Digital and Analog Audio's Curious Coexistence (cnet.com) 345
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.
wrong conclusion (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Yes, but the argument that an analog reproduction of a 96khz source is more faithful than a 44khz CD is not incorrect.
Don't misunderstand, I'm not trying to say you're wrong - I did say that we're not talking about differences you can hear, and personally I prefer digital over vinyl. All I'm saying is that their argument isn't 100% invalid - they're not wrong either.
Re:wrong conclusion (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
+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... [xiph.org]
Re:wrong conclusion (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:wrong conclusion (Score:4, Informative)
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... [audiocheck.net]
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Most pop songs could probably be listened to in 10-bit without any noticeable difference. Too much compression.
LOL.. I think you are being generous with 10 bits. I used to work at a "top 40" pop format station (as junior audio engineer), I can tell you they process and compress what comes off the CD's into oblivion to get the audio signal as "loud" sounding as they can. It was awful sounding to me... These days most Pop coming off of CD's have the same sound to me and needless to say, I still don't like it.
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That's because of the fidelity of FM broadcasts in the first place. You have to cut off the high frequencies and smash the rest to a super-load flat line just to get decent sound on the other end.
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Actually, FM has pretty good fidelity and dynamic range, assuming you have full quieting in your receiving equipment.
There is so much bandwidth there, they can modulate multiple audio signals which are totally separate... In fact, multiple piped in music sources for businesses used to be sent on the station where I worked... So you had the mono signal, the Stereo differences sent on the first pilot, then a couple more audio channels for different music sources that got played in business lobbies and on as
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If you got headaches around some old analog TVs, you were probably sensitive to the horizontal scan frequency of 15,734Hz (at least in the US). If the flyback transformer had a loose core it could vibrate and I got terrible headaches from those.
VGA monitors were usually running at 25-32kHZ, and I rarely reacted to them unless the core was really really bad (or poorly designed), and then only through my right ear. My left ear is down at least 40dB through most normally audible frequencies, which leads to int
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Vinyl often sounds warmer because the master recording has heavy clipping, and vinyl smooths it out a lot. Same with valves for amplification, especially with things like overdriven guitars.
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Vinyl often sounds warmer because the master recording has heavy clipping, and vinyl smooths it out a lot. Same with valves for amplification, especially with things like overdriven guitars.
Exactly. The vinyl process distortion and the tube amp distortion might sound good to some people, but it is still distortion.
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I agree, it is distortion, but then again so is the clipping. It's digital aliasing, a sampling error due to the signal being beyond the maximum range of the digital representation.
So actually the smoothing that vinyl/valves produces could reduce the amount of error through a kind of anti-aliasing, similar to anti-aliasing that some DACs use. It can seem counter-intuitive, but adding a certain amount of noise is a common way to reduce overall error.
The Wikipedia article on dithering has more info.
Anyway, th
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And this is why amateur recordings sound so terrible. If you don't record at 96KHz / 24-bit or higher, you don't have any margin for mixing and smoothing.
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Of course, a proper recording engineer isn't going to allow any clipping in the master recording. And once the master recording is finished, you can adjust gain and compression to produce any output format without further clipping.
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You're mkaing the flawed assumption that they're mastered the same. The master on the CD will most certainly be compressed to the point that anyone under 30 should be able to hear the distortion, particularly to the high hats.
That compression depends on the type of music you're listening to. What passes for Pop these days hardly matters if it is compressed or not.
If the vinyl is mastered separately, and it generally is, then it will sound a whole hell of a lot warmer because it's not compressed nearly as brutally.
"Warmth" is also distortion. Just the distortion you like. Yeah, I can enjoy listening to a nice tube amp or the occasional vinyl. But not very often as the record is damaged with every play.
Now those tube amps - I loves me some nice hollow state technology now and again. But yeah, it distorts the sound.
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"Warmth" is also distortion.
No, warmth is a qualitative descriptor for sound. If you start with an original recording and compress the hell out of it so that it loses all warmth, the original sounds warmer; that warmth is not distortion -- the lack of it in the remastered version is.
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Interesting you should mention lasers. My university's library considered buying a unit for their record archive, but they found that the laser units actually produced a lot more noise because of all the dust and stuff that accumulates on the record's surface. Takes some expensive (at the time) audio processors to filter it out. Turned out that a regular high-quality needle was was the best choice. The act of playing a record with a needle gently cleans it and helps keep the sound noise free.
