There are people who insist on vinyl records, claiming that any digital medium destroys the sound in ways they’re capable of noticing. There are people who insist on vacuum tube amplifiers, claiming that no other technology (presumably including even analog transistor amplifiers) can reproduce the specific tone tubes produce. As a result, there are companies pressing vinyl and making tubes to this day.
However, I’ve never heard of audiophiles insisting on wax cylinders, the technology that preceded vinyl records. I’ve similarly never heard of them insisting on any magnetic tape medium, either cassette or eight-track, though both of them were and are fully analog. Why the lapse? I’m certain that if demand were there the supply would follow, so where is the demand?
(Side question: How long until some audiophiles insist on optical disc media, shunning even losslessly-encoded downloadable music?)
IANAAudiophile, but I am a guitarist who uses tube amplifiers who spends a lot of time dwelling on sound quality.
Vinyl is generally considered the best medium for analog music - wax cylinders were made of cruder material and the tighter diameter of the cylinder most likely introduces more signal variation vs. an LP record (just a WAG on my part). Tapes were designed to be small, convenient and easy to copy more than they were expected to sound better than vinyl - their sound fidelity got better over time, but it was their other features that made them appealing vs. LP’s back in the day. So it is not suprising that analog heads stay focused on the LP / vinyl as their preferred media…
Bottom line is that analog music sounds different vs. digital, even with high digital sampling rates. It is in part due to what digital misses - i.e., sampling missing things that a continuous signal picks up - and in part what analog recording adds - while vinyl less hiss and other things that make it sound better vs. tape and wax, it does impart a bit of compression and warmth (increased mids) and cuts the highs a bit. But the different is noticeable if you geek out about stuff like that - and audiophiles do, so they hold onto vinyl…
Does this help? And as for tubes, well, I can speak to that mostly as a guitarist and tube amps sound MUCH better than digital, but for reasons that are quite different than why an audiophile might like tubes for their sound system…not sure if you want to go there…
I will try to check with my buddy the record producer - you’d think it would be that easy, but he has commented in the past how it is not. He has even pointed out how some digital recordings include replicated tape hiss not just to sound retro and “cool” but because it masks some of the ice-pickiness you get from digital. I’ll try to ask him…
This isn’t an audiophile reason, but in some punk-rock circles, cassettes are (or at least were at one point) preferred over burned CDs or MP3 collections for making mixes for others. Cassettes are seen as a labor of love: making a mix tape involves actually sitting there and listening to the music as you copy it, and juggling music-types and song-times simultaneously (you have to pack each side of the tape to avoid dead space at the end, while also needing to avoid songs which don’t work back-to-back), rather than just pasting a list of tracks into a burner and pushing a button.
I know several audiophiles who only listen to an old reel-to-reel tape machine because the think its the best, and therefore have no music after 1980 or so.
That’s blue collar craftsmanship, I guess. Kinda like counting the letters and spaces in every line before you type on a manual typewriter, so it comes out right justified.
Cassettes are also pure analog, relatively lo-fi, and fragile. Play one on an f’d up old deck and it will snarl and snap and make deathlike clicking noises. A punk epiphany.
I am not punk, but I often have to do even my CD and mp3 mixes in real time, because the source material is Lps and 78s. Horrors!
I personally feel the best quality sound for “my” era of music (electrically recorded 78s) comes from “parts” - the metal masters that were made from “waxes” cut at the session. Parts often were destroyed after several years - record companies are notoriously businesslike about their archives. But when they’re available, they sound incredible.
Oops, I went a little astray there. The part is actually a “negative” used to stamp vinyl for production - better known as a stamper. The “positive” metal master is called a mother.
Can you see why they were so anxious to get rid of analog discs?
This is orthogonal to the “sound quality” issue; it’s a question of media archiving and availability of the music. For example, if an artist wants to make an extremely limited release (I have several discs that were supposedly released in runs of 100 or even 50 discs), it’s simply going to be easier for them to physically burn the discs themselves and sell them on tour than to upload the tracks and develop an appropriate system to limit access.
Pure anecdote - but I was once trapped into three hours of one-sided conversation by a Thomas Edison disciple who insisted that cylinders were vastly better than vinyl records.
