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Sony plans to make vinyl records again

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Sony plans to make vinyl records again

#321

Post by aurelian15 »

Oh, for goodness sake, Sony, would you please just master CDs decently? I know, that would mean that you release your intellectual property to the world in uncompressed¹ quality, in a world where people frivolously commit abominable criminal acts such as copying and sharing their media.

But pretty please? I don't want to resort to an archaic medium with 10 bit effective dynamic range if I can have 16 bit on a CD. I don't want your petty streaming services. I don't want to download music amateurishly encoded in a lossy format (almost) older than me.²

I know. I'm probably the weirdest of all, longing for this sterile, lossless sound of digital awesomeness. But can I please, for once in ages, buy a CD that has been decently mastered, that I can copy onto my computer and listen to with my headphones and enjoy?

I think I'm now going to put on “Dark Side of the Moon” from 1973 and cry myself to sleep, weeping, because something so old can sound so good, whereas decades of modern music, decades of culture and art have been sacrificed to the capitalist gods of the loudness war.

¹ Both in the dynamic range and audio codec sense. ² MPEG-1 Audio Layer III.

Re: Sony plans to make vinyl records again

#322

Post by peatmoss »

cheeseprocedure wrote: post #212
eanzenberg wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno.. digital music just sounds better, is more consistent, portable, and all around easier to play than vinyl. Why stop there? Do you also churn your own butter, milk your own cows, shave with a straight razor? Personally, I think it's just silly hipster bias.

Due to physical limitations of the medium, mastering the vinyl release of an album is often (usually?) a separate process than mastering the digital version. One of the consequences is less compression/clipping, better dynamic range, etc. for the vinyl version. This can have a huge positive impact on sound quality. You don't have to be a nutbar audiophile to appreciate it, either - you can even hear the difference be…

I've heard that the otherwise snakeoil high-res digital audio recordings tend not to be combatants in the loudness wars.

Re: Sony plans to make vinyl records again

#323

Post by __david__ »

Declanomous wrote: post #116
cr1895 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

12" x 12" artwork/inserts/posters/etc. vs. a small CD box. Many of the records I own are beautifully printed and satisfying to hold. Can be super informative too, with inserts/booklets (of course CDs can also have this info, but often not as nice). Analog is neat. To me, at least. There's a microscopic groove cut into some plastic in which a tiny chunk of diamond connected to a cantilever is pulled through, and the m…

I don't care at all for the act of playing vinyl, but I really love the artwork. I occasionally buy records just for the art. I wish they sold the art separately because it's kind of ludicrous to spend all that money for something that is kind of incidental to the actual product.

Nine Inch Nails did something kind of like that for their latest EP. They sold the art plus a flac download. It wasn’t large 12” art but it was bigger than a cd and… “interactive” (which really just meant “messy”). I would be totally down with more artists doing that.

Re: Sony plans to make vinyl records again

#324

Post by __david__ »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #201
k-mcgrady wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problems I have with CD's that I don't with Vinyl: - CD's scratch and then skip easily - CD's come in horrible plastic covers that break if you look at them wrong. - Skipping to a certain part of a song is much more difficult with CD's. - The benefits vinyl provides (large artwork and liner notes/ lyrics, posters etc.) don't all apply to CD's and at that point there's not much/any benefit CD's have over digital.

> Skipping to a certain part of a song is much more difficult with CD's. Why would you even play the CD? Just rip it once to your media center in a lossless format, and then put it back on the shelf and never touch it again unless you suffer a hard drive failure with no backup. On a media center, it is easy to skip to whatever part of the song you want. Plus, if you don't open the CD's jewel case again after that ini…

Incidentally that’s how I deal with the few records I have. I rip them once to flax’s and then never touch them again. Then I can experience the noisy clicks and pops from the comfort of my phone. :-)

Re: Sony plans to make vinyl records again

#325

Post by cheeseprocedure »

peatmoss wrote: post #322
cheeseprocedure wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Due to physical limitations of the medium, mastering the vinyl release of an album is often (usually?) a separate process than mastering the digital version. One of the consequences is less compression/clipping, better dynamic range, etc. for the vinyl version. This can have a huge positive impact on sound quality. You don't have to be a nutbar audiophile to appreciate it, either - you can even hear the difference be…

I've heard that the otherwise snakeoil high-res digital audio recordings tend not to be combatants in the loudness wars.

Interesting! As much as I loathe the woo around the audiophile industry, I need to learn more about this.

Re: Sony plans to make vinyl records again

#326

Post by kasey_junk »

ovao wrote: post #308
kasey_junk wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not normally considered a hipster and I agree the advantage to vinyl is that it encourages active participation with music (and the art is better). I consume most of my music digitally essentially in the background but if I want to have a music listening session, alone or with friends, I reach for vinyl.

I wonder though: how would you feel if a digital medium forced the a similar ritual? In other words, if the task you had to perform to get music playing was as involved as putting on a record, would you gain the same sense of satisfaction from it? Or would it just feel contrived?

I'd probably be into it but why? I tend to buy new vinyl that comes with digital download or cheap second hand vinyl. This works for me.

