Slashdot Mirror
Vinyl To Signal the End for CDs?
PJ1216 writes to mention that vinyl seems poised to make a comeback in the music industry. Some are even predicting that this comeback coupled with the surge in digital music sales could possibly close the door on CDs. "Portability is no longer any reason to stick with CDs, and neither is audio quality. Although vinyl purists are ripe for parody, they're right about one thing: Records can sound better than CDs. Although CDs have a wider dynamic range, mastering houses are often encouraged to compress the audio on CDs to make it as loud as possible: It's the so-called loudness war. Since the audio on vinyl can't be compressed to such extremes, records generally offer a more nuanced sound. Another reason for vinyl's sonic superiority is that no matter how high a sampling rate is, it can never contain all of the data present in an analog groove, Nyquist's theorem to the contrary."
Forget vinyl - when can we get things recorded in Analog to Water?
Plus, when you're done listening to it, you can make Ramen noodles with Skwisgaar's solos, or maybe even coffee with Toki's Rhythm Guitar parts...
DETHKLOK RULES!
This statement is true, but completely irrelevant. The fact that a recording medium is analog does not mean that it is better at accurately recording and reproducing a sound than a digital medium. Magnetic tapes are also analog recordings. Putting a pencil on a string, hanging it next to a speaker, and having it draw a line on a moving sheet of paper is also an analog recording.
It's true that a digital recording can never contain the amount of data in a vinyl groove, but who is saying that all the data in a vinyl groove is more of an accurate representation of all the data extant in the original sound wave than a digitally sampled recording?
This is similarly irrelevant. Compression is a way of altering a sound wave, and has nothing to do with the final recording medium. Overcompression is a problem, but this is not an argument for vinyl over CD--it's just a comment on postprocessing techniques.
Unless they meant music that is sold as a file over the internet, digital music included CDs.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
...8 tracks are due to make a comeback in 5 years
In 3, 2, 1...
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
Not until laptops come with a vinyl drive.
Too bad you'd need a US$10000 player to prevent your vinyl from wearing out. I for one would prefer properly mastered losslessly compressed audio files (or CDs if need be).
Vinyl is better than CDs because the lack of technology and features means that the people who make 'em can't fuck 'em up as much?
And they say technology can't solve social problems. Or, in this case, lack of technology...
-F
Since the audio on vinyl can't be compressed to such extremes...
This guy doesn't know what he is talking about.
People who disagree with you are not automatically evil, greedy, or stupid.
People don't want vinyl. There's a tiny subset in the audiophille market who do. The vast majority of people don't care. Just look at the victory of mp3 in the marketplace, and the lack of demand for high quality encodings- convenience beats quality, every single time. Vinyls are not, and never will be convenient. You may see CDs phased out in a decade or two as music goes purely digital, but you won't see CDs giving way to vinyl. No portable players, no players in cars, no way to play it at a friend's house (since they won't likely have a vinyl player). Its DOA.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I think a good middle ground can be found in the way has been handling a few of their new releases. About 2/3 of the tracks get released on a CD, but it also comes packaged with a 7" that contains another 4 or 5 songs. You get a full album's worth of material, plus you also get the artwork and extras that a 7" can offer.
... but a resurgance in vinyl would be a good thing. For DJ's like myself, it never left. I can still usually buy the latest dance and hip hop on vinyl, and software like Serato Scratch and Traktor Scratch allow one to manipulate mp3's just like vinyl through the use of a special interface and timecoded records. Buying pop is a CD only affair. Sucks, but record companies make the bulk of their money from CD sales.
Sure, most of your top-40 DJ's use CD's, and that's not a bad thing, but DJ purists still prefer vinyl.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
Another reason for vinyl's sonic superiority is that no matter how high a sampling rate is, it can never contain all of the data present in an analog groove
Never? Really? Never? This is a technology website, and you're using the word "Never"??
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Just because vinyl CAN sound better doesn't mean it always will. The audiophile market can have their preference, but the general population isn't going to care about the difference in quality, especially when considering the relative durability of CDs and the ease with which they can be ripped.
You can argue that the CD is dying, but of all things, vinyl sure as hell isn't going to be what replaces it.
Stupid vinyl trolls are annoying as hell, by the way.
One of these days, I'm going to cut you into little pieces.
Ah yes, the centre groove.....
More important though, there is one thing that vinyl lacks - error correction. A couple of scratches on a CD don't make that much difference usually because the CD player will compensate, but once you've gouged a vinyl record that pop or click is there forever.
Three Squirrels
I wonder, cannot some 3rd party (such as fan) make extra data, which would be then applied over original song, and it would change the dynamic range? This wouldn't be against any copyright or anything.
What is Nyquist's theorem, and how does it relate to this?
Years ago, when CDs first emerged I picked up a few Telarc disks and was impressed. Stupidly I assumed this meant all CDs would be of high quality and began physically downsizing my music collection. At some point, after unloading some treasures I'll never see again (for less than $$$$ on ebay anyway) I listened through a few recent exchanges and realised a lot of CD re-issues were shite. Bollox! I halted the exchange and have since retained the majority of my vinyl collection and even added to it. Some of that old well mastered stuff is well beyond the means of modestly priced CD player and even some immodestly priced ones.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The loudness war does bring an interesting twist to the debate of vinyl vs. digital (CD). I was never one to choose vinyl before; I believe that the "warmth" that vinyl was known for was just hiss from the needle.
:-)
That being said, I'm pulling out some old vinyl and giving it a try. At least I don't have to worry about it not working on a old turntable (anything made in the last 30 years, at least), or DRM for that matter. Also, cover art looks better on an album than on CD.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
To compress dynamic range means to make faint sounds louder or loud sounds fainter. It makes no sense, that this CANNOT happen with the vinyl medium, maybe it WON'T, but that's a matter of policy, not capability.
...Is CD sales are dying out even without Vinyl in the picture. People are moving their purchasing dollars online because you can (nearly) instantly gain access to your new song right after purchase, without leaving your house, and you don't have anything taking up physical space to lug around.
CD sales may be on the decline but it hardly has anything to do with Vinyl records coming back into the picture.
The original generic sig.
I thought the new analogue format was laser encoded ceramic...
Deleted
It sounds like there is a market demand for "analog-like" digital recordings.
For purists, offer CDs or digital downloads with minimal compression and other features that make them sound like the vinyl of yesteryear.
For the real purists, make it sound like a fresh-off-the-presses '78 recorded with pre-depression-era microphones.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
CDs are relatively immune to a few minor scratches warping and dust, they don't need lots of cupboard space and store easily. You can rip them easily and quickly on a standard PC (no need for a special vinyl player).
Perhaps the odd audiophile/luddite might want his vinyl back, but the vast majority of folk would rather have CDs.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Aren't we overdue for some "2008 Is Going To Be The Year Of Linux On The Desktop!" stories? That at least has a better chance than vinyl. Heck, the Amiga has a better chance than vinyl.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Couldn't a digital reproduction have as many bits per second as there are molecules per second of vinyl? Wouldn't that give you the exact same resulution and greater readability? What about the resolution of the original cutting apparatus? I'm not saying vinyl sounds bad, but people don't go around saying stained glass is optically superior to plain glass, even if blue poodles and sidewalks are an improvement.
Audiophiles are the only people on the planet that wish Macs were MORE expensive.
vinyl's niche is very different than digital/cd's niche. To say that vinyl is the end of cd's is inaccurate at the very least. there will still be people that buy vinyl used or not and people who prefer digitized formats for whatever reasons they may be. Unless vinyl can somehow outcompete digital tracks on storage and portability I don't see them dooming cds any time soon.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
...because technologies similar to the ones that people are already familiar with, like DVD Audio, would occupy the same form factor as CDs, but give all of the audio quality that can be mustered, assuming that music is mastered properly. They store in the same space, load the same way, and players can be made in the same form factor (car DIN, bookshelf, component, rack-mount), and can even be played in existing DVD players.
The argument for going back to Vinyl is like if I were to argue in favor of going back to Laserdisc (which is analog) because analog will capture nuances that are left out of digitally-mastered DVDs. Mind you, I have 380 Laserdiscs, but I'm not about to argue that every Laserdisc is better, and I can only argue that one Laserdisc is truly better (the first Highlander DVD that I found is terrible for its digital artifacting).
Keep making Vinyl. DJs like it as it's cool looking and if they want to scratch they can, and yes, some people can tell the difference. The cover art is also really cool compared to CDs. But, don't reasonably expect vinyl to come back, especially when optical players are cheap.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Well this time around, the industry needs to give us record recorders and blank vinel disks. We didn't have that last time but now we are spoiled after all the CD's, DVD's, iPods, digital music, even cassettes ,etc, that we have been exposed to.
It doesnt necessarily mean that the quality would be any better on a majority of mainstream releases. The fact of the matter is digital recording processes and digital mastering processes are widely used in the industry. Just because the final audio product is printed to vinyl does not change how the original audio was recorded and mixed and mastered.
One can still use a huge amount of dynamic compression during the mastering process.. before printing to vinyl.. in order to make their product still sound "louder".
** Share what you know, learn what you do not **
Any serious musician has known for a LONG time that the sound quality of vinyl is FAR superior to that of CDs. And no, I don't want to hear from all you digital fan boyz about your short sighted abx testing and how those of us who are audio-philes and/or muscians think we have magic ears. You know what? You're right, we do have magic ears! Our hearing is obviously much better than yours if you cannot tell the clear difference in quality between all anlaog and CD audio.
Who is more qualified to make an opinion on sound quality? A bunch of pimply faced MP3 fan boyz who think that their knowledge of computers somehow equates to a knowledge of music? Or those of us who actually play intruments and have worked closely with both analog and digital recording methods?
Until digital gets some more serious sampling rates it will never match the resolution of an analog record...
"Nyquist's theorem to the contrary."
Damm right my ears are so good that I can toss out the cornerstone of DSP!
Vinyl doesn't have an infinite resolution anymore than a photograph does. You can not keep blowing up a photograph even though it is an analog recording medium. Vinyl does have a finite resolution just like digital methods.
And guess what? They will still use digital equipment in the studios because there is no quality loss when making copies! They will just move the DAC stage from your receiver to the cutting head for the record.
Nope your as wrong as any creationist and showing just as deep an understanding of science.
Yes the loudness wars are making CDs crap but that has nothing to do with digital vs analog.
I hate to sound like a member of the tin hat bunch but I have to wonder if this isn't a brilliant plan by the music companies to sell you the same music yet again! It is a lot harder to rip a record and put it on your ipod than a CD. So they sell you the "Better sounding" record for your home stereo and then the digital download full of DRM for your music player.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Vinyl CAN produce a better sound then CDs due to an increased frequency range. You might not be able to hear the missing frequencies, but you can feel the bass and the inaudable high ranges effect the audable high ranges.
That being said, it makes little difference if source recording was done digitally as the extreme frequency ranges have already been cut out. I wish vinyl purists would just be honest with themselves and admit they prefer the medium becuase it is cooler (and I say this as a die hard vinyl lover).
Vinil is no way superior to properly-produced CDs, though it might sound a bit differently (because of different set of noises and distortions).
But in any case, there's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Audio_CD and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-Audio - both of them FAR superior to vinyl (for example, they can carry 6:1 sound and have much wider frequency band).
Unfortunately, these formats utterly and completely failed because of invasive DRM...
and yet, records have not made it back. My guess is that digital will still hold the edge. The reason is that the vast majority of ppl have been willing to accept mp3s for a VERY long time. That means that ogg/mp3/mwm/etc and flac will own the formats.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
A friend of mine and I had this battle about 10 years ago. He had a very high-end turntable from Linn and I had a CD player from Nakamichi. His argument was that vinyl retained a certain "warmth" and "depth" of sound that was lost in digital recordings. We played jazz, classical and soft rock tracks from various artists and the CD simply blew the turntable out of the water. The vinyl recording, even on his ultra high-end turntable and component stereo system, still audibly popped and crackled. The CD sounded absolutely clear and had an impressive depth of sound. The argument died for me that day. Technology is king.
Your average consumer doesn't care about sampling rates etc, and doesn't have the ear to distinguish between good and very good sound. But since 'owning' a 'physical' copy of a recording has moved from necessity to novelty, increased vinyl demand makes sense from the point of view of fashion... many view vinyl as more glamorous than cds, etc (new radiohead case in point). Vinyl for dance music isn't going anywhere either (even though we have serato now) in fact many dance/electronic label don't even release CDs, just vinyl and mp3/beatport.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
As a bit of a greenie I'd like to live off-grid and low-tech at some point in the future, and for this reason vinyl wins the race for me. This is a music storage technology where playback can be achieved with no electricity and the player is fairly robust/fixable. This is unlike a CD player, which is completely electricity-dependent, delicate and potentially brickable. Plus there's something beautiful and timeless about the amplified crackling sound of a needle in a groove that appeals.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Go out and see live music!
Squirrel!
The "Loudness War" explained in 112 seconds: http://youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ
Vinyl usually does sound better. The CD format itself has a number of really ridiculous compromises in the modern era such as simple 16-bit pcm encoding with a low 44.1 khz sampling rate (barely over the Nyquist rate). The Nyquist rate of 2 samples / hz is under ideal DAC and ADC. DACs and ADCs are some of the cheapest components used and not anywhere near ideal. CDs are usually poorly mastered. I was shocked when I realized that well encoded lossy MP3s sound better than a portable cd player because of these reasons (better ADC and amplifier usually). Almost anyone can tell that the average DVD sounds better than an audio cd. The music industry did respond with SACD and DVD-audio, but most people don't care about sound quality that much, and they have failed. Those two sound great and generally better than vinyl. I like hybrid SACD best as the future format, but who knows.
We are just plain ripe.
Yes, I have noticed that. No matter how much I strain, I cannot hear the background on CDs. No hiss, no pops, no crackle, no distortion... nothing that wasn't in the original music.
OTOH, on CDs I can hear some unwanted background noise that I cannot hear in vinyl, for instance in classical music recordings there's the faint paper rustle when the musicians turn the pages in the score. That sound is very clearly heard in some CDs, but completely masked by the background noise in vinyl.
The problem with records are that they arn't very portible, its not like your going to put batteries in a record player and listen to it on long road trips. And very very very few companies have done anything productive with digital music, either they trample over your rights but have a good selection or they are very respective of your rights and have a poor selection. With a CD* I can play it in my; Car, Stereo, Portable CD player, Windows Computer, Linux Computer, Mac computer, MP3 player (after its ripped of course), and my friend's Car, Stereo, etc. And I can burn multiple copies in case it breaks, I can share songs with my friend, I can have 1000000 backups of my songs if I feel like it and can play it whenever. With most digital audio I can play it in my: iPod OR Mp3 player and Windows and Mac computers, unless I install "illegal" codecs to play them. Until I can buy digital audio and play it in more things without DRM and make as many backups and share them as I can with CDs digital audio will never fully catch on. And although records are nice, they lack the ability to be "burnt" how CDs are and rip music from them.
*that is excluding the rootkitted ones
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
> So they sell you the "Better sounding" record for your home stereo and then the digital download full of DRM for your music player.
Tin hat theory, perhaps. But don't think for a second that somebody has considered this.
But the FA is missing one REALLY HUGE point:
Most people don't "listen" to music. They use it as a soundtrack to their sad pathetic lives as they schlep their bodies to and from work, or put it on as background during dinner, or an ambient enhancement while reading or cruising the web, or as something to hide the sounds of bedsprings while they fuck their paramour du jour.
But VERY FEW people sit and listen to music with the attention one would need to bother with discerning the subtleties between different recording principles. Music is under competition from a thousand different directions, and people's lives are so busy, that sitting around in a comfy chair with a nice drink and listening, being MOVED by music, being swet away by something that matters, is an increasingly rare event.
I consider this a sad thing, but not unexpected, given the circumstances. There is no urge toward quality. fuck - if there was, then I wouldn't have 160 gigs of 192bps mp3 files. WHY do I, as a lover of fine audio, have so much mp3? Because I can't fit my stereo system into my office, and I like working to music. I am not uncommon. I know MANY people with extensive record and CD collections who have huge mp3 selections. And I also know many people who have huge mp3 collections and very few CDs and no vinyl records at all. They are perfectly good people who CAN'T TELL THE DIFFERENCE. They are not deaf - they just don't care. And more and more people are like that.
