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.

Comments

wrong conclusion

[religionofpeas]

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.

Re:wrong conclusion

[AntiSol]

It's a bit of both. A regular 44khz audio CD can't capture the full resolution of a digital master done at e.g 96khz. But imperfections in the medium are more likely to cause differences you can actually hear.

Re:wrong conclusion

[religionofpeas]

A regular 44khz audio CD can't capture the full resolution of a digital master done at e.g 96khz

Mastering at higher resolution is useful for mixing and filtering, but a 44 kHz final output is enough to capture the full range of your ears.

Re:wrong conclusion

[religionofpeas]

Yes, but the argument that an analog reproduction of a 96khz source is more faithful than a 44khz CD is not incorrect.

The 44kHz CD can exactly reproduce all the waveforms in the 96kHz source, provided they are below 22 kHz. The analog vinyl can reproduce some waveforms over 22 kHz, but introduces distortion over the entire frequency spectrum.

Over the part that we can hear, the 44 kHz CD is more faithful to the original than vinyl. In either case, the differences are not due to the source material.

Also, none of the components in the sound system, such as filters, amplifiers, and microphones are designed to operate properly at ultrasonic frequencies.

Re:wrong conclusion

[Joce640k]

+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...

Re:wrong conclusion

[Anonymous Coward]

I took a course in audio engineering in the late 90s. I would like to have had the world settled on 48kHz and 20-bit for listening. 96kHz 24-bit for mastering is just fine. 44.1/16 was a good technical compromise for 1980 and superior in almost every way to vinyl, epically in the reproducibility department.

That being said, my ears do like Blu-Ray audio a lot. But my CD collection isn't going anywhere. My vinyl collection was liquidated in the 90s and I do not miss it. Though I do miss my record player and old 60s "HiFi" for sentimental tactile reasons.

All analog systems had filters and bias compensating EQs built in. From the late 70s on these were ALL digital. So even people thinking their tape master was Analog were wrong. All tape has a bias and must be compensated for. The main difference to me in recording is clipping, digital clips horribly and analog sometimes sounds good when it clips. This is not an accurate reproduction of the sound, but so many people think it is. If you want this effect, you can do it in the studio with digital.

Most consumer audio systems can't reproduce anything beyond 18kHz or below 20Hz. That is probably a good thing to protect the speakers from over heating their coils due to long tones playing that no one bothers to listen for. But I do miss overtones in violins and wind instruments. I had documented ability to hear 24kHz when I was 20. I was the only one in the class. I could also hear and transcribe accurately conversation and test tones at SPL levels most people couldn't distinguish from background noise. Now I don't think I can hear past 19kHz. But I am very sensitive to 16-17 for some reason and am still Radar O'Rielly when it comes to hearing things way before others (and some dogs) do.

So, if you want to better replicate the entire experience of GOOD human hearing, boost the dynamic range to 20-bit and extend out to 10Hz-24KHz, with Nyquist this means 48kHz sampling playback. Whether anyone but one in a million will notice is another question. So thus, contentment with redbook 44.1/16.

Note: a properly mastered CD should sound great at 16-bit, giving around 60dB dynamic range. An orchestra has considerably more dynamic range, but usually not in the same passage. So if you master correctly, 16-bit listening should be enough... but I'm anal and would like loud-soft transitions to be done more natural. For recording and mastering 24-bit is a major plus. Aliasing is a bitch. Most pop songs could probably be listened to in 10-bit without any noticeable difference. Too much compression.

Loudness war.

[DrYak]

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.)

Re:96KHz

[Joce640k]

The placebo effect is real, too. You can actually cure illness with sugar pills!

Bottom line: If analog sound is better in their heads then it really is better (for them).

Vinyl fans need renamed

[simpz]

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.

Re:Exactly? Umm, no.

[religionofpeas]

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.