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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.
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'
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.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.
>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.
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?
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."
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.
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/
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.
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.
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*!
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
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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
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.