[Animal the Drummer]

Frankly, I don't think Vinyls have better sound than CDs (let alone HiRes formats). Vinyl has a significantly lower signal-to-noise ratio than CD (60-70 dB vs 90-95 dB), and also a lower stereo seperation range (30 dB vs 90 dB). Moreover, vinyl has a bigger problem of physical deterioration that affects the reproduced sound.

Not every quality is numerically measurable, especially as far as music is concerned. CDs (usually - not always) have great clarity, but good LP sound can often be warmer and more atmospheric and, for some of us at least, provides a more enjoyable listening experience for that reason.

Incidentally I'd put in a word here for the much maligned cassette. It enabled you to start or stop the music wherever needed and, for a variety of reasons, knocked spots off the CD as a medium for burning one's own compilations.

 

[starthrower]

One thing that bugs me about these discussions is the use of the word vinyls. It's vinyl. And that's final!

 

[Simon Moon]

Some of us have listened to it over a far longer period of time and have more experience with it than you. And regarding a post above that says some older vinyl is ’dead quiet’, under optimal conditions, it may sound that way with speakers, but listen with good headphones and there is always going to be some kind of groove noise whether it be light ticks and pops or ‘needle in groove’ noise. In order to come close to ‘dead quiet’ for years I used this (still to be found on eBay):

View attachment 185160

Devices by this company, Sweet Vinyl, (called the Sugarcube), stomp all over that SAE device.

 

[SONNET CLV]

A lot of folks talk about the convenience of CDs, even when they recognize that a vinyl record may sound better, especially when the playback equipment is good. It seems a bit strange, though, that convenience is a matter to one who appreciates music, especially in those cases where the person is a musician and plays an instrument. It isn't convenient to learn to play and to continue to play an instrument. I mean, you actually have to take the thing into your hands in one way or another, and touch on it or blow into it, or strike it, or whatever. Sure, it's more convenient to sit in a chair and let someone else play the instrument. But musicians, people who love music, don't seem to care.

I don't seem to care about the "fuss" of a vinyl record playing system. It equates closer to playing an instrument than does pressing a button on a CD deck. I've polished and oiled a trombone, adjusted a harmonica, restrung guitars, and retuned a piano. A bit of fuss to get things right is all right with me if it is in pursuit of a passion. If all I wanted was convenience, I wouldn't need a passion.

Which may explain why I still have a working reel-to-reel tape deck in my system. You can't couple the word "convenience" with "reel-to-reel tape deck", but you can sure get a heck of a beautiful sound from those reels. And if you care about the sound of your music .....

 

[fluteman]

Frankly, I don't think Vinyls have better sound than CDs (let alone HiRes formats). Vinyl has a significantly lower signal-to-noise ratio than CD (60-70 dB vs 90-95 dB), and also a lower stereo seperation range (30 dB vs 90 dB). Moreover, vinyl has a bigger problem of physical deterioration that affects the reproduced sound.

I don't necessarily disagree. But I just fired up my 22-year old Rotel stand alone CD player for the first time in a couple of years and fed it an early (1985) Denon CD featuring the Smetana Quartet playing Beethoven. Ouch. Now I remember what I hated about early CD sound. (It did improve considerably circa 1995.) I never bought another stand alone CD player. A few years later I did buy a Sony SACD player that ended up getting a lot more use as a DVD movie player. Several more years later I ended up ripping many of my CDs to my computer's hard drive.

With my latest laptop, which has a quiet solid state drive (SSD), and an external dac, digital sound has finally arrived. My SSD Sony Walkman is good too. But it took a lot longer than I expected. And I have 1950s mono London/Decca LPs that sound vastly better than that 1985 Denon CD on players of about the same quality, vintage and price.

 

[DaveM]

.
I don't seem to care about the "fuss" of a vinyl record playing system. It equates closer to playing an instrument than does pressing a button on a CD deck. I've polished and oiled a trombone, adjusted a harmonica, restrung guitars, and retuned a piano. A bit of fuss to get things right is all right with me if it is in pursuit of a passion. If all I wanted was convenience, I wouldn't need a passion.

