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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."
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).
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.
Hum how exactly does vynil prevent range compression ? (honest question here)
\u262D = \u5350
Actually 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.
As you said, the comment about compression is nonsense. 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.
The truth of the matter is that vinyl records are crap compared to CD's in every measurable way - distortion, dynamic range, frequency response, signal to noise ratio, you name it. Are they perfect? No, that does not exist in technology. The Redbook standard is a tad short of the maximum theoretical dynamic range and frequency response the human ear is capable of. The conversion of digital data back to analog is tricky to get right. But it is superior to vinyl.
But some people do like vinyl better. Audio tastes are funny. People become habituated to certain types of distortion and other artifacts in the sound. To them is sounds better. But by any measurable means it looks like garbage compared to CD.
The "Loudness War" explained in 112 seconds: http://youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ
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?
I'll take the pro's opinion in this case.
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.
... 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. These days it's more a cultural quirk of DJ's then actual technological limitation. The primary reason vinyl is popular with the DJ's here is that you can manipulate/spin with it and people won't take you seriously as a DJ until you do. You can now spin with digital formats in exactly the same manner. So your left only with the cultural inertia.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Vinyl is not as convenient to rip as CDs, but it can be done.
A game has objectives and is competitive, anything else is just play
I thought by definition, 'sound reproduction' was just that...trying to get the true sound out?
Quite often, the sound that came from the session, that the engineer, producer, band, etc....all agreed on, is blown away by later 'mastering' people..over compression to make it louder...reducing the dynamic range....
Oh well, that's another rant altogether, but, really...sound reproduction is trying to get the true sound of what the band laid down for you. I dunno why people have forgotten what good sound reproduction is about and what is available to do so. Same crowd I guess, that is happy to listing to mp3's in poor listening environments. Then again, a lot of music being put out commercially today, isn't worth listening to in a critical manner, so I guess it all evens out.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
If you're trying to say that your CD will sound identically on every CD player, this is completely untrue. First, different CD players will deal with errors on the disc differently. But much more critically, the most important part of the interpretation of the data on the CD by the player is the transformation from a digital input signal into an analog output signal and here, there are huge differences which will affect what you hear. This is why you will hear a big difference between a 20$ discman connected to semi-decent amp and speakers and a $500 CD player connected to the same system. Some CD players use upsamplers, others don't. Some CD players have a transistor-based output stage (which range from very cheap (e.g. in a discman) to extremely good), others use valves and all these factors define, in fact, how the CD player interprets your CD. The same CD, even though it is an exact copy, will not be the same on every player.
If your point is that different copies of the same CD will sound the same on the same player, then this is quite likely to be true, bar some errors on the discs, and certainly more so than for vinyls.
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
No, this is just a way for them to be able to re-sell you the same content you already have. Now, re-mastered Beatles albums, now only on vinyl! And of course, it's a format that's easily damaged, and wears out just by listening to it [and yes, I know you can get very expensive record players that use laser's or some such thing instead of a needle]. Leave it to the music industry to give you want you don't want...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
CDs have a lot of advantages, but logevity is not one of them.
Being digital, you can regularly copy CDs and keep essentially the original recording for a indefinitely long time. Even if your vinyl lasts forever each playing of it destroys part of the original recording.
No, this is just a way for them to be able to re-sell you the same content you already have. Now, re-mastered Beatles albums, now only on vinyl! And of course, it's a format that's easily damaged, and wears out just by listening to it [and yes, I know you can get very expensive record players that use laser's or some such thing instead of a needle]. Leave it to the music industry to give you want you don't want...
Ah but many of us want vinyl. I've been causally looking around for a turntable and I've been seeing more and more stores carrying them. I also want to get a new Reel-to-reel tape deck with a bunch of empty tape reels. Once I have both I'll go back to doing what I did many years ago. Back then what I did was the first tyme I played a new vinyl record I would record on a reel of tape then I'd put the vinyl away for safe keeping. Thereafter I would play the tape. When the tape eventually wears out I still have the record to rerecord. As for the actual vinyl records, while TFA said Amazon opened a vinyl store, there are a number of online stores where they can be ordered. Where I live there are 2 stores I know for sure that sales new vinyl, one 5 minutes walk and the other maybe 15 minutes walk. Another I store I know of also about 15 minutes walk may sale vinyl as well though as I have only seen it while going by I haven't checked it out yet. I about freaked out and had to fight off the urge to buy this record I saw at the store "around the corner" even though I don't have a turntable now. It was by Otis Reading with his "(Sittin' on) the Dock of the Bay".
