[nick_charles]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ethebull /img/forum/go_quote.gif Fourth, vinyl holds more information. Some say by a factor of ten compared to Redbook in resolving the smoothness of the original wave form, but this is the fourth reason IMO.

This is just incorrect. It is based on a wilfull misunderstanding of communications theory, information theory, sampling theory and the whole digital reconstruction thing. Over 20 - 20K CD has 8x more information. CD bass is not summed to mono below 80hz which vinyl is, CD has massively superior channel separation, massively lower noise and massively higher dynamic range i.e more information. In information terms vinyl on a good day gets you a dynamic range of maybe 75 - 78db, on any day of the week CD gives you 96db. The resolving power of vinyl is approximately 8K discrete levels that is a smidge under 2 ^ 13 compared with CD's 2 ^ 16.

But playing a straight bat to this I will just ask you to find one, serious i.e decent quality journal paper that supports your contention with anything like technical evidence. Just one, and I will even accept a decent quality conference paper.

 

[ethebull]

Geez,

Glad I didn’t list it as my number one reason. Wouldn’t want your head to explode.

“I have to tell you man. In listening to sound, I guess what I’m after is the closest thing that I can get to reality. Now, I know it’s not going to be reality, cause the thing gotta go through wires and gotta go through filters and this and that. I understand all that. But what I really like is to get as close to the natural sound of the instruments as possible. That’s why I like analog as opposed to digital. Because I don’t give a s**t what anybody tells you man, I know what you guys are going to tell me…’Oh yeah, but it’s clean Ray!’ Well it’s clean but it don’t got no balls!!!” - 1999 interview with Ray Charles by Michael Hobson of Classic Records

Probably not technical enough, sorry.

 

[bigshot]

Quote:

Originally Posted by memepool /img/forum/go_quote.gif Well yes, no, maybe. This is far from being universally agreed.

I did some research on this a year back. I couldn't find any tests that found that frequencies above 20kHz had any affect on the sound of music at all. I did find several studies that said that it had no effect at all, and a couple that found that most everything above 10kHz was unimportant to the quality of sound.

I think most people who focus on frequencies above the range of human hearing have no idea what sounds correspond with the numerical figures used to represent them.

As for frequencies below 20Hz, one would be very lucky to be able to reproduce 20Hz with any degree of flatness through a speaker rig. It would take some remarkable woofers and a LOT of power. The further down you go, the more power and the better woofers are required. I've heard a system that was flat down to around 22Hz and it sounded great. But it wasn't something that would fit well in my home, and the power of sound it put out when we played the cannon blasts of Dorati's 1812 Overture could be heard a block away.

See ya
Steve

 

[nick_charles]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ethebull /img/forum/go_quote.gif Geez, Glad I didn’t list it as my number one reason. Wouldn’t want your head to explode.

My head is fine thanks, I merely pointed out some possible problems with your assertion. Information is a word with a specific meaning.

If you say you prefer LP that is great, some do some don't. But you made a specific claim about information. You are the one who stated that LP has more information than CD.

Ps I am not anti-vinyl and I do own two Turntables, though neither get much use these days.

 

[bigshot]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ethebull /img/forum/go_quote.gif There are several elements to the signature of vinyl sound and why so many prefer it.

I was with you up to number four.

One through three could be dealt with very simply by just obtaining an extremely clean original pressing and using that to act as the master for CD release. This is quite common in pre-hifi era recordings where the metal parts have deteriorated from too much use.

As for number four, vinyl does not hold any more information than digital. Both formats are capable of producing wonderful sound. The differences between them are differences in kinds of artifacting. Digital is subject to over-processing. Analogue has problems with inner groove distortion and noise. Neither format is superior, except when it comes to convenience. CD wins hands down in that department.

I say this as a dedicated record collector with tens of thousands of LPs and 78s in my collection.

See ya
Steve

 

[ethebull]

Analog sound vs. digital sound - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A fairly balanced article.

On my fourth point, it is listed last for good reason. I didn’t make it up, but it is open to refute. Though the noticeable superiority of SACD and (to a lesser extent IME/O) DVDA, in sound quality, would tend to support my fourth point. SACD seems to get the textures right, a la analog. Redbook has its limitations.

I too own thousands of Lps and Cds. I buy them for music enjoyment not technical recording merit. I have on occasion bought reissues on CD, mostly to get bonus tracks, but also when my LP was a poor/noisy pressing. 9 out of 10 LP’s IME/O won’t be bettered by the CD redo.

I don’t often buy current releases on vinyl, but I did recently pick up “Sky Blue Sky” by Wilco. It includes the CD along with the 2 disc vinyl copy. Spatially and texturally, the vinyl is strikingly better, though I’m sure it wouldn’t measure better in any regard.

 

[bigshot]

I found differences between LP, CD and SACD as well, so I did these direct A/B line level matched comparisons...

