I mostly buy LPs so I can have the albums I grew up with on tape, in their original intended format. Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Procol Harum, all of that stuff.
I have some newer albums on LP as well, but I've stopped buying those, since they don't really make much sense. I would much rather have the exact same master as a digital file instead. I do make exceptions for tour singles that are only released on vinyl, autographed albums and a small selection of stoner/doom metal/rock bands, where I think the format just fits the genre.
Quality goes to the LP? The format with severe problems for bass reproduction, limited frequency response, linearity problems, wow+flutter and countless other faults that negatively impact sound quality.
A CD is merely a physical distribution format for 44.1KHz/16-bit digital audio. The physical format is going away, but the same digital audio lives on as FLAC and WAV downloads.
Comparing pen and paper to vinyl records is disingenuous at best, the purposes, end results and methods are completely different. Pen and paper should be compared to a musical instrument, something which is used to create art.
But LPs are meant to reproduce the already-recorded art, and they do a middling-to-poor job at it, compared to digital audio, which is simply more accurate to the recording in every way possible.
Unlike a normal turntable, where the stylus helps push aside dust, the laser turntable plays back EVERYTHING, which necessitates ridiculously heavy-handed click and noise reduction, which murders the sound quality.
You're much better off with an ordinary setup of decent turntable and a decent cartridge. My SL-1210 Mk2 and a good Ortofon cartridge cost me $360, and will beat the laser turntable for sound quality any day of the week.
You can absolutely have good digital. 44.1k/16 is not it though.
Yes, it is enough. In fact, it's more than enough.
Despite a large number of controlled listening tests, and decades of audiophile bullshit about the subject, no one has been able to show an actual audible difference between 44.1KHz/16-bit and so-called "hi-res" audio for normal musical content. Never. Not even once.
some actually take advantage of that wonderful 96 dBm of dynamic range (and even (much) more with 24 bit DVD-A/SACD recordings).
No music takes full advantage of 96dB of dynamic range, it would simply be way too dynamic to even listen to. 96dB is like the difference between an extremely quiet room (20-30dB) and a chainsaw at full tilt at 1m distance. Most rooms have somewhere between 30-40dB background noise, so to actually use all of that dynamic range, the peaks would have to hit over 130dB, which is louder than a rock concert.
24-bit has 144dB of theoretically possible dynamic range, which is even more ridiculous. To use that fully in a normal room, you would have to have peaks around 180dB, which is ~40dB above the threshold of pain, and would cause instantaneous hearing damage or even complete deafness.
The point of 24-bit is not for playback, it's for recording and mastering. Every time your run the signal through another device, every time you apply an effect, every time you change the signal, you're adding a little bit of noise. That adds up over time. By using 24-bit, you make that noise accumulation quiet enough that it will not have an effect on the final 16-bit product.
Steven Wilson's remasters of Jethro Tull's albums are absolutely amazingly good. He also managed to salvage the sound on Opeth's "Damnation" album, where they had some issues with drum mics during the recordings, AFAIK they simply didn't have anything from the overhead mics.
Compared to the original compromised release, his remaster is a revelation.
Bob Katz did a great talk about what happened to digital mastering, some years ago.
Back in the old days, you were advised to shoot for -20dBFS average sound level when recording/mastering digitally, and let the peaks fall where they may. Having a solid 20dB of headroom was a massive step forward and let artists record with basically all the dynamic range and headroom they could ever want.
Now, everything is either normalized right up to 0dBFS for the peaks with some compression (which is not ideal, but OK), or outright slammed against 0dBFS with clipping as a result (which is NOT OK). When looking at the dynamic range of my collection, the peak badness seemed to hit right around the early 2000s. There are still badly-mastered albums released, but I have newer albums that are really well mastered. Not 20dB headroom well mastered, but still quite good.
(I mostly listen to hard rock and metal, mostly non-mainstream bands. YMMV)
It's because everything sold in digital is mastered like garbage and there's so much bass you cant hear what the singer is singing.
That's just bullshit. I have thousands of albums ripped from CDs and downloaded. None of them have overpowering bass, and most of them have decent-to-good mastering.
You either have a problem with your ears, your room, your speakers or your amplifier, if bass is completely overpowering.
Or maybe you're just listening to Bassy McBass and His All-Bass Big Bass Band XXXtra Bass Edition. In which case you should probably find something else to listen to.
It's all down to the mastering. A well-produced CD will trounce anything else for sound quality.
Do you want to hear a secret? 99.9% of all LPs released over the last 10-15 years have used the exact same masters as the CD releases, overcompression, clipping and all.
Dude, if that's what modern music sounds like to you, you need to find better music to listen to. Or maybe you just need to turn down the bass knob on your amplifier, which you probably turned up to compensate for the lack of bass on most LPs. Maybe you need to get better speakers that don't distort like crazy on actual bass content. Or maybe you need to look into room correction, if your room makes heavy bass boomy like that.
I have some tracks with crazy amounts of bass. Not overdriven or distorted, just lots of bass. They sound great on a good stereo, and the lyrics are perfectly intelligible. I even have a couple of LPs with amazingly deep bass, compared to what you'd expect from the format. On a proper stereo, preferably with decent subwoofers and proper room correction and calibration, even the deepest bass is well-controlled and not overpowering at all.
