The quality from LPs is ludicrous

[Electron]

[/B]

The signal is decoded from the digital domain to the analog domain by an exact inverse of the encoding algorithm. The sampling rate determines the frequency range available.

Put simply as long as the sampling rate is sufficiently high (44.1KHz in the case of CD, an exact replica of of any waveform in the frequency rage 44.1Khz/2 can be reconstituted. Engineering requirements mean that the actual frequency range is limited to 20-20Khz.

Essentially, between any two samples, there exists one and only one possible shape of waveform in the range 20-20Khz that will pass through both sample points.

So, you do NOT get a "join-the-dots" approximation. It is a smooth waveform, as near as makes no conceivable audio difference to an exact replica of the analog input.

In fact, the output waveform is a much closer copy of the input waveform than can ever be produced by any analog process.

This has been shown and demonstrated many times.

Chris

Sorry Chris but you're still not getting the point. This is not relevant to what I'm saying. Digital's superior accuracy and bandwidth is a given in my post and the OP.

Playback/replay is what I'm talking about. Put very simplistically to make the point - sound generated by a vibrating pin may communicate better to vinyl enthusiasts than sound generated by a dac chip. It is more inaccurate / distorted / whatever you like but it is generated in a similar way to all sounds in nature. Our brains are more familiar with this than digital sound which has really only become the norm over the last century.

This is not a commentary on sound quality but is just a response to the OP as to why vinyl 'sounds' as good as some of us believe. No vinyl / digital agenda on my part.

 

[redhunter]

On most recordings that i have got copies on both CD and vinyl. The vinyl has the following characteristics. Some of which are obvious colourations but others are harder to explain.
1. Greater bass impact and fuller. possibly less deep though.
2. Instruments appear to come from a blacker background ???
3. Transients appear to have faster attack and quicker decay.
4. Overall dynamic range seems greater.

These differences are apparent with every CD player that i have tried on my system.
The most expensive of which was a DCS Puccini. I have four turntables here but only the LP12 exhibits the above characteristics. I have 2 DD decks, which sound more CD like, and an Axis which does have some of them but not to the same degree.
Can anyone explain why the LP12 sounds different to everything else. Because until i got this deck i was quite happy listening to CD and unfortunately i have hundreds of them. Anyone want to swap them for vinyl?

 

[Darth Vader]

Stolen from elsewhere:-

'You have to remember that while the music data is digital, the physical process of burning a CD is an analogue one, and that the error protection embedded in audio CDs is much inferior to that of data CDs. The CD burner creates small bumps in the playing surface of the CD-R that the CD player can then detect. The spacing between each bump is critical to being able to detect and decode the data signal. But more importantly, the rising and falling edge (the beginning and end) of each bump is also critical, and this is the aspect that is most affected by different combinations of burn speed, disc media and the state of the laser.

If the bumps have shallow edges rather than nice sharp, crisp edges, the CD player extracts a very jittery signal with ambiguous timing references. Depending on how well designed the player is, a jittery output can often throw the rest of the data decoding system into a state of unreliability, leading to a higher error rate and thus a greater number of uncorrected errors.'

Some interesting reading by people who know their stuff http://www.johnvestman.com/digital_myth.htm

Cheers,

DV

 

[sq225917]

DV, that's simply not true though, the ratio of distance between pit transitions and pit length for any encoded data bit are so vastly different that 'pit jitter' just doesn't exist in the real world. if it was causal then cd's of software would be similarly affected. After all, all data on a cd has to be read and one bad sample would throw the game off.

@redhunter.
1.Bass is mono'd on vinyl so it comes through both speakers= more bass, better excitation of rooms nodes.
2. Not sure I've ever heard that, cd noise floor is just lower, no doubt about it.
3. Yes I often hear more attack, I put that down to overshoot in the cartridge phonostage. Quicker decay, sometimes, but with a higher noise floor you would expect the subtleties to be swamped earlier.
4. Yeh, mostly that's a simple fact, the mastering is better, classical cd's excluded.

 

[Alan Sircom]

So on a more pragmatic level why do some (lots) people prefer vinyl to CD if CD measures so much better.

I'm genuinely interested in your response, no agenda with me I promise.

