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Vinyl Gets Its Groove Back
theodp writes "Time reports that vinyl records are suddenly cool again. Vinyl has a warmer, more nuanced sound than CDs or MP3s; records feature large album covers with imaginative graphics, pullout photos, and liner notes. 'Bad sound on an iPod has had an impact on a lot of people going back to vinyl,' says 15-year-old David MacRunnel, who owns more than 1,000 records."
You know your format is doomed if you consider a 15 year old your "expert" to quote.
We've only been hearing this since about the day after the first CD player came out.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
... That a guy who owns 1000 records justified his stupendous outlay by making blanket statements that compressed digital audio sounds bad.
And then the audiophile jargon of "nuanced" etc etc... What a load of crap.
The guy walking down the street with his portable vinyl player from sony "The VinMan' Boombox style on his shoulders
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
Didn't we just read some equally idiotic bullshit on slashdot about vinyl making a huge comeback because of it's many superiorities. Okay here's something to consider. Digital music sounds the same every time you play it. You hit the seek button and the next track plays. It outputs at speaker level. It doesn't degrade on your hard drive and the file can't melt in the sunlight. I know of one band that releases their songs on vinyl and since my dad's a DJ about ten thousand that don't. What a stupid story. You could even call it anti-geek since we're all into...oh you know, technology and stuff. I haven't heard a hurray for punchcards post recently. If you're going to retro-updgrade to something ancient that doesn't sound like crap, go with WAV
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
I am sure the fact that records wear out with repeated plays also contributed to their excitement over this trend. But hey, records are something I can't make at home. I would be more than happy to see the music industry shrink away to one that only manufactures records. At the moment they seem to manufacture mostly ill will.
Some 15 year old with a bunch of records telling me they sounds better than digital playback does not convince me.
Does vinyl have a bigger possible range of frequencies? And if so can the human ear tell the difference?
I'm having a hard time coming up with a synonym for "whatever."
The problem with claims like this is that they're not falsifiable in any meaningful way. Of course it can be argued that vinyl is "warmer" and more "nuanced" - all depending on your definition of "warm" and "nuanced". What is true is that when accurate reproduction of the source sound is the goal, digital is used nearly exclusively.
This is entirely separate, of course, from the issue of the quality of compressed sound files, such as those most commonly found on iPods. Depending on the algorithm and the amount of the compression used, it can certainly have a dramatic influence on the sound quality - in some cases making it clearly lower quality than records.Of course iPods will produce inferior sound when you're using the standard earbuds, they suck. Does anyone not understand this? Get some real headphones, or decent speakers and then compare lossless FLAC to vinyl with a range of different music--and make sure it's a blind test, nostalgia is more powerful than you think in swaying your perception.
All of which is less interesting than how a 15yo acquired such a large collection of music. I don't know anyone with that many records or CDs. I have over 1000 albums but it's all digital so it hardly counts as a tangible collection.
(cue 10 responses by umpteen thousand vinyl collection owners)
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
I've been involved with club and event promotions in Melbourne for about 6 years.
When I first started out, all the DJ's across Trance/House would only DJ with Vinyl and CD's were unheard of. In the past 12-18 months though that's all changed. Vinyl sales are down as DJ's and enthusiasts are all moving to CD's. CDJ's are now excellent quality and offer much more dynamic mixing abilities with better effects, beat matching and looping and sampling.
At the same time, tracks being produced are instantly available on MP3 which allows DJ's to purchase fresh hits the day the producer is happy with it, other then having to wait for tracks to be pressed to vinyl.
I believe this trend has followed Europe where they have been progressively been moving away from Vinyl in the past 2-3 years.
Vinyl is still excellent, I still love to collect it, but technology has finally caught up in the club scene where MP3 and digital music now offers much much more advantage to the DJ, especially in price. Buying 5-6 new records per week to play in clubs is expensive, when you can buy the same tracks for 3-4 dollars each online and burn them to CD.
In related news, 8 millimeter film with its scratches and character is said to be replacing high definition video. Owners of more than 1000 of the films say they look warmer, and they're not just talking about those cells melted by the projector.
Does anyone in this day and age really buy this nonsense? When you listen to records, you aren't listening to the band playing, you're listening to them playing plus a lot of noise introduced by the technology. You might just mistake that for how a band should sound, but trust me...that's not what music sounds like live. Thats not even what the master mix sounds like on tape, or on the hard disk these days. You are listening to the machine, not the band, if you think records sound better.
It also never occurred to me that pops and clicks were really part of a "nuanced" sound, and not the inevitable failure of an archaic mechanical playback process.
Fiat Homos et Pereat Theos
Call me silly but in the age of HDTV & DVD does it not make sense to incorporate all this data one had on 12 inch a have it displayable? Even a 15 inch monitor would be adequate, and hell with an rss feed you can pop in that disc and not only get your album graphics but updated information as to when tours are going to happen, when the next album is coming out, and even other projects.
12 inch was a nice format, but space savings is more important to me than raw information.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
If the source audio is recorded and processed digitally, would this negate the "warm nuance" of pressed vinyl?
>I haven't heard a hurray for punchcards post recently.
Newer technologies just don't give programs the same nuanced performance and octagonal algorithms as punched cards. The clean edges of a punched bit totally rule over the bits on magnetic media that require a dedicated computer just to recover them from the noise. All that extra work to reconstruct a bit makes them tired, and fatiguing to debug.
Face it: programs run off hard disks just have grainy memory usage and an indistinct sound stage.
But punched cards are a distraction from the real issue, which is that only a vacuum tube computer can do justice to the best algorithms.
Hell, I'd rather more vinyl albums be sold like Cheech & Chongs Big Bamboo album - with foot-long rolling papers included!!!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
If someone has a thousand albums on MP3, whatever. It doesn't say anything about them. They spent a night raiding P2P. Big deal.
If someone has a thousand albums on Vinyl, it's a different story. You think something of him. Maybe good, maybe bad, but you can expect him to rather deeply identify himself by his music. Each record was individually chosen, to the exclusion of others. Time was invested, thought was expressed, identity is reflected.
And that, of course, is what not just Vinyl, but the entire shared music experience is really about. Music is more than bits. Music is more than waves of air lapping or pounding at one's eardrums. Music is, or at least can be, about identity. That a fifteen year old kid is desperately trying to assert his should surprise absolutely nobody here.
...there's no beating half-inch reel-to-reel. Vinyl, pfft.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
I don't want to go in to it now, but there is a massive laundry list of problems with vinyl. A bit of research brings up bizarre phenomena such as pre-echo and warbling, and it has severe problems with fidelity and stereo separation. Your record sounds worse the further towards the inside that the needle travels!
My personal vendetta against vinyl stems from crackle. I have lots of MP3s which have been ripped from vinyl, and you can always tell because crackling (dust on the track) is very difficult to eliminate in a practical manner. I have a high quality audio system so I can hear the crackle very clearly. The first time I noticed it I thought my speakers had developed a severe fault before I realised it was a vinyl rip.
High-end audio is not about the perfect source, but I'm afraid vinyl just falls too far short.
...or that it has more than 0.1 dB of dynamic range? Vinyl can't have the amplitude smashed like digital.
Jory
(mind you, he's not commenting about the destruction of mp3 compression, he's talking about uncompressed digital audio, and how it can't reproduce what we had with analog)
quote 1:
The instant you digitize a signal, you destroy the phase-angle relationship between the high frequencies and the lows. That's why you can't make a decent chorus with a digital delay unit. Phase-angle distortion has been with us since the day 3M introduced their incredibly expensive, 15kHz digital-recording deck. I still remember the famous quote from their marketing department: "There is an introduction of phase-angle distortion, but the human ear can't hear it." I find that so hysterical because the human ear can hear things we can't measure yet. And the ear does use phase-angle information to determine the location sounds originate from, and the space within which you're standing when you hear those sounds. Simply put, that's what tells you, "Oh, that sound came from over there." The end result is that digitized music destroys the spatial characteristics of the music, and the first thing I noticed about it--other than the horrifying distortion of 16-bit digitized reproduction--is that the sound spectrum is really flat.
quote 2:
You know what? It doesn't really matter. I mean, 16-bit audio absolutely destroys the waveform, especially in the high end. A lot of things that I thought were fine on vinyl or cassette tape parts that had a lot of brightness and sibilance in them sounded horrible on 16-bit CD. I literally could not listen to those albums on CD all these years. I saw this as a huge opportunity. I dropped everything, I shut down a 10-day vacation I had just started around my birthday [March 10] and went to work. We just literally went through those things second by second or, I should say, millisecond by millisecond and did all the things you can do now with automated EQ and other signal-processing techniques. Since it was going to be in the digital format anyway, there was nothing to lose.
quote 3:
I work only in an analog studio, so I hear music at its very best. I mean, there's nothing like the sound of an analog multitrack recording playing back. You'll never hear it sound so good again because it actually is the real thing. It's the real music by the real musicians, the phase hasn't been all screwed up by the A/D conversion, and the high end isn't all messed up trying to fit a 16-kHz tone into three pieces of a 44-Hz sampling rate. In an analog studio, you're hearing pristine, real-world sound, the way it would sound if it was coming through the mikes, and you were listening to them in headphones right there in your room. 24-bit digital sounds pretty good to me. But as soon as you make the conversion to 16-bit, it sounds like crap. [laughs] I have a hard time listening to CDs after working on an analog original because of what they do to the depth perception. The phase-angle errors caused by the A/D conversion really bother me. They bothered me the very first time I heard digital next to an analog original. I was always amazed that people didn't perceive that something that once sounded like it was located way beyond their speakers now sounded like it was on a flat plane...
I've listened to a lot of tape, vinyl, a lot of CDs, and a lot of 320,256,128 & 64 kb/s mp3s....
good 1/4 inch tape on good equipment through full headphones is unreal, it only goes down from there....
That's crap. How about rewording it to be a bit more truthful (and accurate): 'Highly-compressed, far less than CD quality sound, on an iPod has had an impact on some people looking for alternatives, including vinyl,'
This kid may have 1000 records, but that pales compared to 100,000,000 iPod sales and still growing.
Besides, portable music is the Big Thing. How are you going to play that vinyl on your portable music player? In fact, it's hard to even find a great turntable at an affordable price any longer. It's not like the old days when a couple hundred bucks could buy a great Dual 1237. Mine still sits next to my computer -- and isn't for sale!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
MP3 is a lossy format so between those two, who knows, but the 'audiophiles' that claim vinyl is superior make me wretch. And yes, I still have plenty of vinyl because there was a time that was all we had.
Vinyls are bit of a history - but some good history in terms of the artwork for some of the albums. I still have hundreds, but slowly selling them online in NZ...
Hmm, I have some $5000 power cords I can sell him, guaranteed to improve the sound of his records. It will provide a distinct improvement in the warmth of deep bass, combined with a crisp treble. Our phone lines are open right now for orders. Just call 911-5324 and get an instant discount...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Truth is, people have been arguing about what reproduces the best sound since recorded sound started, and they're not likely to stop now. It's a lot like wine -- enjoy what you like.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Mainly because lots of demos that you will NEVER FIND ELSEWHERE were released only in vinyl, and are increasing in collector's value (For example, I have the dual-vinyl demo of Alice in Chains Sap/Jar of Flies, with one side of one record holding purely a vinyl-scratched impression of the AIC logo.) Last time one of my vinyls was appraised, I was holding a four-hundred dollar album. I'll not get into the ultra-thick Edison vinyls that I have, that's another beast altogether.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Vinyl "warmer" sound is due purely to decreased bandwidth and dynamics, plus untrained sound engineers who can't adapt to a new medium that doesn't hide the smallest mistake and snake oil buyers (audiophiles) who now say vinyl is better, then tomorrow will shell $3000/meter for a loudspeaker cable.
...Analog is better!". That's digital material, people! What you hear as warmer is digital stuff that passes through the natural filter+dynamics processor+noise adder called vinyl.
There were artists who recorded at least one step of their material in digital since the early 80s (anyone remembers the Betamax+AD/DA converter cards used at that time for mastering?), and the same stuff once put on vinyl makes those audiophiles scream "ooooh, see?
Decades ago people said AM radio sound was warmer and synthesizers could never become serious instruments too. Luckily nobody listened to those people and research continued.
