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Vinyl trend causes discord

F1eng said:
We seem to have degenerated again into the thorny question of whether humans can hear/sense over 20kHz.
It has always been a mystery to me why this would matter anyway. Most golden age micrphones only go up to 12-15kHz, pretty well no analogue tape deck is much use above 20kHz and record decks can theoretically give output above 20kHz only with a limited range of stylus profiles and only if perfectly aligned.
I am astonished that so much heartach seems to go into this questionable area when most systems do not cope with the lowest 1 to 2 audible octaves at all. There is absolutely no question that this is audible to everyone of all ages and easily reproduced by all hifi electronics and sources. Speakers and room interactions are difficult to optimise but, my dear god, why oh why do we go on and on about half an octave of debatably audible and important upper harmonics and, apparently not bother about the huge amount of vastly more important and indubitably audible bass in of our systems??????????
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In my case the hf interests me because bass on CDs usually sounds excellent, and often much better than on vinyl where it has usually been high-passed and monauralised. If there is an area where CD recordings disappoint, for me at least, it is when the drummer whacks a cymbal.
 
Mescalito said:
Why ignorant, Nic?
He is expressing an opinion, backed up with some salient facts/reasons as to why he holds these opinions. Just because these opinions and facts/reasons do not support your position does not make them ignorant.

With regard to your assertion that if vinyl playback were distorted or lacking, you would not be listening, the very fact that you do listen gives lie to that statement. It is demonstrably true that vinyl playback, in comparison to any lossless digital playback is noisier, more distorted and has inferior resolution. Therefore you are effectively saying that you actually prefer the inferior fidelity of the vinyl format. Of course there is nothing wrong with that. You pays your money & takes your choice.

Chris
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Ignorant because the assumption is always that we who enjoy vinyl as well as digital are duped by some rosy aspect of the sound. I am not. I listen to vinyl because; in terms of detail it matches and often surpasses the CD equivalent. I hear more nuance in instrumental timbres and vocals from my record player and am always left smiling with the quality of attack (and decay which seems a problem for CD e.g. in reverberant classical recordings). Unless the record is for the bin, I do not perceive surface noise and it is always possible to hear tape noise on an analogue sourced recording of, say, the 1960s. The only artefact I dislike is print-through which is a tape problem.

The fact that Tony L often states that it’s perfectly possible to throw a CD/LP dem on mastering says it all; that, all things being equal, LP replay can be the equal of 16/44.1 in any domestic environment. The figures don’t bear that out, I know, but there it is.

I for one wouldn’t be without either and will continue to enjoy both.

No amount of battering us over the head with facts and figures will help your cause. It is lost, because we like what we hear.

For the removal of doubt: 16/44.1 is technically superior to vinyl. But vinyl sounds just as good if not better to my ears and nothing you can say will alter a fact which is demonstrable in my living room. If you don’t like it, tough.
 
Nic Robinson said:
Ignorant because the assumption is always that we who enjoy vinyl as well as digital are duped by some rosy aspect of the sound. I am not. I listen to vinyl because; in terms of detail it matches and often surpasses the CD equivalent. I hear more nuance in instrumental timbres and vocals from my record player and am always left smiling with the quality of attack (and decay which seems a problem for CD e.g. in reverberant classical recordings). Unless the record is for the bin, I do not perceive surface noise and it is always possible to hear tape noise on an analogue sourced recording of, say, the 1960s. The only artefact I dislike is print-through which is a tape problem.

The fact that Tony L often states that it’s perfectly possible to throw a CD/LP dem on mastering says it all; that, all things being equal, LP replay can be the equal of 16/44.1 in any domestic environment. The figures don’t bear that out, I know, but there it is.

I for one wouldn’t be without either and will continue to enjoy both.

No amount of battering us over the head with facts and figures will help your cause. It is lost, because we like what we hear.

For the removal of doubt: 16/44.1 is technically superior to vinyl. But vinyl sounds just as good if not better to my ears and nothing you can say will alter a fact which is demonstrable in my living room. If you don’t like it, tough.
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I am quite happy with the fact that vinyl sounds better to your ears, no has ever been challenging that fact. There is no lost cause.
 
adamdea said:
I am quite happy with the fact that vinyl sounds better to your ears, no has ever been challenging that fact. There is no lost cause.
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More specifically there is no "right" format; rather than your previous assertion that fans of vinyl prefer distortion.
 
sonddek said:
We have come a long way from my original query.

