBred]

That's what I was saying. I never said it was a problem, I said it was a physical limitation. Limitations aren't always bad.

And no, you can't get the same with an mp3. It still depends on the source CD, which is all the tracks already mixed together. The only solution would be to re-mix the source tracks so they weren't all loud as hell simultaneously, and an LP basically forces you to do that.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[eat here_get gas]

"Which wouldn't be an issue if "artists" didn't think blindly that louder is better, period. "

"Made loud, to be played loud" j.giels band, 1974
I believed it then, I believe it now...if it's too loud, you're too old!

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's much more to digitization than is explained in the grandparent post. He did get it as right in that short comment as it needs to be to understand the basics. No need to nitpick, especially since neither 22kHz nor 22.05kHz are relevant bounds in practice, because the signal is filtered after the DA conversion and filters which are steep enough to come close to these limits aren't cheap enough to put into consumer electronics. (I'm just waiting for the dumbass who claims that CDs don't capture more complex waveforms than sines at 20kHz and vinyl will let him hear 20kHz sawtooths or something...)

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[serginho]

"This is why vinyl fanatics get laughed at by people who know how and why digital audio works."

There's only problem with this: vinyl lovers are not worried about signal-to-noise ratios or the frequencies that are audible to the human ear. It is simply a matter of taste.

Vinyl records, if played in a decent setup (good turntables, good capsules, good speakers - but by no means audiophile gear), do sound different to CDs. They sound warmer, with more presence. That's what vinyl collectors are looking for.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[eat here_get gas]

"MP3 is a lossy format, I don't think there would be much to gain. Although, I've never tried to encode an MP3 from a 24-bit source and not sure if that is even possible."

from the samples I heard, it's possible, but not practical, as the sound degradation is horrendous.

"It would be awesome though if they sent you a data CD with the masters in WAV format."

thats exactly how I collect my bootlegs. In my circles we shun mp3, not just because of its "lossy" stigma, but as to someone who REALLY appreciates THE SOUND(S) of music, mp3's are empty. Downgrading (or downsampling) to mp3 chucks out a lot of music. mp3's don't just compress the music, they throw out a lot of it, hence the inherent file size differences. On the other hand, SHN (shorten) and FLAC (free lossless audio codec) will compress music greatly, without sacrificing ONE SINGLE NOTE!

On a side note- since I collect/trade-for-free live concert recordings, and not commercially-produced cdr/lp/cass, drm and dmca is not a thing I worry about....

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Kamineko]

They should give you the vinyl, a listen to-able MP3, and a hyper-master-mix (or unmix. Bung the tracks on there too.) FLAC version.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Mr2001]

So even if you reproduce two frequencies that are not audible by humans, their beat frequency often can be eared.

But you have to have a very high fidelity sound system to reproduce these frequencies, so for most consumers, the sampling frequency of a CD is Okay. I think the more likely explanation is that if you own a "very high fidelity sound system", it means you've spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to get a slight improvement in sound quality, and you'll think you hear a difference whether it's actually there or not... because you know that if you don't hear a difference, you're just a sucker.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[eat here_get gas]

um, mp3 and flac are oppositional. lossy vs. lossless. one or the other.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[trentblase]

Vinyl records, if played in a decent setup (good turntables, good capsules, good speakers - but by no means audiophile gear), do sound different to CDs. They sound warmer, with more presence. That's what vinyl collectors are looking for. CDs sound different if played with digital filters. Don't tell me nobody's come up with a "reduce bandwidth and introduce artifacts so this CD sounds like vinyl" filter.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Trailer Trash]

. Nothing below 22kHz is misrepresented in CD-quality audio.

Bullshit. A 22kHz sine wave will be a 22kHz square wave when recorded onto a CD. They don't sound the same. Of course, humans can't hear that high, but the point is that if you're quantizing a wave you won't get the exact same thing out at any frequency. However, 22kHz is far enough above the limits of our hearing and even moreso above the limits of what is interesting to record that the effects are limited.

But the higher the frequency, the more it's going to look like a square wave after it't digitized.

Records have other effects, but a new vinyl record can likely produce better sound quality than a CD the first time it's played. For the long term, I prefer a CD, or, frankly an mp3 (which is even worse than a CD). There's more to it than sound quality for me.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is slashdot. This where if you prefer records over CDs you're a 500 dollar wooden volume knob buyer, yet if you want MP3s you want them encoded at 320kps so you don't lose any quality until they come out of your 99 cent earphones that can't reproduce the frequencies you'd be "losing".

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Anonymous Coward]

So even if you reproduce two frequencies that are not audible by humans, their beat frequency often can be eared.

If it can be "eared", it is below 20kHz, which means it will be recorded and properly digitized. A frequency above 20kHz which might have played a part in creating that beat frequency will not be represented in the digital data stream, but it's effect will be, and that's all that matters, unless you're trying to train bats.

the problem with CDs is more with the quantization level.

No, 16bits provide enough signal to noise ratio so that the noise floor of the digital signal is inaudible at an amplification where the loudest signal can damage your hearing.

Anyway, sound is personal, hey ?

No, none of that is personal. Liking tube-amplifiers for the characteristic distortions that they introduce into the signal is personal. Quantization noise and sampling of beat frequencies (like all other frequencies) are the subject of signal processing, which is maths, not emotion. Not liking something doesn't change the facts.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[tuba_dude]

"...no need for anything better." I beg to differ, but I will preface this with the fact that I haven't studied the engineering or the physics behind it. It could just be the fact that I'm an audiophile and musician, but there's an audible (very subtle, yes) difference between a 24-bit/96KHz (or higher) recording and a CD-quality recording. Some people are better tuned for listening than others. It's like sitting some people in front of a CRT. Some will be able to tell the difference between refresh rates, some won't. I had a hard time staying on focus, I wanted to rant about audio compression or live/recorded sound, but I'll control myself for now! :)

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[tuba_dude]

Also, feel free to shoot me for using HTML formatting and forgetting to use tags.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[trevor-ds]

Actually, the difference between a 22 kHz sine wave and a 22 kHz square wave is the higher frequency information. A square wave, at any frequency, is the sum of an infinite series of sine waves, up to infinite frequency. So, when it is said that "humans can't hear above 22 kHz", that is equivalent to saying that humans can't tell the difference between a sine wave and a square wave at 22 kHz.

In addition, the oversampling and filtering process in your CD player is meant to ensure that no frequencies higher than 22 kHz make it out of the player, meaning that a 22 kHz wave of any kind encoded on a CD will come out of the player as a sine wave.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is almost completely correct, but you're still a bit off.

Consider a continuous real-valued function f on [-pi, pi] and an arbitrarily close simple (in the sense of Lebesgue) approximation s. For simplicity's sake, assume that f is strictly increasing. (This condition ensures that s has at countably many discontinuities).

Calculate an appropriate Fourier approximation to s. The Fourier series will exhibit Gibb's phonomenon at each discontinuity.

In an ideal circuit, it turns out this isn't a problem, since an ideal single pole low pass filter will exactly cancel Gibb's effects. However, real transistors transistors have a slew rate that may more may not faithfully produce Gibb's phenonmenon. (They can if their slew rates are at least 2pi * f * A_max, where f is the highest Gibbs induced frequency and A_max is the maximum amplitude in volts). If a particular DAC can't do it, the low pass filter will end up artificially attenuating the higher frequencies.

Cheap DACs usually have low quality transistors.

Kind of neat, huh.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Bassman59]

. Nothing below 22kHz is misrepresented in CD-quality audio.

Bullshit. A 22kHz sine wave will be a 22kHz square wave when recorded onto a CD. They don't sound the same. Of course, humans can't hear that high, but the point is that if you're quantizing a wave you won't get the exact same thing out at any frequency. However, 22kHz is far enough above the limits of our hearing and even moreso above the limits of what is interesting to record that the effects are limited.

But the higher the frequency, the more it's going to look like a square wave after it't digitized.

I have to call bullshit on your call of bullshit.

You, and many other people, seem to forget exactly how sampling and reconstruction actually works. You do NOT draw a straight line between the samples!

Dan Lavry has an excellent paper that clearly explains how sampling and reconstruction work.

What's also interesting is that many audio editing programs, including ProTools, don't properly display waveforms. If you load a delta function (the sample at time t=0 is infinite, all other samples zero, but we represent infinite as full-scale after digitization) and display it in your favorite audio editor/DAW, it'll probably show a straight line drawn between the full-scale sample at time t=0 and the zero sample at time t=1/fs (the second sample). The one program that does this correctly is the old Cool Edit 2000, which displays a sinc function.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Lorkki]

A 16-bit integer can represent numbers from 0-65535 (2^0-1 through 2^16-1), and since there's no need for negative numbers (this is Pulse Code Modulation, or PCM, so no, you don't need to represent a +/- of a waveform) you get the full 0-65535 swing.

Well, not exactly so. The Red Book standard explicitly specifies that the format is 44.1 kHz, two channels, with 16-bit signed samples. How you choose to represent the zero amplitude level in a PCM format is only a question of definition. Higher bit depth nets you a larger dynamic range, as well as a slightly better representation of the waveform (albeit with very quickly diminishing returns).

This is why vinyl fanatics get laughed at by people who know how and why digital audio works. The limits of even now-mundane CD audio are far above the possible limits of even hypothetically perfect human hearing. Nobody can hear 22kHz. Nothing below 22kHz is misrepresented in CD-quality audio.

Nitpicking a little more, that's presuming some ideal conditions that don't come into effect when you step out into reality. In practice you lose more detail the closer to that end of the spectrum you get, and production stages tend to use higher sampling frequencies precisely because of that.

A reason I've often heard as to why some people prefer vinyl and analog equipment in general is that the sound seems "warmer" in a sense - which on the other hand might well be due to different characteristics in how high-frequency detail is preserved (or lost). It's not difficult to see why this point would be lost to audiophiles for whom the sole defining metric of better equipment is more precise numerical representation of sound.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Anonymous Coward]

(I'm just waiting for the dumbass who claims that CDs don't capture more complex waveforms than sines at 20kHz and vinyl will let him hear 20kHz sawtooths or something...)

There he is

People who think that vinyl can produce sound more accurately than SACDs or even CDs should be forced to use the superior accuracy of vinyl to encode digital data and see how much they can cram into the "infinite resolution" and "infinite sampling rate" (and read back without an error, of course). That would be fun to watch.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[kevinadi]

I believe engineers know that the ear is non-linear. CD is linear simply because they throw everything into a single number (sampling rate and bit depth), but mp3 and aac most definitely not. They use human perception to vary the encoding of various bands to control the distortion and achieve "compression" by actually creating distortion in the parts where you'll not likely to notice due to masking effect and such.

For vinyl vs cd, the most damaging argument to vinyl is that it uses constant angular value instead of constant linear value, so you got more data at the edges compared to the inside tracks, hence you have lower fidelity as you go. I say if people like vinyl, let them be. Arguing which sounds better than which is purely subjective.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[SimonBelmont]

Nothing below 22kHz is misrepresented in CD-quality audio.

Wrong. The Nyquist Theorem states only that a sample rate of double the highest expected frequency is the minimum required to avoid aliasing. Meaning that, if you sample 22kHz at 44kHz, it won't come out sounding like something other than 22kHz. But you could theoretically be sampling at the 0 every time. The Nyquist Theorem isn't really about faithful reproduction.

And in reality, there's no such thing as a perfect low-pass filter. This is why CDs are at 44kHz and not 40kHz, given that we can't hear anything above about 20kHz. But that still doesn't mean they reproduce 20kHz well, just that we can use a low-pass filter which doesn't significantly attenuate 20kHz and sample it to a CD without audible aliasing.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[kevinadi]

Even though these typically fall outside the range of human hearing, we are still able to sense and feel them.

Nope, it's been proven that humans cannot hear ultrasonic sounds. Dogs, yes. Humans, no. Otherwise, you'll be reacting to a dog whistle.

The only argument against CD is that people are getting concerned that 16 bit is a little on the low side, and getting 24 bit or more is better. For the time being, there's no argument that the sampling rate is too low. What you hear coming out from your speaker is the result of the D/A converter, so if your CD sounds bad, it's probably your player/amps/speakers and not due to a defect in the CD technique itself.

A lot about music and hearing is subjective. You can convince yourself that your shower radio sounds better than a $10,000 equipment if you try really hard. It's fine by me if people judge vinyl sounds better than a CD, but from a technical standpoint, it is not.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Anonymous Coward]

please, for the love of god, if one more person gives their homespun interpretation of Nyquist's theorem i'm going to puke. Besides, I think the guy that was talking about reduced bit depth was referring to mp3's, and in that he is quite right. MP3, being a lossy compression format, places more emphasis on lower frequencies, which our ear is more sensitive to in terms of detecting artifacts, and higher frequency information is more compressed. Google "psychoacoustics" for more info. No matter how many /. stories I read, I'm always amazed at how unqualified most of the comments are.. if you have an opinion, state it as such, don't spew b.s. under the guise of an actual law, theorem, or technology.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fantastic. Ultraviolet falls outside the bandwidth of my eyes, but you will laugh at me when I show you my sunburn?

