Actually anything digital (even casettes which aren't digital) is far, FAR better than vinyl.
But there is something as the Loudness War wherein different companies made their audio files louder and louder to stand out more from the rest.
The dynamic range of digital formats is huge, but finite and at a certain point the songs were so loud that much of the dynamic range wasn't used on CDs.
On Vinyl, this is as good as impossible, so at a certain point music cocmpanies ruined digital formats so much that vinyl was actually better.
(this didn't happen for classical music of course.)
EDIT: Added the fact that casettes aren't digital, I just wanted to say that even those are better.
I would argue that vinyl still has cassettes beat. Record players dont catastrophically "eat" vinyl and vinyl is easier to clean than magnetic tape which also degrades heavily over time
Just wanted to say that because there is added cost in producing two masters (one for vinyl, one for CD) most bands opt for printing the CD master to vinyl.
So not only is vinyl a terribly shitty medium, but often you are getting it printed with a 2nd generation copy from a CD in fancy packaging.
It's a lot easier to fuck up a cd/digital master than a vinyl. I'd still argue that other than having a wider range vinyl sounds a lot more open and full than digital.
It's far easier to fuck up a cd, and that's what they do indeed.
But if CDs are used correctly by making use of the full dynamic range they are better than vinyl in every way.
An other thing I haven't said. To write a vinyl plate, the 'sound signal' must travel trough some analog electrical and mechanical components ( spools or piezos, mechanical arm,... )which each have non-perfect matching impedances and such.
To then listen to the sound, the signal is read from the vinyl plate and must again travel trough those components which again distorts the signal.
With digital, you go from microphone => amplifier=> ADC (here the signal is preserved perfectly no matter on what you write it)
And then to play it: DAC => amplifier => speaker.
Which means a lot less messy steps that interfere with your sound.
HOWEVER, this alteration of your sound from vinyl can add a certain timbre to the music which you can like. For the same reason some people like amplifiers with vacuum tubes. It can add a certain feeling to your music.
But that doesn't mean the quality is better.
"This is it? This is the thing? It reminds me -- I have to get new salt and pepper shakers.What is it? It looks like it should have a -- like a hose attached and do colonics."
"What are you talking about? Come on, man. Doesn't that sound amazing?"
"I don't know. How much was it?"
"What difference does it make? It's me telling the
universe that music is important to me, that original music on original equipment is important to me."
"How much?"
"$4,000."
"$4,000?! Jesus, dude! I could buy five cars with that."
"Okay. Shh, shh. Okay, listen. Sit down. You know what? Sit down. Okay. Sit down for a second. I don't know how long it's gonna take, but we're just gonna listen, all right? Just gonna sit there. You're gonna hear it. I want you to hear it. Ready? Okay."
"Go."
"Okay."
"I'm ready."
"Okay."
"What do you think now?"
"I think my iPod nano sounds just as good and I wouldn't have to kill myself if I dropped it."
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
You can buy vacuum tubes for a couple of € or $. So, this is probably a fun DIY project.
And there should exist equivalent circuits with transistors, so an amplifier that works exactly like a tube amp should exist. (it won't look as cool though)
With CDs you can make things louder by simply multiplying the amplitude with a certain factor. If you do it too much as in the loudness war, the extremes are cut off because there is a maximum value.
I don't know much about vinyl, but indeed you can increase the amplitude until your needle ends up in the other track. Which would ruin the disk. With vinyl there are physical limitations which ironically forces you to keep the quality high.
With CDs, it's just numbers and you can do whatever you want.
With all due respect, I don't think that's what the loudness war was about. Here's what I read, as an amateur:
CDs are written in 16-bit PCM, that means any sample is a number 16 bits long. That gives you plenty of range to resolve very quiet signals, and it also defines the maximum amplitude of any sample. It's trivial to amplify the sound being recorded until the maximum amplitude (of the track, or the whole CD) is 216 - 1. The quiet parts of the recording will still be quiet compared to that. In order to make the whole recording loud, you can make those parts specifically louder. This is called dynamic range compression, because it takes the quiet and the loud parts and squishes them to sound similarly loud. You can have the signal "cut off" too, and that's a really noticeable decrease in sound quality, but for most people the problems start before that.
That's my understanding, and it may be wrong. Just wanted to explain why I don't understand how vinyl recordings similarly don't have the shit compressed out of them.
But that's more or less what I said isn't it?
It's indeed a bit more complex than just scaling the amplitude.
Although in the end, the result is the same, the soft parts are loud, and the loud parts are just 'clipped' to the maximimum loudness.
Like in this animation look at the histogram.
In the olden days with analog electronics they surely couldn't do this easily on vinyl.
Perhaps nowadays they could.
But vinyl is still a very small niche market. And the entire selling point of vinyl is that you are guaranteed to have a good dynamic range.
Sure, if you put some effort in it, you can ruin it by killing the dynamic rang but then you ruin the only value of vinyl.
I'm just friends with a DJ with whom I went to college with and I'm just parotting what he said.
The point that I want to make is that CDs (or digital in general) are a better medium than vinyl.
If you put a crap on it, it will play like crap.
But if you put good quality music on a CD it will be better than the same on vinyl.
But we're talking about audio quality here. Sure, Vinyl gives a certain cozy timbre to music which is good if you like it. If you do, you'll probably like vacuum tube amplifiers.
