Discussion on Vinyl and digital

[square_wave]

• Film Music from Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and to a smaller extent Bengali and Malayalam.
• Hindustani and Carnatic - both vocal and instrumental.
• Ghazhals, Qawwalis, non-filmi modern Indian vocals and instrumentals.
• Indian and western fusion.
• Western classical.
• Jazz.
• Rock other than really hard rock.
• Japanese music.
• Instrumentals such as Kitaro, Hans Zimmer, Ennio Morricone, John Williams, Mike Oldfield.....
• Italian Music.

For majority of this music, digital is the best. My guess is not wrong.

 

[venkatcr]

For majority of this music, digital is the best. My guess is not wrong.

Sigh! <Mod edit>What can I say? What other genre is left? Do you have any specific genre that suits ONLY analogue? As I said, I will be glad to add it to my genre.

 

[Bloom@83]

Sigh! This is silly. What can I say? What other genre is left? Do you have any specific genre that suits ONLY analogue? As I said, I will be glad to add it to my genre.

To answer your question- if you’ve cared to read my post : All hindi and regional film /non-film music released before 1990s , classic rock from 1950s to 1970s.

 

[arj]

For majority of this music, digital is the best. My guess is not wrong.

True that
Also Consider the time period of the recording as mentioned by @Bloom@83 above
The difference between a digital and cd version of classic albums like rumors or communique especially in the quality of bass is an eye opener.

Recent music where you are taking the same quality for cd and LP, the cd can sound better depending on the equipment used. Eg the difference in quality of the old and new lamhe as well as "call of the valley" LPs itself stands out rather starkly

 

[arunkvivek]

Venkat, I also don’t think you have been at a mastering session for CD duplication. The kind of compression that is added is not funny. I have been privy to this. They don’t make a copy of a digital master and send it for CD duplication. The copy that is made from the digital master is heavily tweaked. I have a digital master and a CD copy of the music of a film I produced. No comparison. The CD sounds bad. All compressed. The digital master sounds glorious. I also had Taal. Again no contest. The digital master is absolutely brilliant. The CD nowhere near it. Infact there’s an interesting story here. The first small lot of Taal CDs were duplicated without tweaking the original digital master. All of them were returned by customers saying the vol is too low and nothing can be heard. So it has to be mastered again with compression

I would love to hear the original CDs and definitely own a copy if possible.

 

[prem]

It’s been given away. I no longer own any CDs.

 

[square_wave]

Sigh! <Mod edit>What can I say? What other genre is left? Do you have any specific genre that suits ONLY analogue? As I said, I will be glad to add it to my genre.

Sorry. To clarify, I have quite a few friends who prefers LPs to digital. The reason is invariably the superior satisfaction they get for their music. Almost always, their music consists of creative artists whose music is also available on LP. Usually pop, folk, classic rock and jazz from certain eras. They also own the cds but hardly play those. Please talk to such people with an open mind and you may get more info. Your experience is personal to you probably because good digital is available for your selection in genre and release period.

BTW, I am only into digital but fully get it when I hear such people's systems with their music. Total respect for the love and care they have put into their systems without which that sound will not be possible. Many of them also talk about the days when they used to buy gear based on specs and reviews alone and was disappointed by the results. Believe me, they are not going back to those days!

Another thing I have noticed with Vinyl people is that they are not into this "malady of over abundance" of music that is so prevalent these days. They seem to have figured out the music they love and have built a collection of those LPs.

 

[arunkvivek]

It’s been given away. I no longer own any CDs.

I was trying my "bhindi pe focus karo" ( 3 idiots movie) moment in the entire chat.

 

[Gerry_the_Merry]

This isn't correct. The lower frequencies are reduced and higher frequencies are increased during recording and restored back during playback. The only reason lower frequencies were reduced using a RIAA equalization curve equation, so that the grooves became smaller to allow more songs to be fitted into the vinyl. During playback the reverse was done. The RIAA curve is actually brilliant and there is no loss of dynamics or content. In fact, the RIAA curve reflects the best minds that came together to fix a practical problem of fitting more music on a single lp record without sacrificing the low frequencies. The brilliance is because the curve also reduces noise due to dust accumulated on records. Records and record player needles are sensitive, so much that even the slightest amount of dust and hair accumulated on either will cause high frequency hiss sounds and the occasional popping sound. By boosting high frequency volumes, this also increases the volume of these hisses and crackles. So why do it?

