We played U-2’s Achtung Baby album during our wedding reception almost 11 years ago – on an 8-track player. No, I’m kidding! It was an album. Eh, wait - what was the media in between vinyl and CD’s - those little cassette tapes? Anyone?
Damn good music, I say.
Actually Monkey, it wasn’t unintentional.
Be that as it may:
I’m not in my early 20’s.
I like vinyl.
A fact based opinion is not logically inconsistant.
There was a thread here somewhere (Cafe Society?) not too long ago about music quality and CD vs vinyl.
IIRC, the Musical Illuminati of that froum decided that vinyl was the best, most accurate way to reproduce the original sound. Me myself, I wouldn’t know. I’ve got lots of vinyl records, but after many repeated playings, a definite “hiss” develops in the background. CD’s suit my ear well enough, but Alice may be correct. Just sayin’.
Now I’m going to spend the next week reading 3595 posts…
Re: the vinyl-versus-CD argument…
It depends on the criteria you bring to the table. If we’re talking about accurate reproduction of a wider range in frequency response, there’s no doubt it’s vinyl. The curse of CD being a digitally-based format is that a limit has to be built into it to make it useable. CDs have a flat response of 20 to 20,000 hertz, which is the commonly accepted standard as the outer limits of human hearing. In the CD format as originally designed, that’s how it is.
Vinyl, on the other hand, can generally be inscribed with a range of 10 to 35,000 hertz. Granted, most of it is inaudible, but the frequencies that ARE inscribable help reinforce the ones that can be heard. The extra hertz at the top end are perceivable as more “air” around the instruments, and at the low end as bass that can be felt as well as heard. Theoretically, vinyl isn’t as limited in terms of the frequencies reproduced…the format could go higher and lower, and may have; there’s no 20,000 hertz top-end limit.
The key difference is that CD can reproduce sounds which have a larger dynamic range, meaning a broader palette of loud and soft, which makes it a good format for a lot of classical music. We’re talking about 92 dB of dynamic range on CD, versus an upper-limit range on vinyl of something like 55 to 60 dB.
In terms of sonic value, it’s a draw. Depends on what you want. A format like SACD has gone a long way toward bridging the gap, but unless you’re talking about lots of money spent on digital processing and research, CDs have a long way to go before they really catch up to vinyl in terms of frequency reproduction.
For cites, I’d recommend almost any random issue of The Absolute Sound, or researching the Stereophile archives. Most of the best writing I’ve seen on this appeared in a lot of issues of Stereo Review in the mid-80s (any of their articles about analog versus digital). Anything you can read about the mastering engineer Bob Ludwig from that era is pretty informative, too…he’s obviously thought about this a lot.
I would just like to say that Achtung baby is the worst album title of all time.
Carry on.
Until you bump yor $5000 MC turntable and your record starts going click and pop. Vinyl has the durability of wet tissue paper.
Maybe, but for any true audiophile wet tissue paper will always be the medium of choice.
Vinyl is not durable or convenient, nor does it lend itself to cheap high quality sound reproduction. However, when done RIGHT, it sounds wonderful, and can have qualities that CD doesn’t.
An analogy would be food, prepackaged vs. from scratch. The prepackaged food will be good quality every time, convenient to use, durable to store, superior in every way except the upper limit of quality goes to homemade. The act of packaging the product brings the quality down, this is the case with CD. CDs are limited by the sample and bit rates, Vinyl is not. As we know from .mp3 usage, sample and bit rates are very important to the quality of the sound. From what divine source do we know that 44.1kHz / 16bit is ‘perfect’ and cannot / need not be improved upon?
Here’s an interesting article on why higher sample rates might be superior to 44.1kHz.
That doesn’t jibe with anything I know. Got a cite?
I just got to say this is the most bizarre hijack/argument I have ever seen on this board.
Ever.
I mean, seriously, do some of you own stock in CD manufactures? What the hell is the deal? Do you just take umbrage to the fact that somebody stated their opinion as fact? Because if that’s the case, there are much, much worse offenders than alice ever will be.
That’s great. Is there anything on that webpage to support your assertion, or am I expected to wade through it and fine something myself?
Anyway, whether sound is continuous or not (and for the purposes of sampling methods, it is), digital recordings aren’t as close as analog ones. That’s simply the nature of sampling.
The article states that the 44.1KHz sample rate is adequate for adult human hearing. (In fact, my own hearing only goes up to about 17,500 which means 35KHz is adequate for me.) However I find it hard to believe their claim that a 15 µs delay is audible. I’d like to see them cite an article in a scientific journal on that one.
As for the 16 bit part, it has been my experience that a sound 1/65,536 of maximum volume is quite inaudible. I presume that is the basis for the CD’s wide dynamic range. However I am willing to concede that as with the sample rate, there may be other effects to take into consideration.
Yes, yes it is a hijack and if it’s because I posted the question then maybe that makes it my fault. My apologies to the OP.
No I do not own stock in CD manufacturers and I’m not opposed to people stating their opinion. I’m trying to fight my own ignorance, specifically, why some people are of the opinion that vinyl is better than CD. Because there’s got to be a good reason why they believe that, and if they tell me what it is, I might actually agree with them.
