Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986

nme.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 410 posts

Re: Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986

#351

Post by simias »

CalRobert wrote: post #240
simias wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember reading an article about somebody 3D-printing vinyls a couple of years ago. It sort-of worked but it wasn't quite there yet. Still, 3D printing technologies improves very fast nowadays so maybe in the not-so-far future it'll make more sense to just print a new vinyl from the master the current one is too badly damaged rather than spend money on a super expensive turntable? In either case I feel like it's s…

Many people swear their subjective experience of the music is better if not digitized. I'm not one of them, but I doubt digitizing vinyl is going to satisfy them. After all, why get the vinyl in the first place?

That's my point, I think what the parent is asking is antithetical to the vinyl experience.

That being said what I propose with 3D-printing is almost certainly what effectively happens with vinyls these days. I doubt music labels maintain a completely separate and parallel analog workflow in order to have "pure" vinyls at the end. Why bother when you can take the digital master and dump it onto the disk and nobody will be able to tell the difference?

Re: Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986

#352

Post by dagw »

msla wrote: post #347
lagadu wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CD quality isn't that good (sample rate is fine, bitrate isn't) and it definitely has compression artifacts at the low end but that's a nitpick. That said, the biggest problem with the CD is that good CD transports are few and far between and pretty much all CD players have garbage-tier DAC implementations. edit: to be clear, a CD will have far more resolution and technical capacity available than a vinyl ever will,…

CDs have better fidelity than vinyl. Vinyl sounds more like vinyl than CDs do, until a specific piece of vinyl is reduced to a shambles by time. People who really like vinyl have a bad habit of equivocating between the above two statements, using "better" to mean either "greater fidelity" (which is wrong) or "sounds more like vinyl" (which is a tautology) without signalling which meaning they mean. https://wiki.hydro…

The other aspect is that, especially for older music (say anything recording over 30 years old), the CD master is often different than the Vinyl master. In some cases this difference in mastering can lead to people preferring the vinyl over the CD and claiming vinyl "sounds better", when in fact all it is is they prefer the way the vinyl was mastered.

Re: Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986

#353

Post by lagadu »

simias wrote: post #349
lagadu wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CD quality isn't that good (sample rate is fine, bitrate isn't) and it definitely has compression artifacts at the low end but that's a nitpick. That said, the biggest problem with the CD is that good CD transports are few and far between and pretty much all CD players have garbage-tier DAC implementations. edit: to be clear, a CD will have far more resolution and technical capacity available than a vinyl ever will,…

You'd have to come up with a good source to convince me that 16bits per sample is not good enough for consumer audio (or that you could tell the difference even in perfect conditions. So might be able to hear it, the vast majority of people won't) but beyond that it doesn't really matter in this discussion because vinyls have a much worse fidelity. If you sample vinyl audio at more than 16bits you'll just be sampling…

> A true audiophile I see, anything consumer-grade is "garbage" in order to justify the purchase of ridiculously overpriced equipment.

Actually I'm rather fond of the $80 SDAC and it stands tall among other, more expensive stuff I have (I'm listening to it as type this in fact). It's miles ahead of any CD player DAC. Seriously, a CD transport into a cheap DAC will sound very noticeably better. Admittedly I've only sampled about a dozen or so supposedly good players and eventually lost interest so it's not a big sample pool.

I'm with you in that I also agree that it's dumb how most amplitude-signal DACs market "32bit/768khz" despite that sample rate being effectively useless and the noise floor in DS chips being at around ~20 bits worth of resolution and that's a best case scenario.

edit: honestly when it comes to amps and dacs, in my experience, there is no spec or measurement that correlates with how good it sounds so with those I pretty much gave up on anything other than my ears.

Re: Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986

#354

Post by guywhocodes »

simias wrote: post #349
lagadu wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CD quality isn't that good (sample rate is fine, bitrate isn't) and it definitely has compression artifacts at the low end but that's a nitpick. That said, the biggest problem with the CD is that good CD transports are few and far between and pretty much all CD players have garbage-tier DAC implementations. edit: to be clear, a CD will have far more resolution and technical capacity available than a vinyl ever will,…

You'd have to come up with a good source to convince me that 16bits per sample is not good enough for consumer audio (or that you could tell the difference even in perfect conditions. So might be able to hear it, the vast majority of people won't) but beyond that it doesn't really matter in this discussion because vinyls have a much worse fidelity. If you sample vinyl audio at more than 16bits you'll just be sampling…

Last I checked it is 14bit. Very long time ago, but I'm very sure it used to be 14 and not sure if it is 16 now. Regardless I'm sure a lot older CDs have a quarter of the fidelity as a result

Re: Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986

#355

Post by andybak »

tzs wrote: post #326
Godel_unicode wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also make an infinite number of perfect replicas of your CDs. You can carry backups of every CD ever made on a flashdrive that fits in your jeans pocket, then recreate any of them at any time with no degradation in quality. There are some quasi-plausible arguments for vinyl, but arguing that durability is one of them is hilariously myopic.

