What drew me to vinyl is backing my favourite artists and receiving a physical token of doing so while listening to their music on streaming services :D
@@ZakiWasik you probably don't know the margin artists get from a vinyl then. They're expensive to make, expensive to ship, to sell, everyone taking a big chunk on the way. Artists get more money from digital, particularly if you buy on Bandcamp. Not mentioning the huge pollution record plants make, which most vinyl addicts don't give a shit about.
These are the guys who think a £500 RCA jack interconnect makes a big difference when in any studio I've been in, including some very, very good ones, the mic cables are all £20 ones from Studiospares and there's a high chance the snare was miked with a £90 SM57.
Analog CRTs are technically inferior to OLEDs or LCD in picture quality yet they give off a particular glow and refresh rate method that can’t be replicated fully by newer display tech and look aesthetically pleasing when displaying low-res content, particularly older pixel video games. Is the CRT “better” than my 65” OLED? From a scientific perspective, no. From a subjective standpoint for particular use cases, yes. Likewise the same for vinyl, it presents music in a pleasing, different form even if it’s not the final word in transparency.
yeah i saw your video while editing mine and i added the slide of the magazine where they said digital is the normal mode. actually i screenshot it from your vid. hope you don't mind!
People falsely think that because vinyl is an analog playback medium therefore the audio on it is also analog. It's a false correlation. And the best part of all is that the vinyl die-hards don't understand the significance of "The source audio is digital. Vinyl is literally no different from a CD or digital audio file". They just break down and get enraged.
It is indeed more or less the same story as todya's movies shot with real films & presented in traditional film projection setup. Sounds like purely analog process from start to finish isn't it? ...But virtually no one realized (or actually realized, but just ignored the fact) that there's no feature films ever made with traditional analog process since early 2000's. ALL of today's movies would went through digital intermediate process somewhere in the pipeline. No 100% "films" ever made anymore, period.
To me the only reason to get vinyl, other than the dynamic range thing, has less to do with the sound and more like reading a physical book rather than an ebook: it's a physical object, you can look at the art, keep it on your shelf, and you can put your electronics away so as to give it your full attention.
i could say the same thing with a clear glass CD walkman and most CD cases come with the same artwork as Vinyl and CD can just store way more information so i dont get it
@@ernestochang1744You just did. And that's cool too. I'm a musician first, and an engineer second. Even though I know very well that not all audio media is created with music in mind, my thinking has always been this: no matter what methods and tools they have available to do it, I'm just happy when people are able to listen to the music they want to hear. At that point, the means of doing so becomes irrelevant.
Bold of you to assume that anyone will actually read the description. I gave up on that year's ago! I bet half of the people who commented didn't even watch the *video* they just commented based on the title. Thanks for breaking these myths. I love vinyl too, but I'm not about to believe in some magical analog fantasy. I just prefer the physical experience, just like you mention at the end.
@@NotJustBikes Yeah it's like shooting photos on film. Nobody does because it's better in technical sense but because they enjoy the different and limiting process.
As a mastering engineer myself, I am constantly being told that I am incorrect on this by the hifi flat earthers. What they fail to realise is that a digitised signal is *exactly* the same as the analogue source, up to the frequency of half the sampling rate. It’s mathematically exact. What’s worse is that the mathematics behind why this is true isn’t exactly new, having been discovered by the genius Joseph Fourier in 1817.
@@piccalillipit9211 It's not for me to try and explain people's motivation for anything. People spend their money how they feel. Even if they are wrong. Personally, I like vinyl as well. I have a vintage Garrard 301 turntable and SME reference tonearm with a Decca head. Total lot is worth about £8,000. Stuff sounds lovely. But I'm not deluded as to why it sounds lovely. I have spent over 2 1/2 decades in studios working professionally. I know what's happening.
@@jeremycarroll451 I was not being ****** - it was a genuine question. Im an ex audiophile and I prefer Vinyl to CD, but i prefer 24 Bit Flac to Vinyl. Someone said it was the "Loudness w4r" that caused this debate and I think it probably was - Iver had £50k vinyl and £50k CD setups and I just find CD exhausting. "Garrard 301". Very very nice
@@piccalillipit9211 Makes sense. What I'm saying is that high quality vinyl on good gear sounds beautiful. It's just quite far removed from what was heard in the studio. Much further than a digital print. By a long way. So, those who claim some kind of 'authenticity' to vinyl are just plain incorrect.
@@jeremycarroll451 No ive never claimed that - Ive only ever claimed it "sounds better" which is subjective, it SOUNDS BETTER to me. I have tube amps - they are nothing like linear but I love them. Music is about enjoyment, if its technically worse but it moves you more and you get more out of it - surely THAT is what matters...?? But to me the whole argument falls apart when you get to the high end digital files, they are really really good. the issue I have is Apple has removed the optical output from the new iMacs so I currently have no way of getting the output to my DAC...
I had no idea they were digitally "mapping" the groove cutting path to keep the grooves from running into each other on vinyl records! I just figured it was always a fixed spacing ratio and then they cut within that set grove "window." That's pretty wild!
I am no expert on the subject of the "varigroove" method (I believe it was also called Rheinische Fullschrift in Europe IINM) but, in all fairness to the analogue enthusiasts, I have come across pictures online of analogue reel to reel machines that used something like a preview playback head. This preview head was placed around 2 seconds "earlier" than the actual head which signal goes to the cutter. This would have been for 33 rpm records, one rotation taking 1.8 seconds, of course. Once again, I have very little knowledge of these machines but I am very certain they used some analogue electronic circuit to accelerate the lathe's movement when a louder passage came by and decelerate it again when the sound level decreased. (...Whoops ! and then I resumed the video. Very interesting machines.)
I'm so analog I hire the bands to come play in my living room. It's the only way to truly experience the music. ...wish their amps would stop hissing though. But seriously, you are absolutely spot on with this. 👍
Professional Recording Engineer (retired)... can confirm. I lived and worked through the digital transformation. You are 100% correct. But you already know that :-).
The audiophile myth arose from early experience with the "loudness war" ... they would buy a CD to augment their vinyl copy and it would be LOUD and right in your face, compared to the vinyl. As pointed out this is a result of different mastering techniques not the medium itself. Years ago I took a lot of my vinyl collection and transcoded it to MP3/320. Once I got the levels right I could not tell the difference between them... Doing A-B comparisons I would actually have to get up and look to see which was playing. Then came the CD loudness war and I just skipped right over CDs and went completely digital. So there is a good reason why my pop music collection dead ends in 1995. I find it truly ironic (and a bit tragic) that the best medium was used to deliver the worst music... and in many cases it still is. The point is that CDs and WAV even MP3 can far exceed the capabilities of Vinyl ... it's not about the medium, it's about the mix and master.
I still have vinyl. Not much and mostly stuff that is either rare, autographed, or not streamed anywhere. I play vinyl through a pricey cartridge, a Thorens TT, and an Audio Note tubed phono pre-amp, and it sounds like crap compared to my digital collection. And something new that I have never experienced in the 20th century is defective pressings. I bought records from the 70's to the early 90's. Never once did I ever have to return a defective record. I don't really buy much vinyl. And half of the new re-releases I have bought were garbage. Some so bad, I thought something was blown in the stereo.😊
@@rosssmith8481 I sold off my vinyl about 15 years ago. My music now resides in a 4tb SD drive in a small compter.... even the transcoded vinyl sounds better there.
I disagree, but I’m not saying that one, either one, is better than the other. That’s personal preference. But the inherent natures of the mediums are a factor. It’s not just the mix and the master, even though those are very important. Obviously to make a recording work on vinyl the audio must be dumbed down a bit to function within vinyl’s limitations. But the medium adds something in the midrange that I find captivating. A few years ago third man records released a 3 vinyl disc edition of patsy cline recordings, and “I fall to pieces” sounds like like the musicians are in your living room - its most noticeable in the standup bass. Obviously that was an excellent recording in the first place and the tracks were I’m sure painstakingly cut. But there are plenty of cds of that recording and none of the ones I’ve heard have that “in the room” quality. But again, that’s my personal preference.
Calling those less slammed masters HDR for “High Dynamic Range” might work. Turn it into the positive it is, point to it directly. They have better range, that’s the point of that master, they’ll be quieter and louder, just like an HDR video file is brighter and darker. People seem to get that. Marketing that concept is surely easier than a “no limiter” version that sounds quieter at first, especially when that wording might violate laypeople expectations about what a “volume limiter” would be.
@ycmneo That's a big part in why Blu-Ray is so popular with movies enthusiasts. You watch on streaming services and they run the audio through dynamic compression. Basically gets rid of all dynamic range. If you want the full range of dynamics back, you pretty much have to get a Blu-Ray player. Of course Blu-Ray also has uncompressed audio. That's a big draw too.
@lslslsfrfr I have a sound bar. Dolby Atmos definitely had sound mixing issues in Mono. but most movies are mixed in DTS and that sounds great in Mono.
Earache Records, a metal/grindcore label, recently-ish released at least some of their records as "Full Dynamic Range" and it's exactly that, no limiters, no over compression, and they even released it on Spotify, so you can actually compare on the same streaming site how different it sound from the CD version. To be honest though, in metal music I kinda prefer the overly compressed and hard limited sound, but that's just my preference.
@@thejman3489 Depends on the streaming service. Amazon Prime Video and Netflix both preserve a wider dynamic range, requiring me to constantly raise and lower my system volume during playback because the quiet sections are inaudible and the loud sections are WAY too loud. On the other hand, TH-cam videos from the same professional channel will have a much narrower dynamic range so that I can leave the volume and not touch it. I've found it's common for younger generations to prefer a narrower dynamic range because it allows for comfortable listening without having the extremes get lost or overblown. If I'm at a concert hall listening to an orchestra, I want to hear that dynamic range (and the space allows for the loud passages to be appropriate). Same goes for the movie theater. But when I'm at home? No, I don't want to be turning up the volume to hear whispering dialog only for my ears to get bombarded with an explosion.
I know that one trick to deal with those people: "Really? Fancy a double-blind test? I can arrange that whenever and wherever you want". Sadly noone ever had time for that.