FalconShould there be a Law?
Yeah, I tried to correct myself on that, but I was heading out the door.
And you're right, there is no physical reason why they cannot make vinyl records very loud. In fact, I think they did just that with singles and jukebox records, so they would stand out in public spaces. However, I understand that this was not done extensively to full albums because it makes the grooves wider. Since the vibrations of the needle accord to the sound wave itself, you gotta get that needle moving if you want it to be loud, which means a deep, fat groove.
Because, as a record company executive, you want your songs to sell. Louder songs stand out more at clubs and on the radio. However, you must abide by government regulations as to how loud a song is, and radio stations play every song at the same volume on their end. However, the difference lies in the fact that humans perceive sounds as loud or soft based on their average loudness, not their peak loudness, and you can make sounds louder on average very easily using CDs. The loudness of the final product is an afterthought.
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
When I throw a party, I see to it that either there is live music, or that someone (sometimes me) is handling the music and/or movie(s) on an individual basis. I consider this part of my responsibility as the host. So this is not a problem for me; instead, it is an opportunity to make my guests more comfortable while hopefully expanding their musical horizons. I certainly would not advocate making all recordings 0 dB with a limited dynamic range in order that I might have more convenient background music playback.
Along these lines, I note that some systems, iTunes for example, allow you to set playback levels on a specific per-tune basis. That's a lovely tool to have, and I wish more playback systems implemented that in one way or another. Add compression, expansion and equalization on a per-tune basis and you have the means to create a music system that performs fairly closely to the way you want it to, if you take the time to work with it.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
That's correct. Tubes produce primarily even numbered harmonics, like a chorus pedal but less pronounced. Solid state amps tend to produce more odd harmonics but a lot less of them. I personally like the warmth of tubes, but that's because I LIKE the slight bit of distortion. It's pleasing to the ear. But it's not accurately reproducing the audio. I work in pro sound on DSP based audio mixers. They're freaking great, and that's what pros use. They do NOT use tubes because you can't rely on them, and because even harmonic distortion is still distortion.
Given the speakers, headphones, and rooms that most people have, any argument about media quality is utterly pointless.
This is simply a media stunt by the recording industry's marketing departments to try and popularize a physical object that people must pay for. Vinyl has all the sex appeal to become that object.
Vinyl needs to be compressed even more so than CD's, as heavy bass can be enough to make the needle pop right out of the groove.
However, all the arguments about increased sound quality, as you point out, are absurd.
I am a mastering engineer, software engineer and have worked on audio software. And in all of my experience there are only a couple of things left to improve upon with current digital audio technology, but for a very small amount of return.
When the music is mixed digitally using certain "professional tools" (no pun intended) it is done in fixed point. A few companies have realized that using double precision floating point *does* sound better. And the difference is measurable. Some sound engineers believe it's also very audible.
In short, sampling a signal, scaling it, summing it and then truncating (or dithering) it, does more than shifting it's level and burying the lower end under the quantization threshold. No technical name exists for this type of distortion, but it is a self correlated noise upon the signal, or cross correlated with the other signals being mixed upon it. What it amounts to is to putting the signal thru a transfer function consisting of a jagged diagonal line (instead of a perfect diagonal line, whose slope matches the gain applied) or jagged grid that shifts up and down with the value of the other streams being mixed. This is analogous to rendering a diagonal line on a computer. The higher the resolution (number of bits) the better. But sadly, at the recording and mixing stage, mixing a large number of tracks with say 24 bits of fixed point resolution is ridiculously bad, even if the final master will be dithered and truncated at 16 bits, because this distorting process will occur repeatedly, for each gainstage, for each track summed. One solution to this is to apply gain and sum at double precision floating point. Yet another, less popular solution, is to actually reproduce each track back into the analog world using high quality DACS and sum in the analog domain. Both sound nearly as good, and certainly better than summing at 24 bits fixed point.
Second, there are certain IIR filters that can't be implemented at just 2x the bandwith. Because of this, the choices are: Upsample and downsample just for that filter (which is computationally expensive and if done at all, seldom done correctly) or just run the entire audio stream at 4 or 8x the bandwith.
