I posted before I realized you did, so I wasn’t addressing you personally. However, it sounds like you’re not making the claim that vinyl always sounds better on principle. Are you?
I’m not sure why people think vinyl sounds better, and it’s probably a mixture of reasons. Nostalgia might be part of it for some people. For me, when I was younger, I thought the fact that CDs were digital meant they were necessarily distorted compared to their analog counterparts. How can a sampled signal have as much information as the “original” analog? And I could have sworn I could tell the difference, too. But that was before I went to college and learned about Nyquist’s theorem. And part of it certainly has to do with the fact that early CDs were mastered for vinyl, and didn’t sound good when transferred to CD. Nowadays, we’re in the midst of the loudness war, and old recordings have more dynamic range in comparison to heavily compressed modern pop CDs.
So there are a lot of reasons people might prefer the sound of old vinyl to newer CD recordings. And some of those reasons were, or continue to be, valid. But as far as basic signal processing principles go, CDs are better, objectively.
I’m on a plane, waiting to take off, and posting from my iPhone, so I can’t answer this definitively, but I will say that vinyl can reproduce micron-sized features.
Perhaps the “warm” sound of vinyl is just the blurring of the sound, due to the failure to reproduce the source perfectly? (This works with photos: add just a hint of blur to a photograph, and it seems “richer.”)
Couldn’t someone devise a digital filter that does the same blurring? “New Vinyl Sound!”
Micron-scale? I really hate to doubt what anyone says here, but… A thousandth of a millimeter?
Okay…vinyl can do this. But what scale does vinyl actually and functionally reproduce? If I laser-scanned two copies of an LP, pressed from the same master, at the micron scale, would they match significantly at that scale, or just match here and there, in certain spots, at that scale?
I’m just the opposite. I prefer CDs for my classical music (and a LOT of stuff I listen to is only available on CD) but I’m beginning to prefer vinyl for my rock and roll. I admit, there is probably a lot of the nostalgia factor that weighs my listening decisions.
Oh, I see what you’re saying now. It’s perfectly valid to prefer analog over digital in the recording studio or live. Hell, the entire vacuum tube industry is being kept alive by the guitar amplifier market, as far as I can tell.
But, I would say, once the record is finished, people would prefer that only the most faithful reproductions are sold. At least, that’s the way I feel. Plenty of people use analog equipment in the recording studio. Ryan Adams and Jack White are known for using nothing but analog equipment while recording, in order to obtain a particular sound. But once they’ve got it the way they want it to sound, I want to hear it as close to the original as possible. I’d rather not introduce more distortion than necessary after the record is already recorded. If you feel differently, then I’m glad there is still analog and tube-based home audio equipment you can use.
You know, there are people out there adding fake record noise back into their music.
I agree. You can stick knitting needles into you amp to get the sound you want in the studio, but once it’s done, I want to hear it that way, not with additional distortion.
One thing I’ve noticed on some older 60s recordings, is that the master itself is of poor quality, and the CD version can reveal that. Some Simon and Garfunkel records really have a low dynamic range right out of the box. Some of the Dave Clark Five songs are overmodulated, and they have noticeable clipping distortion. I don’t think these were intended, like the Kink’s were.
I’m old enough, I should stop being astonished at what people do.
(It’s funny to see comic books with fake dog-ear-corners on the pages, and fake faded spots, fake four-color dots, even places where a page has cracked and been repaired with fake Scotch Tape.)
(Another funny one is movies with vertical scratch/streaks, like 1940’s silent newsreels.)
(Also funny when you watch WWII silent newsreels…and The History Channel adds sound effects to them.)
Depressing! Someone upthread noted that the first time you play an LP, it sounds best. After that, there’s degradation with every playing.
Well, distortion is kind of like blurring the sound. Vinyl distorts in a way that I often find pleasing. Most records you buy these days have a digital download as well, and you can usually get uncompressed files from it. Sometimes (like Dan Deacon’s Spiderman of the Rings), I like the digital file better, other times (e.g. The Alabama Shakes’ Boys and Girls), I’d rather hear the record.
And someone could devise a digital filter that gets you close to the distortion curve of a record, but that seems like a lot of work for a very weird goal. I think it’d have to be tunable to really do it properly.
Well, as I described earlier, almost no two stereos sound the same. Even before someone has jacked with the EQ; the differences in equipment, how the speakers are placed, even the shape of the room and what’s covering the floor and walls affects the sound heavily. When you make your final mix, you try to take all those stereos you listened to it on into account and accommodate them. Since this is the case: the speakers we actually did the mixing on had a flat response, but they didn’t sound very good in comparison to some of the home stereos we used to test mixes.
So, no matter what you do, it almost certainly sounds different at home than it did at the mixing console. In all likelihood, it sounds better. Provided everyone twiddling a knob did their job - whether you choose to listen on vinyl or digital delivery systems isn’t transferring you appreciably further from the studio than a million other factors already have.
The first records that I bought were vinyls (well, technically my parents bought them for me). That was in 1982, I guess. By the mid 80s, I had a decent collection of 45s - at least for a 10 year old kid. I moved on to 33s around 1988 but I also had cassettes.
I stopped buying vinyls in early 1991 and I’m not planning to go back to that medium. As a matter of fact, I’ve been slightly annoyed by offers for brand new vinyls on Amazon. It’s a bit misleading after two decades where they were a niche product, almost completely unavailable in most record shops. I have to double check before placing an order now.
Can someone explain why no one has come out with a reasonably priced laser based LP player? I remember hearing about them years ago and I guess the advent of CDs kicked the legs out from under it but by the same token CD players must have driven down the cost of laser reading technology. Why can’t we buy a USB turntable where I insert the record like a CD and have a laser read it without degrading it?
Well, nobody really wants them. The wear that you get from playing a record with a normal, non moon-rock needle isn’t really anything to be concerned about until you get into the hundreds of plays. Add the fact that it can’t play anything but black records, and queuing a song has to be just as frustrating as a linear tracking turntable, then who needs it?
Hmm. Do these machines play a record that has flaws? Very deep flaws, like scratches, skips etc?
That would be cool for anyone with a vinyl collection that has sentimental value. Not to mention archivists, amateur historians, or bargain bin hunters, or anyone really. It would open a whole world.
I bought vinyl until 1987 or so when I bought a home CD player and then started buying just CD’s. I also had some 8-track tapes in the 70’s, then some cassette tapes in the 80’s for the car. In the 90’s, after having cleared out my vinyl, I started buying small amounts of vinyl. In the 2000’s, a local bookstore had an excellent selection of vinyl for cheap prices, mostly under $5, but went out of business by the time I had extra money to spend on it. I’m now considering getting rid of the 50 or so records that I do have to downsize my belongings.