@@philippkemptner4604 I’ll make the time. Where are you located? I’d gladly take a doubt blind test. ****⭐️ To be very clear, this is all for fun. i am absolutely not trying to come at you in an argumentative manner in the least. Again, this stuff is all for fun. I’m far from one of those snooty audiophiles who look down on someone based on their record collection, knowledge, or what gear they use. Everyone has to start somewhere, and you pick up info here and there, because you find it extremely interesting. I’ve also been a record collector for 35+ years, am a musician, and have made music a part of my life as not just a hobby, but also a profession since I was 18. 🔊😊🎶⭐️****💜
@@philippkemptner4604 I’ll make the time. Where are you located? I’d gladly take a doubt blind test. ****⭐️ To be very clear, this is all for fun. i am absolutely not trying to come at you in an argumentative manner in the least. Again, this stuff is all for fun. I’m far from one of those snooty audiophiles who look down on someone based on their record collection, knowledge, or what gear they use. Everyone has to start somewhere, and you pick up info here and there, because you find it extremely interesting. I’ve also been a record collector for 35+ years, am a musician, and have made music a part of my life as not just a hobby, but also a profession since I was 18. 🔊😊🎶⭐️****💜
I’ll make the time. Where are you located? I’d gladly take a doubt blind test. ****⭐️ To be very clear, this is all for fun. i am absolutely not trying to come at you in an argumentative manner in the least. Again, this stuff is all for fun. I’m far from one of those snooty audiophiles who look down on someone based on their record collection, knowledge, or what gear they use. Everyone has to start somewhere, and you pick up info here and there, because you find it extremely interesting. I’ve also been a record collector for 35+ years, am a musician, and have made music a part of my life as not just a hobby, but also a profession since I was 18. 🔊😊🎶⭐️****💜
@@philippkemptner4604 only that the vast majority of people who suggest a DBT do not know what it actually entails. It’s entails more than two or three people. In fact you probably need at least twenty to thirty people for an audio DBT. And they all need to be specifically trained. If you want to argue science then it’s best to understand how scientific processes work.
I’ve been working as a mastering engineer for vinyl records for over 15 years, and while I agree with some points, I’d like to clarify a few things. Whether digital or not, masters for vinyl can differ for both technical and artistic reasons. For example, vinyl tends to sound dull when the music is over-limited, as the dynamic range is constrained by the physical grooves. This influences how I approach audio for cutting, prioritizing relaxed compression and proper leveling. Other aspects like stereo imaging, EQ, and phase handling also come into play, often requiring significant adjustments. In many ways, mastering for vinyl involves considering the physics of the medium-needle movement, groove depth, balance, and more. It’s almost like being part audio engineer, part physics engineer.
@Guynhistruck Not almost-that’s exactly right. This applies to any medium. For instance, inter-sample peaks are crucial on platforms like Spotify. They prevent you from exceeding certain levels because the codec can vary across devices, which affects playback. Similarly, if you’re mixing for vinyl, you need to account for specific aspects of production (including the physics of the medium) that ensure compatibility across all playback systems. In a way, digital is more forgiving of errors, while vinyl forces you to respect the laws of physics at every stage of production.
@@thiagopinheiromusic Mastering for target media (or medium) goes back. I recall broadcast promo 45s being mastered in both stereo and mono, often with mix differences, too. My studio work did not involve mastering for vinyl (tape duplication masters.. did those!), but the 2020 Covid shut downs gave me a chance to catch up with the old guys and gals who did that work, and from microphone to vinyl groove to playback speakers, it's a miracle that what comes out bears resemblance to what went in. There are so many places to screw it up, so many "gotchas" especially if moving tapes between studios. I think you're very right that digital recording can be more forgiving, because a longer play time doesn't have any physical effect, but cutting lacquer, a producer wanting to squeeze another 60 seconds onto the side, with some significant 50Hz, and not reduce the overall level of the side... Probably lots of folks here never considered that track sequencing on a vinyl album is influenced by the physics of groove velocity and groove pitch as the effective diameter decreases.
I totally agree with your take on "releasing the vinyl 'HDR' master" digitally. I wish more bands/acts would do that. Having a well mastered digital file/CD is always my preference. It's why the late 80s early 90s CDs are the one I go for when I buy CDs.
There's a database for dynamic range called "Dynamic Range DB" (can't post links here, just google it) and it is a great tool when you're looking to buy a certain album (or not). If you're not familiar with the DR value, it's good at 10 or higher. Once you go below 8, the music usually starts having that "crushed" modern sound. It's not always perfect and some album might sound better at 8 than another at 9, but it's a good indicator of what you want to buy or not.
@APMastering Remember, the Edison cylinders and early discs were cut using 'vertical' rather than the 'lateral' method...100% acoustically recorded. Edison, being the money grub he was, patented the 'vertical cut' records (true 'records' of a historical performance event... single take... no multi track mixing/layering.. pre-electric process). Vertical meaning the needle moves up & down, not sideways.
@@BTW...Edison finally began electrically recording his diamond disc format in 1927 after others transitioned about 1925 like the victor Orthophonic or Columbia vivatonal. -my opinion starts- However, I argue pre electrical era diamond disc records (not durring ww1 due to phenol shortage) sound far better than others of that time, while victor specifically has a very particular 'canned' sound. I have a 1927ish Edisonic CLT with a brand new cork/shellac paper diaphragm and silk linkage a very precise copy of originals of my own construction and wow omg do the late electrical or acoustic DD records sound incredible. Very loud, excellent dynamic rage and very low surface noise. I never used to like DD records but now I understand why people highly regarded it, wrote many letters to Edison in praise, and why they advertised it as 'phonograph with a soul'. I'd like to begin cutting and making my own records possibly over the summer and put music that never existed at the time on it to see how it sounds. All in all I have so much fun with experimenting and working on the old mechanical technology, even though it's old it's quite complex (like design and materials and how specific it has to be) and I couldn't imagine the R&D and set up they had to do just to get to production
There is an era of vinyl, late 70s early 80s where they were actively marketing that it was DIGITALLY RECORDED. These were the audiophile discs of the time, demanding a higher price tag because it was a new and superior method of recording and mastering. I collect DBX encoded vinyl from this era whenever possible, because it really does reduce surface noise and it's always a very good recording.
The no-lim versions: it’s all about marketing it. You need to call it something, that sounds like it has higher perceived value, like UNLIMITED DYNAMIC MASTER :)
i don't think you need to market it that much, the ones who want it know what they want, it's just never available. It's really sad that its basically impossible to get it without getting the vinyl.
A big part of the "vinyl sound" depends on the EQ profile of the stylus+cartridge. If you use a calibration disc to plot this, you can then reverse it and get a clean, accurate reproduction of the frequencies. Apply that same profile to a digital recording and it takes on the sound the vinyl had, but without the surface noise. If you like the vinyl sound then actual vinyl is a great way to get it - but it's not magic. 🙂
Obviously different materials and completely different playback equipment can make the same recording sound different. Surprised no one ever brings that fact up.
You made me remember the silliness during the transition to digital of the photography and advertising businesses: So we shot photos on film, ektachrom, showed it to the client for approval , then used quite imperfect scanners to digitalise it, then post-produced the digital file, then got an other ekta, out of this digitally edited file, to show to the client, OK from him, then scanned this back for the printing process..... All this quality ruining, expensive and time consuming , not to say crazy, procedure just because the clients were nervous, with the idea of making their mind, looking at a computer monitor.
@APMastering Simply because art directors, clients, even some photographers were not familiar with the new tools.... They were used to look at diapositives on a light box, or prints. Actually ektachroms, with their poor dynamic range, colors shifts, compared to negative films, were just used because it was more convenient and cheap.... More I think about it, more I see parallels between our two domains. As an "audiophile" I remember listening to my first "realTime digital recording" (1982 Miller & Kreisel Sound Corporation), acoustic jazz on my JBL 4310, it was great. This guys seemed to know how to use the new tools, at least to my ears... 🙂
Hey I'll give them some credit. Early digital cameras were pretty low res and film was realistically well over 4K in many cases. It's why we have remasters of shows like Star Trek in 4K because of film. Sadly doesn't work with tape though... Technology Connection even has a video on it because of how everyone freaked out from a commercial from the 80s that someone re-uploaded in 4K.
That's an interesting thought. There was also a problem in the early days of CD mastering. In the mad rush to get CDs mastered and pressed, they were taking the tapes with RIAA equalization and going with those. I don't know how many, but there were discs getting to consumers with a huge high frequency boost; the EQ that makes vinyl LPs sound good. I'm a fan of vinyl, but I would never say that it's best. The 33 1/3 LP is an amazing example of materials science and engineering from CBS in the late 1940s.
@@scottgfx Very early consumer DAC chips were not linear and were actually 14 bit and not 16. Basically Philips has to select every TDA1540 they made for linearity. The most linear were used in Marantz CD players, the other in Philips ones. Then they made the TDA 1541 that at leas was 16 bit. Linearity problem were solved in the SAA7321 that used 1-bit "PWM" bitstream the linearity problem was solved. So early CD players, epecially if used with a system designed for vynil sounded with a lot of high frequencies and tinny.
I think you are probably correct. Im a recovered addicted audiophile - ive had £50k CD systems and £50k Vinyl and there is no way CD is more enjoyable to listen to. I could put on an LP and listen for 8 hours. CD Im tired before the end of the CD. BUT 24 BIT FLAC is a whole different ball game. My dislike is CD...!!! Now that may not be the technology - it may be how people used it. CD was amazing the second you turned it on, and it was great for low cost systems.
As an engineer with 40 years in the biz, I learned early on that you can't reason with the unreasonable but I give you props for trying. I think many people get confused because in the studio we use analog devices to add flavor in the creative process. It does not help that when trying to explain digital you are fighting against an entire industry that benefits from maintaining the myth of analog.
Do you think any of the cable claims are true? Some people say they can hear the differences between copper and silver, or solid core vs stranded wire. As an engineer, do you think there's anything to that argument? I can't find any good references that are based in science that would either confirm or deny these claims. I guess that what I'm trying to ask is, if I went to school to become an engineer, am I going to come across information that would imply, yes, it is possible differences in cables may be heard, or not? One of the things that make me very skeptical is, even if there isn't any formal science that can be referenced, setting up a listening test that meets the requirements needed to be considered legitimate science is not that difficult. Simply, is there a difference between A and B? Yes or no. So, even if we can't explain why there is a difference, we can at least prove if there is a difference.
A/B tests over a short time period are notoriously faulty. There can be differences in cables and similar equipment, but those differences will evidence themselves over time, not in a 10 minute test.
It sounds contradictory to say we use analog devices to add flavor and then for others to say you can’t A/B between an analog and digital source and tell the difference. Obliviously this is admission analog DOES color the sound to some extent.