Because when you later invert the RIAA equalization curve in the electronics of the turntable, you end up reducing the volume of these noises, providing an even clearer listening experience. Let me make more sense of this for you.

No matter what audio is being played by the needle, the hiss and clicks will be the same volume. So by boosting the high frequencies on the record itself, they will drown out these noises. This increases the signal-to-noise ratio, which reduces the volume of the noise floor. So during playback, when the high frequencies are then lowered back to their correct volumes, the noises (which were also boosted but not as much relative to the actual music) are reduced in volume lower than they would have been played back without this equalization curve being applied

Is analog perfect? The RIAA curve doesn't solve the motor rumble problem. So what did the manufacturers do? They kept on improving the motor. Just like analog, digital too isn't perfect. Eventhough humongous amount of work has been done on digital, it is still susceptible to jitter. Analog has never been perfect, but the quality that can be seen with so much imperfections is a testimonial to the human spirit and igenuity. The same ingenuity continues in the digital world. Few years back Fraunhofer Institute said the MP3 codec that they developed is soooo perfect and no humans can actually distinguish between a high quality losless mp3 and uncompressed music. But many of us can actually distinguish between the quality of mp3 and wav/flac/dsd. Companies like apple promoted it and almost destroyed lossless music. The same argument holds when manufacturers say that the human ear cannot hear jitter and other digital imperfections. Tomorrow will be another day.

To quote Amir,


The father of jitter if you may call, Don Waltman, who first showed that jitter is freqency dependent proved that audibility of jitter highly dependent on the frequency. As far as audibility of jitter is concerned, there is hardly any research on this subject. Dolby Labs in 1988 showed that pure sine wave spectrum jitter can be audible in just a few nanosecond range. So only DAC manufacturers will say jitter is no longer a problem to sell their highly priced dacs. Unless the human species have evolved their ears since 1988 to reject jitter in nanoseconds range, the observations are still valid. Most of us cannot afford to have DACs with that precise clocks or analog systems with LP records that are spotless clean, we should be content with whatever best we have. But when we assume that the system we have is perfect, it is veering towards snake oil, just like the audiophile hard disk or the cable with special super conducting copper or some rare earth material used in an inductor used in a 'make in india' power conditioner or a cable cooker needed to break in a cable. No system is perfect. I myself use digital more than analog and I do believe it is the future and will get better and better every year. As of today, digital may be better and has overtaken analog (I haven't heard a state of the art analog system yet), but to say digital is sooo perfect is incorrect. To bring out the issues with digital is != disparaging digital.

This graph is from dolby labs 1988 AES paper: Theoretical and Audible Effects of Jitter on Digital Audio Quality
View attachment 65687

@venkatcr...did you reply to this? I am asking since you mentioned about compression in LFs due to lack of length in the groove...

 

[superczar]

@venkatcr...did you reply to this? I am asking since you mentioned about compression in LFs due to lack of length in the groove...

Not quite sure what anyone can say to that.
Fact is Vinyl, even in the best case scenario will max out at 65-70db of dynamic range - which is not bad by itself.

When it comes to digital though, any DAC with a SnR of 70db would go straight into the garbage bin by every single member on this forum.
90db would be the minimum for digital that anyone here would be OK with.

Any additional finagling on the recording methods (that you have referred to) is purely to get around the limitation of the low dynamic range available on the physical medium itself.

Having said that, I completely understand the charm of vinyl - there is a charm associated with the tactility of the playback process itself.
And the sound will naturally seem different due to the compression equivalence.
Perhaps warmer/ more ambient , so to speak - and this can surely be preferred by some. Nothing wrong with that.

Others may prefer digital because of the convenience - and the more precise sound
Or clinical, so to speak - which can be preferred by others. Nothing wrong with that either.

However if you are trying to say that vinyl as a medium is technically superior - sorry , but that is simply not true by a long shot by any measurable metric.

 

[Gerry_the_Merry]

Superczar, in my opinion, in my use, it is neither about tactility of experience nor technical superiority. Just plain and simple quality of reproduction. Perhaps digital is better or will be better for modern recordings. For old recordings dating a few decades back, vinyl is very very good. In my system even for 80s recordings I have seen no diff. The sound is absolutely 100% identical. This based on observing it for more than a year. A couple of forum.members who visited me in easier times said as much and they did not seem surprised by it. I am getting the impression that we are too strongly wedded to our biases. It takes the form of introducing new variables into the discussion, or mentioning technical drawbacks that don't exist etc.

