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A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

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Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#201

Post by bayindirh »

Sporktacular wrote: post #186
bayindirh wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, you can’t change the mastering of the album you have bought. When the CD version of the album you have bought has subpar audio quality, the abilities of the medium has no value and importance.

"When the CD version of the album you have bought has subpar audio quality" Yes, but these mastering choices could apply to the vinyl version too. In other words, your response had nothing to do with a comparison of the two media.

Nope, you can't apply the same mastering to the vinyl, esp. the latest stonewalling compression/normalization techniques because of RIAA equalization [0].

Without RIAA equalization, it's not possible to keep the needle in the groove with that amount of bass and low end. You can't keep the needle on the track with stonewalling even with RIAA equalization.

As a result, you are limited by the medium itself, hence you have to make milder choices.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#202

Post by EL_Loco »

mod wrote: post #31
jrajav wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the time people will argue that vinyl has "warmth" and this makes it subjectively better. This is true, but it's actually because of the pleasing distortion record players add to the music. Being distortion, even if it improves your listening experience (and this depends on genre, though it generally does), it is certainly objectively worse in terms of accurate reproduction.

Can't the warmth just be reproduced in a digital player anyway?

Sure you can, but then you can't call it 'analog' anymore. But you can reproduce the distort...I mean, the "warmth" with digital filters or whatever and it will pass any blind test.

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#203

Post by bayindirh »

jrajav wrote: post #12
allears wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a little simplistic. You can certainly tell the difference between a good analog recording played on a high quality system vs. an MP3. But once you throw enough samples and bit depth at it (more than are on a standard CD), you get quality that's equivalent to, or better than, most analog media.

44100hz sample rate is enough to reproduce well above the highest frequency even young humans can hear, and 16 bits of depth is enough for 96db of dynamic range, enough to make the noise floor of any consumer system totally inaudible. Standard CDs might not be good enough for archival and further production work (where you also need wiggle room for further processing or format changes), but they have plenty of headro…

> Any more is just placebo.

This is a very simplistic view of things, on many fronts, but I'll try to be as concise as possible.

In a classical wind/bow orchestra, there are more harmonics at play than the 20Hz-20KHz band, and these harmonics affects our perception of the sound and soundstage. However, recreation of this is very hard, because you need both recording and playback chains which can handle these harmonics as well.

To faithfully reproduce such orchestra, you need a speaker for every instrument, ideally with the exact air movement capacity of the instrument you're mirroring. This is not practical. Instead we mic all of them, mix all of them, and add room echo to the mix to capture harmonics as best as we can.

However, this can't replicate some instruments anywhere around its real sound.

Examples are Turkish qanun [0] and Chinese guzheng [1]. These instruments sound bland, flat and shallow on all recordings, but listening them live, directly with your ears is a goose pimlples inducing experience. Higher end stringed instruments have a similar vibe to them.

So, a 16bit/44KHz signal at 20Hz-20KHz band cannot reproduce these instruments with any faith.

Standard CDs, high quality vinyls, lossless files carry a lot of information, but not all information we can process with our ears. Like how even the best digital cameras cannot reproduce the colors we can see with our eyes.

Reaching these resolution levels are neither cheap, nor practical, hence we use what's practical.

As a result, your master-pressed-vinyl possibly can't carry this information either, because the recording chain was not able to capture that amount of information, even if you went all the way to install your own power pole to feed clean power to your impossibly expensive audio equipment with all that capacity to reproduce that sound.

IOW, you can't extract the sound which is not there to begin with.

Your friendly ex-orchestra player reported from its AKAI-AM2850.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanun_(instrument)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guzheng

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#204

Post by lucas_membrane »

mod wrote: post #31
jrajav wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the time people will argue that vinyl has "warmth" and this makes it subjectively better. This is true, but it's actually because of the pleasing distortion record players add to the music. Being distortion, even if it improves your listening experience (and this depends on genre, though it generally does), it is certainly objectively worse in terms of accurate reproduction.

Can't the warmth just be reproduced in a digital player anyway?

The finding some years back was that the harmonic distortion in tube circuits was even harmonics and in solid state was odd harmonics (or maybe vice versa). This could cause tube electronics to sound better than equally good (by measure of thd %) solid state electronics.

This says nothing about the difference between analog and digital recording media unless you think that disc lovers shun solid state electronics or something like that. Do they?

There wasn't much digital sound around when McLuhan said that "The medium is the message." I think that's the substance of this whole brouhaha. What's wrong with rejecting digital media when one deplores the inundating tide of changes in society's tempo, cultural content, aesthetics, and forms of dis-function that have been carried so far and wide by digital media? Isn't change always impugned?

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#205

Post by tzs »

jrajav wrote: post #12
allears wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a little simplistic. You can certainly tell the difference between a good analog recording played on a high quality system vs. an MP3. But once you throw enough samples and bit depth at it (more than are on a standard CD), you get quality that's equivalent to, or better than, most analog media.

44100hz sample rate is enough to reproduce well above the highest frequency even young humans can hear, and 16 bits of depth is enough for 96db of dynamic range, enough to make the noise floor of any consumer system totally inaudible. Standard CDs might not be good enough for archival and further production work (where you also need wiggle room for further processing or format changes), but they have plenty of headro…

> 44100hz sample rate is enough to reproduce well above the highest frequency even young humans can hear

It's enough to reproduce well above what we can hear by the normal mechanism that we use for most of our hearing (sound vibrates the eardrum, which vibrates some tiny bones in the middle ear, which cause fluid in the cochlea to ripple which disturb sensory hairs which we perceive as sound).

