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Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986

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

#341

Post by ScottBurson »

lmm wrote: post #334
ScottBurson wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but that's no barrier to compression , which reduces the dynamic range. Compressed material is all at about the same level. The reason people speak of the "loudness wars" is that after compression, even the parts of the music that would have been quieter are now almost as loud as the peaks. It's actually quite ironic, I think, that compression has become such a fad only now that we have digital media with their…

> Yes, but that's no barrier to compression, which reduces the dynamic range. Compressed material is all at about the same level. The reason people speak of the "loudness wars" is that after compression, even the parts of the music that would have been quieter are now almost as loud as the peaks. The point is that if you want to make a vinyl sound "as loud as possible", you're best off not compressing it, since you c…

This doesn't make sense to me. When I say "the parts of the music that would have been quieter", I'm mostly not speaking of softer passages vs. louder ones. I'm referring to the fact that even within the span of a single measure, the original signal will generally have had significant peaks and valleys. I don't think it's possible, given the number of pairs of adjacent grooves on a vinyl record, for a recording engineer to ensure that no two adjacent grooves have peaks at the same moment.

What makes compressed music sound "loud" is that there's some sound present to the ears at full volume, or nearly so, at all times. It's not that it simply has a higher peak level. Indeed, it's the listener who controls the peak level of the sound that reaches their ears, not the recording engineer — they can always turn the volume up or down as they please. The reason compressed music sounds "loud" is that it has a higher average volume than uncompressed music of the same peak level.

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

#342

Post by lmm »

ScottBurson wrote: post #341
lmm wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, but that's no barrier to compression, which reduces the dynamic range. Compressed material is all at about the same level. The reason people speak of the "loudness wars" is that after compression, even the parts of the music that would have been quieter are now almost as loud as the peaks. The point is that if you want to make a vinyl sound "as loud as possible", you're best off not compressing it, since you c…

This doesn't make sense to me. When I say "the parts of the music that would have been quieter", I'm mostly not speaking of softer passages vs. louder ones. I'm referring to the fact that even within the span of a single measure, the original signal will generally have had significant peaks and valleys. I don't think it's possible, given the number of pairs of adjacent grooves on a vinyl record, for a recording engin…

> This doesn't make sense to me. When I say "the parts of the music that would have been quieter", I'm mostly not speaking of softer passages vs. louder ones. I'm referring to the fact that even within the span of a single measure, the original signal will generally have had significant peaks and valleys.

I don't think that can be right - sound is a waveform so even the loudest notes will oscillate around zero. "Loudness" would usually be defined as something like root-mean-square amplitude, but if we zoom in to talk about a single note (sine wave) then the peak amplitude and the RMS amplitude are in a direct relationship with each other. On the scale of a whole piece, yes there's a difference between average and peak, but on the scale of one groove to the next - a couple of seconds - I don't think there's any practical difference.

The complaint I've heard about "loudness wars" e.g. Californication is precisely that there are no soft passages - every bar is pushed up to full volume. I'm not aware of anyone talking about the effects of compression on a smaller scope than the couple-of-seconds scale.

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

#343

Post by kibibu »

ScottBurson wrote: post #299
kibibu wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a very concrete way, the inability to apply hard-clipped brick-wall limiting and extreme compression is why vinyl often does sound better than CD - the physics of the needle-in-groove mean that there are limits to the amplitudes you can try to encode without bouncing the damn thing out. So vinyl masters often (but not always) avoid the loudness war and have a wider dynamic range.

Hmm, this seems to be a common idea, but I don't think it's true. As I said above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20914699

The problem isn't with the compression part per se, but rather with clipping. The two typically go hand in hand for modern needle-in-the-red CD masters.

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

#344

Post by Jaruzel »

jarjoura wrote: post #295

I think there’s some confusion in here that everyone buying vinyl is repeating the habits of our parents and grandparents. I think there’s this misconception we’re buying records of whatever the latest hit band is with only 3 good songs and mostly filler. Vinyl today is very much about the collecting of good music and taking part in the physical ness of that collection. The b-side is just as good as the A-side, even…

> The b-side is just as good as the A-side

For me this is really important, When I used to collect vinyl I'd seek out 12" special editions of songs simply because of the obscure gems that the artist/label would put on the B-sides. Even now I'm sure that a lot of those B-sides still haven't made it into the digital domain.

I also loved picture discs along with great album art. Both of these things seem to now be a relic of history now that digital music is the de facto method of consumption.

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

#345

Post by lagadu »

cosmotic wrote: post #265
tzs wrote: post #71

Is anyone working on a reasonably priced turntable to play vinyl discs without degrading them? In the mid '80s, Finial Technology announced such a turntable, and had a working unit at CES in 1986. It had a stylus that contained laser interferometers that could very accurately and precisely measure the distance from the stylus to the grove walls. It kept the stylus near, but not touching, the groove, getting the audio…

If only there were a durable music format that had absolute perfect quality, didn't need special handling, no DRM, no compression artifacts, was stereo, and handled frequencies all the way down and all the way up to where humans can hear. Oh, the CD!

