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Ksolem
Trad climber
Monrovia, California
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May 11, 2018 - 04:34pm PT
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But certainly vinyl is not free of its own problems. Some mention of its inherent limitations is missing from your post.
I did mention one of it's biggest limitations. It is fragile. No one wants to sit and listen to a dirty scratched up record. A CD or your portable device will take a lot of punishment and still come up with the goods. Which makes the whole vinyl experience different from the easily accessible always the same digital audio world. It's a bit ritualistic; the handling of the records, the decision as to when to play them, etc. And of course the variance between different turntables, cartridges, and pre-amps is far bigger than the difference between one $200.00 cd player and another.
But more directly to your question, a good one it is.
Our vinyl record, well produced, well mastered and pressed, played back on a suitable set of gear, can outperform the CD format easily. "Can" being the operative word. The CD is like many products, uniformity. That uniformity comes at a price, it is far less than ideal. A lower common denominator
The losses in analog recordings are additive. Scratches on a record, Speed changing, hiss on tape, all those things. The losses in digital recordings are subtractive. Less obvious. In an orchestra recording the basic formants of an instrument's sound decay by upper mid-range and are gone in the high end.
So, while a messed up, worn out record sounds like crap, a clean one well reproduced offers a fine listening experience.
When I was mastering at Future Disc, we got a gig to make vinyl of the Tool albums for promotional gifts to movers and shakers. I have a set. Two discs per CD, four songs on a side. F'ing awesome. They make the CD's sound like toilet paper. You in my part of the world? I'd love to play 'em for you.
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Ksolem
Trad climber
Monrovia, California
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May 15, 2018 - 11:04am PT
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Kevin is a good friend and former colleague and knows very well what he is talking about... I would go so far as to say that Kevin knows all there is to know on the subject.
Did you find his website? http://www.cohearent.com/
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Ksolem
Trad climber
Monrovia, California
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May 15, 2018 - 01:04pm PT
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“It is very simple to adjust your volume control to the desired volume when playing a CD. That way you are hearing the natural dynamics of the music, not slammed, all-one-volume drek... I have heard and read dozens of mastering engineers complain about this. We are doing something about it. If LOUD is what you are looking for, please just take it somewhere else!”
That’s mint Kevin Gray. And his skill and expertise have put him in a position where he can take a stand like that.
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G_Gnome
Trad climber
Cali
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May 15, 2018 - 02:45pm PT
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And if you just abandon the CD as a medium all together you can release a digital version with vastly better resolution. There are some great websites selling hires recordings these days. My OPPO DVD/CD player has no trouble playing any of them from a thumb drive or straight off my computer.
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Ksolem
Trad climber
Monrovia, California
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May 15, 2018 - 04:09pm PT
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A CD itself has the inherent capability of containing all of the audio information that most people's ears can hear.
A CD itself has the inherent capability of containing all of the audio frequencies that most people's ears can hear.
People at dbx experimented with a two bit digital audio recording system. You simply run the sampling rate so fast that an audio frequency waveform only has time to go up, down, or stay the same before the next sample is taken. Even with the codecs of the day it sounded great. The problem is that if the bitstream is broken, whether it's data loss due to the storage medium, or an attempt to edit, it no longer knows where it is.
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Ksolem
Trad climber
Monrovia, California
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May 15, 2018 - 07:22pm PT
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Digital sound recording was in its infancy. The standards for cd had been set but were a few years from actual production. This two bit idea, I think they called it Delta Mod, sounded good. So I suppose they thought the basic problem could be solved.
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Jon Beck
Trad climber
Oceanside
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May 20, 2018 - 05:18pm PT
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I have heard that most albums do not have much response over 18khz, that do that to avoid overheating the cutter head when making masters. Kris?
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Ksolem
Trad climber
Monrovia, California
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May 20, 2018 - 05:47pm PT
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I have heard that most albums do not have much response over 18khz, that do that to avoid overheating the cutter head when making masters. Kris?
This is true. And even then the engineer cutting the master has to be careful about amplitude at those frequencies. Frying a cutting head is not cool, especially today when they are rare, and incredibly expensive to repair.
Where the higher frequencies do come into play is in the form of harmonics. These variations in the underlying waveform tend to happen very fast, but at a fraction of the amplitude of the overall sound. To a great extent, though, it is harmonics and overtones which give different sounds their unique qualities.
I tested my hearing with a simple online tone generator. I couldn't hear any tone above about 12.5kHz. What do you suppose that means in terms of my ability to appreciate vinyl vs CD?
That's not too bad really. Of course a lot of speakers roll off pretty sharply about there too.
But both of the questions go back to my point up-thread, that the resolution on a CD only has about 4.4 snapshots of a wave at 10kHz (that's the entire cycle of the wave, positive and negative.) That's not enough data points to resolve the higher frequency harmonic components of that waveform, whereas most of that complexity of that sound can be recorded and played back from a vinyl record. The operative words are "can be." CD resolution is consistent. Not good enough, but unchanging. Vinyl, like anything analog, is full of variables.
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Ksolem
Trad climber
Monrovia, California
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May 20, 2018 - 08:08pm PT
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If someone plays high D on a trumpet, someone else plays the same note on a piano, and someone else on a clarinet you can tell the difference. You don't need to be able to hear the harmonics to hear how they alter the original sound.
