Does vinyl sounds better than cd or not?

[prem]

Hi jls001

Even more interesting is his observation of sacd which is supposedly high res. He finds the tonality of a cd better than a sacd.

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

But the resolution better on SACD.

Going back to the opening quote interview...

METCALFE: Well, I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I'm primarily a recording engineer, as far as working with music. And it's - the closer thing to what I'm sending into the recorder is very much what I'm getting back out. With analog formats, although the sound can be very pleasing in certain styles, it's definitely imparting its own sound on it. And I think, to an extent, it's that sound that some people are really drawn to. But it's nice as an engineer to have the confidence of knowing that what I'm putting into - in most cases these days, the computer - is pretty close to what I'm going to get out.

I'm not suggesting one guy is wrong and the other right, or that we hit each other with quotes from different recording engineers, perhaps the answer is ...No simple answers!

 

[prem]

In the past when i had an Esoteric cd player which could play both cds and sacds, i used to have a few titles on both cds and sacds. The sacd sounded more open and more impressive as compared to the cd, but some of my friends who are amateur musicians, preferred the cd. They kept saying it sounds more real and natural. Their observations were more in the context of what Steve Hoffman has to say.

Later i had the cd player and the turntable together for a very short while. I do not listen much to new music but i did have few albums on both cd and vinyl. Raising Sand, Modern Times, Shangri La, Ray of Light and Come Away With Me. In and each and every case i preferred the vinyl to the cd. The microdynamics came through much better which just made the whole mix sound way more interesting. I obviously would not like to generalise based on my one listening experience. But i thought i would just share it

 

[prem]

With due respect to Met Calfe, he is not in the same league as Steve Hoffman. Would you listen to Sachin Tendulkars views on how to bat or would you listen to, say, Abhishek Nayyar?

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

No idea, prem... like I said, I'm not trying to hit one quote against another: we could probably dig up many. I suppose we could tally them up and check the count.

On a previous iteration of this, or similar, discussion, there was a video discussion with some leading lights of both music production and audiophile communities. I could be wrong, but if memory serves, the concensus was that SACD was the best thing in audio evolution (at least at that time) and what a shame it never really happened.

I can't say anything about SACD --- I have never had an SACD player. Might have a DSD DAC one day, but I'm not really for re-collecting my music, and I'm certainly not going to pay the record companies for it yet again!

 

[prem]

I appreciate what you are saying Thad. I guess we all hear differently. I found the sacd very impressive but guys who are musicians and the like look for tonality

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

I have to understand what you mean... that instruments sound right? realistic? That they combine musically?

Trouble with words is that we might not understand the same thing by them.

I don't know so much about musicians in other genres (I simply don't know so many of them) but Indian musicians I know don't see to worry about hifi at all. Like the neighbour in another thread, they probably wonder why we spend the money: a portable cassette player is all they need! :lol: I'd rather talk to you guys about sound! Any day.

Come to think of it, of the carnatic forums I been a member of for last decade or so, although I can remember a lot of complaints about hall sound engineering, I cannot think of a single discussion about quality music playing. Maybe the rasika community doesn't care.

 

[prem]

I am not a musician sir. I only shared what these guys told me

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

OK, I'm not either

 

[ranjeetrain]

I had merely expressed my experience and my views in the matter. You are always free to disagree.

What I did not expect was this personal judgment and insinuation, something I had not experienced on this forum before. I've no time for such attitude, so I'm outta here, at least as far as this thread is concerned.

I didn't intend to be read/interpreted like that. You seem to have taken my post a little too seriously. Any parts of my post that have made you feel bad, I apologize for that.

My intent was just to point out things I found factually incorrect. I would be last person to try to pull someone down. We are here for a reasonable discussion in a respectable fashion, nothing more. Again, apology for anything that made you uncomfortable.

 

[ranjeetrain]

I think the gaps people refer to is not meant to be heard in literal sense. I suppose they refer to the overall quality of sound which is affected by the 'gaps'. By gaps I think they mean the sampling rate. At same bit depth, if 192 khz samples are sounding better than the red book standard 44.1 khz on a revealing system, then it means our ears can see the gaps. Similarly, if DSD128 sounds better to anyone, it could be due to the smaller gaps (!). In that sense analog has no gaps. May be this is what he meant.

I guess I understand what is implied by the 'gaps' here. But if those are supposed to be referred to as gaps, nothing absolutely nothing will be continuous. It will be a very very very long post, if I have to elaborate on this point to explain it in sufficient detail. But since the person making that point is taking it personally, I would leave it here.

@ Ranjeet,

I honestly feel that many of these things are not so straight forward due to the many fangled nature of music creation methods, mastering and manufacturing process.

If you do not believe me, visit an audiophile who has both analogue and digital setup in the most optimal way and listen to the same music. You will most probably prefer some music on one medium while preferring many on the other. I am sure you may have already done this experiment.

