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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

#211

Post by Tsiklon »

kstrauser wrote: post #19
bayindirh wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless it’s brick-wall normalized during mastering.

That's a real thing, to be sure. The Loudness Wars have completely ruined any number of otherwise decent recordings. The worst I ever heard was Dropkick Murphys's "The Meanest of Times" which had the dynamic range of an air conditioner in Phoenix. Still, you can always take a great analog recording, pipe it into a good ADC, and listen to that sample forever without degradation. I think almost everything can play FLAC…

Metallica's Death Magnetic was another truly dreadful example of the loudness war - Thankfully a better mastered release came out in 2015. I've just got my hands on this release and comparing it against my original copy it is a night and day improvement - especially on "All Nightmare Long".

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

#212

Post by kstrauser »

analog31 wrote: post #152
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.…

There's no a priori reason why any recording medium needs to have a flat response curve, so long as the curve is known so it can be reversed. The reason for the RIAA curve is that most sound has an inverse relationship between amplitude and frequency. The RIAA recording curve limits the overall amplitude of the groove, allowing for better management of dynamic range and distortion in the cutting and playback processe…

More people own CD players than record players. Indie bands would be better off selling CDs if that were really the main intention.

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

#213

Post by dopylitty »

Honestly the thing that surprised me most was how real everyone in the story was.

The record store owner is a real dude. The record company has a bunch of real engineers who care about the product. Even the executives seem somewhat human.

It’s such a refreshing change from faceless stores with ever changing all caps names on faceless enormous e-commerce sites selling mass produced garbage.

And fleecing audiophiles is just good clean fun anyway.

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

#214

Post by crooked-v »

JJMcJ wrote: post #172
jgust wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just watching the record spin is so incredibly satisfying.

Yes, a connection to the physical world. Sometimes especially on Zoom I look at my cabling and think it's amazing that images of other people and their voices are going through that cable. Only on Zoom and similar video conferencing. For all other uses I don't even think about it.

You may find VR social environments interesting.

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

#215

Post by kazinator »

Edman274 wrote: post #76
kazinator wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 100% fine for someone to say that they subjectively prefer the sound quality of a record player to a CD It's not intellectually fine, only fine in the sense that it's well within the bounds of free speech.

A digital recording has to be mastered with the understanding that it could end up getting played on a car stereo, on a bluetooth boombox, on cell phone speakers, in bluetooth earbuds, at a dance party with a DJ or on a hi-fi stereo setup that looks like the one from the old Maxell "blown away" ad. A recording on a vinyl record doesn't. The person mastering a record doesn't need to care about bluetooth earbuds, car s…

Nobody who is mastering records gives a damn about bluetooth boomboxes or phone speakers; and there is no way to optimize for a phone speaker and the "Maxell blown away" stereo setup.

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

#216

Post by kazinator »

JJMcJ wrote: post #163
ryukoposting wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."…

I remember when CDs were very very new the first review of them in an audiophile magazine a friend subscribed to. The reviewer was quite unhappy. The next month he reviewed a different player. He basically retracted his opinion of CDs but said the player from the previous month was obviously terrible, at least the particular one that he did his review on, if not the entire brand. And for audiophiles themselves, I not…

I will have you know I have great taste in total harmonic distortion and frequency response!

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

#217

Post by [deleted] »

323 wrote: post #95
com2kid wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the "warmth" generated by from literally any possible analog circuit can be reproduced digitally. Physics doesn't care about people's beliefs, but sadly many people also don't care about physics.

In theory. In practice, if I give you a random analog box, transforming it into an accurate DSP algorithm it's an extremely difficult problem. Which is why people instead of doing that, they recreate the "idea" (reverb, delay, ...) digitally, but it's not a copy.

[deleted]

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

#218

Post by staticautomatic »

kstrauser wrote: post #5
gwern wrote: post #2

"The fallout of the MoFi revelation has thrown the audiophile community into something of an existential crisis. The quality of digitized music has long been criticized because of how much data was stripped out of files so MP3s could fit on mobile devices. But these days, with the right equipment, digital recordings can be so good they can fool even the best ears. Many of MoFi’s now-exposed records were on Fremer and…

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’ve heard stories about things like the cannon sounds in the Telarc vinyl of the 1812 Overture blowing out unfiltered speakers. Are they myths?

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

#220

Post by bigiain »

kstrauser wrote: post #5
gwern wrote: post #2

"The fallout of the MoFi revelation has thrown the audiophile community into something of an existential crisis. The quality of digitized music has long been criticized because of how much data was stripped out of files so MP3s could fit on mobile devices. But these days, with the right equipment, digital recordings can be so good they can fool even the best ears. Many of MoFi’s now-exposed records were on Fremer and…

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.…

> It's absolutely, 100% fine for someone to say that they subjectively prefer the sound quality of a record player to a CD.

I love listening to vinyl. But I’m not gonna lie to myself and say “it sounds better”. The engineer/scientist in me knows it doesn’t, and the pragmatist/experimentalist in me knows that even if I can reliably detect differences between a good digital recording and a good vinyl copy of a song (which I’m not convinced I really can) there is nit nearly enough difference ever to say one is better than the other.

I like the ceremony of playing vinyl. It adds to my enjoyment, but in the kind of way that a Japanese tea ceremony “improves the taste” of tea.

Also, a long time back I realised that listening to hifi _gear_ leads only to criticism and unhappiness, while listening to great music leads to joy. So I mostly have given up critically listening to “gear”. A great song or album can be a thing of joy coming out of your laptop speakers. Coltrane or Ellen Allien or Polyphia are no less amazingly talented in shitty phone earbuds compared to my thousands of dollars of living room hifi. I’m too old to want to argue about “clarity of soundstage” or “time alignment in the tweeter crossover”, I just want to rock out or dance or groove along to great tunes. I can do that with a 100% analog signal path in my lounge room, or in cheap Bluetooth earbuds inside my motorcycle helmet with a 97db noise floor…

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