Re: Sony plans to make vinyl records again

#327

Post by flavio81 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #292
flavio81 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is theoric considerations, not practical. For frequencies from about 2Khz to the limit, the dynamic range of the LP is over 100dB. The quoted 60-66dB dynamic range is only because takes into account low frequency rumble. CDs are mastered with 44KHz sampling rate which is now generally accepted as too low for high quality audio. Yes according to Nyquist, you could capture up to 22KHz with no problem with such sam…

> CDs are mastered with 44KHz sampling rate which is now generally accepted as too low for high quality audio. According to who?

According to a lot of music lovers and studio engineers, if you are within that scene.

Re: Sony plans to make vinyl records again

#328

Post by flavio81 »

teilo wrote: post #225
flavio81 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is theoric considerations, not practical. For frequencies from about 2Khz to the limit, the dynamic range of the LP is over 100dB. The quoted 60-66dB dynamic range is only because takes into account low frequency rumble. CDs are mastered with 44KHz sampling rate which is now generally accepted as too low for high quality audio. Yes according to Nyquist, you could capture up to 22KHz with no problem with such sam…

> This is theoric considerations, not practical. With all due respect, there is nothing remotely practical about the theoretical ability of any medium to record frequencies above 22Khz. Do you play your CD4 quadrophonic records to your pets? On what? Ribbon tweeters? Furthermore, the ability to perceive dynamic range attenuates with frequency. So once again, you are back at the limits of human hearing, even if I acce…

> And what you say about DACs has not been true for many years. These days, even run-of-the-mill DACs employ oversampling.

Oversampling does not solve the issue i have commented, which is that 44KHz is too low. Read about filtering at the ADC and DAC stages. Read about the pros/cons of using FIR-digital, IIR-digital, brickwall-analog filters at them. Oversampling with a FIR filter was already used on the second CD player on the market, the Marantz CD63 aka Philips CD-100 of 1980. All through the eighties all kinds of DAC+filter combinations have been used and now in 2017, despite any combination you use, higher-resolution (say, 96Khz sampling rate) audio sounds better. 44KHz isn't enough.

You see, what happens is as you approach the 22KHz limit, all sorts of nasty stuff will happen with the audio. No matter what filter you use, the upper octave (say 10-20KHz) will have any of the following ills:

- ringing - rippled frequency response - wild phase shifts. - pre-echo or post-echo

So, again, let me repeat: 44KHz isn't high enough. Using a higher sampling rate like 96KHz or more, allows to move such problems away from the audible range.

> With all due respect, there is nothing remotely practical about the theoretical ability of any medium to record frequencies above 22Khz. Do you play your CD4 quadrophonic records to your pets? On what? Ribbon tweeters?

Yes there is. What this means is that a system that can resolve up to 50KHz will have clearer reproduction of the 10-20KHz range, which is so important to add definition to the sound. "Clearer" as in "less artifacts and distortions."

> It is also relevant that the dynamic range of vinyl is a function of the circumference of a track, and decreases as the record plays. It also decreases every time you play a record.

What decreases on the inner grooves is the ability to record higher levels for the high frequency ranges (>14Khz). And even this is a limitation that is self-imposed by record cutting engineers to make the record easily playable on the cheapest kind of stylus, the 0.7mil spherical stylus.

Advanced stylus shapes (line-contact, shibata, hyperelliptical, Fritz Gyger FG70, JICO SAS) wouldn't have any problem with this.

Re: Sony plans to make vinyl records again

#329

Post by zeep »

zeep wrote: post #273
bcrescimanno wrote: post #144

As someone who started collecting vinyl about 3 years ago, it's about the difference between passive and active involvement in music. So much of our music consumption these days is a largely passive activity. We have music in our headphones while we work. We have music on in our cars while we drive. We have music on in the background of social events. While modern digital formats have given us true ubiquity of music…

Why can't you plug your iphone in your home stereo and "listen"?

For me, i cant listen unless the band is playing live in front of me...

Re: Sony plans to make vinyl records again

#330

Post by flavio81 »

kazinator wrote: post #192

Frank Zappa on vinyl, BAM (Bay Area Music magazine) [1987]: http://www.afka.net/Articles/1987-01_BAM.htm BAM: Working with a computerized synthesizer, do you find that vinyl is no longer the most desirable way to present your music? Will you be releasing CD-only recordings? FZ: Well, vinyl never really was all that terrific a medium anyway. Some people cling to the belief that vinyl sounds better. I don't know. Not t…

Frank Zappa fan here.

The ironic part of all this is that FZ records are a case for getting into LP records. For example the original version of the Hot Rats album (1969) has the original released audio, while the CD version (1987) has a totally different remix, with different instruments in the mix, different edits of the solos, etc. Like a different album.

The "You are what you is" LP (1981) shows excellent sound quality while the CD (1987?) is one of the CDs with most atrociuous sound quality ever made, this is widely acknowledge. Not due to the digital medium, but due to wrongly applied compression.

The "Shut up and play your guitar" album has tracks recorded in 24-track analog tape versus 24-track digital tape on the same CD. It is curious, but the analog tracks sound remarkably better than the digital tracks. I know, this is a digital CD, but the quality difference is there.

EDIT:

> FZ: You do get different stuff, and the reason you do is that the dynamic range of the digital tape is 90 dB and the dynamic range of a record is about 45 to 50 dB.

The signal-to-noise ratio of a LP is about 66dB if you consider the low frequency spectrum, which includes rumble. Regarding dynamic range, uf you consider only the high frequencies (>1KHz), dynamic range approaches 100dB on the higher end of the spectrum. This is thanks to the RIAA equalization curve.

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