No, ultrafilter, I was jusht being an ass. Sorry.
I was referring to the wave nature of sound. Any sound is defined by how often it is not continuous, and how thoroughly non-continuous it is.
Ha ha ha - you’re quite amusing you know! Quite the comedian. Excellent!
Indeed, CDs do have a ruler-flat response; however, they are quite capable of representing DC. So, the response is actually ~0 - 20KHz. Well, in actuality the upper range is 22.05KHz. But who’s for splitting hairs?
Cite? I doubt you will, somehow, given that the frequency range generally available with vinyl is something like 40-15KHz. Standard recording only, ta - no trickery, no specially slowed-down transcriptions, no records pressed on unobtainium.
Got any evidence that frequencies outside the audible range can influence perceived sound? I’m not holding my breath on this one. Not holding my ears, either.
Yes, very low bass is nice to have. Of course, you’ll lose this with vinyl. Ah well.
You could think of some vinyl-like medium which could reliably reproduce a wider range of frequencies, with a greater dynamic range. But it ain’t vinyl.
Well, you are basically correct here, although no CD recordings approach 92dB of dynamic range in reality.
In terms of sonic value, vinyl is dead as a HiFi medium. However, people may well prefer the inherent distortions in the vinyl medium. That, however, is a different Kettle of Kod.
Regarding SACD et al; there’s no guarantee that these will sound different from CD. I suspect not, but we’ll see. More of a factor - and a worry - is the prevalence of mp3s and such…
BfT.
So, what your saying is that even if people prefer the sound of vinyl, CD is still better? I would suggest, ever so gently, that if you prefer the sound of vinyl over CD, then you should probably consider vinyl better, but that’s just me.
Well, how about a quick review of a SACD? Well, that’s just somebody’s opinion of how it sounds different, that really doesn’t mean it really sounds different, or anything.
Unless you partake of music by reading frequency charts and oscilliscopes, your enjoyment of the sounds produced is the most important aspect. Which, aryk29, is exactly what alice was getting at in the first place. She listened to both, found different qualities present in both, and prefered vinyl.
If you’ve listened to both, on good systems, and preferred CD, then you have your argument as well. But, until you listen to both, all that your saying is that CDs have better specs; you don’t listen to specs.
Now that NinjaChick’s OP has pretty much been beaten into the ground by a stampede of posts that seem to reflect something of the attidute that she was pitting in the first place, let me add a wee rant of my own.
People, stop quoting the damn CD frequency response is 0 - 22 KHz factoid! Do a search on “Nyquist Sampling Rate”, read what you find and then consider this… it applies to Fourier analysis which attempts to reproduce a signal by using a combination of sine functions. So if you sample at a rate of 44.1KHz, the highest pure sine wave signal you can accurately detect is one of 22.1Khz, 1/2 the sampling rate. However, if the signal was a pure square wave, or a sawtooth, or anything else, you are going to obtain (amplitudes and phases otherwise being equal) the same results, but are not going to reproduce the original signal. In addition, there are a host of other factors that come into play when dealing with music, which is far from a simple set of sine waves (unless played exclusively on tuning forks)
There, I feel better now.
p.s. sorry for the attidute, tude.
Boldface Type, I gave my cites at the bottom of the post. Most of your issues will be addressed there.
I’m not a huge fan of online cites, unless there’s no other option. Frankly, it’s not really worth my time to have an argument with someone who’s incapable of using a library card, but here goes:
One example of a cartridge designed to reproduce outer limit frequencies, the ones you claim aren’t really in use:
http://www.audiophile.com.au/grado_specs/ref_mastspecs.html
Obviously, you don’t need a cartridge capable of reproducing frequencies from 10 to 60,000 hertz unless there’s a possibility of using them. And this is not atypical; a search on Yahoo on vinyl + cartridges + retail will turn up many, many more results.
And it doesn’t stop there. How about phono preamps?:
http://www.vxm.com/tone.sunfirepreamp.html
Why would you need a frequency response of 5 to 50,000 hertz in the phono stage unless the format was able to reproduce those frequencies?
And here’s an audio engineer who routinely reworks audio recorders to get great specs:
http://www.ear-usa.com/timdeparavicini.htm
Of specific interest:
“Although de Paravicini will upgrade any tape machine, his favorite is the legendary Studer C37…after de Paravicini’s modifications, the response is 7 Hz to 35 kHz, +/- 1 dB, and S/N is 90 dB!”
No need to do it unless there’s a format that can attempt to capture the sound of the tape. That would be vinyl, for now.
The problem with your assertions above is that they imply the inherent lack of doctoring in any mastering process in any format. Again, check any mastering-centered interviews with Bob Ludwig, or, frankly, any mastering engineer. It’s not like they’re sacrificing chickens to get results.
I’ll even help:
http://emusician.com/ar/emusic_masters_mastering/
or:
http://www.musictap.net/Interviews/LudwigBobInterview.html
I’d also recommend hunting a bit on prosoundweb.com, too.
I’m done hijacking this thread. In my opinion, the best U2 album was The Unforgettable Fire.