opaqueice;347211 Wrote: > When CDs and vinyl records are made from the same recordings, I think > they are usually mixed differently to take into account the limitations > of the medium.
No, they use RIAA correction and pre-emphasis for recording to vinyl. The element on the turntable will invert these changes so you hear the same thing again. When you remix you make a different recording. This is not what they tested because obviously it'll be way different. The CD's master has to be digital so the analog master is fed through an ADC. In addition to that, many later released CD versions of original LP's were "digitally remastered" which is a wrong term because they mean that the mix was changed. When you convert an analog master to digital you are also remastering digitally because you make a new master so the term is flawed. I am unfamiliar with the genre they used but I'm confident both versions are the same mix or the test would be useless. > But again, what they actually tested was vinyl versus CD, which means > the medium was under test. Maybe that's not what they wanted or > intended, but it is what they did. The two different media are indeed in the test but be assured that the listeners were ignoring surface noise. They listened to the music (the music, -not- media flaws) from LP and CD and tried to determine which sounded better. > I think you're confused about this. There is no intrinsic problem with > digital, and there is no sense in which analog is intrinsically closer > to the original sound. That's a common misconception, and it's simply > wrong. No it isn't. Here we go again :-). The term "problem" is just a term that I wouldn't use because there's nothing wrong listening to digital music. When you listen to digital instruments it is even perfect. But when you listen to analog instruments (or voice), acoustic or electric, from a digital recording, there is a -difference-. A soundwave is analog and has infinite values on both signal-level and time-axis, while in digital form both are limited, ie. redbook has a maximum of 65535 signal-levels (16 bits) and only 44100 measurements of the signal per second. The soundwave is infinite on both accounts so even a 32/192 "take" records only a small part of that wave. Those are fundamental differences. So YES analog is closer to the original because it is analog and the original in most cases is analog too. In other words: music from vinyl is an approximation of the original because of limits of the medium. If one would physically improve that medium, the sound gets better (Japanese pressings for example). For a CD it's different; even on a 24 karat gold CD that is bit-perfect, the music is still an approximation because you lost information during the ADC. Improvement of the physical medium doesn't give you an improvement in sound quality (higher resolution is what improves digital audio) So, both have their specific, different, "problems". There are many more factors involved but those are the same for both (better studio, technicians etc.) It's like color on computer-displays. They say 32-bit color is true-color but it isn't... People think digital audio is a nice clean business, zero's and one's, pure digital, clean-rooms for producing the wafers etc. But, unfortunately, audio isn't digital, it's analog. The two conversion processes are in reality a big mess. All improvements over the years are about dealing with that mess which means oversampling, nyquist, filters to prevent aliasing are all invented and done to clean up this mess. And all those years --all those years-- we're told that you can't hear it. But all those years they have been improving the cleanup because we DID hear it. The first digital audio was ugly, there's no other word for it. Ah, aliasing so we put the analog signal through a low-pass filter at the nyquist frequency and bye bye aliasing... but that filter ruined the audible signal. Ah, we'll filter at a way higher frequency and increase the sample-rate accordingly so we don't ruin the sound under 20kHz (over-sampling) and we can filter at 20 kHz in the digital domain... yes, those are improvements and they cleanup the mess enough so that we, as nice little sheep, say oh and ah and thank you big wizard manufacturers and accept what we hear. What can we do? (go to live performances for the real thing!) > Look - suppose we press two vinyl records, one from an all-analog chain > and one from the same masters put through an A->D->A chain. Do you > think you could tell the difference? I'm willing to bet you can't. Well those people who participated in the test obviously did hear it and they preferred the analog source by far. Remember that the CD version followed exactly the chain to digital and back to analog as you describe. Putting it on vinyl adds noise and limits fidelity but they didn't do that... they used a CD and their own audiophile grade DAC's to go back to analog and even then they preferred the vinyl! > I don't understand what you're saying. Are we looking at the same > webpage? They compared vinyl to CD - how can format have nothing to do > with it? > > But it -was- vinyl to CD! When you compare two different novels and one is in paperback and the other is written on toiletpaper, what do you compare, the story or the medium? I know it's not a good example but I try to widen your path of thinking ;-) If you really think that these people preferred the reduced fidelity from the vinyl medium over the CD medium, you are the one that can't grasp what they are after. Believe me, they do hear the flaws of the vinyl medium but the music they hear -the music- sounds better to them if it's sourced from vinyl and they like it so much better that they accept the flaws of the medium and buy vinyl instead of CD. > But they don't get better in sound quality - not significantly. It's > only in the dream world of audiophiles that that happens. In the real > world, digital playback technology matured years ago. What does happen > is convenience improves, products like the squeezebox and transporter > appear, digital room correction improves, etc. It's not just playback; that's only half of it. It's in the recording/mastering part too. When a studio records vocals in 16 bits digital, they use a compressor. Only when they record vocals in 24 bits they can leave those out and do all touch-up's later in the box. You know that compressors ruin the dynamic range, right? > Incidentally, from what I can see the differences in the digital results > are completely attributable to chance - that is, if all digital sources > were identical and everyone was answering randomly one would expect > about the same spread in the averages. sssttt! people with $50k CD players are reading this forum! ciao! Nick. -- DeVerm ------------------------------------------------------------------------ DeVerm's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=18104 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=53355 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
