You’re saying two very different things. There are things the audio engineer can control and things they can’t. Compression is not one of them. The quality of the sound capture, applied effects, filters and the levels of the channels can have a huge effect on the listening experience. But it’s simply false to imply that compression issues are the result of a incompetent engineer, that is downstream of what they touch.
I think there’s a whole bunch of reasons. Nostalgia among baby boomers is certainly a factor, and interest and curiosity among the younger generation is another. Without getting into tedious arguments about whether CD or vinyl is “better”, there are the indisputable facts that (a) they are definitely different, for a whole bunch of reasons ranging from different mastering/equalization to inherent deficiencies of the CD format (and entirely different deficiencies in the vinyl format), and (b) the fact that the vinyl format is, in fact, pretty damn good.
Vinyl is like internal combustion engines: based on ancient technology, but so incredibly well refined and engineered over a great many years of human ingenuity that its performance is remarkable. A CD player is pretty much a cheap commodity item, its main components being a laser beam and a commodity decoder chip. Whereas a good turntable is kind of a cross between an electromechanical engineering marvel and a work of art. My younger-millennial son is fascinated that this electromechanical gadget with its genesis basically going back to Edison can produce such fantastic sound.
And yes, while I don’t want to get into the tedious arguments about “better”, they are different for the various reasons I mentioned and there are indeed cases where the vinyl really does sound better than the CD. Plus, from a purely aesthetic point of view, the album covers and liners and the physical workings of the turntable are in many ways a nostalgic and aesthetic delight.
I think this analogy is totally backwards. I agree with the message of course, but I think you chose a bad comparison. ICE cars are a very good comparison to digital technology what with their gears, transmission losses and piston cycles. The issues with ICE cars are comparable to the issues with digital audio. EVs however are entirely analog in their power delivery. The electric motors, without any gears, deliver continuous power along a smooth curve.
Nope. Vinyl has a maximum dynamic range of about 70 db. CD’s are more like 90 db, which is about ten times higher.
Paradoxicalky, it’s this higher dynamic range that started the problem with CDs. When albums were remastered for CD, the average volume level was lower than the albums because the quiet passages were quieter. People perceive loudness as higher quality, and also CDs were used a lot in cars, where high dynamic range means you can’t hear the quiet parts over the background noise.
So… audio engineers started over-compressing remastered vinyl for CD. This kicked off the ‘loudness wars’, where songs became ever-more compressed to make them stand out over other songs at the same volume level when listening casually.
CDs also came along at the same time as the rise of digital effects and editing, which were used liberally. This changed the sound of newer music. Also, there were simply a lot of bad remasters in the early days of CD.
None of this means CDs are worse than vinyl. They aren’t. A properly mastered, full dynamic range CD will kick vinyl’s ass. There’s not a single specification I can think of where vinyl is superior.
I read an article approaching the end of 2020 that a reason for the uptake is because the pandemic has made people want to wind back. Older people who have a nostalgia for their younger years but also younger people who have grown up with all this flashy instant technology at their fingertips now wanting to spend less time on phones and internet.
You’re overthinking my analogy. Forget about analog and digital for purposes of this comparison. I’m saying that ICE engines and vinyl share the common trait that both are at their core very old technologies, and accordingly, ICE engines should be as unreliable as a 1909 Model T and vinyl records should sound like your great-grandfather’s wind-up Victrola, yet both technologies have been superbly refined to an almost miraculous extent.
Vinyl : horse :: CD : ICE
Ringo Starr was on Jimmy Kimmel and he said that his most recent EP sold better in cassette than vinyl. Has vinyl lost its hipness?
Since I’m old enough to have spent decades without an alternative, all I can do is wonder about the vinyl trend. I’ve heard wonderful sound from vinyl on audiophile equipment, but who has that? Real world vinyl is a set of flaws begging to be replaced.
Oh dear, we’re getting into that tedious argument I wanted to avoid. But let me make one thrust and parry and then run away. I can think of one specification where vinyl is superior: that in some cases it subjectively sounds better. This can be due to many factors, some of which were touched on upthread, by you, me, and others. It need not be a war. I have a turntable and a small vinyl collection, tons of CDs, and digital music files whose number greatly exceed both of the others put together. I enjoy all of them.
“Compressed” really isn’t the right word to use here. “Compressed” in this context refers to the use of data compression algorithms to decrease file size and required bandwidth. The .cda format of audio CD’s utilizes no data compression. There is actually a 16-bit value for every 1/44100s of the track encoded in full on a CD.
What you appear to mean is that there is no digital audio format that can perfectly describe an analog waveform. This is true. Regardless of how high frequency a sampling rate you adopt, or how many bits of resolution you use, analog waves can (will) take paths that fall between the points that are available to be described in the digital format. The sampling error introduced by this finite resolution available in digital formats is not compression, though.
For analogy, consider two different digital artifacts we find in graphics. If you’ve got a hard, high contrast edge in a photograph, you might have issues with aliasing when that edge runs diagonal relative to the pixel orientation. This is a sampling limitation due to lack of resolution. It has nothing to do with compression. However, you might simultaneously have another issue with that same edge in the same image if you’ve used a heavy jpg compression where you get a halo effect around the edge as an artifact of jpg’s data compression algorithm. That is compression.
Uncompressed audio formats, like .wav or .cda, and lossless compressed formats like .flac have zero compression artifacts, but will exhibit the limitations of 44.1kHz 16-bit sampling (assuming they’re in that most common of digital formats) in the somewhat rare instances where the resolution limitations of that format are audible to human hearing.