I'll make you a bet. That all those wonderful, warm, modern vinyl records all come from digital master tapes. The days of direct-to-disc recording are long gone.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Typical crappy article about Vinyl. 15 yr old "They sound better" than my 32kbps wmas or the other guy "they are warmer" mp3 sound "tinny". Well yeah, but vinyl isn't a better medium. All you need to know is that low bit rate compressed files are crap, the loudness war is killing music and if you really want you can just add a bit of third harmonic distortion if you want that "nuanced warmer" sound. For those that don't remember when CD first came out you could buy very expensive little inline boxes that made the sound "warmer" and some CD player had valve front ends for the same reason. I suspect you can still get them, just look up $10,000 speaker cables retailers and I am sure they will be happy to sell a sound cleaning box. Having said that I still like LPs from a physical perspective. A fold out album cover beats a 10x10cm book in an CD case and handling vinyl disc had a nice romance about it all. However, i don't miss worn records, the hissing or snap crackle and pops. I also love the portability of digital music. You can't run with a record paper and tapes just suck.
There's compression as in "making file size smaller" and there's compression as in "dabbling with the dynamics" of a piece of recorded sound. The latter might be the reason why new titles on cd sound like crap. You just can't make a mix like that and press it on vinyl; the needle would jump out of the groove.
Due to the technical limitations of the medium, vinyl records have been spared from the overcompression craze that makes most recent mainstream music sound so lifeless and irritating. So, while technically inferior, they definitely sound better to my ears than their digital counterparts.
I knew I never should have thrown out my 70s LPs.
:-)
Except of course for The Knack
Fizz
The process of creating and playing back a record introduces much distortion to the original recording. Distortion that is aesthetically pleasing to the ears, but distortion all the same.
Sound that is going to be placed onto a master disc for pressing vinyl goes through something called the RIAA curve, which equalizes the sound. The amplitude of the low frequencies are lowered and the higher frequencies raised. This has the benefit of reducing the size of the grooves, leading to more revolutions per disc, leading to longer playing times. The master is then cut with the processed audio. When the record is played back, the player processes the sound through an inverse RIAA curve. The audio is re-equalized so that the amplitudes of the low frequencies are raised, and the high frequencies lowered, so they resemble their original equalization. Distortions are are introduced at every stage in this process.
This is a very brief explanation, so it is naturally missing other important information. I'm also very tired, so who knows what I'm forgetting. So to get to the point. Just because vinyl is "analog" doesn't mean that it's more accurate that digital. Both have natural advantages and disadvantages.
I remember discussing this issue a few months ago on slashdot.
The bottom line is that while one can prove that digital is at least more consistent than vinyl, one cannot prove that one or the other "sounds better" because it is largely a matter of aesthetics. Distortion (from original) by itself does not make a sound "bad". After all, musicians and artists purposely distort sounds for effect. But measuring the "goodness" of that is largely outside of the scientific realm.
Table-ized A.I.
There are probably some people out there who would buy $100,000 Hollerith keypunches.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Megahertz? Uh? Sound is registered in kHz, not MHz. Also, given a sufficient bitrate, you can store digital data at a higher precision than a vinyl album would ever be able to provide. So, in conclusion, you're wrong, and the person that moderated you is wrong.
That depends on where you press it.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
A proper set up (not necessarily an expensive setup) can make vinyl sound very good and make wear on the actual media negligible. However, most people have only heard vinyl on very cheap equipment that was improperly set up, which is no way to judge the format. The problem is that even with very decent equipment, properly setting it up is difficult as there are many variables (tracking force, anti-skate, overhang, vertical tracking angle, etc.). Some may argue that this difficulty is even more of a reason to go with CDs or some other digital format exclusively. These are the same type of people who argue that Linux is too difficult and that everyone should use Windows, as it is obviously superior. My personal reason for having a turntable is that a lot of excellent music is simply not available on any other format. The same also goes for vinyl: a lot of excellent music is not available on vinyl, which is why it is stupid to restrict yourself to only one format for any reason.
That "warm" sound is distortion. Some listeners may like it, but from a quality/reproduction standpoint it is most definitely a bad thing. If record companies really are selling vinyl again, they're probably just trying to make a quick buck on nostalgic idiots who are actually dumb enough to buy vinyl records in 2008. Even the record companies realize that online distribution is the next big thing.
Most of the problems with CDs and digital audio can be blamed on poor compression and the loudness war. I'm really sick of hearing the same old rants from vinyl fanboys... why is this even worthy of Slashdot's front page?
Oh, and technically speaking, vinyl has a finite bitrate. Once you get down to the molecular level, that is... so I'll have no more of this "vinyl has infinite quality" nonsense.
One of these days, I'm going to cut you into little pieces.
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/tech/2008/01/12/data.doctor.records.cnn
Coincidence? I think not!
I'm happy with my CDs. No room for defects in sound (unless you're careless with them), and 100% uncompressed digital audio. And now that Time said it's cool, look out for all major retail to start selling vinyl.
For me vinyl was always cool, but regardless of the arguments abount sound quality there's one feature that vinyl posesses for DJ's that's frequently overlooked - the user interface - the way you can control the music by dragging the record on the turntable, the way you can seek to the right point in the record just by dropping the needle in the right place - the way you can see the beats, the builds and the breakdowns on the media just by looking at the way the light reflects from the surface. That's why I still buy it, for performance purposes.
Now, there are many attempts to replicate the interface, either with the giant jog wheels on the CDJ's or vinyl control discs sending control signals to computers (Serato/MsPinky/Final Scratch) but while these bring advantages to the equation - mnamely being able to carry a larger selection in your record bag or laptop's disc - they still fall short of the pure vinyl experience in subtle ways.
Now I can listen to practically any track ever recorded, on demand and for free at sites like imeem.com when I love music I want the physical artifact and a vinyl version always gets more love from me.
Oh and vinyl is robust, I have 10 year old CD's that are turning brown and won't play, but I have 50 year old vinyl that still works just fine.
That's an expensive collection at 16.
I was thinking that my collection of 112 or so was a pretty heavy investment. It stood at just over a hundred when I was 19.
But, no, CDs are nice in that they don't have hiss.
They aren't so nice in that they drop out completely right in the range that young ears can still pick up timbre and definition. It's not -3db or -6db, it's a sharp cut. Absolute, unrecoverable compression to the square and then nothing.
On the other hand, true high fidelity sound systems are addicting in ways that CDs are not. I can still remember sitting in the music store at eighteen, listening to Katy Lied. (And they say Fagan and Becker were unhappy with the recording quality on that album.) CDs, I can listen to and work at the same time.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Vinyl degrades with each use; there is no getting around it.
:
Actually, you CAN get around it if you're willing to shell out $10k+
http://www.elpj.com/
-3db?
-6db?
square wave?
Yeah, good digital is noise free in storage and transmission. But the sampling rate is not high enough on CDs, so you lose a little something. I don't know if I can still hear it at 40+, but I could hear it when I was a teenager.
I do like the lack of hiss on CDs, but, if I could afford to be choosy, I'd prefer significantly higher sampling rates. It would be nice if audio on DVD had caught on. And/or if the guy who invented the laser pickup for vinyl hadn't been so successful at destroying his own tech and market.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
For MP3:s and other lossy formats the effect is that the lower and upper frequency ranges are stripped out, which also causes a loss of information and therefore gives a sloppier sound.
The vinyl records are a different kind of thing - but the disadvantage with vinyl is that those records slowly degrades over time where the upper frequencies are lost first. But a fresh vinyl record on a really good player is really an experience if it is a good recording.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Actually, it was two or three months ago, getting on the train at Minoo station. A gal had an old portable record player on a strap over her shoulder and was listening to it. But that's not the kind of vinyl hi-fi we're talking about here.
I don't think it was Sony, either.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
It couldn't be that hard to make a DSP degrade CD input to vinyl standards.
Regarding the inferiority of cd's, is there anyway to expand on the current format of cd recording technology, to make it even better now? Or is it the space limitation of the cd that makes them inferior to analog?
When audio is released on DVD's will we get "ultimate quality"?
Just wondering.
Your sig sucks
I've been buying old records for about seven years. I got into it because they were cheap. Heck, today I stuck my rack of CDs in a back room because they're all ripped neatly into iTunes. My records are proudly displayed under my TV, and I have a few hanging on the wall.
The thing with vinyl is that it's fun. I tend to "stumble" across rare records in stores, like my original pressing of "Switched on Bach,". About a year ago, I picked up a record of interviews with John Lennon that never made it to CD.
I have a Santana record that just can't sound as good on CD. It sounds like they played in time with 33RPM, this way that pops & clicks, and wow & flutter, will sound like it's part of the album. The digital version will be too clean.
I got into Air because their record had a cool cover. (I didn't buy the record because it turns out that a friend of mine already owned the CD.)
Likewise, I got into Synergy because the record had a cool cover. I've only listened to the record a few times, but I regular listen to Synergy on my iPod.
No, I will not work for your startup
Atomic level of tolerance would be significantly higher fidelity than any digital system we presently have.
But the problem is the appropriate sampling rate. CDs are really just barely high enough to satisfy the average consumer who wants to be able to tell a country fiddle from a classical violin. Which is pretty good, really. But the recording accuracy doesn't just fall off a few dbs at between 16 and 20 KHz. It goes to square wave.
The playback electronics does some nice interpolation in modern CDs, but there's only so much interpolation you can do between samples without generating sound that wasn't there. Failing to interpolate also generates sound that wasn't there.
Just for a data point, in the electronics lab when I was eighteen, I tested my hearing with a sine wave generator and a cheap five-inch speaker. (And I'm not talking about the modern ones with rare-earth magnets.) On a good day, I could hear to 19K, even with that cheap setup.
Don't try to tell me CDs are better than vinyl. I know better.
DVD Audio at 192 KHz, I'm not going to argue a lot with, but CD is killing that market. I'D prefer at least 16 times the CD's 22KHz sampling rate, to reduce high frequency artifacts.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
A lot of vinyl I've seen lately comes with a certificate for an mp3 download of the music on the record. This is cool because you have the mp3 on your portable, but you can play the record at home. At this point, having your music on physical media is mostly to have a physical object as a collector's item with the artwork and liner notes. A record makes a much better item because from most people's perspective, it's more physical than a CD, and since it's bigger, it allows for larger and better looking artwork.
There is nothing inherently better about the way vinyl sounds. It's down to the mastering. A lot of modern music has the life pummelled out of it during mastering due to the so-called "loudness wars" - my album has to sound louder than yours. CDs would sound much better than they do if the music industry were willing to take advantage of their vastly superior dynamic range.
When a track destined for vinyl is mastered, there are compression and equalization limitations due to the mechanical transducer used to reproduce that music - you just cannot squash the mix and pump up the bass as many people do with CD mastering. If you tried pressing a record with many modern CD master recordings, the stylus would jump out of the groove.
"Clean up the air and treat the animals fair" - Captain Beefheart
Something like this.
I'll doubtless get modded to hell for this but what the hey.
Have any of you ever heard an analogue master tape played on high end audio gear? I have. Have any of you heard a very high quality vinyl pressing of said master tape played on high end audio gear? I have. Have any of you heard high quality CD 24 bit mastered from the same master tape on said high end audio gear? I have.
Just so people understand this, I'll take this slowly.
The CD sounded great. Very crisp and clear. However, it sounded like a recording. The vinyl produced something of the ambience which was missing from the CD. This is probably down to distortions in the analogue playback system but those distortions did manage to produce a more lifelike sound than the CD did. However, neither was a patch on the master tape. The CD sounded harsh and thin, lacking the dynamics and clarity of the master tape. The LP was closer but still didn't sound real. With the master tape you would swear that you were there. Awesome.
On a scale of 1-10 where 1 is an MP3 and 10 is the master tape, the LP was about a 6, maybe a 7. The CD was a 4 at best and that was an audiophile CD, not the compressed to death crap that most CDs are. It is conceivable that SACD or DVD-A can get closer, maybe even all the way to a 10 but there is bugger all available on either format.
Don't quote Nyquist and human ears this and that at me until you have been exposed to the best analogue tape can offer.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
I own a few vinyls. There were a few that I can think of that sounded better to me on vinyl then in the cd form. I don't know why they sounded better, I just thought they did. My turntable doesn't keep pitch anymore, and I generally listen to mp3s now.
