Vinyl Outsells CDs for First Time Since 1987

[bill5]

12 minutes ago, Anderton said:

 

But what I'm trying to look at are the objective elements. CDs have lower distortion, that's objectively provable. But what the eff is good is that if engineers squash the crap out of the music to where it's distorted? In that reality, the music coming off the CD can be much more distorted than the same music coming off vinyl. So if something thinks CDs sound more distorted...well, unfortunately in a lot of cases involving popular music, they're right. 

 

Another aspect that the anti-digital crowd never brings up, but I believe is one of the strongest arguments for analog, is that with digital technology, distortion increases at lower levels. With analog, distortion increases at higher levels - just like the real world. Granted, analog has a noise floor when the level gets really low. Think about it, though: this problem with low-level digital distortion is/was considered serious enough that dithering was added to - wait for it - add a noise floor. 

 

As to whether anyone can hear data compression, I think it depends on the material and the listener's ear training more than anything else. There are programs that can isolate what data compression omits from the music. Once you've heard that, you know what to listen for, and you start hearing it in data-compressed music - mostly transients. It's like how after hearing Auto-Tune a few times, you hear it ALL the time on recordings.

 

So many times the discussion gets into emotions and subjective terms that have no standardized meaning (the only standardized meaning I know for "warm" is somewhere between "cold" and "hot"  ). But, we don't have to go there. So many factors are objective and provable, and are worthy of discussion. I see no technical reason why digital sound can't have the same character as analog sound. However, it won't until that character is identified in objective terms. For example with digital, if you consider the low-level distortion aspect, then 24-bit resolution is not going to have the same issues with low-level digital distortion as 16-bit resolution.

 

"My advice to you is to start drinking heavily."     IMO you're looking for more objectivity than is realistic to get, although I admire the desire/attempt.  

[nursers]

11 hours ago, Dave Bryce said:

 

When it comes to records, I don’t think I fall into that category.

 

I love my vinyl collection.  For the life of me, I don’t understand how anyone can argue that CDs are better, per se - they’re just different.  Yes, the tend to sound cleaner, but there’s a dynamic that the records have that the CDs simply don’t.

 

As has been observed earlier in this thread, the LPs have s vibe to them that CDs miss, and streaming totally loses.  The 20 minute slice of time is really fun IMO, and I seriously love the act of essentially DJing for myself, my wife and my friends.  The act of choosing a record, then picking a side you want to hear is my kind of good time.   Because of all this, I find I sit and listen to the records when I put them on.  CDs are too long for that most of the time, and streaming is essentially just background.  I do tend to stream in the car, on planes, when I walk my dogs, etc…but at home, it’s either records, CDs or 5.1 remix discs for me.

 

Since I started listening to records, there’s this big touch of nostalgia that gets scratched.  It’s like an old friend is back.  It feels comfortable.  I really like it.

This exactly  - growing up I actually never liked records much, loved cassettes as that's what I could afford, and then REALLY loved CDs. Now, I collect vinyl and love the process of listening to a side or four on a decent turntable and speakers. Would happily never bother with cassettes again obviously

[Dave Bryce]

9 hours ago, Anderton said:

As to whether anyone can hear data compression, I think it depends on the material and the listener's ear training more than anything else. There are programs that can isolate what data compression omits from the music. Once you've heard that, you know what to listen for, and you start hearing it in data-compressed music - mostly transients. It's like how after hearing Auto-Tune a few times, you hear it ALL the time on recordings.

 

 

I agree.

 

Check this out: a few years ago, I was working on an older tune.  I started with a scratch track of bass and drums, and the only copy I had of it was mp3.  I recorded a bunch of new tracks to finish the tune, but the mp3 bass and drums had to stay.  Between the effects and the full res tracks, I thought I did a really good job of dressing the tune up…but when I took it to brother Steph Marsh for mastering (along with several other tunes that did not have any mp3 elements), he totally caught it - asked me if it was possible I had made a mistake and included an mp3 instead of the full res version of the tune, even though most of the tracks were full res.

 

I also think part of being able to detect an mp3 depends on what codec was used to create it - not just the resolution, but the process the codec itself uses.  I compared a few of them a bunch of years ago, and - to my ear, anyway - there was an audible difference between them.  I actually found 128k on some codecs sounded better (to me) than higher res mp3s in other formats.

 

As to the dynamics aspect brother Craig brought up earlier, it’s fairly provable.  I keep a turntable in my studio, and when I look at the metering when comparing a vinyl version of a tune to the CD version, it’s pretty clear how much more the peaks on the meter move and vary when playing the LP back.  I’ve shown this to a few people - rarely fails to surprise them.  Even my (non-musician) wife could spot the difference.

 

dB

[Stokely]

10 hours ago, bill5 said:

As far as noise reduction, yes. Otherwise? phblblblblt.   The analog vs digital thing isn't an either/or. Analog has a warmer, more "saturated" sound. That isn't necessarily better or worse and subjective.

