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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.
In other words vinyl's sound quality or lack thereof has mostly to do with the quality of the original recording
No, if everything comes from the same digital master, then vinyl's difference in sound quality comes from imperfections in the medium itself.
Give me CDs any time. I'm glad to be rid of hiss, pops, scratches, wow, flutter, 5% total harmonic distortion, stretching, rumble.
The dynamic range compression required to stop the needle jumping out of the groove plus the non linear frequency response of the needle itself and the also non linear way the actual dynamic range changes as the needle gets closer to the centre (and so is effectively moving slower) give vinyl a particular feel/sound which is what some people like. They fool themselves into thinking its better reproduction of the original source that digital - its anything but.
However music is subjective and its what you like that matters, not how true it is to the original.
This article on Myths of Vinyl has some interesting facts
A regular 44khz audio CD can't capture the full resolution of a digital master done at e.g 96khz.
The thing is, human ears can't capture it either.
Physics/physiology has a nasty habit of popping in the way.
More seriously, there's a point in the digital domain (basically when it has reached and overtaken the limitation of the human ears you're targetting) beyond which you can consider the sound perfect and all the problem coming from the medium. And as you point out :
But imperfections in the medium are more likely to cause differences you can actually hear.
(Perfect: it's not actually. But unless you have a few bats and dolphins that managed to hide among your public, you can ignore safely the difference).
(Also, hoping that the digital to analog conversion isn't horribly distorted).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The obsession with analog audio stems from a gross misunderstanding of what digital audio is. People see digital sampling as a partial capture of the analog waveform, and thus conclude analog must be superior. Digital sampling is not a partial capture. It's an exact capture of the analog waveform within the frequency range (22 kHz in most cases - well beyond what most people can hear). The part that's not intuitively obvious which trips most people up is that if you take a digital sample of an analog waveform, there is only one possible analog waveform which passes through all those digital samples while not exceeding the frequency cutoff. So the digital sample ends up being a perfect reproduction of the analog waveform (within the frequency range of interest).
You can demonstrate this by taking an analog waveform, feeding it into a digital sampler, then converting that digital sample back into an analog waveform. The beginning and ending waveforms will be identical despite the latter one having been converted to digital and back to analog.
All the "warmth" and "richness" of analog audio is nothing more than distortion.
I'm glad to be rid of hiss, pops, scratches, wow, flutter, 5% total harmonic distortion, stretching, rumble.
You can gladly exchange them for saturated over-loud mix, where your equalizer's "frequeccy analyser display" has all the display bars permanently stuck to the top, with frequent pops and clicks due to range-clipping.
(More seriously, there is a key difference :
- Vinyl's defect come from limitation (and fagility) of the medium.
- CD's biggest problem come from the idiot at the mixing table who tries hard to get more attention by attempting at being louder than the others
But these defect might be also a reason to why people might try to avoid digital media : not because inherent flaws, but because they are fed up with the type of mixing that ends up being done on those media.)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Tubes change the sound, making it "warmer".
Warmth = distortion, yes.
No sig today...
Aside from the only truly valid reason to own a turntable, which is, 90+ % of all the music produced prior to about 1990 will never be released in a digital format ... in other words it's about the software, not the hardware. It is the fundamental reason for owning a vinyl playback system, or a cassette deck for that matter. All this hardware talk is just noise. Sure, some people want better playback of these analog formats, but focusing on that is a huge Red Herring. For some reason Tech writers can't get past a focus on hardware, and that goes for digital as well as analog audio.
But, we live in an analog world when it comes to music. It starts analog, and it ends analog (playback). A very, very long time ago I learned that with electronics, every time you make a translation ... whether that's simply recording live to tape or Digital Audio Workstation, or a change in format, or any number of ways to do a job with the electronics ... and there is always the final translation to moving air in a room, you lose something. Maybe not much, but something.
The other thing is you use the best tools for the job. Recording on a DAW is better than recording on magnetic tape, the only real viable alternative option. Yes, you can record direct to (vinyl) disk, but that's hard and doesn't lend itself to large quantity replication, so it's a niche example. It is better than mag tape, but it's also severely limiting, an "old-school" technique, live to final mix, that was happily abandoned when multitrack recording technology came along.
So, whatever tools were used to *create* an album, when it's final form is finished, that's your product. It doesn't matter if it was recorded, mixed and mastered on a DAW anymore than it matters that the artist used a toy piano or a concert grand to make the music. Once in finished form, then it matters how it's played back, because a vinyl record doesn't sound like a CD, and it shouldn't sound like a CD, otherwise there is something seriously wrong going on (with the CD, probably).
So, a phono cartridge is a transducer. Like a dynamic microphone, like a loudspeaker. What distinguishes transducers from other parts of the playback chain is they are not powered devices. A phono cartridge has no power supply, it generates it's own voltage through movement. If you push on the cone of your subwoofer, it generates a back-electromagnetic force on the power amp. And so on.