Captured a Lincoln Mayorga Sheffield Lab direct to disc to digital. Burned it to a redbook CD and compared it to the original LP. No difference.

Compared the redbook layer of a Pentatone DSD recording to the SACD layer. No difference.

Whenever I've found differences between an LP and CD or the CD and SACD, it has always been attributable to different mastering... sometimes even a completely different mix. If differences in sound quality between formats exist at all, they are minute, but the differences between the quality of engineering are often massive.

If you want general rules of thumb as to whether an LP or a CD will sound better, you need to know a little bit about the pressing of the LP and the approach of the CD reissue. If an LP is pressed on RCA Dynaflex (like David Bowie's Diamond Dogs) or rechanneled stereo the CD will always be better. Likewise if the LP was pressed in the late 70s-early 80s during the oil crisis when vinyl was recycled. With classical music or acoustic jazz, odds are the sound quality of the CD reissue will be as good or better than the original LP, particularly for seventies pressings- less so for fifties and early 60s pressings. Music originally recorded digitally and released on LP almost always sounds better on CD, except perhaps for some current audiophile reissues that have been remastered for vinyl.

If the CD has been remastered, it's a crap shoot. It could be better, could be worse. But one thing is for sure... it won't sound the same as you remember it (middle period Rolling Stones on SACD, Led Zeppelin). Pre-hifi material is all over the map, with some releases, particularly Naxos classical, being excellent and others destroyed by fake stereo and additional reverb. Rhino reissues are notorious for having all sorts of broadband noise reduction artifacting and intrusive manipulation during remastering.

That's what I've found. It all comes down to a case by case basis, because it isn't a result of the format. It's the aesthetic choices of the engineers and producers.

See ya
Steve

 

[ethebull]

Hmm, I ripped a copy of the Wilco vinyl to cd, it wasn't the same.

Could I recommend a good ear, nose and throat man, or perhaps some system upgrades?

Cya,
E

 

[ozz]

I will have to agree with bigshot on this one mastering has everything
to do with it and if anyone is interested the SVS ultra pb13 can hit 20hz
flat its only a quarter of the size of a refrigerator.

 

[nick_charles]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ethebull /img/forum/go_quote.gif Hmm, I ripped a copy of the Wilco vinyl to cd, it wasn't the same. Could I recommend a good ear, nose and throat man, or perhaps some system upgrades? Cya, E

How did you do the comparison ?, also sadly not all CD players are properly flat on playback if you have a Wadia for instance you can take it as read that it will have a -3db roll off to 20K. If you have a tube stage in your CD player it will also be unflat.

The whole Vinyl to CD has been done to death. There is a bunch of spanish chaps (Matrix-HiFi) who did a very careful DBT in a properly controlled environment, with high end kit and carefully level matched and synchronized set-up and none of their (pro-vinyl) audiophiles were able to tell the difference between a CD-R of an LP and the LP itself.

The devil (as they say) is in the details...

Look at it logically, why would a competent 16/44.1 recording of an Lp be different from the Lp. The Lp has less dynamic range, more noise, higher crosstalk and more distortion, no offense to Lp but there it is. There is nowt on the LP that would be a problem for a decent ADC. The only thing that the ADC cannot capture is energy much above 20K, so it may disappoint your pet bat or dog but there really is pragmatically not much up there...

There is one other thing that Lp has going and that is it does have a faster rise time, does this matter ?, unless you have one of a handful of Direct Cut or Half Speed masters probably not...

 

[bigshot]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ethebull /img/forum/go_quote.gif Hmm, I ripped a copy of the Wilco vinyl to cd, it wasn't the same.

What sort of digitizing hardware did you use? Odds are, that's your problem.

See ya
Steve

 

[memepool]

Quote:

Originally Posted by nick_charles /img/forum/go_quote.gif How did you do the comparison ?, also sadly not all CD players are properly flat on playback if you have a Wadia for instance you can take it as read that it will have a -3db roll off to 20K. If you have a tube stage in your CD player it will also be unflat.

Equally you have to ask yourself why would Wadia, or B&O or any number of other companies roll off the treble on CD? why would something as ridiculously out of date, in engineering terms, as a thermionic valve be added to a perfectly good, flat upto 20khz, digital output by Musical Fidelity or Shanling?
When you look at the circuit in these things what is the "tube" or "valve" actually doing? This is not just some marketing trend in audiophool land either when industry standard kit like FocusRite preamps employ a valve stage in a microphone pre-amp feeding a DAW.

The reality is that right from the get go there has been a problem with the standard brick wall filtering in CD which is responsible not just for curtailing anything over 20khz but also causes artifacting lower down in the more audible frequencies.
You will find endless threads here where this has been debated over the years ad nauseam with various pubished papers. I remember posting early reviews of CD from Hi-Fi Choice highlighting exactly these issues although they were otherwise very positive.
All kinds of methods to fix this been tried as I'm sure you are aware from more oversampling to upsampling, to less oversampling to no oversampling to sticking valves in the way of the signal to hopefully disguise this problem, yet it remains because digital formats are necessarily set in stone which is both their great strength and weakness.