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[grub]

Nope, it's been proven that humans cannot hear ultrasonic sounds. Dogs, yes. Humans, no. Otherwise, you'll be reacting to a dog whistle.

When I was a wee lad of ~8 I could hear one of the high frequency sounds made by our TV remote control (way back it was done with high frequency sound). Our dog heard it, too. No one else in the family could hear it but we did tests where I'd have my back turned and could hear the sound of that one button. You'd hear the buttons being depressed but I only commented when the one that caused that high pitched 'tingle' in my ears was the one bring pressed.

Of course I was about 8, after 25 years of blasting Motorhead and other grinding music these 41 year old ears aren't quite what they used to be. Thanks Lemmy.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I will laugh at you when you pretend to sense or feel soundwaves at frequencies of 22kHz or higher which are produced by normal speakers at normal listening volumes and distances (that means ultrasonic cleaning equipment touching your body is irrelevant because neither the intensity nor the direct coupling is something which vinyl could record or reproduce). I will laugh at you because I'm a nice person, not an asshole who would recognize the opportunity and try to sell you overpriced audio voodoo.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[instagib]

> CDs sound different if played with digital filters.

Exactly. Different CD players, which have different filter setups, sound different; in the end it is a matter of taste and preferred music style.

The argument that CDs sound artificial/metallic/etc is from the old days when CD players had no real noise shaping filters. Also, many of the first reissues on CD where copied sloppily from the vinyl master, which made them sound thin and boring, because vinyl masters are heavily equalized to suit the medium and turntable characteristics.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[zippthorne]

No, YOU couldn't get it with an mp3, because all you have access to is the CD, so anything mixing that's done is already done before you get it. But a record company could certainly do it. If not with mp3, then with a compression scheme designed to allow it. The point of a format is to record enough information to reconstruct the signal. Mixing parameters are information, and pretty low-bandwidth information at that.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[jhol13]

Actually the filters are quite cheap. They are called up-sampling (or oversampling) converters. They do most (or all) of the filtering in digital domain (before D/A).

They can get very close to 22kHz (if not better, I have not checked the specs lately) and the filter will be brick wall and phase error free.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[jhol13]

First, Nyquist *IS* about faithful reproduction. But it is a mathematical concept (and therefore "assumes" e.g. infinitely accurate measurements). Nyquist states you can get infinidesimally close to f/2 (but not to f/2).

In reality there are such things as near-perfect digital low-pass filters. They are in pretty much every (decent) CD player.

Filtering with digital filters up to 22kHz is not impossible. Filtering up to 20kHz is trivial (with less than 0.1dB attenuation and no aliasing).

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[haraldm]

It's more likely that a vinyl disc does not store frequencies above 15-16 kHz at all, let alone 20. The Hi-Fi standard was defined to provide frequencies up to 15 kHz, remember? Many people don't hear a lot above 15, in reality, especially not if their second home is discos or rock concerts. My music teacher at school lost his hearing above 8 khz as a lad. Bad luck for an acting musician. I'm now 45 and still hear up to 17-18 kHz, maybe more but my Sennheiser 580 may not reproduce more than that.

There's another legend how the 44.1 kHz came into existence. The CD format was eventually fixed at 650 MBytes per disc, and Herbert Karajan wanted his take of Beethoven's 9th symphony to fit on the disc which is 74 minutes. Go do the math :-) Even if it's an urban legend, it's a nice one. According to http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc, the story goes as documented in http://www.exp-math.uni-essen.de/~immink/pdf/cdsto ry.pdf

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[fuzzix]

Look, if you're going to make up justifications for using vinyl, make them more convincing.

OK. The CD, while providing decent resolution, has made digital music production more popular. Nothing bad about this until you realise who runs the record labels. There was a phenomenon in rock music during the 70s where the first 30 seconds of the vinyl were made louder than the rest of the record. That initial kick would make the listener think "Whoah, this is loud!" and tell all his friends "Whoah, that was a loud record" - I won't attempt to inject some 70s vernacular.

The attempt to employ similar tricks on the CD has led to the use of digital compressor algorithms which are capable of much finer frequency isolation than their analogue counterparts. Since the CD can't go beyond 0 db, the perception of loudness has to be introduced by increasing the amplitude of the quieter frequencies. It sure is louder but all dynamic range is sucked out of the track. Taking the example of a rock or metal record, the vocals and guitar drown out the instruments which provide the "kick" - drums or bass for example. Not so bad if they stuck to that first 30 seconds of the CD but since there's no technical limitation (the wider spaced tracks of the louder part of the vinyl made it impossible to do this with the whole record) to make them do so the whole CD has this monstrous technique applied. This leaves aside the issue of CDs released with actual clipping distortion (samples beyond the 0 db threshold) - plenty of them out there too.

It is my guess that this is why some vinyl aficionados have some quality issues with the CD.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[leenks]

Not strictly true. If you play two frequencies, say 28000hz and 28500hz together, they will beat and you will hear that. Sure, you can't hear the frequencies but you can hear the effect. This could be why mediums that apply a hard filter appear dull at times.

Modern digital equipment sounds far better than it should because of the tricks employed in the converters. Oversampling and noise dithering has a massive effect on the sound, and you aren't really hearing the true digital signal but a smoothed one. Before such techniques were used, digital equipment got huge criticism for being clinical sounding (quite rightly). Vinyl and other analogue systems don't have this problem obviously, but bring loads of others to the table (wear and tear, damage, static, etc).

For some material, 16bit is definitely not enough. It's fine for a lot of modern chart material, where the mastering has multiband compressed it to hell and back to make it sound louder than the competition, but those tracks don't need the dynamic range of a Chopin valse, or a Beethoven symphony. The quiet bits on 16 bit recordings definitely lose a lot compared to 24bit (side by side comparison using old and new gear) - but I think it is really the recording and production stages that need 24bit or more, not necessarily replay because of the tricks that can now be applied.

Anyway, what does it matter? It's the material played that is ultimately important, not the method of reproduction.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[dunkelfalke]

sure, you can hear higher tones when you are young (maybe up to 19khz), but you still won't hear ultrasonic sound.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[caluml]

Nope, it's been proven that humans cannot hear ultrasonic sounds.

Surely sounds that humans can hear aren't ultrasonic, by definition.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[iainl]

I absolutely agree that modern record production is crushing all the dynamic range out of music, and furthermore pushing the gain so high that there is a horrid mess of distortion as it bangs against the hard limit of the signal range.

However: (a) none of this would stop a well-produced song from sounding great on CD, if only labels weren't idiots, and (b) the smug vinyl fans seem to assume that this compression is only done to the CD master, when I've not seen any definite indication that the signal on their precious black plastic hasn't been similarly ruined.

I know I was a vinyl snob, wasting good money on two copies of albums so I'd have a digital one for on the move, and a gorgeous slab of vinyl for my deck at home. Then I bought a better CD player (only as expensive as my record deck, at that) and CDs took the lead again on sound quality on my system.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Gordonjcp]

This is why vinyl fanatics get laughed at by people who know how and why digital audio works.

I know how and why digital audio works. I even use and write digital audio software. I still think vinyl sounds better. Note that I'm not saying it's a more accurate reproduction - it sounds *better*, not more accurate. It's much the same way that a valve guitar amp makes your guitar sound better than a hifi amp.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[ddhuyvet]

It's not from listening to loud music that you stop hearing higher frequencies, it's a natural phenomenon: your hearing of high-pitched sound degrades as you grow older. This has been used to repell teenagers using an annoying high-pitched sound adults can't hear:

"The device, called the Mosquito, emits a high-frequency pulsing sound that, he says, can be heard by most people younger than 20 and almost no one older than 30." An other application is using it as a ringtone adults can't hear. But these sounds are still below 20 kHz, even children can't hear sounds above 18 kHz or so.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[FST777]

That is true. However, with a turntable it's quite easy to change the characteristics of the produced sound (presence, warmth) by just replacing the cartridge / stylus. This is why I still love hearing a good DJ use vinyl in a club: he knows what kind of cartridges he should use.

On a home system, I never heard a reasonably priced stock CD player produce the warmth and precense my turntable gives me. The filters used in stock CD players are too "commonplace" for my taste. My turntable gave just the right edge and warmth to my metal records (until the stylus broke). I have yet to come across a CD player that gives me the same experience.

That is not caused by bad technology, but by the fact that digital recordings imply the need for digital or DA filters. Since that is less "natural" than a good stylus / magnetic cartridge, it implies design desicions, which are most certainly not tailored for my taste. Most CD players focus on harmonics and fidelity in the higher ranges of sound (above 500 Hz) to improve quality while listening classical music or non-distorted pop / dance. I'm usually looking for warmth in the lower regions and smoothness in the higher. An average turntable cartridge either gives me just that or is as useless as a CD player. When I have a cartridge I like, you can be sure that Beethoven will sound horrible on it.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Tomfrh]

Nope, it's been proven that humans cannot hear ultrasonic sounds.

I can reliably hear ultrasonic under controlled sighted listening test conditions.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Eivind]

A "22 Khz square wave" doesn't exist. (other than in maths)

In the real world a X-hz square wave is sin(x) + 1/3 sin(3x) + 1/5 sin(5x) + 1/7 sin(7x) ....

The part of the 22Khz square wave that is under 22Khz is perfectly represented (modulus sample-depth), the part that has higher frequencies, 66khz upwards in this example, are not correctly reproducible.

If you can't hear frequencies over 22Khz, there's no audible difference between a 22khz sine and a 22khz square wave.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[gEvil (beta)]

I useta screw with our old TV by playing with a slinky. Every now and then the channel would change or it would turn off. I'm sure the volume would change from time to time, too, but it would only do it by a notch or two, and this was the days before onscreen volume indicators...

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Nyquist. There's a Theorem, a Limit, and a Guy that discovered these, all by the same name. What an amazing co-incidence!

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Hal_Porter]

FLAC can coarsen the bit depth in some confluences of sound though. I prefer to keep the musicians locked up in my cellar, fed on rainwater and grain alcohol.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Hal_Porter]

However, I do have a question for you regarding your "laughing at vinyl fanatics"

My friend was a bit of an audiophile at university. Once he looked kind of pissed off. I asked him why and he said he was talking to one of his flatmate's friends and she had said that he was "the kind of guy who would get up during sex to turn over the record".

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[petermgreen]

Actually, the max. frequency that can be sampled is 22kHz, not 22.050kHz - what the Nyquist theorem states is that in order to construct a signal accuately, you need to sample at twice the maximum frequency + a little more, because then you can also deduct the phase of the original signal.
Hmm, interesting ugly case but it seems to only apply when a signal is right on the nyquist point.

The bad news is to acheive nyquist performance you need perfect brick wall filters and perfect brick wall filters can't exist (a nasty property of the fourier transform is that if filter is bounded in the frequency domain its impulse response won't be bounded in either the positive or negative time domain). In order to make sure you cut all signals beyond the nyquist point to negligable levels you have to cut some signals before the nyquist point as well. You can improve your bandwidth by oversampling and making the anti-aliasing filter digital but you get into a game of diminishing returns.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[petermgreen]

Nothing below 22kHz is misrepresented in CD-quality audio.
wake me up when we have a time machine so we can implement a perfect filter.

anti-aliasing and recontstuction filters can never be perfect, this means that some higher frequencies will get aliased down into the audio spectrum and equally some frequencies near the nyquist point will be lost.

you can improve theese to the point they are below the noise floor but how many systems actually do? Interestingly one of the best ways to improve them is to use higher sampling rates at the conversion stage and then convert to/from CD sample rate using DSP techniques.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

So there's no need to worry. Nothing gets coarse. Nothing loses fidelity. Nothing loses audible quality. This is why vinyl fanatics get laughed at by people who know how and why digital audio works.

Thank you for this informative post. I am amazed at how many people honestly think that "vinyl is better". I've always viewed vinylphiles are having more money than sense. I know of an online retailer here in the USA (I won't give their website address so they don't get slashbombed) that I sometimes buy CDs from because they sell a lot of classical CDs that are difficult to find. Once a week they send me an email with news about new releases and specials and a significant part of that email is devoted to very expensive equipment for suckers (cough! cough!), um, I mean "vinyl afficionados". The current email I have from them has a record cleaner that lists for only $1994.99. What a bargain! They also sell some sort of clamp device that supposedly improves tracking on turntables for about $400. So you can spend a few hundred dollars and be able to play CDs reasonably well, or you can spend several thousands of dollars to play records as well as possible and have the bonus benefit of having to deal with surface noise, a smaller dynamic range than CD (they always forget to mention that one, don't they?), and the fact that an LP degrades every time you play it. A fool and his money are soon parted.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[bfischer]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasound Carefully-designed scientific studies have been performed and confirmed what they call the hypersonic effect - that even without consciously hearing it, high-frequency sound can have a measurable effect on the mind. Maybe you don't know everything?