I think this
Distortion (Score:2)
Can you give some figures on this claimed distortion? Start with %THD and then IM.
Re:Exactly? Umm, no. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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A 22KHz signal captured at 44KHz would only have a 0 and a 65535 with nothing in between. Not much different than a 0 and a 1. Let's say it's perfectly aligned with the sample rate for simplicity. The first sample is at the peak (or 65535). Because it will be back to the peak again two samples later, the next sample will have to be at 0. And the third sample would be at 65535 again. Any waveform shape is imaginary at this limited resolution - there is only peak/valley/peak/valley.
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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.
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So pure digital output from a sampler running at twice the frequency in question can produce a sine wave before filtering can it? Wow, you should write a white paper on this, clearly you have a nobel prize waiting!
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So pure digital output from a sampler running at twice the frequency in question can produce a sine wave before filtering can it?
Normally, you would first increase the sampling frequency in the digital domain, and then convert to analog. The residual error can be pushed to the high frequency domain (> 100 kHz) where it can be easily removed with a simple analog filter.
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That was my point you pillock.
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introduces distortion over the entire frequency spectrum
Care to elaborate on this
Inner groove distortion, wow, flutter, dust, static, the list goes on and on.
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One thing I never understood about this debate is why do people care that people care? why do people insist on debating it? If they think they hear a difference then can't they just have their vinyl, and you can have your CDs, and I can have my MP3s, and we all just live in harmony?
The nature of humans, especially the male of the species. That yummy competition, where similar things get ranked, with whatever the person likes being just perfect, and seems like the other options don't work at all. But they do.
Look at Ford versus Chevy, Mac versus PC, iPhone versus Android, Tube amp versus Solid State, Vinyl versus CD versus MP3. Coke vs Pepsi.
vi vs vim. Jesus vs Mohammad.
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The nature of humans, especially the male of the species.
There is an element of that. I personally used to subscribe to "live and let live", but age has changed that. Now when someone says something that is anti-scientific and ignorant, I think of GMO labels, AGW deniers, and anti-vaxxers. This scientific illiteracy is having a direct effect on me and so I speak up - even if it's something as seemingly benign as someone spending their money unwisely on bullshit audio equipment without doing a proper blind test. I've long challenged my audiophile friends to listen
If that is true (Score:2)
Then why does the BluRay spec have audio sampling at 192KHz? Why is "CD" quality fine for music but movies need sampled an order of magnitude deeper?
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That's just marketing. Higher numbers sell better. And now you get to buy the White Album yet again.
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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.
44.1 Ks/Sec is NOT enough to capture the full range of your ears, and I have dozens of recordings with cymbals that sound like escaping steam, and tambourine and bells that have aliasing artifacts down into the mid-bass(!!!) regions, to prove it.
If you accept 20-20 kHz as the range of normal human hearing, then 44.1 ks/Sec just does NOT cut it. Nyquist be damned. First off, that really only gives you 2 samples per WAVEFORM at 20 kHz. Great! But then, there's the so-called "Brick Wall" Low Pass Filter. It it
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If you use a DAC that creates discrete steps, and feed the output through a perfect 0-22kHz lowpass filter, you get the original signal back.
Because it is impossible to create such perfect filter, a common method is to convert the 44 kHz sample rate to a much higher one, say 1 MHz. Feed that through a DAC, and then use a much simpler lowpass filter to get rid of anything above 500 kHz.
As far as higher harmonics: if you can't hear a pure sine at 30 kHz, you cannot hear the harmonics of a 15 kHz fundamental either.
That would be a Delta-Sigma D/A converter, which is most common nowadays and quite different from the original multibit type (see http://www.rane.com/note137.ht... [rane.com]). I think the point is there is a whole lot of filtering going on, and that is where the subtle differences emerge. That perfect copy is in theory only.
96KHz (Score:3)
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
Re:96KHz (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
Physics (Score:2)
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).
Umm, no. That is not an objective truth we can agree upon. The placebo effect is real but you don't design a medical system around it either. Similarly, just because a single person claims they prefer an "analog sound" you don't go and pretend the laws of physics somehow are different for that one person.
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The placebo effect is real but you don't design a medical system around it either.
Why not?