I own exactly two or maybe three vinyls (Liz Phair “Exile in Guyville,” Sleater-Kinney “Call the Doctor”, and the maybe is a possibly lost 45 by a friend of mine.) I have played them exactly 0 times, as I do not own a phonograph. I bought them because, well, they’re cool, tangible works of art. I love LP sleeves and the cover art, and the tangibility of the medium. By the time I started listening and buying music, it was all cassette tapes and CDs for me, but nothing could beat LPs for the experience of the medium and packaging itself. Combine that with ritual and nostalgia (both mentioned above), what more reason do you need to enjoy vinyl?
Pah-leeze. There is nothing “cool” about vinyl records. Real purists only listen to music in Quad 8 format where it seems like the music is a poltergeist that is invisibly flitting about their room ready to strike. If you can back up and listen to a track again without having to cycle through the entire album you just can’t get the experience that Bill Lear and RCA intended.
Vinyl records, pshaw!
Stranger
The word “compression” is used in two different contexts: dynamic range compression and data compression. Both are correct, but it can cause confusion. It should be noted that analog recordings have dynamic range compression, but different than the ones used for digital recordings.
To be fair, that is as much the pharmacological effects of the speedball than the quality of the hi-fi system.
Are older people really into vinyl? I was under the impression that it was primarily young hipsters. I’m in my 60s, my record collection is long gone, and I don’t miss it one bit. Having my entire music collection inside my phone is, to me, miraculous. I don’t feel a shred of nostalgia for the rituals that surrounded playing LPs—handling them by the edges, cleaning them, lugging heavy boxes of records every time I moved. All that stuff was a pain in the ass.
I could see older folks wanting to play their beat-up copies of Sgt. Pepper or Tapesty while they look at their high school yearbook. But from my observation, the current resurgence of vinyl seems mainly driven by younger people. My daughter is 32 and lives in Chicago, and her excruciatingly hip neighborhood has two record stores (along with the usual coffee shops and juice bars). I visited both of those places out of curiosity, and I was the oldest person in them by a wide margin.
Oh, I don’t doubt that. The question is why it sounds better. For example, some theorize that humans tolerate analog distortion much more than digital distortion.
But frankly, when it comes to sound quality the factors that matter most are things like speakers/headphones, room acoustics, where you are sitting, background noise in the room, your own ear’s frequency response, etc. And of course that vinyl is mastered differently and you just might prefer that.
Are you talking about a situation where you don’t have good input and output filtering? The Nyquist theorem says that 2X oversampling can perfectly capture an analog waveform of a given frequency. Of course, a complex wave can be made up of fundamental frequencies much higher, but that’s what the filtering is supposed to eliminate.
ABX tests have shown that people can’t actually differentiate between uncompressed digital audio and vinyl. I don’t even think most people can identify an MP3 vs uncompressed unless it’s less than 256 kb/s.
Color me skeptical. Hipsters have been fetishizing vinyl for a long time before COVID. Consumerism saw an uptick during lockdown across the board, I don’t think there’s any COVID induced nostalgia. This sounds more to me like a political agenda disguised as pop science.
I followed what you were saying, but it just struck me that ICE vs. EV really worked for the digital vs. analog comp. Also, electric motors predate ICE by quite a bit, and those designs have changed far less over the last century and kick ICE’s ass for reliability by a wide, wide margin.
While there are indeed some people who insist vinyl sounds better, I don’t think that has much to do with the current craze. You get the record or cassette to have a physical form of this otherwise ephemeral object. Sure, you could get a CD, but there’s something nice about the physical object being analog. Then, of course you have the nostalgia and fascination with technology before your time, whichever is relevant.
As for compression: there are two types. There’s the kind used for digital works. These are not relevant for CDs as they use uncompressed digital audio. The one that is relevant is dynamic compression, which is about reducing the dynamic range of a recording.
As for whether you can hear the difference between analog and digital audio? Both the theory and A/B testing suggests this is impossible. Sure, analog recording will introduce errors due to the media. But if you played back a digital copy with those errors (track noise and so on), it should sound the same at even CD audio quality. The only loss of information should be frequencies above what humans can hear and variations in volume that we can’t distinguish.
Add digital compression to the mix, however, and that changes.
I don’t think @Omniscient was referring to dynamic range compression, because he described it as “It’s literally impossible to create a digital recording, even with WAV, that’s not going to lose a infinitesimal amount of information.”
It’s of course not impossible to create a digital recording with zero dynamic range compression, so long as the audio you’re recording doesn’t have more dynamic range than your format. For a trivial example, a recording of a constant volume 1k sine wave is going to have zero dynamic range, and hence zero dynamic range compression.
This is really it. However, let’s acknowledge that the ‘craze’ is a tiny fraction of total music revenues.
Again I have to agree. CDs are “perfect sound forever” except if you break/lose/scratch the disc, you can only listen to the one disc at a time, unless you want to shell out for a big disc changing system, and it’s hard to take your collection with you to the beach, or in the car. Streaming is “perfect sound forever” but without any of those downsides.
Vinyl is beating out CDs because there’s no nostalgia to the CD, no tactile feel, no scratch of the needle, no cover art. For all the ‘vinyl is worse’ talk, vinyl actually still sounds good, it’s not ‘perfect’ but it’s good, very listenable. I bought a turntable last year, and my son loves looking at albums and buying things he likes, it’s a different experience than pulling up a spotify playlist.