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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."
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.
The Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem states "Exact reconstruction of a continuous-time baseband signal from its samples is possible if the signal is bandlimited and the sampling frequency is greater than twice the signal bandwidth." More information can be found here. Wikipedia is your friend.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
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.
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.
Aliasing noise is not related to sample rate or bit depth. A properly dithered 8bit 7KHz recording will have a high noise floor, and be severely band limited, but will not have aliasing artifacts. The noise floor is 'white' noise, and not related to the signal. The glitchy sound you associate with low bandwidth recordings is due to not dithering properly, data compression, or as using it as an effect etc. Have a play with some audio editing software some day. It's interesting how good the audio sounds at 12bit 35Khz or so. Modern records often have so little dynamic range that you could use 14bit and no one would notice. :)
Anyway, 192Khz converters are very cheap nowadays. I think about £2.50 or so.
It's the analog side and the clocking that makes the difference.
16bit 44.1Khz is fine for listening if the conversion to analog is adequate.
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).
Tivo man!
TIVO
(I haven't seen it either)
0xB315AA8D852DCD3F3DCA578FD2E0BF88
You believe wrong. They call them laser turntables.
http://www.elpj.com/main.html
We have enough youth, how about a fountain of SMART?
Wired seems to take all the standard audiophile BS hook, line, and sinker... "analog provides a warmer sound" (much more total harmonic distortion than a digital player), etc.
The argument about hot mastered CDs is particularly hilarious (reduced dynamic range). Basically, this is a result of crappy commercial pressure to sound louder, and is common but by no means universal. The fact that vinyl lacks this possibility is touted as an advantage. It's like claiming that a knife is better than a gun, because you can't shoot yourself in the foot with the knife.
For a devastating rebuttal of audiophile BS from a very experienced engineer, read Douglas Self's site: http://www.dself.dsl.pipex.com/ampins/pseudo/subjectv.htm
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Sorry mwvdlee, you are wrong. Acording to Nyquist, EVERY signal that has a limited bandwidth (don't know if that's the correct english term), that means it contains no frequencies above a certain limit frequency, can be totally reconstructed out of a sampled signal with double that limit frequency as sampling rate. This is a perfect reconstruction if you leave noise floor out of the equation. With 24 bit or even 16 bit per sample the noise floor is practically unhearable and much better than on a vinyl record.
Please, read up a bit about digital signals and the Nyquist theorem, it is counter-intuitive, but it works. There are no "edges" in a reconstructed (played) digital signal!
You want to avoid polishing in the same direction as the temporal flow of the data. As you go around the disc in a circle you are moving ahead through time relative to what chunk of data correlates to how far along in the music you are. If you polish at right angles (from the hole in the center out to the outer edge and back) to the concentric rings of lands and pits (okay maybe it's just one long spiral like a record) any scratching you do (and that's what polishing is, replacing big scratches with much smaller ones) will not obscure sequential data bits, which means that the error correcting mechanism has a much better chance of working, whereas polishing along the same path which the laser beam will take risks obscuring several consecutive milliseconds worth of data.
For polishing CDs I recommend Wright's Silver Cream (originally intended for polishing silverware and probably available at your local grocery store).
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I'll apologize in advance because I have a lot of nit-picking to do with your post.
... .
it just sounds fatter, warmer and... feels better... and it really IS the choice of
hardcore audiophiles.
I would like to know the science that makes something sound 'warm' or 'fat'. What defines a hardcore audiophile? Would they use the terms fatter or warmer?
. In contrary to CD's, the sound quality coming from a vinyl recording
depend on various external things
The needle used matter, (purist techno DJs and audiophiles spend insane amount of money on
their pickups, a good needle can really improve the sound)
To what level? How much money do you have to put into a needle before it reaches CD quality?
The quality of the actual
vinyl print matters a lot, for example the number of imprinted revolutions with respect
to the vinyl size, if we imprint 100 revolutions on a 12" disc, the soundquality
is generally improved compared to imprinting 500 revolutions. Further, the quality
of the overall manufacturing process and the vinyl material used matter. Further,
remember that technology is advancing within the field of vinyl record making and
playback, it has improved since the day CDs were born, today vinyl sounds better than ever.
I'll call this one a wash. You consider revolutions, the CD buyer can consider how the disk was mastered. 6 of one, half dozen of the other. Though it isn't an advantage of vinyl, it just means that you have to be careful what you buy. If anything that is a disadvantage.
You state that vinyl has improved since CDs were introduced. Did CD technology remain static during this period? The simple fact that the manufacturing process improved doesn't make the product superior to any competitor. The manufacturing process for wax candles has improved lightyears beyond what it originally was, but that doesn't mean you would use them to light your house today if you have electricity.
sum it up, depending on the circumstances - vinyl sound quality today is equal to or
better that CD quality, and vinyl sound will most likely improve as tech does.
This is a false statement. Vinyl is certainly not 'equal' to CD quality when you consider that to even come close to CD quality requires an investment of at least a thousand dollars. Compare a $20 CD player to a $20 vinyl record player. Not even in the same ball park. And to get 'better' than CD quality? You are going to be shelling out thousands of dollars for what is a marginal improvement at best. Your average CD in your average player will always sound better than your average vinyl record in your average player.
Vinyl sound will improve as the technology does... yes, I suppose, but the same is true for CDs...
And what do you prefer? a big 12" cover artwork of your fav band and a black
shiny thing that smells nice, is completely unique and cannot really be duplicated...
or a sloppy piece of cheap 12 cm plastic that only displays your geeky face when you
look at it, coming with with a CD sized artwork booklet?
I prefer not to think about smelling 12" black shiney things.
But kidding aside, what does album art have to do with the quality of the sound? And please forgive me, but something that is completely unique and not easily duplicated is not something I consider a strength. I like that I've taken my CDs copied them into a lossless format, stored that format on a server that I can access anywhere I go.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
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