Actually, the evidence above sheds absolutely no light on the issue of whether the content at any frequency on any recording is noise, distortion, or music.
The reason is that no reliable reference that we can analyze to determine what the recording should contain seems to have been provided.
Without a reliable reference, it is all just speculation.
I provided a comparison with the CD version of the recording, using a segment (a single note) which was not loud enough to suffer the compression that affects that CD master. So the black spectrum is the reference, the red is the vinyl which compares to it. You can see that the high frequency band from 13-15 kHz spectrum matches the peaks reasonably well, which shows that the vinyl sound in that band will be substantially similar to the digital gold standard. Remember I'm with you, Arny, I'm a scientist who knows that the digital playback should be a gold standard against which the vinyl can be judged. I already established much earlier in the thread that the only clear difference between the CD and LP masters of this particular recording is the amount of compression. This particular segment of the recording which I analyzed should be relatively unaffected by the compression process because it is nowhere near the peak amplitude overall.
I think that here in the sound science forum, it's nice to provide some analysis to buttress what we're saying. I'm seeing a lot of theoretical arguments about the superiority of digital, none of which I would dispute. Yet I'm the only contributor who has gone to the trouble of analyzing real world recordings on CD and vinyl and seeing where the chips fall. Reality bites, as they say. I don't wish to read anymore posts that don't provide an analysis of specific data on specific CDs and records. As they say in my favorite auto forum, "this thread is useless without pictures." And I don't mean pictures of theory, test disks etc. I mean analysis of real recordings that you buy. I conceded the point in my very first post, that CD is superior to vinyl *in theory* and *as a medium of reproduction.* The point of my thread has been to emphasis that, in spite of this, *real CDs that you buy* are *very often and perhaps most of the time* not superior to vinyl, because of how the masters have been "sabotaged" as you put it earlier.
Arny you were willing to grant that my one example indeed shows that there is *one* CD which is sabotaged. But I continue to posit that this far from the only one, and in fact my general claim is that, leaving aside classical music, 90% of all CDs are sabotaged and their corresponding vinyl records will sound better when played on quality equipment.
I don't have time to prove this point, so for now I leave it open as merely a claim, a *hypothesis* for those of scientific persuasion; however I do not wish to read any argument against it that does not show, as I did, actual findings.