If we can help some people without using drugs, why wouldn't we?
I get that the ethics of lying to a patient are complex, and skeptics likely are immune, but there is a large group of people we could be helping with placebos and I see no reason not to start there.
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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/... [wired.com]
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 th
Placebo (Score:2)
I have had people suggest that maybe they can "feel" the higher frequencies somehow.
People also suggest that homeopathy actually is something more than a placebo. Doesn't change the fact that it is a bullshit claim that has yet to withstand any scientific scrutiny.
Re:96KHz (Score:4, Interesting)
At 96Khz 24bit recording resolution you are at the equivalent of current analogue tape.
Please provide a link to an analogue tape+recorder with S/R ratio of 144 dB.
However the other thing the human ear is sensitive to is harmonic frequencies, and if they are missing, it sounds weird.
There is no difference. If you can't hear a single 22 kHz note, you can't hear the 22 kHz harmonic of a 11 kHz fundamental tone either. Even worse, the presence of lower fundamentals have a blocking effect on our ability to hear higher frequencies.
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I mean S/N ratio, of course.
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My understanding is the nature of vinyl also necessitates remixing. That process is more of an artform than a science. I imagine the mix adds more character to the music than the vinyl itself.
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I imagine the mix adds more character to the music than the vinyl itself.
Indeed it does, and this is what most people who claim the CD vs vinyl "war" is pointless don't understand.
For me, personally, put the vinyl mix on a CD and it'd settle it pretty decisively. Most CD recordings are way overcompressed and I do like me some dynamic range.
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There's a big difference between fidelity and quality. Sometimes the distortion introduced by a medium or by processing can make the music sound better, even if it is also less like the original.
Plus the vinyl version often has a slightly different mix than the CD version - it's not even the same song.
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Or, "digital" doesn't offer enough information in order to make an accurate assessment of what's going on. For example: I'm no sound engineer, but I'm guessing the studio has far higher quality equipment using far higher sampling rates and bit depth per sample than standard 44khz PCM. Once the master is made in the much higher quality, it's then downsampled to the CD audio and digital files distributed to iTunes / Google Play / Pandora / Spotify / Amazon / Whoever.
If the Vinyl is cut from the higher quali
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You are both rights.
The original master is often made with CDs in mind. CDs have more dynamic range than vinyl, and can have more loudness enhancement applied. If your recording is too loud the needle will skip out of the track on a vinyl record, so lazy sound engineers just apply some filtering and send the file off to be duplicated.
Good engineers do a proper re-mixing of the source material, which often ends up with the vinyl release sounding better because it is less compressed and more dynamic.
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No, if everything comes from the same digital master, then vinyl's difference in sound quality comes from imperfections in the medium itself.
Partially correct; You're missing a step. The engineering done for CDs/digital, especially starting in the 2000s, is typically massively over compressed. By compression I'm referring to dynamics compression. This isn't the case with vinyl.
Take a track from the DDD recording for Power Windows by RUSH, the original CD, and a track from Vapor Trails (original, not remastered.) Compare the waveforms. It's not pretty. Vapor Trails is a solid thick line. The vinyl release of the original Vapor trails likely look
NO - you are wrong (Score:3)
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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.
TBH, the complete quote was:
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.
In other words: the quality of vinyl has mostly to do with any step involved in the creation of said vinyl, which sounds reasonable, but also meaningless.
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which sounds reasonable, but also meaningless.
Actually, given that vinyl as a medium simply does not support the dynamic range compression often used on CDs, whether a master is intended for CD or vinyl will, necessarily, affect the choices made by, at least, the mixing and mastering engineers. It's far from meaningless if you're dealing with good engineers.
That said, my equipment can play much louder than I can comfortably listen and the "loudness wars" with CDs are wholly and truly pointless, at least for me. Give me a recording mastered for vinyl
I grew up pre-digital. (Score:2, Insightful)
Give me CDs any time. I'm glad to be rid of hiss, pops, scratches, wow, flutter, 5% total harmonic distortion, stretching, rumble.
Loudness war. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.)
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yes, but how is vinyl not affected by the loadness wars. as noted, all the mastering and mixing is done digital. it is then transfered to whatever medium - cd, vinyl, streaming/conpressed digital format, ... so they all have the same source and should sound the same within the limits of the medium they are on.