Thank you! Finally someone who articulated a lot of what's been in my head but unable to easily put into words for the last 15-20 years (but with even more detailed tech explanation). During the loudness war era (late 2000s + early 2010s especailly) I'd buy an album on vinyl, unwrap it and the first use would be recording it off a USB deck to computer, then I'd use that as my digital version, in preference to CD/mp3. Had the higher dynamics but obviously it'd also get a bit of surface noise and crackling which would annoy me and make me wish that version of the master was made digitally available somehow. When HDTracks website came about, I thought this would finally be that...but nope, turned out to be lossless versions of the same digital master. There's definitely a market there for a digital release of the HDR master.
CD is my preferred way to listen to music. But I did discover that there are some issues with older recordings. I remember when I got a Procol Harum album on CD, Shine on Brightly I believe, the CD songs were all slightly shorter and pitch shifted a bit higher than my vinyl copy. After looking into it I discovered that the original studio recorded for several months with a mis-calibrated reel-to-reel deck. The newest CD remaster of the album (at that time) didn't take this into account. Fortunately I was able to find an older release that was done correctly. But other than weird instances like that, vinyl will be hard pressed to beat digital.
I completely agree with you on this. I stopped using vinyl about 15 years ago and sold my turntable. I started selling my records for a while but it was a drag to package and post them. I recently bought a high quality direct drive turntable on a whim and started playing my remaining vinyl. It was wonderful to hear music leap from these records, which hadn’t been played for over 20 years. I really regret selling some of them and it has been fun to play them again. I agree that vinyl doesn’t have a special sound but it is a wonderful medium.
I went through a similar transformation. A Tom Petty box set came with a record and I wanted to play it so I refurbished my old turntable and liked the experience so much I dove head first back into vinyl with many new albums and upgraded turntable.
When you buy a really expensive turntable with a good needle and clean your vinyl with some fancy machine the lp can sound almost as good as a cheap cd.
@@hazardeur Well, the vinyl record is likely more expensive, I think the poster aimed at that? I try to read forgivingly, with text being highly lossy and such.
absolutely true. i think a lot of what people like about vinyl are the flaws. for instance, i think "musicality" is dynamic stylus drag. high torque turntables sound "dead" or *gasp* "digital" because they have accurate and consistent speed. the more accurate your playback... the more it sounds like the digital which is either accurate, or not playing.
Also, very few multi-track recordings issued commercially since the 1960s ever involved recording the sound of a group of musicians playing together at the same time in a single room. Every instrument may have been recorded and processed (including electronic/digital echo, pitch and rhythm correction, etc.) independently. There was no group performance at all, just a whole bunch of separately altered fragments edited and layered into a polished track. No ensemble ever performed "I Am the Walrus" or Beyonce's "Cowboy Carter," so there is no "what it sounded like in the room." You're listening to a carefully assembled collage of many sounds captured in bits and pieces by various means in different places under different circumstances at different times. It only exists as playback, not as performance.
@APMastering It is neither good nor bad. It's just the way it is. So, when people say they want to reproduce what happened between the musicians in "the room," they're imagining something that never happened.
Literally all of classical music recordings and much of jazz involve the sound of a group of musicians playing together at the same time in a single room. Also, virtually all live concert recordings of most any genre. It's funny how people tend to generalise and talk in absolute terms when all they have to go by is their own bubble.
There are exceptions. Audio Lab Japan issued consistently amazing recordings, usually "direct to disc" (one take) and they did capture an actual performance of a group. These were usually small jazz ensembles or a solo pianist. Some of the jackets show you the arrangement of the players in the recording space and the playback seems to match this (as much as two speakers can attempt to replicate it). All that said, I am pretty sure that Audio Lab Japan used digital processing, and the DBX encoded versions require processing through a hardware device.
@@jdraven0890 Yes, there are definitely specialized "audiophile recordings" being made in various quarters, in the USA and overseas. Those are the exceptions, not the rule. I was referring to run-of-the-mill mainstream commercial popular music aimed at the general audience.
I recall when at Opus One, we techs loved when CD's came out. All the issues we had with turntables went away. I posted this as a response on facecrack... I eventually got a comment from Larry Boden stating - " I wrote the book “Basic Disc Mastering” and you have nailed the flaws of disc playback perfectly. My had is off to you, sir. Well done." I don't mean to be a Debbie Downer, but vinyl/turntables suffer from quite a few issues: - tangential tracking error caused by a pivoting tone arm - masters are cut radially... Unlike the cutting head of a mastering lathe - which travels at a perfect 90d tangent to the groove - a stylus is constantly changing its addressing angle to the groove walls. So the modulations of the groove are not faithfully reproduced since the playback stylus is always moving at a non-perpendicular direction as to how it's cut. Pivotal tone arms also lead to: - Skating. As a disc rotates it impinges forces on a contacting surface that cause it to be drawn to the center of the spinning disc. In the shop, we had blank records with no groove that we'd use to set the antiskate mechanisms (usually a spring or weights) that would try to counter act that force. Problem is under compensation causes the stylus to ride up on the side closest to the hub (the left channel) and proper compensation causes the groove closest to the outside (the right channel) to have to drag the stylus against the antiskating force, which causes the stylus to ride up on the outer wall of the groove. It's a real problem that's very hard to deal with. - low frequency modulation caused by the slight warpage - causes the woofers of a system (or the panels in planar speaker like an Acoustat or Magnepans) to modulate signals above it. You can see it on a Lissajous display on an oscilloscope. it cause the center dot on a blank groove to bounce. You can also see it in larger woofers moving at super low freq (~1-10Hz). - mismatched RIAA equalization curves - this is the reason you hear about how records sound "warm". That warmth is a mismatch between the RIAA curve that was used to cut the master, and the inverse one used in the consumer's gear. See Larry Boden's book. The RIAA curve was developed to increase the play time on an album side. So during cutting it rolls the bass off and increases the treble. On playback, the consumers reproduction system is supposed do the opposite - increase the bass and roll the treble off. Unfortunately, getting two filters to do a perfect inverse is impossible. Just won't happen. See this - Reduced elasticity of the groove walls on subsequent passes of a stylus. You see, records are made with polyvinyl materials that have plasticizers mixed in. The problem becomes that as the tiny radius of the stylus impinges on the groove wall, it compresses it. That can be an issue if enough time has not elapsed on subsequent plays of the same section of the groove. That can lead to fracturing of the groove wall, since it's already compressed. - Asperities in the surface of the vinyl. These cause the noise heard. It's because there's no way to make a perfectly uniform material, so slight variations in the surface are unavoidable. - Limited channel separation - a few issues lead to this - one the aforementioned skating forces in addition to the limitations of the groove geometry. An groove with stereo information that is in-phase and monophonic swings the stylus left to right. Channel information is realized by a 45d up pitch of the stylus movement - which is limited so it limits the separation of the left/right signals. But what's really bad is left and right channel signals that are out-of-phase. This causes the cutter head to move vertically. If significant low frequency information is out-of-phase in the audio signal it can cause lift out of the groove path which leads to skips in the groove. Note this is what happened to an early pressing of an early Led Zeppelin release. Why we used scopes set to show Lissajous/X-Y when mixing - Decreasing circumference as the groove goes toward the center of the record. This is obvious as the record is spinning at a constant RPM (revolutions per minute) so that means less material is available for groove modulation. So yea - records suck - sorry. Even the guy that won seven Grammy's for engineering Steely Dan -- the stuff all the golden ears vinyl people seem to like (and it is really good, analog or digital) - hated vinyl - Roger Nichols. He wrote an article called "Snap, Crackle, Pop" that explained the reasons for his becoming an audio engineer (he was originally a nuke engineer). Where: Snap, Crackle and Pop Music A tale of the (wrong) tape when remastering By Roger Nichols "I originally got involved in recording music because I hated clicks and pops on record. I figured that the only way that I was going to get good quality recordings to play was to record them myself. I could then bring home two-track 15 ips copies to play on my stereo. Much better than the Rice Crispy sound of vinyl LPs." After I posted this, Larry called me up and reminded me of one issue I forgot - the decreasing radius as you go towards the center. He told me that as you get closer to the label/groove runout, you actually start erasing things you just previously cut. He mentioned a story when he was working as a mastering engineer of trying to convince the label that "Frankenstein" on "They Only Come Out At Night" should be one of the outer tracks since it had such wide spectral content. Nope, they wanted it at the end of the side. Larry was bummin' from what our conversation sounded like. Oh well... As to MC cartridges that have lower moving mass than their MM counterparts (because having the coil on the cantilever results in less inertia) I had a story of a guy with a Thorens table and a Linn-Sondek tonearm with a Supex MC cartridge. One day a KA-7 unit came down to the shop - at Opus One, we had a lift that would go between the fancy showroom and the dingy shop/warehouse in the basement. On it was the service tag that read, " Picks up Radio Moscow on right channel" ... I was like WTF? I went up to Phil - a sharp well versed sales guy that wrote the ticket. As I was starting to say this is nutz, he mentioned that the customer ran the electron microscope at CMU... so he wasn't a neophyte to technology. I tell them the only way I can troubleshoot this is to go to the customer's house. Being a broadcast engineer I was familiar with various atmospheric conditions that can affect radio propagation - such as how the sun angle can change the ionization over the period of a day depending on the time of year - this is why some AM stations are called "daytimers" and have to change power levels at different times of the day depending on the date - - s So I get to the guy's house about 5PM and he takes me downstairs to his stereo set up. It's near a window/outside wall. I then put on some headphones, turn on the KA-7, set it to MC and just leave the tonearm on his Thorens on the tonearm rest. Sure enough, I eventually hear the BBC station, then Air Canada, and many other longwave transmissions dancing around in the stereo field. It was quite interesting as they'd pan and fade out as another would appear. So I looked out the window and saw a longwire - it's an antenna that looks like a typical clothes line everyone used to use to dry clothes. But it's made of wire and is used by enthusiasts known as DX'ers - - DX stands for "distant station" in amateur radio lingo So I ask him if he's a DX'er ... sure enough he is. I then as him what he's using for lightning protection for the longwire. Turns out he was connecting to the ground lug of the outlet right outside the room that his stereo is plugged into. If you may recall turntables have a separate ground wire that is usually tied to a terminal on the back of the preamp which is at ground potential. I go outside and notice that the insulators for his longwire have mold growing on them which is also present on the lightning arrester (basically an airgap) which is bridging across to the ground terminal. This gives you an idea as to how low-level the signal on a cartridge is.