So, in short, I think vinyl will NEVER replace CDs. CDs and vinyl will be replaced by high quality digital audio downloads and digital/cable/internet radio. I love my vinyl, but I'm not stupid about it.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Records can sound better than CDs
Are you kidding me? Well I can make a piece of crap look like a sculpture but it's still a piece of crap. Not only that, a poorly mastered cd has no bearing on the quality of a record- of course a record can sound better than a crap-cd. A good cd can sound a million times better than any record and anyone who says otherwise is insane. All those "audiophiles" out there... I have a bridge I want to sell you.
>no matter how high a sampling rate is, it can never contain all of the data present in an analog groove, Nyquist's theorem to the contrary."
Sure, I could sample at 1 bazillion hertz, but if I'm only sampling at 1 bit I'm not going to be reproducing the original signal very well, since my sample size isn't high enough to differentiate the data I care about. And if I can't tell what data looks like, Nyquist can't tell me anything about how much sampling I need to do in order to capture it accurately.
Nyquist doesn't directly say anything about the sample size (8 bits, 16 bits, etc, just the sample rate (22 KHz, etc).
Because I'm not anything of an audiophile. I do, however, enjoy the fact that a posting that talks about how parts of an article are irrelevant was modded "informative".
Just interesting irony, nothing else.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
So they compress the sound on CDs too much... maybe just don't compress it so much. For the label to propose going back to vinyl to limit its own freedom to do that compression, is like admitting that one really needs a straitjacket.
16 bits is enough range to express sounds that are too quiet too hear, all the way up to the threshold of pain. At least that's what they told us when CD technology was new...
Vinyl wears out with use, so maybe they could sell more records because of that. And maybe they are realizing that the "analog hole" has high enough barriers to entry that less casual copying would occur, whereas ripping CDs is just too easy.
Personally I don't plan to stop buying CDs (at least really iconic ones of lasting value, once in a while) until they sell uncompressed, un-DRM'd digital formats (like FLAC). If they'd sell 24-bit recordings, also uncompressed, that would be a real reason to consider CDs obsolete. I think the 99-cent tracks should be "premium," and they should offer lower-quality MP3's for much less... then they could sell several times as much music as they do today. And hey if they want to keep making vinyl to satisfy the DJs that's fine too... but this pretense that it's "better" just because they have been making the CDs with too much compression is ridiculous.
This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Audiophiles shouldn't be allowed to submit stories to Slashdot.
No, vinyl doesn't sound better than CDs. And this so-called "loudness war" isn't cause to abandon twenty years of progress and return to analog music. What idiot connected the dots in such a ludicrous way?
The medium is at issue here. The waning of CDs is derived from iPods and the like don't play CDs. Vinyl, (and I still got mine), sound fine except for the scratches and pops -- but they don't play on iPods as well. Ripping is for people with time. mp3s without DRM are the simply media of choice.
Musicians will tour to make money, with music being a free givaway. Labels were needed foremostly for distribution and promotion. With the internet as a distributor and plenty of iRadios, there is no need for the middle man.
Radiohead is doing their own distribution, with NIN opting similarly. This is the new paradigm.
Labels are dead, dead, dead - and good ridance. Physical media is dead. Music is alive. Long live the king.
(Horn blowing - Now: IT Director / Then: Music buyer - record store clerk (5 years!))
ceci n'est pas un sig
Dark Side of the Moon again!
Records are composed of molecules. At a small enough scale, they essentially are digital.
Even if every single molecule was placed exactly correctly, a record grove's displacement would still be less accurate than a 32 bit sample.
Likewise, the molecules are dragged passed the needle at a discreet rate.
Although both rate and depth are much higher than a CD, there is a digital sampling rate and number of bits per sample that would be superior.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
There are no technical reasons why CD's can't sound much better than records. You have wider frequency response, no noise, and 16-bits of dynamic range (at least 80 db depending on how you define the bottom end), and infinite channel separation. Not to mention random-access and no degradation on copy.
While on a record you have 15KHz top end, lots of rumble, scratch and hiss, maybe 55db dynamic range, and only 15db channel separation on a good day.
Why to discussions about the technical aspects of audio always devolve into stupidity when it's just a branch of electrical engineering?
/. piece is full of errors and misconceptions that keep propagating. I'm not going bother to read TFA because I can already guess where it goes.
The lead
I'm going to address only one issue here. TFA (/.-redacted) says "Since the audio on vinyl can't be compressed to such extremes, records generally offer a more nuanced sound." Who makes this crap up? The compression is done in electronics before it is committed to a distribution medium. If vinyl really does regain popularity, the same marketing assholes who are forcing the mastering engineers to overcompress CDs will force them to overcompress vinyl.
On a side note, try to find the LPs made in the 1970s by Sheffield Labs. Stunning (except for the usual noise floor of vinyl). Recorded direct-to-disk with the only intervening electronics being the microphone preamps and the amplifiers that drive the cutting head. They did issue them on CD (eventually) but I can't find any, myself.
Yah, the proof of this is the very phenomena the poster is bemoaning.
If people cared enough about the loss of dynamic range to switch to vinyl as a result then they would care enough not to purchase the CDs that sacrificed dynamic range for a cheap loudness trick.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
and that tiny audiophile market are nutjobs as well.. ok some are more nostalgic than nuts but that's splitting hairs.
The most informed Audiophiles are listning to HD audio recorded with really incredibly audio gear at insane sampling rates and dynamic range. At CEDIA I boguht a dual layer DVD full of FLAC files from a gentleman that recorded some music that made even the best master discs i have listened to sound dead and flat. all I had to do was send them out toslink to my Anthem preamp and it happily played the 7.1 audio out in a way that was just like you were sitting in that concert hall.
That is where the audiophiles are headed, recording that use high end gear, great care is spent on the audio from microphone to pressing making it as good as being there. not downgrading to a medium that is only "good" for 2 plays and then it's muddies significantly from the needle wearing the surface, and that's if you can get a 2nd generation pressing, most records are garbage 4th or even 6th generation pressing and they lose a LOT of audio detail coming off that many generations of copies.
At least that is how the old records in the 80's were done. maybe they will press them with decent quality control this time around.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Another reason for vinyl's sonic superiority is that no matter how high a sampling rate is, it can never contain all of the data present in an analog groove, Nyquist's theorem to the contrary.
The mathematics behind sampling theory is widely misunderstood, and unfortunately the author has fallen into the same trap. I would like just once to see someone properly reference the Nyquist theorem when debating the merits of different recording formats.
The Nyquist theorem is about aliasing, a phenomenon where a sampled wave comes out as a different frequency than the input wave, and this will happen any time the input wave is above half the sample rate, or Nyquist frequency. Nyquist's theorem states it will not happen below that frequency, and it's pretty intuitive - suppose you are sampling a pure frequency at at least twice the frequency; then you cannot jump over any contiguous positive or negative portion of the input, and so you can't get aliasing.
The Nyquist theorem is not about accurate reproduction. You can still sample the Nyquist frequency at the zero every time.
In addition, the "information content" of analog is irrelevent - first of all, no analog medium has "infinite information", due to quantum uncertainty. Second, even if it did, there's no such thing as a perfect analog recording, and what's important is the deviation from the source, not the amount of information. In fact, this sounds like an argument for digital, because with a high enough sample rate and small enough quantization, a digital signal is to our ears indistinguishable from the source, and has the added benefit of being able to be copied perfectly.
Not to be outdone by the resurgence in vinyl, CD makers have recently banded together to deliver a digital version of the "warmth" given by vinyl.
The next generation of players will be able to accurately mimic warble, speed fluctuation, hiss, scratches, and even (for some top end players), "stomp skip" that mimics a record player's skipping effect when jostled. The degradation of frequency response from vinyl from needle friction over time was not listed among the features.
Anticipating several other nostalgic endeavors, the industry is packaging such add-ons also with the ability to reproduce tape wow and flutter (for several widths of tape), mechanical noise from wax cylinders and terrible reproductive qualities of dull needles, magnetized heads and tiny speakers. Look for all these effects in the latest players, including MP3 players, usually in the form of a "plug-in" or aftermarket feature.
Vinyl pressing sources state that they are already planning the next move: digital encoding of the sound onto their albums using high-rate, high-level sampling. As long as the player can decide between the "on" and "off" of each bit read (and some auto-correction encoding and re-reading capabilities of some players), the sound quality should never degrade. They are also exploring ways to make vinyl more portable by previewing "portables" - small carts that one can drag behind you, wagon-like, to keep your music with you as you travel outside. There are rumors of a hand-cranked turntable just around the corner, starting in Q2 '08.
Stay tuned, the world of music is suddenly going to explode with possibilities!
The beginners are the ones who want convenience. Those of us who have been listening to music for a while, or do our own recording, can easily pick out the shitty quality. If it weren't for the RIAA's slimeball tactics, I would buy CDs of a lot of the music I listen to (but I refuse to reward theit behavior with money)
all this shit should be public domain now anyway.
Well, in my case, the corners on the square digital waves hurt my ears, whereas, analog's nice round waves don't - so there!
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
People don't want vinyl. There's a tiny subset in the audiophille market who do.
...
There's also a bunch of stoner metal guys who are *gagging* to fork over their money for extra heavy "audiophile quality" vinyl.
But it's a small market and they go to gigs and listen to guitar feedback and drone at ${TOOLOUD}dB without earplugs.
They won't be able to tell the difference between vinyl and a 78 shellac in a few years
I get the impression that a lot of people are thinking of "compression" in terms of WAV -> MP3. Here it means amplitude compression, reducing the dynamic range: quiet and loud sounds approach the same (louder) level in order to make the CD sound louder, which is apparently more appealing to dumb-ass teens who like Britney and her ilk.
Technically CD's should sound much better than vinyl, but in reality they often don't because of this decision made in the mastering process by the studios. If you want to hear how good a CD can actually sound, listen to the Cowboy Junkies "The Trinity Session" CD.
I've been gradually digitizing my vinyl collection from a decent Sony turntable and burning them onto CD. It then sounds just as good as the vinyl, including the wide dynamic range characteristics, but also the normal background noise which I reduce as much as possible by cleaning the record carefully beforehand. It certainly sounds no worse at all than just playing the vinyl.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Now, music can still sound better on vinyl or whatnot but this is purely subjective and has more to do with your equipment and your speakers.
The last TMBG show they offered their latest release on vinyl. I thought about picking it up as it would be novel. However, vinyl is rather bulky, a 33 1/3 has to be flipped mid play. I do have a turn table but needles are spendy suckers. So while cool, I had to say no.
The only real complaint is cover art was nicer on 12 by 12, but I would hope that next generation music discs will take advantage of HD resolution and go for a virtual flyleaf.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
For one thing, vinyl has always had a loudness standard: the bigger you make the grooves, the fewer can fit on the record. So LPs were most often mastered at levels appropriate for a 24 minute side. (Extended singles for club play, which have fewer songs on them, are often mastered louder.) Compact Disc Digital Audio, on the other hand, never had a concrete definition of the playback volume.
CD is more portable than vinyl and is often listened to in a moving environment. The loudness race started when portable audio players such as Sony Discman and car units first came out. Some used a cheap op-amp to drive cheap headphones; others were car units that played over the radio. Record producers realized that end users could barely hear Dire Straits' Brothers in Arms over environmental noise, and they pushed mastering engineers to push the levels hotter.
Also, vinyl equalizes the bass down before recording and equalizes it back up in the player's preamp, based on a standardized New Orthophonic preemphasis curve. The limiter algorithms to overamplify an audio signal while fitting it into [-1..1] in the flat-equalized time domain of CD are not optimal for a time domain equalized in New Orthophonic. It's the producer's job to approve a master, and hearing these suboptimal results on vinyl might encourage an ambitious producer to back off on the demands to the mastering engineer.
I'm going to ignore the utter stupidity and technical inaccuracies of this article to make a point.
The only issue with CDs is compression. But compression really can be good - it's done for a reason. What we need is a CD format like what DVDs have where the compression information can be embedded into the audio stream so that the player can decide how much compression to apply. My DVD player allows me to adjust the compression, and I actually turned it to full because I don't have a great sound system and I keep having to adjust the volume. But if I ever get a 5.1 sound system and a single house, I will want it turned off (or at least down). CDs have plenty of bandwidth to do this same thing if the format was changed. The problem is compatibility.
For the audio purists out there, I have special low skin effect ultra wide-band kettle cords for your amplifiers and turn tables. These cards are guaranteed to enhance the audio experience. Only $5000 each.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
"vinyl seems poised to make a comeback in the music industry"
Blah blah blah. We hear this every two months, and have done so since 1987. It ain't happening. Vinyl never quite disappeared, and every time some new group or demographic 'discovers' it, there's rumour of a resurgence in popularity. It will remain on the fringes, but it will remain. No news here.
"vinyl purists are...right about one thing: Records can sound better than CDs."
Absolutely. Great vinyl can sound better than shitty CDs. However, great vinyl won't sound as good as great CDs.
"mastering houses are often encouraged to compress the audio on CDs to make it as loud as possible:"
On most CDs, yes. Exactly like they did with most vinyl for two decades. Have you actually HEARD some of the compressed crap that was released in the early 1980s?
"Since the audio on vinyl can't be compressed to such extremes..."
Wrong.
"...records generally offer a more nuanced sound."
Wrong.
"no matter how high a sampling rate is, it can never contain all of the data present in an analog groove, Nyquist's theorem to the contrary."
Wrong. Well, pedantically almost correct but totally irrelevant. Do you understand Nyquist's sampling criteria? To get ALL of the data present up to a given frequency, you need to sample at twice that frequency. Simple. The point is that it's irrelevant to sample at a frequency to capture anything beyond human hearing limits.
You can love vinyl all you want--I know that I do! I've got some BEAUTIFUL music recorded brilliantly on heavy vinyl, I've got a damned nice turntable setup, and I have no interest in replacing that stuff with CD. However, you can't make any pseudo-technical claims to the "superiority" of vinyl recordings, because they just aren't there. Deal with it.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Everybody says that "vinyl = analog => it has more data." This is not entirely true because, on top of the issues onemorehour raised, there's also a limit to the feature size that vinyl can have. Theoretically, a vinyl record will never have more resolution than 1 molecule of the vinyl. Realistically, the limit has to do with read/write head sharpness and/or the structure of the vinyl itself. Not to mention the mechanical wear and tear inherent in actually using it is greater than with CDs.
One thing that interests me is the possibility that sampling at a constant rate could introduce distortion to the sound which can make an audible difference in how the lower frequencies are percieved even if the higher frequency is inaudible. If this is possible, then the best solution without an insane amount of oversampling would be some kind of stochastic sampling where there is some jitter explicitly added to the sample rate that would make the higher frequency noise broadband, and thus more white, and thus less likely to effect any one sound.
It's a shame that people are putting out such unmitigated nonsense.
"Portability is no longer any reason to stick with CDs,
Compared with MP3 players, this is true. But then again, vinyl falls down on that one.
and neither is audio quality. Although vinyl purists are ripe for parody, they're right about one thing: Records can sound better than CDs.
"Sound better" is a purely subjective concept, so in that respect it is true.
What LP quite objectively and measurably cannot do is accurately reproduce a recorded sound with ruler-flat frequency response, unmeasurable wow and flutter, and no surface noise, scratches or hisses.
Although CDs have a wider dynamic range, mastering houses are often encouraged to compress the audio on CDs to make it as loud as possible: It's the so-called loudness war.
If they're encouraged to do it on CDs, then why wouldn't they do it on LPs as well to get the same benefit ?
Since the audio on vinyl can't be compressed to such extremes, records generally offer a more nuanced sound.
Making a sweeping statement about the standard of reproduction of an audio medium based on the treatment that some recording companies give to some types of CD is really pushing the boat out. CDs can sound very very bad, but that is only if the record companies choose to allow them to do so. LPs can also sound very very bad, given the fact that they degrade each time they are played, catch dust and so on, ignoring the measurable crapness of their audio reproduction. Until relatively recently all recording tapes had to be heavily compressed at the low end in order to ensure they would play properly on home record decks and to ensure that the cutting lathe would not overheat.
Another reason for vinyl's sonic superiority is that no matter how high a sampling rate is, it can never contain all of the data present in an analog groove, Nyquist's theorem to the contrary."
The author obviously never heard of "frequency response" or "noise floor"; the quiet sounds that manage to make it onto an LP recording are masked by the surface noise and distortion inherent in a mechanical pickup being dragged through stamped bits of plastic.
