I don’t know if your brain is playing any kind of tricks, but I do know that I’ve heard similar sorts of things from others. In addition to “placing” the musicians, I’ve heard vinyl described as “warmer” or “more human.” I agree; I had and played many LPs and 45s in my day, and that’s the best I can do at describing the sound. If our brains are playing tricks, Jimbo; well, they’re rather nice tricks.
As for the OP, I think we’re looking more at subjective criteria when we are asked what sounds “better.” Yes, it is possible to use special equipment to measure, objectively, the pop-and-hiss-free-ness (the quality?) of vinyl vs. CD sound. But does it sound better to you? To me? To that guy over there? That, it seems to me, depends on our personal preferences–which means this GQ cannot be definitely answered until we come up with a more objective comparator than simply, “better.”
One of the problems is that you really can’t do an A-B comparison between vinyl and digital, even if it’s a blind test. If the listener already believes vinyl is better, he/she will know which source is vinyl by hearing the snaps & pops, and vote for it. OTOH, if the listener believes vinyl is inferior, he/she will (also) hear the snaps & pops and vote against it.
This is true. The clicks & pops give do give it away.
However, I think you can rule out some bias if a particular individual prefers vinyl for some albums but CDs for others. If it was 100% preference either way, it would seem to point to blind prejudice.
I recall just that being done back when CDs came out, and the people who claimed that vinyl was better mistook the CDs with added noise for vinyl. I’d say that what the vinyl people are attracted to is inferior quality that they happened to be used to. Nostalgia, in other words.
I am seeing a lot of comments about pops and hiss on vinyl. That is an indication of a poorly cared-for record, not an inevitable flaw of the medium. If cleaned, handled, and stored properly, you won’t hear that. But it’s a lot more work than taking care of a CD.
I am not an audiophile but I used to have almost the same rig as MrFloppy. I still have the Linn Kann speakers but gave up the $2000 Linn turntable in the divorce settlement.
Wouldn’t A-B test be done using virgin discs that haven’t yet acquired the surface defects that cause the pops and crackles.
CDs played through valve equipment sound very much like vinyl.
I’ve retired my record deck due to lack of space but use a Shanling CD-T100 valve CD player in conjunction with Electrocompaniet amplification that is said to have a valve-like quality and to my ears CDs on this rig are almost indistinguishable from vinyl bar the surface noise.
It might be said though that one is merely replacing one kind if distortion with another.
I fear that this is one of those questions that will never be satisfactorily resolved. It has certainly been going on long enough.
I posted this in another thread a long time ago and I’m too lazy to search it but:
I have a friend that does remixing of old albums for release onto CD’s for a major musical company. He has won a Grammy for his work. So he told me:
There is an endless debate as to whether these albums should be released to sound like what was recorded in the studio or to sound like the original album. In the first instance they will go back to source tapes and producers/musicians notes to determine what the sound was intended to be. In the latter case they will listen to the original album and try to duplicate it.
The point is that vinyl is not pure sound. The vinyl recording has a bias of its own. Some people become so enamored of it that they perceive it as “true” sound. The fact is that digital, by it’s nature, is much truer. This was a huge point of contention in the early days of CD’s when the producers had little experience in mixing the sound and it seem unusually harsh.
The other point is that albums that have been re released on CD don’t always sound the same. The pompous “purists” say that the sound is degraded. In fact, the producer may have actually given you the product that the musicians intended. The CD may actually be much truer to the sound than the vinyl recording because it eliminated the vinyl bias.
Somewhere long ago, I read an article that quoted Neil Young as favoring LPs. IIRC the analogy he used was that if you look through a screen door at a scene outside, you’ll see nuanced color in each square in the screen. Digital recording, he said, destroys that, reducing it to the prominent color for that square.
Seriously, I believe that CDs can sound better than vinyl, but that they don’t. The problem is that they over-compress the music before burning the CD, as described in rowrrbazzle’s link. Also see the “Rush link” in this post I made just a couple days ago.
Why do people keep saying this? ntucker already pointed out up thread that you can just add to the CD a track with the sound of a record’s popping and clicking. Those are just sounds like any others, after all. They aren’t somehow magically impossible to capture digitally.
You make it sound like the LP gives you an infinitely-resolved view, within each square of the screen, of the real scene behind it. In reality, each “square” gives you a randomly-smeared patch that’s in the neighborhood of the real scene. You might say that the random smear has more “nuance”, but those nuances needn’t bear any similarity to those of the original scene.
Besides, it’s all well and good to speculate on theoretical reasons for why CD could provide an inferior listening experience. The question is, do they do so in fact? If the extra “nuance” in LPs is below the threshold of human sensibility, it’s not going to have any effect on the listening experience.
This would be the correct statement. Analog vs. digital has nothing to do with this; the key issue is how the audio was recorded and how it’s played back. (e.g., recorded binaurally and played back through headphones or via some other type of spatialized audio technology). If you see the term “soundstage” in a review, you can safely assume that the reviewer is a wanker.
(I wasn’t doing research on spatialized audio in grad school, but my station in the lab was next to the guy who was.)
I am a recovering audiophile from the early 1980s. You can get wonderful sound out of vinyl if it is great vinyl. Shitty vinyl gives shitty sound. Redbook standard CDs give nice sound, and run of the mill CDs sound shitty. I gave up on MP3s soon after they were introduced because the sound was intolerable. Worse than an old wind up 78 Edison that was all mechanical with nothing electric. (For which it sounds like you are listening through a drainpipe at a live club, which is very interesting.
