Vinyl Records
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Munchies_Matt wrote:
Digitised music is clipped and doesnt have the attack you get in an anlog reproduction. It is also less subtle, and lacks depth.
That has nothing to do with it coming to you in digital format. It has everything to do with songs being over-compressed in the [The Loudness Wars](http://www.npr.org/2009/12/31/122114058/the-loudness-wars-why-music-sounds-worse)[^]
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP.
Could well be, but I remain to be convinced. For example. Take a live band that uses a drum machine for the backing. Now compare that to a live drummer in a group. You are walking down the road, and you hear the music, the first sounds like a recording, the latter like a like band. It has punch, power, that is the attack I am talking about, and it stand outs a mile. Same with valve vs digitised guitar amps (with effects). The digital version is soft, lacks the impact. It is just how I feel it. :)
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Doesn't happen if you look after your records!
Slogans aren't solutions.
Not everyone has the ability to care for their records like that, especially not a teen or twenty-something I and my friends were back in the Days of Vinyl. And, stuff happens. To everyone.
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP.
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The Presence on a well recorded CD is astonishing. In interesting analogy between movies and recorded music. Lots of remakes - but not as good as the original. Concentrating on special effects instead of quality. OH BRAVE NEW WORLD!
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010
I remember being quite interested in the [Barry Diament Audio](http://www.barrydiamentaudio.com) website, which talked about recording techniques vs. result. Some of his samples absolutely blew me away. (The albums can be clicked on on that page, for samples.)
Sudden Sun Death Syndrome (SSDS) is a very real concern which we should be raising awareness of. 156 billion suns die every year before they're just 1 billion years old. While the military are doing their part, it simply isn't enough to make the amount of nukes needed to save those poor stars. - TWI2T3D (Reddit)
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DACs can be surprisingly good but ultimately analogue will always beat digital when it comes to sound.
Slogans aren't solutions.
Crackle, wow, flutter, hiss. Yes. Vastly superior. :laugh:
We're philosophical about power outages here. A.C. come, A.C. go.
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I was in a charity shop the other day and a record (vinyl) cover caught my eye. It was this Bert Kaempfert | Album | A Swingin’ Safari[^] which I recognized as an album my Dad had owned in the sixties. What I remembered was that the music was very corny but the recording quality good. I checked the disc and it looked almost unplayed so I bought it for $2. I took it home, put in on the turntable and was amazed. Lots of things have come a long way in 50 years but in my opinion an mp3 played on a headset just doesn't come close to a record played through a good hifi. I am now playing Dire Straits, Love over gold and that sounds pretty good too. The record store label from where I bought it states 5-10-82 which was just on the cusp of cd's. Looks like a bottle of red and some chicken wings tonight - oh and of course dig out some more old records.
Peter Wasser "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell
I have a whole 1m high pile of my late dad's jazz LP's, some dating back as far as the 50s. I still want to catalogue and digitise them for sharing with jazz lovers.
Immanentize the Eschaton!
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I have a whole 1m high pile of my late dad's jazz LP's, some dating back as far as the 50s. I still want to catalogue and digitise them for sharing with jazz lovers.
Immanentize the Eschaton!
I've had a go at this and have not been too happy with the results. To do it well one needs records in very good condition and high quality equipment. It is certainly worth doing. A metre high pile of records would be too daunting for me.
Peter Wasser "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell
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I was in a charity shop the other day and a record (vinyl) cover caught my eye. It was this Bert Kaempfert | Album | A Swingin’ Safari[^] which I recognized as an album my Dad had owned in the sixties. What I remembered was that the music was very corny but the recording quality good. I checked the disc and it looked almost unplayed so I bought it for $2. I took it home, put in on the turntable and was amazed. Lots of things have come a long way in 50 years but in my opinion an mp3 played on a headset just doesn't come close to a record played through a good hifi. I am now playing Dire Straits, Love over gold and that sounds pretty good too. The record store label from where I bought it states 5-10-82 which was just on the cusp of cd's. Looks like a bottle of red and some chicken wings tonight - oh and of course dig out some more old records.
Peter Wasser "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell
The main reason for sounding good is that todays music is over-compressed. Read about the "loudness wars" and you will see that most of the stuff that came after 95 is pure crap. But luckily there is a new broadcasting standard spreading on which all over-compressed music sounds like crap, where the old un-compressed sounds like the best thing after the bread.
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I've had a go at this and have not been too happy with the results. To do it well one needs records in very good condition and high quality equipment. It is certainly worth doing. A metre high pile of records would be too daunting for me.