Does this mean I will soon be able to demand a AM/FM/SW/satellite/cassette/8-track/mini-disk/DCC/open-reel/phonograph player for my next new car? SWEET!!!!
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
There were valid theoretical reasons for vinyl to sound better than CDs in 1985. More importantly if you listened to recordings back then, even on my old barely middle end turntable, many vinyl recordings *DID* sound better than the remastered garbage on CDs. This was largely due to poor digital analog conversion from the analog masters to the digital copy and to a lesser extent from the digital form back to analog form from the CD player. Back in 1985, the conversion from digital back to analog was done by a single 16 bit chip and the last two bits were very inaccurately rendered causing distortion in the wave forms. Also, harsh analog filters were applied to eliminate digitization noise which also cut out some of the top frequencies before oversampling and digital filters became popular. However, most of the problems were in the mastering process (probably mostly due to inexperience), because the CDs made from digital masters, which were only newer classical recordings in 1985, always sounded better on CD than on vinyl even on cheap CD players. Some of my old CDs *still* probably sound like crap.
None of these considerations are valid with today's technology - and it amazes me that these issues are still misunderstood over two decades later. Then again - tubes sound better than transistors too...
No, its the vast majority who want convenience. Do you really think that in US culture, with dozens of radio stations in every city and MTV, that there's a single person in the US over the age of 12 who hasn't "been listening to music for a while"? Yet they still don't care about quality. There's a market for audiophilles such as yourself, but its no more than 1% of the total music market. Vinyl will stay around to support that 1% for a while, but don't kid yourself that you are anything other than a tiny minority. It isn't about being a "beginner", its about having other priorities.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
ALSO: for those without special gear ... look for a special DVD disc set as reviewed here http://www.audaud.com/article.php?ArticleID=864 ... That one is also fantastic and makes every record I have heard sound like crud being played on a standard DVD player and sent to even a mid level Home stereo system. you do not need Anthem level of gear with a slim devices transporter to enjoy the HD audio out there.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"mastering houses are often encouraged to compress the audio on CDs to make it as loud as possible: It's the so-called loudness war. Since the audio on vinyl can't be compressed to such extremes"
You don't compress the audio on a CD. You compress the audio on the original master recording, which then gets transferred to the CD. There's nothing to stop them from doing it with vinyl. Just because they are going to vinyl instead of CD doesn't mean that the record companies will suddenly become honest and quality conscious.
"records generally offer a more nuanced sound."
And those "nuances" are completely obscured by the clicking, popping and noise generated by a needle being dragged across crappy low quality vinyl.
Frankly this sounds like marketing bullshit. CDs are ubiquitous. Sales are flat. They need a new gimmick. And there's an entire generation who has grown up without ever touching a vinyl LP.
There's a tiny subset in the audiophille market who do
I know a lot of audiophiles, and although some like vinyl, they wouldn't argue it is superior.
Most audiophiles want analog tape that can be slowed down for higher quality sample based on the particle placement on the tape.
However with newer digital audio streams producing twice to several magnitudes the quality of CDs, even this is no longer important to most audiophiles, as tape would need to be on insanely sized reels to produce the same level of quality based on the magnetic particle spacing.
I'm sure people that love vinyl do so for good reasons, but it is not a superior format; even 1940's wire based recording was superior to modern vinyl.
Every analog component a signal runs through adds noise. Signals / sounds significantly below a system's noise floor are simply undetectable and lost. The statement that no digital system can contain what is on a vinyl disk is false. It can be argued that existing digital hardware does achieve this level. However, it does not take a huge number of bits to exceed the SNR (signal to noise ratio) of any analog system made out of real world components.
Awhile back I received a copy of old albums on CD, notable Bad Company and a Deep Purple disc. One of the things I noticed right away was that the CD had a hiss, like you would hear from a tape on a bad tape-deck. My guess is that the CD was recorded from a tape on a crappy deck, because that's exactly what it sounds like. Music isn't worse on CD's, it's when lazy and greedy music companies pull shit like this that it's worse. In the case of these particular albums, they sound better on tape, not because tape was better, but because decent tape-decks had filters built-in to take out the expected hiss. CD players have no such thing, because there's no reason to expect the hiss would be there (except for greedy and lazy music corps, of course).
are you really this much of a stooge to post this? not only was most of this debate settled two fucking decades ago most of it is irrelevant as any honest audiophile will tell you.
...and I'll say it again.
Vinyl for mixing.
CDs for listening.
MP3s for walking.
And that's all I have to say about that.
C-x C-s C-x k
It should be "It's funny. Laugh"
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
Man, where's the love? Audiophiles are NAUGHTY. I think I count as something other then a person who "use[es] it as a soundtrack to their sad pathetic lives as they schlep their bodies to and from work" but I don't get all freaky about it. I've played bass in a punk band, owned and operated my own studio WAY before it was considered cool (or trivial) and currently run an internet radio station.
But none of that makes me better then you, or anyone else. People do what they like, hopefully (don't get me mixed up as a nice person) love. If you love your highs and lows that much I'm really glad for you. Super. But the moment you think that somehow makes you more special then someone else you've missed the boat.
Quack, quack.
In regards to the CD vs Vinyl argument, its best to refer to Mad Max beyond Thunderdome. Remember the kids played the vinyl record at the end. Its hard to play a CD when you have no electricity.
A lot of ignorant reactions IMO. Would vinyl really be as bad as people here claim, how can it be that a certain record studio is still producing 30.000 records per day? And we're not merely talking dance music here.
I can hear the difference. I happened to get both a CD and a vinyl recording of the exact same classical performance many years ago. I still had my turntable and a top-of-the-line Denon CD player. The vinyl recording had more hiss to it than the CD. That was to be expected. However, the vinyl recording also gave me a better impression of actually being right in from the performers (a quartet). It just also happened to give me the impression of an army of small hissing bugs that had joined us.
I do believe that digital can give a good enough quality to get the same impression as analog. But the CD format just isn't it. You'll need to completely and totally eliminate all aliasing to achieve it. In theory that can be done with the 44.1 kHz sample rate, but I believe it will be too expensive to actually achieve it. I propose 8 times the sampling rate and twice the number of bits as a new audio standard for the high end purist. It will require the space of an HD-DVD to record it, or maybe a DVD with lossless compression such as FLAC. But this is all practical today.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Vinyl wears, it gets dusty, it scratches, it wears, requires pre-emphasis and de-emphasisis curves applying to the audio, it requires a lot of good clean amplification.
So yes, once you remove all the static, clicking, jumping and amplify it well then vinyl is better sounding than CD.
But why compare vinyl with something as old as CD? it's an ancient format that should have been replaced with 24-bit 96Khz by now. The technology is cheap, I have a 12 in, 12 out 24-bit 192Khz firewire interface that was 300 uk pounds, so a HD audio player could easily be sold for 100. Of course it would be DRM laden.
right next to the arm of my turntable.
probably illegal to use it, I imagine some troll in the tech world has patented this so-far-from-obvious anti-skip device
Awesome! Analogue sounds better and now you ca plug it into a computer and digitize it!
By reading this signature, you hereby agree with the content of the above comment.
Why didn't you tell me sooner! Finally someone definitively clears it up for me.
Quack, quack.
Conversely, how much does an analog groove contain? How accurate is it? How often and how much is it modified by relatively uncontrollable factors such as air pressure, dust, pollutants, temperature, and the quality of the music itself when it is played for the master copy (i.e., without digital editing they must do it perfectly and no one can be perfect)? (These factors I assume would not necessarily be "uncontrollable" but expensive to control.) In support for Nyquist theorem, the smallest unit of time that is currently accepted by scientists as possible is a planck time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_time/), so everything could essentially be digitized merely because of the fact that both time and matter have certain defined minima at which or above which, and only at which or above which, they can exist. Therefore, in extrapolation, it shouldn't be too hard to make something well beyond human's limits today or in the near future.
However, the only way to empirically test this considering today's limits to technology would be to actually test it with real people, both of them blindfolded, and they both listen to DVD-quality audio and Vinyl-quality audio via the same speaker system a few times in a random order, with the order changing for each group of people. The listeners will first hear a notification on which test it is (e.g., 1, 2, 3), and then they are to record which tests sounded better on paper with pencil.
I can't wait to play Bioshock off an analog vinyl disk. I'll bet the graphics will be AWESOME.
Property is theft.
The resolution of a vinyl record can't be higher than the length of the needle. Just as the maximum amount of data on a CD can't be wider than the wavelength of light used to read it.
And the mellowness and lack of dynamic response you talk about in Analog? That's data loss.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
When I was a kid the cool people had reel-to-reel. Everyone else had turntables.
Quack, quack.
the rest of us listen to music.
At least thats what I remember from discussing audio equipment among friends.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Really? What happens when I am sampling so fast that I am recording the individual molecules passing by the needle? I must still be losing something on that vinyl disc.
You are missing something else here, the number of bits once you convert from analog to digital. This is what determines dynamic range, not just sample rate. Every piece of electronic equipment creates noise and one measurement of the quality of a recording is the signal to noise ratio. Once you get to the point where you are digitally encoding the noise, how exactly is an analog recording better?
As an audiophile that read High Fidelity magazine during the time frame of the digital "revolution", I will try to add something useful to all this. Sampling highly complex audio waveforms, to convert to a digital medium will involve some loss. Compression, digitally, or analog, involves dynamic range loss. This may actually be required in some music, to prevent clipping, or a total loss of the quieter passages. So both sampling and compression become necessary evils in a "digital" age. The sampling level, and level/TYPE of compression are the determinants for overall quality. Unless you listen to synth/pop music, in which case differences are usually minimal, as the source material lacks the subtle nuances, and wider dynamic range inherent in non-synthesized music. Please bear in mind that the following, as well as the preceding are opinions and information subjective in nature, but largely true from an engineering and audiophile perspective. In the 80's I remember reading up on the Compact Disc format. While 44,100 samples per second, with 65,535 levels of volume may sound like a lot, even as a teen ager, I was unimpressed. Audiophiles were pushing for 96 Kilobit sampling rates, to ensure a more accurate representation of the analog wave form. Many wanted greater bit depth as well, since inaccuracies in digital reproduction would be buried under the noise floor. What we got, as consumers, was the aforementioned 44.1KHz, 16 bit sampling. The best that we could do was use strong "smoothing" in the analog output stages, and try to hide the "edginess" many complained of in the sound. Producers would do a digital recording, analog, mixdown, and drop it to the digital medium, at the end. This method, while seemingly over complicating things, would typically soften the sound somewhat on less expensive gear. High end gear would use extremely expensive analog output stages, or qould pass the signal to a dedicated D/A converter. Overall, I have never been happy with the CD medium for critical listening, especially recordings involving the female voice, or very complex high frequency content with wide dynamic range. Think of "unplugged" sessions, or orchestral recordings, when picturing examples. fiddy Cent is not affected by the CD format's limitations..... So where does that leave guys like me? In an age when kids are being taught that 128 kilobit data rates for MP3 is "CD quality, and simple, convenient formats, and lossy compression are fully acceptable, I am apparently a minority. MP3 is based on removing "data" that is expected to not be perceived. This removal is applied in varying degrees, depending upon desired data rate, or a variable rate, with an upper limit. I find the trend towards acceptable loss, in an already compromising medium, to be anything else but acceptable. It only takes one listening session of any preferred music on CD format, with a comparison to MP3 encoding at 320 kilobits data rate, to see a huge difference. At 128 kilobit data rates, it gets plain embarrassing. All of this assumes at least mid range equipment. If you are comparing the two digital formats on a $200 rack system from Wal- Mart, or on your PC speaker setup, it may not show the huge disparity in quality. All this being said, I hate the current CD format, and long for "albums to come out on DVD, with 96KHz or higher sampling, and 24/32 bit depth. While I have a custom D/A converter (PS Audio), and use B&W speakers, my total investment is WELL under $5000 for all of my gear. Perhaps when I cannot detect edginess or overall "grittiness" in the widely varying music I listen to, I will be happier with digital formats at the consumer level. I will never like the hack job that MP3 does to music. My opinion. YMMV. Some restrictions may apply. See your doctor if this post causes an erection lasting longer than four hours.
Who gives a toss? If only they would be able to get some quality content onto their circular medium on choice.
I've experiments to run, there is research to be done on the people who are still alive.
Has anyone actually done a real study on this and actually determined that vinyl is better than CDs?
This reminds me of a number of years ago when the magazine "Popular Electronics" was still around and was considered a serious authority and not another junk rag. When large diameter and other "special" speaker wire started appearing and all the self-proclaimed audio experts announced that the "special" wires "sounded better", PE did a study and found that at that time, the "special" speaker wires performed no better than 18-gauge lamp cord.
This also reminds me of the age-old tubes versus solid state argument, and I don't think that one has ever been looked at objectively either.
Just like I have a few Amish friends who will be happy to tell you that a horse out performs a car...
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Album cover art. Somehow, it just doesn't work on a CD.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
as it seems there's more of a rise of including download codes for high quality MP3s along with well made records. There is a conscious effort, by some labels, to embrace both the audiophiles or retro-style kids AND the portable music player folk, too. And at 320kbps! Mind you, I haven't actually seen anyone review the quality of the MP3s for proper ripping and encoding, but some labels are diversifying quite nicely.
Abacus better than modern chip?
Coal - the new oil?
Pidgins making cellphones obsolete!?
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
Analog on vinyl is not lossless. From Wikipedia:
. .
[snip]
Think of it as analog dynamic range compression.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
As the quality of digital music improves and the restrictions are lifted CDs will die out as a viable format but Vinyl will live on. The problem with the digital music is that it does not have a tangible product that you can display and treasure and CDs are not a great deal better generally the packaging is cheap and unspectacular. Vinyl disks and packaging has so much more scope for being something tangible, something to display and treasure. All our music will eventually be delivered digitally one way or another but for those looking for something more tangible, to keep and remember Vinyl offers that little bit more pleasure. It soon will die out but only because it will not be relevent to the populace of the day.
When I read the original post I thought "Not this CRAP again! F*cking luddites and philistines! Now I've got to educate another group of idiots about something well understood and basic." But it looks I don't have to. Everybody else is doing a fine job of education.
Yes, CDs are superior to vinyl in every way. Vinyl is not pure analog. The needle has a frequency limit, the vinyl material has a limit to the sizes of peaks and valleys. The recording medium is plastic and thus repsonds differently at different frequencies. So vinyl doesn't record "nuances" any better than a digital CD. In fact the opposite is true.
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
So when we stop driving cars and switch to personal flying vehicles, but some people will still ride horses for fun - will we see a "Horses to signal the end for cars?" headline on Slashdot?
The latest toys for audiophiles:
Devices to demagnetize your CDs. Or your vinyl. Yes, demagnitize your plastic. (I predict that some dumbass will reply to this defending one or both of these devices, with a lot of technobabble they don't understand, because it doesn't actually mean anything.)
$100 speaker cables.
$8000 speaker cables. (Current flamewar going on between manufacturers of the two over which is the bigger pile of steaming shit.)
Tube amplifiers.
$485 wooden volume control knobs for your tube amplifiers.
Magic markers to color the edges of your audio CDs to improve the sound.
Magic laquer to paint on your transistors.
Note that any of these claimed miracles would easily qualify for the $1,000,000 JREF prize - if they worked. None of the manufacturers, or the reviewers or editors for various audiophile magazines, has the time - maybe half an hour - to win a $1,000,000, which they all confidently claim they could win. If only they had the time.
Audiophiles are idiots.
I can hear it too (always could), and I'm in my 30s. I can even hear the capacitors in some more high-tech pieces of equipment (like some cheap laptops or portable media players). This was especially "fun" when I had to return a laptop because I couldn't use it for more than 5 minutes without getting a headache, and couldn't demonstrate the problem...
Anyway... During college, I knew at least 2 other people who could hear high-pitched noise from electronic devices at those frequencies, so it's probably not that rare.
I think that paradoxically, the fact that vinyl isn't convenient actually attracts some audiophiles. Ie, with a CD you just toss it in the player and slouch on the couch. With vinyl you have to take care of it, carefully put it on the player, keep the equipment clean, etc. Vinyl requires a ritual. And the ritual helps enforce the audiophile's belief that he or she is superior to the CD slob.