Appreciate this. But one thing to consider regarding vinyl cut from a digital file is that it usually has different mastering than the digital counterpart. Some people may prefer the sound of the vinyl mastering, particularly in cases where the digital counterpart is overly compressed, which has been a trend for a lot of digital albums for almost 30 years (loudness wars)-you touch on this but I don’t think you specifically called it loudness wars. It’s a completely different story for albums recorded fully analog-in my experience they typically sound better on vinyl or tape, but I’ll let someone more equipped explain how transfers to digital have typically been done and why some of them have been subpar from a sound quality standpoint.
CD sounds fantastic, especially the early CD issues. Vinyl has a distorted sound that’s more elastic and less accurate. I love both and have been buying vinyl and CD for 40 years now. Vinyl is now being pressed from high definition digital files because it’s far easier to do this rather than use a complete analog path. The Nightfly was recorded on a 3M digital machine. ABBA had one from 1981 onwards, The Power Station recording studio in New York had one that Nile Rogers liked to use. There are many flaws with vinyl, inner groove distortion is incredibly annoying, especially for songs you love, CD excels here. Clicks, pops in the wrong places are torture too. CD is accurate, powerful and transparent. What I hate about CD remasters is the loud compressed audio that’s going on for the last 25 years. Compressed modern vinyl is even worse as it’s now €40 a pop! Expensive rubbish.
Actually, ABBA, The Visitors, was the FIRST commercially produced CD, not the first sold that was Billy Joel (and was an analog recording), but ABBA was the first produced, and it was digital end to end, it was also the LAST CD they did before their break up, they have since issued an album more recently Voyage in 21'.
@ As far as I know, the first 3 tracks of the Visitors were analog, then digital from there on. There’s a definite snappiness to the drums that’s not on the first three songs. I have a “Red Face” 1983 CD of The Visitors and The Singles double CD.
@@KRAZEEIZATION I was not aware, I'm from the industry and was always told it was D end to end, but I was not at the sessions and never saw the mix, so you could be correct, D was not super wide spread yet in 80/81 other than perhaps with classical recording, they seamed to start earlier.
@ I read that about Visitors a while back. I’m obsessed with music and recording so I’m always annoyed when album details are not comprehensive enough for me! From Wiki- The members of ABBA and their personnel have memories of the recording sessions for this album being rather difficult. To begin with, their sound engineer Michael Tretow had to become accustomed to using the new 32-track digital recorder that had been purchased for Polar Music Studios. He said, "Digital recording...cut out all the hiss, but it also meant that sounds were sharply cut off below a certain level. The sound simply became too clean, so I had to find ways of compensating for that". The first three tracks for the album had already been recorded using analogue tape and therefore Tretow had to transfer all subsequent tracks from digital to analogue and back again to avoid a difference in quality.
@@KRAZEEIZATION Excellent!! I love that you have passion for the industry, I'm no longer active, but I listen to my huge collection of virtually all media types every single day. Nothing gives me so much enjoyment!
Stevie's Hotter Than July was cut on a Sony digital machine in 1980 I think and sounds great. Likewise, Dire Straits' Brothers in Arms was tracked to a Sony digital multitracker and sounds fab; crisp, clean, yet warm and not at all "digital" sounding, if such a sound exists. It's often used by the analogue fans to slate digital recordings as "cold", "sterile" or "brittle".
I have occasionally listened to Brothers in Arms lp on a serious hiend equipment on an exhibition. It sounded big, detailed, but: digital, glassy cold poored timbres etc. I was wondered (I even asked the man there if he knew if they have possibly used any digital stuff on this record) and then later I read, that the whole LP was recorded into digital and Knopfler was so proud of that. I knew nothing of this album history previously, as I am not a fan of DS.
@@sfgylk34u_57 Personally I like it but I think the argument for digital being cold and glassy would only maybe hold water in the early days of digital. Nowadays, the quality of recording and mastering AD/DA converters is incredibly good to the point where the likes of Bob Ludwig can't tell the difference between the analogue master and the digital clone.
@@CANKRAFTWERK True, but as far as I know, it was a DDD job - digital tracking, mixed to digital and mastered to digital so there's a fair old bit of digital for the Neve to contend with and yet still it sounds good to my ears.
The digital sound is neutral. Just neutral. It has NO sound. It spits back what is recorded on it, that is all. In the early 1980's, recording and mastering engineers, freed for the first time from the "limitations" of vinyl, in other words the rules one has to follow to cut a record (no giant treble boost, etc.) went totally nutsy and with parametric EQ, boosted the treble, shaved off the bass cloud and generally made really ****ty sounding CD's. Everyone thought, digital is harsh. It really isn't at all. People know this by now but they still fall into that old cult thinking all the time. You want proof? Something you can do yourself? If you have a CD recorder or whatever, needle drop a song from your favorite vinyl album. Now, play it back synced up with the actual record. See how it is almost 100% exact when switching back and forth? The digital recording has captured all of the vinyl magic and is reproducing it without adding any "digital harshness" because there is NO SUCH THING.
Yes. I am not one of the hi-fi fanatics. But I also mix and master music, and one thing: Master track (also digital) to Vinyl sounds better than Master track -> compressed to Mp3 -> compressed to streaming, like it's especially the case for smaller bands in modern times. It's all about the information loss. And yes, there is no huge 'detail' difference between a CD and a Vinyl, but not all positive aspects of Vinyl comes from the record itself! The way the sound is created in a vinyl player sounds different to how it is created by a PC or a CD player. That's not so much a matter of source material, but rather of the actual technique it's played. The music on my studio monitors may share almost the same information as a CD (not as streaming, streaming has noticeably less), but the way this information is forged into a sound sounds different. It creates another experience, one that I prefer over CDs. That's also why I prefer tape over CDs. A listening experience is more than just the pure audio of the source material.
You are absolutely correct in stating that the listener, who is interested in sound quality, wants the non slammed Hi-Res Wavefiles. I really hope the industry will provide them sometime in the near future, because I am tired of seeing so many classic rock/pop re-issues (on CD or even Hi-Res) being brickwalled, compressed or peak limited.
if i means anything, I collect CD's for modern pop and electronic releases and I have noticed that the trend has been reversing. CD's I've had in the last 5 years have had great DR and mastering, sans completely one-man indie releases. If anything, I'm annoyed that 'anniversary' releases are being produced with vinyl being the ONLY physical release, with the digital files being a downloadable link. I would like labels not to discount CD's as being forgone, they can have their own unique packaging materials and goodies as well! Economically easier to ship as well.
You don't need the Hi-Res files if they just released good masters on CD (or streaming for that matter). You don't want un-mastered raw files, mastering is a good thing but they seriously need to stop slamming everything into one block of loudness.
For me, to get the absolute best sounding mastering of an album, 75% of the time it's on vinyl. Yes, it's a vastly inferior medium, but the medium for all it's faults often gets the better mastering. Example - I have the SACD of Dark Side of the Moon, but my mass produced vinyl release from 2016 is much more dynamic sounding to me. It's actually easier to find the exact version you want with vinyl vs. streaming. Trying to find the exact master you want via spotify is a crapshoot and you don't know if they are actually using different files for different re-masters. Edit - At 14:00 or so he makes my point. And yes, if producers and studios gave us the "non-slammed" files I would flip to mainly digital listening in a heartbeat!
I agree. I prefer the way music is mastered for vinyl. The last 30 years of loudness wars due to the higher dynamics of digital to me sounds terrible. Also, not really on topic but related to new tech is the pitch correcting and auto-tuning which makes everything nowadays sound sterile. Old music on vinyl is preferable to me. It's more real and sounds fresh.
A love letter reads better by candlelight than under cold fluorescent light. You hit the spot on that's it's about the experience. You draw terrible though :D
We all love you. Please don't stop. You're greatly appreciated. It's just fear, probably no hate at all and possible that hate isn't even real. Go, music!
There’s also a shitpile of cash invested in turntables, tape decks, amplifiers, preamps, speakers etc. by audiophiles that massively bias (conscious or unconscious) opinions.
The playback is analog. It's also a feedback loop. It loops sound back into the playback. Footsteps. Bass. Etc cetera. This adds a "familiar" feeling into the playback. The room is added in at a low level. "Realism" is boosted by familiarity. Each playback will also sound slightly different. That, big art and the fact it's actually moving during playback makes it a hit.
Great video! I thought the album Steely Dan fans and audiophiles used as a benchmark was Aja, not Nightfly. I think it was recorded 5 years earlier in the mid-70’s.
I treat vinyl like an opportunity to buy some sweet art that happens to have strange useless plastic trash inside. We should just normalize bands selling art prints and little booklets. Better for literally everyone.
This argument of digital vs analog and how analog maintains the information that is being lost by digital sampling process has been around for ages. It is technically true that some information is being lost but this not the information humans would be able to perceive anyway. All the high end digital equipment samples at 96kHz. This means it can accurately capture frequencies up to 48kHz. This over double the frequency what human ear can register. Even if you "only" sample 44.1kHz (CD) it's still gonna capture all the frequencies humans can hear. It's almost like the original engineers chose this sampling rate on purpose based of this fact. I think most people don't realize they always are listening to analog because analog is what comes out of speakers. Resulting sound wave will be exactly the same from digital or analog source (minus the noise).
The value to vinyl is space for album art and other inserts. Even 16/44k is audibly transparent. I'm actually working on a digital vinyl preamp with switchable response curves for pre-RIAA-standard records, and known publisher-house-specific response curves.
a couple years back, NIN digitally released TWO masters for the same album (hesitation marks). a CD mastering and an "audiophile" mastering closer to the vinyl pressing. when you bought the record, you could download either, or both. their vinyl masters typically sound a bit different than their CDs. some of the distortion relies on limiters, which don't work well on vinyl. and, like, except for his first album, everything is recorded, produced, mixed, and mastered entirely digitally. the first album is actually a straight analog process... of nearly 100% digital instruments. it also happens to sound way better than the CD, but i think that's down to late 80s CD mastering and whatever they were doing that made everything sound a bit tinny at the time
Ive always tried to explain to people that it only really makes sense to buy vinyl if its an original analog source that is being reproduced. But I still buy vinyl when it's not. Why? Because I love engaging with my music. Its a wonderful experience, and a lot of fun. A great set up is a great set up, if you're enjoying it, who cares if it's digital or analog. But the need to convicne yourself of "superiorirty" is ridiculous and toxic. First and foremost, listening to music should just be fun
Vinyl CAN sound better.... depends on the mix/master of each audio format. Plenty of vinyl releases sound like trash compared to digital. Visa versa also. The limited DR on vinyl seems to tame the "loudness war" on properly mastered records... FOR ME. Regardless, analog colors a sound, sometimes favorable, sometimes junk, so many variables that analog makes it fun to experiment with IE different cartridges, heads, preamps, and of course "synergy". Analog is great for playing, digital (file or streaming, I don't do optical media) is great for the efficiency/lazy/convenient reasons, again, for me. As a TV engineer, I confirm the crusty jack fileds and miles of NOT "audiophile" cable through my tours of recording and radio studios.
