So true,and another thing,I loved many if the covers from albums like Tales of the Topograhic ocean,Electric Ladyland,Wheels of fire and so forth,no cd has yet made me go ‘wow,that’s cool.’ Catch my drift.
That is fascinating - thanks. Humans are weird and unreliable as test subjects, aren’t we? Reminds me of all the research dismissing eyewitness accounts - time again, our brains fill in gaps to fill out our perceptions; and after the fact, to fill in our memories as we go over them.
Related to the OP: why does the Society for Creative Anachronism exist? Why do folks (like my son and I) build cheap-ass cigar box guitars when we are in a golden age of guitar making? While some vinyl fans base their arguments on “sounding better” and this thread makes a data-based case for how wrong that it, vinyl is clearly about a music-listening experience that is more than just the technical sound.
Which is fine - if people fetishize the medium or are on a nostalgia trip, I get it, though those reasons have nothing to do with why I listen to music. But (anecdotal, I realize) every single person I know who listens to vinyl won’t cop to that, and instead makes the case for superior sound (and the “warmth” of analog), which just makes them seem like pretentious fools.
Well, I don’t know about pretentious – they are just not up on the details. BTW I learned a lot from some of the engineering-oriented posts here – neat stuff.
I’m not a musician, just a music fan who occasionally helps out my musician friends with setting up basic recordings for their myspace pages or whatever, but I read at least one monthly recording magazine which has some interviews with heavy, respected, studio rats who are responsible for mixing, recording engineering, etc., which often reveal their misuse of “warmth” and stuff like that. Of course, musicians generally have no idea, but they’re all crazy anyway ;).
I like vinyl because I have a hundred or so OOP titles that over the years I spent a bunch of dough (for me) acquiring and lots more used titles that I just picked up because they were a lot cheaper than buying a new or used CD – might as well use them, right?
But I can’t stand fiddling with the cartridge and everything – so long as the stylus and its alignment doesn’t sound terrible, and I can hear the content, it’s good enough for me. Bonus if it doesn’t fuck up the physical record anymore than it should. No discwasher or stuff like that for me.
Because they are people, and are every bit as prone to ridiculous obsessions and fetishism as anyone else. You do NOT want to talk to them about microphones, and if you look at the racks of compressors, you’d think that nobody has made one since 1970.
I moved from audio to video a long time ago (though I still mix audio for my own projects), and the video side is blessedly free of most of the silliness of the audio side. There is nobody using old SD Plumbicon cameras because they are “warmer” than new HD ones, or using 2" Quad video recorders because they believe analog is better than digital.
Awesome. Thanks.
There’s plenty of that in still photography. People still claim film is superior, and come up with various explanations why it is so.
On the art and amateur side, but not one of the pros I know (easily half of the top photographers in Kansas City) shoot film for any purpose other than fun.
I am a fan of vinyl and occasionally spin the records on my turntable. I have purchased over 75 vinyl records, some new…some lightly used, just within the past couple years. However, I still listen to CDs and digital tracks more often due to convenience, cost, availability, and portability.
There is a difference in sound with vinyl, for better or worse. The far majority of albums have unique studio mix(es) & master for vinyl compared to their CD/tape/digital counterparts. The unique character of the vinyl sound shines through best with a great stylus, vacuum tube amp, speakers, cabs, etc. A CD counterpart of the same album on the same vacuum tube driven stereo system sounds great too, but starkly different…some albums sound more starkly different than other depending on the mix. The pleasure of vinyl is mostly lost if the record is not in really great condition, IMO. A clean dust-free, scratch-free record can sound really stellar.
Some music can only be found on vinyl. I have at least a dozen LPs that don’t exist in other formats as far as I know.
There are some limits to vinyl. Turntables are not easily portable. They get damaged easily. There’s a high frequency roll-off. And on the low end, one cannot get a huge bass sound - especially as heard in some rap and funk - to the same degree on vinyl compared to CDs et cetera all else being equal. The needle would bounce around too much and the grooves can’t be shaped to handle some modern recording mixes. Some high end DJ turntables with beefy stylus+arm can handle being in the same room with boomy speakers though.