One point that I didn't get around to making is that while a perfect square wave is supposedly impossible, in fact a good speaker should, and can get quite close at lower frequencies. An ideal speaker would be able to produce a moderate approximation to a square wave at higher frequencies too. The relevance of this to music is that the high frequencies of a signal wave can be quite unpredictable, possibly containing some very abrupt wave-fronts, even if only of small amplitude. We might refer to this as 'micro-dynamics'. It surprised me that 44.1k and 48k efforts to reproduce a square wave in Audacity sounded so different, and could only be described as a dramatic fail. Don't forget, this is not about whether the speakers can do it, but rather it is about why two 13kHz square waves sound so different. It makes me wonder whether sampling rates might affect the audible tone of high frequency "micro dynamics". It would be interesting to do an experiment in this area to find out whether there isn't in fact a reliable way to distinguish 44.1k and 48k encodings of hf tones of various shapes. Does anyone have any links to research on this?
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The abruptness of a wavefront really is the same as the maximum frequency in the signal. The Time and frequency domains are interchangeable. This means that when you band limit (eg by using a real world microphone) you affect the abruptness of the change too. But all is not lost- this is all taken into account by the limits on frequency resolution of human hearing. anyway a 20Khz sine wave enables you to get from 0 to peak in 1/80000 of a second, which isn;t bad.

There was a rather heated exchange between James Johnston and some auiphiles about the time resolution of 16/44. The upshot is that suprising though it may seem 16/44 can resolve events happening much closer together than the sample interval- IIRC the maximum resoltion is the sample interval divided by (two to the power of the bit depth) divided by 2 pi

It occurs to me that there is a possible explanation for squarewaves sounding different on 44Khz and 48Khz sampling- but it would i think depend on the filters being very different. I don't think the sampling rate itself would make any difference if the squarewave was properly band-limited prior to sampling.
Perhaps you should ask Werner.
 
Greg said:
More specifically there is no "right" format; rather than your previous assertion that fans of vinyl prefer distortion.
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This is the point at which we are going round in circles. There is a perfectly good explanation which is consistent with all the measurments- people like distortion.

The "[some] people like noise and distortion hypothesis" fits the facts, is perfectly rational and enables people to like whatever they like. It can also gain some support from the "people like dynamic compression" theory for which there is also lots of evidence.

The "vinyl is superior. It's not that i like noise and distortion it's just better honestly" argument is the one for which there is no evidence.
 
adamdea said:
This is the point at which we are going round in circles. There is a perfectly good explanation which is consistent with all the measurments- people like distortion.

The "[some] people like noise and distortion hypothesis" fits the facts, is perfectly rational and enables people to like whatever they like. It can also gain some support from the "people like dynamic compression" theory for which there is also lots of evidence.

The "vinyl is superior. It's not that i like noise and distortion it's just better honestly" argument is the one for which there is no evidence.
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Not a very scientific method, just demonstrates your faith (quasi-religious faith ? :) that the theory must play out the way your bias predicts when experiencing the application. I'm afraid it doesn't.

What seems to be the case is vinyl can do a more convincing job and 16/44.1 a less convincing one when compared and contrasted.

Vice versa of course as 16/44.1 has the potential to also sound great and vinyl's format does not make it intrinsically a winner.

The route cause does appear to be poor mastering though.
 
Nic Robinson said:
The only artefact I dislike is print-through which is a tape problem.
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Hi Nic,
I think you -may- be confusing tape print-through with pre-echo.
I would be very surprised if any print through ends up on an LP since most will be mastered fairly soon after recording and print through develops over a (long) period of time in storage. Recordings made from vintage master tapes may show this but from new ones - unlikely.
Pre-echo OTOH is fairly common and an artefact of the LP cutting process. It happens when the engineer is trying to pack a longer time onto the record side than will properly fit. Then whilst cutting the laquer the cutter is close enough to the groove one rotation behind that it distorts the already-cut groove. It is a well known shortcoming of trying to pack more time onto a side than can be properly cut.

It is the thing which annoys me most about LPs too. Otherwise I find my records generally nice to listen to.
 
adamdea said:
This is the point at which we are going round in circles. There is a perfectly good explanation which is consistent with all the measurments- people like distortion.