But as you get progressively into the higher frequencies on a CD you no longer have enough data points to record/reproduce the complexity of the waveforms, and we begin to recognize different instruments by their dynamic envelope.
Let's say that the basic sine wave in this example is 10 kHz. So, we have 4.4 data points to draw the picture. See what I mean? Yet if you hear it live the harmonically distorted wave will sound dramatically different from the sine wave even if you can't hear the frequency of the harmonic.
Let's say that its 5 kHz. Now we have almost 9 data points. That's better but not enough especially considering that each time the wave repeats itself the samples will be taken at different points in the wave.
Analog or real high-resolution digital are capable of recording and reproducing these sounds. The state of the art in analog is 1/2" two track tape, Dolby SR encoded, going across the head of a Studer or Ampex machine at 30 inches per second. Professional digital today is 96 kHz x 24 bit. The very highest frequencies still sound a little flakey, but it's hard to complain about, and the precision with which amplitude is resolved is spectacular.
So, vinyl is not the best analog has to offer by a long shot, but I find it refreshing to listen to when almost all of what I hear is CD res or worse. If the record is good and the playback system capable, there is much more there than on a CD.
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Ksolem
Trad climber
Monrovia, California
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May 20, 2018 - 10:21pm PT
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How am I saying that Nyquist was wrong? A sampling system can record frequencies up to 1/2 the sampling rate before aliasing occurs. Nyquist says absolutely nothing about the detail with which those frequencies are recorded.
The higher the frequency you are recording relative to the sampling rate, the fewer samples you have for reproducing the wave. Eventually you hit the limit Nyquist defined. But on the way there you lose more and more resolution.
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Ksolem
Trad climber
Monrovia, California
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May 20, 2018 - 11:33pm PT
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Your telling me that you can't hear the squareness of the distorted wave on the left, the result of the 30 kHz harmonic? Or the more peak shaped wave on the right? These are differently shaped waves at 10 kHz, the result of a frequency we cannot hear. In a sense the 10k is being biased by the 30. Of course if you find an on line generator that claims produce the 10K wave with 3rd harmonic distortion and you can't hear it, that's not your ears. It's because the very low sample rate of 44.1k can't create or reproduce it.
Nyquist's theorem is simple. But there are implications. Since he says that the system breaks down if you pass the limit of one sample for each half of the waveform, it is clear that as the frequency we are recording goes up, we are progressively approaching that limit. The number of samples relative to frequency is decreasing. The ability to record details is dropping steadily. So Nyquist is not a brick wall where everything is fine until you hit it.
But you know this. Where I disagree with you is your conviction that if you can't hear the harmonic frequency it becomes irrelevant.
Anyway I'm going to be careful not to get in over my head here. What I have is some, but not all knowledge of the weaknesses of the technology, and 25 years of real world experience hearing those weaknesses and working with them. Once, preparing materials for a class I taught, I messed around with an analog tone generator making various frequencies with all sorts of harmonic distortions, listened to the original, and how it sounded passed through a 44.1 x 16 bit codec. The difference is appalling. Since music is another whole world of complexity than the simple tones we've been talking about, all that hash gets hidden inside the dynamics.
It's getting late. Cheers. Interesting stuff if your an audio geek :-)
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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May 20, 2018 - 11:38pm PT
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Just watched Pawn Stars. Dude sold his Beatles collection for 20 Large!
The vinyl expert valued it at $30K!
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Ksolem
Trad climber
Monrovia, California
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May 20, 2018 - 11:40pm PT
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Damn. Was it still in the shrink wrap?
I'm thinking maybe it was the half speed mastered re-issue complete set still in the original case, like a typewriter case, never opened. Or the originals still sealed. I hope for the buyer's sake they were stored flat, no more than four in a stack...
You saw it, please do tell.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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May 21, 2018 - 06:49pm PT
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Kris, it was a complete collection of almost everything they made.* He had like 8 variations
of a couple different albums! There were at least 3-4 still shrink wrapped, two of which I think
the expert said there were only 100 copies made! One he valued at $1200, one at $1K, and
a bunch in the high three figures! $30K seemed a little low to me. Quite amazing. I dunno
why the guy took only $20K.
*meaning all the different art and type variations
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Tarbuster
climber
right here, right now
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May 21, 2018 - 07:36pm PT
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There are some people out there with mondo vinyl collections.
For instance, Peter Buck of REM:
Buck is known for his encyclopedic knowledge of music, as well as his extensive personal record collection. On March 12, 1999, in an interview on Wiese, a television music show based in Oslo, Buck estimated his collection to be around 25,000. In the late 1990s, he estimated he had 10,000 vinyl singles, 6,000 LPs and 4,000 CDs.[18] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Buck
I don't know why Wikipedia hasn't got an updated total for Buck's stash: maybe he ain't talkin'!
John Bachar had a killer vinyl jazz collection, I'd imagine that is now in Tyrus' hands.
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stevep
Boulder climber
Salt Lake, UT
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May 21, 2018 - 08:47pm PT
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Kareem Abdul Jabbar had a huge jazz collection, sadly I think he lost most of it in a house fire :-(
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Tarbuster
climber
right here, right now
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May 21, 2018 - 09:19pm PT
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Forget about the cost for a moment: that audio gear is weirdly beautiful!
Thank you, John Brennan.
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