All of these formats I listen to very intently, giving it my full attention. With proper care I have found that each sounds good with good recordings. The only exception being MP3s, which I think are uniformly shitty, but I gave up on them before the iPod came out.
I prefer nowadays to skip the fancy equipment and put in a CD without worrying about cleaning it, the stylus, before and after and worrying that maybe someone fiddled with the turntable. I just put it in and listen. Oh, and I like DVD-Audio (now a dead format) and SACD (mostly dead) better than plain old CD. But I suspect that my liking those better has to do with greater care in transferring them to disc.
I recall a TV documentary where a class of graduate level music students were put in front of a cathedral style organ and an electronic amplification system of the same pieces being played. They could not tell the difference. Remember that. Enjoy your music.
I have a relative who loves hot sauce. He puts hot sauce on everything. Sometimes I feel bad for his wife, who’s an excellent cook. No matter what delicious food she cooks, he puts hot sauce all over it. From our perspective, the hot sauce is hiding the taste of whatever he’s eating. From his perspective, if it’s not spicy, it’s bland.
It’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s very similar to the defects of vinyl. You cannot simply say one is superior or inferior when it comes down to a matter of taste. Yes, nostalgia surely plays a part in my liking certain records on vinyl rather than CD. However, that same nostalgia also plays a part in me appreciating the music on the record.
Listening to music is not a scientific experiment, it’s a subjective experience. If a vinyl record, with its large jacket art, its heavy disc, its cracks and pops and distortion, makes a more vivid impression on me than a CD, can you really say that it’s inferior?
Golden ear here. Friends ask me to help them choose speakers. Again, UNDER IDEAL CIRCUMSTANCES, LP’s sound very noticeably better than CD’s, especially in dynamic range and DETAIL. Warm? Harsh? Whatever. Most of my stuff is on CD or MP3 at a high bit rate. Better to listen to good music. Some of my favorite recordings are old 78’s and audience tapes. It is the performance, not the medium that makes music. And if you bought an expensive high end CD player, you wasted your money. Spend your money on speakers, good phono cartridge, etc.
I know that some of my lightly (and not so lightly) used albums I’ve picked up have the pops and hisses. I don’t dislike it, I just look at it as “hey, its a 4 buck record that I wanted on vinyl.” I check it to make sure there’s no MAJOR scratches that would keep it from playing and buy it.
But when I do buy new vinyl I expect it to sound perfect. I used to have a cheaper turntable and you could tell from the quality of the machine that it was playing records (always had a faint hiss to it that went softer then louder, no matter what needle I used). I then got a much better unit (not the super crazy thousands of dollar machine… But decent) and a brand new vinyl sounded great. If I take good care of my good vinyl it still sounds the same… Maybe a rare click or pop.
I can’t say that CDs are all that great. I never noticed the big difference between them and cared for vinyl. The whole thing is, though, yes, you have cases, but just knowing they’re just a string of ones and zeros that I could make a quick 1-1 copy of whenever I get the time to makes me not take as good care of them as I should… or that I would if they were vinyl. Because of that stupid mistake and before I ripped all my bought CDs to the computer I lost many good albums and wasted a lot of money buying them again.
Can’t find a reference, but people have been known to pay hundreds of dollars for a volume control knob. Not many of those people had an EE degree, I suspect.
That’s a nice explanation. The only problem is that it is fundamentally wrong. See the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem. Analog systems have a noise floor, so they can never offer perfect reproduction, even if there is no distortion. Digital systems can improve their signal-to-noise ratio by quantizing with more bits. 16-bit quantization, like used on CDs, offers a much better signal-to-noise ratio (96 dB) than any analog system. If you are willing to spend the money, you can quantize more bits (24 is common) and increase the sampling rate (96 kHz, 192 kHz).
Sound is not an infinite range of wavelengths. Human hearing covers a limited range of frequencies, roughly 20-20 kHz. Within that range, a digital system can offer almost perfect reproduction, certainly much better than analog media.
Analog magnetic tape suffers from noise, non-linear amplitude response, and speed variations from the tape and transport.
Vinyl has even more problems. It is increasingly difficult to make the stylus follow the undulations of the groove as frequency increases. The stylus damages the record every time it is played. The mastering process has to monkey around with the frequency response and limit the dynamic range in order to create a record that is playable on a typical turntable. It is difficult for the drive system to maintain a constant speed. High oil prices have resulted in many record companies cutting corners in the quality and amount of vinyl used to make a record. They also cut corners by continuing to use stampers that have worn out and need to be replaced. The average turntable is far inferior to a top-quality turntable that is properly setup and maintained.
Comparing systems is problematic. There are too many variables in the mastering process. Carefully mastered and pressed vinyl can sound great, while the same recording on CD can easily be botched by sloppy engineering, poor source material, and producers who think louder is better. Still, all other things being equal, digital (linear PCM like on a CD) beats analog by a mile.
In the end, it’s garbage-in garbage-out. I’ve heard AM radio programming that sounded much better than the average FM broadcast station. AM can sound amazingly good with proper engineering, a strong signal, and a well-designed receiver. Most people have never heard how good and clean AM can sound. On the other hand, FM broadcasting has become a vast wasteland of distortion, non-existent dynamic range, and multi-band compression. I can’t listen to music on most FM radio stations for any length of time without getting a strong urge to turn it off.