 

That said, as for vinyl vs CDs, I contribute that to CDs no longer holding any value. Vinyl has that nostalgic/analog vibe going for it...CDs have nothing going for them any more really now that you can have "CD quality" soft copies on your computer/device/whatever....same quality, far more convenient.

 

I also don't get the MP3 snobbery frankly and would love to have a blind test of MP3s vs .wav or .flac files and suspect few if that could tell a diff in most if not all cases.

I agree with the first part.  I think the less-clear, saturated sound can be pleasing.  Then however you the fact that music recorded digitally can have analog units/virtual analog plugins applied to the sound!  If it sounds as good, then you have the benefits without the noise, on paper at least.

I disagree about the mp3 vs wav, not in the example I tried.  I had a high-quality mp3 copy of Daft Punk's Random Access Memories, and I loaded a few songs into Metric AB (a referencing plugin) along with a wav version I bought from HD Tracks.   Metric AB lets you volume match (super important, louder sounds better) and select the exact same portion of songs.   The differences were subtle, probably nothing you'd notice if listening to music while out on a walk, but I was really paying attention because I wanted to use this album as a mixing reference source for my current project.   The wav file had a tighter low end; the kick and bass were in specific spots in the soundstage, while the mp3 had them more spread out.  The high end, mainly the cymbals, had a similar "smearing" effect across the spectrum in the mp3.  The different cymbals tended to blend into "cymbals" while on the wav versions they were very distinct.   Again without the wav version to listen to, I would have been happy with the mp3!
 

[Anderton]

9 hours ago, bill5 said:

In pristine conditions maybe, OK. But the thing is tape so easily compromised due to heat, someone touching it, jamming, etc etc etc. From a practicality standpoint, arguing for tape is IMO roughly the same as arguing for floppy disks.

 

I wasn't "arguing" for tape, just pointing out the reality of the situation. If you were recording a classical string quartet, you were better off capturing with tape and Dolby SR than a DAT. Remember, this was back when the world used 16-bit converters, too. Digital wasn't the same as it is now.

 

As to tape in general, LTO tape is still the preferred medium for enterprise archiving. It can do 15 to 30 years of archival storage (more than any digital media I'm aware of except specialized/expensive/slow optical formats like M-Disc BD-R/DVD+R), cartridge capacities go up to 185 GB, it's encrypted, and portable. On the downside, LTO tape is expensive, slow, and the environmental conditions have to be maintained at the right temperature and humidity. But for audio? I couldn't wait to get rid of multitrack tape.

 

I know some people who talk a good game about how they love tape, how it's so much better than digital, etc. etc. So I offered to give them my 2-track mastering recorder for free because I sure as hell don't use it. When push came to shove, they said "uhh...thanks, but no thanks."

[Anderton]

I still think DSD/SACD sounded better than any of 'em so far   And I still think it's because of the output filtering, not the 1-bit technology itself. Kind of moot at this point, and doing multitrack with 1-bit technology is crazy difficult, so...

[spokenward]

1 hour ago, Anderton said:

I know some people who talk a good game about how they love tape, how it's so much better than digital, etc. etc. So I offered to give them my 2-track mastering recorder for free because I sure as hell don't use it. When push came to shove, they said "uhh...thanks, but no thanks."

If you still have it, the world has changed. 

 

Including the work of a Nashville neighbor. https://maramachines.com/

 

It's an audiophile thing now. Unlike a lot of audiophile things, it is a pretty defensible project. 

 

The university and library archival sector is another area of interest.

[Dave Bryce]

1 hour ago, Anderton said:

I still think DSD/SACD sounded better than any of 'em so far   And I still think it's because of the output filtering, not the 1-bit technology itself.

 

 

 I have quite a few SACDs - both stereo and surround - and I believe those are among the best sounding media in my collection.

 

dB

[Bill Heins]

Some of the early CDs sounded god awful! Overly compressed and apparently no one noticed the digital distortion

 

Bill

[AROIOS]

4 hours ago, Dave Bryce said:

...I also think part of being able to detect an mp3 depends on what codec was used to create it - not just the resolution, but the process the codec itself uses.  I compared a few of them a bunch of years ago, and - to my ear, anyway - there was an audible difference between them.  I actually found 128k on some codecs sounded better (to me) than higher res mp3s in other formats...

This is true. Quality among various MP3 codecs 20 years ago varied widely. For example, the Xing codec was popular because it was light on CPU, but it sounded wobbly on lower bit rates. The OG, Fraunhofer's codec only fared slightly better and was the most widely used. These two bad-to-mediocre codecs contributed to a huge amount of mp3 files that gave the format a bad name.
 

Better codecs soon emerged. Apple's AAC sounded better than Fraunhofer's mp3. The free LAME codec also sounded better and gradually swept Xing and Fraunhofer's codecs away. OPUS came along later and beat all of the above codecs. It's the codec Youtube uses to stream the audio of their videos.
 

What also happens from time to time is ignorant users re-encoding low bit rate mp3/aac files to higher bit rate files using better codecs. This doesn't improve the files' audio quality as they wished and simply wastes storage space and bandwidth.
 