Accuracy means different things to many people. For some, it is adherence to a certain kind of sound while for others is the capability of the music system to recreate the same feelings which you get when you listen to live music.

To me this is a much more complicated manifestation. That is why this is an interesting hobby.

I agree with that and my posts have a similar meaning if you read carefully. About the experiment you are talking about: Of course the opinion expressed by me here are based on listening experiences. That too on fairly good systems.

Different people like different things in life. Same goes with music reproduction. There are so many aspects of music reproduction. It's hardly surprising that different people like different aspects. It's only natural.

What I fail to digest is when some people from a certain camp come out with sweeping generalization and declare the other mediums/formats dead, that too without using facts to back up their generalizations.

Sure, if someone likes his music in certain ways, on certain type of gear, from certain type of medium, more power to them. But they shouldn't go out and make generalizations based on what they like and try to suggest what they like is the best way to listen to music.

 

[Santy]

I guess I understand what is implied by the 'gaps' here. But if those are supposed to be referred to as gaps, nothing absolutely nothing will be continuous. It will be a very very very long post, if I have to elaborate on this point to explain it in sufficient detail. But since the person making that point is taking it personally, I would leave it here.

Well, atleast I am interested to know how you believe analog is not absolutely continuous. I agree it could be painful to write so a googled link will do too.

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

Equally, I'm interested to know how digital is not absolutely continuous!

Because it seems to me that assertions that it isn't are based on assumptions and misconceptions. I speak as one who also assumed and misconceived. Here are some of my assumptions/misconceptions. which I believe are widely shared...

1. The word sampled. If the music is sampled, then it must mean that it is not all there.

2. The step graph/diagram. Again, pieces of music missing, right?

To non-technical innumerates like me, these things stand to reason. But it seems that they don't. It seems that the whole theory behind the digitisation that is used says that the wave form in is reproduced as wave form out. Exactly. No gaps, no steps.

How can that be? Crazy weird maths; don't ask me to explain it, I can't even begin to, but it is easily found out there on the net.

Oh, wait... that we don't get anything above 20Khz (CD quality) is not an assumption, it is a fact: whether or not our equipment can reproduce that or our ears can hear it is another argument --- and we can leave the 20Khz limit behind with higher sample rates anyway, so. even of the criticism is valid for CD-quality music, it is not for digital music generally.

On the "analogue" (which everyone takes to mean vinyl records) side there are all kinds of disadvantages which never get mentioned or talked about. It's tough to get music, especially of a high dynamic range, into those tiny grooves, and the mastering has to take account of that if the record is to be physically playable. The RIAA EQ is all part of that. But nobody ever says that this electronic removal and re-adding of the bass comes between them and the performer --- but doesn't it? Who's listened to LPs without EQ, and discovered what's actually in the grooves?

I'm not knocking analogue, vinyl, LP, or whatever anyone wants to call it. Or putting digital above all else. What I'm knocking is the mistaken arguments, on both sides.

The subjective experience cannot be argued with. Nobody can tell me what I do, or don't feel about spinning a disk, or what I do or don't feel about a directory listing and a PC monitor. It's when we start justifying that that things get contentious.

 

[Saket]

Jumping in a discussion like this involves a lot of risk but the fact is that I myself do not know that what actually sounds better.

When I say the above, I want to add that there are certainly a lot of vinyls in my collection that would beat CDs hands down any day, but, the vice-versa is also true. Hence, IMO, the vinyls, CDs, tapes, deliver mostly what the recording & mastering engineer wants us to have AND not what the medium is capable of. We neither have the original cut of the LP, neither the master tape nor the masters of the CD. This makes the comparison totally inaccurate for academic purposes. Also, the dynamic range which the CD can accommodate is much higher than the vinyls, but is it practically useful?

I know, my post has more questions than answers, but I think the discussion should be on the track that what is the ultimate capability of a medium and not what we hear at home because what we hear is not ultimate and just what is served to us by the music company. If the vinyl is pressed based on a digitally mastered recording, what we have is just digital music on a medium which is basically analogue & nothing else.

Just my 2 cents on the discussion!

Regards,
Saket

 

[ghatgepatil]

This is too dated a debate and with no winners till now. However, what little I tried out in my predominantly digital set-up with a minor exception of a single TT in it, playing vintage vinyl discs and comparing those with the same tracks played via CD and internet radio, it was not difficult to pin-point to the naturally holophonic sound signature from the TT. Even my teenaged daughter (from-nowhere-an-audiophile) was taken aback when she heard the mono-TT output and accidentally happened to hear the same track playing in an adjoining room, this one through a capable CDp. Her 'only' comment was 'the former sounds real' and live.

 

[Santy]

1. The word sampled. If the music is sampled, then it must mean that it is not all there.

2. The step graph/diagram. Again, pieces of music missing, right?

To non-technical innumerates like me, these things stand to reason. But it seems that they don't. It seems that the whole theory behind the digitisation that is used says that the wave form in is reproduced as wave form out. Exactly. No gaps, no steps.

