[Shike]

 
Quote:

I prefer the sound of vinyl over the sound of CD, generally speaking.  I have never had anyone listen to vinyl and CD on my stereo who did not think that the Vinyl sounded better.  Not a single person.
 
Now, I am not arguing that vinyl playback is technically superior to CD.  And I am not saying that every turntable sounds better than every CD player.  But *MY* vinyl front end sounds better than my CD front end, on my stereo, to me (and at least several dozen or so other people).
 
And for people who like to point to the "hassle of playing records", for every one of you there is probably one of me, who truly enjoys the process of playing a record.  For me it's not a hassle at all - it's actually a pleasure.
 
I listen to far more digital music than vinyl - since I listen a lot in places other than where my records and TT are.  But when I actually do have the choice - it's always vinyl.

Are you comparing ones that offer roughly the same mastering at the end in terms of dynamic range?  Loudness wars is the CDs #1 enemy after all.

 

[Skylab]

Quote:

Are you comparing ones that offer roughly the same mastering at the end in terms of dynamic range?  Loudness wars is the CDs #1 enemy after all.

In some cases, the LP mastering is likely different (better), but in many cases, it's not. 

 

[MZ Lab]

I think many people are missing the point.  In the nature all the sounds are analog.  The CD or even the superior quality SACD are digital. The natural analog sounds are transferred into zeros and ones during the recording process.   At home the consumer plays back the digital signal which is transferred back to analog.  I had an old friend who unfortunately past away recently who used to say: The CD gives us information about the music the Vinyl is the music.  So until we have bio ears and we aren't robots  who can plug in directly into a socket to experience  music  the  most natural source would be the analog.  Some people like reel to reel better than vinyl but they clearly have never herd a great direct to disc record.

 

[grokit]

Robots have digital hearing so they don't even need to plug in

 

[Shike]

Quote:

I think many people are missing the point.  In the nature all the sounds are analog.  The CD or even the superior quality SACD are digital. The natural analog sounds are transferred into zeros and ones during the recording process.   At home the consumer plays back the digital signal which is transferred back to analog.  I had an old friend who unfortunately past away recently who used to say: The CD gives us information about the music the Vinyl is the music.  So until we have bio ears and we aren't robots  who can plug in directly into a socket to experience  music  the  most natural source would be the analog.  Some people like reel to reel better than vinyl but they clearly have never herd a great direct to disc record.

 
Really, you needed to revive a thread from 2010?
 
This has nothing to do with analog vs. digital in that sense.  It has to do with mastering, distortion, flutter, crosstalk, clipping, etc.  See the nyquist theorem - digital can reproduce the analog waveform just fine.  What we're dealing with is poor measuring gear (vinyl in general) and crappy mastering (put on CDs).  Of course there's some badly done records and some well done CDs, but generally speaking this seems to hold true in a lot of cases.  SACD/DVD-A seems to fix a lot of the poor mastering argument for digital since they usually are handled with better care, but isn't guaranteed either.
 
Even then, you may like the sound of the technical problems that vinyl presents, such as some crosstalk, harmonic distortions, and even nostalgia regarding the occasionally audible hiss and pop.  While you may enjoy it, that doesn't make the CD inferior in any way -- especially quality.  It means you have attachments to limitations of a technically inferior medium or to better mastering.

 

[grokit]

Great point, but vinyl is still capable of much more resolution than the redbook 16/44.1 cd so it's not without it's technical benefits. It's just more of a hassle to get there and higher-resolution digital music is leveling the playing field in that respect so as you said so well vinyl is getting more anachronistic as digital continues to improve in bandwidth.
 
But I can see Shikes point as well. Our hearing is analog, as is any mechanical transducer like a speaker, microphone, or tape head/phono cartridge.

 

[Shike]

Quote:

Great point, but vinyl is still capable of much more resolution than the redbook 16/44.1 cd so it's not without it's technical benefits.

Provide a scientific peer reviewed citation of this please, since this flies in the face of nyquist theorem.  Remember, this is sound science.

 

[leeperry]

vinyl is still capable of much more resolution than the redbook 16/44.1

links? proofs? measurements? I personally really hate the loud and random vinylistic surface noises.

 

[grokit]

There's a very dry and extensive video in the RMAF archives about digitizing vinyl where the demonstrator refers to the fact that using a 44.1 or even 96 khz ADC wouldn't do justice to vinyl's resolution potential. The guy (Rob Robertson) is a Channel D (Pure Vinyl) engineer so I would assume he knows his stuff.
 
Anyways that part is what stuck with me as my outboard ADC is only 44.1 (Firestone USB I/O). I did a couple of tests and got better (more dynamic) results to my ears using the audio input of my Mac Pro which is 192 khz capable. He did acknowledge vinyl's limitations in other areas but evidently resolution isn't one of them.
 
It's a long video and he's not the most charismatic presenter so it's a bit hard to get through in a single sitting but the content is good and the details you are seeking are in there, I just don't remember them all:
 
http://audiofest.net/2011/video_player.php?video_id=19&Sid=26f71b43e5c0da560a0acc026a4f8e60

 

[leeperry]

"resolution" is too vague of a word...vinyl carries poor crosstalk, poor SNR, stellar THD...this all doesn't add up tbh, but alright I'll check the video out

 

[chinesekiwi]

Quote:

Anyways that part is what stuck with me as my outboard ADC is only 44.1 (Firestone USB I/O). I did a couple of tests and got better (more dynamic) results to my ears using the audio input of my Mac Pro which is 192 khz capable. He did acknowledge vinyl's limitations in other areas but evidently resolution isn't one of them.