Some of the reasons are purely psychological. You engage with vinyl more directly than digital (the ritual of LP is far slower, perhaps more contemplative and more interactive than with CD or selecting a music file). Because you cue the track by eye, people feel a more personal interaction with the music than simply pressing 'play'. I suspect there's also a learned response to vinyl ("well, vinyl sounds better, doesn't it?" is a meme that extends far beyond the hi-fi community).

I don't think that's all there is behind the re-invigorated interest in LP (hipsters playing vinyl haven't had that learned response, but love the format all the same), but I think the psychological and totemic aspects of vinyl and vinyl collectors play an important part in its continued success, and shouldn't be ignored or dialled out as irrelevant nonsense.

Perhaps a more interesting question is not 'why do people love vinyl so?' but 'why do some actively dislike digital?' I suspect the deeper you go in answering that question, you hit psychological barriers before you hit actual format performance.

 

[Mescalito]

Sorry Chris but you're still not getting the point. This is not relevant to what I'm saying. Digital's superior accuracy and bandwidth is a given in my post and the OP.

Playback/replay is what I'm talking about. Put very simplistically to make the point - sound generated by a vibrating pin may communicate better to vinyl enthusiasts than sound generated by a dac chip. It is more inaccurate / distorted / whatever you like but it is generated in a similar way to all sounds in nature. Our brains are more familiar with this than digital sound which has really only become the norm over the last century.

This is not a commentary on sound quality but is just a response to the OP as to why vinyl 'sounds' as good as some of us believe. No vinyl / digital agenda on my part.

Vibrating air molecules or speaker cones react to the waveform. They don't know or care how that waveform was generated. Neither does your eardrum.

For yous proposition to be valid, there would have to be something other than the waveform involved. There isn't.

Think about it. The vast majority of new vinyl releases have gone through at least one cycle of AD/DA processing, either at the recording, mixing, cutting stage. ADA or DDA in other words. Were your proposition to be true, these would readily and easily be identified as digital in nature. But they are not.


Chris

 

[flatpopely]

Some of the reasons are purely psychological. You engage with vinyl more directly than digital (the ritual of LP is far slower, perhaps more contemplative and more interactive than with CD or selecting a music file). Because you cue the track by eye, people feel a more personal interaction with the music than simply pressing 'play'. I suspect there's also a learned response to vinyl ("well, vinyl sounds better, doesn't it?" is a meme that extends far beyond the hi-fi community).

I don't think that's all there is behind the re-invigorated interest in LP (hipsters playing vinyl haven't had that learned response, but love the format all the same), but I think the psychological and totemic aspects of vinyl and vinyl collectors play an important part in its continued success, and shouldn't be ignored or dialled out as irrelevant nonsense.

Perhaps a more interesting question is not 'why do people love vinyl so?' but 'why do some actively dislike digital?' I suspect the deeper you go in answering that question, you hit psychological barriers before you hit actual format performance.

Interesting, I don't actually dislike digital at all! I listen to digital audio most days and in some cases will listen to it for ages and not get any vinyl out.

 

[Mescalito]

Stolen from elsewhere:-

'You have to remember that while the music data is digital, the physical process of burning a CD is an analogue one, and that the error protection embedded in audio CDs is much inferior to that of data CDs. The CD burner creates small bumps in the playing surface of the CD-R that the CD player can then detect. The spacing between each bump is critical to being able to detect and decode the data signal. But more importantly, the rising and falling edge (the beginning and end) of each bump is also critical, and this is the aspect that is most affected by different combinations of burn speed, disc media and the state of the laser.

If the bumps have shallow edges rather than nice sharp, crisp edges, the CD player extracts a very jittery signal with ambiguous timing references. Depending on how well designed the player is, a jittery output can often throw the rest of the data decoding system into a state of unreliability, leading to a higher error rate and thus a greater number of uncorrected errors.'

Some interesting reading by people who know their stuff http://www.johnvestman.com/digital_myth.htm

Cheers,

DV

Pluasible nonsense, I'm afraid.

Chris

 

[adamdea]

Some of the reasons are purely psychological. You engage with vinyl more directly than digital (the ritual of LP is far slower, perhaps more contemplative and more interactive than with CD or selecting a music file). Because you cue the track by eye, people feel a more personal interaction with the music than simply pressing 'play'. I suspect there's also a learned response to vinyl ("well, vinyl sounds better, doesn't it?" is a meme that extends far beyond the hi-fi community).