I'll say one last thing. People put down vinyl because it's not as accurate as digital. But accuracy is impossible to achieve in the sense you're going for. When artists record and master music, they listen back to it in a variety of different ways, certain speakers and settings which you have no idea of. And even if you knew, that still doesn't mean you can accurately reproduce what the artist/producer/engineer intended because they are frequently working in "translation" where they are listening back with a certain sound system, but they are actually keeping in mind what it will sound like on other sound systems, with no one way being defined as the exact way it should sound; they weren't intending anyone actually to listen to the music with a pair of studio monitors, even though that's how they were listening to it. So what then could possibly be the "accurate" sound? It's best not to get bent all out of shape over these things I think. The nice thing about vinyl is that you can buy some good albums for cheap at used record stores, but I suppose it depends on what you like, but anyone with a general appreciation for music who isn't too particular can find some good music on vinyl for real cheap.
Although hearing to the 20MHz range is a nice fantasy.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I think some people who didn't grow up with or aren't interested in vinyl may find it hard to understand what it is vinyl lovers see in it. There are a number of reasons: If you buy a CD it feels like you have been short changed because of the small size of the art work and a file doesnt even get on the scale. They don't even smell the same ! Good vinyl is not only warmer it has a clarity and fullness of sound which is clearly missing on CDs. I can hear the difference easily on my mediocre system. I think most people can hear it if they are honest. It may not matter to the majority of people but if you are a big music fan then it often DOES. Yes vinyl wears but its really not an issue if you treat right. The same is equally true of CDs. The amount of jumping CDs I have heard is probably more than worn records. Yes many DJs may be trying out digital solutions to the nightmare of carrying a load of wax. I can understand that. Portable music is great but where I really enjoy music is sat in front of my speakers with a few beers and good friends spinning some killer records. Try it you might like it
The "warmer, more nuanced sound" can be reproduced with your own CD player. Just use an equalizer and turn the top- and bottom frequencies way down, as the LP never managed to reproduce those properly. You can also slowly crumple up some paper for that added soft cracking sound in the background.
The LP was just never a very good reproduction of the sound in the studio.
But ok, some people prefer the sound the way it is distorted by reproduction via LP/record player, a matter of taste.
Kay: 'This is gonna replace CD's soon. Guess I'll have to buy the White Album again....'
The conspiracy theorist in me wonders how much the 'record' companies are milking the vinyl renaissance in a crass attempt to make the listening public buy music in yet another format (albeit one that isn't novel, but resurrected from the scrap-heap). I bet the labels are salivating at the prospect of remastering their back catalogues on vinyl and extorting another $10/album. I wonder how long until we have 8-track and cassette retrolutions. And don't forget 78's -- damn the sound of a steel needle on shellac brings back such memories. Ahhhhh!
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
...'How Shellac Got Her Groove Back'
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Yes we all know how wonderful vinyl sounds as the quality was universally good in every pressing. Naturally if you first heard something on vinyl that is the way it was meant to sound...right? All recording mediums have positive and negative qualities, and some of these have far more pluses than minuses. I once had a Woody Guthrie fan tell me in all earnestness that he felt the clay cylinder recordings were more representative of the music than LPs! Listen to what you want, it neither breaks my nose nor picks my pocket, but stop trying to convince me that there is some special over-riding purity in vinyl.
What I think is a trip is the new trend of mp3's ripped from vinyl at a high bitrate.
Now that's weird. And cool. And weird.
expandfairuse.org
I've been spinning vinyl for a couple of years now.
You can argue back and forth about the sound quality, warmth, comparisons to CD/SACD, and so on. Suffice it to say that vinyl sounds great and you don't have to spend $20k on it. A $400-$500 used Rega (or similar) will do fine, as will about $200-$300 on quality headphones. *Not* Bose, but Sennheiser, Grado, AKG, Beyerdynamic: the good ones. For those used to mass-market consumer sound (anything from a big box store, no matter the price) something like this will shock you with good sound.
The other benefit is that if you buy used, the music is cheap. Just got a dozen more today for a quarter each. That's only slightly more than an illegal download, except buying a used record is 100% legal. It does not put a cent in the RIAA coffers, and your money (typically) goes to benefit charity when you buy at a thrift store.
What's not to like? Great sound, inexpensive new music and your money goes to a truly good cause.
Guess what?
It's all in the production of an album/cd/whatever. Music these days is produced LOUD, period. There's no quality in production anymore and there's not been for a good 10 years now. That being said, as an audiophile I used to be all about vinyl, still am to a large extent. However I'll still listen to Pink Floyd DSOTM 30th anniversary edition cd before I'll listen to a 1st cut vinyl of DSOTM. There's stuff on the cd that you just don't hear on vinyl. All you pundits can talk out of your neck all you want AFAIAC, shitty production equals shitty releases. If you want to hear quality production go pick up some Dead Can Dance, Lisa Gerrard, PF DSOTM 30th Anniversary, and later Tool. If you PAY attention you'll hear for yourself why most engineers suck ass these days. That being said, alot of music that's put out is done in the home studios where you don't have an experienced engineer or producer that can mix properly and bring out all those little subtle sonic nuances. Currently I've got 10k albums in my collection but it's taken me buying close to 20k albums just to find and keep the ones that sound right so I can archive to FLAC.
EOF
Lets see... where to start.
1/ 16bit digital audio has about twice the dynamic range (numerically) of vinyl records. In fact 16bit digital audio has more dynamic range than the best professional analogue tape recorders - even when those tape recorders use good noise reduction techniques.
2/ 16bit digital audio has more than twice the channel separation (numerically) of vinyl records. In fact it has complete channel separation.
3/ 16bit digital audio does not require dynamic compression in order to fully capture and playback the entire dynamic range of a large orchestra. Vinyl requires dynamic compression for almost everything that is to be reproduced with vinyl, including capturing all frequencies below 1kHz.
4/ The simple process of tracking the "stylus" through the grove of the record damages the vinyl, deforms the grove and introduces distortion. It is simply not possible for a stylus to faithfully capture from the vinyl what was pressed onto the vinyl - even with the most expensive equipment. Most styli are not even capable of not jumping out of the grove in louder parts of the music.
5/ ALL music recorded in professional studios today is recorded digitally using either 16bit or 24bit recorders. The bit-rate is what determines the depth of the sound and the total dynamic range available. All vinyl does is introduce limitations and distortions.
AND they still say that vinyl has a superior sound. Well yes - it does - when you compare it with MP3s! But that really is not saying much.
Insipid hipsterism has has a lot of impact on people going back to vinyl.
I am an audiophile, but not a crazy one. I have a simple test for anyone's sound system. Try this out sometime.
Put one some music, preferably recorded live. Something with a single instrument--like guitar, violin, or sax. Make sure its something without amplification. Play it at a volume that gives you the illusion that the instrument is in the room. On a decent system and a good recording this shouldn't be too hard.
Now here is the test. Step into the adjacent room. Ask yourself if the illusion still exists. Does it sound like there is someone playing the guitar in the next room? Or does it sound like it's coming from a box?
Most setups fail this test. They will sound "boxy" somehow. My setup passes this test with flying colors. It wasn't that expensive put together. I don't have tube amps (distortion), turntable (more distortion), nor $5000 cables (useless). What I do have is a faithful reproduction of sound that was recorded. When listening to CD's, most distortions I notice these days are poor mixing, poor miking, poor eq, dynamic compression, and other terrible things done during production. And my speakers faithfully reproduces these without "warming" them or "soothing" them or something.
Oh, and vinyls sound like crap on my system.
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
Anyone knows that to be taken seriously in the deth metal scene you can only record on pure h2o. Find me one vinyl that sounds as good AND is as refreshing to drink!
http://greenobyl.com/ please.... think of the children!!
I'm still waiting for Laserdiscs to make a comeback.
> Vinyl does sound better than a 16-bit CD in quiet
> passages... MUCH better, actually.
Firstly, as I posted elsewhere, all music recorded today is recorded digitally using either 16bit or 24bit recorders. It is simply not possible for vinyl to improve on the sound of the original digital recording. Perhaps you are referring to the absolute necessity for recordings when being transferred onto vinyl needing to have most of the dynamic range compressed out of it in order to fit within the dynamic range of a vinyl record. 16bit digital audio has approx 100dB of dynamic range available. The only problem with digital audio that I have come across is having too wide a dynamic range for listening comfort and I'm needing to turn the volume DOWN for when the orchestra gets into the seriously loud parts.
> It has to do with bit depth which decreases as the audio level goes
> down. CDs are mastered with between 12db and 20db of headroom before
> absolute clipping, so you're only using about 14 of your 16 bits
> right there.
Actually, when I was *mastering* CDs I was wanting to have the peak volume no less than 3db from 0dBfs.
Also, the bit depth does not alter at all. It remains that the signal is still captured as a 16bit sample. The fact that the audio level may be capable of being STORED in fewer than 16bits does not change the fact that the voltage difference represented by, say, 65535 and 65534 up near the top end of the 16bit dynamic range is the same voltage difference that is represented between 127 and 126 down near the bottom end of the 16bit dynamic range.
If you take the same, 50dB accoustic signal and record it both digitally and using a good professional analogue recorder, (both set to be capable of capturing an accoustic peek of 96dB without distortion) and then digitally normalise the former to have a peek of, say, 1dBfs, and you playback the output of the former into the input of another likewise good professional analogue recorder, but this time amplifying the output so that it has a peek of 96dB, you will find that both will introduce their own types of distortion into the signal.
The trick really is to record it once, to set the recording levels correctly the first time, and to process the captured signal as little as possible between original recording and final mastering.
The fact that some CD players were so poorly manufactured that they could not cope with the fully dynamic range of 16bit digital audio without the analogue part of the digital/analogue converter itself starting to distort is not in any way a fault of digital audio. People experiencing that should go out and buy a CD player that can do what it claims it can do.
I once, on successive nights, heard a violin solo at the opera house, with no electronic assistance. The next night, I went to a Yanni concert which had a violin solo that had a mike attached to the violin, and was blasted over the speakers. There was a world of difference in the sound. Yanni had the best equipment, but speakers simply cannot duplicate the sound of a real instrument. It's a far larger gulf than 16 to 24 bits, or vinyl to CD. Try listening to a piano live sometime, or harp, or violin, or trumpet, or guitar, etc. It's not even close to the best stereo equipment.
Because low frequency sounds have much more "energy" than high frequency sounds, the sound on an LP is equalized before encoding onto the record. This equalization is done according to a standard curve so all playback equipment handles it roughly the same, and the equalization boosts the high frequency sounds by 20db while REDUCING low frequency sounds by 20db, with a crossover point at roughly 1khz. The exact constants are 314uS and 3140uS, or about 100hz and 10khz, above and below which the equalization is "shelved," or flat.
If this equalization were not present, it would be almost impossible for the LP record to exist, as the grooves on a record would have to be so far apart. It would also be very, very hard to get playback equipment to reliably track such a record.
Now, records are not just "cut" in a dumb fashion. Since the 70s at least, mastering equipment has been smart enough to move the cutter head across the record at variable pitch. In this way, passages that had a lot of bass content (and thus produced wide excursion of the stylus) could be recorded at a wider pitch than "average" tracks. In fact, it is this equipment which allowed those "extra long play" records of the late 70s to come into existence. Radio Shack sold a few of these featuring such artists as Arthur Feidler and the Boston Pops, and Earth, Wind and Fire, and these albums could play a half hour or more on each side. This was done by careful equalization and record level settings combined with variable pitch cutting of the master disk.
So far as excursion goes, no, it aint limited at all to anything like 2 mils. If you can find an old copy of Telarc's recording of Stravinsky's Firebird Suite and look closely at the record, you will see places where the groove pitch is about fifty times that! This was considered one of the benchmark tests of the day as many cartridges and tonearms could not play it without skipping. In fact, if you simply read some old equipment reviews of the 70s and 80s you will often find this recording to be one of the standard reviewers tests.
