I switched gradually from vinyl to CD’s in the mid-to-late 80s. Before that, I bought vinyl, but recorded a tape that I actually listened to. I never liked fussing with records. Now I buy CD’s and record an mp3 that I actually listen to.
When iTunes first came out I experimented with different bit rates. I believe that other people can hear the difference, but I can’t. The very lowest rate I tried (something people use for music, but much lower than Apple’s default) sounded possibly, maybe, ever-so-slightly “cleaner” than the others.
I migrated to CDs for popular music, but have never given up purchasing my classical music on LP. It may be strictly in my mind - I’m willing to concede that much - but there is a fuller sound to orchestral music on vinyl that is missing in compressed formats.
Here’s another techie question: what is the frequency/bitrate/whatever limit on vinyl? How small can they make the little wiggles that the needle scrapes over?
LP is 11 inches across. At 33 1/3 rpm, that’s 366 inches/m, or six inches a second. If you could conceivably get 44100 hz sampling, that would make each individual wiggle on the LP .0001 inch, or around .003 mm. Vinyl plastic can’t hold shapes that small!
(I Googled for the answer, and found discussions of the topic, but no actual answers.)
nitpick, you are implying vinyl isn’t compressed. All recorded music is compressed. The only uncompressed music is live sound straight from the instruments to your headholes.
Being as vinyl is an analog medium, I don’t think there is a direct comparison. CD sampling rates were set at 44K because that allows conversion of the frequency range that humans can hear, with cushion. You could always sample any number higher, but you’re increasing file size for no real effective gain in quality.
However, records can reproduce sounds higher than 20K Hz, so the medium has more capacity than it can use. But they aren’t as good at low frequencies. The grooves get so big that the needle has to move a lot to follow it, and you can get distortions. In the worst cases, the needle can jump right out of the groove.
And I’m willing to admit it may be completely perceptual on my part, not scientific at all. But as long as both are available, I can indulge myself and self-justify in any way that tickles my fancy.
Well, the word ‘bitrate’ has ‘bit’ right in it. It’s inherently digital. An analog vinyl record has ‘bumps’, not discrete ‘bits’ of data. Also, a vinyl record is CAV, not CLV. This means that the speed in which the needle travels across the bumps gets slower as the turntable’s arm moves in towards the center of the record. I’ve seen discussions in the vein of 'the warmth of it’ where vinyl-lovers even talk about how the first songs on a record sound better because of this. IMO vinyl is such a crappy medium that discussions like this are pointless.
The best way to estimate a vinyl records equivalent ‘bitrate’ would be to simply say at what sampling rate does an MP3 recorded from a vinyl record sound the same as on a turntable. My guess is that 128 would be about right. Maybe a little lower. Of course turntables also have their own myriad of analog distortions like wow and flutter (I can’t really remember what those even were).
I explicitly tested this when iTunes was new. I didn’t go to 320, but did three different bit rates, one 128, and two higher. I couldn’t hear the difference.
I’m not claiming that no one could hear the difference. And it’s possible that I could with better headphones. But using the equipment I actually used to listen to music, they sounded the same to me.
I believe he meant that a conversion, as with a USB turntable and software like Audacity, will stop benefiting from increased bitrate after a certain point. Not that a song recorded from a live performance stops benefiting from higher bitrate, but a song recorded from an LP will stop benefiting from higher bitrate.
Again, vinyl must have a certain physical limit, based on the width of the little physical ridges alongside the groove, which shove the needle back and forth.
It appears that the wiggle wave-length is about 1/300 of an inch. At six inches a second, that means that no sound-signal can be more than 1/50 of a second. (??? That can’t be right, or how would an LP play any musical tone higher than 50 Hz?)
This is why I’m asking you guys for help here; I’m out’n my depth!
That’s ridiculous. I agree that there’s no meaningful exact sampling rate comparison and that subjective listening is the way to do it, but the estimate of “128 [Kbps] … or maybe a little lower” is just nuts. You’re letting your obvious disdain for vinyl hugely skew your estimate. Back in the day, I used to tape my vinyl records on a high-end reel-to-reel machine to preserve them, and the minimum tape speed that wouldn’t incur fairly obvious audio degradation, especially in high frequencies, was 7 1/2 ips, half the normal 15 ips of a studio master. Ideally 15 ips would have been better. I’d subjectively put a new vinyl record or a 15 ips recording of it as about equivalent to at least a 256 Kbps MP3. 128 Kbps is closer to AM radio and probably worse than an LP transcribed to tape at 3 3/4 ips.
According to this article, the answer to the question “What bitrate is needed to sound like analog FM?” is “300 kbp/s or greater … in less critical listening environments, bit rates of 160-192 kbp/s will work.”
That’s equally absurd. In the days of VHS, consumer videotape was extremely bandwidth constrained and VHS was roughly equivalent to 333×480 pixels luma and 40×480 chroma resolutions, which was crap even by SD standards, let alone HD.