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Vinyl is imperfect (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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They fool themselves into thinking its better reproduction of the original source that digital - its anything but.
I don't think it's that people "fool" themselves. It's that we (humans) actually like distorted sound. The distortion is what makes music, well... music.
An electric guitar and a trumpet can both play the same note, but they don't sound even close to the same. They both introduce different distortion into the sound and that is what our ears find pleasant. The medium itself is no different. The distortion introduced by vinyl was part of the music, and so when newer types of media didn't contain that same dist
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"I don't think it's that people "fool" themselves"
Oh they do. Thats why you have audiophools paying $20K+ for turntables when they could get better reproduction quality out of a cheap CD player or $100 smartphone.
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That's my point. It's not about reproducing the original sound perfectly. It's because they like the distortion that vinyl introduces and that's is what they want to hear.
It's like you're saying I'm fooling myself by playing my electric guitar with the distortion on. Turning off the distortion may "reproduce" the sound of my guitar better, but it's not what I want.
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You're missing the point. If they wanted distortion they could by a turntable for $100, but they think a more expensive one will get them "closer" to the original source. Its the usual story of idiots with too much money being parted from it by snake oil salesmen.
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In your original comment you didn't distinguish between a $100 turntable and a $20,000 turntable. Your subject was "Vinyl is imperfect", not "People spend too much on turntables".
But if that's what you meant then apparently we agree. :D
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"n your original comment you didn't distinguish between a $100 turntable and a $20,000 turntable"
I'm not sure how clearer "$20K+ turntable" could have been tbh.
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There's distortion that people prefer, and distortion that don't. the $100 turntable may have too much of what they don't want, where a more expensive one makes a sound that is preferable.
Yes, as you go farther up in price, the differences become more minute, and actually placebo - the point you're trying to make in a rather hamfisted way. But at the lower end there is definitely a difference just in the mechanics of how the thing works - belt drive versus direct drive, the quality of vibration dampening
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" the point you're trying to make in a rather hamfisted way."
Hamfisted? Sorry if my blantantly obvious point wasn't clear to you, next time I'll trywriting it in crayon for you. Would that help?
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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.
In theory yes, but in practice CDs are capable of reproducing very highly compressed audio that would make the needle jump on vinyl. So the CD ends up being far more compressed than the vinyl release, and the vinyl sounds more dynamic.
Sometimes the digital master for the vinyl version leaks out, and is highly prized by fans. Sometimes the Japanese special editions have less compression too, because for some reason that market prefers it or is more willing to buy re-masters.
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Sometimes the digital master for the vinyl version leaks out, and is highly prized by fans
So why don't they just sell both ?
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Sometimes they do, the digital version being the SACD or DVD-A edition that costs 5x as much.
It is odd though, isn't it? Clearly there is demand, but like how Lucas won't sell you the original version of Star Wars sometimes they just don't want to.
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Probably the demand is only from a small group, not worth the effort.
again - the RIAA curve is not compression (Score:3)
The defects of vinyl (Score:4, Informative)
Obsession with analog stems from misunderstanding (Score:3)
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 [youtube.com] 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.
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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 [youtube.com] 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.
Re:Obsession with analog stems from misunderstandi (Score:4, Informative)
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... [xiph.org] at 21:00
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It isn't possible for there to be literally no loss of phase, but I may have overestimated the minimum increment. Thinking about it some more, I think the minimum time resolution varies with the frequency of the input wave, and inversely with the product of the sampling rate and the noise floor (bit depth).
My bad for posting while still half asleep.
He covers the whole topic of timing in about 30 seconds and does so in very scant detail, and with an infinite wave very very far from the filter frequency. It
What's the point of the article? Flamebait? (Score:2)
Pointless unless it's to (re)ignite the tired old debate about digital vs.analog & recycle some gold monster cable jokes.
Anybody who worked with the old analog studios will tell you how "noisy" they were; harder to use too, and the damn tapes always seemed to break at a critical moment, or strangely erase themselves, or just get plain lost or stolen...
Digital also allowed many more people (for better or worse) to record and mix cheap & fast.
Anyway, the main reason why a lot of "digital" music on CD
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"But I don't want "snap, crackle & pop" in the middle of a quiet section of an opera aria, thanks."
Play 'em wet. 50/50 distilled water and ethanol, add a drop or two of ethylene glycol (or dishwashing liquid), wet a cloth with it, wring it out until it just stops dripping, and wipe that over the vinyl. Play, then dry before putting away.
