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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."
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.
...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?
... 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.
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
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.
Audiophiles are the only people on the planet that wish Macs were MORE expensive.
"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.
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.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
The "Loudness War" explained in 112 seconds: http://youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ
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).
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?
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.
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.
By contrast, your beloved analogue sources will have been processed with analogue filters (you can have the frequency domain or the time domain approximate the ideal, but not both) to provide Dolby noise reduction, NAB or similar eq onto tape (record and replay, best hope they match), then RIAA encoding onto the vinyl and then off again (again, best hope they match). To get worried about the time domain distortion of the filtration to limit the CD's signal to 22.05Hz seems a bit mote and beam...
ian
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
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.
Well, if you have one of these I can see why. I savage a beautiful Philips turntable from a flea market, built it a new walnut base so it wouldn't look shabby, and gave it the love and care it needed. Along with a proper phono pre-amp it does a fine job of reproducing music. I also keep my records clean and unscratched, so no clicks, pops or anything else. Long ago I figured if I was going to have hundreds of $ in vinyl I'd best take care of the collection. CDs are convenient that you can play carpet hockey with them and still get a reasonable output, but that "error correction" is just approximating and filling gaps.
Worst is so many recordings which originated on vinyl never will be released on CD as they weren't popular enough. Other albums have had songs trimmed to fit on CD, for whatever rationale the musica company had for editing. Last, the crummy "remastering" -- the first Dire Straits, Sultans of Swing was trimmed at the end for CD, eventually restored to its full on a later "greatest hits" release. Wow. One Chicago collection CD was clearly taken from some media in distress, perhaps old master tapes or even copied from cassettes. Terrible.
Music captured as digital and given good treatment, as Telarc do, is a fine thing on CD, but some of the old stuff just never had a fair day in court when converted -- or was initially released as a jobber recording, to be followed by Re-Master, 20 bit, 24 bit, SACD, etc. to garner money over and over again for the same recording.
I keep both, but don't expect much from CDs. When they are good, that's fine, when they aren't, meh.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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
I can't wait to play Bioshock off an analog vinyl disk. I'll bet the graphics will be AWESOME.
Property is theft.
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.
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
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'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.
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).
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!
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.
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
... 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!
"Has anyone actually done a real study on this...
...and actually determined that vinyl is better than CDs?"
Yep.. Many of them. TONS of them, in fact.
Ohhh! NOW you add conditions! In that case, the answer is no.
"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."
Sure it has. Early transistor amps had lower THD but much higher IM distortion, which led to worse sounds. They were also prone to oscillation, which hurt the sound. Then there was the hard clipping at limit vs. very soft clipping of tubes, and you have lots of reasons that tube amps were better than transistor amps--in 1965.
Good transistor amps became completely transparent in the mid 1970s, by my estimation. That put them into the extreme stratosphere with the very very finest tube amps. Nowadays, a few hundred bucks and some good engineering will get you a transistor amp that is sonically neutral within its parameters. A few thousand will get you a tube amp that accomplishes the same thing. If you push either amp beyond its limits, or cut down either amp to be audibly flawed, you will get very different but very clearly understood and measured (and predictable) distortion models. Easy, straightforward, and proven for about a quarter century. Just don't tell the audiophools.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
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
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
That's because a 22kHz sampling rate means that the highest frequency that can be reproduced is 11kHz, which is well within the human hearing range.
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.
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
Exactly right. A 22 kHz sampling rate means no frequency above 11 kHz can be reproduced (realistically more like 10 kHz with a good anti-aliasing filter). 44 kHz sampling rate cuts off at 22 kHz (realistically more like 20 kHz).
This is the Nyquist theorem, which says that the highest sound frequency that can be stored/reproduced in a digital signal is HALF the sampling rate.
If you have young and healthy ears, you should be able to hear many sounds above 10 kHz.
My bicyles
"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...