I have an old Pansonic record player/radio/cassette player that cost me 99 bucks 20 years ago that I use to play my albums on. It has a new needle, everything else on it is 20 years old. When I play unscratched albums on it using headphones, I can hear pretty much all the nuances and background instrumentation that I can with a standard CD player, or at least I think I do.
So my question is, is CD quality really superior to that of the album? Or is it just that CD’s are superior in other ways (portability, size, durability)? Have any actual studies been done on this? And what if you had the best quality CD player made vs. best quality record player- which one would produce superior sound?
CDs win in durability hands down. The record contains a more exact recording of the original sounds, but there’s some serious debate as to whether you can actually hear any difference.
The music on LPs is as good or better than the music on CDs. Overlain on this are pops and hiss from the medium itself, or from damage or wear in the grooves. On CDs, one issue is how they do they analogue to digital conversion, Simply sampling, then rounding off to 16 bits can introduce artifacts in the sound. I think this was an issue when CDs first came out, but not any more. Another issue is that many (most? all?) CDs are over-compressed now, and personally, I’d rather have an LP to make my own digital translation from. Between the two problems, there was a sort of Golden Age of good CDs, roughly in the 1990s.
Once the music is on CD, they are much more durable, and you can make exact copies, so if you have a good CD to start with, every copy and every listen will have the same good sound.
There was a debate about how digital music doesn’t record exactly the sound that analog does…I seem to remember a few musicians who were very passionate about that. Dave Mustaine from Megadeth was obsessed with the idea that the CD wasn’t representing the music the way it should be heard.
This is just my opinion, but I think that vinyl LPs were being made extremely cheaply in the US towards the end. they were thinner, easier to warp and much easier to scratch. The sound may have been okay the first couple of times you played it, but after that the integrity of the sound really deteriorated.
I was a long time hold out for vinyl. I didn’t like cassettes, which broke far too easily, and I actually did think that the sound quailty was a little mechanical from a CD. But I knew just from the poor quality of the vinyl that the US was producing that it was only a matter of time that it would be eliminated and I would have to go with CDs anyway. I wasn’t happy about it.
And then, as a Beatles fan, I heard Strawberry Fields Forever cleaned up on CD. Compared to the old, staticky record I had, it sounded like a completely new song. I mean, all the elements were there, but you could hear so much more. And it followed as I increased my CD collection, there was always at least one or two songs on the Beatles albums that blew me away with how much better it sounded. Dizzy Miss Lizzy, You Can’t do That, and *I’m Down * all come to mind.
Vinyl is better than CD, but the theoretical difference between the two is practically imperceptible to the average listener. The problem with CDs at this point is the digital processing done to the sound. Rather than focusing on faithfully reproducing the recorded sound they basically lop of the extremes and make everything in the middle as loud as possible within the data confines of CDAudio. In the old days you had full range and had to turn up your volume. They’ve cut out the range and turned the volume up for you. It sounds like crap because all the pointy audio bits that get lopped off are converted to bursts of static. Crash of cymbals? static. Snare roll? hiss. All the various, unique, and nuanced percussive sounds? noise.
It’s not obvious what’s been cut out. In many cases the frequencies involved are beyond the limits of what humans can sense. But that thumping white noise is annoying, and even people who honestly cannot identify any difference will grow fatigued at the noise of CDA.
Of course, vinyl pressed today would probably suffer from the same problems and be pressed from the same master audio as the CDs.
Exactly. CDs can be engineered to either reproduce the “warm” distortion of vinyl (if that’s your preference), or reproduce the sound of the instrument precisely (to the best that any human ear can distinguish). The problem is that today’s sound engineering often doesn’t do that, and many “digitally remastered” CDs of old analog recordings are made worse by clipping and boosting the signal because of the “loud = better” myth. It tears my ears out when record producers have all of that gorgeous digital dynamic range to work with, and they flatten it out into bass-thump white noise.
Most of the CDs of the 80s and early 90s, before the compression popularity, have way more dynamic range than vinyl.
When done right, CD kicks vinyl’s butt. I’ll bet my gold-mastered CD of “Dark Side of the Moon” against the newest virgin vinyl of the same any day.
Thanks all- does anyone have any expereince with these 180 gram audiophile LP’s you see on ebay for ungoldy prices- how do they compare to CD’s and regular old LP’s?
I once had a buddy tell me, “all recorded music is distorted. It’s just a matter of what kind of distortion you prefer.”
I love the sound of some of my records. Some sound like shit. I’ve never really A/Bed anything, but I swear it sounds like I’m at a live studio recording session when I put on Pink Floyd’s Animals, and fucking crank it.
But, listening to tunes is more than just the sound quality. The ease of an MP3 is ridiculous, and even played through my stereo, most everything sounds good. All my MP3’s are really WMAs at 192kbps, though. Not CD quality, but very good, IMO.
Clipping? Deliberately? No self-respecting audio engineer would allow clipping on a final mix unless you are going for a deliberate distortion!
And you can’t boost the signal in a digital medium more than the top dynamic level represented by the largest number that can be stored in the bits allocated. Perhaps you meant compressing?
The problem with that is if you compare a highly compressed version with an uncompressed one, the compressed version, missing the peaks and valleys, sounds “uninspired.” While I can understand radio stations adding a small amount of compression to their signal on the theory that the average listener isn’t in a quiet environment, the signal on a typical CD has a very wide dynamic range.
Of course, I’m sure you can find exceptions due to genre differences, etc.
As others have pointed out, many objections to “CD sound” are from the mastering processes.
Scott Silfvast, the founder of Euphonx, (which was famous for their digital controlled analog mixing consules) explained it really well once to me over a bottle of a very nice Merlot, that since you’ve got digitalized reverb, then there really isn’t any way to separate the two worlds. Essentially, everything is getting A/D then D/A converted, even in an analog world.
This was when they had their first System 5 protocol, and I had brought over a Japanese engineer to listen to it. We had quite the discusson on the various merits of the different technologies.
Al Schmitt used to say the problems with these new kids is that no one knows good mic’ing anymore, and the tendency is to fix everyone in the mix. Since Al is known as the God of mics, one can’t really argue with him. He gave a demonstration at King Records here in Tokyo and showed how mic’ing should be done. When he records, he really records.
It’s a long debate, and there are too many factors to really say anything easy. I’ve blind AB’ed my share of processors, both analog and digital, as well as mics, amps mixing consules, etc., and can’t really come down with a simple answer.