 

[Bloom@83]

However if you are trying to say that vinyl as a medium is technically superior - sorry , but that is simply not true by a long shot by any measurable metric.

I don’t think any sane person would say Vinyl is ‘technically’ superior to digital.

But the problem with digital , as many people have pointed out before , and which something the digital crowd sometimes fail to recognise , or turn a closed eye to (since nothing could be done about it ) - is that the digital source files (for 90% mass market Albums for most of the popular genre including rock , pop , blues ) have been compressed horribly in studio prior to CD release to increase their gain ( refer to the loundness wars ). They bear no relation to the original untweaked masters which are actually brilliant sounding (but never gets to see the light of day ).

The same problem persists in high resolution streaming too.

 

[arj]

We do need to differentiate between the Technology and the Content here else we are discussing 2 different things

By Technology of recording/storage and maybe even reproduction, Digital and especially Hi rez is undoubtedly technically superior/. I am sure for long term storage of the original masters digital will be the medium.

By Content ie the content used final reproduction on media, Vinyl masters were/ are very ofter mastered better since the majority play it on good systems.
Digital masters for reproduction are very often compressed / equalised for the most common denominator of its consumer base which used to be two in ones/ walkmans and now maybe the mp3 and basic earbud generation.

eg the earlier Hi rez Norah jones were nothing more than upsampled CDs which itself were inferior to the Vinyl. so its not the digital medium which is inferior but the content in it.

 

[Gerry_the_Merry]

Why would hi rez be compressed? I mean the creators of the content might not be aiming at the lowest common denominator or budget systems.

 

[arj]

Why would hi rez be compressed? I mean the creators of the content might not be aiming at the lowest common denominator or budget systems.

same reasons..although I would like to believe the true mastering does not have it. Many of the earlier SACD/DVDAs were just upsampled CD content. Norah Jones I know was discussed at length

 

[raghupb]

DRC (Dynamic Range Compression) was introduced to cater to discman market in the late 80's and 90's
File compression kicked in when personal music players became popular early 2000, with DRC.
All of this was to attract more earplug/headphone users.
Now with streaming getting popular, every service play around with both of these.
So what one really hears in the end maybe be vastly different from the studio (digital) master.
MQA is an attempt to sell or re-sell master quality, but has not picked up yet.

So, if you get a decent digital recording and you like it, save it safely (with redundancy)

Cheers,
Raghu

 

[Bloom@83]

so its not the digital medium which is inferior but the content in it.

exactly.

There are bad sounding vinyl pressings too , where it’s sometimes cut too hot , or with lower bass , too much sibilance etc. But with vinyls it is very easy to know which are bad pressings by prior basic research on the web and avoid those.
It’s a conscious choice we can make unless we are buying blind or in lots.

But with CDs there is almost zero info on their SQ vs pressings. There is zero effort in tracking CDs by their pressings ( the good ones ) as it exists for the vinyl community (unless those are Japanese Black Triangle CDs of DSOTM which are the rarest exceptions). Consequently it’s next to impossible to track CDs which have been mastered well (and there are such CDs ).
For streaming , the choice itself doesn’t exist.

The irony lies that even for recordings which are mixed and mastered on digital ( which includes all recordings from 1980s to present day ) an LP, mastered from digital , sounds better which is so ridiculous!

Western classical CDs , jazz recordings CDs , vocal jazz ( favourite demo material of all high end audio shows) , opera recordings and some specifically esoteric audiophile recordings have escaped the butcher’s fate (aka compression damage ).

 

[mbhangui]

digital fanboys often cite the lower dynamic range of LPs as a big reason for LPs to be inferior but they refuse to see the dynamic range limits of the different class of music, the dynamic range of the hunam voice. At the same time they will refuse to acknowlege the problem of jitter claiming that the levels of most dacs are below the capability of the human ear to hear it. The genre of music is so important. Vinyl do have a lower dynamic range compared to CD, but where this becomes apparent and hearable is for Western Classical music. It is this reason that the first class of people who adopted digital were classical music listeners.