Peter Wasser "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell
I have digitized a few hundred vinyl records: Some kinds of noise can easily be filtered out. If you use a reasonably good wave editor (I use Steinberg WaveLab), it comes with a set of high quality filters for removing noise from dust specs, high frequency "tape hiss" (some of it is really from the tape - it fades out at the end of a track and comes back at the start of the next track, but some of it is from the vinyl surface). But the distortion that has been added by wear, playing the record several hundred times, that cannot be removed. In my student days, I could play my favorite records a couple times a day, and some of them were favorites for years! In addition to the distortion, sometimes a different kind of lower frequency hiss builds up, modulated like a rumble (but with much more medium range frequencies than "real" rumble), which no filter I know of can remove very successfully. So those vinyl records that were only semi-favorites, or below, has been transfered quite successfully. For those old favorites that has not been reissued on CD I must simply accept to listen to the music rather than to the sound (quality).
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W∴ Balboos wrote:
inyl Better? An absolute absurdity on its own.
Not so. Digitised music is clipped and doesnt have the attack you get in an anlog reproduction. It is also less subtle, and lacks depth.
Munchies_Matt wrote:
Digitised music is clipped and doesnt have the attack you get in an anlog reproduction. It is also less subtle, and lacks depth.
With 96 dB dynamic range there is certainly no need to clip the signal. I have seen the waveforms from thousands of ripped CD tracks, but never seen any clipping. I believe that lots of people really don't know what clipping is like, but (ab)use the term to refer to high dynamic compression. If you display the waveform image to fit inside your screen window, it looks like a brick. But it does not bang its head into the ceiling, and if you expand it to see the curve peaks one by one, they are smooth and round. Of course the sound quality may be crap due to the compression. But clipping sounds quite different.
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Not everyone has the ability to care for their records like that, especially not a teen or twenty-something I and my friends were back in the Days of Vinyl. And, stuff happens. To everyone.
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP.
It seems to me that even grown people, so old that they must have handled vinyl records in their youth, now have forgotten how to treat the records. In my youth, we knew never to touch the surface, only the edge and the label, to discharge static electricity and carefully brush all dust off using a special-purpose brush. These days, you hardly see anyone but extreme HiFi-fans handling vinyl in a proper way. Not even in nostalgic TV-programs where you see them putting the record on the player. You can hear it from the sound quality: In the old days, I sometimes taped (to open-reel tape at 7,5 ips) music from the radio because my own vinyl was worn down due to hundreds of times playing: The copy at the radio station was always without dust, cracks and static noise. Nowadays, vinyl played by the radio station is much worse than my own records, ruined by the kind of noise that comes from improper handling.
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Just like vacuum tubes will always beat transistors in amplifiers.
if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); } Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016
There is a real explanation for that: When a transistor reaches the ceiling, it hits the ceiling very hard. The signal peak is clipped, as if the peak of the signal curve was cut off with a knife. That gives an extremely nasty kind of distortion (which is nothing like the dynamic compression that some people refer to as "clipping"). Tube amps doesn't have any such hard ceiling: They may be unable to bring the signal curve to its very top, but first: It can for (very) short periods go way above the rated effect, and second: Even though lower than idea, the curve form resembles the ideal curve quite well. The answer to this problem: When buying a transistor amp, select one which has at least ten times the output power you will normally need. Now, five watts gives you a lot of sound from most HiFi-class speakers, so fifty watts is plenty for most living rooms. But if you regularly turn up you amp to more than -20 dB (assuming that you have a volume knob graded in dB, with 0 dB as max), you need a bigger amp. Another thing that is rarely discussed: Even a tube amp can deliver those peaks only if it can draw the power from somewhere. In the old days, the power supply transformer held signifiant energy as an electromagnetic field in the coils and transformer core, and a brief sound burst could tap this energy. Some amps had power supplies designed explicitly for building up an energy reserve: When the amp was switched on, you should let the power supply "charge" for maybe half a minute before playing loud music. Modern, switched power supplies have no such energy storage, unless they are equipped with huge capacitors solely for this purpose (which some of them have). Again: If you have an amp designed to deliver 10 dB more than you will ever want to listen to, you will not risk emptying the reserve power stores. You do not need the power to play loud (even though some HiFi-freaks use it for that...) but to have power for the peaks when playing at more normal levels.
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MP3 recorded at 160Kbps or 192 have all the data to play better than vinyl - of course if the source was that refined itself. Of course a good hi-fi has better audio than a headset: no power consumption contraint, no weight/cost constraint, no size constraint. They have different uses - my headset is almost constantly in use while my Hi-Fi has maybe 30 hours of usage in 10 years.
