From Che Sent Wed, Apr 22nd 1998, 16:04
From Che Sent Wed, Apr 22nd 1998, 16:04
Oh joy! I've been waiting for the ol' vinyl vs. CD thread to pop up ever since I started doing noise removal on vinyl recordings, and discovered that vinyl's even worse than I've let on in the past... At 10:58 PM 4/21/98 -0700, robot wrote: >David Hodgson wrote: > >> on the subject of minidisic >> what do other people think of the quality of Minidisc > >All compression is evil. Everyone should buy vinyl as their TOP >priority! Goddard once said that film was truth 24 frames per second. >Actually we all know that film could not possibly be TRUTH, and in fact >Goddard was commenting on how easy it is to lie with film. Digital >recording is the same! It can not possibly do music justice even if the >sampling rate is above our "comprehensable" rate and the bit depth is >"enough for us not to tell the difference"... It is still digitized and >therefore not the pure sound. If you add digital compression into the >picture this problem is ESCELATED! > >At the same time, I do admit that I own a CD player and own quite a few >CD's. Their portability is invaluable for on-the-road listening (in the >car, snowboarding, biking, running...). However, in these settings the >all the background noise renders perfect reproduction unimportant. Seems like you should be lugging around a record player, if perfect reproduction is unimportant... >I know I am in the minority here, but I own a Technics 1200 with an >Ortofon needle and a JBL power amp and JBL studio monitors. While, >these are not the finest nor the top of the line pieces, I can >DEFINATELY hear the suberp sound quality and dynamic range that I get >out of vinyl over my CD player plugged into the same system. Albeit, I >don't have a top quality CD player but for the $500 price tag of the >turntable + the needle vs. the $500 price tag of my CD player I CAN tell >which is better. Ok, try this then. Record some vinyl into your computer. Run it thru some good depop/decrackle/devinylnoise software (Sonic Solutions NoNoise is the best, but for us mere mortals Sonicworx Studio is pretty damn good, or if you're of the Wintel persuasion, SAW). Take the result, invert it, add it back to the original recording. Listen. What you're hearing is all the noise that was removed. You'll discover just how AWFUL vinyl really sounds. You know how when you get to the runout groove, the record suddenly sounds noisy? Here's a little secret - the whole record is that noisy, you just don't notice it (except during quiet passages) because the music masks it. I'm finding that the noise floor of vinyl averages 75dB-80dB (in the case of a pop, the SNR is negative, meaning that the noise is louder than the signal!), versus 92-96dB for CDs. And I find vinyl noise to be much more objectional, fairly strong up to 600Hz, interfering with the signal and a bitch to remove when the signal gets low, like during a long fadeout. At 11:09 AM 4/22/98 +0200, Irene McC wrote: >On 22 Apr 98, siliconvortex wrote > >> a cd, which is (given good mastering) an exact digital copy > >There you said it "DIGITAL". All cut up into millions of little >bits and jammed back together, not one smooth sound curve. >It samples at 44 thousand.1 times per second.... Yes, but the reconstruction filter after the DAC smooths all that out. Look at it on an oscilloscope, you'll see one smooth sound curve. Go brush up on the writings of Nyquist. >> or vinyl, which has been converted from dat to analogue, cut with >> a lathe into a piece of metal, then pressed into a piece of soft >> plastic, then tracked through a dust filled groove with a diamond >> connected to a magnet, then put through an riaa equaliser, before >> you hear the end result. which did you say sounds better? > >It's not quite as simple as that. Yes, but that's a pretty good description of just how removed from the reality of the original recording a vinyl record is. >The actual vinyl has "give" in it, meaning that the walls of the >vinyl contract and expand Meaning that every time you play a record, you destroy it. Play it more than once in 24 hours and you accelerate the rate of destruction immensely. >- causing a certain amount of compression >that happens in the vinyl itself which sounds attractive to the >human ear. It's called "Wellie" (coming from the visual image of a >kick up the bum with a wellington boot). If you go above clip in >digital you get a terrible distortion but in any analogue medium it >givies it more 'wellie'. > >That's why certain recording artists deliberately go from their >digital master onto 1/2" analogue tape to saturate the tape which >gives it a much better "warmer" sound - and then transfer it to CD >from THAT. And many rock artists only record directly to analogue >multi-track tape and then use the Apogee UV22 process to achieve >analogue-like "warmth" on CD. The mastering process on the CD is >the most important : there is a *big loss* between original analog >mastering to digital - unless 24-bit mastering is used (which is >already available). Of course those atavistic (ripoff) "artists" would be using old recording methods to attain that old sound for their recycled music. What you're describing is a form of distortion, of which there are many kinds. IDM artists tend to use whatever sort of distortion sounds right, including digital clipping - check out the Rhythmatic remix of YMO's Technopolis - brilliant! >A well-mastered vinyl 12" can contain harmonics up to 30 kHz, which >would be chopped dead on CD at 20 kHz. Brick wall. That's true, but if you keep listening to the clicks & pops on vinyl, you'll lose your ability to hear the high end soon enough. Pops are evil! Don't write off digital til you've heard something recorded 20 bit/96 kHz. CDs aren't perfect, but for me, they're much closer to reality than vinyl. I suppose someday they'll build a true 22 bit DAC (the ones now are linear for 20 bits), but 24 bit is a chimera - that accuracy is below the thermal noise of silicon. Che