70 db is not the dynamic range of vinyl. It may be the dynamic range of some inferior system used by some one to measure dynamic range at some point but it ain't the limit of the medium at all. Here is a nice little article that sheds some light on the real world of dynamic range for both media. And note that the tests done for this article were not done with SOTA vinyl or SOTA vinyl playback gear. It turns out, the dynamic range meter that folks are using to measure different releases doesn’t work accurately on vinyl records

Dynamic Comparison of LPs vs CDs - Part 4

Yes, you have heard all the arguments before, and you are probably sick and tired of it. LP vs digital is a "religious war" that has been played out by various audiophiles ever since the CD format

www.audioholics.com

Here is an intesting read on measuring the dynamic range of vinyl

Measuring Vinyl Dynamic Range - It's Complicated!

Vinyl releases often have better dynamic range than their digital or CD counterparts. But can you measure it accurately?

www.yoursoundmatters.com

The maximum dynamic range we can put on a vinyl record is around 70 dB.
CD (16bit), on the other hand, can achieve 96 dB dynamic range.
The dynamic range of human hearing is roughly 140 dB.
The dynamic range of music as normally perceived in a concert hall doesn't exceed 80 dB, and human speech is normally perceived over a range of about 40 dB.

There really isn't really any music in existance that has 140 dB of dynamics. But in short. If it is western classical recording, digital will beat vinyl hands down. The quiet passages in such recordings will get drowned down by the vinyl noise floor. If it is the old recordings from 90s and before, There are many vinyl records where the mastering beats anything available on digital hands down.

 

[superczar]

Superczar, in my opinion, in my use, it is neither about tactility of experience nor technical superiority. Just plain and simple quality of reproduction. Perhaps digital is better or will be better for modern recordings. For old recordings dating a few decades back, vinyl is very very good. In my system even for 80s recordings I have seen no diff. The sound is absolutely 100% identical. This based on observing it for more than a year. A couple of forum.members who visited me in easier times said as much and they did not seem surprised by it. I am getting the impression that we are too strongly wedded to our biases. It takes the form of introducing new variables into the discussion, or mentioning technical drawbacks that don't exist etc.

I can agree with that.. With a fair amount of effort, cost and planning, a well setup vinyl system should and will sound very good.
Any limitations on the dynamic range will very well be countered by the limits of our hearing.

The problem arises when the same tenet is flipped upside down , as it often is around here
(e.g. I am sure you too would have seen people finding flaws with 16bit 44.1khz sampling audio as being noticeably inferior to 24 bit /192khz)

digital fanboys often cite the lower dynamic range of LPs as a big reason for LPs to be inferior but they refuse to see the dynamic range limits of the different class of music, the dynamic range of the hunam voice. At the same time they will refuse to acknowlege the problem of jitter claiming that the levels of most dacs are below the capability of the human ear to hear it. The genre of music is so important. Vinyl do have a lower dynamic range compared to CD, but where this becomes apparent and hearable is for Western Classical music. It is this reason that the first class of people who adopted digital were classical music listeners.

Please read this with reference to the part above.
A - If we were to agree that a 0-70db (or even 0-80) range is going beyond what we can perceive... because vinyl

B- Any jitter induced anomalies on (for example) the lowly 900/- INR Apple is more than 100db south of the main signal and therefore is irrelevant for playback.

If A is true , then B has to be true as well.. or both have to be false.
Isn't it?

 

[prem]

Below is a post by Steve Hoffman, one of the best masterings engineers out there. It’s a straight cut paste that I have done from the Stevehoffman site

“First, let me say that I love records, compact discsand SACDs; I have a bunch of all three formats. Nothing that I discovered below changed that one bit.

I did these comparisons a few years ago. Since I spilled the beans to an interviewer on mic last year I continually get quoted and misquoted about this subject. I'll try to set the "record" straight in this thread. Please note I'm typing on a whacked out computer not my own with a tiny monitor and no spell check.... There could be a (gasp) typo or two...

A few years ago, mainly out of curiosity (and nothing else) I got the chance at AcousTech Mastering to compare an actual historic analog master tape to the playback of a record lacquer and digital playback. Also did the same test using DSD (SACD) playback as well later on in the day. The results were interesting. The below is just my opinion. Note that we cut the record at 45 because the lathe was set for that speed. A similar test we did using the 33 1/3 speed yielded the same result.