Reduces heat from friction, too.
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Really? Me, and the parent "flamebait"? Someone's drunk.
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"Worse, many people's introduction to CD was in a bundle with crap (cheap) amps and speakers; this sounded not good compared to (Grand) Dad's audiophile setups with massive class AB amps and speakers the size of iceboxes."
My own "introduction" was when I added a $500 Sony CD player to my ~$2k stereo system back around 1983. The first thing I noticed was that some CDs sounded great while others were crap. After a while someone pointed out that almost all the CDs were being produced in either Japan or Germa
Shock horror! (Score:2)
SPARS code (Score:2)
This reminds me of the early days of CDs with people looking for DDD on the box.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Vinyl is really just hype! (Score:2)
The real points here are not with the recorded sound quality, but with the listened sound quality.
If you insist in using earpieces, noisy environments, low attention and MP3-like sources, the vinyl ain't any better than a 192 kHz MP3. And it loses quality play after play.
If you instead use high end speakers in adequately insulated rooms and keep your attention to the sounds you're are listening to, than maybe the first plays on a vinyl will make some difference.
But also SACD [wikipedia.org] and DVD-Audio [wikipedia.org] can do the same wh
Nothing to do with "vinyl" (Score:3)
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.
Vinyl fans need renamed (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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They are true science deniers.
Yup, this is what annoys me the most about most of the vinyl crowd. It really wouldn't bother me if most of 'em understood that their format was shit, but as a matter of personal preference they still preferred it. However, there's almost always this insistence that science is wrong, "vinyl is a superior audio reproduction medium!"
The primary reason it was popular in its heyday was that vinyl was easy and cheap to mass produce, making it an ideal high-profit format for distribution and sales of music. Ev
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Keep in mind music is recorded to sound best in the media it's going to be distributed in. The ambience of the media is factored into the production, whether intentionally or not.
If you play an old 78 from the 1920's on a modern turntable with modern amplification, it sounds like someone is frying an egg in the background, because modern equipment can pick up the defects in the media.
If you play it on 1920's Victrola, it'll actually sound pretty decent, because the acoustic reproduction equipment is incapab
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The are several reasons why a 78 will sound bad on a modern turntable. First you need a different needle for 78s. Secondly back then the speed at which the record was cut could fluctuate a lot between manufacturers so you need more leeway on adjusting the rotation speed. Third the RIAA equalization curve is different or non existent for 78s so yeah it's going to sound bad. Go on YouTube to hear some properly played 78 records.
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Nyquist isn't the whole story about digital audio, though in practice it's a major argument. When you look at the math of the Nyquist limit, it assumes a few things that don't hold precisely in real life. One of the real-life issues is quantization error, which is kind of obvious: higher bit depth per sample is better. If you use 1-bit sampling at 44.1 kHz, it'll probably sound horrible.
The subtler issue about quantization error is that it's not a random error. So adding a bit of analog noise at levels u
How about DRM? (Score:2)
Analog = Unlimited ownership of your physical medium.
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There hasn't been DRM on music since 2009.
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lol. Hello soulless communist. Your life is measured in experience and not by marketing specifications. There is more to life than efficiency and five year tractor production targets. Do not forget the ceremony of dropping the needle and the perusal of the gate-fold sleeve.
P.S. Republicans are deluded children, scared of everything.
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Tubes change the sound, making it "warmer".
Warmth = distortion, yes.
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The point is to make money off of the same idiots that buy really expensive HDMI cables, because apparently the idea of minimum signal-to-noise ratios in digital communications are completely lost on that crowd.
The ones are so much one-ier with this $90 Monster cable than they were with the cheap $10 Amazon Basics cable! What do you mean that as long as there's decodeable digital signal, it doesn't much matter if I'm 20 dB over the noise or 50 dB over the noise?!
It's slightly different in this circumstance
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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.
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THIS..
Most "audiophiles" don't possess the necessary acoustic environment, speakers and setup to actually hear any of the differences all that money they spent on equipment. Most of the time, the argument boils down to who spent the most and can produce the best looking performance numbers from the sales literature.
Not to say there are not differences, only that most folks, unless trained, wouldn't be able to hear them even if the sources where side by side and setup the same. Most don't have the equipm
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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