Slashdot Mirror
Vinyl Record Production Gets a Much-Needed Tech Upgrade (engadget.com)
Ever wondered why you sometimes have to wait months after an album's launch to get the music on vinyl? It's not necessarily because the label hates vinyl -- in many cases, it's because the decades-old manufacturing process can't keep up with the format's resurgence. From a report on Engadget: Relief may be in sight for turntable fans, though. Viryl Technologies is producing a pressing machine system, WarmTone, that should drag vinyl production into the modern era. Much of WarmTone's improvement rests in its use of modern engineering. It's more reliable when producing the "pucks" that become records, makes it easier to switch out stampers (the negatives that press records) and sports a trimming/stacking system that can better handle large-scale production. Also, there's a raft of sensors -- the machine checks everything from pressure to temperature to timing, so companies will immediately know if something goes wrong.
No need of DRM. People who buy vinyl want to listen "vinyl" (and vinyls are much harder to duplicate, compared to a CD or a file).
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
records are not lossless and every copy is unique and imperfect. not only that, but the act of PLAYING it destroys and degrades the medium.
I grew up with lp's and I'm happy to say that the last one I played was well over 20 yrs ago.
today's dacs are so good and the a/d's in studios are so good, there is zero reason for using lp's at home.
the ONLY valid reason is that the mix is intentionally different, which makes zero sense. there is more dyn range in cd and 'files' than any LP could produce. and yet, they put better mixes on records for pure marketing reasons.
dacs can do 24/192k and even DSD. records are about 1/10 of that or even less.
sigh ;(
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
There is more dynamic range on a CD in theory, however with sound compression (i.e. "loudness wars", not "lossy audio compression as in MP3 or AAC") we end up with CDs and audio files from music stores that sound like crap.
#DeleteFacebook
Can they solve the problem of the record skipping in my car?
I know you're joking, but for those who don't know, they actually did try record players in cars many years ago. They were very expensive and had lots of drawbacks.
http://gajitz.com/road-tunes-w...
Vinly is pressed from a negative produced from a "gold master". It is most certainly a master. It's not a "studio master", which is probably what you're thinking of. And even studio masters aren't the source recordings. Those are usually just called "originals" or "takes" or "cuts".
The point the GP was trying to make was that vinyl gold masters are created using "RIAA compression", which is a standard set of analog compression processes applied post-mixing to make the mix sound good on vinyl. CD's don't need this because they fully represent the entire 20-20k human hearing range with room to spare. The GP is mistaken in his belief that RIAA compression will make music sound better on non-vinyl media. It usually just sounds muffled and hissy due to the way it mutes harmonics and plays tricks with the noise floor.
That's why CD's use a different master: a "glass master" that can be used in old-school foil-flash CD pressing machines. This comes from the same studio master as the vinyl one does, but has different compression applied to it. This is where they play the "loudness" game that grumpy oldsters love to complain about. There are valid reasons to push everything into the top 10%, but there's no convincing some people. Usually those people aren't worth pleasing.
Actually, there was a short-lived drive to resurrect CRTs. You see, the ideal pixel isn't a square. It's a blob whose brightness falls off with radius, which is almost exactly what a CRT produces. The pixel is supposed to represent the brightness and color of an infinitely small sample at a certain location. A CRT phosphor's blob does that very well. When you represent it with a square LCD pixel, you're introducing a lot of high-frequency noise which doesn't exist in the original sample. In 2D imagery they're called jaggies, and we've had to implement anti-aliasing, especially in fonts, to remove that noise and make things look pretty much like they did on a CRT. LCDs only produce "sharper" output when displaying perfectly horizontal and vertical edges (like windows on a computer desktop) because in those cases the noise coincides with what's being represented. For all other shapes and angles, a CRT's pixels are better.
The movement died when extremely high PPI LCDs became available - the high-frequency noise due to square pixels in those is too small to be visible.
I'm sitting in a recording studio right now. If you want to hear the music as intended by the musicians you would listen to the recording in the medium of the day.
An album from 40 years ago was recorded with studio settings to overcome the limitations of vinyl and the pressing process. The sound was better on the vinyl LP than in the studio. Especially with guitars, where the amps treble settings were set high to overcome treble loss in the vinyl process.
This is also why for the first few years CD's sounded like shit, harsh was the common term, btw.
There is no reason to listen to a recording from last week on vinyl. The people mixing/mastering the music are not mixing/mastering for vinyl. You will not hear the song as intended. It will be degraded.
My old guy classic rock and jazz albums are on vinyl. Most everything else over the last few decades I buy on CD or download in a lossless format.
Bands releasing vinyl LPs in modern times is a gimmick. Not that there's anything wrong with that, and I do pick up a vinyl version of a new release now and then myself, but not for the sound of vinyl.
To add insult to audiophiles who fuss over their gear (like me), we have a pair of really, really shitty speakers in the studio here that we use for our final mix down. We do not mix for audiophiles, we mix for the shitty speakers 95% of listeners have.
And along that same line, I use standard mic cables, guitar, patching and speaker cables, I do not purchase 1,000 dollar oxygen free copper or whatever the voodoo of the day is in my studio, I have no idea why some people spend more money on cables than speakers or room treatments at home.