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Vinyl Record Pressing Plants Struggle To Keep Up With Demand
An anonymous reader writes The WSJ reports that the revival of vinyl records, a several-year trend that many figured was a passing fad, has accelerated during 2014 with an astounding 49 percent sales increase over 2013 (line chart here). Some listeners think that vinyl reproduces sound better than digital, and some youngsters like the social experience of gathering around a turntable. The records are pressed at a handful of decades-old, labor-intensive factories that can't keep up with the demand; but since the increased sales still represent only about 2 percent of US music sales, there hasn't been a rush of capital investment to open new plants. Raw vinyl must now be imported to America from countries such as Thailand, since the last US supplier closed shop years ago. Meanwhile, an industry pro offers his take on the endless debate of audio differences between analog records and digital formats; it turns out there were reasons for limiting playing time on each side back in the day, apart from bands not having enough decent material.
All modern DACs (other than some silly audiophile freaky-fringe products) have output reconstruction filters that mean there are no stair-steps on the output.
Digital audio is NOT stairsteps. Never has been. Proof with an analog oscilloscope: http://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml
It is well known that differences in audio quality between digital formats (CDs, MP3, FLACs, etc.) to Vinyl are due to different mastering for the respective media. HA has also set up a wiki page regarding misconceptions about Vinyl mastering and Vinyl as a medium. Vinyl is an inherently flawed medium, with problems like wear, necessitating expensive gear and knowledge for playback, and low audio quality compared to digital media. That some people still prefer Vinyl releases shows that they either don't really have good hearing, or that contemporary music is mastered so that a medium with roughly 13 bits of dynamic range is sufficient for even "critical" listeners. That means CD quality audio is simply excessive for that audience. Interestingly enough the same Vinyl crowd will glady buy 24bit/192khz releases, which are even more excessive.
No, it can't be emulated by equalization. If at all it could be emulated by special DSP effects that also add some special distortion. There are plenty such effects available (in fact, a bit too many), but it's usually a horrible idea to slap one of those over an already mastered track.
The real problem has nothing to do with the warmth of vinyl, though. The real problem is that as a result of the infamous loudness war digital CDs are nowadays mastered in a completely different way than vinyl records, a way that is so overcompressed that it completely destroys the sound quality of the music - and provably so, as you can measure the horrible effects of this mastering precisely. It's not a subjective thing at all. Vinyl records have become much louder over the past few decades, too, but they have physical limits that digital media like CDs don't have. If a vinyl record was mastered like a CD, the needle would literally jump out of the track. (With adequate mastering CDs would be superior to Vinyl in almost every respect, but the reality is different due to the way mastering engineers were and are still forced to squeeze every inch of dynamics out of productions.)
Things get much worse with modern digital formats like MP3 or AAC. These would be barely tolerable with very careful mastering, but with modern "loudness competitive" mastering they create even worse artefacts than CDs due to intersample peaks and the interplay with the lossy recording process. Mid/side processing can reveal the horrible blubbering effects that these formats produce in case you can't hear them. (Although, if you can't hear them then you're probably deaf anyway and it won't matter.)
There is great hope that once broadcast stations have adopted new loudness measurement standards like EBU R128 the problem will vanish over time. These standards level the broadcast signals not to standard amplitude levels but according to broader loudness criteria - measuring mean values and taking into account the dynamic range of the audio material using standardized procedures. With these new standards we will hopefully get some dynamics and audio quality back to digital media which are principally vastly superior to vinyl.
Not to mention how the hell are we gonna clean weed on CD covers or iPods?
You could de-seed a whole oz. in 5 minutes on a good double album and a card back in the day.
But then, the weed today isn't half seeds like it used to be, either...
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
First I'd love to cite an extremely good video on this topic https://www.xiph.org/video/vid...
I'll try to distil down the relevant portion here.
Nyquist showed us that a bandwidth limited signal sampled by a discrete time system can be reproduced perfectly using 2n samples per unit time where n is the bandwidth of the signal in hertz.
Perfectly isn't hyperbole here. That is mathematically shown.
The other half of digital audio is the accuracy of measurement of those discrete samples. “Bit depth” or bits. While we can reproduce a signal perfectly with perfect samples there is some noise that is added by imperfect sampling of a signal. This is mathematically identical to tape hiss and can be manipulated to less noticeable frequencies using a technique called dithering.
Digital audio can and does faithfully reproduce the original signal with levels of noise below human perception even at a meager 16 bit depth and 48KHz sampling rate (44.1 is also very popular but 48 allows easier low pass filter design).
The stair-steps don't come out of the audio jack, the signal is reproduced by the imaging circuit.
Fast attacks that fall “in-between” the samples are NOT delayed or lost since, again using Nyquist, the signal can be perfectly reproduced (and this is demonstrated directly in the video).
There is a lot of myth and misunderstanding when it comes to digital audio, and there is a lot of truth too. The loudness wars, as other posters have pointed out, has done more to damage the reputation of digital audio than anything else and there are plenty of examples of compressed (both kinds) audio sounding just terrible. One being too low a data rate combined with a terrible encoder, the other just using a small fraction of the overall dynamic range. Those are real issues but they aren't fundamental to signal reproduction.
Hope that explains some of it!
md5sum
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
I can, and have done since 1985 with my first Philips cd player, I have been tested to hear from 17Hz to 22Khz also medically, I can honestly tell the difference easily on say Enya orinocco flow, the one on the original release CD has bass that goes to around 18Hz the one on the "Best of" cuts off at around 25Hz and the treble is sliced too. To most that use crap mp3 players or midi HIFI 's the difference is small, but for someone who has a decent system it's like night and day.
http://chimpbox.us
In the early days of CDs, delta-sigma devices were not always used. Some systems used a true analog 44.1 kHz sampling rate using high precision devices from Burr-Brown and others. These devices would indeed produce stair-step patterns, and even with severe analog filtering some 22.05 kHz and aliased nearby frequencies would appear in the output. Young people with exceptional hearing could detect it, particularly after some training.
Technology has improved, and it's no longer difficult to design a system without that problem, but there was a time when it was a problem.
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