I don't think that's all there is behind the re-invigorated interest in LP (hipsters playing vinyl haven't had that learned response, but love the format all the same), but I think the psychological and totemic aspects of vinyl and vinyl collectors play an important part in its continued success, and shouldn't be ignored or dialled out as irrelevant nonsense.

Perhaps a more interesting question is not 'why do people love vinyl so?' but 'why do some actively dislike digital?' I suspect the deeper you go in answering that question, you hit psychological barriers before you hit actual format performance.

I agree with all of this.

On the last point, there is a striking coincidence exhibited on this thread of a people with strong preferences for vinyl having an attachment to unconvincing or demonstrably bogus technical explanations for the shortcomings of digital.

It does make one wonder whether
a. this is simply a case of reason following the passion (or, to put it another way, what catholic theology calls demonstrative proof); or
b. instinctive distrust of how sampling works, a process that pretty much everyone who understands it realises is not intuitive, influences people to dislike it.
c. no one understands digital sampling anyway and vinyl lovers are simply representative of the population generally.

 

[adamdea]

Pluasible nonsense, I'm afraid.

Chris

If it were true it would only go to show that playing cds, as opposed to bit perfect rips, is dumb.

 

[Mescalito]

Some of the reasons are purely psychological. You engage with vinyl more directly than digital (the ritual of LP is far slower, perhaps more contemplative and more interactive than with CD or selecting a music file). Because you cue the track by eye, people feel a more personal interaction with the music than simply pressing 'play'. I suspect there's also a learned response to vinyl ("well, vinyl sounds better, doesn't it?" is a meme that extends far beyond the hi-fi community).

I don't think that's all there is behind the re-invigorated interest in LP (hipsters playing vinyl haven't had that learned response, but love the format all the same), but I think the psychological and totemic aspects of vinyl and vinyl collectors play an important part in its continued success, and shouldn't be ignored or dialled out as irrelevant nonsense.

Perhaps a more interesting question is not 'why do people love vinyl so?' but 'why do some actively dislike digital?' I suspect the deeper you go in answering that question, you hit psychological barriers before you hit actual format performance.[/QUOTE]

The vinyl playback chain is intuitive and easy to understand. Sound is a vibration. You freeze that vibration as a varying magnetic field. You then use that varying magnetic field to make a hot needle melt a copy of that vibration onto a disc.

Digital, on the other hand is deeply counter-intuitive, and to really understand how it all works you really need to be at ease with some pretty sophisticated mathematics and engineering.

That rules out most of the population ever really coming to grips with the mechanics of it at an intellectual level, and many people distrust & fear what they do not understand.

Chris

 

[Werner]

So on a more pragmatic level why do some (lots) people prefer vinyl to CD if CD measures so much better.

And round it goes.

I hope that we all understand, with the geographical spread of PFM contributors, that this thread is threatening to eclipse the LHC soon?

 

[adamdea]

Sorry Chris but you're still not getting the point. This is not relevant to what I'm saying. Digital's superior accuracy and bandwidth is a given in my post and the OP.

Playback/replay is what I'm talking about. Put very simplistically to make the point - sound generated by a vibrating pin may communicate better to vinyl enthusiasts than sound generated by a dac chip. It is more inaccurate / distorted / whatever you like but it is generated in a similar way to all sounds in nature. Our brains are more familiar with this than digital sound which has really only become the norm over the last century.

This is not a commentary on sound quality but is just a response to the OP as to why vinyl 'sounds' as good as some of us believe. No vinyl / digital agenda on my part.

Interestingly, if you accept that the mechanism by which the vibrating pin "sounds" better is simply that it is intuitively more acceptable as an explanation for sound coming out of the speakers, then everyone is agreed.

It's only your quest for a missing property, which is apparently not actually sound quality, which stands between you and Chris.

 

[Mescalito]

Pluasible nonsense, I'm afraid.

Chris

Or Plausible even

 

[Electron]

Vibrating air molecules or speaker cones react to the waveform. They don't know or care how that waveform was generated. Neither does your eardrum.

For yous proposition to be valid, there would have to be something other than the waveform involved. There isn't.

Think about it. The vast majority of new vinyl releases have gone through at least one cycle of AD/DA processing, either at the recording, mixing, cutting stage. ADA or DDA in other words. Were your proposition to be true, these would readily and easily be identified as digital in nature. But they are not.