Even if vinyl does make a comeback, I don't think it will disrupt either CDs or other digital media services. I think it will be the select group of vinyl maniacs, like myself.. I stopped buying cds a LONG time ago and got back into vinyl because the sounds are so much softer. However paying $30 per vinyl (or there about) really sucks. But Hopefully things make a comeback and I can get my media on my prefered format cheaper. Thats what I think..
Comment removed based on user account deletion
FLACs ripped directly from the DAC tapes, stolen at night from the studios. Vinyl is crap quality.
I've finally managed to get my Debian testing system (AMD64) to produce sound (the very first ALSA HOWTO you hit when using Google is from 1999 - sigh).
It's so great to listen to all the Toccata's and Fuga's of Bach that I already owned on vinyl, but now downloaded (unfortunately as MP3's, not OGG/Vorbis' format).
I can't keep buying new parts (belts, needles) for my aging turntable into eternity (the thing is 32 years old by now).
Thank God for a format that can be played until doomsday comes !
Please stop quoting Wikipedia.
Please stop arguing about theorems you read up on for 3 whole minutes.
Please use a little thing called common sense.
Analog copies of analog signals are more detailed than digital copies of analog signals, yes.
DETAILED != ACCURATE.
I weigh 150 pounds. - ACCURATE.
I weigh 560.243272342374 pounds - DETAILED.
You can draw me a digital circle in photoshop at 320 by 240, and I can draw you an analog circle on paper.
Which is going to be more accurate?
Which can be read without error?
Which can be reproduced perfectly?
And guess what: The universe itself is digital (quantum), not analog.
Technically, "analog" signals are inferior mathematical approximations of the true digital signals.
Technically, all of calculus is an approximation.
But hey, lets all buy some expensive cables, a turntable, and repurchase all of our songs, AGAIN.
as soon as I saw the line "Although vinyl purists are ripe for parody" all I could envision was the donut mr show sketch, then I see the wired article links directly to that
further cements the fact that any mr show parody of something becomes THE definitive parody
I'm very surprised to hear compression brought out as an advantage for vinyl. In practice, compression is an ever-present concern in playing records -- in order for the needle to get enough contact, it has to be compressed using the weight of the record player arm. This physical compression of the stylus translates into (directly proportional) compression of the audio signal since the travel of the needle is reduced. Any warping or scratch on record and more compression is needed so it doesn't skip.
Clueless Idiots. Didn't we just have a thread debunking most of these claims?
Fiat Homos et Pereat Theos
There's a lot of subtleties involved in going from Nyquist's theorem to actual practice. Some are related to problems of numerical analysis and others relate to how close you want the upper frequency cut-off to approach the Nyquist limit. The numerical analysis aspect is that the digital (discrete) representation is never exact, having said that, it is close enough most of the time (e.g. bass in mid-range). Getting usable frequency response to be close to the Nyquist limit requires use of 'brick-wall' filters which do bad things to time domain response - probably the worst case being an instrument like the triangle.Some of this is covered on the design and implementation of direct digital synthesizers.
Compression is the removal of dynamic range, and is actually REQUIRED for vinyl to get the low volume sounds out of the vinyl surface noise to make them audible.
BS. What's required is pre-emphasis (e.g. the 'RIAA curve' created ca 1950, back when the RIAA was doing something useful). To get a decent amount of recording time on vinyl, you don't want a consistently high recording level (requires larger spacing between grooves and may burn out the cutting head) - which argues against using compression.While a properly made CD will typically sound better than a vinyl recording, the article was correct in stating that CD's lend themselves more to overcompressing than vinyl and that has to do with the process of cutting the record (see points about groove spacing and burning out the cutting head).
GP posters joke going right past you.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Think at the advantages of vynil: no DRM, no root kits, no embedded (digital) viruses... Analog does have lots of advantages.
Back when DAT came around, my boss told me it was the wave of the future. I told him that I believed (and still do) that one day you will be able to take a simple solid state memory device (think Nintendo cartridge type thing, me says) and plug it in, and listen to music that way. He laughed at me, said I didn't know what I was talking about, and went on to probably be the only person on the planet to have a total DAT set-up. I think he had a Sony Beta machine, too, come to think of it.... I tried to warn him off of that, too. (for the record, I also predicted digital animation using a human's movement for reference way back in 74)
Karma: Bad is the liberal way of saying this guy won't drink the kool aid here on slash dot. I wear my Karma with pride
The final medium means nothing if any of the recording, editing, mixing and/or final mastering are done in the digital domain. Dynamic range compression is typically applied during several stages during the production process. First - on the way into the recorder (whether it is analog tape or a DAW), then during mixing on individual tracks and across the final 2-buss master (master buss compression). Then it's usually compressed and/or limited again by the mastering engineer as they create the final 2-track master.
So, how does vinyl prevent any of this?? It doesn't!
The only change will be that once the final master is made - it will need to be limited an additional time to control the cutting head to be sure it doesn't break through the groove during the cutting of the master vinyl disc. This may bring the overall level down - but there is no change to the damage already done by having 45 minutes of music with a total of 1dBspl of dynamic range. The issue isn't just that the recordings are too loud - it's that they remove the natural dynamics to get the loudness, causing listening fatigue nearly instantly.
Sounds like someone needs to take themselves to an audio engineering class to figure out what exactly happens at all these stages and where the problem really is.
Yeap. Tubes are still out there but you have to find them and they are expensive, at least the last tyme I saw prices which was a few years ago.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Will the vinyl people get a book and learn, please. Really please!!!
.wav file. Should sound peachy.
(1) "analog" does not mean infinite data density, vinyl does not contain more data than do CDs. CDs contain more information about the sound. Remember, a vinyl record is designed to move a real mass (the needle) at the speed of all the sound waves. There is NO way (physically) the medium can have the dynamic range or data density of a CD.
(2) Vinyl albums are bad, the outer edges move a higher velocity than the inner edges, so the outer edges will sound "better" (assuming there's no dust or particulate matter to hit the needle.)
(3) Vinyl degrades with each use.
(4) CDs better represent the actual recording than do albums. Anyone who says albums "sound better" is using a very subjective measure that shows preference over fact. All that distortion and dynamic compression may sound "better" to someone, but, personally, I prefer my music clear and crisp.
(5) It is easier to add distortion and dynamic compression after the fact, and almost impossible to restore it. If you love the sound of LPs, convert a CD to a low sampling rate MP3, and add a distortion filter, and write it out to a
(6) I'm 45 years old, I had real to real, lps, 45s, 8track, cassette, CDs, and MP3s. Vinyl belongs in the 70s, it has just as much practical value in this century as the buggy whip.
it's total bullshit. those nuances they rave about? it's the scratchy hissing sound you get from vinyl. cd's aren't compressed, sure they have been ramping up the volume for a while now, but that's another issue.
of course nothing you can say will ever convince a snob, they will argue till blue in the face then run home and play with their turntops while crying.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
>the statement about Nyquist's theorem is poppycock.
>This a mathematical fact, not some weird subjective
>result open to interpretation. Saying that Nyquist's
>theorem is wrong is equivalent to stating that the
>value of pi is really 6.
Thank you, you beat me to it.
Brett
I bet it's a lot harder to come up with crazy new DRM or rootkits for vinyl!
Which I didn't see mention scanning over the posts.
Given the quality, etc.
CDs store in a much smaller space than vinyl and take up less space and is thus more convienent to store and browse.
In my experience, those are not compressed. I don't have many DVD-A discs, but those that I do have a very high dynamic range mix on them. What's more, they can be surround (which is extremely engrossing when done right) and are exceedingly high fidelity (24-bit 96kHz in the case of DVD-A). So if it really is about the best sound, that'd be what you are after right? Dynamic range and frequency far in excess of CD and vinyl, not squashed like a CD, and no wear like a record.
It's not about it being better, it is about elitism. It's harder to be elitist with digital audio since even the cheap stuff sounds damn good. You can get a $100 DVD player that plays DVD-A and, while it doesn't have the high quality converters of an expensive one, it still does a really good job and will give you good sound. However in the vinyl realm there's a very high barrier for entry if you want reasonable sound. As such it's much easier to be elitist about it.
You spend $50,000 on audio equipment, you'll think it sounds better regardless of if it does or not.
In some respects though the artists producing the stuff might be sick of CDs. No body can deny they have really come out second best in the digital revolution of music distribution. Some people say its only the record companies who miss out but I know a lot of good artists or groups of artists who have there own labels these days. I would be pretty disappointed if I worked for a year all day and night to produce something and then see it only being released on mp3.com how ever producing vinyl you really feel as if you have been involved in producing 'something'. If anything the popularity of live shows is definitely coming back more then anything, why because people some people like to be there when its happening to really enjoy the music and know that the artists they like so much are getting most of the money.
It's true that a digital recording can never contain the amount of data in a vinyl groove, but who is saying that all the data in a vinyl groove is more of an accurate representation of all the data extant in the original sound wave than a digitally sampled recording?
The kicker for me showing a total lack of understanding of the technology is the popularity of USB turntables. They can't keep them in stock. Quick, someone show me any analog signal in a USB specification.. Analog is better.. Analog is king, Here use this USB turntable to enjoy your analog sound. What are they smoking? Nothing out the USB port of a turntable is analog in any shape or form. Who has a better low noise analog to digital converter, a consumer grade turntable or a CD mastering house?
Analog is king only because the mastering house slaughtered the conversion in the loudness war. If you check the links, the youtube link provides the best summary with an example of the problem which can be heard and seen.
http://createdigitalmusic.com/2007/05/16/loudness-war-music-over-compression-demonstrated-on-youtube/
http://my.opera.com/swerfot/blog/2007/08/26/loudness-war
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=55892
CDs are on the way out because the music on them is crap. Finding a decent recording in the pile of crap is why many simply avoid the contaminated format. USB turntables, even though you don't get analog, you also don't get the over compression, which is why the ability to play better source material is so popular. Analog has nothing to do with this argument. Destruction of the sound on compact discs in mastering is the problem.
The truth shall set you free!
this comeback coupled with the surge in digital music sales could possibly close the door on CDs
Gee, I wonder which of the two is responsible for obsoleting CDs? The 7 new people who starting buying vinyl again, or everybody else?
(I know, I know: (-A Million, Redundant), but come on, this is pure, unadulterated stupid!)
sic transit gloria mundi
If you move back to the higher quality sound of vinyl you lose the main reason that CDs became so popular - convenience and portability.
Personally i do see a comeback of vinyl do to its higher quality, and a even bigger rise of MP3 for portablity ( and its 'close enough' quality ). But the balance will be tipped far to the MP3 side of the house, and will make the biggest impact on the demise of the CD. Which is sort of a shame, as its always nice to have a pressed copy that wont degrade anytime soon, and its always niceer to take something home for your 15 bucks, instead of some abstract bits that you have to keep track of on your own.
But, if it means more vinyl, ill go for it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
First up, perhaps I'm a bit weird. Massively into vinyl - the majority of my music is on vinyl, and that's something of an achievement given that it is largely pop/rock with some more interesting stuff thrown in for good measure. Why do I buy vinyl? For the product: I would far rather have something cool, beautiful big cover art, maybe a nice booklet to go with it, something...tangible...than just some horrible plastic CD. Picture discs, gatefolds, boxes, so many different and rather wonderful things...
:|
I also have a large MP3 collection. Most if not all of the music I have on vinyl I also have in my iTunes library. Some of that has been acquired via P2P, but I don't feel guilty as I've already paid for the record once. They like to talk about licensing content - well, by buying it on vinyl, I've licensed it.
But what would be really cool is if you could get a free FLAC or MP3 or something download with the vinyl. That way, you buy the vinyl - the special thing that you keep, or put on your wall, or whatever - and you put the MP3 on your iPod. Convenience and a beautiful product.
Vinyl has made a considerable comeback in Britain in recent years (I know nothing about elsewhere), thanks in part to the increased prominence of hip-hop and dance but also, I think, because of its perceived value as a product. 7" singles, which owe nothing to the aforementioned genres (which rely more on the 12" single) and which had almost completely died by the mid 1990s, are now back with a vengeance. Most indie/alternative records now come on CD and at least one 7" single. Sometimes two. At 99p, they are cheaper than CD singles as well! Couple a free MP3 (or, if you must, FairPlay DRMed AAC file) with that and I'd be very happy indeed. Given that everyone who buys these kind of records has an iPod these days, I can't be the only one.
iqu
I buy records. They certainly don't sound better than CDs. But I still quite like them. Is that ok?
Nyquist works out ok as far as the frequency content, the problem is in the jitter (the inequal time spans between samples). Nyquist works out pretty good with a high bit-depth (which is for number of amplitude divisions, nothing to do with frequency), as long as the jitter is as low as possible, however, most home playback equipment has crap jitter specs and none of the average consumers really cares that much to get external ADCs and master clocks and such.
Now, the higher sample rates are available really only for a few things, and the main one is to push the aliasing (foldback frequencies) higher than human ears can perceive. Foldback frequencies exist when a sound that we normally can't hear because it is too high a pitch, "folds back" into the normal hearing range because of how digital sampling currently works. For example (i'm using simple math here for brevity), with a sampling rate of 40kHz, the Nyquist limit is 20kHz (limit of almost all humans hearing, CD is a little higher). Now if somehow (AC noise or something) a tone at 22kHz gets into the digital recording, then it will appear at 18kHz. The original 22kHz tone would be gone because on A/D and D/A there are aliasing filters that attempt to remove everything above 20kHz.
Now you can use a sampling rate above 44.1 (CD spec), and the same phenomenon occurs, but all the aliasing frequencies are so high you can't hear them. These higher sampling rates are only really needed in the recording studio, and not really even there if the jitter in the system is very low.
Also, the vinyl medium not having the loudness war problem (not as much anyway) is mostly because if you compress too much then the bass parts of the groove make it too wide and the needle jumps out of the groove, AKA coaster to use CD vernacular.
Maybe this is more about control?
If record companies go back to vinyl and abandon CDs (not likely), here's some reasons to think about:
1) Ease of "ripping" goes down down down. A CD can be copied point and click, with absolute digital exactness. A vinyl rip is quite a bit trickier and you will have to use something like Audacity to clean it up and break it into tracks.
2) They sell mp3s and other downsampled "digital" formats. Without a CD to rip lossless from, consumers will be "forced" to buy whatever they give you. If you don't like it, see #1 and good luck.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
welcome our new analog over CRACK new analog over CRACK new analog over CRACK new analog over CRACK new analog over CRACK...
^[:wq!
Screw vinyl... Screw CD too!
It's not the medium that's at fault here, it's the hot-shot producer who's too busy getting his dick sucked to bother turning down the gain to reasonable levels.
Well-produced CDs can sound quite excellent, they're just non-existent in the pop genre. Pick up a decent jazz album and you'll find it sounds completely different, with far more detail and subtlety than the latest Stones release.
Compression is good for certain things, like electronic music, drums and distorted guitars, and to smooth out a crappy vocalist. Putting one of those "magic compressor" stages on the entire mix is something that should not be done outside of a house club.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
There are a lot of people out there. Some downloaders will only go for FLAC or other lossless codecs, while others are happy with whatever they can copy to their iPod, be it 96kbps MP3s they find on MySpace or 256kbps AAC from the iTunes store.
Then there are people who "use" their vinyl - crate diggers and DJs of all sorts. Some learned to mix and scratch on turntables, others think the only samples worth having are from old records that won't be re-released any time soon. Yes, there are iPod and CD DJ decks, but they are all imitating turntables. Queuing to an exact moment in a song is a bit trickier with digital files (though I guess you could cheat and have a push-button sample catalog). Stanton's FinalScratch or other systems that integrate laptops with turntables merge things, and also allow for the inclusion of vinyl.
Vinyl is not dead, you're just talking to the wrong people.
Transistor amps need to filter out all the harmonics the transistors 'heterodyned' into the signal, Tube amps are just bang on linear over most of their range. They are also typically much simpler in design.
Let's not even get into the noise associated with cheap IC amps.
The audiophiles are right, tube amps sound much better. There is a reason why most quality recording over air is done with tube microphones.
Sorry about contributing to useless debate. (Tube vs. Transistor, no opinions will be changed.)
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The notion that content on vinyl can't be just as processed as anything going onto CD is just silly.
Any processing used for CD mastering could be applied before cutting a master disc for vinyl.