But what you completely missed is electrical noise. See, a standard phono cartridge has an impedance of 600 ohms. A 600 Ohm source impedance, at room temperature, has a fairly well defined noise floor. That is, barring any other source of noise, the simple thermal noise of the transducer itself can never go below a certain level. Given a "0db" standard for most phono cartridges of roughly 4.5mV, the noise floor can never me more than 76db below zero. This was, in fact, the source of some amount of fraudulent advertising during the "numbers race" of the 70s and 80s, when many manufacturers would claim phono s/n rations of upward of 100db. While one can most certainly make a preamp that can prodice this low noise output with a SHORTED input, connecting an actual transducer to the input throws that right to the wind. As a result the FTC mandated phono S/N be specified with a standard input impedance of 600 Ohms.
None of which _really_ means anything. Zero db on a phonograph is not a hard limit (as shown by the Telarc recording) and that noise floor does not mean no information can exist below -76db. But likewise, Digital recordings are not so "hard limited" either. Noise shaping allows much greater than 96db s/n floor across the midrange where it is most needed at the expense of higher frequency noise floor where it is less likely to be audible.
Basically, the difference between these two - outside the distortions implicitly mandated by the RIAA EQ curve and the electronics needed to accommodate it - comes down to mastering. Which adds new meaning to the phrase "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice..." When, in a few years, these kids buying vinyl have grown into twenty somethings with plenty of disposable income and are once again lured into replacing their "old vinyl collection" with new digitally mastered SACD recordings that are cut from the _analog_ masters (that sound good) rather than the CD masters where the signal was digitally comp
One RIAA Exec to another: "So, we issue this press release saying vinyl is better than MP3. All our problems are solved. Let's see the little fuckers try and download an LP"
Do you or your partner snore? - Visit www.snoring.com.au
Depends on what you consider the "warmth". If it's something introduced by a reproduction error in the vinyl medium it'll appear no matter what the source is.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I dont think CD is to blame for the lousy sound we see in most music today. My strong beleif is that all the various corrections make the sound flat and very unconvincing. Pitch correction of bad singers not only makes things sound better, it also takes away any variance in the singers way of expressing themselves with their voices. Compression which nowadays is standard also takes away any dynamics in the music. Its like a steamroller went over most recordings flattening them out.
While vinyl has better resolution at the cost of S/N i dont think the same exact recording sounds much different on a good CD or a good Vinyl player today. Our hearing isnt that good except for a very few people.
If something is to be done to get better sound its a big slap at the studios with a big clue-by-four and force them to stop cutting corners all the time.
HTTP/1.1 400
> The LP was just never a very good reproduction of the
> sound in the studio.
>
> But ok, some people prefer the sound the way it is distorted
> by reproduction via LP/record player, a matter of taste.
Mate, I agree with you. That's spot on the money.
Ok, fair enough. Now where can I get a portable phonograph that fits in my pockets and holds 50+ albums?
That's what the "audiophiles" claim, but that's not the way CDs are recorded. That mythical "number of bits" figure is mostly a marketing argument, digital recordings today are done in a way that eliminates quantization noise in the audible band
Digital recording technology isn't just a fad, if it were a new one would have replaced it by now. Digital is actually better than analog in *all* aspects, if done right. If done wrong, well, does a bad analog recording sound good to you?
The weakest link in sound recording and reproduction is almost always the conversion between electrical signals to sound and vice-versa. When people "compare" digital sound to analog they are often comparing listening to an ipod with earbuds with listening to a $100k analog system. Well, try to listen to the ipod in a pair of these $5350.00 speakers and tell me again again about those "warmer, more nuanced" sounds.
Turns out nobody actually cares, though. There are more important things to think about than insignificant/nonexistent differences in audio quality.
Or in other words: Vinyl isn't coming back because it's vinyl.
The sound quality is not the point.
Playing a phonographic recording is just a whole different experience, you more or less celebrate playing it.
MP3s on the other hand just are there at a touch of a button.
I guess one reasons for the rise of the vinyl record also was, that it was, till recently, one of the few media to get music legally from. MP3s were not commecially available till recently and legal CDs are hard to find. (of course there are a lot of pirated CDs on the market)
Why would bass be limited? I would have guessed you could burn a redbook audio CD containing one sine wave whose period is 80 minutes (0.2 millihertz).
I got my turntables last year & have been buying vinyl for a while...I mix old skool jungle mostly, but must say that vinyl is the s**t! You can definitely notice the quality there...
http://nathanlindsell.blogspot.com/
The DJ thing is pretty poplular right now. I think people wanting to "mix up" those phat club beats has played a big part in boosting vinyl sales.
... real audiophiles only trust the richness of wax cylinders.
...most of the old skool jungle I mix was only released on vinyl anyway, the real underground stuff always is, so it's always gonna be vinyl. Don't understand people who use CD mixers, they're not real DJs.
http://nathanlindsell.blogspot.com/
Ah, the kinds of things that "audiophiles" claim...
Probably the funniest was one on the HardwareCentral forum, which insisted that MP3's sound differently off different hard drives, and of course his superior ear can easily tell the difference between a Maxtor and a Seagate. He actually went into a funny (in a village idiot kind of way) theory about how it's recorded magnetically like on cassettes, and we all know how different magnetic coatings (e.g., iron oxide vs chromium oxide) in cassettes behaved differently in different frequency ranges. So it stood to (his warped lack of) reason that the same would happen to hard drives. Some would have better bass, some would have a greater dynamic range, etc.
Sad to say, no amount of explaining that a 1 is a 1 is a 1 on a hard drive and the MP3 read will be identical on any brand, made any difference. He was sure that that's nonsense, the magnetic coating of a HDD platter has no reason to behave differently than that of a cassette, and most importantly he had convinced himself that he can hear the differences. (Without a double-blind test, though. Funny how many "audiophiles" resent those three words.)
Also in the funny stupidity category, I submit to you such gems as:
- $1000+ power cables, and people swearing that their music sounds better with one,
- specially-tuned wooden volume knobs (no, seriously), and people swearing that their music sounds better with one,
- audiophile motherboards with one vacuum tube at the end of an otherwise 100% digital chain, and again people swearing that their MP3's sound closer to the original with that (never mind that it's really just adding the tube's own soft-clipping kind and harmonics, to those that the digital chain already introduced),
Etc, etc, etc.
It's just the emperor's new clothes story. Except the original story got it wrong. If you tell someone that only some kind of superior beings can see those clothes, or hear the subtle sound differences, they'll actually convince themselves that they really see or hear that. They won't fake it, they'll actually be convinced that if they squint just right, they kinda see the fabulous clothes on the emperor.
And a kid shouting "the emperor is naked", actually won't make any difference. That's actually what they want to hear. Being better is relative. You have to be better than _someone_. For you to be better, someone else has to be worse. So once they got it into their head that they must be one of the geniuses that see the clothes, other people shouting "The emperor is naked!" just provides ample "proof" that yup, others aren't that good.
In fact, here's an even more depressing parting thought: the more blatantly absurd and provably wrong something is, the more vehemently its advocates will defend it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Suits are back in style!
From college dorm rooms to high school sleepovers, an all-but-extinct clothing article has been showing up lately. And we don't mean the fanny pack. Suits, especially the luxurious wool pin-striped suit that helped define the golden era of business in the 1980s, are suddenly cool again. Some of the new fans are baby boomers nostalgic for their youth. But to the surprise and delight of fashion executives, increasing numbers of the Emo generation are also purchasing suits (or dusting off Dad's), buying ties and dressing to impress!
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
No point spending 5300 dollars on speakers when you're an average adult in this day and age in the Western world. You've probably got that much hearing damage by the time you're 30 that spending anything over a certain point (a few hundred dollars) is really not going to make that much difference. For small children maybe, but the rest of us have walked past that many pneumatic drills, been to funfairs and rock concerts, firework displays and walked alongside busy roads that really, spending the price of an auto on speakers is wasted money. For a small percentage of careful people they might make a difference, but if you spent any time as a teenage with ear bud headphones stuffed in your ears listening to music, forget it....
The only thing that's making vinyl sound good to 15-year-old kids is that modern producers are by and large shite button-monkeys who compress the fuck out of everything so it'll sound good when ripped to mp3 and/or played through tiny earphones or club sound systems.
The sort of engineers and producers who would care enought to produce a vinyl LP these days would probably also make damn good CDs.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
If vinyl cant do low end then why is a whole load of Drum and Bass released on it?
"Welcome to our world. We are the wasted youth. And we are the future too." Yes, I know these are stupid lyrics.
bzzt. wrong.
The assertion that 'all music recorded today is all recorded digitally using 16 or 24 bit recorders' is incorrect; 2-inch analogue multitrack is still widely used where vinyl production is a requirement.
Not every DJ is using CDJs/serato/foo yet.
Market still exists, demand is being filled.
--- Do you believe in the day?
One day 20 years ago in a college physics test, the teacher (who was a bit of a showman, as I think all college physics teachers are) had a massive looking amp and speaker setup at the front of the lecture hall (a '20s era building with the large lab bench up front). After a few minutes, he looked at us and said "What is the matter with you kids? Don't you know loud music is bad for you!" and went on to explain that he was pumping out about 120 db spl worth of noise at 23Khz and that he was going to demonstrate why we ought not waste money on speakers that claimed 20+ Khz response.
He turned down the frequency generator to about 10Khz (when we realized it was super loud) and then the volume and told everyone to raise their hand and then lower it when they could no longer hear anything. 90% of the class had their hand down when the frequency generator hit about 19Khz, and the ones left were all girls and nobody lasted to 22Khz.
The other one is high fidelity in cars -- even the nicest "riding" car I've ever been in (Jaguar) still has an audible road noise floor which makes fidelity in the car pointless, especially if you're a wanker in a Honda like me.
Flashforward to 2010:
CDs Gets Its Groove Back; Ripping a CD gives you better sound than downloading the track off the net. Music industry trying to relaunch the CD is claiming superior sound. "The bits gets scratched and dented a lot when traveling through the long pipes on the internet. When you rip a CD, the bits only travel through the shorter pipes inside your computer, and does not get as many scratches"
Audiophiles also claim to be able to hear the difference.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
"Warmer" an "Nuanced" and other such words that have absolutely NO quantitative value re used regularly by the snakeoil salesmen called Audiophiles.
There is absolutely NO way that vinyl sounds "better" than CDs. What ever argument you want to put forward, to human beings with our method of processing sounds, A CD with the same source of audio data will reproduce that audio data more faithfully than vinyl. Period, end of discussion. It is up to the audiophiles to disprove this statement.
The nonsense words like "nuanced" and "warmer" and so on are merely way audiophiles with seemingly no real background in engineering, or like fundamentalist christians, somehow fail to shine the lite of reason on their beliefs, are merely ways of describing the distortion that vinyl mechanics adds into the audio.
Now, "sound" and "music" are different and I will grant that there are a lot of things that make recordings sound "pleasing" that are not the quantifiable, but somehow I don't think it is the job of the audio delivery system to inject its own crap into the system.
Also, Audiophiles have an impossible and contradictory view on audio. They'll argue that $7000 speaker cables are worth the money (http://www.pearcable.com/) while also arguing that vinyl is better because it is "warmer" i.e. distorted.
Audiophiles are idiots and they are nothing more stupid people with too much money to spend on stuff that is he electrical/audio equivalent of placebos. In psycho-acoustic terms, if you think it sounds better, then it sounds better. If you are gonna pay $7000 for a cable set and $1000 on your turntable, you have a vested interest in the sound of your system sounding better, so it will. (to you)
Maybe I shouldn't argue with Audiophiles, maybe I should sell them "oxygen free" copper cables at $250 a foot.
You need to listen to recent music pressed on vinyl vs old vinyl. Then also compare old vinyl albums with the version on CD.
Why? an old album will have been recorded on tape and used classic analog amplifiers, maybe even some valve kit here and there. The modern album is very likely to have been mostly digitally processed.
Simply listening to a modern album and then going back to something recorded in the 70s does not prove that CD or MP3 is less vibrant, it just proves the difference in recording technology. Listening to the same classic album on CD will determine if the format is colouring the sound.
I know it's a joke, but you really are onto something. Back in the day, you would punch out your program on cards and send it off to the computing facility to run in the overnight batch. You'd think a lot more about getting the program right first time. If there was a bug, the best possible result was that you would submit the corrected program for the next overnight batch, and you would lose a day; but since computer time was severely limited, you might not be allowed a slot in the next batch, and you'd lose even more days waiting until you were allowed another slot.