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Mattintosh]

My comment stands. You're not a fanatic, since you're reasonable about why you like one over the other and are willing to hear the other side of the argument. You aren't part of the group I was describing.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[fuzzix]

However: (a) none of this would stop a well-produced song from sounding great on CD, if only labels weren't idiots, and (b) the smug vinyl fans seem to assume that this compression is only done to the CD master, when I've not seen any definite indication that the signal on their precious black plastic hasn't been similarly ruined.

I've seen this done to CDs from independent labels run by musically proficient people... Horrific. I'm not sure vinyl would stand up to that sort of treatment. You could get away with some dynamic sucking compression but after a point it would start to reveal itself as the noise it really is.

I know I was a vinyl snob, wasting good money on two copies of albums so I'd have a digital one for on the move, and a gorgeous slab of vinyl for my deck at home. Then I bought a better CD player (only as expensive as my record deck, at that) and CDs took the lead again on sound quality on my system.

I buy vinyl when possible (because it's still cool to me) and capture it to a moderate quality vorbis file for listening on the computer/on the move. I'm not really a HiFi nerd (that said, I'm only a well-paying job away from becoming one...) so the quality only concerns me to a point. A half-decent set of speakers and decent source (without too many compression artifacts and all that) will do me.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[noidentity]

Yep. At exactly 1/2 sampling rate, you can only accurately represent a signal of one particular phase. Any other phase results in an apparent amplitude reduction, to the point where 180 degrees around the amplitude comes out as zero. Any frequency just a hair lower than this can be accurately represented, since the sinc reconstruction function will recover the phase and amplitude in the long run (though for practical windowed sinc reconstruction, the maximum frequency must be more than a hair lower).

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're quoting out of context, and Wikipedia does not cite any of these "carefully-designed scientific studies". "I tell you, I can hear bats" would have about the same weight. But that's without the context: If the middle ear, which is "designed" to guide sound, acts as a low pass filter, then what do you think the rest of our bodies will do to ultrasound before it reaches anything that could sense it?

Besides, even if we could hear or otherwise sense ultrasound, it is still laughable that vinyl, of all audio media, would be able to reproduce these sounds, especially since every time you play it, the pickup makes an abrasive journey over the peaks and valleys of the groove.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[raxx7]

What the other poster was refering to is a phenomenon called "loudness wars".
Most music labels and/or artists are keen to compress the dynamic range of the music as much as they can.
This is done with a device (or piece of software nowadays) called a "compressor": it's essencially a sort of variable gain amplifier that amplifies the music in the quieter parts and
Technically, the goal is to make the average sound level as closer to the maximum sound level as possible.

Experience wise, this makes the music sound "louder" when played at a given volume setting on your amplifier.
Thus, it tends to stand out agains less "compressed" music. It's also "more listenable" in some environments, such as the car or the street.

With the improvements in technology, albums have been released with the average level just 10dB below the maximum.
All of this while CDs allow for a dynamic range of 96dB!!!!

However, when you listen to a lot of music this quickly becomes unpleasent and tiresome. Actually, highly compressed music is not very inviting to crank your amp to the max and ignore the complaints of the neighbours. Less compressed stuff is so much better.

And what has vynil to do with this?
Paraphrasing one sound engineer, "vynil's best feature is that it can't be played in a car".
The music industry has always made a practice of mastering the same album in different ways for differnt medium, for multiple reasons, since the time of vynil, cassetes and 8-track.

Nowadays, most albums on CD have a lousy dynamic range due to excessive compression, while vynil, SACD or DVD-A editions are blessed with a better mastering.

This is why you have a bunch of people swearing that vynil sounds better and a bunch of people swearing that nothing can sound much better than a CD.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[croddy]

I prefer records because they're more fun to collect and play, and it occasionally provides the opportunity to troubleshoot an old machine. The sound quality is great (although, of course, technically and perceptually inferior to CD digital audio), and I find its most common failure modes less annoying than those of CDs.

No need to get into esoteric acoustics at all!

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Reziac]

I'm one of those freaks who can see and hear beyond the norm. I have tested-perfect hearing (less some volume deafness with age, but I don't seem to have lost any range or accuracy). My own anecdote:

With tape or vinyl, I can ID some orchestras, and sometimes which hall they're in, BEFORE they play a single note -- even over FM radio. Some orchestras and certain venues have a distinctive "ambience signature" which I can hear. (I suppose rather like "hearing the sea" in a seashell -- they all sound different.)

Put the same work, orchestra, and venue on a CD, and now I can't ID it -- whatever it is that I hear from tape/vinyl just isn't there. (In fact I find classical music on CD or MP3 unlistenable, because to my ear it sounds like big chunks are "missing", most especially with "massive" works like Beethoven's symphonies. -- This doesn't bother me with most other genres, probably because there's less going on in the first place.)

This isn't a matter of frequencies outside of human hearing; this ambient background is firmly in the midrange. And as you say, it's subtle -- I'm well aware that most people won't hear it even if they specifically listen for it.

I can generally tell MP3s made from vinyl from those made from CD, too -- there's a difference in their depth of tone, even at a lowly 128kbit.

Brian Wilson (of the Beach Boys) has been known to rail against what CDs do to music. I think it is not coincidental that he's also reputed to have a perfect ear.

As you say, some people can hear stuff like this, and others can't, so they think we're suffering from auditory delusions. :)

I see minute differences between colours, too. As I recall, that ability has been ID'd as due to a specific fairly-rare gene. Since vision and hearing both rely partly on bio-pigments, I wonder if the two abilities are related??

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Reziac]

I dunno about that, but (having grown up with live/tape/vinyl) I think Beethoven sounds bloody horrible on CD. I've tried several times to listen to favourite symphonies on CD and it just sounds like too much is "missing". (See my previous post where I rant about my superhearing :)

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Reziac]

Recently someone sent me a "mosquito" tone that supposedly old folks can't hear. Well, I'm 52 this month and I can hear it even at low volume; if I turn up the volume it's quite painful.

I can also hear all the tones emitted by my fairly expensive vermin repeller, which is why I can't use the bloody thing.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Bruitist]

Anyway, what does it matter? It's the material played that is ultimately important, not the method of reproduction.

Thank you. I study music technology and I have never understood audiophiles. Who gives a shit what your stereo sounds like? It's what's coming out of it that's important. I'd rather listen to a shitty recording of a great band, recorded in someone's basement using a tin and some string, than a pristine 24-bit, 96kHz recording of Ms. Spears latest bowel movement...

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[trentblase]

CD or MP3 unlistenable, because to my ear it sounds like big chunks are "missing" This is believable for MP3s - your psychoacoustic model may differ from the norm, and MP3 is all about removing what the average person won't be able to discern. However, I don't see how it's possible for CDs, which should be able to reproduce the ambient midrange at least as well as a tape or FM broadcast. Are you sure the difference isn't excessive filtering when they remastered the work to CD? In other words, have you tried digitizing the output from one of your tapes and burning it back to CD? It would be an interesting experiment. The other possibility is that this ambiance you describe is actually in the >22khz range and is being high-cut at the CD player, where a tape might have some noise in that range (perhaps not faithful reproduction, but as far as I know tape players do not use low-pass filters similar to CD players). Then your super-hearing might come into play.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Reziac]

Interesting tho perfectly accurate description of MP3s :) Oddly in some folks' view, I also prefer CBR to VBR, because VBR has a faint but annoying muddiness that's not present in CBR.

Making my own CDs from tape would be an interesting experiment, if I had the tapes to do it with. I used to DJ at a station that had a subscription to the Chicago Symphony tapes. Too bad they cost an arm and a leg back then...

I've tried a wide variety of classical CDs from the library, and have been to varying degrees disappointed (as a general rule, the "bigger" the expected sound, the more "damaged" it is). I can't believe that *all* CD mastering sucks, nor that all the "big empty space" sound from an orchestral venue is high frequency (especially since much of it is the result of people shuffling stuff around). That only leaves "it ain't there on the CD" as a possible culprit.

Can't be just my CD player either (that being the computer, with decent sound card and good speakers) -- I've had the same complaint about classical CDs played on friends' high-end dedicated equipment.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[youthoftoday]

Apart from heterodyning (which DOES make a pscyhoacoustic difference). This point has been argued back and forth in previous threads.

Also a 22kHz square wave does exist. In real life. On a CD. 11111111 00000000 11111111 00000000 . There.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Kamineko]

I didn't say 'in the same file', did I? (Although you probably could use some weird container layering thing if you desperately wanted a FLAC in an MP3)

What I -meant- was that they should give you all three versions. A vinyl, a disc with a listentoable MP3 on (and the song as redbook track if you like), and a disc (same disc if it'll fit) with FLAC master tracks on it.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a time-domain representation of a 22.05kHz sine wave, sampled at 44.1kHz (or rather a flat bias, because it's the same 16 bit value repeated...). Perfect rectangle waves would require a pressure difference in zero time, which is not possible, except in theory (where it's called a discontinuity and usually causes many problems).

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[mshurpik]

The problem is that with vinyl, you are required to sanely mix their tracks, whereas with a CD you can blow out everything with no repercussion. On vinyl if you do that, you wind up with the needle skipping.

I'm trying to answer this intelligently and I'm not sure what you mean.

CD's have a defined audio range. If you amplify it too much, you can hear the limits of the CD format. Generally CD's have a well-defined high end and no bass. No amount of bass boost is going to give you that bass.

Vinyl tracks, otoh, have a well-defined bass range, and the upper end is mostly defined by the quality of the cartridge (anywhere from $20 to $175). However, most records play, without skipping, at any speed and with any cartridge. "Skipping" has nothing to do with vinyl play. It's not an issue unless you scratch.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[mshurpik]

This is why vinyl fanatics get laughed at by people who know how and why digital audio works. The limits of even now-mundane CD audio are far above the possible limits of even hypothetically perfect human hearing. Nobody can hear 22kHz.

Can your computer hear 22kHz?

Are "audiophiles" just another name for the Circuit City retail market?

"Audiophiles" get laughed at by people who own direct-drive, S-shaped tonearm turntables such as the Technics MkIII.

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[madprof]

That's amazing as audio on FM radio has all sorts of stuff done to it before broadcast, very often including dynamic compression.
In addition, tape cannot come anywhere near CD for audio quality, it's a complete non-starter. Dynamic range and frequency response are nothing like the same, plus what the Dolby noise reduction system does to tape is horrible unless you get your tape read heads adjusted right.
I can see your point about mp3, but what listening environment do you have here? Headphones, right?

Re:Possibly better than CDs?

[Reziac]

We're talking big-reel commercial tapes (the kind NPR used to send out), not dinky home-user tapes. And nope, not headphones... even FM over ordinary radio was good enough to hear what I was talking about.

If I were to visually map what I hear, tape/vinyl is 3D, and CD is 2D. I've noticed this as well with a friend's tapes (he tapes live bands in various venues, using equipment that's high-end for portables) -- sometimes I've startled him by correctly guessing the general aspects of a venue I've never seen, just by how stuff sounds on his tapes. Once he's CDized 'em, that sense of "space" is lost.

Hybrids everywhere

[linguae]

I guess I will be looking forward to playing my hybrid vinyl records in my hybrid Toyota soon.

Pulseblack has done it for a long time

[Echo5ive]

http://pulseblack.com/

They've been doing this for a long long time with CDs. Very nice record label.

Re:Pulseblack has done it for a long time

[gEvil (beta)]

With CDs? What, you buy the CD and they'll let you download mp3s? If I have the CD, I'll encode it myself...

HUH?

[InsaneProcessor]

HUH?

Funny coincidence

[50000BTU_barbecue]

I just bought a turntable as an impulse purchase, a Pionner PL-516 for the curious. I have about 30 LPs lying around. I saw that HMV (a music store) had some new vinyl titles in stock, so I grabbed one at random, "The Arcade Fire". An abominable album to be sure, but it was just to hear how new vinyl sounds. Sounds pretty good. Got this famous coupon in there as well.

My conclusion is that this is how things should work. Obviously there's a demand for vinyl, and the convenience of digital is undeniable. Somehow, music companies got this right.

Re:Funny coincidence

[LiquidCoooled]

The most impressive thing I have ever seen with vinyl disks was a friend saying "you have to listen to this" and searching the disk for a particular pattern and dropping the needle on it.
Deadly accurate and spot on.
You could see the entire album and know where quiet sections are and how much to skip to to get past the annoying interlude or whatever.