In reality, vinyl is more likely to need some processing. There's a narrower dynamic range available, so a signal may need to be compressed to both be kept above the background noise level and kept below the maximum modulation level. Whether it be vinyl, CDs, AM radio, FM radio or net streaming, excessive use of processing is a sure-fire way to kill the dynamics of a recording.
Too many things sound like a wall of noise. Anyone who ever tried to use a cassette deck to record off the radio probably noticed that the VU indicators would practically sit still at one level. Ideally audio processing should be used as sparingly as possible. The optimum type of processing is different for each medium, as the noise and overload characteristics are often frequency dependent and have different profiles. The type of music makes a difference too. If you're simply trying get get a sort of sound effect, things are much different than when trying to recreate a live non-amplified experience. It's like with TV. If you watch cartoons, bright and noise free is good enough - subtle errors in color shading or grey values just don't matter then.
Loudness wars really started with radio. AM radio needed audio processing to mask all sorts of noise (atmospheric noise, other stations, man made interference etc). And there was a time when many people listened to tiny transistor radios or in a noisy car. Keeping the signal level above the noise helped AM radio almost as much as using more power might have. And programmers (program directors, not coders) did get into loudness wars wanting to sound louder than the competition. Many an engineer was pressured into using far more aggressive processing than they'd ever want to listen to personally. In the era of analog-knob tuned radios, programmers figured people were more apt to stop and listen to the station that sounder stronger.
While a wideband AM receiver could actually sound very high fidelity, auto radio manufacturers mostly moved to making the filters narrower bandwidth to reduce interference from other stations and ignition noise. Many radio stations had processing equipment adjusted for best results on those narrowband car radios and small portables. Processing evolved over time, splitting the audio into separate frequency bands and processing them separately, then again and recombining, became common. Generally processing wasn't adjusted for best fidelity, but to give the most loudness by maintaining distortion at the maximum level folks thought you could stomach. Of course the people making these choices didn't like listening to their own product. Would you eat the food of a cook that didn't want to eat his own cooking? Welcome to radio in America. (There are exceptions, but not many)
Hit recordings tended to get processed to sound better on the radio, and sound "like a hit" to a music director that might sample only a bit of a recording before dismissing most for airplay.
With the much wider dynamic range between the noise floor and overload (all 1's), CDs could have easily been used for recordings done with no compression or limiting. It's a sad story how most CDs have ended up sounding so bad from so much processing.
There certainly is no need to go back to vinyl for less processed recordings, it's the behavior of people, not the hardware, that's the problem. Good recordings on vinyl played back with decent equipment can sound very good. But it's a technology that just isn't practical for most people.
It's ironic how many so-so quality MP3s many of us have ended up being satisfied with. Digital compression brought us so many new ways to degrade a recording.
The only difference with analogue is that the limit is gradual, with digital the limit is harsh. With a record, you are going to get a SNR of somewhere around perhaps 70dB if everything is right (quality equipment, new recording, no dust, etc). That means that noise will start 70dB below the loudest signal. However you'll find that the dynamic range is more than that. What happens is that you can hear things below the noise floor. Just because the noise is there, doesn't mean that you can't hear anything below it.
With a CD it's different, the SNR is 96dB and that's also the dynamic range. That is just the limit to how accurate it stores the samples. Also, low level samples get progressively more distortion since there's less bits for them. A 1-bit sine wave would, in fact, be a square wave.
So this is why vinyl is better right? Well wrong, because that problem with digital, really isn't.
You can solve it two ways. One is simply to increase the bit size. Use 24-bit and now you've got 144dB of dynamic range. Given that even the best converters are hard pressed to do over 120dB, as are human ears, you needn't worry. However you don't even need to do that. You do the analogue thing in digital. You just dither the signal. You take a high resolution signal, and dither it down to 16-bit. This lowers the SNR, but raises the dynamic range. So with 6dB of dither you'd have an SNR of 90dB, still very good, but you could expand the dynamic range to perhaps 114dB and eliminate the quantization noise entirely.
What it really comes down to is we can sample more accurately with digital with analogue, and we can easily store it past our ability to sample.
As we know from the excellent Spinal Tap documentary - loudness on analogue signals can be pushed to 11 (possibly further). We sometimes forget that CDs being digital can not pass 1.
And often overlooked fact.
They're like car modders -- they don't really care how fast the car goes, they care how much bling they can pile on that they can PRETEND makes it go faster.
Woah... car modders of the serious sort do care about speed. Everything they do, the good ones, is about shedding weight and adding horsepower and torque and stopping power. superchargers can make a car go faster and brembo brakes can make them stop quickly more often (that is, you can slam on the brakes repeatedly and still be able to stop).
This is my sig.
A large number of DAC/ADCs these days are 1-bit. More frequency, less bits. What you do is use Pulse Wave Modulation (PWM) instead of Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) to represent your data. Then you just convert it later. Or, in the case of SACD, you don't, you do PWM directly. SACD is 2.8224Mhz, 1-bit.
Works like a charm. Many devices are also along these lines, but less intense. They'll be, say a 4-bit DAC but not oversampled as much. Non oversampling DACs, that is ones that actually run at the frequency they are playing and do pure PCM, are pretty rare. Most are Delta-sigma these days. Often they are multi-bit, but like 4 bits and oversampled, but 1-bit is not uncommon.
I am not fucking going to replace my entire music collection yet again. I bought vinyl albums first. Was smart enough to skip the eight-track mistake. Then I went to cassette. Now I have CDs. I've paid for my music three times. More if you count the vinyl albums I had to replace become of excessive wear (Dark Side of the Moon never gets old!).
This is an evil plot by the RIAA to extract more money from us. They finally realized that we aren't buying the shit they try to pass off as music these days, so they looked at the income history, realized the switch to CDs was their biggest financial windfall ever, and are trying to repeat it.
I'm not falling for it. It's time we go string up some of those bastards! Get a rope and meet me in front of their office.
Hey, even if I'm wrong about the reason is no reason to not lynch those bastards. Let's do it. It'll be a hoot.
-- Will program for bandwidth
I'd be glad to try out your prototype. I can think of lots of fun hacks.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Can't do that with CD.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
... for wax cylinders.
Have gnu, will travel.
All this discussion about the sound quality of vinyl versus CD is irrelevant. The real reason that vinyl has survived and will continue to survive is because you can _TOUCH_ IT! Do you really think that all those DJs are still spinning vinyl because of the "analog" richness of the sound quality? It's because vinyl has yet to be surpassed as the best performance medium of pre-recorded music. As long as new releases keep making it big in the clubs before the radio (which, thanks to the intricate relationship between DJs and record producers, there's no reason to think this will stop), every rap and dance tune will be pressed on vinyl. And if you're going to tell me that the overpriced jog wheels and buffers passed off as CD/MP3 "turntables" are any replacement, you obviously haven't played one. CDs are only used by two types of self-respecting DJs: small timers that can't afford the vinyl and have to download their tracks, and international DJs who don't want to cart around 50+ pounds of plastic on a trans-atlantic flight. And in a few years, even this crowd will be spinning off of thumb drives. The DJ movement is the only reason for the continued existence of vinyl period. Tweed-wearing audiophiles make up such a small portion of the market for vinyl as to be irrelevant, and the focus on these geeks in this discussion is sadly telling of the Slashdot readership. And to the guy who said that vinyl is inferior because it sounds lousy at high volumes, call the infoline, make the trip, take two pills and call me in the morning!
Who cares that there's more data if it is in frequency ranges that the human ear cannot percieve?
Once upon a tyme, years ago, I drove an audiotechnician crazy as he was testing my hearing. He tested me with one set of equipment but got upset and kept trying out other equipment until he asked someone else to test my hearing. When I asked why he said I was hearing frequencies I should not be able to hear. I replied back if I shouldn't be able to hear then why should he be using those frequencies, but he didn't answer.
For some reason my ears became sensitive after I had an ear infection. Now I suffer from Tinnitus, which is now manifesting as a ringing sound in my ears.
FalconShould there be a Law?
It's not the tubes themselves that are expensive (about $8 for a 12AT7, to use a type someone else mentioned), but the equipment in which they're installed that often sells for insane prices.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
.... than the entire 10-TeV Large Stupid Collider facility at CERN will generate during its operational lifetime.
:-P
That is all.
Last time I looked the Russians were the best source for Heirloom Electron Tubes
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Your CD player is doing analogue to digital conversion?
D/A converters and the expertise in making good mixed digital/analog circuitry has improved immensely over the last decade ... there is nothing about a good design for CD player design which makes it costly and thus market forces have commodotized quality.
That does assume blind testing of course, without blind testing the bling can be heard.
I'm an audio geek and you should hate me for it. Yes, I'm one of those losers who spends $300 on an interconnect.
Download, CD and vinyl formats each have their benefits and I would hate to lose any of them. I like online music stores because they're a great way to discover and buy music. I like the CD for quality and because it's the most ubiquitous format; in all likelihood a CD will play on your PC, Hi-Fi, your car and your friend's car. I like vinyl because it has a different sound that's rather good.
The recent Radiohead release was perfect for me - the box set includes the album on CD, vinyl and MP3, all in one price. You get the download instantly and the rest will follow in the post. If the Radiohead release is popular then you might find other releases, especially remastered/rereleased albums like Tubular Bells, will come out in premium download/CD/vinyl sets too.
and its a poor one. Vinyl is not making a comeback. Its a niche player. Thats it. Nothing more.
For the past four months I've been using my ION Turntable (http://www.thinkgeek.com/electronics/mp3/90a0/) to turn my 200+ 70s/80s Vinyl collection into mp3s/CDs.
The only album that I believe I can hear a difference with is Led Zeppelin IV. But that may be just me and the 15% hearing loss in my left ear.
The bad thing with Vinyl is that its getting harder to find decent needles (for my once top of the line Sony Turntable). You also can't walk into Radio Shack anymore and get record cleaner. I'll still keep the records around for pure nostalgia/album art work. Everything new I purchase is all compact disk.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
I haven't found a music forum with activity even close to that of Hoffman's.
The discs he's mastered are great. His "Breath of Life" approach is, to pardon the pun, a breath of fresh air for those born after the age of vinyl. His painstaking approach results in very natural recordings. No fucking around with the tapes, just getting the best, "purest" source, and using it. A great example would be the DCC (Gold Disc) version of The Beach Boy's Pet Sounds. That'll set you back over $100 on eBay. Head-Fi's second podcast has a great interview with him.
I hope the resurgence of vinyl is a sign that ending, the loudness wars, are.
People will buy record players and vinyl records. For similar reasons - people have clockwork watches, faux antique furniture, retro clothes and space hoppers, fake fur rugs and fake fire fireplaces, its Nostalgia, a reluctance to change, popular culture and big business.
Care to prove that? "Idiots" is a good tag.
FAQs are evil.
"Another reason for vinyl's sonic superiority is that no matter how high a sampling rate is, it can never contain all of the data present in an analog groove, Nyquist's theorem to the contrary."
Written by someone who doesn't understand SNR or distortion. An "analog groove" has its own limitations in representing an audio signal which are far worse than CDs.
In similar news, the death knell of the video tape was the combination of home IMAX projectors and DVD players.
vinyl
a) no flipping of the disks 1/2 way through your music
You may think of it as benefit to not have to flip a record, but some like me looked and used flipping as an advantage. When I got up to flip to record I also did something else. Such as stopping the Ree-to-reel tape deck I was recording on. Stop the tape, back it up a little, flip the record and start playing the obverse side as well as restart the tape deck. Once a reel of tape was used up I had 8 hours of music to listen to without getting up and either flipping or putting another record on the turntable. Nor would I have had to switch one cd disk for another.
b) less care and feeding (no "de-dusting" and all that)
After recording it on my tape deck I could put my record away and not touch it again for months, unless I wanted to show someone the cover art.
c) portability (can't put a vinyl LP in your car, but can do that with a CD)
Even better, just use an mpg3 player, then you don't even need to carry CDs, what's more portable?
d) storage space. CDs are smaller than LPs.
What takes more space, a bunch of CDs or a large hdd?
When this new format came on the market there may have been grumblings about having to "re-buy" your music collection, but the above features may have made it worth-while for most folks to do that.
I didn't have to re buy my music on tapes when tapes came out, I simply recorded my vinyl while playing it the first tyme. When cassettes came out I could record onto black cassettes, and when CDs came out if I had wanted to I could have burned CDs of my music. No need to re buy music, just buy blank media. Maybe you haven't seen the new turntables but many have built in USB ports. You could simply plug the turntable into the computer and record the music on your hdd. Then you could make up your own playlist and burn it to CDs, or transfer to an mpg3 player.
Here's a thought... INNOVATE...
"Innovate" is a dirty word to the RIAA.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Unfortunately, that's unlikely to happen, because
- CDs are "good enough" and so heavily entrenched
- "golden ear" audiophiles who by their spending have heretofore had a lot to do with driving the "better than cd" formats will insist that no matter what that dude "Nyquist" says if you just go whole hog with your equipment ($6000 cables included) you really can hear the difference that 384 kHz sampling makes, and that 64 bits per sample is soo much better
- the industry has decided that letting engineering and quality considerations determine the format rather than DRM and marketing was a mistake
- distribution and playback as distinct albums is giving way to lossy singles and hard drive players
More's the pity.I can hear the difference.
So can I. There is a difference between vinyl and CD prints from the same recording. (Keep reading)
I happened to get both a CD and a vinyl recording of the exact same classical performance many years ago.
"Many years ago" could translate to "back when A/D converters really sucked." Audio engineers and producers have told me that the early Sony A/D converters - which were used in virtually every major studio at the time - were complete crap, with plainly audible artifacting, and encoding only 14 bits per sample. How true this is, I'm unable to verify; but I do know that I have CD's from the mid-1980's that were later remastered using late-1990's equipment (Miles Davis "Kind of Blue"), and the difference is just astounding. It's not subtle at all. So that's one thing to be aware of.
I still had my turntable and a top-of-the-line Denon CD player. The vinyl recording had more hiss to it than the CD. That was to be expected. However, the vinyl recording also gave me a better impression of actually being right in from the performers (a quartet). It just also happened to give me the impression of an army of small hissing bugs that had joined us.
Let's put aside the hissing, crackling, popping, wow and skipping issues for a moment. You said it was a classical piece that you were comparing. Most classical performances are nuanced and many are highly dynamic (ppp to fff). High-end analog studio tape recorders using Dolby A encoding can accurately reproduce ~120db of dynamic range. CD's can manage about 90db (96db theoretical). Normal LP-length vinyl recordings are about 42db. (Equivalent to 7-bit digital audio, FWIW). Since classical recordings often exceed the dynamic range of vinyl, they must be run through a dynamic limiter/compressor during mastering. All vinyl masters are compressed to comply with the RIAA equalization curve as well. Add to this the tendency for vinyl to emphasize mid-range tones slightly, and you have a very different audio experience than the same performance played back from a non-equalized, non-compressed digital master. Of course you can hear the difference. You're hearing "more of the music" because the soft tones (instrument subtleties) are emphasized by the narrower dynamic range. (Soft sounds get louder) You interpret that as a pleasing "presence" or "soundstage definition," when really it's just that you couldn't hear the subtleties in the CD (below your hearing threshold). Did I explain that well?
Now, back to hiss: The weird thing about hiss is that our brains like white noise. Background hiss may be interpreted by the brain as a pleasing artifact, equivalent to film grain in a photograph.
I do believe that digital can give a good enough quality to get the same impression as analog.
Here's an experiment that I've tried: Choose a great vinyl album, and record it with your best turntable/tonearm/stylus to a digital medium at "CD quality" (44.1khz, 16-bit). Now, do an A-B comparison by switching between the inputs while playing the recordings back at the same time, switching between inputs periodically. With your back turned, have an assistant ask you periodically which source you're listening to. Try it several times. I think you'll be surprised how similar they are, and how "vinyl like" the digital recording is under these circumstances.
But the CD format just isn't it. You'll need to completely and totally eliminate all aliasing to achieve it. In theory that can be done with the 44.1 kHz sample rate, but I believe it will be too expensive to actually achieve it.
When I was a young man, with my first CD deck, I could hear frequencies up to about 24kHz. Now that I'm older, I can't. There's not really any musical information above 15kHz anyway.
I propose 8 times the sampling rate and twice the number of bits as a new audio standard for the high end purist. It will require the space of an HD-DVD
Even one bit per sample is enough to range from too quiet to hear up to the threshold of pain. You just make everything either one or the other.