Quote:

Originally Posted by nick_charles /img/forum/go_quote.gif Look at it logically, why would a competent 16/44.1 recording of an Lp be different from the Lp. The Lp has less dynamic range, more noise, higher crosstalk and more distortion, no offense to Lp but there it is. There is nowt on the LP that would be a problem for a decent ADC. The only thing that the ADC cannot capture is energy much above 20K, so it may disappoint your pet bat or dog but there really is pragmatically not much up there... There is one other thing that Lp has going and that is it does have a faster rise time, does this matter ?, unless you have one of a handful of Direct Cut or Half Speed masters probably not...

By all the common metrics used to measure analogue recording digital looks way better on paper. But then there are a whole host of nebulous things like jitter from which digital suffers which aren't an issue with analogue.

I guess it comes down to carefully optimising each machine rather than making sweeping generalisations perhaps and both can sound very good but ultimately we listen to music not measurements and if the measurements don't communicate the music then the problem is more likely to be that we are not measuring the right things.

 

[ethebull]

Quote:

Originally Posted by nick_charles /img/forum/go_quote.gif CD bass is not summed to mono below 80hz which vinyl is,

I find it interesting that you use this “flaw” in the LP format to claim its inferiority. Since the human ear relies on arrival time differential to locate left to right placement of instruments, and given that our ears are only six inches apart, we cannot localize bass below 80 cycles because the wave forms are too long. I’d guess you already knew that, but I find it curious given other statements about how the flaws in CD are irrelevant.

Quote:

Originally Posted by bigshot /img/forum/go_quote.gif Whenever I've found differences between an LP and CD or the CD and SACD, it has always been attributable to different mastering... sometimes even a completely different mix.

I would replace always with mostly, then completely agree. Definitive statements on subjective topics are flawed IMO.

Quote:

Originally Posted by bigshot /img/forum/go_quote.gif If differences in sound quality between formats exist at all, they are minute, but the differences between the quality of engineering are often massive.

So SACD as a format, DSD as an archival digital A to D method - basically bunk is your view. Where’s that damn EN&T guy?

Quote:

Originally Posted by bigshot /img/forum/go_quote.gif What sort of digitizing hardware did you use? Odds are, that's your problem.

Quote:

Originally Posted by nick_charles /img/forum/go_quote.gif How did you do the comparison ?, also sadly not all CD players are properly flat on playback if you have a Wadia for instance you can take it as read that it will have a -3db roll off to 20K. If you have a tube stage in your CD player it will also be unflat. The whole Vinyl to CD has been done to death. There is a bunch of spanish chaps (Matrix-HiFi) who did a very careful DBT in a properly controlled environment, with high end kit and carefully level matched and synchronized set-up and none of their (pro-vinyl) audiophiles were able to tell the difference between a CD-R of an LP and the LP itself.

Well, I’m sure my words will fall on a deaf ear here(literally and figuratively?) but the rip just didn’t have the same vividness in spatial cues. Frequency balance, bass impact, dynamics across the spectrum were all fine, but the vocals and guitars lost realism and imaging. Much like the difference between having my speakers a couple of feet from the back wall and dialed in just right vs. a placement that diminishes soundstage and imaging. I also feel the rip lost harmonic detail.

How was it recorded? On my Marantz DR700 CDR component player/recorder.

On the controlled DBT comparo, it is what it is. Put me in a new room with a bunch of EQ I’ve never lived with and I don’t know that I’d shed any light on any number of subjective considerations, for the tester, or for myself.

 

[Tarkovsky]

Quote:

Originally Posted by memepool /img/forum/go_quote.gif Equally you have to ask yourself why would Wadia, or B&O or any number of other companies roll off the treble on CD? why would something as ridiculously out of date, in engineering terms, as a thermionic valve be added to a perfectly good, flat upto 20khz, digital output by Musical Fidelity or Shanling? When you look at the circuit in these things what is the "tube" or "valve" actually doing? This is not just some marketing trend in audiophool land either when industry standard kit like FocusRite preamps employ a valve stage in a microphone pre-amp feeding a DAW.

It's hard to claim doing this accurately reproduce the mix yes, but if people like the sound of valves and high end roll I don't see the argument against using them when recording. Next you'll be complaining they are using these electric guitars instead of a respectable tangelwood!

 

[bigshot]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ethebull /img/forum/go_quote.gif So SACD as a format, DSD as an archival digital A to D method - basically bunk is your view.

SACD is a totally pointless format. I suspect it was designed to charge more than CD prices for the same thing, and as a trick to sell people their umpteenth copy of Dark Side of the Moon.

High bitrate recording is useful for the flexibility it gives sound mixers, not for any improvement in the home.

Your CD recorder is probably the problem. A good sound card and computer could make a totally transparent copy.

See ya
Steve