Re:Funny coincidence

[TenBrothers]

I must be old to see this comment as cute and quaint.

Re:Funny coincidence

[JensenDied]

Sticking with the seeing the music.
You can do this with your digital collection on Amarok with the moodbar plugin.

Re:Funny coincidence

[Anonymous Coward]

Most record shops around here (here being a major metropolitan area in Canada) sell a lot of new albums as vinyl records. The thing is that the vinyl version of the album is twice as expensive as the CD version. And a large enough number of people still buy the vinyl versions over the CDs, mostly college kids, but it still happens enough so the music shops keep the vinyl in stock.

That Arcade Fire album you got, the CD version I have, which is now an MP3 version, sounds fantastic, much better than a vinyl record, and it's portable to boot! And it cost half as much! MY GOD!

Re:Funny coincidence

[Lemmy Caution]

What do you have against The Arcade Fire? One of the better bands I've seen in a while, and the album is excellent. It's enough of a sea-change in style that it takes some getting used to, but it's entered my personal high-rotation list.

Re:Funny coincidence

[FixinDixon]

Yes, you are old, as am I. Do I have permission to use "I must be old to see this comment as cute and quaint." as my sig line?

Re:Funny coincidence

[clickclickdrone]

There was a guy I saw on TV once that could tell you what a record was by looking at the grooves (at about 12inches away). They tried him with about 5 or 6 classical albums and he was 100% correct.

Re:Funny coincidence

[clickclickdrone]

That Arcade Fire album you got, the CD version I have, which is now an MP3 version, sounds fantastic, much better than a vinyl record

You wouldn't happen to have a $50 turntable and a $300 CD player would you?

Re:Funny coincidence

[Reziac]

Yep -- if you handle enough vinyl, you get so you can "see" the music in the vinyl's patterns. Even beginners can spot loud (big wide grooves) vs soft (shallow narrow grooves).

When I was DJing (1980ish), when I was in a hurry I would sometimes do a visual scan of new arrivals, to make preliminary guesses as to which I'd want to use. And when I was previewing, rather than listen to a whole song (which I generally didn't have time to do), I'd drop the needle into spots that had different grooving, to quickly sample the variety within a given song.

Re:Funny coincidence

[50000BTU_barbecue]

It's entirely trite, sophomoric and bland. Don't get the enthusiasm for this band. I've had more musical borborygmus. I'm having much more fun listening to my Synergy and Ministry albums.

Re:Funny coincidence

[mshurpik]

> searching the disk for a particular pattern and dropping the needle on it. Deadly accurate and spot on.

Yep. Welcome to vinyl. Instant-access, highest quality. Vinyl is there for a reason. Like most great inventions, there will be detractors.

Best advice, buy MKIII's and don't look back. You might hate the fact that you have to spend $10.99 for every 4-track album. But you will love the fact that you get to listen to it completely before buying.

That's not a hybrid

[Threni]

Any more than a book with an offer inside for an eBook version is a hybrid hard/soft copy.

Anyway, years ago magazines had flexidisks on the cover which could (if you were lucky) be used to load data into a home computer.

Re:That's not a hybrid

[clickclickdrone]

Pah! I remember when the BBC used to transmit free software for their home computer via the Teletext data and their Teletext add on.

Re:That's not a hybrid

[Threni]

There were a few attempts at that - usually using noises or lights. They were ultimately futile.

Re:That's not a hybrid

[clickclickdrone]

>There were a few attempts at that - usually using noises or lights. They were ultimately futile.
Teletext was a much better way to do it - and worked. For its time, the Teletext add on was great - you could update stock prices, capture news stories, get software, all for free. Well, once you'd coughed up the GBP200 or so the device cost plus another GBP400 for the BBC B computer. You can read about it here http://www.beebmaster.co.uk/CheeseWedges.html

Re:That's not a hybrid

[Threni]

I know all about that - I had a model B. I used teletext almost daily (on my tv, not BBC Micro) until I got a Freeview box the other yet. The equivalent is loads better, but teletext was great. You can't beat Mode7 graphics!

Wow, this is awesome

[ProppaT]

I'm in a small minority, but I'm a rabid music collector. Often times I'll buy both the cd and the vinyl versions of an album (the vinyl to listen to at home, the cd for the car or to rip to portable player). Basically, this allows me to only buy one version of the album (vinyl, the version I really want anyway) and just burn a copy for the car and drop one on the mp3 player. The only way this could get better is if they start supporting flac...then I can convert that to whatever format I want. This is great news for the indie / record junkie scene, though.

Really go retro: old tape recorder interfaces

[G4from128k]

Codes to access an MP3 is so lame. I thought they were resurrecting the audio data file format used in early home computers that read data to and from a normal cassette tape recorder.

If they're going to go retro with vinyl, they might as well go retro on the computer formats too.

Re:Really go retro: old tape recorder interfaces

[shredthrashgrind]

Surprise! People actually LISTEN to music from vinyl nowadays. Some even claim that the quality is better than other availbile audio formats (although its up for debate). Nobody actually still reads data from a casette tape recorder... I don't even understand what you're suggesting - should said record companies distribute data tapes with their vinyls? Really?? I think their solution is rather elegant. A feasible hard-copy alternative might be to pair a data CD with vinyls.

Re:Really go retro: old tape recorder interfaces

[Dieppe]

It is a very elegant solution! If you want the digital version, you just have to use your bandwidth to download. Providing a physical CD with the vinyls puts manufacturing a CD back on the record company. (Not to dis your suggestion.. just.. they should only have to provide one physical format, and an optional digital format. Awesome!) :)

Re:Really go retro: old tape recorder interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep in mind that First Word are a hip-hop label,so they're not really "going retro" by selling vinyl. More likely, they're selling the physical format that people want, for turntable scratch-playing.

In hip hop, vinyl is supposed to get scratched :-)

DRM - no sense

[Skadet]

"Making a legal, paid-for version of the file less useful than a copied or pirated one doesn't make sense."

And herein is the best anti-DRM argument there is. Just this sentence and no further. If I were writing a thesis on DRM, this would be my main point.

Of course, expading the "doesn't make sense" part is important. It's also critical for the surely-to-be analogizers below to realise that this has no usefulr real world (as in, tangible) comparison. If three clicks of the mouse provides you with something far more useful than something you've shelled out your hard-earned cash for, something is wrong. Lax enforcement -- not to mention the difficulty of enforcement -- and fuzzy laws make this so.

It's not as easy as saying, "Stealing a car has more utility than buying one, we should all steal cars!" since enforcement and history are so vastly different. See, the car analogy is wrong! Ha!

Been doing this for awhile

[gEvil (beta)]

I know I've seen various rekkids put out by Merge and Matador Records that had stickers on the front offering exactly this sort of thing. The thing is that I saw those albums about 1-2 years ago. This isn't exactly new...

Re:Been doing this for awhile

[Anonymous Coward]

Yo La Tengo!

This is the future

[tentimestwenty]

As silly as it sounds with Indie Rock, Hip Hop, Jazz and to an extent, Classical, the sales of vinyl are growing at a quick rate and CDs are slowly massively. People value the sound quality and physicality of the vinyl and generally download the tracks from file-sharing to use portably or in the car. While I don't personally care too much for the free downloads, it will save a lot of people a lot of time and it keeps them "in-tow" with the record label's marketing. Everyone wins.

Re:This is the future

[mrdaveb]

I do occasionally buy music on vinyl and attempt to download a digital copy for use on the move, so yes I agree that is possibly a growing market.

But unfortunately, vinyl sales as a whole are still decreasing, although of course not disappearing... I really wish I could find a link to the stats, I remember seeing BPI figures a while back, but I can't easily google them up now. Anyway, LP and 12" single sales were down a bit quite a few % compared to the previous year, although for some odd reason sales of 7" singles were going through the roof

Re:This is the future

[digitig]

I do occasionally buy music on vinyl and attempt to download a digital copy for use on the move, so yes I agree that is possibly a growing market. Hmm. I'm an avid collector from the vinyl generation, but I would only buy vinyl now if I couldn't get it on CD, and the first thing I'd do would be rip it to MP3.

The Fools!

[zmollusc]

Don't they realise that evil hackers will make multiple copies from the vinyl to audio cassettes and listen to it on portable tape players? Home Taping Is Killing music!

Re:The Fools!

[gEvil (beta)]

We must outlaw candles immediately, since pirates can use the wax contained in them to make copies of these vinyls. Only a pirate would own a candle!

Re:The Fools!

[Anonymous Coward]

When candles are outlawed etc etc...

Re:The Fools!

[serginho]

Cassettes? Come on...

This is the ultimate copying technology: pirate the records onto new vinyl slabs!

Audiophiles will be happy with this

[Yapz]

I hope they took the MP3's from the same master as the vinyls. Will make some audiophiles happy since both actually will -do- sound good.

Re:Audiophiles will be happy with this

[kurbchekt]

Not me. Sound frequency has to be downgraded (especially the bass) when converting music to vinyl format as the deeper resonance bass can cause the groove to intersect when cutting.

Re:Audiophiles will be happy with this

[eat here_get gas]

huh?
I have some killer vinyl of Vanilla Fudge, which in its day, was probably one of the bass-iest bands around. I have NO intersected grooves, and the cd-conmpilation I made sounds terrific. And I've yet to see their stuff on cd...

Re:Audiophiles will be happy with this

[poopdeville]

Depends how hot you cut the record. The louder a record is, the more you have to cut back on the bass. But the quieter it is, the higher the noise floor is. There's usually a happy medium, and it's a mastering engineer's job to find it.

Somewhat pointless

[11223]

Given that I can buy totally unmolested WAVs from Beatport, what's the point? I find it hard to believe that there are vinyl purists who want MP3s, or that those who would work with an MP3 wouldn't rather deal with a master-quality WAV which can be manipulated even more.

Lossy compression is just as insidious as DRM when the bandwidth for CD-quality uncompressed audio is available.

And to those who say you can't hear the difference, if you slow the track down by 50%, you can. If you don't know why you would do that, ask a DJ.

Re:Somewhat pointless

[TeknoHog]

Lossy compression is just as insidious as DRM when the bandwidth for CD-quality uncompressed audio is available.

And lossless compression like flac makes even more sense.

Re:Somewhat pointless

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know a dj. Please explain.

Re:Somewhat pointless

[hkgroove]

But is that a limitation of the software that changes the tempo from say 128 bpm to 64 bpm? (In Ableton or a CDJ)?

I've actually quite wondered this for a while. I know that there have been times when I've changed the tempo but used the 'pitch-lock' on the first version of the Pioneer CDJ1000 and heard a noticeable distortion as I changed the tempo. (I also heard this on vinyl that I ripped directly to WAV).

The MK3s have been better about this. It has been sometime since I've actually tried changing the tempo drastically.

Re:Somewhat pointless

[bill_mcgonigle]

wouldn't rather deal with a master-quality WAV which can be manipulated even more.

if you believe in vinyl you believe that analog reproduction is better than whatever sampling rate you've set your WAV to.

Re:Somewhat pointless

[revengebomber]

I'm assuming this is not a joke. DJs frequently slow or speed playback of discs/vinyls to create different sounds.

On another note, the ONLY song I've ever heard that didn't compress well under MP3 is track one of the Quake disc. MP3 noticeably destorts (or more accurately, completely destroys) the beginning of the song.

Re:Somewhat pointless

[MrNemesis]

I dunno about you, but:
i) I buy vinyl because it looks and feels nice (pretty picture discs from The Sundays and the gorgeous OK COmputer gatefold from Radiohead are what got me into vinyl in the first place), I couldn't care much about the sound quality of it. I rarely listen to it. I imagine alot of people outide of the audiophile/DJ circuits buy it for the same reasons.
ii) I'm perfectly happy with high quality MP3. Bleep do some very nice 256 and 320kbps MP3's and the occasional FLAC, 4AD do some nice AAC's.

I think most people fit somewhere into the pigeonhole I put myself in - vinyl is a nice thing to own, but a pain in the arse to play back. By offering vinyl and an MP3, these record labels are giving the consumers something that's nice to look at and non-volatile music that'd damned easy to play and sounds good enough for anything but the most discerning ear - the best of both worlds in my opinion. As far as customer satisfaction goes, it gets a thumbs up from me. 99% of the time I'll be happy with the digital files and some nice hi-res JPEG's of the artwork, but for that really "special" album, holding the vinyl is hard to beat.

Re:Somewhat pointless

[Reziac]

I presume mostly to save the bother of having to rip the vinyl yourself. A lot of people don't have the equipment or the expertise to do it.

Besides, REAL vinyl purists only play the album ONCE -- to record it onto some other media for everyday use -- because after that first play, it's never quite as perfect again, due to the initial mechanical wear on microgrooves.