It's well known that tube amps are really horrible from a technical standpoint. If you measure them, they're absolutely atrocious compared to modern amps. But they sound good in a way and a lot of people like them....
i like vinyl because the combination of crackling, surface noise and the different master create a warmer more pleasant sound to my ears. it obviously doesnt sound "better" and anyone who thinks that lives in a fantasy world. there are actually a couple albums i own that i can only listen to on vinyl because the digital master is really harsh and treble-heavy but the vinyl is much softer on my ears. plus, big art and pretty colors :)
Man, I love your analysis in this video and the many I have watched previously. I was a club dj in LA for many years and collected way too many vinyl records until my wife told me it was getting out of control (taking over the house and occupying storage space). I sold off much of my collection a decade ago and used the money for more practical things. I can tell you it becomes an obsession with some of us and it is hard to have your vinyl purist world collapse when you do blind listening tests with digital transfers of said vinyl records. Of course well mastered cds have superior dynamics, frequency range and low noise floor. One time Adrian Sherwood, famed reggae and dub producer from the UK came to our club to spin a set including his private recordings and other classic dub plates. The house crew were highly anticipating to drool over his "legendary" rare vinyl collection and almost shit their pants when he pulled out a sampler loaded with his recordings and proceeded to mash up the dance. This was a club where no CDJs were allowed, but this was Mr. Sherwood so he was given pass. I asked him if he had any qualms about digital sound recordings and his answer: It sounds like what I hear in the studio and I'm too old to break my back with crates of records through the airport every time I go to play a gig. When I asked him to sign my Pounding System record, he laughed and said, these give me more space to scribble on.
Yep....100 % true. Lots of analog/vinyl enthusiasts don't know that little detail: most of mastering studios in the 80s had the Studer A80 that converts the signal to digital before cutting the vinyl 😅
@@willnorth6339 how the Studer A80 with a digital delay line works: 1. Analog (from the tape recorder) → 2. Digital (in the delay unit) → 3. Back to Analog → 4. Then engraved onto vinyl. The digital conversion was done at 12-14 bit, 44.1KHz (not even CD quality) Almost every major release after 1980 was done at a mastering house that used this way of mastering. So, no more analog, since the vinyl was cut from a digital signal
@@OrangeMicMusic Again, vinyl is an analogue playback medium - once you’ve pressed from an originally digital source (in your example) to an analogue medium it becomes analogue. There is no longer any samples containing bits of information, the pressing become a continuous path of sonic information - an analogue vibration. Your example is like taking water, freezing it to ice and then still calling it water.
@@willnorth6339 the discussion in this video (and the comments here) is about having an all analog path from recording to vinyl. Once an audio signal was converted to digital and back to analog, that path it's no longer 100% anlaog
Thank you for showing some of the obscure stuff regarding vinyl. I was never very interested in it as I already knew it's an obsolete technology. But seeing the details of the process was fun and informative!
I am SO GLAD you talked about the digital delay aspect. Everyone upset with Mobile Fidelity needed to hear this. Also super glad to see Paul's setup. I heard about it from Bonati but he never showed me photos.
I've been saying for years, all 'new' vinyl is ultimately digital.. Unless it's originally 80s or earlier mastered. Having said that, there is still a noticeable difference even with modern records recorded from a digital source.
I completely agree that it’s important to debunk the myths. Of which there are a lot. I work with video and film and I see it more like that industry. In the process of shooting a movie these days there’s a lot of digital stuff going on, but most movies, although shot digitally, will spend A LOT of money adding film grain back in to the finished movie. There’s all sorts of processes, but one is literally just recording the finished and edited movie onto a film, and then digitising it again. In that process it picks up real film grain that behave the way real film grain does, I.e. more present in the shadows, moving at the same frame rate as the movie, slowing down for slow motion shots etc. And this genuinely makes for a more enjoyable film although all we’re doing is adding analogue noise. Most big movies will do this, because digital is more convenient but they want it to look like analogue film. We have digital cameras that can recreate flawless images but we add flaws to make them more beautiful and enjoyable. With vinyl I think it’s the same thing, it doesn’t matter if there’s some digital processing in the chain, especially if it’s transparent. As long as we can still hear some analogue noise, because it makes it feel more beautiful and enjoyable. I go to some audiophile listening parties and I noticed when some hip hop was being played that there was a huge difference between how songs that were recorded in the 90s sounded compared to 2000s. I can’t remember the songs but they were played back to back. The 90s songs was sample based and so I imagine was sampling analogue sources, vinyl. The other song had less samples and some FM synths and was more modern. Both being played from vinyl and I could really feel a warmth from the older song. The newer song felt cold and sterile but also had a harsher distortion to parts of it. I could have just been the mastering on the newer one but I assumed it was because of their most likely being more analogue elements in the older one. That’s when I first really noticed a big difference. So even though it was being played from vinyl, it sounded too digital, by that I mean clean but then with harsher distortion when it did distort. When I’m making music, I’ll play an analogue synth through a digital amp and it will sound a thousand times better to me than when I play a digital synth from Ableton or an FM hardware synth. So, personally, I don’t care if there’s som e digital stages in the process, as long as that hasn’t removed the analogue noise and as long as it hasn’t added any digital distortion.
Hey, great video. I feel bad for some peeps though because what the vinyl fam think they're hearing as "superior" is actually harmonic tape distortion and saturation, which makes an audible tangible difference to the sound. The medium of vinyl carries that harmonic tape distortion in a really natural sounding way which gives the music a very realistic representation of the original recording, and that combination is what I am personally talking about when I say vinyl is superior to digital. My DAC is great when I'm listening to it, but the vinyl copy has always fundamentally just sounded better with recordings that were captured on tape or included tape saturation in their mastering process. Also, the fact it goes through a digital conversion at the end of a signal chain is irrelevant, that's a given and assured for reproduction in the sample rat. The effect of the track being mastered for and cut to the limitations vinyl is where the sonic magic so many people swear by happens. Another thing people misunderstand when talking about analogue signal chains is that it's the sonic character of those chains we want - the signal can end in a high res digital capture because at that point we already have the pure tone.
Digital is not really transparent though. It is a series of very fast snapshots of a waveform. There are pros and cons to both analog and digital. Also, many have stated that long listening sessions that are many hours long leave one more relaxed after an analog session vs a digital one. Just throwing it out there.
I’m an audiophile but try not to be an audiophool! I also think you are 100% right. I prefer vinyl (I have around 2000 LPs) and tube amps, but don’t pretend they are of a higher fidelity than digital, ‘cos they are not. If you add up all the distortions in the vinyl playback process it would not be pleasant reading…I haven’t as, for example I don’t actually know how far out my stylus offset is from optimum, but even it was exactly optimum it’s only ever “correct” in two places: I haven’t measured crosstalk from the stylus: I know what my valve amp adds and generally it’s less than 1%, higher at low frequencies…and I suspect the distortion would be several thousand times the distortion from a digital source using a solid state amp (which I expect is close to zero). I also don’t fall for the speaker wire or the power cord fantasies and other audiophile snake oil…I obviously don’t have a sufficiently resolving system to hear any difference ;)
This was my comment in respect of the "loudness war" being the core of this problem: I think you are probably correct. Im a recovered addicted audiophile - ive had £50k CD systems and £50k Vinyl and there is no way CD is more enjoyable to listen to. I could put on an LP and listen for 8 hours. CD Im tired before the end of the CD. BUT 24 BIT FLAC is a whole different ball game. My dislike is CD...!!! I PREFER to listen to vinyl on tube amplifiers and I am not bothered if its better or worse, its more enjoyable for ME. Im happy to listen to 24 Bit FLAC. I dont like CD.
" I also don’t fall for the speaker wire or the power cord fantasies". Yeah, I did some tests on this. It turns out that every speaker wire filters out a different part of the spectrum. No need to spend a fortune on high end speaker wires - just run 5 different low-end speaker wires - even use CAT 5 internet cable and household electrical cable. You can easily test this - just go buy a few meters of the hard wire you use in your house walls and run it in parallel to the existing wire - I promise you it will sound better. If it does not just ignore this internet ***** LOL Power cord you just need a thick cable and clean connectors - what will make a difference is you are using tube amplifiers is to use a separate GROUND. Buy a copper ground connector and bank it into the ground outside the house and then run a cable to the chassis of your tube amplifier. Tube amplifiers NEED a really good ground and most houses don't have one. There is usually +/-20 v to +/-50v on the ground of a house
@@piccalillipit9211 I like CD, and streaming, but Vinyl most of all because it is so visually and aesthetically pleasing…vinyl reminds me of days long ago (I’m 67 now, so very very long ago). I recently bought a fairly old and inexpensive CD player, purely as it had a great transport which I use straight via Toslink to my DAC, sounds great to me.
@@piccalillipit9211 I think once you have spent around $100 dollars on speaker wire, you have as good as it gets. Better…ensure you match impedances between speaker and amp (esp valve amps) to ensure the amp is driving the speaker effectively, impedance of the cable between the two is negligible.
Responding to the description: Thank you for sharing your insights. As someone who works as a mastering engineer for vinyl, I can relate to some of the challenges and misconceptions you’ve highlighted. Vinyl mastering is often romanticized, and many people overlook the technical complexities and compromises involved. The notion that vinyl has a "magical" or "warm" sound is more a matter of perception than reality. Vinyl has inherent physical limitations-like restricted dynamic range and susceptibility to distortion-so achieving great sound often comes down to how well the mastering and cutting process is handled. As you mentioned, digital delays are a standard part of vinyl cutting today, even in many so-called "all-analogue" processes. Few people realize that analogue purism has been heavily diluted since the late '70s, especially with the advent of digital tools used to optimize cutting. I’ve seen firsthand how digital masters, when prepared carefully for vinyl, can translate beautifully onto the format. In fact, I often adjust compression, EQ, and stereo imaging specifically to account for vinyl’s physical constraints. To me, what makes vinyl special isn’t that it’s inherently "better" or "warmer" than digital-it’s the craftsmanship and thoughtfulness that go into adapting the music for the format. As for ABX tests, I’d love to see more discussions based on actual blind listening tests rather than subjective claims. Most listeners might be surprised at how subtle (or even imperceptible) some of the differences are between vinyl and digital when played back on properly calibrated systems. Ultimately, I agree with you: chasing "purity" in vinyl is a bit of a rabbit hole. At the end of the day, it’s all about how the music makes us feel, not whether it adheres to some purist ideal.