The question is at what point the range of available values is large enough that enough dynamic information is preserved to faithfully reproduce the different dynamic levels in the original. With good mastering and dithering 16bit can be enough that people can't tell the difference between it and significantly higher numbers of bits per sample. But a little bit extra might be worth it. 20 - 24 bits is plenty- sometimes people seem to think that's be 1.25 - 1.5 times as many possible levels but of course it's 16 - 256 times as many.
It's not the tubes themselves that are expensive ( about $8 for a 12AT7, to use a type someone else mentioned), but the equipment in which they're installed that often sells for insane prices.installed that often sells for insane prices.
Thanks for the link. Years ago I was nterested in building things and want to get back into it. One thing I want to do is build a shortwave radio and get my license. I'd like to use tubes to make it.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Last time I looked the Russians were the best source for Heirloom Electron Tubes
Years ago friends of mine and I used to joke that if we ever had a nuclear war while the US equipment would fail the Soviet Union's could keep working. While I was in the US Army many of the soldiers in my unit, in infantry, used to say that if we saw an AK 47 on the ground we'd pick it up and throw down the M16s we were issued. M16 are, or were, rather picky about sand and such getting into it, however an AK 47 could be buried in sand then picked up and it will still fire perfectly good.
FalconShould there be a Law?
You want vintage? I picked up one of these for my daughter: http://www.thisoldtoy.com/new-images/images-ok/900-999/FP995-EB81909379-B.JPG/ Better battery life than my mp3 player and fewer cracks and pops than any vinyl I've ever owned. Definitely more wow and flutter, if that's your thang.
...which is exactly why we need to scrap the physical media and distribute music in lossless digital formats such as FLAC or WAV or something like that. As internet connections get faster and become more commonplace, it won't be unreasonable to download an album in a lossless format at 96k/24-bit format, which will please people that like the convenience of digital audio, as well as the audiophiles that enjoy higher quality recordings. Even now, it is probably more cost effective to download an album in a lossless format than it is to get in the car and drive to the store to buy a CD that cost money to produce in a factory in China.
I for one welcome our new digitally distributed brainwave beat overlords!
I was glad when I left my LPs behind. Sure, for the first few years there were problems, but the format has been around long enough that people know all the tricks on making sound good. Cleaning LPs, removing static, the wear and tear on needles and the vinyl are all bad memories. I have no interest in scratching, so this is just a joke idea to me. CDs may go away, but vinyl is NOT a decent replacement.
Welcome to the world of $4000 oxygen-free cables, where people claim that Soviet manufactured vacuum tubes sound better than active electronics, refrigerator-size ribbon speakers sound better than carefully designed waist-high speakers with 12" woofers, and vinyl, yes, that stuff that goes snap crackle pop, shick pop, shick pop, shick pop, shick pop, shick pop, BRRRRRRRPPPPP, sounds better than CDs.
I knew a mutant dude who in his 20s could hear 20 kHz. So vinyl was a good thing for him, at least until he hit his 30s. But aside from the ability to make sounds only dogs and cats and mutant humans can hear, vinyl is shit. So are those goddamn Russian vacuum tubes.
Have the standards for morons slipped drastically while I wasn't paying attention? Or is it just that the ganja from the vinyl section is way, way better.
I think many times people confuse that extra noise in the background with live-ness and depth and warmth... so why not add noise adder to one of the mp3 player functionalities and viola, live sound! Wait... most CD players already have these... ah well. I guess we just need to turn on those equalizers(sp) then.
Of course in a quantum state world analog signals are an illusion. There are a large number but still finite set of states that can be theoretically extended to the frequency and amplitude of audio based on the medium it is passing through. And second, a digitization more than 2x the resolving power in frequency or amplitude of the human ear/brain system would render analog obsolete. I deal with this is the spatial color domain visually and past a certain point increased color depth and increased pixel density are moot. The big trick is to cover the range that can be perceived and so far that is the "hard problem" visually. We come close in several models but not close enough
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
I think it's funny (hilarious) how quick so many people are to hail digital as superior. Obviously it smacks of "I like what I know about already - and will fear and ridicule that which I have little experience with." It also seems many of the responses I've read have been mocking digital music's portability. I think that makes an excellent point! The obsession with techno-everything and instant gratification. God forbid you should turn all your electronics in the house off, turn down the lights - and listen to some music as an experience rather than background shlock.
Usually they don't so much modify as build or rebuild them.
... I have no idea how it works... but I have read the end game will have people getting 500, 600, 700 or more horsepower out of an engine...GM, I believe, to show off its Ecotech 2 liter, managed to somehow jack it up to 900hp for short lived and self destructive run.... and, then, of course, with all of that power comes the rest of the car. Stock transmissions and steering, etc, simply isn't designed to handle all of that extra power, so, that will all get swapped out. I think somewhere along the way the suspension has to go to... don't need your big fancy engine to wheel hop you into a broken rear axle now.
It really depends... see, the thing is, the performance of a car is objective, and audio quality is really subjective. I find myself nostalgic over vinyl now, but I remember when CD's first came out, and I thought they sounded great.
But, to get back to cars. I have a friend that's a car moder, and he calls it "the fever". Car mods start cheap and then gradually escalate into, well, as much money as you want to spend, someone will sell you something that will definitely improve the performance of your car.
Car modders usually go for a few quick tricks first that are cheap. Changing the muffler and the air filter / intake is a cheap way to pick up a measurable increase in horsepower, and that can be done for cheap. Next up on the plate is a supercharger or even a turbo charger. And I think you could probably chip some engines too to get more power by disabling environmental controls. Those things can be done for under $1000. Notice the jump in magnitude in money spent. Along the way, you'll want to swap out the stock car seats, because they weigh too much, and then get in some racing seats. Those weigh less and are said to be more comfortable. Less weight = more acceleration for car. With that extra Go, you probably want more reliable Stop, and then you'll probably think about Brembo or some other high end brakes... they don't necessarily make you stop "quicker", as, the tire patch dictates that, but, they do make able to stop more often as they are more resistant to fade. By now we've plopped about 10k into the car, if not more, and the only thing noticable from the street, really, is the brakes. Anyway, from there, you can think about good tires. And, thus, we've added another couple of grand into the mix.
From there, the fever becomes all out. You'll start tearing apart the engine, going for more power
Seriously, electronics modders have absolutely nothing on car modders. I used to tune my PC a bit - overclock, get the best ram, find the right chips, motherboards, etc, but that's chump change to a die hard car modder. Car modders are the real deal. Anyone that sits there working a PC or a piece of audio equipment and claiming to be "tuning" it, really, almost insults the word "tune".
Just go to your local track, and look at what people do to their cars. Its amazing.
This is my sig.
And Vinyl lovers are pretentious suckers. Listening to Vinyl is like looking at an ugly woman. If you squint your eyes so you don't see clearly, she looks better.
I buy vinyl. No, I don't have the delusion that it sounds better. Nor do I really care about how it was mastered differently for the different medium. I also buy lots of CDs and MP3s, and enjoy them. But there will always be a special place in my heart for records. Here's why I like them:
1.) I like having 12" x 12" artwork in my hands to explore while I listen to new music.
2.) I like the way it smells. No kidding. It's nostalgic, I guess. Yes, CD's also have a nice smell.
3.) A shelf full of records just looks cool. (No, style does count. It's not my fault you lack it.)
4.) I like manually changing the speed to some music and physically manipulating sounds. It's fun. Yep, I know you can do this with CDs and what not, but it's just not as fun.
P.S. I didn't even read the stupid article. Obviously vinyl won't bring about the end of CDs-- Digital content will. But I think vinyl will continue to sell-- there's a lot people out there who just like to buy it. They like it. There's a valid cultural (but not technical) impetus for buying vinyl. And if you can't understand that, then I'm sorry.
You can't take a record, stick it in your computer and rip it to mp3.
At least not without special hardware.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Really good vinyl is superior. The filter requirements for 44 KHz sampling
are painful.
The human ear response of 20 - 20 KHz is based on listening to sine waves.
Not many instruments produce those. Flutes do. Reed instruments do not.
Nyquist is correct, but Fourier applies too. If you have an instrument
producing square waves ( Oboe ), those waves will not be square without
many odd harmonics. Quickly 20 KHz becomes a limiting factor. Do the math.
Look at a scope, use a frequency analyzer.
Try listening to the sound of cymbals, snares, high hats on an acoustic
jazz record. CD's come up short. Even on non-top of the line equipment.
These sources really require bandwidth.
The big pain for vinyl is that most phono pre-amps are not good enough.
At least not in average consumer grade stuff. You need a good low noise
amp with a high max input.
They did use to make lots of 12" vinyl for 45 rpm. I remember Rolling
Stones dance mix records with one song per side. You could easily view
the groove modulation with the naked eye. Definitely needed a high input
overload level for those.
Marcus
This story is INSANE! Of course badly engineering master will always sound bad no matter what the medium. But a CD with decent master is FAR superior to vinyl. And especially after playing it the 500th time!
TROLL!
The other advantage of a CD is that the data on a CD is precise, an exact copy of the original
WRONG
It can't be. Research "quantization error". So says a guy who wrote a thesis on digital signal processing.
But then, we are talking about real music rather than loud obnoxious crap.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
No man. Currently a renaissance is underway courtesy of Chinese production. Adjusted for inflation quality tube gear has probably never been cheaper. Truth is some UL-approved (some isn't, don't use it wet) quality gear - Prima Luna for example - costs less on in today's dollars than the original MSRP of midline Seventies solid state gear. Certainly you can spend insane money but it's in no way necessary.
It won't mean anything until the Google Apple Vinylpod comes out. Hopefully with AJAX somewhere.
If we can read pits on a disc or recover data from HDD platters optically, why not optically read a record?
CD's *ARE* "digital". If you are measuring "Digital Music Sales" then sales of CD's count.
"Digital" is not equivalent to "Online"
I have a very modest project studio and it is 64 channels of 24-bit 192kHz uncompressed audio. The CD is 2 channels of 16-bit 44kHz uncompressed audio. What is needed is not vinyl but simply higher-quality consumer audio playback. The last step of a digital audio workflow is to create a CD-quality copy of the actual audio program, because that's all consumers can handle. What will greatly enhance consumer audio quality is simply to listen to the entire recording, with the extra depth that comes from more bits and the complete harmonic structure captured by 192kHz.
Also, it has to be noted that if you press vinyl today, your source will be a digital master. Probably a 24-bit 192kHz digital master. It's better just to get the digital master and customize the sound to taste with your playback system, e.g. tube amps or really good speakers. If you playback a lowly CD on a really high-end playback system it will blow your fucking mind. Most of the speakers and headphones in the world today suck ass.
So in short, get a better digital copy and better speakers if you want better sound.
http://www.elpj.com/ No Needle, No Wear
a groove made of matter isn't even continuously analog. I think there would be a minimum practical grain size of platter material which could cause a needle to deflect.
Even if you had one of these: http://www.elpj.com/main.html the maximum frequency would still be determined by the largest molecule or grain size and speed of rotation of the disk.
So, as the information in the platter is finite, you can always match or exceed it by digitally sampling at high enough rate.
i.e. you can't record a 10MHz signal on a vinyl platter and expect to play it back, but you can certainly record a 10MHz signal by digital sampling and reproduce it faithfully (e.g. using my 100MHz storage CRO).
http://www.elpj.com/ Boo ya!
Compact discs blow. People were not meant to hear music with such clarity. People need to hear snaps and pops and that shit. This, my friend, is the only modern piece of equipment I will touch. It's a mini-Victrola and it allow me to listen to the only decent music ever committed to viñyl.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Just because audio engineers are using compressors on their music, it does not mean vinyl is better. First off they're using a audio processing compression. This is not a "zip" like compression for those who may be wondering. It is a way to compress frequencies so that they sound louder. Its an artistic design decision. It is not a limitation of the CD.
The CD is superior to Vinyl in every way. If the CD dies, you can be sure that no form of DRM free music will ever exist again. Keep the CD standard alive and buy a few.
Let's consider the problems that LP's face:
1) The sheer physical contact between the record needle and disc means both with wear out over time.
2) You have to deal with the problem of rumble from the turntable platter itself, not an easy problem to solve unless you go direct drive or belt drive with a heavy platter.
3) The problem of off-center records which can cause a very audiable "wowing" quality to the sound.
4) The accuracy of the turning speed of the platter itself (wow and flutter), resolved by either going direct drive or belt drive with a heavy platter.
5) The really finicky adjustments of the tonearm and cartridge (geometry adjustments, setting tracking force and setting anti-skating force).
6) Keeping the disc clean.
7) The limits of circa 23 minutes of music per side on an LP.
8) The limits of dynamic range of around 60-65 dB due to limitations of the disk cutting head and tonearm cartridge without going to a sound-compromising compression technique such as dbx.
9) Having to put the entire turntable on a flat surface that is physically very stable.
Is it small wonder why CD's rapidly replaced LP's?
While it's true that a CD can never represent all of the details found on a vinyl record, most of the details it's not reproducing [b]are not part of the original music[/b] -- they're just errors introduced by shoddy media.
I think I'll stick with media that don't wear out from being used, thanks.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Vinyl making a comeback and ending CDs, eh? Now I've heard everything. Well, I have respect for those who claim to "hear a difference" between the two, but come on. First of all, is there anything that really means THAT much to such a person that they feel bad listening to it in CD form? I guess they HATE any digital music files then. And what about repeated play quality and shelf life? I'm no scientist, but I know for a fact that vinyl sounds progressively worse after years of repeated playing (unless true vinyl purists only play something once and then replace it? lol). And unless they was some breakthrough in the polymer industry, vinyl albums still easily scratch and warp. I wish CD's would be replaced with even smaller memory cards, being enough memory to hold say 240 minutes uncompressed. Now that would w00t!!
The quality is simply irrelevant what matters is the experience.
On a CD you pop in a disk into a drive, wait a bit and then have a bit-to-bit exact copy of it on your harddrive or flash. You cannot do much wrong with this process and your data well also always sound precisely the same, nomatter what you do. (unless of course you are using sub-standard D/A converters)
With vinyl on the other hand you actually have an experience. You take that disk, carefully put it into the tray or turntable of your record player and carefully play it. It actually matters if you clean your record before putting it into the player as the laser will read every particle of dust as a click.
You cannot easily copy records (although devices to cut your own records are moderately cheap) and you definitely cannot replace the experience with CDs or MP3s or whatever.
Sure, from the technical standpoint microgroove records are a thing of the past, but you have to see the whole user experience. People like them because something turns.
BTW, the problem of wear has been solved a decade ago:
http://www.elpj.com/purchase/index.html
If you spent $3500 on an amplifier for driving 4 or fewer speakers, then you spent $2500 too much. I don't care what audiophiles say, every recording engineer who made the songs you listened to through it will tell you the same. A, let's say, Mackie m1400 is $300, retail. It can drive 1400 watts with 0.025% THD from 20-20000Hz. That's pretty fucking impressive...
I'm not saying you should have bought a rackmount power amplifier with cooling fans, but your money goes a long way for quality if you stay away from the money pit that is prosumer and boutique audio.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
The correct way to mix audio in fixed point is as follows:
1) Convert your gain or envelope from a floating point number to a fraction (G/256 or G/65536)
2) Multiply the track by the instantaneous gain/attenuation factor G (but don't divide yet).
3) Add masking noise
4) Sum across all mixed tracks
5) Divide by (N*256 or N*65536) where N is the number of mixed tracks
You can do this accurately with all 32-bit quantities if your tracks are 16-bit. If you need 24 or 32-bit fidelity, then you're already considering floats which are probably 64-bit, and 64-bit integer math works just as well.
OTH, a totally 32-bit FP has other benefits, but it's more interesting if it can come straight from the sampling equipment that way.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
But you're supposed to run the signal through a low-pass filter before you sample. That's how you avoid aliasing artifacts and slew-rate issues.
Oh wait, you do the EXACT same filtering when you go to vinyl! (If the mastering engineer doesn't do this, which I'm sure he will, the lathe at the plant does this at a higher cutoff to protect the equipment)
If these supposedly missed frequencies aren't even in the passband, well...
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Stopband is up near 18kHz. You don't push it up to 20 because the rolloff is too sharp and messes audibly with the phase, and you really can't hear those frequencies anyway.