Re:Somewhat pointless

[mshurpik]

>I find it hard to believe that there are vinyl purists who want MP3s

I don't want mp3. I can cue vinyl with my hands. MP3 is just for preview or for live mixes I can't get any other way. Thus, this article seems gimmicky.

I'll be glad if on-line stores want to sell WAVs (or FLAC), that's an honest format. But the trade-off for massive amounts of WAVs at deep discount is that I have to sit in front of my computer.

Download Reason-->sitting in front of computer-->underwhelmed.

Re:Somewhat pointless

[mshurpik]

if you believe in vinyl you believe that analog reproduction is better than whatever sampling rate you've set your WAV to.

The nice thing about WAV is that it doesn't have the audio resolution to record scratches on vinyl, so it sounds better.

In other news, Heather Locklear looks great on television.

Tenacious D

[vulcan]

I bought the /Pick of Destiny/ picture disc LP, and it came with a code to download non-DRM MP3s as well. Can't remember who released it for certain; was it Sony? (Seems ironic, I know.)

Re:Tenacious D

[Anonymous Coward]

Tenacious D's "Pick of Destiny" soundtrack/album was released by Epic Records, an imprint of Sony BMG. But it's rather hard to know how well the many arms of the music industries are controlled (or even guided) by their head company.

Fuck Opie & Anthony

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of half-wit listens to those two buffoons anyways? Good fucking riddance. It's censorship when the government won't let you say what you want. It's not censorship if a business does not want to let a couple of sophomoric chimps fling feces on air. That's just good business sense.

Re:Cancel your XM accounts!

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn I wish there was a -1: Retarded

someone gets it

[timmarhy]

"Making a legal, paid-for version of the file less useful than a copied or pirated one doesn't make sense."

BINGO, YES why can't the rest of them understand this?

Re:someone gets it

[[Marvin]]

Indeed! Consumers tend to follow the path of least resistance. IMHO the best way to combat piracy would be to provide superior content for paying customers. A couple of examples come to mind....

- My Futurama DVDs have anti-copy warnings in four different languages that I have to sit through after *each* episode. How is that better than having them sitting around on my hard drive in DivX format without all the superfluous junk?
-My MST3K boxsets are region 1 because no European distributer can be bothered with them...which means I have to use region-defeating software when I watch them on my computer.

I sometimes feel like a fool for buying movies and music instead of downloading it...

320kbit/s noobness.

[Anonymous Coward]

320kbit/s CBR mp3 encodes are the ultimate "I have no idea what I'm doing" sign in the audio coding world. All the downsides of mp3 (lossy, huge files) with none of the benefits. "I'll just turn all the knobs to 'highest' and hope that's good".

Re:320kbit/s noobness.

[hkgroove]

Well, then get on the labels' ass or the distributor of them to only support WAV or a lossless format.

DJing in a club, most people, even the audiophiles can barely notice. Even on a solid setup that's not hampered by some moron using self-powered mackies and a pioneer mixer (note: use Allen and Heath)

Re:320kbit/s noobness.

[NeoManyon]

Obviously your amp doesn't go to 11, or else you wouldn't say that.

'enhanced' CDs

[Anonymous Coward]

They used to make these multi session audio CDs with the CD audio also encoded as WMA on the second session.

They don't make them anymore. The distributors had to pay out twice the royalties to the artists since there were two copies being distributed.

Somehow I don't think this new scheme will last long.

Looks cool, and functional too

[CheeseTroll]

Perfect, now audiophiles can look cool with their 'retro' collections of vinyl (even if they never listen to them), and still get easy access to the far-more-functional digital copy.

Ah, vinyl...

[mobby_6kl]

the original, rental model, of DRM!*

-
*Yes I know what the D stands for.

Even better idea...

[keithmo]

...distribute the MP3 files on vinyl.

Re:Even better idea...

[Anonymous Coward]

dead link

NOT better than CDs

[mangu]

I'm not an audio engineer but from a telecom course I took the basic idea is that you sample at twice the highest frequency

You are correct, the Nyquist theorem states that you must record at a sampling rate that's above twice the higher frequency in your recording.

All this debate over vinil is rather tiresome. Anyone who has studied electronics engineering like I did knows that vinil records have a rather low signal-to-noise ratio. I did a course on "Probabilistic Models in Electric Engineering" where we learned how to calculate noise due to the fact that electric charge is quantized. Now, get this vinil fans: ELECTRIC CHARGE IS QUANTIZED. There is no such thing as a charge smaller than an electron, which is 1.6e-19 coulomb.

There are no such thing as analog values in this universe, everything is quantized. You cannot possibly have an electric signal that's totally free of noise, what you get is a number of "clicks", one for each electron that goes by. The same way, you cannot even hear a sound without noise, what you get is a number of "plocs", one for each air molecule that hits your eardrums.

Now, I know people will say, "sure, but these effects are very small". Well, think again. Human hearing evolved to be as sensitive as it physically could be. Inside an anechoic chamber you can hear the blood flowing through your veins. The sensitivity of our ears is just short from hearing individual molecules hitting the eardrum. In any analog pick-up, be it moving coil or moving magnet, human ears are sensitive enough to hear the noise due to the quantization of electric current.

Digital equipment have much better signal-to-noise rations because they have high currents in low-impedance circuits, the effect of charge quantization is diluted by averaging a large number of electrons. In analog vinil pick-ups either the impedance is relatively high for moving magnet models or the voltage is very low for moving coil types.

And all this is considering only the most fundamental effects, not to mention problems as dust on the record. The cleanest cleanroom specified in the ISO-14644 standard has 12 particles per cubic meter. The lowest spec in ISO-14644 allows over 40 million particles per cubic meter. Does the room where you do your listening conform to an ISO "cleanroom" specification?

Digital sound standards were created to be as good as they need to be. CDs have all the bandwidth and dynamic range one needs in the final recording. It's only when you are going to mix and resample the music that you may need better quality to avoid round-off error in the processing. Because of this, professional equipment normally use something like 24 bits @ 192 kbps. The widespread acceptance of MP3s show that the CD standard has actually a better quality than the majority of people need or want.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[Cadallin]

Better is subjective. Do you deny that CDs sound different from Vinyl? As you point out, human ears are very, very sensitive, thus the noise and distortion on compact disc can be distinguished as different from the noise and distortion on Vinyl. Whether one measures better than the other is irrelevant. Some people, due to conditioning, random chance, etc find that they prefer the sound of Vinyl to the sound of Compact Disc. For them, Vinyl is "better." There are also people that prefer the sound generated by Vacuum tube amplifiers. Again, the distortion introduced by them is different and distinguishable from the distortion of solid state. The same principles apply. Leave these people alone. They like what they like.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[Endo13]

No, "better" in this case is not subjective at all. I think you entirely missed his point. His point is that you can create any sound you want with digital. Any sound at all. If you wanted to make a digital version of a track that sounded like it did on vinyl, you could do that and put it on CD. The issue here is that CD audio is a lot closer to the original live audio. Therefore it's a better reproduction. Just as 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375 10 is a better representation of Pi than 3.14 is. So the question isn't so much "do you like CD or vinyl better". The question is "do you like live music or vinyl better". Because with CD, you've basically got the exact same sound as if you were actually at the concert.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[neomunk]

There are no such thing as analog values in this universe You tell that to my friend pi and his buddies. But be careful, I understand they can be quite irrational.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[Anonymous Coward]

As anyone who listens to live music knows, what you get with CD is not the same as the sound you get at a concert. It's the same as the original master. There's a long way to go yet in transducer technology.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, get this vinil fans: ELECTRIC CHARGE IS QUANTIZED. There is no such thing as a charge smaller than an electron, which is 1.6e-19 coulomb.

You're not trying to imply that human ears (or any equipment) can detect a difference of a single electron in an audio system? Or are you trying to imply that vinyl fanatics don't know what an electron is?

Re:NOT better than CDs

[gordgekko]

We are talking about a group of people who buy "special" cables which "improve" the sound of the final output, right?

Re:NOT better than CDs

[colanut]

The question is "do you like live music or vinyl better". Because with CD, you've basically got the exact same sound as if you were actually at the concert.

That is BS. CDs are no where near "live". First tracks (as in individual instruments) are recorded separately and then mixed together, edited in production and then eventually mastered for final encoding. There are many steps between recording and pressing and at each step there is loss/enhancement.

If CDs were so perfect, why was there a need to spec out SACD or DVD audio (other than the obvious audiophile cash grab)? Because CDs are mostly adequate. Also early CD mastering was pretty awful. CDs are convenient for the digital age, but I wouldn't consider them "source" perfect. Also, labels that produce vinyl might be recording and mastering analog so your point would be moot.

I'm not saying that vinyl is the most accurate recording of the source, but your CD worship is pretty baffling and ignorant of the audio recording/distribution process. The real question is: do you like the aesthetics of vinyl or the convenience of CDs? The question that the article is pointing too is that vinyl positive labels are now offering the convenience of digital with their experience. I don't see why people on either side of the "debate" must somehow declare superiority. People like what they like, and people will often set up business plans to make money off of it. This isn't a holy war...

Re:NOT better than CDs

[Faux_Pseudo]

Human hearing evolved to be as sensitive as it physically could be.
This is incorrect. Human hearing evolved to be as sensitive as it needed to be. Evolution does not gear toward perfection but toward good enough. There are many animals out there that have the same basic sound set-up we do but hear much better because their survivability depends on it to find food or avoid being food. Human hearing is actually pretty mediocre compared to a lot of animals. We have found other ways to accomplish what some species use hearing to do because we just don't need the range that some species do.

The dungeon acoustics noticeably change. --More--

Re:NOT better than CDs

[Dantu]

There is no such thing as a charge smaller than an electron, which is 1.6e-19 coulomb.

There are no such thing as analog values in this universe, everything is quantized. You cannot possibly have an electric signal that's totally free of noise, what you get is a number of "clicks", one for each electron that goes by. The same way, you cannot even hear a sound without noise, what you get is a number of "plocs", one for each air molecule that hits your eardrums.

Let's follow this logic through. Some quick research turned up that a phono pickup runs at about 0.1v and 22kohm. This gives 4.54e-6 Amps. Recall that 1Amp = 1 coulomb/s. Now, divide this by 44khz (the sample rate of CDs) and we get 1.03e-9 C/sample. Divide by 1.6e-19 coulombs per electron and we get 6.4e9 electrons per sample, vs 65535 for a CD . Thus, according to this logic, records have roughly 9.7e4 (ie nearly 10,000) times the resolution of CDs.

Now, I'm not really arguing that phono is better than CD (nor am I arguing against it) my point however is that the granularity of the electrons in the wire is several orders of magnitude finer than the granularity of a CD and not really relevant to the topic.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[mangu]

Human hearing evolved to be as sensitive as it needed to be

And how sensitive is that? Think of a deep, very quiet cave. Three living beings are inside. One of them has saber teeth. Of the other two, which one lived to leave descendants? The first one to hear the sound of padded paws, of course. Multiply that by a thousand, ten thousand, generations.

Human hearing is actually pretty mediocre compared to a lot of animals

Care to cite sources for that affirmation? As I mentioned, human hearing is so good that we can listen to our own blood flow and other body noises in a quiet enough environment. This fact is reported by everyone who enters an anechoic chamber. What we, civilized beings lack compared to other animals is a system that filters noises and generates an alarm on hearing suspicious sounds. Our hearing sense is comparable to that of dogs, our instincts aren't.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[mangu]

Divide by 1.6e-19 coulombs per electron and we get 6.4e9 electrons per sample, vs 65535 for a CD

At zero ohms impedance. You forgot to consider the effect of electrons randomly hitting atoms. What you described is more or less shot noise, but there's also johnson noise to be considered.