Ultrasonic sounds can be conducted to the cochlea via the surrounding bone bypassing the eardrum and middle ear. Those bone conducted ultrasonics can be perceived. See [1].

This is probably not important in music except in maybe a few rare cases.

I'd still like to see better frequency handling though, so that our music wouldn't sound terrible to the dogs and cats that are forced to listen with their owners. We can't normally hear much past 20 KHz (more like 12 KHz for many of us), but they can.

There are several musical instruments that have significant ultrasonic output. It would be an interesting experiment to see if dogs and cats like those instruments live better than they do recorded (or dislike live less than they dislike recorded). Then compare to the same experiment but with instruments that don't have ultrasonic output.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23384569/

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#206

Post by mrandish »

FullyFunctional wrote: post #185
kstrauser wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That whole line of thinking just blows me away. It's possible to accurately sample and reproduce any vinyl recording in the digital realm. It's absolutely not possible to accurately record every digital recording onto vinyl. For instance, it's not hard at all to make bass so loud that it causes the needle to leap out of the track, or treble so high that the needle can't accurately track the high frequency vibrations.…

Flat earth, Scientology, dowsing rods, ... willful ignorance is hard to fight. Anyone with basic understanding of A/D conversion and sampling theory will understand that you can always exceed analog with digital, given enough bits (and 2*16 @ 44.1 kHz is already pretty darn good). In the early days of MPEG Audio, Level 2 (not mp3) I spent a lot of time listening to samples and I was taken aback when I finally traced…

Agreed. So much of the early negativity around "digital" and "compression" was due to avoidable mistakes made when mastering some particular pieces of media back in the early days.

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#207

Post by [deleted] »

Sporktacular wrote: post #188
NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. A CD audio recording can contain literally all the information in the audio spectrum with enough dynamic range to capture human breathing and a jet flyover simultaneously. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist–Shannon_sampling_theor...

You are not understanding his point. Linear PCM systems encode quiet parts of music with a lower signal to noise level than louder parts. So by over-engineering the bit depth, you keep the quantisation noise further from perceptibility than without it. I think everyone gets sampling theory by now, your response was to an audio engineer.

[deleted]

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#208

Post by tzs »

bayindirh wrote: post #203
jrajav wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

44100hz sample rate is enough to reproduce well above the highest frequency even young humans can hear, and 16 bits of depth is enough for 96db of dynamic range, enough to make the noise floor of any consumer system totally inaudible. Standard CDs might not be good enough for archival and further production work (where you also need wiggle room for further processing or format changes), but they have plenty of headro…

> Any more is just placebo. This is a very simplistic view of things, on many fronts, but I'll try to be as concise as possible. In a classical wind/bow orchestra, there are more harmonics at play than the 20Hz-20KHz band, and these harmonics affects our perception of the sound and soundstage. However, recreation of this is very hard, because you need both recording and playback chains which can handle these harmonic…

> To faithfully reproduce such orchestra [...]

It has never been clear to me what the goal of home playback is supposed to be.

Let's simplify from a full orchestra to just a solo piano. Is the goal

1. to sound like it would if that piano was being played in my living room, or

2. to sound like what I'd have heard if I was there in the concert hall sitting in a good seat when the recording was made, or

3. to sound like what it would sound like if a replica of my living room was built inside the concert hall but with walls that do not transmit sound, with my speakers replaced by speaker-sized holes in the wall behind where the speakers normally sit, and I was sitting in that replica living room during the concert?

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#209

Post by bayindirh »

tzs wrote: post #208
bayindirh wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any more is just placebo. This is a very simplistic view of things, on many fronts, but I'll try to be as concise as possible. In a classical wind/bow orchestra, there are more harmonics at play than the 20Hz-20KHz band, and these harmonics affects our perception of the sound and soundstage. However, recreation of this is very hard, because you need both recording and playback chains which can handle these harmonic…

> To faithfully reproduce such orchestra [...] It has never been clear to me what the goal of home playback is supposed to be. Let's simplify from a full orchestra to just a solo piano. Is the goal 1. to sound like it would if that piano was being played in my living room, or 2. to sound like what I'd have heard if I was there in the concert hall sitting in a good seat when the recording was made, or 3. to sound like…

Normally, it’s “2”. Music is mastered to transfer you to the place where it’s recorded. Mastering is just tuning the sound to fit into your music system limits, while keeping the atmosphere as much as possible.

ABBA’s sound is mastered to fit into AM radio and jukeboxes for example. To make the music broadly listenable, for example.

Today everything is so blurry, because there’s no studio per se. It’s just sequenced, vocal is added, mastered, compressed and released (today’s pop). Rock and other stuff is still track recorded, tho.

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#210

Post by noduerme »

ryukoposting wrote: post #103
kstrauser wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That whole line of thinking just blows me away. It's possible to accurately sample and reproduce any vinyl recording in the digital realm. It's absolutely not possible to accurately record every digital recording onto vinyl. For instance, it's not hard at all to make bass so loud that it causes the needle to leap out of the track, or treble so high that the needle can't accurately track the high frequency vibrations.…

I absolutely despise most of the vinyl community. Don't get me wrong, I love my records. I have hundreds of them and I play them regularly. For some reason, almost everyone I come by has this delusion that vinyl is objectively better than a good digital recording. Anyone who dissents from that narrative gets gaslit: "oh what kind of turntable do you have? oh that's not good enough, there's your problem right there."…

>> The end result is a bunch of nerds ruining their credit scores

Hilarious and well put! Speaking as an erstwhile musician, this has been my theory about Guitar Center's business model since the 90s.

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