Got a cite for that?
Perhaps you haven’t heard of the RIAA equalization curve. There is a high-frequency BOOST on the recording, compensated by a cut in the playback. Conversely for the bass. But the sum of both provides a flat response overall.
Aside from the fact that audiophiles prefer the sound quality of LP over CD, the predominant format for transferring and sharing music in some less than mainstream musical genre scenes (i.e. punk rock) is vinyl. No body wants to see a punk band in the basement of some club selling mp3 downloads of their latest single. They want to buy a 7" record or something tangible that they hold in their hands.
Thread’s in need of a kick - can’t have people thinking the fidelity limits of CDs are beyond the resolution of the average person. They were pretty awesome in 1982, but they have noticeable failings and better digital technologies are now available. Here goes then…
A lot of SA-CD enthusiasts would beg to differ: Debunking Meyer and Moran. To be fair to David Moran, he does pitch in to argue his case, and offers up the challenge to come up with a better experiment. But then, in defence of his detractors, the experiment does seem intrinsically flawed, in that most of the source material wasn’t suitable for such a test, and A/B/X testing really doesn’t work well with high-end audio discrimination (more leisurely A/B tests give better results). Anyhoo, it’s a great thread; a 19-page pissing contest that the SDMB can only hope to aspire to. Bottom line: If the Red Book CD standard is the peak of perceptible fidelity, why do CD player manufacturers go to all the bother of trying to squeeze a bit more out with oversampling, dither, 1-bit DACs etc? It can’t all be marketing BS.
I quite agree - quantization noise does it for me. I don’t recognise the pre/post ringing artefacts that are a consequence of CD’s 20 kHz brick wall filter, but that’s just my unschooled ear right there, and if I were suitably enlightened then I’m sure that’d annoy me too. Here’s a neat YouTube short that gives an effective demonstration of Beethoven dropping from 16 bits to 8. It’s particularly noticeable in the quiet sections, even on the lo-fi YouTube. Dropping from 24 bits to 16 (say) isn’t as extreme, but it’s not beyond the discrimination of the average human ear.
That’s really neat, what an excellent thing to have done! I can believe that worked well for rock & pop drum samples, and a lot of digital music effects are quite adequate at 8-bit (I designed a digital sampler effects rack for a college project back in '89, and 8 bits was fairly OK for electric guitar, though violins sounded a bit rough. Also, I remember having to scrabble for RAM during a worldwide shortage at the time). Here’s another YouTube short that, ironically, the poster put up as a demonstration of quantization noise (though starting at 24 bits is massive overkill, given the presentation medium). You won’t miss much by skipping the intro, but it’s interesting how the chosen drum fill passage sounds OK at 8 bits, and quite astounding that it doesn’t sound that bad at 5 bits.
Respect due, Musicat, you’re a part of popular music history right there. I wonder how many millions of people have listened to the sounds you played a big part in creating?
For the record (ouch…), I’ll quite happily listen to CDs, I have lots of vinyl but rarely listen to it these days and don’t buy much new any more, and I don’t have a SA-CD player. I’d agree with with majority view that there’s an emotive and nostalgic quality to vinyl that is the reason that most vinyl aficionados prefer it to CD. But some will put up with the crackles and hiss because they find it less objectionable than CD’s artefacts, and they’re not just the golden-eared brigade - anyone with normal hearing is capable of picking up the flaws in the CD standard, particularly if some bastard helpfully points them out…
Yes, it was a fun time and one of the highlights of my life to have worked with Keith Barr, who was also responsible for the original ADAT 8 track digital recorder, using SVHS tape at a non-standard speed.
I recall discussions with Keith about storage mediums, prior to the ADAT. He planned to have consumers put sounds on floppies. I argued that he should stick to the standards already in place for FAT storage so the floppies could be read on other computers. He disagreed, and pointed out he could design a better interface and storage specs and it would work faster at the expense of compatability. This is one of the few things that I think I was right about, but it was typical of Keith to tinker with standard parts, like an OEM, off-the shelf VHS mechanism, then announce that he could build one that would be much better and, in quantity, cheaper. In the case of the ADAT, he was right. The first one he built had a custom head and transport and cost over $50,000 per sample.