So when you do this, and then sample with an ADC, then the audio doesn't contain "missing" frequencies or any of the aliased energy in the output. You removed them in the first place.
Now if somehow there was a magically clean signal path, all the way from microphone, through the studio, and analog reproductive medium, into your playback hardware, and out to your monitors, where the 20-40kHz band was completely unmolested, I would have to say this to you:
Only your dog would notice. You'd hear the EXACT same thing that you would if you listened to the filtered audio that was sampled digitally and reproduced. And you and I both know you'd fail the double blind test.
Besides... it's pointless anyway, when you consider mic preamps, effect boxes, and mixing desks all potentially contain their own lowpass filters for various performance and quality reasons.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
You have a CD and a record exhibiting *exactly the same issue* and you come out in favour of the vinyl?
And that's beside the fact that if your CD has scratches, it wasn't well treated by definition. There's no reason anything ever has to touch the surface of a CD, and you can back CDs up.
AFAIK, most songs/albums these days are recorded, edited, mastered and post-processed digitally. Therefore, given a suitably big digital medium there couldn't be "more information" on an analog medium like vinyl than on the digital one.
Am I right or am I right?
1. Downsample and distort modern music.
2. Burn the post-processed result to a million CD's.
3. Brand them as "Modern Vinyl".
4. Profit!
there's either an atom there to etch away for the groove, or there ain't.
This space available.
You have a very strange definition of "many." I'm a hardcore record collector and I've NEVER seen a laser turntable. I don't even know anyone who could afford one--they cost something in the region of ten grand a pop, whereas a top of the line turntable can be had for less than a grand, and a good turntable can be had for a couple hundred bucks.
Vinyl playback adds all sorts of qualities to the sound. It is warmer, and I prefer it, but it is in no way superior because it has better "accuracy." It is a subjective preference, not a scientific syllogism.
I'm sure somebody already mentioned this, but I'm just going to add to the pile, because you need to be told this more than once.
--
Toro
Apparently vinyl are not great for sound, but for rolling a joint.
Mind you, this was modded insightful instead of funny, so maybe there is some truth behind : junkies prefers vinyl to CD.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Welcome to the world of $4000 oxygen-free cables, where people claim that Soviet manufactured vacuum tubes sound better than active electronics, refrigerator-size ribbon speakers sound better than carefully designed waist-high speakers with 12" woofers, and vinyl, yes, that stuff that goes snap crackle pop, shick pop, shick pop, shick pop, shick pop, shick pop, BRRRRRRRPPPPP, sounds better than CDs.
Some people never learn... in your attempt to pick on audiophiles (which to to extent some of them deserve it) you haver made some horribly incorrect assumptions. You have assumed that simply because an audiophile has an interest in something that it must be the incorrect way of doing things. And you have shown in your comments that you know VERY little about electronics...
"Welcome to the world of $4000 oxygen-free cables" is a perfectly good rip on the average audiophile who knows nothing about eletronics / science and buys over priced crap for all the wrong reasons. How ever, you then go on to say:
where people claim that Soviet manufactured vacuum tubes sound better than active electronics
I can only assume by "active electronics" you meant solid state? I cannot think of what else you could have meant here, so I will work under the assumption that you think vaccum tubes are not as good as transistors for audio. Well, you are WRONG. Any one who has a solid education in eletronics knows that the transistor was originaly developed as an on/off switching device for use in digital eletronics / computers. After they became available it was found that, through some trickery, they could be used for audio. How ever transistors are not as good at handling analog audio signals as tubes are. Transistors tend to have very erratic response curves and are not very linear across their gain range. And vaccum tubes handle signal clipping much better, as they have a natural compression effect once you go into clipping. When you send a transistor into clipping all hell breaks loose, they become extremely erratic. Also most audio source devices are high impedence, such as studio mics and guitar pickups. Vaccum tubes in a preamp are well matched for high impedance, where as transistors are not. Even in todays high end mostly digital studio you will still find most audio engineers using out-board tube mic pre-amps for at least the vocals if not ALL mics in the sutido! Sure it goes into a digital board after that, but the important thing to stress is the continued use of vaccum tubes as the FIRST signal handling device in most studios.
refrigerator-size ribbon speakers sound better than carefully designed waist-high speakers with 12" woofers
Are you talking about Magnaplanars, or similar speakers? Yes, they are FAR superior in sound quality. Obviously you know very little about the physics of audio and the logic behind speaker design. Perhaps you are confusing output level for sound quality? yes, your typical 2-way or 3-way speaker with 12" woofers is going to be more energy efficient than a planar speaker system, so you will get more sound / volume from them. Typically as you increase the sound quality of speakers you decrease their energy efficiency. For example ported speakers are more efficient than sealed cabinets, but sealed cabinets have MUCH better sound quality if you have the power to properly drive them. Magnaplanars require that you own very well designed high power amps. Most of todays consumer audio amps would not be able to handle such a speaker, as most have shitty switching power supplies and poorly designed output stages that just cannot muster the sustained power required at an acceptable quality level. How ever, planar speakers are technicaly better for a number of reasons. I don't have time to get into the very long and drawn out technical discussion about proper speaker design, the known problems with conical shaped drivers, time of arrival issues, directional beaming problems with both horn and dome stlye tweeters, etc. All I can say is that if you bother to ac
To copy a CD requires a CD writer which costs near to nothing. To replicate vinil costs (AFAIK) a heck of a lot more. The problem with that is that it would force the RIAA to abandon fighting little people and address the 'big' pirates again for whom such kit is a worthwhile investment (in other words, it's like hard work).
Insert
Like so much other science & technology journalism, the article is written for science fans, not science practitioners.
Anyone who follows the pronouncements of the self-proclaimed "golden eared audiophiles" should know that the Hi-Fi industry only appeals to science & technology as a smokescreen for their never ending quackery of What Will Make Your System Well Again. Did I mention vinyl is making a comeback? If they can get the patient to swallow that expensive medicine, they can go back to flogging all kind of analog "cures". They dislike digital for marketing reasons - it has a mathematical basis, and they have little leverage in that context.
I'm not against people spending money on their hobbies, but please get the science right or just stay away from it.
Before I gave up holding out for CD prices to get lower, I collected vinyl for 20 years. I also spent 6 years working as a radio DJ playing vinyl records -- thousands of them -- owned by radio stations.
...
IF your turntable is properly adjusted and IF it doesn't contribute much wow, flutter or rumble and IF the audio chain is properly equalized and noise-free and IF the audio amplifier is decent quality and IF the vinyl is new and IF it's kept reasonably (never completely) free of dust and scratches and pizza crumbs and hand grease and IF the recording has no manufacturing defects
THEN the occasional record will, for the first few plays, sound as good or better than a CD. Maybe.
But DESPITE THE KNOWN REAL-WORLD PERFORMANCE of vinyl, some people will continue to pay more for less, because digital pollutes their bodily fluids. They'll learn the hard way about those little accidental scratches that you'll listen to for the life of the record that -- like tube hiss and bias -- the purists call "ambience", "warmth", etc.
Not to mention the day that your best friend trips over the dog and snaps the needle outta the cartridge and, once again, you learn that vinyl is best for *very finicky and cautious* people with *lots of money*.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
Actually I started off in school as a EE and worked on signal processing software for several years before and after getting a CS degree. (Also, before that, I learned to spell.)
I personally can't tell the difference between music played on vinyl or CD. Except if I stop sharply at traffic lights or drive faster than 2 mph. Oh - or go over a bump. Or round a bend.
If the record companies were really interested in providing us with a better audio quality, then audio DVD's would be the next logical step instead of this arcane business plan.
An audio DVD could give the user a very high quality digital recording because of the space available on the DVD format. In truth however, the record companies are not interested in providing us with a product of this quality, but are looking for another means to sell their catalogs, again.
Participatory Governance : The only feasible option for a real democracy, where everyone really does have a say.
> Another reason for vinyl's sonic superiority is that no
> matter how high a sampling rate is, it can never contain
> all of the data present in an analog groove,
1/ Digital Audio has 100% complete separation between all audio tracks.
2/ mechanically representing a two channel stereo audio signal using the 2 walls of 1 spiraling groove produces output with approx 20% cross-talk.
3/ A pre-echo is definitely audible when a relatively quiet signal is followed closely by a relatively loud signal.
4/ Signals on a vinyl medium are only capable of a maximum signal/noise ratio of approx 70dB, when not factoring in pre-echo.
5/ The mere act of dragging a sharp point through a flexible vinyl grove introduces its own distortions. The vinyl both deforms as the point is dragged through it, and also has the more quickly modulated parts of the grove worn off, resulting in a progressive diminution of frequency response with each playback.
Of that guy on tv in a documentary about shoes.
He collected sneakers (puma, adidas) and was raving about having extremely rare pumas of which only a couple are made. They cost him over a 1000$ and of course he didn't wear them.
According to him, sneakers were more important than life itself, sneakers WERE life.
And I was just thinking: 'Dude, you've spent all your life saving on 600 pairs of shoes, and you think having sneakers makes you more special?'
Everyone has a pet project or hobby they like. My hobbies are restoring antique straight razors and C++ template programming.
I don't think you are an unwashed plebe just because you (possibly) shave with a gillette (or worse, an electric shaver) instead of a straight razor, or don't apreciate the finer points of partial template specialization.
So why do you consider me one just because I don't fancy spending 1000s of dollars for a stereo and then sit down in a chair, doing nothing but listening to music or maybe even test tracks.
How the heck am I supposed to fit a 12-inch LP player in the dashboard of my car?!?
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
It's "vinyl" so all those idiots who spell it vynil, vynyl and every other variation, stop it! Also, learn to use the word vinyls correctly. In most cases, the word you want is vinyl.
Wrong: I have lots of vinyls in my music collection. I like listening to vinyls
Right: I have lots of vinyl in my music collection. I like listening to vinyl.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Instead, this has everything to do with hipness. Coolness. You know, the stuff that sells! Ask any chuck-wearing, record-store working hipster which is cooler: a huge CD collection, or a huge record collection? While people still buy CDs now, their appeal always seemed to be their portability and ease of use. Now that other techologies are surpassing CDs in that respect, I wouldn't be surprised if records out-lasted them. Records are a fetish item- a physical artifact that hipsters need to reaffirm their coolness with themselves and those around them. And don't get me wrong; there's no problem with that. In fact, I think that finding a rare record in the hipster circle would be akin to getting your Dell Axim to run Linux in (*ahem*) some other circles. Of course, there are exceptions- like the CD-R culture that's currently emerging; it's much harder for an indie band to get vinyl pressed than it used to be, but they still want to give the fans an artifact that they can touch and show off to their friends.
but until they invent a vinyl turntable & storage unit that fits in my car, I'll stay in the 21st century. kthxsbai.
Sorry, you're wrong. Excessive tracking weight does not compress the music in the sense of this article. It leads to tracking distortion and an altered frequency response.
=S
Now, what about amplitude? If you only have two samples going up, how do you know you've not sampled asymetrically and that the amplitude you think you have is wrong?
So what happens to overtones that make the difference between second octave C on a piccolo sound different from that on a flute (or, even, violin)? Lost it, haven't you. The ammount of "mix in" of these higher tones is lost and that is much of the difference between the instruments.
Nyquist is also the minimally reproduceable limit. It doesn't mean that the errors don't fuzz the limits.
And you stil (even though the flaming summary said it) that CD's can take a lot more audio compression, reducing the fidelity *on purpose* and has therefore nothing to do with what the CD *could* play but with what they put on there. I mean, you can record a Speccy 8KHz bleep on a CD and that won't get you 16-bit 44KHz sound out of it.
You just have a bee in your bonnet about being told stuff you don't believe.
2. When it comes to hi-fi and the listening experience, the more you spend on hi-fi, the less the improvement in audio quality you get - plus it rapidly gets to a stage where there is no point paying £1000 for an amplifier and £2000 for a pair of speakers unless you also spend £20,000 on acoustic damping on your floors, walls and ceilings.
3. Vinyl needs to be both handled & stored in far more rigid conditions than a CD ever has to - that makes it impractical for most people.
4. As you get older, your hearing range starts to decrease anyway - so by the time you're earning enough money to buy expensive hi-fi, your ears probably aren't good enough any more to hear the best from it.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
The phono stage of vinyl has an even harmonic symmetry while digital amps have odd harmonic symmetry. Odd harmonics take more harmonics to produce the same comfortable sound that even harmonics do, so require more bandwidth to make this up.
It may be more *accurate* but it's a lot harder to stop CD's sounding fatiguing because of the odd harmonics than vinyl. And since all this music is for our enjoyment, that's the prime motive.
Of course the RIAA want's vinyl to come back. Compared to CDs, 1) can't burn a copy for a friend, 2) pain in the butt to rip into mp3s 3) harder to steal and 4) costs more to ship!
www.itjerk.com
Here's another reason vinyl may sound -- or seem to sound -- better than CDs. Many albums have been remastered and re-remastered so many times that they're not the same album that was on vinyl. The original tracks for the different instruments have been remixed in the stereo, and the sound envelope of the dynamic range has been changed to be more modern. So the vinyl album is the old mix, and the CD is a new interpretation of the album. The CD is NOT the original album at all, but the vinyl is. Sometimes the new remasters are good: I thought that the original mix and the first remaster of Yes' Relayer sounded like crap, and the second remaster was the first listenable version of that album ever made. But they'll pry my original-remaster Genesis CDs out of my cold, dead hands before I buy/listen to the new ones because the Genesis remasters preserve the delicate dynamic range of the originals.
i love to note how passionately people discuss audio-gear, audio format-wars, audio compression, audio sampling, and don't even blink while purchasing indulgently expensive audio gear. however, no one seems to care about their own sense of hearing, about protecting their ears, about the priceless treasure of hearing and listening that needs care and protection more than ear-splitting decibels. niyam bhushan
Just curious about something here. Why am i able to tell the difference between 22kHz and 44.1kHz if i can't hear above 22kHz?
/.
Disclaimer: i'm NOT trying to be sarcastic, i'm really curious
Disclaimer disclaimer: i need the disclaimer because this is
While it is true that you can expect every reasonable CD player to pick up the same digital stream, CD players can and do in fact sound quite different from one another. Few are "crap" these days (though in the early 90s, the cheaper ones were absolute rubbish!) but there is a difference. If you compare different players anyone can hear some difference, no audiophiles required.
The main reason for this are the D/A converters and some further colouring is added by the rest of the analog stage.
Another reason for vinyl's sonic superiority is that no matter how high a sampling rate is, it can never contain all of the data present in an analog groove, Nyquist's theorem to the contrary.
Apart for being hogwash to begin with, it also reveals ignorance about how modern vinyl is produced. For the last few decades, the machine that cuts the master uses a digital buffer in order to be able to adjust groove widths to signal strengths (enough slack all the way through would mean very short play times).
Plus practically all mastering is done digitally today anyway.
sudo ergo sum
See, it's posts like this that make audiophiles so much fun. Just mention the word "tubes" and they're off on a rant.
Depends on the CD you're listening to. In your vanilla modern CD, they record about 60 different tracks in the studio - every instrument is individually recorded, every singer is recorded individually. The drums are recorded with several mikes, and guitar rigs are recorded with a mic or more per amp so that the sound can be "tweaked" by scaling levels on the mixing board. When there's not something active on the track, they mute it - they have to do this because the background noise of 60 tracks summed together is a hell of a racket. The result, however, is that CD's are missing background noise. Ironic, since the Spector "wall of sound" method of mastering that everyone follows is supposed to include a bit of everything so your ear doesn't notice anything missing. But lots of CD's don't do this. One of my favorite CD's is the Stevie Ray Vaughan "Soul to Soul" CD. The track "Little Wing / Third Stone from the Sun" is recorded with all instruments playing at the same time and no noise gating. You can hear the 60Hz buzz from SRV's amps the whole way through the track. You can hear the band occasionally getting out of sync (drums being hit slightly too late, a couple wrong bass notes, etc) and you can hear other clatter throughout the track. And it's uncompressed - the quiet periods are quiet, the loud periods are loud, and the song goes all over the place between the two. If you're listening to the song in your car, you'll probably find yourself playing with your stereo's volume knob throughout the song - it's something to listen to in a chair on a home stereo. It's a great song, and a great recording of the song. And taking this to the extreme, if you like background noise you must listen to "Jimi by Himself" - which is just Jimi Hendrix singing and playing guitar in a hotel room. It's noisy, the quality's terrible, and at one point the phone starts ringing in the background when he's playing. Despite all that, it's a very good, listenable, enjoyable recording.