> You can carry backups of every CD ever made on a flashdrive that fits in your jeans pocket Gracenote had 3 598 785 CDs in their database in 2005 [1], so I'll take that as a lower bound on the number of CDs ever made. I don't know what the largest flash drive that will fit in a jeans pocket is, but the largest I was able to find is 2 TB, but SanDisk showed a 4 TB prototype at CES 2019, so I'll go with that. Assuming…

Perceptually lossless and mathematically lossless are two different things. I'd be happy with the former.

Re: Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986

#356

Post by projektfu »

guywhocodes wrote: post #354
simias wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd have to come up with a good source to convince me that 16bits per sample is not good enough for consumer audio (or that you could tell the difference even in perfect conditions. So might be able to hear it, the vast majority of people won't) but beyond that it doesn't really matter in this discussion because vinyls have a much worse fidelity. If you sample vinyl audio at more than 16bits you'll just be sampling…

Last I checked it is 14bit. Very long time ago, but I'm very sure it used to be 14 and not sure if it is 16 now. Regardless I'm sure a lot older CDs have a quarter of the fidelity as a result

"There was a long debate over the use of 14-bit (Philips) or 16-bit (Sony) quantization, and 44,056 or 44,100 samples/s (Sony) or approximately 44,000 samples/s (Philips). When the Sony/Philips task force designed the Compact Disc, Philips had already developed a 14-bit D/A converter (DAC), but Sony insisted on 16-bit. In the end, 16 bits and 44.1 kilosamples per second prevailed. Philips found a way to produce 16-bit quality using its 14-bit DAC by using four times oversampling.[9]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_Digital_Audio#Aud...

Re: Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986

#357

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

phicoh wrote: post #152
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #66

CDs are a nearly-perfect format and it's sad to see them decline. Mainstream digital music stores don't even offer CD quality, and streaming services are antithetical to preservation and allow content to disappear overnight.

The thing that got me to stop buying CDs for the most part is how badly they are mastered. In past it was some labels that put out badly mastered CDs, these days artists that once produced excellent albums now seems to accept a final result that tries to win the loudness war.

Yes, unfortunately mastering is an issue. It's the only reason that new “superior to CD” formats ever sound better (aside from perhaps extra surround channels), and entirely not the fault of the format.

Re: Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986

#358

Post by masklinn »

dagw wrote: post #352
msla wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CDs have better fidelity than vinyl. Vinyl sounds more like vinyl than CDs do, until a specific piece of vinyl is reduced to a shambles by time. People who really like vinyl have a bad habit of equivocating between the above two statements, using "better" to mean either "greater fidelity" (which is wrong) or "sounds more like vinyl" (which is a tautology) without signalling which meaning they mean. https://wiki.hydro…

The other aspect is that, especially for older music (say anything recording over 30 years old), the CD master is often different than the Vinyl master. In some cases this difference in mastering can lead to people preferring the vinyl over the CD and claiming vinyl "sounds better", when in fact all it is is they prefer the way the vinyl was mastered.

IIRC that was one of the huge consequences of the loudness wars: you can't really master loud vynils, so they've avoided clipped mastering.

Re: Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986

#359

Post by r_c_a_d »

lightedman wrote: post #306
jonhohle wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have CDs from the early 90s that still play fine. I have vinyl from the 70s that plays fine as well. I can resurface the CDs, not so much the vinyl.

I have CDs from the 80s and 90s that are eaten by metal-eating bacteria. Good luck resurfacing that layer.

Try contacting the original publisher. I did this with the small number of my discs that "rotted" and they were replaced with brand new ones without question. Probably because the industry made such a big deal about them "lasting forever" at the time of release. One disc was not replaceable (it was a weird compilation album that was no longer available) but the publisher let me pick another disc from their catalogue instead.
Post reply on HN