371–380 of 410 posts
So I've been thinking a lot about this video recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ2czFuIYmQ It talks about, demonstrates and measures the air quality around vinyl. Apparently the things are leaching dangerous compounds into the air constantly, especially when being played. It made his air quality measuring device give an alarm, instead of just reporting the number of particles or something. I'm not sure, maybe…
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!
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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…
That'll fit in my pocket, so that's 240 million megabit, 160 million seconds, or 2.7 million minutes, about 1 million songs. OK not every song ever, but a good portion, and possibly every song that's been in the charts.
I did see one claim that there had been as many as 100 million songs ever recorded, which would mean the density won't be there fore another 15 years or so.
An average person can expect to live upto about 2.5 billion seconds, which requires (for stereo 44.1khz 16 bit), about 220TB - 2.7TB a year. Given the growth of storage, you could record everything you hear from now to forever, keeping it in your pocket.
So I've been thinking a lot about this video recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ2czFuIYmQ It talks about, demonstrates and measures the air quality around vinyl. Apparently the things are leaching dangerous compounds into the air constantly, especially when being played. It made his air quality measuring device give an alarm, instead of just reporting the number of particles or something. I'm not sure, maybe…
I lost my dad to cancer last year, and I think it can be maddening to try to unwind the causes. I think when you lose somebody, the natural impulse can be to reach out for a cause, at least so you can understand it, and there's a tendency to seize on any evidence or theory, no matter how weak, just to have somewhere to lay down the blame. So you might be right that vinyl records are dangerous, or maybe that had no im…
The video creator uses an air pollution meter[0] to find out that his records are causing very high PM 2.5, VOC, and formaldehyde. The vinyl records seem to only need to be taken out of their sleeves.
The results look shocking. There have to be some HN users who have the knowledge and equipment to attempt to replicate this experiment. Please do that and share!
If I had to guess, I would have said CD beats vinyl in early 90s. Or maybe I'm just not taking cassettes into account.
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Since "real" was in quotes, I assume they're talking about the change to sound quality that is caused by the physical touching of the devices. It's not necessarily more clear or better, it's just different, and that's the point of doing something so retro. But if you aren't actually doing that thing, it loses a lot of the psychological value. It's similar in some sense to the reasons why people go to see live concert…
I don't see how CDs, in the abstract, can really be different from records, in that, surely you could apply a suitable filter to a CD decoder to make the output sound exactly like a record. Especially given modern computing power. It's just that, I assume, people have chosen not to.
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I hope you’re /s
Partly. When I read his comment I remembered an argument some people had in HN a few months back where they were saying there's no point in listening to music in a car unless you had their particular brand and model of sound system because you don't get the full experience. My thought at the time was that unless they have a string orchestra in the back seat, they're not getting the full experience. I still maintain t…
And strangely enough, even with the usually great "right to repair" laws in the EU, unless you have a very specific and expensive license that takes many years to request, it is actually highly illegal to perform certain kinds of repairs on your string orchestra.
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…
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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 sa…
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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…
https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/134...
Additionally, this is purely talking about loudness dynamic range, not even including resolution or JND (just noticeable difference). I will demonstrate to you below how even 20 bits per sample is insufficient in some cases.
Imagine for a moment that you could argue that the human hearing threshold of quantization error is only 4 bits (only 16 discrete values!) at the sound level of a pin dropping (10db). Now, I think we can all agree that’s absurd; we need a lot more than just 16 discrete amplitude values to represent the sound of a pin drop indistinguishable from reality to a human ear. But for the moment, let’s be really really generous to your point and assume it’s enough!
Now, let’s suppose we want to extend the recording so sounds at 110db appear later on (say, an intense bass explosion in an action movie after a quiet scene early on). To do this without clipping, what range of discrete values do we need? 110db-10db = 100db = 100,000x greater amplitude than the pin drop. This means we need to be able to represent peak amplitude values of 1,600,000.
This exceeds the ability of 16 bits to losslessly represent the quiet 10db pin drop and 110db explosions within the same movie’s audio track! You would need at least 21 bits in this example. And I’ve been generous with my assumptions here, making the extreme assumption that even 4bits per sample is enough to record a 10db pin drop, which is clearly not enough.
If you think 110db is unrealistic for brief periods, it’s not, even for music: bass frequencies in particular can reach extreme amplitudes that might surprise you. I recently played an extremely well recorded orchestral piece at reference volume on my equipment and was so impressed by the dynamic range, I later measured the decibel levels (C-weighted). The quietest moments are around 65-70db, increases to 80-90db at times, and peaks several times momentarily to 105db when the bass drum hits (you feel it like a punch of an air wave)! It turns out this is exactly how real bass drums measure. Yet, the drum hit doesn’t sound unbearable loud (as treble would be at that decibel level), so much as tactile, because much of that energy is subsonic.
If you do much research into perceptual psychology studies, you’ll see just how surprisingly difficult it can be to completely pin down the limits of human perception on average, let alone including outliers among the human population. In that sense, it’s entirely reasonable that a durable high fidelity recording format that holds up to time should be over-engineered, so there’s at least no worry that some study will prove it’s missing something later.
That said, I don’t really agree with the parent post that most DACs are horrible, but I can’t comment on CD player DACs since I don’t use physical media. Most phone DACs are quite good. Most PC DACs are horrible not because of the DAC but because buzzing noises from system clocks and other sources always appear on my speakers (it’s very loud and noticeable), so I’m forced to use a cheap $20 external DAC, which quite frankly is nearly as good as anything else you’ll get at any price.