So the gist is: When someone says "Mp3 sounds bad", what's actually "bad" could be the codec, the encoding settings, the source material, or their ears. That comment is almost meaningless unless they mention the specific codec and encoding settings used to generate the audio file/stream they heard, and whether it's based on proper source material.

[AROIOS]

3 hours ago, Anderton said:

I still think DSD/SACD sounded better than any of 'em so far   And I still think it's because of the output filtering, not the 1-bit technology itself. Kind of moot at this point, and doing multitrack with 1-bit technology is crazy difficult, so...

Yup,  a couple AES members pointed out years ago, that the audible differences between SACD and CD on the same album, is not a result of the format, but from deliberate re-mixing and re-mastering to make SACD sound deceptively better.

They recorded SACDs and burnt the audio onto good ole CDs, and voila, listeners can't tell the difference in double blind tests.

[Anderton]

1 hour ago, AROIOS said:

They recorded SACDs and burnt the audio onto good ole CDs, and voila, listeners can't tell the difference in double blind tests.

 

I've had the good fortune to be able to capture the same music with 1-bit DSD and PCM, and play back over their respective technologies. So that takes the sneaky SACD practices out of the equation (FWIW I heard the push for SACD from Sony was because it allowed them to get some more mileage out of their original CD-based patents). I felt the difference in the high frequencies was along the same lines as the difference between linear phase and minimal phase filters at high frequencies - nothing that would cause the earth to stop spinning, but noticeable. 

 

Cakewalk can do DSD import/export as well as PCM, so there's any easy well to check out the difference in the comfort of your own studio if 1) you have a way to record DSD, and 2) can play it back without an intervening PCM stage. But that's a mighty big "if," eh?

[AROIOS]

2 minutes ago, Anderton said:

...

I've had the good fortune to be able to capture the same music with 1-bit DSD and PCM, and play back over their respective technologies. So that takes the sneaky SACD practices out of the equation... I felt the difference in the high frequencies was along the same lines as the difference between linear phase and minimal phase filters at high frequencies - nothing that would cause the earth to stop spinning, but noticeable...

That's certainly possible for folks with trained ears. For the vast majority of consumers who were ditching CD for mp3s at the time SACD came out, even Sony's sneaky tricks didn't make big enough of a difference to save the physical discs from their demise.

This also echos the 1db distortion and the loudness war issue you mentioned earlier. iPod, the most popular audio player in human history, had always had an idiotic design flaw: it lacked an audio level limiter, which is one of the most fundamental part of any cassette walkman design. As a result, modern music mastered to the max inevitably distort on iPods as soon as the listener dial in an EQ preset that boosts any frequencies. Did the average consumer notice that? Well, not a single person I know ever complained.

As I mentioned earlier, "good enough" is the name of the game when it comes to consumer audio/video technology and hardware. The nuances we pro nitpickers with proper tools and trained ears/eyes can spot, are rarely the actual factor that makes or breaks a product. Marketing/Psychology does.

(and don't get me started on the shitty photos created by iPhones, you know, the devices Apple and tons of professional reviewers claim to "take the best pictures" 😄)

[spokenward]

So for recording DSD -  RME added this pricey audiophile series, ADI-2/4 Pro SE and ADI-2 Pro FS R Black.

I've got the Tascam DA-3000 which is discontinued (AKM).

The Korg series devices are more available in Japan than here these days.

Mytek has had some in the audiophile market.

(Edit. much later...A couple of Antelope interfaces.)

Am I missing anything? Are any of these passing through PCM first?

 

I did not know that Cakewalk could load DSD (since 2015 😲, I've been sleeping on that). Good tip!

[Mighty Motif Max]

I was just in Walmart the other day, and what do I see? A group of teenagers combing through LP's. Such a strange sight! But hey, I have ~200 old records and enjoy the heck out of them, so I get the appeal. I like the sound honestly.

[ProfD]

I have a collection of cassette tapes, CDs and vinyl recordings.  Nowadays, I hear a lot of compressed audio. 

 

I was a music listener long before I became a musician.  To my ears, the music has always transcended the physical medium.

 

As mentioned in another thread, forums like this one exist to facilitate discussion/debate about technology and analog/digital and the best facsimile of a real acoustic piano or electromechanical KBs, etc,😁 

 

Deep diving into the finer points of technology we use to play and compose and record music is adjacent to the creative process.

 

I'm an old musician now.  I no longer consume music for pleasure.  I mainly listen to to music for inspiration and ideas. 

 

Recorded music is great source material. Even scratched up vinyl records serve a purpose because the music cuts through.😁😎

[Anderton]

As I've always said...professional engineers listen to sound, of which music is a part. Consumers like to music, of which sound is a part

 

[ProfD]

25 minutes ago, Anderton said:

As I've always said...professional engineers listen to sound, of which music is a part. Consumers like to music, of which sound is a part

Absolutely. Recorded sound has been ritical to enhancing our musical listening experience.

 

Sound recordings have gotten a lot better since Edison invented the phonograph and Bell Labs and Berliner improved upon it. 😎