[hijack]As a writer, editor, and publisher, I’m here to tell you that this is not craftsmanship: it’s destructive insanity. If you want to force yourself to read the output, you can do so. If you submit it for me to work on, I’ll bounce it without reading a word. Final product gets justified. Manuscripts never do.[/hijack]
This may be a good thread to raise an issue that has baffled me for the last decade or more.
Having grown up with rock and made the transition from transistor radios* to cheap stereos to audiophile equipment, I’ve heard the incredible differences in sound quality that good equipment makes. I don’t except the transition from vinyl to CDs, better mixing techniques, and the higher quality transmission of music over the radio. I can hear lyrics and backing instruments now that I never heard when I was younger, and it sure isn’t because my hearing has gotten better.
Then the net came along and all the increase in quality stopped. Good enough became the standard. Listening through ear buds is the norm. Most stereo stores have gone out of business.
I can’t think of another industry where poorly quality products have driven higher quality ones out of the popular market.
So what happened?
My first was actually a crystal radio set with no speaker, only an earphone. It only got one station to come in, but that was the Top 40 station and in 1964 nothing else mattered.
I defy you to find a landline phone with decent design and build quality.
CRTs are still better as computer monitors than LCDs, but you can’t get a good one any more.
Ikea furniture.
McDonalds et al.
Supermarket produce.
(Bear in mind, I’m just as horrified as you are at the general degradation in consumers’ standards regarding audio quality, but it’s not a unique case.)
Exapno Mapcase does have a point. For the other examples of lowered expectations (disposable phones and other shoddy consumer electronics, fast food, Ikea furniture, etc.), there is a trade off yielding a benefit that users of those products find reasonable: cost (you can buy a shoddy landline phone for $5, so being flimsy really is not a problem), size (a 5 pound LCD panel versus a 75 pount CRT), or convenience (McDonald’s is ready in 30 seconds and you don’t have to leave your car).
MP3s made sense when most folks used dial-up and file storage came at a premium; the trade-off in quality for portability made sense, and for P2P users, the trade-off also resulted in free music. However, now broadband is cheap, and file storage is insanely huge and cheap (and lossless torrents abound), yet people are still using MP3s designed for early 1990s tech, and many are now paying as much song-for-song for those MP3s as they would for the same songs in lossless forms. I doubt many people would expect to see home video give up on HD in favor of .flv or even .rm filles, but the equivalent is happening in audio.
I’ve long had the sense that Beta was considered to be a superior technology to VHS, and that “what happened” was that Sony, in attempting maximize the available profit from the use of its technology, made ill-advised business decisions that resulted in VHS driving it out of the market.
And didn’t something similar happen with the LaserDisc?
And I know that Apple computer products aren’t exactly going away any time soon, but MicroSoft can generally be expected to eat their lunch, in the long term.
Still, as you note in your MP3 comments, the lower standards can go overboard–for example regarding the “supermarket produce” item, I’ve seen people in a local supermarket buying produce when directly across the street there was a farmer’s market selling better stuff for less money.
I know, and it’s baffling to me. Even the people who master vinyl acknowledge the limitations of the format and that the master tape for a vinyl project has to be mixed differently than one for a CD. The bass has to be mixed to mono because the track can’t be cut otherwise. The dynamic range of an LP is a fraction of the range of a CD, so you have to compress more - and it’s a constant battle between range and length, as wider grooves means fewer grooves on a side.
People can babble all they like about how vinyl sounds “warmer” or use some other subjective, non-measurable term, but the plain truth is that vinyl does not sound more like the original master tape, but less.
Tubes are a different issue. The limitations that make tubes a poor sound reproduction system work when used as part of a sound production system, like in a guitar amp.
*“I don’t think, in general, that recent technology has improved sound,” he states. “In fact, if you listen to a well-tuned Edison 78 player with an emerald needle, it’s cleaner, louder and fuller range than anything we have today. To me, it was as good as sound reproduction has gotten. Digital may eventually get there, but it’s got a long way to go.”
*
Yes, he’s gone completely round the bend.
I have a friend with an Edison wax cylinder recorder and a collection of blank cylinders. We’ve recorded music onto them for a project, and yes - it was every bit as poor as one might imagine.
That would be silly. Even the best optical media has to do error correction to “mask” errors in reproduction. A lossless digital file is the original file.