Which may explain why I still have a working reel-to-reel tape deck in my system. You can't couple the word "convenience" with "reel-to-reel tape deck", but you can sure get a heck of a beautiful sound from those reels. And if you care about the sound of your music .....

And since I care about the sound of music wherever I go, I play CDs in the car or on a walk. I tried that with a vinyl turntable and reel-to-reel tape deck and the two of them were a might unwieldy, the turntable arm sent the needle scratching across the record, not to mention that the long AC cord I used broke when I was about 25 feet from the house..

 

[stevechandlermusic]

Count me in the digital audio camp. As an aficionado of organ music I can promise you there's very little audio on vinyl below 50 Hz, the format just won't support it because the needle would skip out of the groove. In fact as a music producer I know that most of what makes a sound pop in a recording is actually distortion. The low frequency restrictions of vinyl are my biggest reason for preferring the sound of CDs. Part of the problem with early digital recordings of popular music was that they were too clean. That's all been solved in the last few decades with distortion plugins. As for classical music it's always been subjected to compression (reduced dynamic range). Part of the reason for that was the surface noise of vinyl, but even with the greater dynamic range and lack of surface noise of CDs they still compress it because very few people listen in a quiet room so the producers have to bring up the quiet parts to compensate.

One last reason for preferring digital is that nobody records analog audio anymore. It's simply not done. Thus the only way to hear analog audio that's never been digitized is to listen to old LPs. Anything recorded since 1990 was recorded digitally and if you bought it on an LP then they mastered it for and pressed it onto vinyl, but the original recording was done digitally. My guess is if you look it will say DDA somewhere on the cover to indicate that the original recording and mixing was done in the digital realm and it was then mastered for analog on vinyl. If you try to tell me that such a recording sounds better on vinyl I'll tell you that's not possible, that what you're preferring is distortion.

Rupert Neve used to claim that 44.1 KHz was not high enough and he made a good case because 44.1 KHz sampling will tell you there's something way up there, but it can't tell you the shape of the wave. Thus 88.2 or 96 KHz sampling is superior, but given my age it's been decades since I heard 20 KHz and I seriously doubt anyone old enough to think they prefer vinyl can hear that high. It was a few decades ago that I realized my hearing topped out around 15 KHz and it's a bit lower than that now (somewhere around 12 - 14 KHz). Finally, someone mentioned stereo imaging, that's a purely subjective area which cannot be quantified. My guess is it wasn't a double blind test and therefore not statistically valid.

Frankly, I'm so glad to not have to hear clicks, pops and skips anymore.

A better question would be can you hear the difference between CD quality 16/44.1 and a MP3 file?

 

[SanAntone]

nobody records analog audio anymore.

This is not true. I just watched a video of Rick Rubin discussing his recent work with Neil Young in which all the basic tracking was done on 2" tape and then immediately transferred to digital for mixing and mastering.

I am sure he is not the only one.

 

[fluteman]

This is not true. I just watched a video of Rick Rubin discussing his recent work with Neil Young in which all the basic tracking was done on 2" tape and then immediately transferred to digital for mixing and mastering.

I am sure he is not the only one.

He isn't. In 2003 German violinist Daniel Gaede released an outstanding record called "The Tube Only Violin", on vinyl as well as SACD and CD. It was quite successful by classical music standards. You can still buy the SACD and CD, and even the vinyl LP. There are even labels, notably including one called Analogue Productions, that specialize in that sort of thing, with both new material and standards from the analogue era in many genres, including classical.

 

[golfer72]

Vinyl is a non starter. As soon as I put my first CD in the player (circa 1985?) I never looked back. It was Roxy Music Avalon. I was amazed at the clarity and silent background. My turntable went into the closet soon thereafter LOL! Oh btw i listen to Classical almost exclusively. Hey people like classic cars too. Its cool. Just not for me

 

[Eva Yojimbo]

I don't necessarily disagree. But I just fired up my 22-year old Rotel stand alone CD player for the first time in a couple of years and fed it an early (1985) Denon CD featuring the Smetana Quartet playing Beethoven. Ouch. Now I remember what I hated about early CD sound. (It did improve considerably circa 1995.) I never bought another stand alone CD player. A few years later I did buy a Sony SACD player that ended up getting a lot more use as a DVD movie player. Several more years later I ended up ripping many of my CDs to my computer's hard drive.