Chris

All true but your last para is the process before the one I'm talking about - this being when the needle trancribes what's in the groove. The only process from here on is mechanical vibration resulting in an acoustic signal. The OP and other contributors to this thread have implied that this has an acoustic signature that they find surprisingly good even if inferior in terms of absolute fidelity to the original recording.

The value of transparency in the other components of the replay chain have been perfectly explained by you and others and should allow the sound generated off vinyl to be clearly distinguishable and recognisable by our brains which I believe potentially does recognize how the sound is generated.

Some of your other posts about familiarity etc etc are spot on and is sort of what I'm rambling on about. I will confess that I found early CD replay uncomfortable perhaps because it was too 'clean' but I've got used to it and thoroughly enjoy my digital equipment now. The twangy pin still sounds more natural to me though.

Regards

 

[Electron]

Interestingly, if you accept that the mechanism by which the vibrating pin "sounds" better is simply that it is intuitively more acceptable as an explanation for sound coming out of the speakers, then everyone is agreed.

It's only your quest for a missing property, which is apparently not actually sound quality, which stands between you and Chris.

I knew you'd be able to put it in to words better than me!

No quest for a missing property just thinking about the OP and at what stage conditioned response influences human perception. The other 'technical' explanations are extremely well trodden ground so left to others to restate them.

 

[Werner]

Digital, on the other hand is deeply counter-intuitive, and to really understand how it all works you really need to be at ease with some pretty sophisticated mathematics and engineering.

Often taught incompletely or even incorrectly to boot.

To give an idea (perhaps illustrating how dim I am). I graduated in 1990 with top marks in micro-electronics engineering (that's chip design, amongst others). I graduated in 1993 with also top marks in computer science (that's mainly useless, amongst others, but the math load there was second only to a degree in, erm, math, or physics). It took me another seven years to 'get' sampling - in the context of audio - inside-out, mainly due to the crappy ways it is explained in all sorts of publications ranging from product blurbs to university courses, and including the intermess.


The really funny thing is that Atkinson described it correctly in Stereophile when CD was launched, only to throw that out again a few years later when hifi manufacturers started spinning different and more glamorous tales. By now he probably has forgotten that he too understood it, back then.


Is there a fundamental reason for this sorry state? Probably. You see, digital audio is about the only engineering discipline where strict adherance to the sampling theorem is attempted.

Metrology never uses decent anti-aliasing filtering, nor reconstruction. ADCs and DACs are used filterlessly, and people live with the ensuing errors, or are even ignorant of them. This is BTW where the rule of thumb comes from that suggests that for any faithfulness one has to sample at least 10 times faster than the fastest signal of interest.

Digital video and photography are more or less aware of the whole story, but anti-aliasing is a function of the optics (hence severely flawed), and reconstruction is computationally impossible. Anyway, what displays are there to reconstruct to?
Likewise, image scaling/resizing (up and down) is entirely subject to the theorem, but again the prescribed filters are unfeasible in two dimensions, thus people revert to cruder interpolation methods. The eye is easily fooled, anyhow.

Modern telecoms rely heavily on the theorem (including its even less intuitive loophole that allows the sampling of, say, a 2GHz signal with a 1MHz sampling rate), but once more total anti-aliasing and reconstruction are not feasible, and probably not even remotely required.


So, who really has to understand it all? A few thousand circuit designers and audio engineers, and programmers of SRC software (who as a rule don't get it). That leaves out a few billion of people ...

 

[spxy]

Why cant you guys accept that the reason people have questions ( whether valid or not ) about digital is because the "best" sound they have ever heard has come from vinyl?

My current situation is that I haven't listened to my record player for 2 years due to work and small children, I only listen to digital for convenience.

It can sound good sometimes great, but never as good as the results I was used to from my Roksan Xerxes or fully spec'ed LP12.

I happy to accept it all down to recoding quality rather than other factors...

 

[Joe P]

Chris,

That rules out most of the population ever really coming to grips with the mechanics of it at an intellectual level, and many people distrust & fear what they do not understand.

I hear ya, man. This is why personal computers will never catch on and the companies making them will never expand beyond two-man garage-level operations.

Joe

 

[adamdea]

I knew you'd be able to put it in to words better than me!

No quest for a missing property just thinking about the OP and at what stage conditioned response influences human perception. The other 'technical' explanations are extremely well trodden ground so left to others to restate them.

That's very nice of you. We seem to have managed some sort of mutual exchange of ideas. I'm feeling dizzy.