Besides, your figures aren't quite exact. My Shure V15 Type IV pick-up, which was pretty much top of the line when I got it in the late 1970s, has a nominal rating of 0.0025 V and 47 kohm.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[Endo13]

Yeah, as soon as I posted I realized I should have said "the same sound you get at the concert or the recording studio." (Hey, live recordings on CD do sound pretty much like the original concert if you've got the equipment to crank it up that loud...) Unfortunately, unlike most message boards this one does not have an edit function... *cough*

Re:NOT better than CDs

[Cadallin]

Your claim that CDs are as good as live audio is just outrageous, and that's even ignoring poor mastering techniques.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[Anonymous Coward]

I really wish I had a response to that.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[Cadallin]

Arg. There are Audiophiles and there are Audiophiles. Some of them are idiots with too much money who buy "magic" cables. Some of them are actually intelligent and realize stuff like that is bullshit. They don't buy "magic" $100/ft cable, but they don't by $0.10/ft Ratshack 22guage speaker wire either. Some realize that there is actually a way to calculate what guage of wire you need depending on run length and load impedence. It is actually possible for speaker wire to improve the quality of sound reproduction, you do this by using cable of sufficient size such that the impedence of the cable is negligible compared to the impedence of the speakers. Nothing "special", nothing "magic." Just rational application of electrical engineering.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[Anonymous Coward]

Your calculations are off by a factor of 10 in the middle (up to 1.03e-10 C/sample) and then in the opposite direction at the end (9.7e4 is about 100000, but 10000 is correct due to the first error). The end result is 29 bits of resolution for that pickup, IF EVERY ELECTRON COUNTS. Still, that means that noise due to charge quantization is not a problem. On the other hand, the least significant bit of a 16 bit digital audio signal is equivalent to only 10000 electrons through the vinyl pickup, and 10000 electrons in 1/44000s is a current of only 0.07 nano amperes (1.5microvolts at 22kOhm). If anything causes more noise than that in the signal from the pickup before it hits the preamp, the SNR of that crucial part of the vinyl chain is less than what can be encoded on a CD.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[Faux_Pseudo]

And how sensitive is that? Think of a deep, very quiet cave. Three living beings are inside. One of them has saber teeth.
I think you are too married to your idea to see that even though took the effort to mention that humans started using other means of surviving that didn't rely on super fine hearing you insisted on ignoring that. One of the people in the cave spent the day before keeping an eye on the cave and seeing if anything went in or out that could harm them. The other one brought the human tool of fire to light their way. They both brought spears just in case.

Human hearing is actually pretty mediocre compared to a lot of animals
Care to cite sources for that affirmation?
Do you want to know how I can tell you are so biased that you wouldn't read a source I suppied? Because you didn't read the source I supplied. Go to my reply and click on the part that says --More--

Our hearing sense is comparable to that of dogs,
Yet more proof you didn't check the source I linked to. Check the table on that page and you will see that dog is listed right under human it shows that dogs have twice the range we do.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[mangu]

you didn't check the source I linked to

The only link I can find in your post is one that says dogs hear frequencies that are twice as high as humans do. I never said anything to contradict that. Sure, dogs can hear high frequencies, that's how dog whistles work. And?...

What I said is that human ears are as sensitive to intensity as they can ever get. Because if human ears were more sensitive than what they are, we would be continually distracted by random molecules hitting our eardrums. And if they were less sensitive, as I said, we would be easy prey for predators.

Try this: look up the table you linked to. See all the animals listed. Check the upper and lower frequencies of each animal against their respective head sizes. Note any correlation?...

Sound frequency is different from sound intensity. Animals perceive frequencies that are more or less related to their body size, but every animal's ear is as sensitive in intensity as it can possibly be.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[Anonymous Coward]

>> Human hearing is actually pretty mediocre compared to a lot of animals

> Care to cite sources for that affirmation?

I'm all for calling people out when they make claims without supporting them, but the fact that dogs or other animals can hear better than humans shouldn't really require a reference. All the same, the grandparent post did include a reference, and if you looked at it, you would learn that dogs have better sound sensitivity (and can hear higher frequencies) than humans. The link even includes a list of further references, in case you want more evidence that dogs can hear better than humans.

Also, you state both that the sensitivity of our ears is near theoretical limits (like molecules hitting eardrums, or the noise due to the quantization of electric current), and that "CDs have all the bandwidth and dynamic range one needs in the final recording." If our ears are that sensitive, and CDs are that good, then you are implying that the quality of a CD must also approach these theoretical limits. We know that's false, because you can plug a microphone into a 24-bit DAC, and see that the quantization caused by truncating samples to 16-bits far exceeds the quantization due to individual air molecules hitting your microphone or individual electrons of current. In other words, 24 bits of resolution would be meaningless if 16 bits of resolution already approached theoretical limits. CDs are generally good enough for human ears, but they wouldn't be if our hearing were as good as you claim that it is.

Another argument for why human hearing is nowhere near theoretical physical limits: if you sit outside your grandson's bedroom with his door closed while he's on the phone with someone, you probably can't hear what he's saying very well; but if you sit there with a microphone attached to an amplifier, you can hear it very well. (You can try this experiment yourself, or watch a Whisper 2000 commercial.) So, there's a lot of audio information in the air around us, well beyond what we hear; this wouldn't be the case if our ears approached physical limits in sensitivity.

The fact that we can hear our own blood flow is nifty but it's not particularly extraordinary when you consider the proximity of our inner ear to blood vessels.

Yes, human hearing is impressive, but it's nowhere near theoretical limits, and it's not as good as a dog's.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[Anonymous Coward]

The only link I can find in your post is one that says dogs hear frequencies that are twice as high as humans do. ... What I said is that human ears are as sensitive to intensity as they can ever get.

If you read the reference, you would see that it refers to both sensitivity and frequency range, and flat out states that dogs have more sensitivity. This is reflected by the data there, which shows that some dogs can hear sounds as soft as -20dB at 3kHz. This is roughly the frequency at which humans are most sensitive (reference), yet we have nowhere near that much sensitivity.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[Faux_Pseudo]

What I said is that human ears are as sensitive to intensity as they can ever get.

You said no such thing. Grep the whole thread prior to this and you will note that the statement above is the first time you have used the string "intensity" so you couldn't have said it before.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[bh_doc]

[quote]There are no such thing as analog values in this universe, everything is quantized.[/quote] Absolutely not true. Position is not a quantised value, nor is any of its time derivatives (velocity, acceleration, impulse) and related values (momentum, force, kinetic and potential energy. Time is not quantised. Phase is not quantised, nor wavelength. There's a whole field of physics interested in continuous-variable quantum mechanics. That was a bit silly to say, actually. Perhaps you meant to say that all particles are quantised, but that's a tautology.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[mangu]

it refers to both sensitivity and frequency range

No, it doesn't. Definitely doesn't. First it says that "an investigator usually must first train the animal to respond to a presented sound stimulus by selecting between two actions using rewards" and "This is done with the animal hungry or thirsty to motivate responding". He excuses his poorly referenced sources with a hand-waving statement that "These audiograms are from a book compiling thousands of published references into a single difficult to find source"

He vaguely states "reporting an average from 11 dogs of unspecified breeds". He believes that "dogs had slightly greater sound sensitivity". Did you notice that "slightly"? And what about the "believes"?

Well, if I could just get an average of 11 dogs of unspecified breeds, with the animal hungry or thirsty to motivate respondingly, I could believe some thousands of references compiled into a single difficult to find source would be slightly supportive of my opinion.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[mangu]

24 bits of resolution would be meaningless if 16 bits of resolution already approached theoretical limits

Have you ever tried this? Have you ever tried truncating a 24 bit recording to 16 bits and listening if you can hear a difference?

if you sit outside your grandson's bedroom with his door closed while he's on the phone with someone, you probably can't hear what he's saying very well; but if you sit there with a microphone attached to an amplifier, you can hear it very well.

Oh yes. Just put your ear where the microphone is and you will hear it just as well. Or try matching the microphone gain, that's how hearing aids work, did you know that?

Re:NOT better than CDs

[gordgekko]

Yeah, and there are about five of those people, right?

Sorry, but there is something about the audio world which afflicts both beggar and king, both believing any sort of ludicrous assertion. A cursory glance at this entire discussion shows that quite aptly.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever tried truncating a 24 bit recording to 16 bits and listening if you can hear a difference?

That's not what he meant. He meant that 24bit recording could not increase the amount of information in the recording if a 16bit recording with the same peak volume would already encode everything down to physically unavoidable noise (quantization or other). Whether you can hear that information increase is irrelevant for that argument, but from that argument follows that we can either not hear down to the physically possible limit and CDs don't capture the physically possible minimum intensity or we can hear the difference between 24bit and 16bit. Since few people can tell the difference in a proper test (same DA converter, for example), and only under very specific and unusual circumstances (painfully loud maximum volume), but a 24bit clearly has more information than a 16bit recording, not just 8bits of noise, it follows that we can't nearly hear the physically possible and CDs don't encode it either.

It's funny that you started this with an argument against vinyl, because it's usually the nutjob audiophiles who bring up "supernatural" hearing and quantization noise to discredit CD audio. But of course it's no real surprise that we've got some whackos on our side too.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[Anonymous Coward]

I give up. You're right. Humans can hear as well as dogs can.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[Anonymous Coward]

except that live you're going to have this off the hook dynamic range because most live systems have crazy awesome peak headroom.... plus you'll have the crowd noise properly dispersed... plus as someone who has mixed and mastered live CDs several times... the CD and the concert are two VERY different things. The EQ is going to be different, the mix is going to be different because you don't have ambient stage noise or monitor splash back to help you on your live mix... a good chunk of live mixes are still done mostly in mono because it's way easier to deal with plus that way in large venues you deliver the same sound to everyone...

umm...

so...

Totally different

Re:NOT better than CDs

[Anonymous Coward]

Position is not a quantised value

Yeah,right. Tell it to any atom.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever tried this? Have you ever tried truncating a 24 bit recording to 16 bits and listening if you can hear a difference?

I can't hear the difference, and neither can most people. That's one way that I know that human hearing does not approach the physical limits imposed by individual molecules striking the eardrum: if human hearing were that good, then we would be able to easily detect the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit recordings.

Oh yes. Just put your ear where the microphone is and you will hear it just as well. Or try matching the microphone gain, that's how hearing aids work, did you know that?

My experience is that a microphone can pick up a lot of things that are too quiet for me to detect, even when I hold it in the same place that I would put my ear. If I could just crank up the gain on my ears arbitrarily, then maybe I could hear individual molecules, but I can't adjust the gain on my ears. The point is this: with a microphone and a high-gain mic preamp, one can pick up intelligible sounds that are below the threshold of human hearing. This proves that the sensitivity of human hearing is nowhere near the physical limits imposed by the quantization effects of individual molecules bouncing around.

To give you a sense for how sensitive our ears would have to be for our hearing to be "just short from hearing individual molecules hitting the eardrum": Atmospheric pressure is about 100 kPa = 100000 newtons per square meter. Air molecules travel at about 500 m/s. A typical air molecule is an atom of nitrogen, which weighs 2.3e-26 kg. For a molecule that hits head on and bounces straight off, the impulse delivered will be 2*500m/s*2.3e-26kg = 2.3e-23 N s. In the course of a second, the total impulse from the air molecules hitting one side of a square meter target will be about 1e5 N s = (atmospheric pressure)(1 second). So, that means there needs to be about (1e5 N s)/(2.3e-23 N s) = 4.3e27 collisions per second to generate this pressure. (The actual number will be higher, because one cannot assume that each molecule hits head on and bounces straight off.) Supposing the human eardrum has an area of about 0.5 cm^2, we get about 2e23 collisions per second (on each side).

Two sources I can find mention mention that the pressure difference involved at the threshold of human hearing amounts to about 3 billionths of a pound per square inch. This is about 2e-10 times atmospheric pressure. So, using the figures above, the differences in pressure involved at the threshold of human hearing amount to about 2e-10*2e23 = 4e13 collisions per second. Supposing even that our hearing were so keen that we could individually detect each oscillation in a 10kHz tone, each oscillation would involve a surplus/shortage of 4 billion collisions. So, I think our hearing is not "just short of hearing individual molecules hit our eardrums". To say that "if human ears were more sensitive than what they are, we would be continually distracted by random molecules hitting our eardrums" also doesn't seem reasonable.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[jwdb]

He did indeed ignore thermal noise, but wasn't that the whole point of this thread? The original poster was claiming that the shot noise was audible with record players, but even with your numbers for the voltage and impedance it is still a factor 100 smaller than CD quantization noise.

A few numbers off a piece of scratch paper:
The power output of that Shure pickup is -74dBm
The thermal noise level for audio is -130dBm, giving us an SNR of 56dB at the pickup (decent)
A CD has an signal-to-quantization-noise level of 96dB, a 40dB improvement (significant)
Your Shure pickup has a signal-to-quantization-noise level of 138dB, another 40dB better. As the healthy human ear seems to have a range up to 130dB, this might just be audible.

The moral is that the electron noise in a record player is much lower than the quantization noise in a CD and will barely be audible, even when the music volume is jacked up to the threshold of pain. Therefore, electron noise plays no significant part and the problem with records remains the thermal noise and dust.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[clickclickdrone]

I give up. You're right. Humans can hear as well as dogs can.

Pardon? Can you speak up a bit?

Re:NOT better than CDs

[revengebomber]

Some people like Vinyl.

They also like Biblical Pi.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[iainl]

From what I've heard of them (I don't have my own DVD-A deck, but then my friend's Tag McLaren amp is so much better than mine that it's probably a fairer test anyway), what makes SA-CD and DVD-A sound better is as much, if not more down to having a different studio mix that actually uses dynamic range.