And Rega? Please, they're basically just overpriced planks of wood with motors that don't even run at the right speed. Get a proper turntable, a Technics SL-12x0 Mk2. Direct drive is King.
If you're not doing just a bit of EQ (preferable parametric EQ) to correct for the deficiencies in your room, you're missing out. Or you have an acoustically perfect room;-)
I'm using a basic dbx Driverack PX DSP-based crossover and EQ for my setup (active studio monitors and active subs), and I've measured my room using Room EQ Wizard and a calibrated measurement microphone. The difference between no EQ and proper EQ is amazing.
The "kiddies" these days design and build gear that will put anything that came before to absolute shame. You just need to find the right "kiddies":-)
You can still buy really damn good speakers, and they don't have to be fancy bullshit audiophile designs. Look into active studio monitors, some of them will absolutely beat even the best audiophile speakers into pulp, when it comes to accuracy and detail. I would pit a set of Adam S5X-Vs against any set of audiophile speakers at any price point, any day of the week.
Unfortunately, a lot of modern (re)releases on vinyl are also compressed to hell and back, but the warts and limitations of the LP format sort of 'hide' some of the badness.
The very best sound quality you're going to get is with mid-80s to mid-90s CD releases. This was after they figured out how to master properly for CDs, but before the Loudness War really got started.
Vinyl isn't better from a fidelity point of view, but it's Good Enough for most purposes. The real appeal lies in the big cover art and the whole ritual of vinyl playback. It makes it feel more special, and people are all about that these days.
I collect LPs, mostly of the albums I grew up with, listening on tape. So there's a huge nostalgia factor. I also buy the occasional stoner/doom metal/rock albums on vinyl, because I think the format fits the music, in a lo-fi kind of way.
The people who think it sounds better than digital because it's analog? Yeah, those guys are idiots.
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Oh man yeah, I absolutely hate the term "digital download". Whoever came up with that should be shot.
I mostly buy LPs so I can have the albums I grew up with on tape, in their original intended format. Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Procol Harum, all of that stuff.
I have some newer albums on LP as well, but I've stopped buying those, since they don't really make much sense. I would much rather have the exact same master as a digital file instead. I do make exceptions for tour singles that are only released on vinyl, autographed albums and a small selection of stoner/doom metal/rock bands, where I think the format just fits the genre.
Quality goes to the LP? The format with severe problems for bass reproduction, limited frequency response, linearity problems, wow+flutter and countless other faults that negatively impact sound quality.
A CD is merely a physical distribution format for 44.1KHz/16-bit digital audio. The physical format is going away, but the same digital audio lives on as FLAC and WAV downloads.
What a load of absolute twaddle and bullshit.
Comparing pen and paper to vinyl records is disingenuous at best, the purposes, end results and methods are completely different. Pen and paper should be compared to a musical instrument, something which is used to create art.
But LPs are meant to reproduce the already-recorded art, and they do a middling-to-poor job at it, compared to digital audio, which is simply more accurate to the recording in every way possible.
It's crap.
Unlike a normal turntable, where the stylus helps push aside dust, the laser turntable plays back EVERYTHING, which necessitates ridiculously heavy-handed click and noise reduction, which murders the sound quality.
You're much better off with an ordinary setup of decent turntable and a decent cartridge. My SL-1210 Mk2 and a good Ortofon cartridge cost me $360, and will beat the laser turntable for sound quality any day of the week.
You can absolutely have good digital. 44.1k/16 is not it though.
Yes, it is enough. In fact, it's more than enough.
Despite a large number of controlled listening tests, and decades of audiophile bullshit about the subject, no one has been able to show an actual audible difference between 44.1KHz/16-bit and so-called "hi-res" audio for normal musical content. Never. Not even once.
Hi-res audio is a scam.
some actually take advantage of that wonderful 96 dBm of dynamic range (and even (much) more with 24 bit DVD-A/SACD recordings).
No music takes full advantage of 96dB of dynamic range, it would simply be way too dynamic to even listen to. 96dB is like the difference between an extremely quiet room (20-30dB) and a chainsaw at full tilt at 1m distance. Most rooms have somewhere between 30-40dB background noise, so to actually use all of that dynamic range, the peaks would have to hit over 130dB, which is louder than a rock concert.
24-bit has 144dB of theoretically possible dynamic range, which is even more ridiculous. To use that fully in a normal room, you would have to have peaks around 180dB, which is ~40dB above the threshold of pain, and would cause instantaneous hearing damage or even complete deafness.
The point of 24-bit is not for playback, it's for recording and mastering. Every time your run the signal through another device, every time you apply an effect, every time you change the signal, you're adding a little bit of noise. That adds up over time. By using 24-bit, you make that noise accumulation quiet enough that it will not have an effect on the final 16-bit product.
24-bit is pointless for playback.
Steven Wilson's remasters of Jethro Tull's albums are absolutely amazingly good. He also managed to salvage the sound on Opeth's "Damnation" album, where they had some issues with drum mics during the recordings, AFAIK they simply didn't have anything from the overhead mics.
