Digital vs Analog

oedipus said:
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.
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Vinyl still continues to give more as the playback equipment gets better, one only has to read the early 1980's magazines to see we have got further ahead, so there is probably still a lot more information available on those vinyl groves than most of our equipment is capable of resolving.

CD on the other hand, those pits are all you get, and no matter how much you upsample or whatever you get no more than that.
 
sb,
you could say the same thing of cd if magazine articles were the yardstick. magazines have to say things are improving in order to sell themselves and create that sense that what we have isn;t good enough anymore - if you were paranoid you might say they were in collusion with the manufaturers but i couldn;t possibly comment on that ;). with cd there are numerous ways to extend the frequency of what is on the cd via interpolation however with most loudspeakers unable to produce much above 25khz anyway what's the point. btw iirc 25khz is the absolute max frequency you'll get out of vinyl anyway and this will degrade lower with each playback - down to a heady 8khz - or phone call bandwidth after 80 plays according to the riaa even after 1 play it's down to 20khz which is less than cd's maximum frequency. so i'd suggest that if you like vinyl better than cd it's not down to sampling frequency - it's something else - perhaps romantacism?
 
julian2002 said:
sb,
this will degrade lower with each playback - down to a heady 8khz - or phone call bandwidth after 80 plays according to the riaa
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erm. I read this claim with some astonishment at the time. They can't have meant a stonewall cutoff, it just isn't plausible. Anyway, if we really are down to 8KHz after 80 plays, how come I can still clearly hear the dog whistle (typically 16K+) at the end of my 25 year old pressing of Sgt Pepper - a record which has been well and truly caned on a truly awful mass market TT (an Akai no less) prior to my introduction to HiFi.
 
Lots of nice technical justifications for and against each format, but frankly, who cares?
Surely we buy kit to listen to err... music.

Assuming that's the case, and you're not doing it for willy waving ego trips, isn't the right approach to maximise what you have and what your musical taste is generally produced on?
What I mean by that is that I have probably 500ish CDs and zero LPs. Doesn't really matter if I prefer LP or CD. Most of my CDs would be very difficult to place on CD, don't mind about on LP, so why would I buy into a different format when I can't listen to what I want?

Clearly there is an argument that I could buy CD and LP front ends. Unfortunately it's simply not something I agree on. My view is that the systems I've heard seem to be optimised for either LP or CD. I've only heard one that sounded the same on both, and that's one out of LOTS. So why bother splitting funds between source type when you can focus on the one that does it for you?
 
Without a CD player I can't listen to all the fantastic music that's only available on CD. And without a record player I can't listen to all my records. So I need both.

Music first, not format. Anyway, everyone knows good CD playback is cheap to achieve :-)

-- Ian
 
So are we mostly all agreed that CD can give us musical satisfaction as well as vinyl ??

Agree with Sideshowbob,have had some really good sessions with those sunday mail compilations they give out,some of the 60's tracks were pretty good,ie,"something in the air" sounds brill.Whatother medium can give us this ?

Will be off to T/Wells tomorrow there are 2 good 2nd hand shops for vinyl,but now I also go through the cd's as well.
 
julian2002 said:
btw iirc 25khz is the absolute max frequency you'll get out of vinyl anyway and this will degrade lower with each playback - down to a heady 8khz - or phone call bandwidth after 80 plays according to the riaa even after 1 play it's down to 20khz which is less than cd's maximum frequency. so i'd suggest that if you like vinyl better than cd it's not down to sampling frequency - it's something else - perhaps romantacism?
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Julian, You do come out with some absolute tosh sometimes!
 
HI GUYS, i think it's all a matter of preference but to say that you can't tell the difference betwin analogue and digital then we are on a different planet, i am not saying that cdp's are not enjoyable most of them are, however i use the m.f.,kw transport and dac but also have an avid acutus s.m.e. arm and over 5000 records but when i have guests i prefer to use cd's for ovious reasons, even the female friends of my wife prefer vinyl sound, like i said it's not technical specs that makes you tick but the pleasure of the music reproduction that suts your ears,regards nando.
 

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