These days, people are far too eager to jump into the debugger, or to just try running something to see if it works. This culture leads to a lot of obscure, since the program isn't designed to be correct, and examined critically in an attempt to say with reasonable confidence that it really is correct but is simply run by the developer. The whole "works for me" syndrome.
> If you ever have the chance to meet someone who insists on recording
> the drums on two inch tape, be polite and ask to listen to it.
They're probably wanting to get the compression that you get on analogue tape.
They do it as a sound effect.
I am playing with vinyl for over 15 years now; got more than 30,000 now and it's one of the only formats I really ENJOY playing with. Not only it can be handled on a much more accurate way with immediate tactical response, it also gives the sounds "smoother" and "deeper" because the frequencies are not cut off at 44.1khz.
;)
The difference is easy to hear even, I've shown it dozens of times to people who reacted the same like you did. I've had released press which was put on CD and on Vinyl, I've got the original here in my groovebox and samplers; the difference was noticible. In a way that vinyl in a club is still grooving those speakers down the neighboorhood, while cd's don't have that extra touch..
The difference has become smaller within the years because a lot of studios deliver their sounds (volume) mastered up, loosing a lot of the details of the song because of limiting, normalizing, etc so it sounds +/- the same because of some added distortion in the field...
It's not really especially in the cables, they will only give the possibility to lower any background noise by using supershielded cables. This makes an important difference in studios, although using expensive monstercables with golden plated connectors is a little bit too far out of reach; since most household applications are not even connected/installed right (like using RCA to connect their television to their surround sets, pulling RF noise from the outside to the inside of their house...
If you really want to be sure your installation is hum-buz-noise free, connect everything digitally, avoid ground loops and if you are going to play vinyl; DON'T get better/expensier cables than the ones hanging on your turntables, because the signal won't get better since it comes out of the turntable anyways.
If your source has silverplated connections the golden plated cables won't really make any difference except in your wallet. I've bought myself KRK RPK6 speakers for example; they are sounding GREAT for studiowork; they costed me 200 euro / piece while I could buy studio monitors of 1000 (or more) euro / piece with only a tiny difference in frequencies; which will be hearable whenever multiple sources are playing at the same time. Why did I pay 200? Because I didn't think the 1600 other euros (with the 2nd including) is not worth the price for that small range of frequencies I mostly don't hear anyways
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
> The assertion that 'all music recorded today is all recorded
> digitally using 16 or 24 bit recorders' is incorrect; 2-inch
> analogue multitrack is still widely used where vinyl production
> is a requirement.
And, of course, music sold on vinyl totals approx 0.2% of the overall market of music sales.
You are obviously trying to apply the experience and skills of one area (one you have) to another (which you don't.) Recording is not analogous to database design. "Digitally normalise". To the fourth digitally normal form, right? M'kay.
Normalisation is a fairly standard thing to do with a digital audio file. See here about two-thirds of the way down the page. 'Normalise' is a standard plugin in most audio software. I can't decide whether you're trolling or not, but if you're not you should at least Google before ridiculing someone.
By the way, digital normalisation is a kind of post-production compression where the peaks at each part of the signal are set to just below digital maximum. It's one of the most extreme forms of loudness maximisation.
A CD stores 44.1KHz 16-bit stereo PCM data. At it's max it can safely reproduce tones across the entire hearing spectrum with a maximum dynamic range of 96dB. How many "modern" recordings and re-releases do you think make use of the range of a CD? Answer: Very few.
As for MP3s most are bandlimited to a top of ~18KHz or so, so yeah you lose the high end, but that's rarely noticeable. If you use a good codec (like LAME) the quality of ~200kbps VBR is for all intents and purposes indistinguishable from the original in all but very non-trivial cases.
So before we all go hyper-mega-insane buying vinyl and what not, let's consider that the source material is shit anyways. You don't think that they wouldn't use range compression on vinyl to keep up with the loudness wars?
I think Wikipedia can explain this one for you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_normalization
Its purpose is to make the best use of the available dynamic range. By adjusting the highest peaks to "just below clipping" you avoid using up dynamic range for headroom. Of course this only makes sense if the original recording has a greater dynamic range than the target, otherwise you would just increase the quantization noise along with the audio signal. That is why studios like to use 20 or 24 bit digital equipment.
As an example, assume the sound engineer leaves 10 db of headroom during recording. Then
1) On 16 bit equipment with 96 dB dynamic range, you get an actual S/N ratio of 86 dB. The 10 dB headroom are lost, normalization would be pointless.
2) On 20 bit equipment with 120 dB dynamic range, you get an actual S/N ratio of 110 dB. In this case, you can convert the 20 bit recording to a normalized 16 bit recording that has a S/N ratio of 96 dB. This is how you make the best use of a digital format with limited dynamic range.
On a more personal note, the way you ridicule GP over a few spelling errors deserves modding down as troll. Especially since you obviously don't understand all of the involved concepts yourself.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Oh please: that is simply not true.
16bit or 24 bit "recorders"??? Checking... yes, you said recorders. And it's a plus 4 insightful mod. Hey kids! Thanks for the reminder that slashdot is not where you go for informed pro audio discussion.
So, are you trying to say that it is inaccurate to call a device used to record sound a "recorder"?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I am playing with vinyl for over 15 years now; got more than 30,000 now and it's one of the only formats I really ENJOY playing with. Not only it can be handled on a much more accurate way with immediate tactical response, it also gives the sounds "smoother" and "deeper" because the frequencies are not cut off at 44.1khz.
Audiophile nonsense, do you think you can hear 44khz? Are you smoking crack? "Smoother?" "deeper?" Nice nonsense words. What are you trying to say? Use an acceptable descriptive vocabulary please. Do you think your speakers can reproduce 44khz? The best tweeters cut off around 25khz. Now, if you have a gold foil ultrasonic transducer in your speakers, you may be able to get 44khz, but only the bats will hear it.
Now on to the TOTAL nonsense of expensive cables. PLEASE in the AUDIO frequency range, a good finely stranded wire from a hardware store of sufficient gauge to carry the current driving the speakers is indistinguishable from anything more expensive. Unless you can claim that (1) speakers can reproduce RF noise and (2) you can hear it. You can do better just keeping them away from 60hz AC, but even then, it is hard to induce enough power into a single wire to actually hear. Even then, slip you hardware store wire into an electric drill and make twisted pair.
None of the continuing arguments address the premise of my post: "A CD delivers a more faithful reproduction of the source audio." Please keep the audiophile babble to a minimum. You may "prefer" on over the other, but that is YOUR preference, you just happen to like the distortion of vinyl.
See also: "irony"
"Perhaps you are referring to the absolute necessity for recordings when being transferred onto vinyl needing to have most of the dynamic range compressed out of it in order to fit within the dynamic range of a vinyl record."
What?
Find a copy of Telarc's recording of the 1812 overture on vinyl. The grooves for the cannon blast look like a 3 year old took a sharp nail to the vinyl. I first heard this in the early eightys at Bjorn's in San Antonio on a huge McIntosh system with Klipsch corner horn speakers. The cannon blasts just about knocked your breath out.
While some turntables won't play it (the tone arm comes out of the groove when it hits the blasts). It does not take a $10,000 turntable/cartridge combination to play the recording. My Dual 1245 with a Shure V15/IV (a very modest combination) would play it just fine.
Yes, I'm sure that some amount of compression comes into play on a normal vinyl recording. But "most of the dynamic range"? Hogwash.
Let me prefix this by saying first, I've prided myself in being an avid audio enthusiast. I own my fair share of high end audio gear, and am quite adept at building my own speakers (and speakers for others) and I have the benefit of being friends with some people that have been audiophiles for 30 plus years, one in fact, owns a small audio shop near where I live.
Now one day, during a small gathering while he was packing up the store for a move, which he did several times over the years, some of the select few of us were invited into the store for a small party of sorts. We all brought something to the mix, be it recordings or audio gear of some kind, or even a case of grape soda.
One of the guys that was invited, brought along his Kuzma Stabi Reference turntable. He had it fitted with a Van Den Hul cartridge, which ran through a Michael Yee Audio phono preamplifier. All said, I think the turntable and electronics he had set up totaled around $5000 USD, however I'm not sure about what the price would be in today's market. Probably pretty close.
After setting up, we did some comparative listening. We had the benefit of having several recordings that were pressed on vinyl as well as released on CD. Now, the system used for CD playback was by no means a slouch, I believe we were using the shop's Acurus ACD-11 at the time.
We played the releases on CD first. We were treated to the normal feats that CD provides, the details of which I won't go into here. We were very familiar with most of these recordings as the shop owner had been using them in the store, some of them for many years to demonstrate Hi-Fi gear. After we had listened to them, we switched over to the turntable to hear the vinyl versions.
Folks, if you have not had the chance to do anything like this for yourselves, I suggest that you try it. The difference is staggering. The image opens up to triple it's original size. The depth of space pushes back, and opens upwards. The sound that was once sitting patiently inside the speakers stands up as tall as the ceiling, looming over your head and wrapping it's arms around you. It's nearly impossible to describe to anyone who has not experienced it.
People like to compare digital audio and analog audio to the difference between digital and analog tv, but that really isn't a fair comparison. That would be like comparing analog radio to digital radio. I prefer to think of it more like, analog audio is like film. Either in a movie theater or a real photograph from a camera. Digital audio is like a DVD or a photograph from a digital camera. The only problem is, we're stuck at 2 mega pixels. Sure, there have been advancements in digital audio, but it's still nothing near what you get with the right gear and a good analog recording.
Set up your own test and try it. Don't quote numbers and theories. Just go down to a good audio shop that sells turntables and try it. Chances are if they sell turntables, they are already prepared to do the vinyl comparison.
Windows has more viruses because linux has more virus coders.
A lot of electronic music is still released on vinyl for the DJ scene... and the warez scene laps it up - they manage to get damn good sounding VBR mp3s out of vinyls.
"Anonymous could not immediately be reached for further comment." - International Business Times
vinyl is alive and well
FAQs are evil.
I get it - vinyl is making a huge come back. The sales are soaring, the serious audiophiles, DJs, enthusiasts, etc buy nothing else; the CD (and probably digital downloads) are in their last death-throes - finally, vinyl's warmth, nuance, and various other magicks have won the day!
My question is, how many freaking times do we need to hear about it?
And always with the same identical comments, making the same identical points (yes, this is one of them).
Just give it up already, nobody cares about vinyl's magical properties that can only be experienced on $25,000 hardware and a mastering process that has little to do with any of today's recording companies'.
Yes, a 128kbps MP3 will sound like shit, but no, the obvious solution for most people isn't to go to the least convenient format since the wax cylinder (it is for some, but then there is also apparently a market for $1,000 wooden volume knobs).
sic transit gloria mundi
A 15 year old??? Obviously this youth has become disenchanted with todays choices of so-called "music" for people his age, and so like my own kids; he is going to see what his parents listened to and probably liked it a lot. There is little or no "hip-hop" and "rap crap" that I know of produced on vinyl--at least nothing here in Minneapolis area. There are those few artists that decided to also market vinyl but it was a marketing experiment more than anything else. The CD's still outsold them by far. All new music going back to the mid 90's that I can find is all end-user produced on CD anymore with vinyl just not available. Even our local favorite; "Cheapo" who used to advertise they carried vinyl, now only has CD's and some tapes because nobody buys vinyl.
So this also begs the question how true is this article? I listen to MP3's on my Apple iPod; but all my MP3's are ripped from the CD's in high quality modes usually stereo 2 track (not joint) with 256 or 320 bit sizing. There is an audible difference with 128 and the others that use this as default, and even Apple's own 128 bit native format in iTunes is not that hot.
I do have a portable Sony EQ that I used to use with my old Sony Walkman (TPS-L2) way back when...; but almost never anymore since going titanium on the phones--they have a hugely hot bottom end!
So; I don't get it. Under my titanium headphones which are of exceptional audio quality, and my iPod; I only hear problems with MP3 at the 128 bit rate, but not higher rates. And; I'm a working musician with studio experience. I like and still own a lot of vinyl myself but prefer putting them in digital format. What gives??
All content in this message is copyright (c) 2008. All rights reserved. RIAA is prohibited here.