The very earliest CDs were often very poorly transferred. I actually think the peak era for CDs were the late-80s/early-90s, after the transfer problem was taken care of but before the "Loudness Wars" started. Thankfully, the latter hasn't really affected classical at all, and hasn't effected jazz as much.

 

[fluteman]

The very earliest CDs were often very poorly transferred. I actually think the peak era for CDs were the late-80s/early-90s, after the transfer problem was taken care of but before the "Loudness Wars" started. Thankfully, the latter hasn't really affected classical at all, and hasn't effected jazz as much.

There was a specific technological development in CDs circa 1994-1995 that enabled more of the maximum possible16 bits to be preserved in the process, though I forget the details. I do remember the exact CD where I first noticed a significant improvement in sound quality. It was called Voices of Light and featured music of Richard Einhorn performed by Anonymous 4. When I looked at the CD booklet, sure enough, there was a technical explanation. Also note the reference to Super Bit Mapping (iirc Sony's term for the new technology, which all the labels adopted almost immediately) on the sticker on the jewel box. No doubt there have been improvements since then, but that was the big one, imo.

 

[mostly_lurking]

IIRC Vinyls can only store 44 minutes of high quality music, 22 minutes per side
In classical music I only buy vinyls when there are different works on each side, none longer than 22 minutes

similarly, I in popular music I reserve vinyls for albums in which the A side is great and the B side terrible (or vice versa), it makes it easier to only listen to the good half of an album.

 

[Scorpion de Rooftrouser]

There's no need for vinyl to exist in the age of compact discs and digital downloads. Vinyl is for people who love throwing money away.

 

[fluteman]

There's no need for vinyl to exist in the age of compact discs and digital downloads. Vinyl is for people who love throwing money away.

You aren't taking account of the vinyl that is already there from an earlier era. I'm not about to hunt down everything I already have and pay for it again, especially when a lot of it is available only as a selection in a huge box containing much that I don't particularly want, or not available in digital form at all.

 

[Scorpion de Rooftrouser]

You aren't taking account of the vinyl that is already there from an earlier era. I'm not about to hunt down everything I already have and pay for it again, especially when a lot of it is available only as a selection in a huge box containing much that I don't particularly want, or not available in digital form at all.

Point well taken; no need to pay for something twice.

 

[Eva Yojimbo]

There was a specific technological development in CDs circa 1994-1995 that enabled more of the maximum possible16 bits to be preserved in the process, though I forget the details. I do remember the exact CD where I first noticed a significant improvement in sound quality. It was called Voices of Light and featured music of Richard Einhorn performed by Anonymous 4. When I looked at the CD booklet, sure enough, there was a technical explanation. Also note the reference to Super Bit Mapping (iirc Sony's term for the new technology, which all the labels adopted almost immediately) on the sticker on the jewel box. No doubt there have been improvements since then, but that was the big one, imo.

"Super bit mapping" is really just a fancy term for dithering (well, Sony's version of it) which is used to shift the (already minor) distortion/noise in the reduction of higher bitrates to 16-bits, mostly by putting them in the high frequencies that human ears are less sensitive too. It probably doesn't make any audibly discernible difference unless you're a golden-eared audio engineer who knows precisely what to listen to/for (and even then I'd have my doubts).

All that said, I'm actually aware of that Einhorn/Voices of Light CD because Criterion used it as the soundtrack to their release of Carl Dreyer's silent film masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc. That's one of the handful of films that, on any given day, I could easily consider the best film ever made, and it's made even better with Einhorn's soundtrack, which he composed FOR the film after being so moved by his first viewing of it.

 

[fluteman]

"Super bit mapping" is really just a fancy term for dithering (well, Sony's version of it) which is used to shift the (already minor) distortion/noise in the reduction of higher bitrates to 16-bits, mostly by putting them in the high frequencies that human ears are less sensitive too. It probably doesn't make any audibly discernible difference unless you're a golden-eared audio engineer who knows precisely what to listen to/for (and even then I'd have my doubts).