Thad.
You are perfectly right in the two pointers you wrote. How much is not the question (could be infinitesimally small given the technology) but music IS missing.

Input is continuous wave, output is continuous wave. Absolutely.
But I am not sure how that proves that digital is absolutely continuous.
What we have inbetween input and output are ADC and DAC (nothing that you are not aware of).
ADC creates gaps and DAC closes it.

I am not going to talk on how much a human ear can see the gaps or what effect the conversion has on music to one's perception (it depends on infinite no. of parameters).

But if someone really wants to know how much effect sampling can have on music, we have to go extreme.

Music clip sampled at 1024 samples per sec.
http://music.columbia.edu/cmc/musicandcomputers/sounds/chapter2/bragg.1024.mp3

Same music sampled at standard 44,100 samples per sec
http://music.columbia.edu/cmc/musicandcomputers/sounds/chapter2/bragg.mp3

Courtesy The Department of Music at Columbia University

 

[Santy]

We neither have the original cut of the LP, neither the master tape nor the masters of the CD. This makes the comparison totally inaccurate for academic purposes.

Agreed. Normally in such comparisons, we are comparing the recording quality and the ability of the system on which the medium is played rather than the medium itself. Also, I wonder how many albums are recorded originally in both Analog and Digital even if a comparison on two high end systems (analog & digital) could be considered to be valid.

I think the discussion should be on the track that what is the ultimate capability of a medium and not what we hear at home because what we hear is not ultimate and just what is served to us by the music company. If the vinyl is pressed based on a digitally mastered recording, what we have is just digital music on a medium which is basically analogue & nothing else.

It will be interesting to see discussions going in that direction coz we all know the analog vs digital debate will not lead us to anywhere. Keeping the comparison strictly within the scope of the medium, if we look at what we wanted to write and what we actually write and what we wanted to read and what we actually read, then I guess it is CD which is superior for an obvious reason; there are only two forms of data: 0s and 1s. Again, the errors of reading 0s as 1s and 1s as 0s and processing them are not within the scope of the CD itself I believe.

 

[jls001]

1. The word sampled. If the music is sampled, then it must mean that it is not all there.

To paraphrase the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem, if the highest frequency component that a signal contains is f Hertz, it is sufficient to sample the signal at 2 times f to be able to completely reconstruct the original signal.

For Red Book CDs, the accepted highest frequency that is audible to human beings may be 20000 Hz, but it is actually sampled at 44100 times, which 2 x 22050 Hz. So a generous 2050 Hz margin is built in into the standard itself. This means it is being sampled at 2.205 times instead of 2 times.

Gaps: yes, there are gaps. But they don't matter as the mathematics says that you need to sample the signal at twice the highest frequency to be able to completely reconstruct it.

If 44.1 kHz is all that is needed, then one may ask why the push to higher sampling frequencies like 96 or 192 kHz? Higher sampling frequencies are primarily useful to avoid aliasing frequencies affecting audio signal in the 20Hz-20kHz band. Yes, one can use filters to remove such unwanted aliasing frequencies but such filters tend to be brickwall in nature, and complicated to implement right. I will try to dig out a graph from an old issue of HFN that explains this concept beautifully.

On the "analogue" (which everyone takes to mean vinyl records) side there are all kinds of disadvantages which never get mentioned or talked about. It's tough to get music, especially of a high dynamic range, into those tiny grooves, and the mastering has to take account of that if the record is to be physically playable. The RIAA EQ is all part of that. But nobody ever says that this electronic removal and re-adding of the bass comes between them and the performer --- but doesn't it? Who's listened to LPs without EQ, and discovered what's actually in the grooves?

I'm not knocking analogue, vinyl, LP, or whatever anyone wants to call it. Or putting digital above all else. What I'm knocking is the mistaken arguments, on both sides.

As far as I understand, nothing is removed but amplitude of lower frequencies are reduced as per a certain curve when a record is made. This avoid large excursions of record groove (since lower audio frequency needs larger groove to describe/encode it), so that more music can be squeezed into the record surface. When it is played out, the amplitude that was reduced will be amplified in exactly the reverse manner.

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

ADC creates gaps and DAC closes it.

Interesting way of putting it.

jls001, you are quite right about RIAA. I put it very badly. Almost looks like I was trying to put a spin on it by misrepresenting the technology. . Honest! I wasn't --- but I'm glad you picked it up.

You also put the digitisation stuff very nicely. Thanks.

(Have to go out... maybe more later)

 

[haisaikat]

Want to break the ice. Everyone should take a break.

Out of topic, I have a thread for some requirements on water pumps and its effect on AV equipments. Can someone please throw some light there too? We can again come back and kill each other here later on.

http://www.hifivision.com/general-l...advice-precautions-av-equipment-new-post.html