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Digital and Analog Audio's Curious Coexistence (cnet.com)
Steve Guttenberg, writing for CNET: It's a funny thing, the ongoing turntable sales surge shows no signs of slowing down, but nearly all new music is recorded digitally. It seems like a contradiction, turntables and LPs are purely analog in nature, but nearly all new (not remastered LPs) made over the last 30+ years were recorded, mixed, and mastered from digital sources. Older, pre 1980 LPs were made in an all-analog world. Today's LPs are hybrids of a sort, the grooves are still analog, but the music was probably made in the digital domain.
Be that as it may, LPs, regardless of vintage, can sound great. While pre-1980s records may be richer in tone and warmth, there are lots of more recent albums that sound just as good or better. In other words vinyl's sound quality or lack thereof has mostly to do with the quality of the original recording, and the choices made by the recording, mixing, and mastering engineers.
Despite the overwhelming number of digital recordings, there is still a tiny percentage of all-analog recordings being made. To cite one mostly analog studio, the legendary Electrical Audio, which owner Steve Albini told me records and mixes around 70 percent of all of its sessions on tape.
Be that as it may, LPs, regardless of vintage, can sound great. While pre-1980s records may be richer in tone and warmth, there are lots of more recent albums that sound just as good or better. In other words vinyl's sound quality or lack thereof has mostly to do with the quality of the original recording, and the choices made by the recording, mixing, and mastering engineers.
Despite the overwhelming number of digital recordings, there is still a tiny percentage of all-analog recordings being made. To cite one mostly analog studio, the legendary Electrical Audio, which owner Steve Albini told me records and mixes around 70 percent of all of its sessions on tape.
This article on Myths of Vinyl has some interesting facts
+several million, informative.
a) If vinyl is "warmer" then that's just distortion
b) 44.1kHz, 16bits is absolutely enough for reproduction. There may be a case for using 48kHz to help with making real-world reconstruction filters but that's it. You absolutely do not need more than that for listening.
Disagree? Please watch this several times before hitting 'reply':
https://xiph.org/video/vid2.sh...
No sig today...
And the minimum phase difference in a CD corresponds to roughly a quarter inch difference in the free air path of the sound (napkin math) .
There's no loss of phase information in a quantized bandwidth-limited signal.
See this video https://xiph.org/video/vid2.sh... at 21:00
but of course the filter has no way of knowing whether the original signal WAS a square wave , or sawtooth or triangle or anything else so to say it can reproduce it exactly is incorrect.
I said "provided they are below 22 kHz". A 22 kHz square wave has higher frequencies (all at odd multiples of 22 kHz, lowest at 66kHz and 110kHz), so it violates that condition. If you take a 22 kHz square wave, and you limit bandwidth to 0-22 kHz, you get a sine wave as the output.
None of this matters, as your ears cannot pick up the 66 kHz harmonics either, so you cannot tell the difference between a 22 kHz sine wave, square wave, or any other waveform with 22 kHz fundamental frequency.
Note: a properly mastered CD should sound great at 16-bit, giving around 60dB dynamic range.
16 bit translates to 96dB, and noise shaping adds another 30dB.
You can try out the effects of noise shaping here with 8 bit samples: https://www.audiocheck.net/aud...