Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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/
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.