But its not as convenient, which is how the world works today.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Actually, I think you'll find that replacing a $300 CD player with a $300 turntable in just about any system will yield huge improvements. There is just such a big difference in the source material, it transcends the rest of the system. Garbage in-garbage out.
Come on, only the dust makes it difficult to enjoy. There is no comparing a cd with vinyl. But bringing vinyl back could be a great way for the music industry to make up for the lost money from piracy. Vinyl cannot be copied (not to another cheap vinyl "rewritable" anyway). Could this be another propaganda? I know the world is not going to switch to vinyl or anything other than mp3 for that matter but still, this 15yr old kid is a good example of why it could bring back some money, or to make us believe it is better. And since nobody in this forum ever mentioned a scheme behind this, the propaganda may already be working and some of you may already fallen for it and rushed off to buy the new vinyl releases that have "incidentally" popped up just in time with the "story" they just sold you...
...unfortunately to realize the biggest ones you would probably need two turntables, and optionally (though it is highly recommended), a microphone.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Actually, normalisation is the least extreme form of loudness maximisation.
It does not audibly change the signal at all, apart from a volume increase.
There is no dynamic range compression of any kind going on.
Normalisation to 0dbfs is identical to turning up your master fader until the highest sample peak in the song hits zero. This does not add distortion of any kind, as you are not going over zero.
You can normalise to other levels too, it does not have to be zero db.
This is always done as an off-line process, as the audio has to be analysed first to find it's highest peak.
If you want extreme loudness maximisation, you want a fast look ahead peak limiter and multi band compressor.
with that kind of thinking.. ever thought of a job at Microsoft?
Reading TFA, I see the 15-year-old in question is from the St. Louis, MO, area. No doubt his vinyl fascination has been fueled by having a good record store to shop at like Vintage Vinyl. I posted on the vinyl-vs-CD/MP3 discussion the last time this was on Slashdot, but let me add this time that actually having a good store to go to, that stocks both new and quality used vinyl, adds a lot of fun to being a vinyl aficionado. And, yet again, vinyl never went away and it's never going to. It will only see dips and spikes in popularity.
:q!
I also think you are completely wrong. Please provide references to support your claims.
Throwing out the 'audiophiles are crazy' argument is like saying 'Arabs are bombers'. The truth is that there are huge communities of people who simply love well recorded and reproduced music, and they buy quality equipment and enjoy finding ways to improve the experience.
Then there are the neurotic OCD types who have to constantly spend money to satisfy some other psychological desire (and they occur in other hobbies as well). They are the ones for whom much of this crazy audiophile stuff is made. It doesn't matter if the company responsible only sells 15 a year if there's 1700% profit in the AC-cord-as-thick-as-a-garden-hose-to-keep-out-evil-spirits (never mind that no amount of petition will get the power company to install an audiophile quality sub-station).
I collect a lot vinyl. A lot of my LP's sound better than the CD versions of the same material. I'm not sure it's digital's fault, it's probably just a fact of mastering. The best playback I've ever heard was a $20K+ all analog rig, however, and the quest to re-capture that sound has brought me a lot of pleasure.
well, i'm sure people could debate all day on what formats sound the best. the bottom line with vinyl is that its outdated and cheap.. I personally love going to the thrift shop and pickin up 10 records for $10.. plus you end up owning a nice novelty item that can actually be used.. whether its actually listening to the record, reading the humongous over-sized inserts, or just framing it as a cool piece of art work.. but i dont really think it sounds *better*.. it has its own unique sound that some people are looking for.. use it for what its worth, dont over-hype it because I don't want records appreciating in value.. it's the last thing the RIAA needs..
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
"Bad sound on an iPod has had an impact on a lot of people going back to vinyl"
Yes, because portable audio and hi-fi are the same target market. Fact is, a lot of people have so-so hearing, and most of the rest simply don't give a crap, just like some people don't care about HDTV. The iPod's popularity is proof that its quality is "good enough" for most.
Sure, good vinyl can sound a LOT better than MP3 and even CD, but it's not a hard and fast rule, and more importantly it's a difference that very few people can actually hear. The way the source material is mixed/mastered will usually level the playing field, at least for popular music where there's isn't much detail to be heard in the first place. I'm also the kind of wacko who can often guess what kind of mics and preamps were used on a recording, but I'm well aware that I'm part of a very tiny minority of audio freaks.
Apple could make a pro-audio iPod with built-in T-amp and 1/4" jacks, but it just wouldn't sell. 99.44% of the music comes from 44khz/16 CDs, and not many people are going to invest another $200-300 for a decent set of over-the-ears headphones. Today's music just isn't worth that kind of investment.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Every time I see these kinds of "discussions" about vinyl vs cd I just chuckle to myself. On one side you have the religious zealot vinyl "audiophiles" on on the other side you have the "scientific" cd devotees. The "audiophiles" love to boast about how much money they spend and how the magical pixies bless their vinyl and how their vinyl gods will smite you while the other "scientific" side boasts about the cd's improved frequency response, lower distortion, and how vinyl costs BILLIONS to reproduce sound anywhere near as good.
The thing is sound is subjective. Everyone has different ears that pick up sound slightly different. Everyone has different tastes as well. Get over it. But some of the things people say are ridiculous. Cd's are more convenient, don't degrade with use (although they DO degrade over time, and degradation is much less graceful), and playback is generally more accurate to the original performance.
Vinyl is much less convenient, requires regular care, degrades with use, is easy to eff up if you are a clod, takes up more space, and is basically less accurate. The thing with vinyl, though, is that it's flaws on paper usually sound good to the ear. Depending on the type of music, lack of higher frequency response may not matter. The lack of frequency response also tends to tame any "harshness" in speakers. As for harmonic distortion, I haven't ever met a person who dislikes the sound of it (think THX sound before a movie). Obviously, excessive harmonic distortion will make a recording sound like ass, but vinyl in decent condition on decent equipment isn't going to overdo it.
Another point is that the $10000-$20000 claims people make for good sound equipment (and this goes for ANY sound format) are such bullshit that I can't even begin to fathom how ungodly stupid the people who make those claims are. As far as vinyl goes, a good sub $200 table with an upgraded cartridge (another $50-60) is plenty good to be able to take full advantage of a vinyl record. Another $500 could buy you a very nice amp. As far as speakers go, they tend to be overpriced so I build all of my own. Doing so, one can get $1000 worth of speaker for $300 in parts and a weekend spent in the "shop" (garage - cars + sawdust in my case).
Back to cd vs vinyl. What it boils down to is one's taste and music preferences. IMO, classical music and oldschool rock (60-70's) sound better on vinyl. 14KHz+ is a moot point, the harmonic distortion just gives it that extra "oomph", and overall sound is less fatiguing. Anything with an electronic sound sounds far better on cd. The extra range is needed, and warmness is undesirable. I've never listened to any modern rock or progressive music on vinyl, but I'd imagine modern rock would be better on cd. As far as progressive, that'd be a tossup..... hmmm.... All of that is my OPINION, though. Music is subjective and if you feel differently I'm cool with that.
At any rate my point is get over yourselves STFU NOOBS!!!!11!1!LOLOLOLZ
Yeah, right. Vinyl is making a comeback. Like when a football team kicks a field goal at the end of 42 - 3 loss is a comeback.
the human ear can hear things we can't measure yet.
False, obviously false. This is a classic snakeoil response. We can put people on the moon, we can measure sub-atomic particles, but nope, we can't measure sound. Yup, our science is so lacking.
the ear does use phase-angle information to determine the location sounds originate from,
False, we have two ears and that's how we track position. There are some theories that pressure from sounds on our physical bodies may assist that, and that makes sense, but no, we do not use phase angle relationships.
Now, I did do some work on a phased-array ultrasonic range finder in the 1980s, that was fun, but the hammer, anvil, and stirrup in your ear certainly can't reproduce it.
16-bit audio absolutely destroys the waveform, especially in the high end
It largely depends on the sampling frequency.
brightness?
Audiophool nonsense.
isn't all messed up trying to fit a 16-kHz tone into three pieces of a 44kHz sampling rate.
Sigh.
Audiophools are a prime example of a fundamentalist, just like christians or muslims, republicans, democrats, or Ron Paul supporters.
Audiophools must not understand electronics very well, as such any in depth discussion of why they are being foolish is lost because a lot of solid knowledge is needed. They don't seem to have the intellectual curiosity or something. They believe what they believe and that's enough. They learn enough jargon to support their position, and can spread it out thick enough for the average joe to say "that makes sense."
Some know they are lying, but they are doing it to sell equipment. Some are completely clueless people with no engineering or science background that have fallen for the junk science and merely parrot it back. Worse yet are the people who should know better.
In the world of audio electronics aka 20hz ~ 20khz, the parameters of transmission and storage of audio signals is well understood. It isn't rocket science. Digital is better than analog. Now, in the field of transducers, i.e. the devices that pick-up sound and those that re-create it, that's an interesting field that continues to advance, but that's more physics than electronics.
In the audiophool world, "warmer," "richer," "depth," "brightness," etc. are just nonsense describing the kind of distortion the system injects into the audio signal. There is a vocabulary for describing signals, and audiophools don't use it.
GP was not talking about a 44.1 kHz sine wave, but about a 44.1 kHz sampling rate. In order to reasonably reproduce a 20 kHz signal, you'd need at least twice the 44.1 kHz sampling rate
Granted, my old ears probably can't hear above 15kHz, still the artifacts produced by a 44kHz sampling rate could be heard on good enough equipment.
no rootkits!
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
...Vinyl is not immune against someone compressing ... Expect such stupidity to happen shortly
Compression is a by-definition requirement of ALL media, from the microphones (too high a sound pressure level will cause distortion and eventually damage), to the master tape (which has a very broad, but not limitless range of loudness representations available to it) and ESPECIALLY for vinyl -- which doesn't have much range between "so loud the needle will jump, or the sound will bleed thru to the adjacent tracks, 1/33 of a minute earlier or later" and "down in the crud of pops, ticks and just noise."
As you might expect, compression technology was created to address vinyl's limitations, and was used heavily then. It became even more valuable for radio, since AM has much tighter constraints (although lower expectations) and FM has slightly tighter constraints.
CDs have a very wide dynamic range, so higher compression of late is an "aesthetic" choice by the producers. And those same producers might correctly think that some people who want a different sound will pay more for vinyl as opposed to people who listen over iPods, radios or CDs, who might be less discriminating, and so compress all but vinyl more heavily. But that doesn't make vinyl superior, because it's worse. The MP3 and AAC formats, as well as virtually all portable players, have much more potential for quality music.
The weak link in the chain is still typically the speakers/phones. Exacerbated by standing waves in the empty space between the ears, in the case of people applying the anti-solution to misunderstandings of the problem.
"Inquiring Minds Want to Know!"
Are tags broken if someone can get wikkawikkaretro as a tag? So basically anything can be tagged anything relevant or not?
But not because of any mystical property of their stereo equipment. It's a purely psychological effect for anything they feel good about. Because they feel good about their expensive setup (probably _because_ it's insanely expensive) it sounds better to them. But you lose that in double-blind because the effect is purely psychological. Very real, but it is all in their head.
But hey, marketing figured this out ages ago and realized that they could sell all kinds of ridiculous crap to them for hefty sums.
In order to reasonably reproduce a 20 kHz signal, you'd need at least twice the 44.1 kHz sampling rate
Yes and no. I was working at Brooktree about 20 years ago and we built an arbitrary waveform generator that was able to produce a sine wave more than 4 times the frequency we were able to produce with the generator. We electrically tuned the output to resonate at the frequency we wished to produce, and drove the circuitry at the proper fraction of the frequency we wished to produce. Also, we were able to shape the wave by driving different voltages at different points on the wave form, still below the actual frequency we were trying to produce.
The point of this is that while Nyquist is 100% correct in an abstract, audio doesn't need to be 100% correct, its all an approximation affected by atmospheric pressure, dust, etc. The amount of distortion introduced by vinyl is far more than any affects of the CD.
$5000 of gear made that big a difference? Hmm. I used to have a phonograph as a wee tot, and who knew that I could get that tinny sounding rig to sound phenomenal if I'd put $5000 worth of additional hardware behind it.