The truth about vinyl vs. CD is that the quality of the source master is a far greater determinant of audio quality than either of the media themselves. In addition, as scabpicker already said, the one that will sound better is the one that the master was optimized for, which was probably a contributing factor to launching the “vinyl is better” mythology in the early days of CD. CD unquestionably provides greater dynamic range and overall better quality when the material is optimized for it, or perhaps more accurately, when the material was not equalized for vinyl. The best that can be said for vinyl is that the harmonic distortions it introduces are often considered pleasing and regarded as “warmth”, whereas defects in digital recordings like quantization distortions and exaggerated highs are subjectively regarded as “harshness”.
Well, you’re just making an educated guess as well. But I disagree that 128 is close to AM radio. Music on AM radio sounds like it’s being played over a telephone, and 128 is not quite that bad (though I wouldn’t encode at anything less than 160, or preferably 192).
Yes, the source material is all that matters. And put simply which do you think is going to be an inherently (and significantly) closer reproduction of the studio master tapes, a vinyl record or a digital CD? And the whole ‘optimized for vinyl’ thing? No. You’re dragging a rock across a piece of plastic. No amount of specialized ‘optimization’ is going to compensate for that. I remember early CDs that had the disclaimer about “…may reveal limitations of the source material”, but even those CDs still always sounded immensely better than any vinyl copy.
Before CDs came out I used to tell friends how when you buy a new vinyl record and play it two, maybe three times it never sounds as good after that. And they looked at me like I was crazy…
I think you’re assuming that perfect reproduction equals a more pleasing sound, here. That is not necessarily the case. If it was, adding tube preamps (which inherently distort) to vocals (and pretty much everything else) wouldn’t be such a popular method of recording them.
I’ve made a record (and numerous recordings), from recording to mixing (I did have someone else do the mastering, but I approved it before it was pressed). We mixed it on a set of reference monitors, which have the truest reproduction, but even the rough mixes sometimes sounded better on other speakers. However, on some stereos, it was still too boomy or shrill or something, so back to more mixing. Even a mix done on the flat response of monitors has to be tested in the real world before it’s “done”. Once it passes the real-world test, it gets mastered.
After the mastering guy put the RIAA curve on the mix and did things like make sure all the bass frequencies were nearly centered and suitable for a record, we send the digital files to the record press. I’ve compared the vinyl and the uncompressed digital files several times. In this case, the vinyl sounds better. The digital files aren’t sharp or shrill, since that was the medium they were originally mixed in, but the distortion in the high frequencies and the fall of of bass that are introduced by the record and the playback system are more pleasing to my ears.
Now, certainly this is somewhat an issue of taste, but generally humans find certain frequencies of distortion pleasant, and those frequencies are often introduced naturally by analog systems.
Well, who are they going to believe: You or their lying ears?
I do have records that I acquired in lots that were played to death before I got them. I have a copy of “Pipeline” by the Surfaris that I absolutely will look at, but won’t play. It actually does sound like AM radio at this point, and it looks like someone sanded it, but it must have been the property of a DJ. I have records that I’ve played thousands of times that don’t have any distracting surface noise. Some people may have ultrasonic hearing, but those are the only people who are going to miss the tiny amount of high end lost after the first few plays of a record
Vinyl is memorabilia. Like a t-shirt or poster. I buy vinyl from bands at concerts and they all come with a free MP3 download, so I can just admire the vinyl from afar while I listen to the music on my phone. It’s a keepsake, basically. I don’t buy CDs, because they’re smaller, don’t come with MP3 downloads, and I don’t even own a CD player anymore (though my Xbox and car could play them if I cared to).
I can’t swallow the “warmth” or “sounds better” claims of vinyl supporters. It doesn’t sound better. It does, however, seem to last longer. I can dig 60 year old vinyl records out of the milk crates at Goodwill and play them, albeit with pops and hiss. I can barely get my CDs from this century to play at all. So I just figure if I don’t play (and necessarily degrade) my vinyl until Amazon revokes permission to download all the music I bought and supposedly “own” and my hard drives crash, then I’ll at least have some decent sounding music to listen to while I rebuild my digital library.
Do you think that I’m making those claims completely due to some sort of nostalgia? Before you answer: remember that I’m talking about brand new records, or records that are very close to it, not the buck specials at Goodwill that the record store wouldn’t take (or dumped on them after buying a collection).
Vinyl sounds are compressed? I once had a landlord who claimed that she only listened to music on vinyl because vinyl had a natural sound while CD had incomplete sounds. She claimed she could feel the difference.
I am just thrilled that I can move all my music from place to place in a grocery bag (3 boxes of cds, a hard drive with about 500 more cds stored on it, three thumb drives and my kindle. Count me with those who do not even remotely miss the sorting, stacking, cleaning, storing, care, and sheer SPACE required by vinyl. And I love the fact that I can bring along the music for a 3 day 700 mile trip on a thumb drive in my pocket and not have tapes and cds all over the car.
I stopped buying vinyl around 1990 when I moved out of the parents house and started college. Vinyl and turntable were just too large to pack around when moving apartments and rooms every 9 months, and CDs were far more convenient and sounded better. I continued to buy occasional vinyl-only hard to find stuff until CDs, and later Napster and iTunes, gradually filled in the availability gaps.
I still have maybe 30 or so vinyls that I’ve kept, selling or trading off most of what I had. I’ve kept the truly rare sentimental ones. Like the Twisted Sister picture vinyl, how could I ever give that up? Or the Jethro Tull with the pop-up book figures?
