Digital vs Analog

Well yeah, that was what I was going to do. As far as I'm concerned, such sources would be just as valid as yourself.

I don't believe "measurements don't tell all", I just suspect (and it's definitely a suspicion rather than a belief) that the measurements we commonly rely on don't tell the whole story. This is simply going on my own experience.

Dunc

 

I suspect that's largely for convenience reasons rather than sound. After all, a very large number of classical pieces are too long to fit comfortably, or at all, on a single side of vinyl. I would wager that's the primary reason for the early take up of CD amongst classical listeners. After all, most of the latter are in late middle age, and therefore unable to hear particularly well anyway, so their preferences are unlikely to be driven by questions of fidelity

-- Ian

 

FWIW here's what Ivan March, editor of the Penguin Guide, has to say on the subject: "When the digital compact disc arrived in 1983, it was obviously far superior to any previous sound-carrier.... Music-lovers began to replace their collections with CDs... The superiority of the CD as a music carrier was quickly established." Rob Cowan, of Radio 3 and The Independent amongst others, notes in the introduction to the Guinness Classical 1000 that CD "has the potential to reproduce a lifelike dynamic range with maximum clarity but no tape hiss". Incidentally, in that book he always offers a digitally recorded alternative on the grounds of sound quality if his primary CD recommendation on artistic grounds derives from an analogue master.

If you take a look at the early-to-mid-80s reviews in Gramophone you see the same story. For a while their modus operandi was to review the LP and cassette, then post a follow-up review describing how much and in what respects - not if - the CD issue sounded better. I can't remember ever seeing a review in there which didn't suggest that the CD was better than the LP in some way, and certainly not one which said the LP was better than the CD.

JackOTrades originally asked why there's no classical released on vinyl, and the answer is simply that within a few years of CDs becoming available the classical market wasn't interested in buying vinyl records any more, and hence there haven't really been any new classical vinyl releases in the last 20 years or thereabouts.

 

Come off it granddad, admit it, you just can't be bothered to get up out of your bath chair to turn a record over. Hands are probably too shaky to cue properly too.

-- Ian

 

Of course there are plenty of quotes from members of the recording industry singing CD's praises from its release in the early 80s, despite the fact that CDs from that era almost universally sound blatantly awful. The power of suggestion perhaps? It's almost as if the recording industry had something to gain from pushing CD onto the public and touting its obvious technical superiority - oh wait, they did...

Dunc

P.S. - I like SSB's reply better than mine.

 

Neither Gramophone nor Penguin is a recording industry publication - both are independent consumer publications which review recorded music, and to suggest that either of them has a vested interest in one format over another is a bit silly, frankly. Rob Cowan likewise is a music journalist, and presents 'CD Review' - not, you'll note, 'CD and Vinyl Review' - on Radio 3. He's employed by the BBC and some of the English newspapers to review recorded music - not by the RIAA, or whoever it is you seem to believe is pulling his strings.

All these people primarily deal with music and whether or not recordings sound right, not with the ins and outs of recording technology, so they lack your ideological hangups about 'digital'.

Ivan March was writing retrospectively in 2005 and Rob Cowan in 1998 - rather too late to be pushing a brand-new format onto an unsuspecting public, though I'm sure they were saying similar things at the time. The reviews in Gramophone from the early 80s were conducting head-to-head comparisons between the LP, cassette and CD versions of the same recordings, and as I've pointed out they had no vested interest in any format.

It's almost as if the hifi industry had something to gain by conditioning audiophiles to buy expensive, fiddly, tweakable record players - oh wait, they did...

Classical music journalists, and their readership, were absolutely unanimous in bidding vinyl 'good riddance' once CDs became available. That is a fact, and it's why JackOTrades couldn't find any new classical vinyl. Read a conspiracy into it if you like, but in truth it's only the hifi buffs who had an emotional investment in vinyl records who tried to keep the dream alive.

 

Woah, steady on there. I have a very large record collection. Always have done, the music in that collection didn't become any less worth listening to when CD came along, and a lot of it is much more plentiful and cheap on secondhand vinyl than on CD even now. Many of us who keep vinyl alive do so simply because we want to play our records, and there's no gainsaying that a nice record player is really a very fine way to listen to music. I don't bother with format wars, I happily listen to CDs too, but there's nowt wrong with having an emotional investment in vinyl.

-- Ian

 

Just to clarify - despite the title of the programme Rob does actually play a fair bit of vinyl.
Never counted whether he plays more vinyl on the Cowan Collection than CD review - the one thing that is always obvious (as Paul said) is that the thing he cares about is the music.

 

I agree absolutely, and in any case I think that if you've got a good deck and a first-class vinyl specimen, there's sometimes not much to be gained in changing to the corresponding CD that your speakers won't mangle out of recognition anyway. In that position I'd buy a new recording rather than a CD I already knew - though as Ivan March pointed out, a lot of people felt otherwise and did set about replacing their collections with CD.

The point I was trying to make is that once the classical buying public - a particularly fussy niche market, as JackOTrades pointed out - had the choice between buying a CD and the corresponding LP, they overwhelmingly favoured the CD every time, as did the journalists, artists and critics. This is why there aren't any new classical releases on vinyl.

Amen to that. I have no objection to anybody's personal preference, only to spurious arguments raised in justification of something that shouldn't need justifying.

True - but when he does play a vinyl recording he only does so because it hasn't been issued on CD, and he never misses the opportunity to complain about it!

 

To me that usually comes across as complaint that the recording is unavailable rather than a format gripe.

Should add that he is one of my favourite R3 broadcasters.

 

Pete, this is all very interesting and I take your point, substantiated by the quotes you provided etc etc.

However I can't stop myself from thinking that back then, CDs were introduced as the new thing, the latest and greatest, the medium with no hiss... and I wonder if that was not its main quality: no hiss (rather than a much superior sound alltogether).

