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I know there's probably a ton of audiophile analogue-proponent types on this board -- I've a question to ask. Nowadays you still hear a lot of people talking about the 'superior quality' of vinyl, but does that really apply to newer albums that were recorded onto a digital medium to begin with -- or albums that were mastered and mixed on a computer? I don't really know much about the subject, but it seems like any 'extra' fidelity of an analogue recording would be lost if it was converted to a digital medium (Though most of the analogue 'character' of the recording would be preserved -- The punchy, compressed sound of loud drums on tape for example) Also, converting a purely digital recording to vinyl seems a bit pointless to me. It's strange to think one could improve the sound of something buy 'dubbing' it -- It seems the opposite is usually true. |
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This question came up a few weeks ago. Ask Dave G, he knows. |
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Hello! I wouldn't call myself an audiophile. I am an engineer. With digital recordings you are always at the mercy of your DACs and the recorded format. CD is 44.1 thousand samples per second. Each sample is a left and right channel 16 bit word. You cannot improve this. The maximum frequency you will ever reproduce is half the sampling rate (see Nyquist/Shannon sampling theorem). With analogue format, say vinyl, you are limited by your stylus and cartridge. If you get a cart with a better frequency response, providing the record has those frequencies, you will hear them. You can't clock a DAC at 88.2kHz on a CD player and expect to "hear" upto 44kHz! With vinyl you can squeeze out a few more trebbly bits with one of those expensive carts. The other important thing is quantisation. With a 16 bit sample, the instantaneous audio level is defined as one of 65536 possible levels. With vinyl, there is an infinite number of levels*, so there is no perceivable quantisation. *I imagine down to some atomic level. I doubt a lathe can cut a groove and split atoms! Next point: music from computer is cut to vinyl vs cut to CD: CD limits you to the "Red book" CD, 44.1kHz,16bit. Vinyl is only limited by the lathe and outboard gear, so with expensive high quality kit you will get a great cut. The computer could be running pro tools at 192kHz, 24bit and this could be cut to vinyl. The vinyl quantisation is 24bit. Cutting a CD would remove the 8 LSBs, giving 16bit but this removes the finesse! Best solution is SACD or DVDA, but these are niche markets really. They do sound miles better than CD, but CD is "good enough" for most people, so the market is quite small. I imagine the slew rate on a vinyl lathe is slower than a DAC, so even if you record a CD to vinyl it will not have such discrete steps between samples, but will be of a more continuous nature. I've already made most of these points in the following href="http://xltronic.com/mb/topic.php3?topic=106608&start= topic: |
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OH ZILTY CHARACTER COUNTING IS BORKED Also, the people cutting the vinyl may be better mastering engineers, they may have access to "better" outboard gear, might spend more time on vinyl than some Sony BMG Leona Lewis shite CD, etc etc. The lathe and stylus all impart a certain something to the recording too, like valve amps, that non-linear distortion sounds nice. Technically it is unwanted, but we don't have mechanical ears. We are humans. It sounds good :) An analogy is printers. Digital is like an inkjet printer. It spits out tiny dots. A line may look solid, but under magnification it is a series of dots. Analogue is like a plotter. It puts the pen down, draws the line and lifts the pen. The line is a solid line. To the casual observer there is little difference, but under microscope conditions there is a huge difference. That is the difference between digital and analogue. It's not the big things, it's the little things that make all the difference. Now get a psychologist to tell you about psycho acoustics and why vinyl sounds better, etc. |
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Like a good bedtime story, but spoken from an engineer. Thanks man, i've learned some new things :) |
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Thank you very much for all the info dave_g. You obviously know your stuff. It seems that, since the majority of people listen to cds/mp3s nowadays, that the final 'mixes' of most albums are dithered down to 44.1kHz / 16bit , even if it was initially recorded at a higher quality. Then they'd probably just take that dithered-down final mix and cut it onto vinyl. Then still a lot of people will listen to it on their run-the-mill record player and say 'it sounds soooo much better cuz it's vinyl!'. --When there is probably little difference at that point. I know there are some artists/producers etc who actually care about this sort of thing and make separate mixes for cd and vinyl. But I think these days it's becoming a secondary format. And it's sad that kids these days are fine with listening to their shitty low quality watery-sounding mp3s. |
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But I think these days it's becoming a secondary format. 2nd to what? CDs are actually 'becoming' second to vinyl when you consider vinyl sales are currently increasing and cd sales are currently decreasing. |
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listening to music on a cd is like having a wall of lego. the wall is made of little bricks that stick together so you can barely see the cracks. it appears as one whole thing, but there are mini gaps throughout. it's 44100 samples per second. listening to vinyl, especially if the music has been mastered onto tape, can occasionally sound even better than when it came out of your speakers in the studio. you do have to compromise stereo/bass sometimes but it is just so creamy, so brandy, so sea bass, luxury. but few have space, money or dedication/standards/experience. fair enuf. vinyl today is for dj's. dj some wax after someone's laptop in a club and you will be louder, fatter, fresher, no question. but crackle free modern cd remasters of old albums can be very good now. vinyl idealy is 6-9 mins a side, 12 at a stretch. i recommend vinyl for dj 12" tracks and 320k mp3 for everything else, or (wav/aiff) cd's if you have room for em. cd's are somehow worse than mp3 they just get destroyed, mp3 gets lost but somehow it doesnt matter as much? it's a bit like having an original painting compared to a print. |
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Dave, you are my hero :P We've just gone through all of this stuff in A Level physics, quite fun to do but boring at times cos it isn't anything really that new. Talking of mp3s... at school in our common room, it's amusing how much badly encoded music gets put on. Of course, half of it is shite anyway but even so, it's interesting to see how many people simply don't care. I think vinyl will always carry on one way or another. The whole listening experience is just much better than CD - BIG cover art, the physicality of putting the vinyl on the turntable and lifting the stylus etc. etc. Also, I've got a question here from something I've noticed recently... very odd - I've got a bogstandard record deck + stylus (cheap Sony job). If I rip a vinyl into 320kbps mp3, then encode down to 96kbps, to me it sounds better than if I had done so from CD as the source. This surely doesn't make sense as 96kbps is awful so would therefore act the same for both sources... Is it a subconcious thing going on or is there any bizarre reason why such a thing should be happening? (Perhaps the cheap stylus doesn't pick up the higher frequencies so much so that the clear distortion of the signal doesn't occur as you can hear when you go from CD -> 96kbps mp3). |
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1. the vinyl master/mix could be different than the cd 2. the dynamic range is probably less than the cd so it is 'compressed'? that might be what you like about it. |
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I dont believe human ear can sense difference between CD and vinyl. It can be a litle diference in phase of percepsion, but its to litle. We can hear only ~20Hz to ~20kHz. If you like you can spin your HDD to imitate vinyl with stream of zeroes and ones (create much richer datastream) but still its not vinyl becouse its limited. But remember you are also limited. And digital can sound diffrent each time you listen, actualy you cant hear everything, and sound waves are created difrently everytime. |
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why do you transcode from 320 to 96? |
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Most people don't realize that analog and digital are actually the same thing. This controversy is merely some newspaperman folderol to excite the common man and sell refrigerators. |
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124bps 44kHz its middle for me. |
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