Why so much dislike for Vinyl? To each their own does it really matter. Different strokes for different folks. In the end it’s a matter of preference. Let it be who really cares.
If retailers would give consumers a choice. Most big retailers that most people frequent are selling only vinyl. It's like to Hell with people who prefer CDs.
I have no clue what this weasel's point he's trying to make. I only heard half of it. I have vinyl and CDs. This load of nonsense just came on my feed.
@@jimmymelendez1836 All vinyl since the 70s is "polluted" by a digital delay step. So vinyl can not be better than digital. Are you proud you don't understand something so simple?
The point is to debunk all the vinyl purists who hate on digital because they think they're better than everyone else. When in fact vinyl is also digital.
Most vinyl masters have been pushed through a-d/d-a during cutting since early 1970's. It was trying to be a 14 bit chain, but maybe 12 or 13 bits actual. It still rawked! 13 bit audio can be VERY VERY GOOD, and still a few dB quiter than the best vinyl record playback. If recordists and mastering of CD's were intent on best s:n and lowest distortion, not overall mostest-loudest, CompactDisc would never have had the hate, and older cd's would sound EVEN BETTER as newer-cheaper-better d-a converters got into $1000 consumer stereos. Loudness War remastering was a crime against consumers of music.
I would say this though, I personally really like the sound of AAD or ADD chain studio production. In fact I believe mixing and mastering analogue tape recordings in high-resolution digitally really helps capture the warmth and 'grit' of the 1st stage and reproduces it in way that is closest to hearing how the music sounds in a studio environment.
I am synthesist and got over the analog/digital things years ago. I have a pile of VST synths and defy anyone to hear the difference if you are a decent programmer. Good VST sound beyond incredidble and appreciate people like you who don;t wallow in sentimentality.
I think that everyone that is my age or older, that lived through the change from analogue to digital in the 80's, knows that the statement that vinyl is better, is BS. As is buying gold plated 365% oxygen free copper cables for your speakers for hundreds of euros per meter, and rediculously expensive interconnects that prevent digital jitter when connecting your cd player to your aplifier to get the purest bits. The good thing at my age is that my ears are getting worse so the requirements for my hi-fi equipment get lower. It's a win win situation 😂
I used to DJ in clubs with vinyl, then moved to digital. It’s obvious that digital is far superior. Sooooo many club goers and music nerds would argue the vinyl is better trope. So funny, all of the music we were playing in those clubs was made on computers. 😂
You can't compare the excitement of an MC shouting out "dubplate business" and a dubplate where maybe a couple exist to a digital file. Also as a nerd I like hearing mixing on vinyl but that's low down the list.
@Louuns mixing on vinyl is also very satisfying and fun to do as a DJ for sure. Unfortunately I found as more people were moving to digital that clubs were no longer keeping their turntables well maintained. Shame really. Dubplates, sure the culture and process around them is super cool. Sadly that cultural practice is well and truly over.
This lad is proper funny. He knows how to play the algorithm game by trolling. He doesn't care if one thing sounds better than another, he knows they're just different. But he has more fun triggering people to get views and comments that get him more money. Top lad
Não existe som digital, mas apenas arquivos digitais. Não existe áudio digital. O áudio é analógico. O computador nos dá uma simulação, nada mais. O mundo digital é virtual, não é real. O analógico é real e o digital é virtual.
They've invested significant amounts of their personal income to reinforce their deeply held beliefs. Anything that contradicts those beliefs can feel like more than just an insult to their audiophilia; it becomes a direct challenge to their personal identity. Tribalism is alive and well.
You made a great point about how people don't actually hear the recording live in studio, so they have no comparison. I was thinking about this kind of thing lately and I realized, the only comparison I really have is classical music concerts vs recordings. That's not even a strict comparison unless I heard it played by the same orchestra or at least in the same concert hall as the recording.
A perfectly summarized and exceptionally valuable addition that serves as a guiding light for both beginners and those lost in confusion or misinterpretation. It not only provides clarity in a sea of conflicting philosophies and misconceptions but also elevates us with its comprehensive and empathetic approach. This contribution maintains the essence of its message while presenting accurate, unambiguous facts and insights that are immensely useful. Without a doubt, this is one of the most enriching and inspiring discussions I have come across in the past two to three years. After immersing myself in the world of digital-to-analog converters (DACs) and navigating the enchanted forest of their sweet, syrupy synonyms, I find myself back in reality, swimming through deceptive specifications. Now I must process and comprehend this new layer of meaning, trying to grasp the magnitude of its significance-what is worth embracing and what is not. And above all, it was refreshing to receive such a concise and illuminating explanation, even on the topic of analog formats.
I met Ry Cooder outside the Sweetwater in Mill Valley, CA in 1987 and he autographed my Bop Til You Drop cd (Ry added the year to his autograph, that's how I can be sure of the year it happened). His son was with him and asked what that was, the cd. Ry replied something along the lines of "Oh that's a format that will soon be obsolete."
@@snakeyengel I didn't get into the show. It was some sort of star studded get together, maybe a tribute or celebration, no chance of getting ticket, tiny club only room for the luminaries and their entourages. I made the 2 hour round trip drive strictly in hopes of getting Ry's autograph. I did see many other great shows there, though. Alos, had a memorable make out session in the alley adjacent with my later-to-be wife.
@APMastering I agree. Some albums got no love at all from the label, artist or pressing plants. I have heard some pretty terrible music on cds as well.. I know a ton of people wish Jimmy Page would let go of some tapes so they could be remastered and put on vinyl because the latest mixes Jimmy put out are stale.
Hahahahahaha! I took a twelve-week mastering course and have read a few books on the topic, and never learned this. That's hilarious! :) This is even funnier than the Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs scandal a few years back, when all the purists found out that many of their treasured MoFi productions were digitized. Wait, you couldn't hear the inherent digital-ness? but I thought digital was cold and soulless... LOL
If you play a vinyl record which contains material from a digital source, it will sound 'warmer' than a straight digital copy. A bit of surface noise and saturation will creep in, imparting 'soul'. Sorry!
Going in the opposite direction, I saw a documentary about the creation of a digital (then modern) version of the Mellotron (a 1960s sampling machine which used tape, most famously used in Strawberry Fields by the Beatles), the M4000D. They said when they recreated and recorded the sounds digitally they sounded too good so in order to make them sound more like the 1960s version they copied the digial recordings onto 1/4 inch reel to reel tape as an analogue recording (like home enthusiasts had) then digitised a playback of the reel to reel recording. That was what was then put into the machine ROM. This added the analogue warmth people prefered.
For the variable grove spacing, I am surprised they stated it was cheaper to buy a digital delay unit which would have been very expensive at the start of the 80's than it was to put an extra playback head in the tape recorder. The head for the predicitive signal wouldn't even need to be very good.
It seems like hell will freeze over and pigs will fly before record companies release hi-rez digital downloads of their music catalogs that aren’t LOUD/SLAMMED and have all the beautiful dynamics that music lovers want. I will pay to buy albums all over again if they do this. I’m SO tired of wanting to turn up my music but it’s too loud, harsh, and in your face. I HATE IT! Ugh 😩 If this ever happens maybe more mainstream listeners will realize dynamic music sounds better and record companies can make more money… because we all know thats all they care about.
Crazy. Since most of my LP’s were made when digital didn’t exist I suppose you are wrong. Do you really believe that most who listen to vinyl only listen to vinyl manufactured after 1980? The newer vinyl I buy mainly comes from Kevin Gray and I can assure you that there isn’t anything digital about them…
@APMastering Most of today's kids don't even know music existed before 2000! Look around the "reactions" channels at all the guys faking hearing older music for the first time, you'll get the idea... right now Sultans of Swing seems to be the favourite.
@@jimmymelendez1836 Look at the songs they'r reacting to... Some of the most played music ever... Sultans of Swing has over 1,000,000 plays on Spotify, alone. Do you really believe they've never heard it before?
I am 51years old. I see it like this! The people in the days of playing vinyl, played vinyl or tapes because that was all they had. In my younger days I played cassette tapes as I preferred them over vinyl but not by a lot. I later obtained a DAT recorder but getting my hands on a good reliable Betamax video recorder was not easy without paying out a lot of money. Sony made ones for studio use at 4000 plus pounds. Not so long after that I purchased a CD player. This I loved. Clear reliable sound easy to use over vinyl or cassette.
Thank you so much for speaking the truth on these subjects. I recently came across your channel and find it so refreshing that you're willing to just lay it all out there with solid facts. I genuinely appreciate your insight and look forward to your videos.
Thank you! I’ve had this argument with people before about how most vinyl in existence is cut from a digital file but I wasn’t aware of the digital lathe used since 1979 and I also hadn’t really thought about the fixed groove process before that and how it would essentially HAVE to be a forced compression of the recording.
This makes me curious what in my collection may be truly analog, because I didn’t know it went back that far. But I’d love to know who is diluted enough to assume anything post-CD is truly analog. It doesn’t matter anyway, so many artists record/mix now knowing their media will be consumed via 128k and/or through a small speaker. Vinyl is a labour of love, it means you’re willing to own something that speaks to you in physical form, and you want to spend the extra time consuming it. For me, it also means I can pitch my music 1.5-3%, which is so much fun.
Whilst you are factually correct, you may be missing a key factor. My faith in the inferior quality of vinyl (as an unfoolable sound engineer/producer) was shaken only once, when listening to an orchestral recording featuring nicely recorded strings. They sounded AMAZING! I checked the CD against what I was hearing, and the CD version of those strings was simply ordinary (in other words, accurate). So, what you might be missing is that the nature of vinyl, whether because of some kind of crappy stylus, poor pre-amplification or inaccurate frequency response, sometimes leads to more musical outcomes. Less accurate, yes. The result of flaws in the reproduction, yes. But sometimes sounding "nicer".
have you heard the brass section on Savoy Truffle? do you think it would have sounded better recorded digitally with buckets of headroom? probably not. So I agree distortion can do something cool, but it is a creative mix choice and not really something that you should be merely subjected to at random.
The two things that really drew me to vinyl are the expense and inconvenience.
😂
@@Boinzy476 Don't underestimate the huge space dedicated to storing vinyl records.
What drew me to vinyl is backing my favourite artists and receiving a physical token of doing so while listening to their music on streaming services :D
I'm particularly drawn to the unnecessary additional consumption of fossil fuels.
