I'm a believer! Lp's really do sound better! (1 Viewer)

[Mattias_ka]

The LP sounds great! The only problem is that it is an electro-mechanical medium, and as such cannot help but introduce some degree of coloration. I have been involved in professional sound for 30+ years as a recording engineer, electronics engineer and now working in feature films, mixing, editing and recording soundtrack music. I have heard all the systems out there. Magnetic tape is colored. LPs are colored. Digital is not. It is as simple as that.

What's your point? Digital can ALSO be colored, as D/A do sound different.
And there is many other that also work in the industries that say other than you say.
Vinyl LP can have a frecvensy range of 3-25 kHz. More that 16/44 CD can have. Vinyl does have some more noise also, but I rather take some noise than a CD that have been totally destoyed in the mastering chain.
So like I said, format are NOT that important, it's what each release sounds like, just like with DVD.
I good site on music are http://www.stevehoffman.tv

 

[Chu Gai]

You know, the differences are so piddling small that the majority of them vanish when levels are matched provided we've got competently implemented DACs. It's kind of a moot point if there's no significant musical energy around 20K and above. Personally I find it more annoying to be listening to something and then have somebody punctuate a gun blast with a fart.

 

[Robert AG]

>>>What's your point? Digital can ALSO be colored, as D/A do sound different.

 

[Steve_AS]

Certainly TAS and Stereophile devote page after page to interconnects, speaker wire, green pens, etc.

It bears repeating that the 'green pen tweak' was started as a *joke* on the Internet, and then got picked up in the press whihc didn't realize it was a hoax. And now of course you can buy a "CD Stoplight' pen for $30 from the Music Direct catalog!

No wonder it's hard to take 'audiophiles' seriously.

 

[RobertR]

Vinyl LP can have a frecvensy range of 3-25 kHz. More that 16/44 CD can have.

Not true from a practical standpoint. Here are some facts from a couple of audio engineers:

The LP medium CANNOT have the low frequency bandpass of the CD medium. CD can, if the engineer so desires, accurately record signals down to and including DC. The low frequency response of LP is limited by a wide variety of problems that physics irretrievably puts in its way.

For example, for a given recording level, the peak to peak groove excursion gets larger as the frequency goes lower. That means that low frequency information MUST take up more room on the disk (and the RIAA compensation makes this problem worse!). Thus, from a practical point of view, the recording master MUST have its low frequency limited to prevent low frequency signals from eating excessive amount of real estate on the LP. LP bass is necessarily summed to mono below 80Hz. CD has NO such limitation. CD has bass which is absolutely flat in phase and amplitude down to below 5Hz in FULL stereo. LP CANNOT do this.

Second BIG problem: and this one you CAN'T get around. The transducer that picks up the signal from the LP suffers irretrievably from a second order high-pass filter effect due to the compliance of the stylus mount resonating with the effective mass of the tone-arm/cartridge. Ideally,

this resonance should be higher than the similar resonance provided by the turntable's suspension resonance AND be higher than the typical warp frequency and off-center frequency of the record (which puts a real practical LOWER limit on this resonance of about 5 Hz), AND is must be

lower than the lowest musical content at 20 Hz (which puts a practical UPPER limit on this resonance of about 15 Hz). Meaning that, in the IDEAL case, the lowest practical frequency the playback transducer system can deal with is around, say, 10 Hz or so.

Add to that the problem that this resonance is SELDOM if ever properly controlled, leading to, in most cases, a rather significant peak and the associated errors in the frequency response at significantly higher frequencies.

As for the high end, 99% of all available vinyl is compressed, peak limited and rolled off above 12-15kHz due to the inherent difficulties in cutting “hot” high frequency, high level signals. Again, CD has no such problems. It handles such frequencies (flat out to 21 kHz or so) as easily as any others.

 

[Philip Hamm]

It bears repeating that the 'green pen tweak' was started as a *joke* on the Internet, and then got picked up in the press whihc didn't realize it was a hoax. And now of course you can buy a "CD Stoplight' pen for $30 from the Music Direct catalog!

This is not true. I remember the green pen thing being discussed in audiophile circles in the mid-80s before Al Gore even had thought of the Internet.