FIRST COMPARISON: MASTER TAPE with ACETATE LACQUER AT 45 RPM with DIGITAL PACIFIC MICROSONICS PCM CAPTURE.

We had the master tape of the Riverside stereo LP Bill Evans Trio/WALTZ FOR DEBBY at AcousTech and decided to do this little comparison. Since the actual master needs a bunch of "mastering" to make it sound the best, I set the title track up as if it was going to be mastered (which in a sense it was, being cut on to an acetate record).

We cut a lacquer ref of the tune with mastering moves while dumping to the digital computer at the same time with the same moves.

Then, after a break, we sync'd up all three, first matching levels. Simultaneous playback of all three commenced and as Kevin switched, I listened. (We took turns switching and listening). First thing I noticed:

The MASTER TAPE and the RECORD sounded the practically the same. We honestly couldn't tell one from the other during playback. This was of course playing back the tape on the master recorder with the mastering "moves" turned on. The acetate record was played back flat on the AcousTech lathe with the SAE arm and Shure V15 through the Neumann playback preamp (as seen in so many pictures posted here of AcousTech).

The flat digital playback of my mastering sounded different. NOT BAD, just different. The decay on the piano was different, the plucks of Scott's bass were different, the reverb trail was noticeably truncated due to a loss of resolution. Non unpleasant, just not like the actual master tape. This is slightly frustrating to me because it confirmed the fact that when mastering in digital one has to compensate for the change (which I do with my usual "tricks"). The record however, gave back exactly what we put in to it. Exactly.

Please note that an actual record for sale would have gone through the manufacturing process and the lacquer would have been processed to a MASTER, MOTHER, STAMPER and VINYL with increased surface noise, etc. but the sound of the music remains intact for the most part. A remarkable thing since records have been basically made the same way for over 100 years.


SECOND COMPARISON: MASTER TAPE with ACETATE LACQUER AT 45 RPM with DSD MASTER (SACD MASTER).

So, using the same master tape of WALTZ FOR DEBBY, we compared the before mentioned acetate that we cut on the AcousTech lathe (manufactured in 1967 and modded by Kevin Gray) with a DSD playback of the same tape with the same mastering and levels.

Result? The DSD/SACD version sounded even MORE different than the compact disc digital playback compared to the analog master. More not-like the sound of the actual master tape. The resolution was fine and we could hear the notes decay, etc. just like analog but the TONALITY was a bit off. It was not telling the truth when compared to the master tape or the acetate record.

THIRD COMPARISON: MASTER TAPE with ACETATE RECORD with OPEN REEL TAPE COPY AT 15 ips:

We made a dub of the tune WALTZ FOR DEBBY to an Ampex ATR-100 at 15 ips non-Dolby, +3 level and played it back with the actual master tape and the acetate record. Both of us thought the open reel tape copy sounded inferior to the acetate record when compared to the master tape; weaker transients, a more "blurred" sound that would never be noticeable unless played back with the actual master tape to compare it to.

So, what does this mean to you? Probably nothing. What did it mean to me? I found it interesting. The CD playback had more accurate tonality than the DSD/SACD playback. The DSD playback had more front to back resolution than the CD playback. The tape copy sounded slightly lackluster. The acetate record playback beat them all in terms of resolution, tonal accuracy and everything else when compared directly with the analog master in playback. This is not wonderful news in a certain sense; vinyl playback is sometimes a pain in the butt and knowing that CD's are not capturing everything in perfect resolution drives me bonkers.

Regarding the lowly phonograph record:

We know that records have their problems (could be noisy, warped, bad cutting, etc.) as well but for the most part they will be a damn miraculous representation of the actual master recording for not much money.

Your comments are welcome.

Please remember, the above is just my OPINION but I found it interesting. I love my compact discs but I realize they are not the last word in resolution; they are damn fine though and when listening for pleasure I play CDs and records, with CDs getting the most play. My Sony and Living Stereo SACDs are never far away from me either. If you disagree with me, that's cool. It's all fun, or should be.

Sorry again for some awkward English in this; my proofing time was limited (but not compressed).”

2019 UPDATE:

Please note, our DSD transfer back then used a machine that I did not care for. We changed machines right before the Nat King Cole Analogue Productions projects and that DSD capture was spot on. It would have been up there with the acetate record capture most likely. The PCM capture might be improved slightly with a more modern A/D but still not as wonderful as the DSD.