CD has plenty of dynamic range in its spec as well, but record companies want the Joe Consumer release to sound "loud" so the mix is compressed and massaged to destroy it all.

If you were clever enough to get past the copy protection and extract the data from the stereo mix on these hi-def formats, convert it to 16-bit 44.1 kHz and then play that back through the same hardware, I doubt you'd notice a difference in a blind listen.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[ben there...]

If CDs were so perfect, why was there a need to spec out SACD or DVD audio (other than the obvious audiophile cash grab)?

Multi-channel, 4.7 GB capacity, and most importantly, built-in DRM?

Re:NOT better than CDs

[specific_pacific]

All this scra/scra/scra/scra/tchin is making me itch!

Re:NOT better than CDs

[psymastr]

This worshipping of live audio outrages me. Since I was a little boy I would always hear people say how live sound is great and you can't get that sound on a recording etc.

Until I started going to actual rock concerts.

The truth: On most of them the sound sucks. Some of them have great sound and some of them have awful sound where you can't hear a thing. Most of them fall in between.

I don't get what's so great about the live sound. People play their instruments/sing into a microphone, it's fed into aplifiers, passed through some hastily prepared filters and goes to the speakers. It's exactly the same on a CD. If you had the same equipment they have on the gig, you'd get the same sound. The CD standard won't limit you.

Note that I still love going to concerts because of the feel and the contact with the performers. That's what makes a gig great.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[Cadallin]

Rock isn't "live" in a number of meaningful senses of the word. Also, because of the reasons you mention, Rock in particular benefits from studio processing. But Rock is not the only music in the word. Many of the people who worship a live sound, do so for Classical music, and other forms of purely acoustic performances.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[guinsu]

I'll just jump in with my uninformed opinion. I do like records, though I mostly listed to my ipod ripped from my CDs though. I like records for 2 reasons. 1) For some reason bass guitar is very easy to follow on records compared to CDs/mp3s listened to on ANY system I have ever had. I think this is a large part of why there were so many good bass lines in rock in the 60s and 70s and less now, but I digress. 2) There is a certain depth to the music that I don't hear on CD but I DO here on DVD-audio and even on a Ben Folds standard dvd that had an audio track (not sure if that was PCM or compressed audio). I don't know what the difference is, perhaps this is the limits of 16bit. And anyone who says bit depth does not matter for rock is wrong, just because something isn't super quiet doesn't mean those bits are useless.

I do have a theory that perhaps the extra noise on a record creates interference patterns that have a pyscho-acoustic effect on how we hear the sound, making it sound subjectively better, though I've got nothing to back that up.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[Weedlekin]

"if human ears were more sensitive than what they are, we would be continually distracted by random molecules hitting our eardrums."

That's not actually true. Mammals and birds have pretty similar auditory thresholds because (1) they use a closed pressure drum system, and (2) are warm blooded with fast circulatory systems that make a lot of noise. Other types of animal with slower metabolisms and open pressure-differential hearing systems have much greater sensitivity, and this rather interesting article on the Acoustical Society of America for example (http://www.acoustics.org/press/swa9501.html) measured some frog hearing systems as being around 100 times more sensitive than any mammalian ear, albeit in a fairly narrow band.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[SEMW]

I know you were joking, but there's nothing mutually exlusive about quantisation and irrationality. To use the original poster's example, elementary electric charge in Coulombs, being an experimentally derived value, is very, very likely* to be irrational. That doesn't change the fact that charge is quantised.


* Reason: 'almost all' the reals are irrational; since the reals are uncountable, and all but countably many of them are irrational.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[SEMW]

Position is not a quantised value, nor is any of its time derivatives (velocity, acceleration, impulse) and related values (momentum, force, kinetic and potential energy. Time is not quantised. Since it's impossible to know position to a precision of less than the Planck length, the effect is surely indistinguishable from if it *was* quantised (in units of Planck lengths). Ditto for time (effectively quantised in units of Planck time, the time it takes for light to travel a Planck length) and all the derivatives thereof.

And obviously the energy, velocity, wavelength etc. of any particle trapped in a stationary state is definitely quantised.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[gordgekko]

> though I've got nothing to back that up.

I'm not attacking you, you had a pretty decent post, but I hear the words I quoted a lot in audio discussions :-)

Re:NOT better than CDs

[Lockejaw]

Whether or not it's irrational really depends on the units you use. I could define a unit called the Lkj such that the charge on an electron is 1 Lkj. This doesn't work so well for the ratio of circumference to diamater, since that's unitless.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[Reziac]

To repeat myself from up above somewhere -- I don't mind so much what CDizing does to rock and various other genres (tho it's not great for jazz either), but to my ear, classical on CD is unlistenable. It sounds not only flat, but like big chunks are missing (most notably the ambient background that is part of a given orchestra's identity).

Re:NOT better than CDs

[Reziac]

[professional dog trainer hat, covering a couple thousand dogs]

Because dogs usually (not always) can hear higher pitched sounds than humans, there is this notion that the higher-pitched the whistle, the better the dog will respond to it. Even some pro trainers believe this. In my experience, the truth is quite the reverse -- the higher the pitch, the more likely the dog is to ignore it, quite possibly because the dog didn't clearly hear it.

Try a high-pitched whistle and a low-pitched whistle at a distance of a couple hundred yards in a high wind, and see which one you can hear. Hint: the high-pitched whistle will be inadible, while the low-pitched whistle will be heard clearly. (You'd think this would be obvious to anyone who's ever planted blinds at a field trial.) And in my experience, if a dog-savvy human can't hear the whistle under a given set of conditions, neither will even a superior dog.

As to other sounds, in my observation dogs are a lot more likely to notice and respond to very faint lower-pitched sounds, like an automobile, than they are to high-pitched sounds. Frex, dogs will notice and can recognise a vehicle by sound when it's still up to a mile away, if there's not too much competing noise. They tend not to notice faint high-pitched sounds unless they are very close or have some other significance, like a mouse underfoot or the warning tone from an electric collar.

As to the chart showing various species -- gee, those with smaller heads have smaller sounding chambers, which I suppose defines the minimum wavelength each can hear. The only glaring anomaly is the whale, but its hearing evolved for a different environment.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[Reziac]

In my ears' opinion, you are entirely correct. Just because there doesn't *seem* to be much to hear doesn't mean it doesn't matter. Wander up the discussion a ways and see where I rant about CDs vs classical music.

I do agree that bass lines suffer from CDizing -- winds up sounding "half strength" so to speak.

CD/MP3's sound doesn't bother me much for most rock, but there are a few unusual songs that I was familiar with from vinyl and now can only get on CD/MP3, and I can hear that some parts are weak compared to the vinyl incarnation.

A couple examples that come to mind are Peter Gabriel's "Games Without Frontiers" and Tears for Fears' "Mad World".

Re:NOT better than CDs

[bh_doc]

Oh? I didn't realise. But surely that doesn't mean that a completely quantised representation of the universe would be sufficient. In quantum mechanics continuously variable amplitudes are used to describe superposition states. I don't see how those can be quantised sufficiently without breaking important quantum mechanics like entanglement. Sure, you can't measure an amplitudee without collapsing to some state, but they can be inferred by measurements over populations of identically prepared states.

Or do the Planck units ultimately limit the accuracy of quantum amplitudes, too?

I have a vague feeling this also relates to the Bell inequality, somehow. But now I'm just wondering out loud.

I guess the point I was trying to make here is that just because you can't measure something doesn't necessarily make it equivalent to being quantised. But then, I'm not totally convinced how true that is.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[mshurpik]

>I do have a theory that perhaps the extra noise on a record creates interference patterns that have a pyscho-acoustic effect

Who says vinyl records are noisier?

Maybe CD's and mp3's just don't have the resolution to record the "scratches" and "pops" of vinyl?

Are scratches and pops the problem, or evidence that the solution (vinyl) works?

I know that when I go vinyl-->VHS Stereo-->16-bit DAC, the scratches and pops dissapear. How convenient.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[mshurpik]

As I said in another post, the process of vinyl-->tape-->CD removes scratches and hisses.

So it's safe to assume that CD does not have the quality to record scratches and hisses?

I'd say so.

Get a minimal recording studio and get back to me.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[mshurpik]

>Until I started going to actual rock concerts.

You might want to hear 8-10 violin fiddlers recorded on a Mackie 16-channel. There's a reason why they make these boards.

>Until I started going to actual rock concerts. The truth: On most of them the sound sucks.

Yep, that's true. Queensryche and Black Sabbath (big name bands) sounded good. The rest (Pearl Jam, RHCP, Tool, etc) sounded like crap. I was fairly horrified to be a teenager realizing that my favorite bands couldn't do "studio" live.

Solution? Go to raves.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[psymastr]

Yep, that's true. Queensryche and Black Sabbath (big name bands) sounded good. The rest (Pearl Jam, RHCP, Tool, etc) sounded like crap. I was fairly horrified to be a teenager realizing that my favorite bands couldn't do "studio" live. Hmmm, all the bands you mention are experienced and I'm sure they could pull a nice sounding show. Sometime it's just a bad night or the setting just won't sound nice, no matter how hard the sound engineer tries.

Re:NOT better than CDs

[mshurpik]

There's definitely a difference between an A-list act like Queensryche that puts on a "perfect" show and a B or C-list grunge band that just tries to keep a steady tempo, let alone get the mixing or the vocals right.

My references to RHCP and Pearl Jam are from, like 1992. They weren't so experienced back then. Tool is somewhere in between performance-wise.

The sky is falling, the sky is falling!

[Opportunist]

Making a legal, paid-for version of the file less useful than a copied or pirated one doesn't make sense.

Someone selling content realizes the "value" of DRM? Excuse me for a moment, I gotta check for flying pigs. And could someone who has his number call the big red guy and ask him if the temperature in his home is still cozy?

Re:The sky is falling, the sky is falling!

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite comfy, actually. A little overcast, but on every soul a little shadow must fall.

Re:The sky is falling, the sky is falling!

[maharvey]

And could someone who has his number call the big red guy and ask him if the temperature in his home is still cozy?

Haven't you heard the north pole is melting? Oh wait, wrong big red guy who enjoys extreme temperatures and, um, is real interested in who's naughty, and who is known as "Nick"... hooboy, my kids ain't gonna like this!

BAH

[hurfy]

Sounds great....now if they only had some records to sell :(

There seems to be one album and 11 (sidebar says 8) singles.

That was a waste to follow that link :/

I did the same as another poster and grabbed new vinyl at random just too play a new one. Next time i'll be more careful, hehe. Full blown vintage Pioneer system with 4-channel 8-track player/recorders :) My buddy never realized we were listening to an 8-track mix tape ;)

Analog and/or Digital

[Dj Stingray]

Okay, this, to me (as a DJ) is pretty retarded. Why wouldn't they just include a CD with the vinyl? Why should I have to download anything? Seems like a waste of bandwidth to me. CDR's costs nothing to make.

Real DJ's want the original vinyl, but most still end up converting them to some sort of digital format if they do a lot of traveling (vinyl weighs a TON). It seems to me this is an attempt to get the consumer to their website.

I don't know anything.

Re:Analog and/or Digital

[White Flame]

Seems like a waste of bandwidth to me. CDR's costs nothing to make.

Bandwidth costs less.

Re:Cancel your XM accounts!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for posting this off topic item. I have extended my 3 XM subscriptions for a year each.

woah, saddle creek!

[Anonymous Coward]

cursive!

Re:Cancel your XM accounts!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not censorship, you dolt. The company that carries their show has decided to suspend them; completely within their right. Furthermore, the First Amendment doesn't consider obscenity as a protected class of speech.

Now, regardless of how I feel personally about what those guys said; this whole deal has nothing to do with censorship; not to mention off-topic in terms of the original article.

Oh, but they do!

[Anonymous Coward]

>>> "Making a legal, paid-for version of the file less useful than a copied or pirated one doesn't make sense."

> BINGO, YES why can't the rest of them understand this?

They do. That's the "beauty" of it. They're in for the money; they know fully well they're screwing the innocent while real pirates go on without being bothered.

I think:

a) they want their music to be pirated where they cannot enforce law, because this is a cheap not-very-efficient way of promoting;

b) they like it: being able to screw people and presenting a false excuse to gullible judges probably is very rewarding for some executives.

What amazes me is how loads and loads of people are being had and keep thinking "it's ok!".

I own Torq

[killermookie]

How is this different from Serato Scratch Live or Torq?

The double-headed approach makes sense for several reasons. DJs and audiophiles will always want the top end of quality, so they will buy physical media, but for convenience you can't beat a digital file.

Yes, it's an analog record playing a digital song. I don't think it's as the highest quality from playing a true record that has the real song imprinted in it.

Otherwise, Torq is amazing and I really like it.

This is ALMOST old news.