@@ZakiWasik you probably don't know the margin artists get from a vinyl then. They're expensive to make, expensive to ship, to sell, everyone taking a big chunk on the way. Artists get more money from digital, particularly if you buy on Bandcamp. Not mentioning the huge pollution record plants make, which most vinyl addicts don't give a shit about.
"Why does it take 41 Country-singers to change a lightbulb?"
"1 to change the bulb, 40 to sing a song about how good the old one was"
Than't awesome! :)
@@hansemannluchter643 there's a 2nd version: 1 holds the bulb, the 40 turn the house in circles 🤪
@@hansemannluchter643
Genius
A-ha )))
@@hansemannluchter643 rosy retrospection for the fail
Man, the hi-fi guys arguing with engineers and producers is so hilarious.
@@vstrvcvrtv I saw one yesterday who said something along the lines of "I don't read Scientific or technical documents, but..." It's embarrassing.
this is the science lol l
These are the guys who think a £500 RCA jack interconnect makes a big difference when in any studio I've been in, including some very, very good ones, the mic cables are all £20 ones from Studiospares and there's a high chance the snare was miked with a £90 SM57.
@@DrRinse And the mic cables are only 20$ because they're like 10m long and they bought them, instead of having the intern make them. 😂
Analog CRTs are technically inferior to OLEDs or LCD in picture quality yet they give off a particular glow and refresh rate method that can’t be replicated fully by newer display tech and look aesthetically pleasing when displaying low-res content, particularly older pixel video games. Is the CRT “better” than my 65” OLED? From a scientific perspective, no. From a subjective standpoint for particular use cases, yes. Likewise the same for vinyl, it presents music in a pleasing, different form even if it’s not the final word in transparency.
...and it has been since the late 1970s, in many cases. See my "Vinyl is digital, get over it!" video.
yeah i saw your video while editing mine and i added the slide of the magazine where they said digital is the normal mode. actually i screenshot it from your vid. hope you don't mind!
@@vwestlife i actually was first enlightened about how long we have been recording digital from vwestlife's video.
People falsely think that because vinyl is an analog playback medium therefore the audio on it is also analog. It's a false correlation. And the best part of all is that the vinyl die-hards don't understand the significance of "The source audio is digital. Vinyl is literally no different from a CD or digital audio file". They just break down and get enraged.
It is indeed more or less the same story as todya's movies shot with real films & presented in traditional film projection setup. Sounds like purely analog process from start to finish isn't it?
...But virtually no one realized (or actually realized, but just ignored the fact) that there's no feature films ever made with traditional analog process since early 2000's. ALL of today's movies would went through digital intermediate process somewhere in the pipeline. No 100% "films" ever made anymore, period.
Your video seemed less contentious for some reason but I of course loved it.
To me the only reason to get vinyl, other than the dynamic range thing, has less to do with the sound and more like reading a physical book rather than an ebook: it's a physical object, you can look at the art, keep it on your shelf, and you can put your electronics away so as to give it your full attention.
i could say the same thing with a clear glass CD walkman and most CD cases come with the same artwork as Vinyl and CD can just store way more information so i dont get it
@ernestochang1744 maybe, but have you ever tried to read those liner notes? Squint city! Plus the artwork looks better on a vinyl
@@ernestochang1744 cd is simply smaller
@@ernestochang1744You just did. And that's cool too.
I'm a musician first, and an engineer second. Even though I know very well that not all audio media is created with music in mind, my thinking has always been this: no matter what methods and tools they have available to do it, I'm just happy when people are able to listen to the music they want to hear. At that point, the means of doing so becomes irrelevant.
@@damianoakes2592 exactly, I own vinyl records because it's fun, not because it sounds better, it doesn't
Bold of you to assume that anyone will actually read the description. I gave up on that year's ago! I bet half of the people who commented didn't even watch the *video* they just commented based on the title.
Thanks for breaking these myths. I love vinyl too, but I'm not about to believe in some magical analog fantasy. I just prefer the physical experience, just like you mention at the end.
A wild NotJustBikes appears!
I guess he really is NotJustBikes... he's vinyl fan too!
@@NotJustBikes what is this, a crossover episode?
@@NotJustBikes Yeah it's like shooting photos on film. Nobody does because it's better in technical sense but because they enjoy the different and limiting process.
Out of all people I expected to see here...
Last time I sent a master to a premier vinyl cutting house, they requested a digital file, 16/44.1 to be exact.
As a mastering engineer myself, I am constantly being told that I am incorrect on this by the hifi flat earthers.
What they fail to realise is that a digitised signal is *exactly* the same as the analogue source, up to the frequency of half the sampling rate. It’s mathematically exact. What’s worse is that the mathematics behind why this is true isn’t exactly new, having been discovered by the genius Joseph Fourier in 1817.
So how do you explain that people who spend £100k on a system prefer vinyl...???
@@piccalillipit9211 It's not for me to try and explain people's motivation for anything. People spend their money how they feel. Even if they are wrong.
Personally, I like vinyl as well. I have a vintage Garrard 301 turntable and SME reference tonearm with a Decca head. Total lot is worth about £8,000. Stuff sounds lovely. But I'm not deluded as to why it sounds lovely. I have spent over 2 1/2 decades in studios working professionally. I know what's happening.
@@jeremycarroll451 I was not being ****** - it was a genuine question. Im an ex audiophile and I prefer Vinyl to CD, but i prefer 24 Bit Flac to Vinyl.
Someone said it was the "Loudness w4r" that caused this debate and I think it probably was - Iver had £50k vinyl and £50k CD setups and I just find CD exhausting.
"Garrard 301". Very very nice
@@piccalillipit9211 Makes sense. What I'm saying is that high quality vinyl on good gear sounds beautiful. It's just quite far removed from what was heard in the studio. Much further than a digital print. By a long way. So, those who claim some kind of 'authenticity' to vinyl are just plain incorrect.
@@jeremycarroll451 No ive never claimed that - Ive only ever claimed it "sounds better" which is subjective, it SOUNDS BETTER to me. I have tube amps - they are nothing like linear but I love them. Music is about enjoyment, if its technically worse but it moves you more and you get more out of it - surely THAT is what matters...??
But to me the whole argument falls apart when you get to the high end digital files, they are really really good. the issue I have is Apple has removed the optical output from the new iMacs so I currently have no way of getting the output to my DAC...
I had no idea they were digitally "mapping" the groove cutting path to keep the grooves from running into each other on vinyl records! I just figured it was always a fixed spacing ratio and then they cut within that set grove "window." That's pretty wild!
I am no expert on the subject of the "varigroove" method (I believe it was also called Rheinische Fullschrift in Europe IINM) but, in all fairness to the analogue enthusiasts, I have come across pictures online of analogue reel to reel machines that used something like a preview playback head. This preview head was placed around 2 seconds "earlier" than the actual head which signal goes to the cutter. This would have been for 33 rpm records, one rotation taking 1.8 seconds, of course. Once again, I have very little knowledge of these machines but I am very certain they used some analogue electronic circuit to accelerate the lathe's movement when a louder passage came by and decelerate it again when the sound level decreased. (...Whoops ! and then I resumed the video. Very interesting machines.)
I'm so analog I hire the bands to come play in my living room. It's the only way to truly experience the music. ...wish their amps would stop hissing though.
But seriously, you are absolutely spot on with this. 👍
But don't you hate it when the guitarist turns up with a digital delay in his effects loop? 😀
Yes and the Amps and mixing desk they use are digital… you need to specify that all these components need to be analogue lol
Professional Recording Engineer (retired)... can confirm. I lived and worked through the digital transformation. You are 100% correct. But you already know that :-).
Same here, and totally agree!!!
pleb here m, and there was a reason people were in a rush to replace their LPs with shiny new CDs in the beginning
@@bobbytesback
Yep.
@@JadoubeX yesh, me too… but went back to vinyl ( for non technical reasons)
The only sound difference...is the lines of cocaine on the mixing board....dampening sound....
The audiophile myth arose from early experience with the "loudness war" ... they would buy a CD to augment their vinyl copy and it would be LOUD and right in your face, compared to the vinyl. As pointed out this is a result of different mastering techniques not the medium itself.
Years ago I took a lot of my vinyl collection and transcoded it to MP3/320. Once I got the levels right I could not tell the difference between them... Doing A-B comparisons I would actually have to get up and look to see which was playing.
Then came the CD loudness war and I just skipped right over CDs and went completely digital. So there is a good reason why my pop music collection dead ends in 1995.
I find it truly ironic (and a bit tragic) that the best medium was used to deliver the worst music... and in many cases it still is.
The point is that CDs and WAV even MP3 can far exceed the capabilities of Vinyl ... it's not about the medium, it's about the mix and master.
EXACTLY!!!! Garbage in, garbage out!
I still have vinyl.
Not much and mostly stuff that is either rare, autographed, or not streamed anywhere.
I play vinyl through a pricey cartridge, a Thorens TT, and an Audio Note tubed phono pre-amp, and it sounds like crap compared to my digital collection.
And something new that I have never experienced in the 20th century is defective pressings.
I bought records from the 70's to the early 90's. Never once did I ever have to return a defective record.
I don't really buy much vinyl.
And half of the new re-releases I have bought were garbage.
Some so bad, I thought something was blown in the stereo.😊
@@rosssmith8481
I sold off my vinyl about 15 years ago. My music now resides in a 4tb SD drive in a small compter.... even the transcoded vinyl sounds better there.
I disagree, but I’m not saying that one, either one, is better than the other. That’s personal preference. But the inherent natures of the mediums are a factor. It’s not just the mix and the master, even though those are very important. Obviously to make a recording work on vinyl the audio must be dumbed down a bit to function within vinyl’s limitations. But the medium adds something in the midrange that I find captivating. A few years ago third man records released a 3 vinyl disc edition of patsy cline recordings, and “I fall to pieces” sounds like like the musicians are in your living room - its most noticeable in the standup bass. Obviously that was an excellent recording in the first place and the tracks were I’m sure painstakingly cut. But there are plenty of cds of that recording and none of the ones I’ve heard have that “in the room” quality. But again, that’s my personal preference.
That's interesting, because I remember the loudness war, it was on radio.
Calling those less slammed masters HDR for “High Dynamic Range” might work. Turn it into the positive it is, point to it directly. They have better range, that’s the point of that master, they’ll be quieter and louder, just like an HDR video file is brighter and darker. People seem to get that.
Marketing that concept is surely easier than a “no limiter” version that sounds quieter at first, especially when that wording might violate laypeople expectations about what a “volume limiter” would be.