I hear what you're saying and I've heard it a number of times, and I remain skeptical. And yes, I've taken the Pepsi Challenge as you've suggested. Vinyl is not "richer" nor is it any other sort of comparative adjective you use to describe it. In order to get the full experience of any recording, only two things matter: the quality of the recording and the quality of the playback unit. To this day, mastering is done on ANALOG equipment and transferred to DIGITAL format. Why? That question I can't answer, however, here is where the comparison falls to irrelevance.
Can you imagine something getting lost in the translation? A copy of a copy of a copy... and so forth? I would suspect that recording on digital equipment and pressed into digital format (which has the benefit of being lossless, which analog to analog or analog to digital can't boast) would have the "richness" you perceive in vinyl.
Even if you tried desperately to get apples to apples comparisons between digital and analog audio, you will never even approach it unless the recordings are in the native format. Pull any CD out of any collection, and almost in every case you'll see AAD on it. That's analog recording, analog mastering, digital copy. This means you are getting the WORST recording possible. Analog recording to analog mastering? LOSS. Analog mastering to digital copy? LOSS.
It's small wonder that vinyl, being a "native" format of analog audio sounds "richer" than a CD burned from the same recording.
There is nothing more rich and warm than the pops and clicks of dust particles that would be present even if the turntable were in a ISO Class 1 cleanroom.
"Warmer more nuanced sound" means "high frequencies clipped."
The trick to getting seriously good audio has nothing to do with audio reproduction equipment. All music is subjective; it's an emotional experience.
Stop paying $10000 for a 'sound system' and wanking endlessly on Slashdot about specs and which recording sounds better. Get yourself a $100 electric guitar and a simple but good headphone amp. A $1 LM386 audio amp IC and a couple of resistors/capacitors from a trashed stereo works fine.
Download some tab files of your favorite songs (the ones that you were going to use to judge the quality of your $10000 stereo system) and some MIDI files of the same songs (if you can find them still on the web).
Learn to play them on your guitar.
It takes a little time, sure. But the results are often feel better than endlessly listening to the same recording on a $10000 system (even with Monster cables).
And I assure you that you will be hearing parts and intricacies of the music that you didn't notice before learning to play the songs yourself on your own instrument. Even if you're listening on a $5 garage sale cassette Walkman.
Music is subjective. It is what you make it to be. 20-year-old Eddie Cochran, John Lennon, Eddie Van Halen, or Carlos Santana didn't need $10000 sound systems to make incredible music. Neither do you.
Don't we get this story like every 3 months?
Seriously?
I'm not sure if that was supposed to come off as an insult, but it sure as hell didn't. Microsoft is one of the most successful companies in the world.
Your "CD delivers a more faithful reproduction of the source audio" is not right either, it's also being remastered towards todays standards where music explodes down your ears. I just have noticed very often the vinyl copy of a master sounds a lot better than the CD copy; Vinyl seems to be produced better than the todays dynamically compressed stuff available on CD. Very noticable on some Depeche Mode, Pink Floyd and Kraftwerk albums.
;)
...
When you start layering audio, those samples loose their natural definition which is quite nice to hear through vinyl and cut off on CD. Try it, you don't need superdeluxe speakers; get a good headphone with a good frequency response; listen to the mastertape which is the closest representation of the recording; listen to the same recording on vinyl and CD. CD will sound "more crisp" but "flattened out" while Vinyl will sound "deeper" where CD just cancels out some of those sounds. I don't need to be smoking crack to feel my music
About those cables, having lots of audio cables together and shielded cables will be a heaven to use; I can't really have any interference to be on any of my devices in my studio (would sound bad on the master); I am not using super-expensive cables although I am for sure using durable connectors which are priced some more together with shielded cable.
I don't really call "wanting to hear those subtle differences" any audiophile nonsense; some people like their coffee black, some like it with cream; I don't like coffee. Just like the dozens of styles there are dozens of different setups and perspectives to look at it. The most important for me is that I always -want- to hear those subtle differences.. That little more.. Just like those bonusses on some DVD's. This does not mean I got a half-million-dollar studio here; I can achieve same qualities with lower costs and healthy thinking & planning too
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Because the people who listen to Drum and Bass are a bunch of wankers who wouldn't know good sound if it kicked them in the butt. The only legitimate use for Drum and Bass is for pissing off other drivers at stoplights. Man, I just wonder why they spend so much money on a car system that just buzzes the trunk hinges.
On a more personal note, the way you ridicule GP over a few spelling errors deserves modding down as troll. Especially since you obviously don't understand all of the involved concepts yourself.
Eh, you're right. That was lame, and I'm obviously not as informed as I'd like to think.
Apologies to the grandparent. I started to make a point --that analog recording isn't quite dead yet-- then just veered into being a inaccurate jerk.
Vinyl as a hifi medium is vastly inferior to the 16-bit 44khz CD. This is not a surprise, as sampling theory pretty much dictates this outcome. Vinyl does sound different, essentially because of (a) the imperfections inherent in the stylus/groove mechanism, and (b) the attempt to compensate for some of those imperfections by pre-warming the spectrum while recording to vinyl, followed by further spectrum manipulation during playback. That some people may prefer the end result of these maneuvers in the vinyl pipeline is simply a matter of preference, but this in no way legitimizes the claim that records are a higher fidelity technology than CDs. If a vinyl record is digitized to a CD, the playback of such a CD is indistinguishable from the playback of the original record... even to these vinyl "audiophiles".
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
I stopped buying vinyl records because of the totally defective analog rights management. I mean have you ever tried to duplicate a record? I tried to simply copy the record's files to my desktop and it just would happen! Then I heard of a way to "rip" the record to my harddrive. It only worked at 1x and it took forever. And the ARM put some weird static on my tracks. I think it watermarked my ripped tracks with noise! The result wasn't nearly as clear as the original. I say a pox on this analog right management and the RIAA!
Let me guess, this kid also sits around playing pong and yars revenge, wearing tightly fitting cloths from goodwill, and who primarily listens to bands starting with "the"
God damn I hate these poseur kids
Yes vinyl wears but its really not an issue if you treat right. The same is equally true of CDs. The amount of jumping CDs I have heard is probably more than worn records.
I have bought a few hundred CDs since the early 90s and none of them are jumping/skipping as far as I can tell. (Obviously with that many CDs, there are inenvitably some that I haven't listened for a few years. Still, the only time I got skipping and jumping was when my old Philips CD player was dying; with the same discs inserted in another player or at the CD drive of my computer, everything played back nicely.) Some of them do have minor scratches, but so far I haven't managed to damage any of my discs enough to cause issues that the error correction can't deal with.
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
Good audio engineers follow some of the same basic principles as good software engineers and good web site designers including:
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Can people not drop this now? True, analogue tapes and vinyl disks generate a warmer sound, but that is why most songs are taped to an analogue medium before being copied back to a CD and then sent out to Mrs P Williams of 11 Williams Way, Slough.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
and I don't need to justify it to anyone. It's what I grew up with and it's what I prefer to listen to. I enjoy my music on 35 year old consumer grade Pioneer equipment that has withstood the test of time (try that with the poisonous plastic crap peddled at your discount stores today). And while I'm listening to a record, I can enjoy the cover art. So much real estate it takes two hands to hold. There doesn't seem to be much effort put into artwork and packaging these days. And it shows. Yes, I buy CDs. I have an iPod. And a Mac Mini to load it with. For music I listen to during commutes. But at home, it's vinyl and open reel tapes for me.
My peace of mind does not depend on
No, vinyl records are not better, they are just different. I grew up on the crux of the changeover from records to CDs. I've heard it all. I work in audio professionally. There is an entire spectrum of audio quality regardless of the format. If there is any issue at all it's that people are getting used to and are willing to forgive crappy compression on audio. Properly recorded digital still has warmth, depth, and has a far more "nuanced" sound because it isn't buried under a freaking mechanical noise floor. This resurgence is just another trend that will fade as quick as it started.
Just imagine, in a few decades, people will desperately try to reproduce the "sound of low quality 128 kbps mp3's". ;-)
"Softer" percussion transients and all that!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Classic music
/. will brand you a snob. Great.
Classic formats
Classic equipment
It's about the total experience. It's something that I can't get with the cheap plastic crap manufactured and boated over from China. Are we not allowed to simply enjoy the experience any longer?
I don't want to sound like I'm putting anyone else down but thats how I feel. The "snob" tag I see for this thread is a real hoot too. What are they saying here. That if you don't follow the herd and do what everyone else is doing,
My peace of mind does not depend on
What is the range of vinyl recording equipment?
Nevermind, it's not really important, whatever the range is, you can design digital equipment that good enough to capture all of the information that isn't lost by the necessary analog parts of your setup.
To put it another way: The physical waveform-capture part of your microphone is analog. The rest can be digital. In principle, digital recording equipment can faithfully capture, store, and reproduce the microphone's output with an error less than that of any human ear can detect. In practice, it's a matter of dollars and cents.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Every seat in a concert hall is unique. What you hear is not the same as what the guy next to you is hearing.
Every human ear is unique. What you hear is not what the guy next to you would hear if you switched seats.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Lasers don't have to be an off-or-on proposition. In principle, they can measure the changes in the reflectivity of the record's surface in an analog way, much like our eyes measure the changes in real-world lighting in analog.
Now, if it were me doing a laser record player, I'd go the A-D route unless the cost of doing it "all analog" were made up by profits from suck^H^H^H^Hcustomers who pay extra for an "all analog" sticker on the box.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"Vinyl has a warmer, more nuanced sound" -- I guess so, especially when hiss, pops, clicks, and more crop up after, I dunno, the 3rd or 4th playing? lmao
I collect them based on their availability in large crates being discarded on the curb, or at 20 for the US$ sort of clearance sales that were frequent at my local used music emporiums (yay Rasputin's). This also forces a sort of random music discovery process that can be pretty enjoyable.
Of course, now that many of my friends are converting their whole collections over to iTunes in order to free up the space, I'm able to do that sort of thing with CD as well.
Also, LPs have an interesting advantage over CDs, they're recyclable! You can melt them down and re-press them. I remember stories from a friend of my dads about getting an album published at a small scale. For cost saving they collected unwanted LPs, scraped the labels off and melted them down to re-press. May have been pulling my leg, but he still makes most his income off writing royalties from the 50-60's so I'm willing to take his word on it.
-sk
On another note, anyone ever seen a CD player that mimics the 'warmness' of LP by introducing some sort of modeled distortion/frequency loss? Shouldn't be that hard to implement and I could see that as an amusing feature on amps or players (sort of like the 'megabass' feature that you see already).
Your "CD delivers a more faithful reproduction of the source audio" is not right either, it's also being remastered towards todays standards where music explodes down your ears.
You are *not* understanding, I have absolutely nothing to say about the various mastering standards, I am saying that audio information is more faithfully reproduced with CDs over of vinyl. What is done before or after, is really not part of the debate, or at least what I am debating.
Yes, of course, the more unadulterated the music is, the better or at least what should be better, and the better way to convey that is a CD.
There are concert recordings, which are basically a dump of what was recorded live in a concert.
There are concert recordings that go through post-production, where the sound engineer tweaks things to make them sound better but are otherwise the same as what was in the concert.
There are studio recordings where the recordings just serve as the raw material for the sound engineer and he does pretty much whatever he and the singer want to make the final product come out however they want.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Whoever said software couldn't damage hardware should read this.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
in the marketing department of course
in that an LP jacket is large enough to use as a work surface for cleaning your weed and rolling a joint.
A CD jewel box is way too small, and don't get me started on MP3s...:)
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Props to you for being man enough to apologize.
Quantization can be considered a form of lossy compression against the original analog signal. Of course, this is inherent to any A/D conversion.
Not a typewriter
Vinyl? Reel-to-reel? Wax cylinders? HA! For real fidelity, when I want to listen to "Stairway to Heaven" while driving to work, I simply have Led Zeppelin perform it for me live in my car. Yes, even Bonzo. Resurrecting him was a bitch, but you can really feel the warm nuances of the sound when his zombified corpse is drumming in the back seat.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Even if there were an advantage to vinyl's sound, since I have limited funds, I wouldn't pay $25 for something on a vinyl album when I could but the same music on emusic for $3-4/album or $9.99 on CD (if it's not available on emusic.)