Of course publications like Gramophone and Penguin guides would go after the market, after all they too want to sell and probably help establish the new technology... you wouldn't bite the hand that feeds you...

But today, there is again more movement towards analog, LP revival as some call it, and there are many that believe in the LP format still holding its own and even being superior to CD (things like non-processed sound, extension, lack of compression are commonly heard. I do prefer, in my system, the sound of LP to CD).

The fact that there is this market, perhaps reborn, in search of LPs, is what makes me wonder why no more classical LPs are being issued... It is not that factories dont exist, as LPs are being produced still... just not classical ones, it seems. Jazz ones, which I would compare to classical in terms on niche/audiophile interest, still have editions being put out...

Cheers,
Jack

 

...and DG have just started a download only label...

 

Pete, just to avoid confusion: I am not saying that the quotes you used are biased in any way. But I do think there has been many movements in favour of CD that are not strictly based on its sound superiority. It is my opinion, maybe I am misguided...

All in all, as it has been said, my question/observation was not to fuel a format war.

The fact that CDs did well in the market must mean that its sound is at the very least acceptable (interesting to see what is happening today with mp3s... a lot of people believe its quality to be much inferior to cd but it is spreading fast, with or without quality so that is not necessarily a tell tale sign of market adoption). I dont want to embark in a CD vs LP discussion. As far as I am concerned, I like both, prefer LP for some things and CD for others (like incar listening for example).

The fact that LP is still being made and sold must also mean something in regards to its qualities and following. New editions of artists from the "CD generation" being released on LP must say something about its market and its perceived collectable value if nothing else.

The fact that SACD was released as a better format, CD without restrictions, LP quality without compromises, also must mean something... still we all know that a lot of marketing goes into those arguments and I am not here to discuss that.

I still find it odd that record companies find reasons to release LPs for certain types of music (Indie, Pop, Dance, Jazz) and do not include classical issues (or reissues). This is the main idea i wanted to debate.

Apologies if I started a format war, it was not my intention at all!

Jack

 

True, and Gramophone now covers downloaded music. However, the difference when CDs became available was that (for a few years at least) they directly compared the CD and LP versions of the same recording, and without fail the CD always sounded better as far as they were concerned. If they talk about the sound quality of downloaded music at Gramophone it's in terms of whether or not it's noticeably worse than the equivalent CD if available.

Nor do I. I just think it's worth pointing out that what's frequently presented in hifi circles as "the music lover's point of view" - ie. that digital 'kills the music', or whatever - is not shared by those primarily interested in recorded music rather than hifi, in particular the classical audience (which I'd suggest is by a long way the fussiest and most demanding WRT the quality of recorded sound, partly because there's an obvious standard of reference, ie. the piano in your front room or the orchestra in your local concert hall).

I don't think it's just the fact that classical is a niche, and vinyl is a niche, therefore classical vinyl is an unviable niche squared - as you've pointed out, other non-mainstream music is still released on vinyl. As I said above, the advantages of CD over vinyl are best exhibited by the wide-bandwidth, wide-dynamic-range material common in classical recordings - hence innumerable "demonstration" recordings of the 1812 Overture and Saint-Saëns' Organ Symphony. This combined with the classical audience's concern with sonic fidelity resulted in the market's migration to CD almost immediately it became available, and it hasn't ever looked back.

If you were to profile the classical audience I think it'd probably on average be the precise opposite of "radically progressive technophile" - if the issue boiled down to wanting into the 'next big thing' then they'd probably still be struggling to introduce CDs to classical buyers!

 

It probably ought to look back, because vinyl replay has advanced hugely since the 1980s. I listen to a lot of "classical" music, and I prefer vinyl, in general.

 

Vinyl replay is only part of the problem - you see someone has to create the vinyl in the first place and vinyl is (and always has been) a collection of compromises for the mastering stage of production and likewise for the engineer operating the cutting lathe.

A brief summary of the problems:

(1) excessive low frequencies, require varying the pitch of the grooves, which limits the total playing time.. So, it's necessary to limit the bass, but the "appearance" of bass can be given by boosting the midrange a bit..

(2) excessive high frequency content will cause tracing distortion. So, HF get's rolled off (giving that "smoother" sound)

(3) too much stereo seperation can result "negative grooves" where the stylus would be thrown out of the groove to skate over the disc.

(4) dynamic range. The outer edge of the disk has (and it takes a great deal of care to achieve this) 75dB of dynamic range. The inner edge has 15dB less. Because of this issue it is necessary to compress/limit the dynamic range transfered from the master to vinyl.

Now, when I say "excessive", I don't mean excessive as in recorded incorrectly, I mean excessive for the vinyl medium.

Problems (1), (2) and (3) are not an issue for CD at all - whereas for vinyl, they actually limit the artistic/production/mixing choices available.

It's fairly well known that CD has 96dB of dynamic range - however this isn't quite the whole story because with noise shaped dither you can get a perceptual 20bit resolution and 120dB of dynamic range which trounces vinyl. [Note, this is a log scale.]

Producing vinyl means that once you are done with a mix, someone has to master it for that medium and another poor sod watches the lathe cut the laquer master and checks for buggered up grooves caused by problems 1-4 through microscope. This is all additional cost.

Vinyl itself hasn't advanced in the last 20 years because no one has be investing in it's development (eg new lathe's) because it is inherently compromised as a storage medium.

 

I don't know why it sounds more natural, but it does.

 

Christine Tham carried out a dynamics comparison of LP vs digital formats, and her findings are quite interesting: http://www.audioholics.com/techtips/specsformats/LPsvsCDsDynamics.php

 

Linky no worky...

Dunc

 

LPs vs CDs and Digital Formats