And although it's not obvious to most people, when you listen to music through a modern sound system, you are listening to the power supply, modulated by a music signal. So the quality of the power supply is paramount to the sonics.
CD player? Power Supply modulated by a music signal.
Amplification? Power Supply modulated by a music signal.
But not a phono cartridge. There is a vast array of issues to deal with when you have to use a power supply driven by mains current from the wall. It would not be an exaggeration to say that almost everything in audio that has developed since the early 20th century is the story of power supply technology and ways to modulate that supply.
So, it would be unusual if vinyl *didn't* sound different, even if the final product (the shipping software, in LP or CD or whatever form) was created exactly the same way.
Not audiophiles but Nyquist deniers !
People on here who say something is lost really really haven't read up to Nyquist or watch the excellent
"D/A and A/D | Digital Show and Tell" video on YouTube.
They are true science deniers. They say it's better but can point to no measurement of why this is. The best they can come out with is frequencies above 22KHz, which are likely noise and even if not, most cutting heads cut ultrasonics to avoid overheating the cutting head anyway. Yet they still claim their medium that is crackles, gets worn out, is likely mono at low frequencies to avoid the needle jumping out of the groove (above the subwoofer cut off frequency) is better.
A few reasons to like vinyl, the art work, avoiding the loudness war and nostalgia. Best to digitise vinyl of first play and never play again, this digital recording will always be the best one.
The analog is always better people need to ask themselves, so why is our DNA is digital, simple, to maintain fidelity across copies.
There is no helping some hipster people.
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.
No, you are incorrect. You would see a 22KHz sine wave as you would expect. Why not a square wave? Because a 22KHz square wave has spectral components greater than the bandwidth of the channel. The same goes for a triangle wave and a sawtooth. Those all have spectral components outside of the bandwidth of the channel.
The reconstruction filters on DACs will reproduce all signals in the passband nearly perfectly. It doesn't have to 'guess' at what the signal was.
Vinyl records have no advantages whatsoever over digital recordings, and loads of disadvantages.
I have four feet of shelf space dedicated to LP's that have never been re-issued in a digital (CD and/or compressed) format. Experts theorize that only between 10 and 20% of all music recorded to vinyl has had a digital release. Tell me again about how having no way to listen to 80% of recorded music is an advantage.
That's just marketing. Higher numbers sell better. And now you get to buy the White Album yet again.
You can demonstrate this by taking an analog waveform, feeding it into a digital sampler, then converting that digital sample back into an analog waveform. The beginning and ending waveforms will be identical despite the latter one having been converted to digital and back to analog..
Funny then that you can hear such a huge difference between different DA converters then.
Simple in theory, but maybe not so much in actual practice.
Seriously? Are you trolling or stupid? I can't tell...
You must be fun to talk to.
What I'm referring to is discussed in some length here:
https://www.wired.com/2009/08/...
Here is a key quote:
"Studies like this open the door to hybrid treatment strategies that exploit the placebo effect to make real drugs safer and more effective. Cancer patients undergoing rounds of chemotherapy often suffer from debilitating nocebo effectsâ"such as anticipatory nauseaâ"conditioned by their past experiences with the drugs. A team of German researchers has shown that these associations can be unlearned through the administration of placebo, making chemo easier to bear."
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
Its perfectly fine to say that the ritual of pulling out a record, enjoying the sleeve art, getting an record out of its sleeve, putting it on the turntable, placing the pickup, the characteristic sounds at the start and end... all add to the entertainment value of listening to music. Its also OK to like the "sound" of vinyl - i.e. the way the music has been mangled to fit the limitations of the medium (especially for studio-produced music that was designed to be heard that way). I wouldn't be surprised if vinyl outlasts the CD for that reason...
The only problem is people who feel the need to justify their subjective enjoyment of vinyl by making pseudo-sceintific arguments as to why it is better quality than digital.
...and if we're talking about pop/rock then its always worth remembering that one of the design goals of guitar amps, effects and synths is not to create mathematically perfect sounds, but, rather, to make them imperfect in interesting-sounding ways. If a guitar amp distorts, or a synth oscillator produces a slightly flakey wave form, that's called "character". Huge efforts have been made to produce digital virtual instruments that faithfully simulate the analog quirks of the originals.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
It is not compression at all. The RIAA EQ curve is an industry standard, in which the top and bottom are EQ'd down, then the reserve EQ curve is applied on playback at the phono input stage. Thinking that compression is the same thing as EQ'ing is stupid.
Republican leadership = Idiocracy
Jeez, people at least google this stuff before you post. The RIAA curve is a standard EQ curve inserted between the output of the mastering console (or 2T tape machine) and the lathe, that reduces gain at the top and bottom. When the LP is played back, the amp's phono input stage restores the roll of, applying the original, only reversed.
Republican leadership = Idiocracy