I like stuff, but I like music more than stuff. I do think it can be worth spending 1 or 2 grand on a hifi, (but even that's 75-300 worth of albums, so you have to weigh these things carefully)
JP
I understanding the backing of MP3 formats, and I have NOTHING against them. In fact, I could care less about FLAC, mp3, OGG etc because as a NORMAL listener they all seem more or less the same to me.
BUT, saying that they hold a candle to vinyl? FOOLISH. I have even read articles saying that the slight, low "pops" that happen due to the needle on records creates sound waves that are not so "clean", forcing the listener to pay more attention.
I have to agree with that as well. The hell with all this "CLEAN", "CLEAR" sounds...lame lame lame. The only thing I want CLEAN is kdawson's mom, and CLEAR of anything that could fall in the STD dept.
But really...Vinyl till I die, and MP3 while I am on the road till I smash into a semi listening to Daft Punk.
Nearly broke my heart when my 15 year old saw my turntable I got out of storage last week, and he laughed, saying "I didn't know you were into rap." Sigh... I had to explain to him you could use it as something other than a "scratchpad."
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
That the ear is perfectly modeled by some transform you have that converts all waves above a certain frequency to square?
When I was nineteen, I could hear a difference between square and sine at 19KHz. I should been more explicit about that.
And it doesn't matter that the difference might have been only a matter of perceived volume which my mind converted to the tinny sound the square wave has. Even the volume difference would be a difference.
In the analog world, response does not drop off entirely at some arbitrary frequency. With digital sampling, it does.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Are you so sure that the ear absolutely clips frequencies above whatever its limit is?
And saturates everything below?
Because, if it did, I could not have heard the difference.
CDs are good in the same sense that FM is good. But if we take these arguments to the ultimate conclusion, we might as well keep our masters in 44Khz sampled audio.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Oh, I'm not saying it's impossible - just very unlikely if you were listening under normal conditions, i.e. through speakers or headphones that don't have a frequency response that high.
Check this out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasonic_hearing
"Ultrasonic hearing is a recognised auditory effect which allows humans to perceive sounds of a much higher frequency than would ordinarily be audible using the physical inner ear, usually by stimulation of the base of the cochlea through bone induction. Human hearing is recognised as having an upper bound around 17-20 kHz, depending on the person, but ultrasonic sinusoids as high as 120 kHz have been reported as successfully perceived."
It would be interesting to do some controlled tests, and see if listeners comparing a sine wave and a square wave from, say. 8kHz up to 30kHz, can tell them apart better than chance.
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
Perhaps the reason for the crappy sound on your iPod has less to do with the mp3 format and more to do with the crap-ass white earphones that Apple packs in there because they know you're a putz who cares more about appearances than sound quality?
RE: "If someone has a thousand albums on Vinyl, it's a different story. You think something of him. Maybe good, maybe bad, but you can expect him to rather deeply identify himself by his music. Each record was individually chosen, to the exclusion of others. Time was invested, thought was expressed, identity is reflected."
I am reminded of a friend I had 30+ years ago, who had a wall filled with shelves holding blues albums. Thousands of blues albums, including works from artists dating back to the 1920s and 1930s. It took a lot of time and money to accumulate a collection like that, and I was impressed that a 20-something white boy would appreciate the blues so much that he put that much effort into preserving it.
Also, folks back then owned books, and they kept on shelves as well. So when you visited someone's home, you'd be able to browse through their books and albums and learn more about that person.
Now you'd have to scan their hard drive, and even then you'd find a lot of junk that the person stored, but which really didn't indicate that person's likes and dislikes.
Wired's TV series Audio Files did a story on, well, Audio files. They had two recording engineers, a band and two people with "golden ears" for their test.
The interesting part was that the digital engineer said there was no difference except that editing in digital was a whole world easier. He said you couldn't hear the difference.
The analog recording engineer said that analog was the way to go for purity and clean sound.
Then they did a test where they did a song with changes from analog to digital to analog to digital... The band and the golden ears were to tell which was which. Basically at around 50% for each, neither the band or the golden ears could tell the difference.
Then at the end of the clip, they mentioned that the fancy digital recording board had a button on it to emulate or simulate the analog sound from analog recordings.
I thought it very strange that a digital board that made recordings so accurately that you couldn't tell the difference needed a button to make them sound the same.
I recently did a study of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss "Raising Sand" LP and CD. They were made from the same master but they are a world apart. The digital on the CD is clipped resulting in clipped analog out of the CD Player. The CD is also heavily compressed compared to the LP. The result was that the LP was a lot more natural but, only because of what the engineer did to the CD in the post mastering process.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
Believe me that was an insult. NO respectable person with any integrity would want to work for such a corporation as Microsoft.
It's like smoking in bars. They outlawed it here in Germany starting January 1st this year. And even though I don't smoke, the first time I went to a smoke-free bar I felt that something was missing: atmosphere. It is not the same any more.
Say out loud: I'm an Aspie and I'm somewhat proud, I guess. Uh. Can I write an email in all caps instead? Hm...
Well, yes, excellent principle that, and more people should remember it. No doubt.
Except while maybe that would help in some situations, sound cards are not in that category. Create a sine wave that goes from 0 to 255 (or 0 to 65535 if you're doing a 16 bit sample) in whatever sound editing program you prefer, run it through, say, any Audigy or X-Fi card you prefer, and probably through any on-board one these days too, and plug an osciloscope into the output jack. There is no hard clipping. It's that simple.
It comes also from not actually _having_ a final stage amplifier (unless it has an external box for that). If you plugged some unpowered speakers into most sound cards' jacks these days, you'd barely hear anything whatsoever. The final stage is in the powered speakers for most people, and in the external amplifier for the rest.
So it's a solution that solves the wrong problem in the wrong place:
1. It's trying to fix clipping in the final power stage, on cards which don't actually have either a final power stage _or_ clipping.
2. Any extra harmonics it introduces are _before_ the final amplifier stage that actually drives the speakers. So they'll be amplified too. And any clipping that that final stage has, will come on top of it.
That's just the kind of hearing what's not there, and "fixing" it via something that doesn't even work that way, that makes some of us make fun of "audiophiles."
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
OK, I can see the necessity of some modest compression in media with narrow dynamic range.
With "stupidity" I meant the "loudness wars" in pop music where the dynamic range is reduced to a point where the music loses a lot of its liveliness (and even the dynamic range of vinyl and radio is underutilized). Perhaps I should have made that more clear.
C - the footgun of programming languages
..., listening to spped, death, thrash, etc, both live and recorded, my hearing is so shot, that it could be recorded on wax cyclinders and I still wouldn't be able to tell the difference! I do all my CD's at 192kps and for the kind of "dog-music" ( my wife's term, not mine ), it's good enough. I listen to most of my music rumbling around the London Underground system to work, so with that almost cutting through my ear-buds, MP3 is good enough and 192 is probably too good. LOL! A lot of this is simply boasting rights, "Oh I use FLAC/Vynyl/MiniDisc,Reel-to-reel 'cos it's far better, without question.". You have convinced yourself it's better, sometimes, I'm sure it does make a difference, but face it most of us just like music for the pleasure of the sound and vibe, not just so we can sit and say "Oh you know if you listen really hard and I crank it up to 230 db, you can hear Bono fart at the end of this track."!
Windows guys please stop pissing on everyone and the Linux guys stop pissing in the wind, hoping to hit Windows guys!
Come on guys, I have a big load of vinyl records my wife wants me to unload. So keep saying it is great long enough for me to dump them on Ebay. I've got a lot of the nice ones - Eagles, Beetles, Styx, even some very old records that date to the 1940s. Otherwise these albums will go into the trash. Curious about Puff the Magic Dragon? I have that too. I was way to young to understand what it was about when I got the record...
Doh! I've known that vinyl sounds good since I got my first Beatle Album in 1964 for my sixth birthday (Meet the Beatles). Still have almost 1000 albums that I listen to regularly. CD's are ok, but, yes, the sound of MP3's is not good and I still don't have an I-pod, despite being an Apple Mac fanatic since 1984 (but that's another story.)
The steps I use. The only thing thats different is I used to record on cassettes now to HD's then to CD's.
;)
Take longer then before but I like the results.
More fun then hitting the rip button
1. Record record at right speed 33.33 or 45 use 45 for 78 to 80.1 rpm records jumpy 45s at 33.33
with zero eq (flat).
2. apply speed change software to desired speed.
2a. clean background noise hiss and snap crackle and pop.
3. apply right eq curve for the record that was used to make the recording RIAA curve for 33.33 and most 45s
3a. there are about 15 eq curves used over the years on 78 to 80.1 rpm records the RIAA set a standard. But you are stuck in the manufactures curve. some preamps are better then some in this area. I set my own.
To match the RIAA spec.
4. burn to disk.
5. enjoy.
6.sometimes profit!!! Some people will ask you to transfer there records (you supply the service not the recording) not all is on DC !!!!
I record at 44.1Khz 16bit most of the time though I sometimes go for 192Khz at 24 for fun (big audio files)
For those that are interested in hard and soft side of it.
Signal chain is Pioneer PL560 Turntable (circa 1978) direct to a RME-Fireface 800 Mic inputs.(custom cables) the rest is computer and software after that. Then the output Of the FF-800 goes to a pair of Yorkville sound YSM1P studio monitors.
RME-Audio total mix for the Fireface 800 / Wave Lab / Tracktion 3 / and DC-6 /
I guess your point is that the wikipaedia article says that it's different from compression. But I did not ridicule the parent, only pointed out his error. Even if I had ridiculed him, that would not be ironic, it would be hypocritical. To refer you back to wikipedia, I think you need to look at the definition of ironic.
Vinyl has a warmer, more nuanced sound than CDs
...or explained in a more technical way:
Vinyl has less precise sound reproduction leading to more harmonic distortion (overtones) and more and louder background noise
In any case, we appear to agree that the precision of phonograph records is inherently lower than 16-bit audio, forget 24-bit
Not what I said at all. You are comparing apples and oranges. I can accurately represent the contents of a vinyl record - or pretty much ANY band limited analog signal - with only one bit. So what?
Who said I disagree with you? WHY do I have to disagree with you to write a reply? I didn't even say you were wrong, I said you weren't entirely informed. So save your confrontational bullshit for your mommy and daddy, babydoll.
Zzzzzzip!
The RIAA curve isn't added to the master, it's added by the recording equipment that creates the masterdisk. Yes, the old masters WERE created to sound good on turntables and tape machines, but they were not pre-riaa equalized. Tape machines have a different sort of eq curve not compatible with the RIAA eq at all. If a CD were made of an RIAA eq'd recording it would be unlistenable - the bass would be 40db down from the highs. 40db is a HUGE amount - 10db is essentially "twice as loud," so you do the math.
Basically, those old master recordings sound bad on cd because they were made when playback equipment wasnt all that hot. Then again, many of the early digital pressings werent that hot, either.
I can't help but chuckle at the sight of all the so called experts popping up here in defense of digital audio, and I really wonder just how many of them have actually listened to a vinyl recording. I mean a fair test, a true sampling of records across several genres and spanning several decades, played at normal listening volume on standard consumer grade (and properly maintained) equipment from the era. Because quite frankly, a record that's been stored properly and kept clean will yield little audible distortion to the normal listener. And increasing the volume will produce no more hiss and distortion (unless you've set up your turntable on top of a speaker cabinet) than that which I can get when cranking the volume of a lossless digital audio file played on a typical contemporary [Chinese mass produced] amp. Most amps today are terrible at audio reproduction, and many have low level hiss and hum from poor filtering and poor quality components and shoddy construction.
/.
And I'm particularly impressed by shear quantity of jerks that reside here, the ones who get garner nice high "scores" for posts that mock and make fun of kids. The true face of
My peace of mind does not depend on
Are you finding a lot of good music there?
JP
Don is right; music is about the songs, not the sound quality. That being said, record players will be around for a long time for novelty and historical reasons, but I don't see how they are going to make a significant comeback. And I'm a low-tech guy that doesn't even own an iPod.
Neil Young CD's are as good as they can, but listen to old Young LPs ('Everybody knows this is nowhere' comes to mind, but also a lot of 70-80's discs) for a better sound. Hell, Young has commented a lot of times how dificult is to make a just 'good enough' CD!.
What's in a sig?
Okay, but what are the restrictions and why are they present?