The "[some] people like noise and distortion hypothesis" fits the facts, is perfectly rational and enables people to like whatever they like. It can also gain some support from the "people like dynamic compression" theory for which there is also lots of evidence.

The "vinyl is superior. It's not that i like noise and distortion it's just better honestly" argument is the one for which there is no evidence.
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I don't expect people are likely to like distortion, personally.
OTOH the areas I know from my work that record players lack accuracy are almost all areas where there is an addition of music correlated information akin to extra reverb. Reverb is added to recordings to make them sound nicer. My studies show that this reverb does indeed sound nice, and when removed the record player sounds a bit flatter and less dynamic.
I am quite sure from the work I have done that this extra enjoyable sound is added by the record player and is not on the record.
Part (but not all) of this can be easily demonstrated to oneself by putting the record player in another room and running long cables either from phono stage to preamp or moving the whole shebang into another room and running speaker cables through the wall.
I expected my system to sound better when no longer subjected to airborne and structure-borne interference, but it didn't it sounded quite a bit worse.
I have satisfied myself that part of the nice sound on my records is generated by the record playing process and was never recorded onto the record. It doesn't stop me listening to and enjoying records though - and I no longer have my record players in a different room:)
 
F1eng said:
Hi Nic,
I think you -may- be confusing tape print-through with pre-echo.
I would be very surprised if any print through ends up on an LP since most will be mastered fairly soon after recording and print through develops over a (long) period of time in storage. Recordings made from vintage master tapes may show this but from new ones - unlikely.
Pre-echo OTOH is fairly common and an artefact of the LP cutting process. It happens when the engineer is trying to pack a longer time onto the record side than will properly fit. Then whilst cutting the laquer the cutter is close enough to the groove one rotation behind that it distorts the already-cut groove. It is a well known shortcoming of trying to pack more time onto a side than can be properly cut.

It is the thing which annoys me most about LPs too. Otherwise I find my records generally nice to listen to.
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Well, the pre-echo on "Led Zeppelin II" is still present on the CD, so I guess it's on the master as well, and has been since 1969.
 
Mescalito said:
What is your sphere of expertise? Do you have even an iota of evidence to support your conjecture?

Thought not.

Chris
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Whatever his sphere of expertise, he's about 50% right though. Hypersonics are or at least can be) detected via conduction (bones of the face). There are hearing aid patents based on this exact phenomenon. However, there is some disagreement in the literature (the peer reviewed variety) regarding the contributions of direct HS perception vs. frequency modulation. It is real though. No argument.
 
F1eng said:
Hi Nic,
I think you -may- be confusing tape print-through with pre-echo.
I would be very surprised if any print through ends up on an LP since most will be mastered fairly soon after recording and print through develops over a (long) period of time in storage. Recordings made from vintage master tapes may show this but from new ones - unlikely.
Pre-echo OTOH is fairly common and an artefact of the LP cutting process. It happens when the engineer is trying to pack a longer time onto the record side than will properly fit. Then whilst cutting the laquer the cutter is close enough to the groove one rotation behind that it distorts the already-cut groove. It is a well known shortcoming of trying to pack more time onto a side than can be properly cut.

It is the thing which annoys me most about LPs too. Otherwise I find my records generally nice to listen to.
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Yank said:
Well, the pre-echo on "Led Zeppelin II" is still present on the CD, so I guess it's on the master as well, and has been since 1969.
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Interesting. Thanks for that explanation F1.
 
Greg said:
Not a very scientific method, just demonstrates your faith (quasi-religious faith ? :) that the theory must play out the way your bias predicts when experiencing the application. I'm afraid it doesn't.

What seems to be the case is vinyl can do a more convincing job and 16/44.1 a less convincing one when compared and contrasted.

Vice versa of course as 16/44.1 has the potential to also sound great and vinyl's format does not make it intrinsically a winner.

The route cause does appear to be poor mastering though.
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I have no problem with the idea that one mastering might sound better than another; and that the difference could be enough to make the better mastering on vinyl sound better than the poor mastering on cd. If that is as far as it goes then nothing to argue about. Nevertheless in that case a competently executed 16/44 copy of the vinyl would sound just as good as the vinyl.

But if one preferred the vinyl copy of the same master, then what could it be about the vinyl that one was preferring?
 
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