Compared to the original compromised release, his remaster is a revelation.
Bob Katz did a great talk about what happened to digital mastering, some years ago.
Back in the old days, you were advised to shoot for -20dBFS average sound level when recording/mastering digitally, and let the peaks fall where they may. Having a solid 20dB of headroom was a massive step forward and let artists record with basically all the dynamic range and headroom they could ever want.
Now, everything is either normalized right up to 0dBFS for the peaks with some compression (which is not ideal, but OK), or outright slammed against 0dBFS with clipping as a result (which is NOT OK). When looking at the dynamic range of my collection, the peak badness seemed to hit right around the early 2000s. There are still badly-mastered albums released, but I have newer albums that are really well mastered. Not 20dB headroom well mastered, but still quite good.
(I mostly listen to hard rock and metal, mostly non-mainstream bands. YMMV)
once you lose the quality from the digitization process it is lost for good.
Lose what quality? 44.1KHz/16bit (CD quality) is way beyond what LP, reel-to-reel or even the much-vaunted master tapes can manage.
It sounds to me like you don't understand digital audio at all. You should watch this video: https://xiph.org/video/vid2.sh...
It's because everything sold in digital is mastered like garbage and there's so much bass you cant hear what the singer is singing.
That's just bullshit. I have thousands of albums ripped from CDs and downloaded. None of them have overpowering bass, and most of them have decent-to-good mastering.
You either have a problem with your ears, your room, your speakers or your amplifier, if bass is completely overpowering.
Or maybe you're just listening to Bassy McBass and His All-Bass Big Bass Band XXXtra Bass Edition. In which case you should probably find something else to listen to.
The DR rating is useless for LPs:
https://hydrogenaud.io/index.p...
I was uncool before it was cool, dammit!
And the huge artwork, don't forget that. I have a couple of albums that I bought strictly because of the covers.
And how many DBX discs were ever released?
Exactly.
It's all down to the mastering. A well-produced CD will trounce anything else for sound quality.
Do you want to hear a secret? 99.9% of all LPs released over the last 10-15 years have used the exact same masters as the CD releases, overcompression, clipping and all.
Dude, if that's what modern music sounds like to you, you need to find better music to listen to. Or maybe you just need to turn down the bass knob on your amplifier, which you probably turned up to compensate for the lack of bass on most LPs. Maybe you need to get better speakers that don't distort like crazy on actual bass content. Or maybe you need to look into room correction, if your room makes heavy bass boomy like that.
I have some tracks with crazy amounts of bass. Not overdriven or distorted, just lots of bass. They sound great on a good stereo, and the lyrics are perfectly intelligible. I even have a couple of LPs with amazingly deep bass, compared to what you'd expect from the format. On a proper stereo, preferably with decent subwoofers and proper room correction and calibration, even the deepest bass is well-controlled and not overpowering at all.
And Rega? Please, they're basically just overpriced planks of wood with motors that don't even run at the right speed. Get a proper turntable, a Technics SL-12x0 Mk2. Direct drive is King.
If you're not doing just a bit of EQ (preferable parametric EQ) to correct for the deficiencies in your room, you're missing out. Or you have an acoustically perfect room ;-)
I'm using a basic dbx Driverack PX DSP-based crossover and EQ for my setup (active studio monitors and active subs), and I've measured my room using Room EQ Wizard and a calibrated measurement microphone. The difference between no EQ and proper EQ is amazing.
The "kiddies" these days design and build gear that will put anything that came before to absolute shame. You just need to find the right "kiddies" :-)
Stage gear often compromises on fidelity for the sake of power handling and portability.
Well yeah, unless you design your speakers properly ;-)
http://www.danleysoundlabs.com...
You can still buy really damn good speakers, and they don't have to be fancy bullshit audiophile designs. Look into active studio monitors, some of them will absolutely beat even the best audiophile speakers into pulp, when it comes to accuracy and detail. I would pit a set of Adam S5X-Vs against any set of audiophile speakers at any price point, any day of the week.
Unfortunately, a lot of modern (re)releases on vinyl are also compressed to hell and back, but the warts and limitations of the LP format sort of 'hide' some of the badness.
The very best sound quality you're going to get is with mid-80s to mid-90s CD releases. This was after they figured out how to master properly for CDs, but before the Loudness War really got started.
Vinyl isn't better from a fidelity point of view, but it's Good Enough for most purposes. The real appeal lies in the big cover art and the whole ritual of vinyl playback. It makes it feel more special, and people are all about that these days.
I collect LPs, mostly of the albums I grew up with, listening on tape. So there's a huge nostalgia factor. I also buy the occasional stoner/doom metal/rock albums on vinyl, because I think the format fits the music, in a lo-fi kind of way.
The people who think it sounds better than digital because it's analog? Yeah, those guys are idiots.
And you believe the RIAA? ;-)
MP3 V0 is fine. Only crazy audiophiles think otherwise.
You probably already know about Bandcamp, they offer just about every format you could wish for.
By far the majority of digitally distributed music is streamed, not downloaded.
Downloaded music is a niche market.