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, I'm just saying that CDs have their own issues and aren't perfect.

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

#346

Post by lagadu »

electrograv wrote: post #283
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A completely analog laser scanning solution is entirely practical. There's no reason to sample it digitally. But honestly, this seems like insane overkill. Vinyl has a ridiculously limited dynamic range, and digital recording at 24/48 is practically transparent even with low-end prosumer equipment. At the high end you have to work quite hard to spend more than $4k on a spectacularly clean and neutral studio-grade ADC…

As far as DACs are concerned, you’d be surprised: A few hundred dollars (e.g. Topping D50) can get you drastically better performance than many multi-thousand dollar “audiophile DACs”: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/m... Now as far as speakers are concerned, yes, you’ll need to spend at least a few thousand for a stereo pair capable of doing justice to this level of precision and dynamic r…

Ah yes, ASR. The place where a DAC or amp having a -100db SINAD means it's a terrible piece of hardware despite it being well below the threshold of human listening and the noise floor of the best recording and tube amps, who have significantly higher distortion, are considered terrible because of it despite the vast majority of people who actually listen to them liking them far more than some of the most beloved hardware at ASR (I'm looking at you THX and Topping hardware).

I belived in their swansong and bought into it up until recently, then I tried "terrible" hardware and dear God it sounds so much better.

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

#347

Post by msla »

lagadu wrote: post #345
cosmotic wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only there were a durable music format that had absolute perfect quality, didn't need special handling, no DRM, no compression artifacts, was stereo, and handled frequencies all the way down and all the way up to where humans can hear. Oh, the CD!

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.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_(Vinyl)

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

#348

Post by jacobush »

archontes wrote: post #325
electrograv wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that if we’re pursuing sheer audio fidelity, CD quality is objectively superior to vinyl in every way. However (as others mention), many vinyl listeners are not after objective sound fidelity perfection: For them, the flaws are part of their “retro” charm. However, one note about CD quality — it may not be as perfect as you think! A peer-reviewed meta-analysis has shown that humans can hear the difference bet…

In addition to this, audio engineers mastering albums often have different masters for vinyl vs. CD resulting in different dynamic ranges. It's not just a matter of reproduction. Humans make the products different.

THIS. A super crappy master mix for a CD vs a good mix for vinyl is the reality.

Look at the bottom of this page:

http://brianstagg.co.uk/p_t_a_clipressed/

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

#349

Post by simias »

lagadu wrote: post #345
cosmotic wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only there were a durable music format that had absolute perfect quality, didn't need special handling, no DRM, no compression artifacts, was stereo, and handled frequencies all the way down and all the way up to where humans can hear. Oh, the CD!

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 noise anyway.

>pretty much all CD players have garbage-tier DAC implementations.

A true audiophile I see, anything consumer-grade is "garbage" in order to justify the purchase of ridiculously overpriced equipment. The truth is that it's very cheap to design a decent quality DAC or ADC these days, mainly thanks to digital processing and the fact that those chips are made in huge quantities. Digital filters are high quality these days and the use of oversampling makes it a lot easier to design good analog filters.

Audiophiles are very hard to take seriously because the hobby is 95% snake oil and 5% reasonable engineering. I'm sorry if you're part of the 5% and I overreacted but it's one of these hot buttons for me. I've spent so much time arguing with people that, no, it made to mathematical sense to want 32bit samples or 160kHz audio...

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

#350

Post by ScottBurson »

lmm wrote: post #342
ScottBurson wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't make sense to me. When I say "the parts of the music that would have been quieter", I'm mostly not speaking of softer passages vs. louder ones. I'm referring to the fact that even within the span of a single measure, the original signal will generally have had significant peaks and valleys. I don't think it's possible, given the number of pairs of adjacent grooves on a vinyl record, for a recording engin…

> This doesn't make sense to me. When I say "the parts of the music that would have been quieter", I'm mostly not speaking of softer passages vs. louder ones. I'm referring to the fact that even within the span of a single measure, the original signal will generally have had significant peaks and valleys. I don't think that can be right - sound is a waveform so even the loudest notes will oscillate around zero. "Loud…

> sound is a waveform so even the loudest notes will oscillate around zero

Sure. When I refer to "peaks and valleys" I'm talking about the envelope of the waveform. I think that's standard usage in audio engineering.

I think you should download Audacity or equivalent and look at some waveforms of both uncompressed and compressed music. I think you'll see that there are loudness variations on a much shorter timescale than you expect, and that compression reduces these considerably.

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