Don't take this the wrong way, but the main problem with the tubes vs. transistor debate is that "audiophiles" don't know the difference between "sounds better" and "accurate reproduction".
Anyone who plays electric guitar knows how different tubes add character to the sound produced. Indeed, this is *looked* for. Transistor amps sound "awful" precisely because they more accurately reproduce the sound created by a solid plank with strings and pickups.
I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
One of the issues with store brands or non-name brands is the supplier can be changed at any time and there wouldn't be an indication of that.
Do you have any tips for finding out these dual marketed products? Is it usually insider provided information?
Thanks.
I agree...this is just a very small but very vocal group of people that grew up with the "vinyl sound" and got used to the clicks, pops, hisses, and distortion. They got so used to it that they consider it part of the music, and when they hear the same sound cleanly on a CD without all that they feel that something is missing. This is nostalgia, pure and simple...it has nothing to do with audio quality. CD's sound better in every way than vinyl, and they don't wear out with playback. Sure you can scratch them, but you can also scratch vinyl (and it's much easier to break). This is why vinyl very rapidly disappeared once CD's became affordable...and these people think that the reverse is going to happen? Yeah right.
However, that does give me an idea for a new product. Take a regular CD player, and add a DSP. Use this DSP to process the signal and add the "vinyl sounds" to the audio stream in real time. With a powerful enough DSP (and DSP's are cheap nowadays), you could do all kinds of post processing, even adding in the hum and distortion that vinyl has. Heck, the DSP from a SB Live or Audigy would be more than sufficient to handle that task. Put the whole thing in an old/weathered looking wooden cabinet, complete with old style knobs instead of buttons, and market it as a "CD player that sounds like vinyl". Sell it for a ridiculous amount of money...it would at least sell as well as the $10000 laser record player.
One of the main problems with digital audio quality in practice (rather than in theory) is that when you bump the gain up high enough on a digital track, you run into digital clipping - where dynamic peaks (or in extreme cases, large proportions of the signal) are chopped off at a fixed point (the 0dB point) leading to highly corrupted waveforms that sound AWFUL. When you limit dynamic range in the analogue domain, the subjective effect is much less unappetising, and much less obvious.
Sadly, a great many CDs these days are mixed at levels high enough for digital clipping to have an audible detrimental effect. I suspect this may be the cause of many vinyl-lovers' subjective preference for vinyl, as you'll never hear any digital clipping (unless of course it was recorded/mixed digitally - which is likely to be the case for a lot of new vinyl pressings!)
Personally, I'm very hesitant to assume that our current typical audio measurement methodologies accurately and wholly explain all of the qualities humans subjectively attribute to sound quality. For one thing, it's extremely hard to scientifically measure a person's subjective appreciation for a music reproduction system. Music is incredibly complex, and extremely varied, and affects our brains in subtle ways that I can only imagine are extremely hard if not impossible to measure quantitatively. There's also the problem that it affects everyone differently.
It seems very likely to me that our typical measurement techniques simply focus on the wrong aspects of a music signal. Can anyone reliably explain why some (I would venture to say most) experienced audio enthusiasts prefer valve amps to solid state, or vinyl to CD? You can talk about self delusion or harmonic distortion all you like, but has it been reliably demonstrated in a scientific context? Has anyone been able to fool an audiophile with a solid state amp that's been modified to sound like a valve amp by adding harmonic distortion (or any other kind of distortion)? I hear techie types making this sort of claim all the time, but never seen the studies.
I've also heard software that claims to make digital audio sound like vinyl - and I can tell you plainly that it does not! Not in the ways that matter to an audio enthusiast anyway. Quite often "rolled-off treble" is quoted as a reason for vinyl sounding more pleasing. I can show you the frequency response graph for my Dynavector cartridge (supplied by the manufacturer before shipping it out) and it's ruler flat to well above 20KHz. Plug that into a solid-state phono amp with ruler-flat frequency response and into my ATC active studio monitors and it *still* sounds obviously better in many ways than my [excellent, and very expensive] CD player. So I don't buy the FR thing. It's clearly not as simple a problem as many [often unjustifiably arrogant] engineers assume.
I'll stop blabbering now. This is an interesting discussion that deserves to be taken more seriously. It's all too often spoiled by pettiness and bile (on both sides) long before it gets to the point of coming to any useful conclusions.
That alleged "data" in the analog groove is buried far below the noise floor of the best disc/reproduction system. The signal to noise ratio (in this context the same as dynamic range mentioned above) means any "data" that's allegedly on the disc is swamped by noise; the S/N ratio of the CD is figured as the ratio between the maximum sampled sine amplitude and the amplitude of the quantization noise. The quantization noise is the "step pattern" made by the discrete sampling, figured as subtracting the quantized signal ("sampled" to a particular amplitude representable by a discrete integer) from the original signal. You get the 96dB dynamic range often given for 16 bit sampling from the 2^-16 quantization noise (assuming full scale is 2^0), and 20*log10(1/2^-16)=96dB
The 44.1kHz/16 bit sampling of a CD is in no way an audio compromise, never mind when compared to vinyl. Higher sampling rates and widths are still useful to give more headroom when recording/mixing/mastering, but any reasonable recording fits well within a 16 bit/96dB dynamic range.
And, of course, there's a paper in the new (9/07) JAES doing double blind testing between new higher-resolution formats and good old CD-style sampling. No audible difference between the signal coming out of the player and one that undergoes a 44.1kHz/16 bit A/D/A conversion out of the higher res player.
As someone who has made his living primarily as a musician for nearly two decades, I could offer a little perspective. Audio fidelity is only one small factor. Most blues fans would agree that Robert Johnson's recordings, made in the 1930s, are among the greatest that exist. If you listen to those recordings, they are noisy and full of audio defects. From the wikipedia article: "the tonally tinny, hyper-treble end product of a sub-standard studio recording from the 1930s". Does this in any way detract from the musicality? Not at all. The songs and their performance shine through despite the poor recording capabilities of the time. Audio fidelity is NOT the be-all and end-all.
? syntax error
Are we forgetting that the needle CHANGES the groove as it presses against it? The more times you play the vinyl the more the needle wears down the groove. Then there is the fact that every time you bump the player you're scratching the vinyl.
/Vinyl is a fetish
Let's do this: Take an album on CD and Vinyl. Rip them at maximum possible resolution (sound quality/bps). Compare them bit by bit or with an MD5 checksum. Rip, compare, rip compare a few hundred times. See how many times it takes for any change to occur. Measure the change over time.
My guess is that the CD won't change much over thousands of rips. The vinyl will change some amount every time. We could then see when the needle has destroyed any advantage it had over CD.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
This article should be on the Onion, not slashdot.
I am an extremely critical listener, but this vinyl superiority stuff is nonsense. While there is a valid point that they have been mucking about making louder CDs to much, that doesn't make Vinyl superior.
Vinyl is not a better medium than digital aside from the nastalgia value. These days those "superior" vinyl albums likely come from digital masters, so vinyl is just adding another one more extra stage to the conversion.
I am old enough to have owned decent high quality turntable(not audiophile though), to have read reviews about moving coil and moving magnet pickup cartriges. I remember the glossy adverts for the pickups. I rejoiced when I got my first CD player and the noise floor nearly dissapeared.
These days I have gone a step further and tested the other modern bugaboo. Lossy compressed Audio (MP3).
Using high quality headphones a Denon reciever and optical output from my computer, with rate matched output to limit artifacts I did a lot of ABX testing, to try to find the merest telltale difference between the original Wave and a good quality (180VBR) mp3. You know what? I can't tell the difference using the most critical setup and being ultra critical on the listening.
I am not alone, the vast majority of snobbish audiophile wannabees that claim MP3s are offessive to listen to, can't actually pick them out when tested. There are freakish individuals who can, but chances are you are not one of them.
because the tape is wider
Yes, but error correction is a two-edge sword. While it's true that a couple scratches on a CD don't make that much of a difference, the problem comes when the threshold is crossed - one more scratch and you go from what seems to be a perfectly-working CD (because of the error correction) to no sound at all. Error correction allows the sound to be reproduced when there are problems, but only to a certain extent. Failure in digital mediums is instantaneous - there comes the point when error correction just can't salvage the audio, while analog mediums tend to have a gradual rate of failure. You'll know when your vinyl record is going bad, but your CD can die from one moment to the next.
Disclaimer: This comment was generated by a Flock of Trained Microsoft Programmers for Aqua_Geek.
Copying vinyl is a 1x speed operation. Needles wear out, a worn stylus means it digs deeper into the groove ruining the record, and it's difficult to tell when it's worn. Wrong pressure on the needle means skipping and probably distortion if too little, more wear if excessive.
Grooves wear out losing hi end detail and increasing noise and distortion, even if you are very careful handling the record. You can ruin vinyl just by keeping it in a car under the sun a little. Vynil is delicate to mail. Heavy to transport.
I still like and buy vinyl. Good for DJs, collectors and audiophiles who wants something that sounds different. Storing data in analog format has some advantages too. But a mass switch back to vinyl is unthinkable.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
"Another reason for vinyl's sonic superiority is that no matter how high a sampling rate is, it can never contain all of the data present in an analog groove," Lots of posts seem to take it for granted that more informatin represents better music. I grew up with vinyl and I can tell you that a lot of the "information" came in the form of background noise (hiss and pops). When I played my first CD, I was stunned by what I didn't hear -- and I am not in the line to go back to vinyl.
Did anyone read the article? As an avid music buyer, I pick up most of it on vinyl. And thankfully the Indies have caught on and include a free download of the album in high-quality MP3. For instance, a copy of the National's Boxer on vinyl can be purchased for around $10-$12 at my local record store, and the Mp3s were 256K/s or better bitrate. A win-win if you ask me.
Some even give you 2-3 downloads per purchase, in a way I think they know you'll share it, but they also know that word-of-mouth sells more albums.
--j
Rather than comment on the ridiculous bickering about audio quality (which has nothing to do with the end of CDs), let's talk about the end of CDs ...
Nothing, to my mind, spells the end of CDs as we know it than the fact that the majority of the new car stereos offered at the local backwoods stereo store in Cumming, GA did not include a slot for CDs. They would connect to your IPod, your USB stick, your statellite radio and in some cases your SD card. But no support for CD. In fact, the more expensive they got, they less likely they were to have a CD slot (took away from the size available for the display).
If you got into the video category, units with a DVD drive would read CDs. No surprise there --- that's basically free --- but my bet is that the feature will never be used.
My own choice was the Dual XHD6425. It has a CD slot. I may make a CDR to put in there with mp3's on it... as a backup source to the USB stick or bluetooth audio source I use for my primary entertainment. I wish it supported OGG (it does not). All-in-all, other then testing it when I installed it, it's unlikely that a music CD will ever darken it's faceplate.
Now... this says nothing about the resurgance of vinyl --- which I don't believe is coming, but it does say a lot about the death of the CD.
It's not about quality. It's not about sound. It's about convenience. The convenience of 1000's of CDs in an IPod or a USB stick.
I still buy CDs for the simple reason that they don't have DRM... and at least in the right places (like used CD stores), they're reasonably priced. But they only likely get "played" once.
Why not go back to horse & buggy while we're at it? I will if you will.
I don't want vinyl. I don't own a turntable any more. Record were scratchy, and you had to flip them to listen to the whole album. I don't even want CDs. I want MP3s. Amazon.com is about the only place that's doing it correctly, you can buy unprotected MP3s for reasonable prices.
An vinyl album is more than just sound. It is album art, record sleeve, liner notes that you can see read with the naked eye. the album was so successful because it was a visual, tactile as well as aural experience.
Tactile?
the process of taking out the album and laying it on the platter lining up the arm and lowering the queue control was part of the experience. So was sitting back and letting the entire side play.
that is the experience that is missing in MP3s and CDs crammed in a multi-disc changer. few CD's are kept with the crappy jewel cases that break. The CD is a cheap, disposable format.
I still like CD. I like casettes too and LP's. Heck I like Reel to Reel. If you want to hear audio quality record your favorite CD onto 1/4" quality tapemachine and play it back. You will hear something magical.
Of course if you really want audio quality listen to what 24bit, 96Khz tracks sound like on quality equipment...or 2" 24 track analog playback...
If the music is good...it could come out of a monkey's butt and still be good.
"[W]ith the Purist Audio A.C. power cord, the sound was always a bit smoother and sweeter and sibilants always cleaner and seemingly not exaggerated plus not having an extended "time-tail" added. http://www.enjoythemusic.com/Magazine/equipment/1001/wireworld.htm
I don't know about you, but I can't stand sour sibilants and extended time-tails in my 60 cycle hum.
CDs might sound better, but can you set your CD player to play at a different speed, spin the CD backwards, or "scratch" the CD ? No.
Vinyl wins.
Suprisingly many people ignore this. But RAID without proper backup will probably do nothing but cause a much greater harm the day things finally go bad, because people thought they were safe.
Though I kinda like hot-swapping mirrored raids, because of the backup ease. Just rip out the drive anytime you feel like an immediate, complete backup. Then plug in an old one for overwrite. Though I doubt you want to store music in a setup like that unless you do it for a living.
I lost my sig.
A CD carries about 85% of the information on a vinyl disc. Over the past 20 years, electronic manufacturers have developed better CD transports and have greatly refined the digital to analogue conversion circuits, both in their ability to convert the digital information into an analogue signal and to remove the objectionable noises that creep into the digital process. As a result, you can now get about the same quality and amount of information from a CD into your amplifier as you can from a comparably priced vinyl turntable, tone arm, cartridge and phono pre-amplifier. A good vinyl player and a good CD player in my basement listening room demonstrate repeatedly that vinyl can sound better than a CD. But the biggest difference among recordings is the actual recording -- if it is properly miked and transcribed to the CD or vinyl biscuit, it will sound good. Given that the vinyl catalogue, despite the remastering and transfer of many older recordings to CD, is still many many times larger than the CD catalogue, there are good reasons for keeping your vinyl recordings. The turntable manufacturing industry is increasing its sales, year over year. Same for cartridge manufacturers. And digital compression and coding for portable sound sources is improving -- once the online sales people start to sell CD sound instead of the 256 Kb stuff currently available, good sound will be everywhere. And, as units that can transfer vinyl and 78s to digital improve, you will be able to enjoy your old, non-transferred vinyl recordings with you in your portable player. The name of the audio magazine, Enjoy The Music.com, says it right: all the great gear is nice, even important, but what it is all about is the music.
Many modern CDs are not only heavily compressed, but also, and much more importantly, heavily clipped. This adds audible distortion to the music as the waveform exceeds the digital range and becomes clipped flat against the max or min value. Look at a waveform (in Winamp for example) and you will see long flat tops in the waveform. This is the clear disadvantage of CDs, as vinyl does not clip if you over-drive it, all that happens is the grooves have to be further apart to accommodate the wider excursions, and therefore you lose playing time. This clipping distortion manifests most obviously as the music being "tiring" to listen to. You can't tell what is wrong, only that the experience is not as satisfying. CDs mastered ten or more years ago sound delightful in comparison, though are obviously quieter. Properly mastered CDs beat vinyl on most metrics of quality, and sound better to me.
The reason I keep a record player and some records around is because it's fun to use. It's what I used as a kid (growing up in the 80's, I was probably the last generation to have vinyl as a primary format). I like taking out the big records and putting the needle down. It's fun to count the tracks to try and get the right song you want (and then slightly miss).
It's a fun toy. I'll always have a record player.
There are two companies still making magnetic audio tape on reels: RMGI and ATR Magnetics.
Thanks, I bookmarked them and will check them out later.
FalconShould there be a Law?
you don't understand digital nor analog.
Do some research, this is why the web is full of misinformation... it is know nothings like you that spout their opinions, none of which are based on fact nor science.
Analog rules, anyone that understands the real differences between analog and digital, like tubes vs solid state, would not argue for digital.
"who's the bigger music fan: The person with a $10000 stereo, and $500 of music, or the person with a $500 stereo, and $10000 of music?"
real music fans play the music by themselves.
I don't feel like it...
ellipsis means 'punchline forthcoming' this was actually quite comical & i demand parent to be modded to funny 5