* CALL APOGEE, SAY AARDWOLF * GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X * Never pay more than 20 bucks for a computer game. * I'm a puny punmaker.
Converting vinyl to MP3 and importing to iTunes is one of my hobbies. I agree, sampling the media at 160Kbps or better and using good sound washing software (Sony Sound Forge) to do peak normalization and clean up the pop/wow from the source produces excellent results. I haven't heard a full-sized stereo that can match the sound of a good pair of Bose noise-canceling headphones playing the content, either.
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Munchies_Matt wrote:
Digitised music is clipped and doesnt have the attack you get in an anlog reproduction. It is also less subtle, and lacks depth.
With 96 dB dynamic range there is certainly no need to clip the signal. I have seen the waveforms from thousands of ripped CD tracks, but never seen any clipping. I believe that lots of people really don't know what clipping is like, but (ab)use the term to refer to high dynamic compression. If you display the waveform image to fit inside your screen window, it looks like a brick. But it does not bang its head into the ceiling, and if you expand it to see the curve peaks one by one, they are smooth and round. Of course the sound quality may be crap due to the compression. But clipping sounds quite different.
I dont mean distortion (the clipping you get when a signal exceeds the capacity of the amplifier) but the reduction in peak volume of sounds.
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I was in a charity shop the other day and a record (vinyl) cover caught my eye. It was this Bert Kaempfert | Album | A Swingin’ Safari[^] which I recognized as an album my Dad had owned in the sixties. What I remembered was that the music was very corny but the recording quality good. I checked the disc and it looked almost unplayed so I bought it for $2. I took it home, put in on the turntable and was amazed. Lots of things have come a long way in 50 years but in my opinion an mp3 played on a headset just doesn't come close to a record played through a good hifi. I am now playing Dire Straits, Love over gold and that sounds pretty good too. The record store label from where I bought it states 5-10-82 which was just on the cusp of cd's. Looks like a bottle of red and some chicken wings tonight - oh and of course dig out some more old records.
Peter Wasser "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell
Where CDs really won out for me was random track access. Audio quality was fine. I don't generally listen through ear buds. Over the ear or nice speakers at home. Well, in the car, too, but, one doesn't quibble about audio quality when fighting road noise. :)
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MP3 recorded at 160Kbps or 192 have all the data to play better than vinyl - of course if the source was that refined itself. Of course a good hi-fi has better audio than a headset: no power consumption contraint, no weight/cost constraint, no size constraint. They have different uses - my headset is almost constantly in use while my Hi-Fi has maybe 30 hours of usage in 10 years.
* CALL APOGEE, SAY AARDWOLF * GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X * Never pay more than 20 bucks for a computer game. * I'm a puny punmaker.
Last year I purchased a SoundBlaster ZXR audio card, Sound Forge S/W, and a computer to run this on. I have something like 600 or so Vinyl records, everything from Peter, Paul, and Mary, Beatles, & Bob Dylan, to Thelonious Monk and even classical. Plan is to use the Yamaha turntable with Ortofon cartridge connected to the Adcom 500 preamp and make some of those 192 KHz, 24-bit depth recordings. I am waiting to see how this all works out. If I live long enough, I may actually be able to get the majority digitized. I will say there's one advantage to CD's; you don't have to flip it over every 15 minutes.
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Actually, vinyl sounding better is an audio illusion. In fact, it is impossible in most cases for vinyl to reproduce the original sound as performed. This is because the dynamic range of a groove is physically limited, and in order to get the full sound to fit into the recorded track, the "louds" must be made quieter, and the "quiets" must be made louder. This enables the brain to have an easier job to hear all of the content, and as far as the brain is concerned, easier is better. There were devices available that attempted to re-expand the dynamics of a recording, called a "DBX". However, this expansion was artificial, making quiet pieces quieter and loud pieces louder, regardless of their original amplitude. So, if you want better reproduction of the original performances - digital is the way to go. If you want easier to listen to, the the old way is better.
Cheers, Mick ------------------------------------------------ It doesn't matter how often or hard you fall on your arse, eventually you'll roll over and land on your feet.
Midi_Mick wrote:
e-expand the dynamics of a recording, called a "DBX".
And turning DBX on when playing non-DBX-recorded sources was always fun. :laugh:
We won't sit down. We won't shut up. We won't go quietly away. YouTube and My Mu[sic], Films and Windows Programs, etc.