All that said, I'm actually aware of that Einhorn/Voices of Light CD because Criterion used it as the soundtrack to their release of Carl Dreyer's silent film masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc. That's one of the handful of films that, on any given day, I could easily consider the best film ever made, and it's made even better with Einhorn's soundtrack, which he composed FOR the film after being so moved by his first viewing of it.

Well, I guess I have golden ears, because without knowing anything about 'super bit mapping' or looking at the CD or its booklet, I recognized the improvement the moment I pressed 'play'. Years afterwards, whenever I heard a dull-sounding CD, it nearly always turned out to be pre-1995. I do agree completely about Voices of Light, both movie and music.

But the very earliest CDs, such as the 1985 (or 1984 according to discogs) Denon Smetana Quartet CD I mentioned earlier, sounded truly awful (great performances, though). I had forgotten just how awful until I listened to it for the first time in years tonight. At least as bad is the 1981 EMI CD of Schubert's Trout Quintet with Sviatoslav Richter, members of the Borodin Quartet and Georg Hortnagel, one of the earliest CDs I own. That one was remastered in 2012, and I was sorely tempted to buy it again, something I almost never do.

 

[Eva Yojimbo]

Well, I guess I have golden ears, because without knowing anything about 'super bit mapping' or looking at the CD or its booklet, I recognized the improvement the moment I pressed 'play'. Years afterwards, whenever I heard a dull-sounding CD, it nearly always turned out to be pre-1995.

But the very earliest CDs, such as the 1985 Denon Smetana Quartet CD I mentioned earlier, sounded truly awful (great performances, though). I had forgotten just how awful until I listened to it for the first time in years tonight. At least as bad is the 1981 EMI CD of Schubert's Trout Quintet with Sviatoslav Richter, members of the Borodin Quartet and Georg Hortnagel, one of the earliest CDs I own. That one was remastered in 2012, and I was sorely tempted to buy it again, something I almost never do.

There are many factors at play in regards to audio quality both actual and perceived. Without blind testing you can never be sure what role the placebo effect is having, and even with blind testing there's the problem of level matching and masterings, which all matter far more than what dithering technology is used. A lot of early CDs were rushed to production to capitalize on the emerging popularity of the new medium and were done with poor transfers, often directly from sources mastered from vinyl with rolled off low end. This was usually corrected with later masterings.

In general I do think the recording and mixing/mastering of classical music has improved over time, but a whole lot of the repackaging of old releases in new formats and version is nothing more than greedy companies trying to get people to buy the same music again even though there's often no audible difference, and it's not easy to know/tell which is which. I know with pop music I always look for releases from the late-80s to early-90s before the Loudness Wars ruined everything. Hopefully one day a lot of the best albums from the last 30 years of pop will get "remastered" with reasonable dynamic range.

 

[fluteman]

There are many factors at play in regards to audio quality both actual and perceived. Without blind testing you can never be sure what role the placebo effect is having, and even with blind testing there's the problem of level matching and masterings, which all matter far more than what dithering technology is used. A lot of early CDs were rushed to production to capitalize on the emerging popularity of the new medium and were done with poor transfers, often directly from sources mastered from vinyl with rolled off low end. This was usually corrected with later masterings.

In general I do think the recording and mixing/mastering of classical music has improved over time, but a whole lot of the repackaging of old releases in new formats and version is nothing more than greedy companies trying to get people to buy the same music again even though there's often no audible difference, and it's not easy to know/tell which is which. I know with pop music I always look for releases from the late-80s to early-90s before the Loudness Wars ruined everything. Hopefully one day a lot of the best albums from the last 30 years of pop will get "remastered" with reasonable dynamic range.

I have, and would again, do blind testing regarding everything I have said in this thread. I just ordered a copy of the remastered Richter CD. It was also originally released as a digital LP, but I'm not going to bother with that, as it wouldn't be good for blind testing. But as the original digital recording used for the vinyl was probably 20 bits, I'm guessing it would sound better too. I always wanted that Richter remastering, thanks for nudging me into getting it.