 

[Chu Gai]

God bless Al Gore Did anyone ever market recordable CD's with a green edge?

 

[Steve_AS]

It bears repeating that the 'green pen tweak' was started as a *joke* on the Internet, and then got picked up in the press whihc didn't realize it was a hoax. And now of course you can buy a "CD Stoplight' pen for $30 from the Music Direct catalog!
This is not true. I remember the green pen thing being discussed in audiophile circles in the mid-80s before Al Gore even had thought of the Internet.

I fear you misremember. The earliest reports surfaced circa 1989-90. THe earliest mention on Usenet is early 1990.
http://www.google.com/groups?selm=12...&output=gplain
See also
http://www.snopes2.com/music/media/marker.htm
I'll try to track down more chronological details of the hoax, which IIRC was propagated first in a west coast newspaper, then (unwittingly) in ICE magazine.

 

[Craig_Kg]

You don't need "Hi Rez" to have inaudible noise. Plain vanilla 16 bit does it quite well. Keep in mind that the dyanmic range of 24 bit audio is -144db below full scale.

Isn't the real role of 'hi-res' formats to allow recordings to be made more easily without topping out the digital waveform? Then for mastering, the level can be set back to the maximum of the format while the minimum disappears into the noise floor (with dither added).

 

[Robert AG]

It is very bad practice to record at a level that is purposefully low and then raise it in the mastering stage. The original signal should be recorded ideally so that the peaks reach digital full scale to start with. Most of the time a db or two is left at the top of full scale to accommodate unexpected peaks, but most converters have a soft clipping provision in any event to avoid digital clipping.

With every 6db you record below maximum, you are throwing away a bit of resolution which can never be recovered. If the peaks never get above say -24 db of full scale, you are essentially only using 20 of the available 24 bits.

The maximum possible real-world resolution of all 24 bit digital systems is around 20 bits which is the limit of the quietest electronic componentry (not to mention the self-noise of microphones). This is a hard limit that cannot be bridged because of random electron motion in all electronic components, active and passive. While it is possible to have sound below the 20 bit level, it quickly gets obscured by this electronic noise. In the above example of recording at a level of -24db in a 24 bit system, and taking the real world resolution as being 20 bits, you can see we end up with essentially 16 bits of real resolution. Obviously even if you have a 24 bit system, it still is mandatory to record at as high a level as possible on peaks in order to use as much of that dynamic range as possible.

 

[Craig_Kg]

Yes but doesn't the hi res mean that it is easier to record within the limits of the formats? Eg, you can set the level to be -12dB of the expected peak level just in case things go OTT.

With studio recording, you can always redo a track if you find the recodring level is causing the signal to clip but this can't be done with a live performance.

 

[Mattias_ka]

RobertR, You are wrong. Here is some info from a serious person that work with vinyl cutting EVERY day:
http://www.recordtech.com/prodsounds.htm
(From the site
The phonograph record is a marvelous medium for storing and reproducing sound. With frequency response from 7 Hz to 25kHz and over 75 dB dynamic range possible, it is capable of startling realism. Its ability to convey a sense of space, that is width and depth of sound stage, with a degree of openness and airiness, is unrivaled by anything but the most esoteric digital systems.
And I take Steve Hoffman's word over your's any day.

 

[Mattias_ka]

It's kind of a moot point if there's no significant musical energy around 20K and above.

Well, yes there is. And it can also be heard. Why? Because these overtones will have a bland effect with frequency that you can hear.

 

[Mattias_ka]

And like I said before, ALL this talk about format are rather meaningless. It's what each issue sound that counts.

But some people rather listen to specs than listen to the music.

 

[RobertR]

RobertR, You are wrong. Here is some info from a serious person that work with vinyl cutting EVERY day:

Quite the contrary, he confirms what I said. I quote:

That having been said, it is important to understand the limitations of this medium in order to make great sounding records. The first limitation is recording time and level (volume). The amount of time possible on a record side is entirely dependent on the cutting level (volume) and the amount of low frequency information (bass). Bass uses more space than treble.