The drum data storage algorithm I outlined had one thing going for it that meant it wasn’t practical for non-percussive sounds. Almost every sound we inserted in the drum machine started out loud and diminished. Just for kicks, I applied the same algorithm to a short sample of the Nylons A Cappella group, and inbetween the “Doots”, the noise level jumped up something fierce. It was a very specialized compression formula, indeed.
I think I may still have the original drum machine samples in my basement, stored as raw 16-bit data on 5" floppies. Someday I should see if I can read them and make them into WAV files. All of the samples were done in a professional studio on Magnolia Blvd in Burbank, digitized in a board tacked onto the back of a portable Compaq, and stored with a Turbo Pascal routine I wrote that interfaced with an assembly language program written by another developer.
I have a wonderful collection of vinyl (and shellac) records that I’ve collected since I was a kid, including LPs singles, and 78 rpms. It’s moved wit h me everywhere, but sadly at the moment due to lack of space is sat in a storage unit. 
I recall visiting Jimi’s grave at the Renton cemetery 10 years from the day he died and i met a few fellow Hendrix fans there and this guy asked me if i wanted to have a look at his record collection and a few smokes with his mates,thankfully,he didnt live that far from the graveside as i was heading to L.A. that afternoon.
Anyway,to cut a long story short,i had never seen such a large collection of material by JH in all my life.
There was literally 100 copies of every album and single Jimi produced and that’s not counting bootlegs either,it was awesome.
I have a good friend who DJs in the San Fran area who said that there is a vinyl revolution going on, such that DJs who use iPod/mp3 technology are being excluded… 2nd hand info to this discussion, but I was with him when he bought a ton of LPs at an old music store for the specific purpose of using while DJ-ing
“CDS will eventually fail”
Notwithstanding decades old usable CDs, is anyone claiming they have never had a CD fail? (By failure I mean lose any portion of recorded data or correct operation).
100-200 years? The Library of Congress certainly disagrees. In the intro to the report linked to below, they note in passing a life span of “several years or even decades”. Certainly while indicating CDs can last several decades (a point I never denied) it also indicates that CDs can fail within several years.
http://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rt/CDservicelife_rev.pdf
I just listened to some old 33-1/3 albums, on a decent system. Man, did those recordings sound terrible (scratches, pops, etc.) also, that “hissing” noise-I’d forgotten that. Hard to believe that this was state of the art, just about 35 years ago!
I read through it, and it was mostly nonsense. Before I opened it, I was sure that the majority of the posts would be complaints about the selection of music samples. Also, the listener could chose when to switch, so they could listen to half the song then hit the switch to hear the other half (which may or may not switch.)
But they still work. I have several LPs from the early to mid '50s that range from very good to poor. Despite any residual noise, they’re all playable. On the other hand, I’ve had about 12 pre-recorded CDs from the early 90s fail on me.
I’m not a vinyl fanatic. I had a few thousand and threw most in the trash last time I moved. Nearly all were available on CD (and therefore mp3 as well), the rest just sucked and I didn’t want to listen to them. I like the 12" album covers but detest the record cleaning, tonearm exercises, balancing the turntable and isolating it from vibrations. I have no preferences as to which sounds better initially, but know that LPs will accrue more surface noise while the CD will remain pristine longer.
In my experience, people are generally enthralled with music from age 15 to 30 and only rarely buy new music or listen to their old stash of music. Radio or iPod binges work for them. This fifteen year length of time works well for CDs, and they can replace the two or three favorites when needed. Probably with a greatest hits collection.
For a long term music collector, CDs are problematic. You can nurture vinyl and get an original album it to last sixty or seventy years. A CD will very likely go bad and may not be replaceable.
The smart money is on digital music. An original file will remain noise-free and sonically accurate for a lifetime. The problem is keeping it around for an entire lifetime. All of the current data storage methods will go bad eventually, and each time you back up that data there is the possibility of corrupting it. Verification schemes work well but are not infallible. Corporations keep multiple backups of critical data so that they can effect any necessary repairs.