What is done today by most studios is run the entire project at 88.2 or 96 kHz sampling frequency. This is great, but requires a very high quality downsampler at the end of the chain to convey the final result.
One could argue that vinyl masters can be cut from a DAC running at 96 kHz and thus have an increased frequency resolution. But that improvement pales in the light of the background hiss level, additional bass compression required for vinyl, preamp distortion, de-emphasis equalizer tolerances, motor speed stability deviations, etc.
I wonder if we just had a tiny speaker on top of a CD player reproducing the very high frequencies that come from the "needle" whether it would finally pass for vinyl.
I bet that much of what is perceived as sounding better for vinyl is the fact that people can hear the sound of the mechanics (the needle itself) as well as the speakers. I remember as a child, that the records sounded a lot better when the turntable lid was open.
-arr
Parent poster is actually quite on target in a lot of instances (though not all... many times "You get what you paid for").
As a matter of fact, for quite some time, J.C.Whitney used to sell "no-name" brand (well, they had a name, but it wasn't Sony, JVC, etc) speakers and such. I found a pair of free-air subs with amazing sound. Turns out that (besides being very cheap, going down to 18Hz, having a high signal to noise ratio and handling a lot of power) they were actually made by that "no-name" company for one of the "big name" companies, with the surplus (of an updated line) being labelled in the actual (no-name) manufacturer's name instead of the big-brand name.
Very thrilled with them... and at $20 a pop, far less than the $100+ each they were being sold for with the "Name Brand" on them. Same specs, same speakers, same company made them, different name on them.
The key is this part... A little research can save a lot of money... many times it's simply the company that no one has heard of - but has wonderful quality, or (as in my example) the company that actually manufactures the stuff for the name brand. CompUSA for instance (yeah, I know they suck as a whole) used to sell many CompUSA branded stuff made for them by big name companies. When BenQ WAS getting the best reviews on DVD-RW drives, we were selling them CompUSA branded for really cheap... 30% less than BenQ boxed drives (that were 100% identical right down to the BenQ label on the drive itself). A bunch of our cases were relabelled Antec cases (that you could buy for 20% from Antec - or us).
Just buying cheap though, will invariably mean you get what you pay for (older Apex DVD players, anyone?).
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
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
Not only there's just one laser turntable available on the market, but it also quite sucks quality-wise.. Actually it's very sensible to dust on the grooves and unless records are REALLY clean plays with more clicks and pops than a normal turntable. Proof is that the same company is selling a (very expensive) digital click remover unit to couple with their laser turntable.
So you'll end up spending $12000+ for turntable and click remover unit and end up with a digitally muffled sound, worse than most decent medium range turntables.
I'm into dance music production and in techno/house genres, vinyl is the ruling media,
it just sounds fatter, warmer and... feels better... and it really IS the choice of
hardcore audiophiles. In contrary to CD's, the sound quality coming from a vinyl recording
depend on various external things (other than your speakers, room or ear goo state).
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) 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.
Putting the nyuist theorem into the discussion doesn't really make sense, since It only
applies to sampled sound. However, all recordings imprinted on vinyls nowadays usually
come from a digital source, often the source waveform is of a higher sample rate and bit depth than
used in the CD format. Usually we start at 24bit/96 Khz, and depending on the vinyl making
process and playback situation, this higher dynamic range may be preserved. In a CD,
it is always lost since we quantize down to 16bit. Higher dynamic range *make* a
difference. In an A/B test between 24/16 bit, you "feel" the difference than
actively hear it. Since human ear has definitely a far greater dynamic range
than "16bit", its hard to say this does not matter, as can be the case with the sample rate.
(As has been said, human ears are bandlimited to ~ 10hz-20Khz depending on the time you have spent on rock concerts without ear muffling and the amount of smelly goo present in your ears, imagine if they were not, and you could hear frequencies to the Ghz range up to air pressure variations at the speed of light... you would be a living radio/cell phone reciever and probably go completely insane and kill yourself, or live in the "heroes" show...)
To 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.
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?
You can also scratch, backspin, change playback speed and do other fun stuff with your
vinyl, this makes you cool (like grandmaster flash). Trying to scratch your CD or play
it backwards is likely to be a bad idea.
+1 Insightful - but I still remember it fondly... ;-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7P59YBoz_o
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
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