[whitewhale]

As of the last few months, I almost never buy CDs anymore---- I'm lucky enough to have a great record store (Amoeba) that sells lots of new vinyl, and now I only buy records that include a download of the album. Recent LP+MP3 purchases include:

Ted Leo: Living with the Living
Low: Drums and Guns
Coco Rosie: The Adventures of Ghosthorse & Stillborn (sorry, Flash, but pretty)
Of Montreal: Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?
Blonde Redhead: 23
M. Ward: Post-War


I totally cannot tell you how much better it feels to spend my $12.99 on an LP than a cheap, disposable CD that becomes garbage after I import it.

And the best part is I'm selling Amoeba all my CDs to pay for it all!

The REAL reason behind 44.1 kHz

[darkain]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD#Audio_format

"The sampling rate of 44.1 kHz is inherited from a method of converting digital audio into an analog video signal for storage on video tape, which was the most affordable way to get the data from the recording studio to the CD manufacturer at the time the CD specification was being developed. A device that turns an analog audio signal into PCM audio, which in turn is changed into an analog video signal is called a PCM adaptor. This technology could store six samples (three samples per each stereo channel) in a single horizontal line. A standard NTSC video signal has 245 usable lines per field, and 59.94 fields/s, which works out at 44,056 samples/s/stereo channel. Similarly, PAL has 294 lines and 50 fields, which gives 44,100 samples/s/stereo channel. This system could either store 14-bit samples with some error correction, or 16-bit samples with almost no error correction."

Wish I could mod that up...

[Valtor]

Making a legal, paid-for version of the file less useful than a copied or pirated one doesn't make sense. It is a pity we can't mod that +5 insightful for the other guys in that industry...

Not a True Hybrid

[PPH]

Its not a true hybrid until they figure out a way to get MP3s to skip and warp if you leave them in a hot car.

They do have MP3 turntables you can use to 'scratch' recordings.

Saddle Creek

[loganrapp]

This is the record label for Bright Eyes; they've also been real good providing their popular (as in, national radio) tracks for use on the Podsafe Music Network. Good people, even if their music ain't your thing.

'digital' vinyl

[hack slash]

When I first saw the heading I thought the mp3s were stored on the actual vinyl and wondered how they'd be retreived from them, nothing so fancy but it reminded me of the plastic flexi-disc I have stored away with my miniscule vinyl collection, the flexi-disc in question having a couple of Sinclair ZX81 programs on them whereby you use a turntable instead of a tape recorder to load the programs in.

Mod parent up - Funny

[__aawkdb2598]

*NP*

Sigma-Delta modulation

[mangu]

a frequency of 65536 * 44.1 kHz would be in the THz range

Fortunately, this can be solved with feedback. Wikipedia has a rather good article (there's a link in the article you mentioned) on what's called Sigma-Delta, or Delta-Sigma modulation. This picture shows how you can overcome the infinite sampling frequency problem. By a clever application of feedback, the sampling noise can be shifted upwards, out of the band of interest.

This is an interesting feature of what's called "quantization noise". Because it's an artifact and not a purely physical phenomenon like the shot noise created by electrons in vacuum tubes, it can be processed and eliminated entirely from the band of interest.

I once designed an interesting system that used a couple of pins in the PC parallel printer interface as an A/D converter. One of the pins generates an interrupt (either IRQ 5 or 7), I never knew of any printer driver that uses this feature but it has been there from the first PC in 1982. I put a 1 kHz clock to drive that pin and used another pin to get a sample from a comparator. The final signal, after digital filtering, was 16 bits (because it was done in integer math) at 20 samples/second. All this worked in an early 1980s IBM-PC with a 4.77 MHz 8088 CPU. IIRC, the circuit had three CMOS chips, a quad CMOS op-amp, a 4.096 MHz crystal, and about a half-dozen capacitors and resistors in the integrator, total cost less than $15, in those days a 16 bit digitizer card would cost about $200.

Daft Punk's Discovery Did Something Similar

[szyzyg]

I have a vinyl copy of that album from 2000, it came with a 'Daft Club' membership card which let me download all sorts of exclusive audio content. In this case though it was DRM protected, unlike these mp3's

I wish I had the time to DJ out and about these days.

Missing decimal point

[Anonymous Coward]

...that allow you to download a 320-kbit MP3 of that record's content. That should be a 32.0 kbit MP3. Anything higher would surely offend a vinyl enthusiast.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Hmm...

[Ayanami Rei]

I think it's disingenious to talk about air as a non-linear system. It doesn't start acting non-linear until you're talking about distances (and/or/which imply) amplitudes that would shatter your eardrums or kill you.

I mean, let's talk about the non-linearity of speakers! They're damped oscillators!

And you can prove to an audiophile (hearing is believing) that sound is sufficiently linear to make such arguments irrelevant.

Take two frequencies (say... 14000 and 14300). If you play them, you get a 300Hz beat. Put that on one channel. Now take a 300Hz sine on the other channel, and then adjust the phase slowly. You should "hear" the 300Hz tone moving around the sound stage.

This experiment only works because sound reproduction (and your ears/brain) are a sufficiently linear system that trying to call it anything else when making qualitative arguments is just silly.

Re:Hmm...

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

> I think it's disingenious to talk about air as a non-linear system.

That was just an example. But you can probably make a much stronger case that the complex piece of engineering that is the ear becomes non-linear at much more reasonable sound amplitudes. (And of course it was disingenuous, I'm not making a case I actually believe... :-)

> Take two frequencies (say... 14000 and 14300). If you play them, you get a 300Hz beat. Put that on one channel. Now take a 300Hz sine on the other channel, and then adjust the phase slowly. You should "hear" the 300Hz tone moving around the sound stage.

That just demonstrates that to a good approximation you can model this particular situation linearly. What if nonlinearities start kicking in at higher frequences? Then this would prove nothing. What if the nonlinearities only become apparent when you have superpositions of many harmonics?

You should record to a loseless format,..

[Ayanami Rei]

but there's no reason to distribute it that way... that just wastes bandwidth.

You should really be using a modern perceptual codec. I hear AAC and Vorbis are nice. And they support 48Khz recordings with arbitrary bit depths / dynamic ranges.

But if you compress at 6:1 - 8:1 using modern codecs, you WILL NOT notice in an A/B test. What you're 'hearing' is the knowledge that you used a lossy codec in the first place -- like people seeing Jesus in pieces of toast and tree bark.

Of course, there are some really shitty (read: old) codecs out there. Don't use them. But an ogg -q6 is quite literally indistinguishable from FLAC (again, only when barring the apriori knowledge of the format... otherwise most audiophiles can suddenly 'hear' the difference again)

Wrong question?

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

If the MP3s are coming straight from the record label, maybe they could be encoded straight from the master mix, rather than a down-sampled 24-bit, 44.1kHz CD. My understanding is that CDs go up to 20 kHz (which is pretty close to the highest pitch humans can hear), but that the bit-depth is somewhat course at that range.

Is there an audio engineer around who can explain if there's much to be gained this way?

I suspect you're asking the wrong question of the wrong people. What you want to know is whether we can produce a better sounding lossy-compressed file by using a digital source with better quality. That question is really a question about whether the psychoacoustic models used in lossy audio encoding can make use of the extra information in a source file with more than 44.1/16 to produce a better-sounding compressed file at that rate and bit depth.

That doesn't sound like a question for an audio engineer, it sounds like a question for somebody who works with psychoacoustic models.

What's the point?

[Daishiman]

What's the point of a vinyl of a digital master?

As I've mentioned on a previous thread, I'm a huge fan of classical jazz and I have invested very seriously on a pile of records from the time, and I'm of the opinion that mastering was done more carefully back then and made to sound well with the way vinyl colors the sound.

But sheesh, if you're going to master an album digitally then why add noise of the line by converting it to a physical medium with a low S/N ratio?

Re:What's the point?

[Captain0Flash]

If I buy a cd with a cool album cover I'll often end up buying a poster or other parafanalia along the same lines. This often means buying the vinyl version just for the nostalgia. If I can get both (and don't mind taking 5 min to download and 5 min to burn a cd) then why not? It's what I did with The Shins most recent album http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wincing-Night-Away-VINYL-S hins/dp/B000MMMUL8

This isnt new

[DJMajah]

Labels have been doing this for years...
http://www.discogs.com/release/324766

That one was released in 2004

They are growing!

[Captain0Flash]

Other independant labels are doing this as well. http://www.subpop.com/

I think it's fantastic considering some of my favorite bands produce beautiful artwork that makes for cool record sleves. I often end up buying the album on cd only to buy the vynal for looks.

But

[ajs318]

By feeding the signals from my direct-drive (it's only a 4-pole motor -- I'm saving up for a 16-pole one :) ) turntable into two of the inputs of my Alesis MultiMix 8 USB mixer using RCA-to-6.3 adaptors, panning one full-on to the left and the other full-on right, cranking up the gain (you've already lost 6dB what with it being unbalanced and another 20db from it being the jack and not the cannon, but the too-low impedance of the latter will distort things worse) and then adjusting the tone controls (treble 9 o'clock, middle 12 o'clock, bass 3 o'clock) to correct for the pre-emphasis used in recording, I can get a nice digital signal (it's a Burr-Brown A-to-D) from a vinyl record (which I already own, so it's just as much Fair Dealing as taping a CD to listen in the car and don't tell me there's a single person in this courtroom who has never done that, your honour) anyway!

Once the controls are adjusted and the record is set up to play with the needle on the edge, start Audacity, select dsp1 as source (this may be different depending how your system is set up), begin recording and start the turntable motor. Come back later, top recording, look at waveform on screen, pick out individual tracks, paste each one as a new recording, trim start and end, save in preferred format (WAV, OGG, or even MP3 -- isn't it great living in a country where there are no maths patents?). Turn over record, repeat process.

NB. Tip from bitter experience: make sure that the room is cat-proofed for the entire duration!

Makes perfect sense

[jocknerd]

An outdated digital codec for an outdated format! Just kidding about vinyl though. I love vinyl. Just provide AAC or even better, FLAC.

Or even better

[f0rtytw0]

Just get a usb turntable and turn any record into a digital format.

Great idea

[dafragsta]

I've recently been spitting the rhetorical "they should" with friends recently along similar lines. My idea was that "they should" come out with stylized USB keys that conform to a specific size and let music lovers collect the cool USB keys that contain 24-bit/96kHz 2.0 or 5.1 FLAC versions of the album in complete DRM free glory at a $10-15 price point and that you could recover the files, should they ever become lost, once you register your key online. I think a vinyl movement would be great too. (except that vinyl recorded from a digital source which most studios use, seems kind of odd.) Basically, we are losing any tangible or visible association we used to make with an album via CD booklets, LP covers and inserts. I also don't like the notion of buying singles and not an album because that kills the album experience you get when you listen to an album that was conceptualized to be a complete work start to finish. Who am I kidding. Rock is dead. Justin Timberlake isn't going to make Dark Side of the Moon. Kerry Underwood isn't going to make the next OK Computer.

Re:NOT better than CDs--correction

[Anonymous Coward]

Oops--I meant that a typical air molecule is a pair of nitrogen atoms. So you can divide a lot of those figures by two.

It's Green!

[wsanders]

Just don't try to take a tax credit for your hybrid vinyl collection.

Ah but you miss my point.

[Ayanami Rei]

I'm saying that if the brain/ear interface actually had non-linear aspects that mattered, then it wouldn't be possible to resolve directionality without a head-transform for cues -- X o'clock relative to your ear centerline in an anechoic chamber if you will -- by just phase alone. And you can pick any combination of harmonics and it still sounds okay.

So for the interesting primary frequencies that the ear is designed to pick up, it seems the brain assumes linear properties for sound, even if physically that is an approximation of reality.

So an audiophile can believe what he wants about the non-linear properties of high-frequency sound.
But if it ain't in the range that my A/D filter is set at, you can't hear it anyway and what you can hear is linear enough to be captured appropriately by the system.

And you do realize I was being somewhat facetious in my previous post, right?

Also, I hate audiophiles. In case you couldn't guess.

Re:Ah but you miss my point.

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

> I'm saying that if the brain/ear interface actually had non-linear aspects that mattered, then it wouldn't be possible to resolve directionality

I just don't know if this is true. You get some pretty sophisticated nonlinear processing in the brain that may be able to disentangle information that's been entangled nonlinearly.

> And you do realize I was being somewhat facetious in my previous post, right?

Well I'm taking this all very seriously now. I'm thinking that if I can justify audiophilia then maybe I could get paid by a high end stereo magazine for writing this kind of stuff.

> Also, I hate audiophiles. In case you couldn't guess.

Yeah, but if you actually listened in the presence of a quadratic residue diffusor you'd change your mind.

yeah but

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah but what about all the poor whining dogs?????

Who's looking after them?