The record groove is an analog of a sound wave. Try to picture looking down on a narrow river or stream. The left bank is the left channel and the right bank is the right channel. Your turntable’’s stylus is a wide round raft that is going to travel that river. For simplicity, imagine that the banks stay parallel, (left and right the same) which means the sound is monaural. The louder the sound and or the heavier the bass, the wider the whole river (and your boat) wiggles side to side. The higher the pitch (frequency), the closer together the wiggles get. In other words the sharper the twists and turns, the higher the pitch. Obviously, everything from bass to treble is happening at once, so the gently sweeping wide curves (bass guitar and bass drum) have smaller, more jagged wiggles (vocals, guitars, keyboards, cymbals, percussion etc.), superimposed on them. It should be mentioned here that if the bass information is too loud, your raft gets thrown over the embankment (skips). So now you should be able to see that the louder the music is cut, the wider the groove wiggles, and the less time can fit on the side. Or looking at it the other way around, the longer the side, the less room for wiggles (volume and bass).

Next limitation: treble. You can put as much treble on a DAT or CD as you want. Unfortunately this is not true on a record (or analog tape for that matter). Although 25kHz response is possible, excessive transients are a problem. There are several reasons for this. It was decided with the advent of the first electrical transcription phonograph record, to reduce bass and boost treble in the cutting of the master record. This reduces bass wiggles and makes treble louder. And we aren’’t talking about a little bit of cut and boost here, we’’re talking about a 40 dB change from bottom to top!

The cutting engineer can usually tell if treble peaks are going to ‘‘break up’’ on playback, by the amount of current drawn by the cutting amplifier. This is measured by current meters on the amplifiers. If the current is excessive, the only way to prevent this is to use a very fast-attack treble limiter to reduce the intensity, and therefore, the groove curvature.

Excessive treble can even cause the cutting stylus to accelerate so fast that its back edge wipes out what the front edge just cut! It’’s unfortunate, but treble rolls off, and distortion goes up as you approach the center of the record.

In other words, he ADMITS the bass and treble limitations I talked about, and admits that in ACTUAL PRACTICE, bass and treble ARE rolled off on LP due to its inherent limitations.

 

[Robert AG]

>>Yes but doesn't the hi res mean that it is easier to record within the limits of the formats? Eg, you can set the level to be -12dB of the expected peak level just in case things go OTT.

With studio recording, you can always redo a track if you find the recodring level is causing the signal to clip but this can't be done with a live performance.

 

[Chu Gai]

OK Mattias, just what are you listening to that has signficant musical energy up there? And if it's above 20K, I seriously doubt anyone but the little fellow below would find it audible.
[c]

[/c]

 

[Craig_Kg]

Please re-read my post _carefully_ All the information you are asking for is there.

Yes, I've done that but I'm not talking about raising the recording level during mastering. I'm talking about mastering down to CD (16 bit - maybe 20 for HDCD) from hi res where you will be throwing away bits in any case so you get some leeway with recording levels.

And for a live performance, even a competent recording engineer could get caught out by a particularly lively passage (and it's better not to fiddle with levels during a recording, isn't it?).

 

[LanceJ]

Robert AG: I have read several times that part of the reason for the vinyl format's "airiness" is that cartridge/stylus/groove interactions cause out-of-phase conditions, thus generating this pleasing effect. What do you think?
For the record: I also think vinyl can sound very good, but it also bothers me what went on in the studio is not the same as what is coming out of my turntable, due to all the mechanical & electrical steps in between (& I would still think the same thing of a $10K turntable/cart system).
My own personal preference is to have the music delivery format as neutral as possible, so that whatever the artist wants you to hear arrives at your ear the way he/she intended, not what the format allows. Airiness and warmth--if desired--can be added easily using several different methods in the studio during the recording's production phase.
Though I will admit to liking one subjective thing concerning vinyl: a turntable with a slowly spinning record being tracked by a graceful tonearm definitely has a major coolness factor that a digital system cannot touch.
LJ

 

[Chu Gai]

There's much to be said for nostalgia and artistic design. Admittedly it's hard not to admire some designs. I'll briefly state that there are intermodulation effects between the two channels and we can play around with that by varying the stylus geometry, compliance, etc. Tailoring the sound as you will to suit the individual. I'm sure Robert will expand greatly on this.