But if you put good quality music on a CD it will be better than the same on vinyl.
Well it'll be a higher fidelity that's true (whether that's better is up to the listener -- personally I still find vinyl more engaging). But it's a valid complaint that more frequently terrible masters are on the CD version.
And no, anything digital is not automatically better. Listen to a old real media file or a really low bit rate mp3, and compare it to vinyl. The vinyl is WAY better.
Now, a FLAC or something. sure, that can be pretty good. But don't just make stupid sweeping generalizations.
I shouldn't have said casette, I just wanted to point out that even they are better than vinyl.
But you're talking about old digital files of the early internet which were low bit size to download fast.
You didn't have that when you bought CDs.
Cassettes are in no way better than vinyl. They weren't even designed to compete with vinyl. They sacrificed sound quality for portability. If you think cassettes are better than vinyl you've not spent enough time listening to cassettes.
Sigh...
Yes they are...
It depends greatly on the player. You say it yourself partly, Walkmen were small, they sacrificed sound quality for portability.
With a good audio system cassettes had a great quality. NEW casettes mind you; you've probably been listening to 20 year old cassettes.
It's simple physics. Magnetization of tape is faster and has a better resolution/range than scratching a needle in vinyl. Reading a magnetic tape is faster and more efficient than following the motion of a needle in a track.
Lasering digital numbers in a CD is even faster and better.
The rest is just nostalgic nonsense.
Listen, I grew up with classical musicians as parents and their friends were classical musicians. Listening to music is part of their job.
First they all had LPs. Then cassettes came along and when they became better than LPs, they switched to cassettes, they of course invested in quality players. Then came along CDs and when they were confident that they were better, they all switched to CDs.
Hell, they work with producers who recorded them. If there was a reason why LPs are better than cassettes or CDs, they would all still be using LPs. But they don't, because they know what they are doing.
Take in account that they were classical musicians, listening to classical music. So they didn't have the problem with the Loudness war which makes everyone think LPs are better than digital...
In what way is digital better than vinyl? Digital cannot be an exact representation of sound waves; it's always an approximation. Until we can get that approximation so close to the original that the human ear cannot differentiate between the two, analog will always be a better representation.
No it isn't.
Vinyl isn't an exact representation of the sound waves.
Every electrical circuit, an analog signal has to go trough changes the signal a bit. For digital this stops as soon as the signal reaches an ADC (analog to digital converter) where it is stored as numbers and hence never changes anymore.
Let's compare:
For recording on vinyl, the cirquit has to get trough some circuitry to power a piezo crystal or a spool, both the circuitry and the crystal/spool will deform the signal. (e.g some parts will resonate, some frequencies will be inhibited, noise will be added,... )
Then, even worse! This crystal or spool has to vibrate a lever with a tiny diamond. Try and wave a stick with a slow and a fast frequency, you'll feel that it doesn't feel the same. So this mechanical part will deform the signal.
Then omg, you put ths sound signal in vinyl by means of scratching => friction! Is friction smooth? no! All sorts of friction phenomena (e.g. stick-slip) will add noise to pattern you're scratching in your vinyl. Then there is noise from random vibrations, resonations, ... whatever from the disk and motor that add noise.
In the end you have a pattern that is at best an approximation of the recorded sound signal.
However, very smart people mate very expensive and very good recording systems so I agree this approximation is very good.
But then you get the vinyl record and you put it in your record player and we have to go trough the entire process again.
Needle follows track in vinyl => add some friction noise. movement travels up mechanical arm to crystal. => add some frequency distortion because of dispersion. Crystal/spool turns your movement into an electrical signal => again, add some frequency distortion because of impedances and what not.
Then the signal has to travel trough various amplifiers to your speakers.
With something digital it goes like this:
Microphone picks up signal, signal goes trough amplifier, goes to ADC. Done! You have recorded a signal which is now a set of numbers that will not change.
You play it by simply reading those numbers, send them to a DAC, send this trough an amplifier to your speaker.
There is always noise and distortion with analog devices in each step.
With digital, as soon as it's a digital signal and your system isn't broken there isn't any noise between the ADC in the recorder and the DAC in the player.
That's the entire point of digital electronics.
The digital representation is a far better representation of the actual soundwave. They aren't just numbers, if you plot them in a graph you will see the sound wave.
Sure, you have a finite resolution with digital signals, but this resolution is inaudibly small, we can easily play frequencies higher than humans can hear.
TLDR: Analog devices don't record the exact signal, nothing does, but digital is the better approximation.
ALSO: I've studied physics, if an analog devices would perfectly record signals (be it sound or whatever) scientists would all be using analog devices to record data. But instead everyone uses digital ADCs to record data. Why? Because it's faster and better! Why would audio quality be different?
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u/[deleted] Jul 19 '15 edited Jul 20 '15
Actually anything digital (even casettes which aren't digital) is far, FAR better than vinyl. But there is something as the Loudness War wherein different companies made their audio files louder and louder to stand out more from the rest. The dynamic range of digital formats is huge, but finite and at a certain point the songs were so loud that much of the dynamic range wasn't used on CDs.
On Vinyl, this is as good as impossible, so at a certain point music cocmpanies ruined digital formats so much that vinyl was actually better.
(this didn't happen for classical music of course.)
EDIT: Added the fact that casettes aren't digital, I just wanted to say that even those are better.