......
 
That has nothing to do with sampling rate and everything to do with other things, including placebo. For music playback, 44.1 kHz is fine. Really. Recording you have other issues thus you need the extra bandwidth but only up to 96 kHz. SACD and 24/96kHz are a scam really. It has nothing to do with format and EVERYTHING to do with mastering and dynamic range.
 

 

[nanaholic]

For "resolution" he's talking about quantization error in digital conversion.  He said that 16 bit isn't quite enough because the "steps" to approximate the voltage level isn't fine enough - which is a fair point, but for a 2V peak to peak wave 65536 "steps" equals approximately 0.00006V, that's a pretty small of difference but I would give you that *maybe* you can hear a difference, but then he said that 24-bit is good (of course, because now you have 16.77 *million* steps to approximate that 2V wave).  So I don't think he is claiming that CD cannot do vinyl resolution justice at all but rather he is stating the approximation that happens when you convert from analogue to digital, which in theory he is absolutely correct.   However that difference is so tiny it is really hard to convince people that you can hear the difference when the science is obviously against that.

 

[Willakan]

It's a nice idea, but the quantization noise you get with 16-bit audio really, really isn't going to make anything sound different. The vinyl noise floor is *considerably* more audible (db-wise) (even assuming uber-audiophile rig and pristine record), but I don't see the vinyl fans complaining that their LPs are unbearably noisy.

 

[jcx]

vinyl can be cut, played back with content above 22 KHz - not at full amplitude, not with all cartridges, stylus profiles, the high frequency won't be even across the disc, inner grooves are moving slower, the features just become too fine, new cartridges, vinyl compounding was required by CD4 encoding which used a subcarrier for FM that reached 45 KHz
cutting heads for mastering vinyl have 2nd order roll off ~ 50 KHz, there was some experimentation with half speed mastering - but that can't be used with direct to disc
 
even direct to disc is limited by microphones, 50 KHz is the fastest sold for recording studio use, the overwhelming majority in use have less than 25 KHz corner frequencies, classic vocal mics may have 12-15 KHz roll off
 
if you want to be conservative I would use 96 or 192 to record vinyl, 24 bits is handy even if you don't get more than ~ 20 bit resolution with today's electronics - for the headroom - not because vinyl ever approaches even 96 dB/16 bit S/N
 
 
controlled listening tests can't prove that "no one can hear X" but there are large tests which didn't find the positive result that any participant could reliably identify content that was recorded with high frequencies in high res formats from the same material properly reduced to 44/16
 
a few published tests which do claim to show over 20 KHz discrimination with music signals have been shown to have technical flaws or haven't been replicated by other groups and accepted by the psychoacoustic Science community as proven yet - it is still an open question
 
 
noise shaped dither gives effective resolution of >110 dB to our ears with 44/16
 
as has been repeatedly pointed out the most practical real test is to digitize the output of your phono preamp (observing proper gain structure, not overloading the ADC) and do a live bypass test of direct vs good quality ADC-DAC with careful level matching - until you do that your opinion is suspect on many grounds
 
 
people arguing for some magical purity of analog simply do not understand signal theory - it is fair to say 44/16 may be "too close" to our hearing limits and may fall short at some points, it is wrong to claim that digital representations of amplitude, bandwidth limited, thermal noise limited signals cannot be accurately represented digitally

 

[leeperry]

That has nothing to do with sampling rate and everything to do with other things, including placebo. For music playback, 44.1 kHz is fine. Really. Recording you have other issues thus you need the extra bandwidth but only up to 96 kHz. SACD and 24/96kHz are a scam really. It has nothing to do with format and EVERYTHING to do with mastering and dynamic range.

Dan Lavry claims that the optimal sample rate is 70kHz, hence his advice to go 88.2kHz: http://www.lavryengineering.com/lavry_forum/viewtopic.php?p=49#p49
 
You can argue about a lot of bs being said on the internet, but IME Mr Lavry very much knows what he's talking about.
 
Rupprt Neve(who isn't a clown either

) has also always claimed that 44.1kHz isn't quite enough...still, getting back to the OP: I don't see how a professional music producer such as JMJ(who's well aware of noise shaping/dithering and so) could publicly say that vinyl kills CD

 
More on the subject: http://stason.org/TULARC/entertainment/audio/pro/5-12-How-can-a-44-1-kHz-sampling-rate-be-enough-to-record.html

For "resolution" he's talking about quantization error in digital conversion.  He said that 16 bit isn't quite enough because the "steps" to approximate the voltage level isn't fine enough

Yup, but noise shaping/dithering comes to the rescue. Ideally you want to run the whole mastering process in 48int/64fp and at the very end use some top notch dithering to 16int. Sony's Super Bit Mapping is very old, and still provides absolutely stunning results: http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=6762

Super bit mapping uses psychoacoustic principles and critical band analysis to maximize the sound quality of 16-bit digital audio. 20-bit recordings are quantized to 16 bits using an adaptive error-feedback filter. This filter shapes the quantization error into an optimal spectrum as determined by the short-term masking and equi-loudness characteristics of the input signal. Through this technique, the perceptual quality of 20-bit sound is available on a standard compact disc.

The vinyl noise floor is *considerably* more audible (db-wise) (even assuming uber-audiophile rig and pristine record), but I don't see the vinyl fans complaining that their LPs are unbearably noisy.

You would be surprised by how good a laser vinyl deck can sound, especially when using brand new records or fully cleaned ones using this non-ghetto version of the wood glue trick: http://www.nuloop.com/en/dj-equipment/item/28343/vinyl_and_cd_care/nuloop_lgl.html