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'High Definition Vinyl' Is Coming As Early As Next Year (pitchfork.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Pitchfork: In 2016, a European patent filing described a way of manufacturing records that the inventors claimed would have higher audio fidelity, louder volume, and longer playing times than conventional LPs. Now, the Austrian-based startup Rebeat Innovation has received $4.8 million in funding for the initiative, founder and CEO Gunter Loibl told Pitchfork. Thanks to the investment, the first "HD vinyl" albums could hit stores as early as 2019, Loibl said. The HD vinyl process involves converting audio digitally to a 3D topographic map. Lasers are then used to inscribe the map onto the "stamper," the part that stamps the grooves into the vinyl. According to Loibl, these methods allow for records to be made more precisely and with less loss of audio information. The results, he said, are vinyl LPs that can have up to 30 percent more playing time, 30 percent more amplitude, and overall more faithful sound reproduction. The technique would also avoid the chemicals that play a role in traditional vinyl manufacturing. Plus, the new-school HD vinyl LPs would still play on ordinary record players.
The volume of the record is dependent on the movement of the needle which is dependent on the width of the track. Louder tracks are wider which reduces the length of play. Remember those old compilation albums with 10+ tracks per side sounded tinny compared to the original because to fit the tracks were compressed and volume (especially bass) was lost.
Vinyl isn't a good format in general. It was the best that could be done for a number of decades, but it will always suffer from the problems related to having physical contact between the vinyl and the needle. This new technique may improve the possible dynamic range, but that's largely a moot point as modern CDA gets compressed to the point where it's not any better than vinyl. And the sound quality sucks as a result. I heard Harvey Danger's Flagpole Sitta over a restaurant speaker a while back and it had been remastered to sound like crap. It was completely lacking any interest or pop that the sound had over the radio years earlier.
What's more, even though we've been able to do better than CDA for decades now, there just hasn't been a market for it. CDA is better than the equipment most people are using to listen to music on at home and the next step up in terms of hi def audio has never really caught on.
To make matters worse, people have somewhat backtracked in what they demand with lossy formats being more popular than lossless ones.
The whole obsession with analog formats (and super-digital formats like SACD) stems from lay people's fundamental misunderstanding of digital sampling. It's not intuitively obvious that a series of discrete digital samples at 2x the highest frequency you want to capture only has a single valid analog mathematical solution, and so the digital sample is a perfect representation of the original analog waveform. Because it's not intuitively obvious, people convince themselves that the digital sample must somehow be missing something that the analog sample captures.
Well, to nitpick, Nyquist's theorem applies only to signals of infinite length, and in fact a 20kHz signal can't be perfectly reproduced with a 40kHz sampling frequency because you lose phase information on any finite signal.
I'm not for a moment suggesting that this actually adds up to a perceptible loss of information in the signal, or that 'transients' are in any way different to high frequency signal components, or that Vinyl is superior. I'm just nitpicking, because it's Friday afternoon, and I've nothing better to do.
PPH theorized:
TFS says they can still be played on old turntables. It seems that what they are doing is taking the digital audio, computing the shape of the groove and passing that on to a numerically controlled laser cutter. The end result is a record track much the same as (and compatible with) older LPs. But they have removed the limitations of the analog master cutting techniques.
It's important to keep in mind that professional digital audio recording is done at frequency sampling rates as high as 320kbps sampling rates at 32-bit resolution (although 192 kbps at 24-bit resolution is more common). In the process of mastering for CD, the final mix is down-sampled to 44.1 kbps at 16-bit resolution (the CDA standard). So the source material is of FAR higher audio quality than the end product that consumers hear.
Rhino Records has issued a stream of premium-quality LPs for the audiophile market that are pressed using 180-gram, very high-grade vinyl discs. These extra-thick records, made of nearly bubble-free vinyl, sound very different than the old-school LPs I bought in my youth. At first play, they are nearly as noiseless as CDs, they're highly warp-resistant, and they're mastered at higher SPLs than the original vinyl releases. On an audiophile-grade sound system, they make the CD versions sound as sonically-impoverished as they actually are.
It's not just the much-vaunted analog "warmth" of the vinyl sound (in reality, that's a product of the distortion characteristics of the vinyl/needle/cartridge/preamp signal chain), either. They offer measurably-better resolution than CDA, and the product of that higher resolution is a richness and detail to the sound they produce of which CD audio simply is incapable.
If you play them on a laser turntable, and keep them properly stored to minimize their exposure to dust, they'll retain that pristine, first-play sound indefinitely. This new vinyl format, then, holds the potential to make future such premium LP releases sound even better than the current audiophile versions.
I'm interested in hearing whether the real-world improvement matches the hype. And I'm willing to withhold judgement on it until I get a chance to do so ...
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It's more likely the patent involves a more "higher resolution" print, eg the grooves have a deeper print into them.
That said, "HD Vinyl" records, you have got to be shitting me. You're basically inverting causality, you can't create anything higher resolution than what you can do with 192khz 48bit 8.2 channels digitally. Analog recordings at best are equal to 32khz 24 bit recordings, and that's assuming you can get no hiss or feedback.
The only thing that has improved in the last 40 years in sound systems analog pathways are the moves from tubes to transistors, and thus the elimination of a lot of noise. The downside of that is that a lot of speaker systems have moved from being large, loud and full-range to tiny sattelite speakers with no bass. Instead you have a subwoofer that gives you the haptic feeling from sound with a deep bass range. You can not create a deep bass effect on vinyl. The upper and lower pitches on vinyl records just do not exist because it moves the needle too much.
And this is the problem with Vinyl, if you ever had a "phono" input on any device ever, the audio is very quiet, and thus plugging a record player into something without a phono input would generate a lot of hiss as it has to be amplified. The Phono input on the device actually had specific pre-amplification.
So people who think Vinyl sounds better, are full of shit, or deaf.
I Analog recordings at best are equal to 32khz 24 bit recordings, and that's assuming you can get no hiss or feedback.
Ehm no. That is a misconception. 24 bit is overkill, even for digital (most `24` bit is actually no more than 18 bit, at most, and more likely 15-16). But as far sampling rate goes, (studio) tape reels happily go over 20kHz, and so does vinyl. You may be confused by FM broadcast, which has a 15kHz bandwidth. More fair would be to compare vinyl to '48kHz/16 bit'.
So people who think Vinyl sounds better, are full of shit, or deaf.
Define better. It sounds different, i think we easily agree on that. Mechanical issues, harmonics and more all play a role. If people say that it sounds better to them, you will have to accept that as a truth, since perception is subjective by definition. It's like saying 'you cannot find yellow prettier than blue, because blue is a nicer color because it has a shorter wavelength'. For similar or other reasons, some people do prefer tube amplifiers.
It's probably said a dozen times elsewhere in this topic, but personally i think the big difference between the vinyl vs digital `experience` is in the mastering. That's most likely why this 1970's old vinyl album of [fill in favorite band] sounds better than the 2005 cd release. Disclaimer: i am one of such people.
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