@ycmneo That's a big part in why Blu-Ray is so popular with movies enthusiasts. You watch on streaming services and they run the audio through dynamic compression. Basically gets rid of all dynamic range. If you want the full range of dynamics back, you pretty much have to get a Blu-Ray player. Of course Blu-Ray also has uncompressed audio. That's a big draw too.
@thejman3489 The same reason blu rays are TERRIBLE to watch on a stereo systems or TV speakers lol
@lslslsfrfr I have a sound bar. Dolby Atmos definitely had sound mixing issues in Mono. but most movies are mixed in DTS and that sounds great in Mono.
Earache Records, a metal/grindcore label, recently-ish released at least some of their records as "Full Dynamic Range" and it's exactly that, no limiters, no over compression, and they even released it on Spotify, so you can actually compare on the same streaming site how different it sound from the CD version.
To be honest though, in metal music I kinda prefer the overly compressed and hard limited sound, but that's just my preference.
@@thejman3489 Depends on the streaming service. Amazon Prime Video and Netflix both preserve a wider dynamic range, requiring me to constantly raise and lower my system volume during playback because the quiet sections are inaudible and the loud sections are WAY too loud. On the other hand, TH-cam videos from the same professional channel will have a much narrower dynamic range so that I can leave the volume and not touch it. I've found it's common for younger generations to prefer a narrower dynamic range because it allows for comfortable listening without having the extremes get lost or overblown. If I'm at a concert hall listening to an orchestra, I want to hear that dynamic range (and the space allows for the loud passages to be appropriate). Same goes for the movie theater. But when I'm at home? No, I don't want to be turning up the volume to hear whispering dialog only for my ears to get bombarded with an explosion.
There is probably a digital pedal in the analog guitar signal chain that it being printed onto a vinyl... Let that sink in.
I know that one trick to deal with those people: "Really? Fancy a double-blind test? I can arrange that whenever and wherever you want". Sadly noone ever had time for that.
@@philippkemptner4604 I’ll make the time. Where are you located? I’d gladly take a doubt blind test.
****⭐️ To be very clear, this is all for fun. i am absolutely not trying to come at you in an argumentative manner in the least. Again, this stuff is all for fun. I’m far from one of those snooty audiophiles who look down on someone based on their record collection, knowledge, or what gear they use. Everyone has to start somewhere, and you pick up info here and there, because you find it extremely interesting. I’ve also been a record collector for 35+ years, am a musician, and have made music a part of my life as not just a hobby, but also a profession since I was 18. 🔊😊🎶⭐️****💜
@@philippkemptner4604 I’ll make the time. Where are you located? I’d gladly take a doubt blind test.
****⭐️ To be very clear, this is all for fun. i am absolutely not trying to come at you in an argumentative manner in the least. Again, this stuff is all for fun. I’m far from one of those snooty audiophiles who look down on someone based on their record collection, knowledge, or what gear they use. Everyone has to start somewhere, and you pick up info here and there, because you find it extremely interesting. I’ve also been a record collector for 35+ years, am a musician, and have made music a part of my life as not just a hobby, but also a profession since I was 18. 🔊😊🎶⭐️****💜
I’ll make the time. Where are you located? I’d gladly take a doubt blind test.
****⭐️ To be very clear, this is all for fun. i am absolutely not trying to come at you in an argumentative manner in the least. Again, this stuff is all for fun. I’m far from one of those snooty audiophiles who look down on someone based on their record collection, knowledge, or what gear they use. Everyone has to start somewhere, and you pick up info here and there, because you find it extremely interesting. I’ve also been a record collector for 35+ years, am a musician, and have made music a part of my life as not just a hobby, but also a profession since I was 18. 🔊😊🎶⭐️****💜
@@philippkemptner4604 only that the vast majority of people who suggest a DBT do not know what it actually entails. It’s entails more than two or three people. In fact you probably need at least twenty to thirty people for an audio DBT. And they all need to be specifically trained. If you want to argue science then it’s best to understand how scientific processes work.
I’ve been working as a mastering engineer for vinyl records for over 15 years, and while I agree with some points, I’d like to clarify a few things. Whether digital or not, masters for vinyl can differ for both technical and artistic reasons. For example, vinyl tends to sound dull when the music is over-limited, as the dynamic range is constrained by the physical grooves. This influences how I approach audio for cutting, prioritizing relaxed compression and proper leveling. Other aspects like stereo imaging, EQ, and phase handling also come into play, often requiring significant adjustments. In many ways, mastering for vinyl involves considering the physics of the medium-needle movement, groove depth, balance, and more. It’s almost like being part audio engineer, part physics engineer.
It's almost like people mix and master in a manner appropriate to the expected listening media and methods of the end-user. Almost.
@Guynhistruck Not almost-that’s exactly right. This applies to any medium. For instance, inter-sample peaks are crucial on platforms like Spotify. They prevent you from exceeding certain levels because the codec can vary across devices, which affects playback. Similarly, if you’re mixing for vinyl, you need to account for specific aspects of production (including the physics of the medium) that ensure compatibility across all playback systems. In a way, digital is more forgiving of errors, while vinyl forces you to respect the laws of physics at every stage of production.
@@Guynhistruck u thought u were special when typing that out, didnt ya
@@thiagopinheiromusic Mastering for target media (or medium) goes back. I recall broadcast promo 45s being mastered in both stereo and mono, often with mix differences, too. My studio work did not involve mastering for vinyl (tape duplication masters.. did those!), but the 2020 Covid shut downs gave me a chance to catch up with the old guys and gals who did that work, and from microphone to vinyl groove to playback speakers, it's a miracle that what comes out bears resemblance to what went in. There are so many places to screw it up, so many "gotchas" especially if moving tapes between studios. I think you're very right that digital recording can be more forgiving, because a longer play time doesn't have any physical effect, but cutting lacquer, a producer wanting to squeeze another 60 seconds onto the side, with some significant 50Hz, and not reduce the overall level of the side...
Probably lots of folks here never considered that track sequencing on a vinyl album is influenced by the physics of groove velocity and groove pitch as the effective diameter decreases.
@@raygunsforronnie847 well said mate!
I think most people who hate digital actually just hate loud mixes. (okay, you basically conclude with this but I typed it out before the conclusion)
Who really cares, I have old cars and they are slow. But so much fun, vinyl is the same ❤
yeah i actually agree
absolutely, their limitations make them more desirable.
I totally agree with your take on "releasing the vinyl 'HDR' master" digitally. I wish more bands/acts would do that. Having a well mastered digital file/CD is always my preference. It's why the late 80s early 90s CDs are the one I go for when I buy CDs.
There's a database for dynamic range called "Dynamic Range DB" (can't post links here, just google it) and it is a great tool when you're looking to buy a certain album (or not). If you're not familiar with the DR value, it's good at 10 or higher. Once you go below 8, the music usually starts having that "crushed" modern sound. It's not always perfect and some album might sound better at 8 than another at 9, but it's a good indicator of what you want to buy or not.
I love how this guy hammers audio myths. Thank you for this video!
I only master my music onto Edison wax cylinders using OTT and Sausage Fattener to help get that "analogue sound".
Thank you for another great video!❤
LOL
Try adding some beef dripping
@@Coneman3 damn! I never thought of that! I'll let the fat drip over the cylinder as the grooves are being inscribed.
@APMastering Remember, the Edison cylinders and early discs were cut using 'vertical' rather than the 'lateral' method...100% acoustically recorded. Edison, being the money grub he was, patented the 'vertical cut' records (true 'records' of a historical performance event... single take... no multi track mixing/layering.. pre-electric process). Vertical meaning the needle moves up & down, not sideways.
@@BTW...Edison finally began electrically recording his diamond disc format in 1927 after others transitioned about 1925 like the victor Orthophonic or Columbia vivatonal. -my opinion starts- However, I argue pre electrical era diamond disc records (not durring ww1 due to phenol shortage) sound far better than others of that time, while victor specifically has a very particular 'canned' sound. I have a 1927ish Edisonic CLT with a brand new cork/shellac paper diaphragm and silk linkage a very precise copy of originals of my own construction and wow omg do the late electrical or acoustic DD records sound incredible. Very loud, excellent dynamic rage and very low surface noise. I never used to like DD records but now I understand why people highly regarded it, wrote many letters to Edison in praise, and why they advertised it as 'phonograph with a soul'. I'd like to begin cutting and making my own records possibly over the summer and put music that never existed at the time on it to see how it sounds. All in all I have so much fun with experimenting and working on the old mechanical technology, even though it's old it's quite complex (like design and materials and how specific it has to be) and I couldn't imagine the R&D and set up they had to do just to get to production
There is an era of vinyl, late 70s early 80s where they were actively marketing that it was DIGITALLY RECORDED. These were the audiophile discs of the time, demanding a higher price tag because it was a new and superior method of recording and mastering. I collect DBX encoded vinyl from this era whenever possible, because it really does reduce surface noise and it's always a very good recording.
@@jdraven0890 1812 Overture vinyl brags about digital cannons.
@@Keith-ux9ku ok that is hilarious - I really prefer fully analog cannons, myself though using one in a recording studio poses obvious challenges
Alan Parsons' Eye In The Sky album proudly boasts being recorded and mastered digitally. Sounds great on vinyl or CD imo
The no-lim versions: it’s all about marketing it. You need to call it something, that sounds like it has higher perceived value, like UNLIMITED DYNAMIC MASTER :)
And for British sci-fi mans they should call Sacha Dhawan, John Simm and Michelle Gomez as testimonials.
"director cut" master, sorta
i don't think you need to market it that much, the ones who want it know what they want, it's just never available. It's really sad that its basically impossible to get it without getting the vinyl.
A big part of the "vinyl sound" depends on the EQ profile of the stylus+cartridge. If you use a calibration disc to plot this, you can then reverse it and get a clean, accurate reproduction of the frequencies. Apply that same profile to a digital recording and it takes on the sound the vinyl had, but without the surface noise. If you like the vinyl sound then actual vinyl is a great way to get it - but it's not magic. 🙂
Obviously different materials and completely different playback equipment can make the same recording sound different. Surprised no one ever brings that fact up.
Surely - proper naming should be digitaly supported playback gear and not digital sound - there is no digital sound. Sound is acoustic happening .
You made me remember the silliness during the transition to digital of the photography and advertising businesses: So we shot photos on film, ektachrom, showed it to the client for approval , then used quite imperfect scanners to digitalise it, then post-produced the digital file, then got an other ekta, out of this digitally edited file, to show to the client, OK from him, then scanned this back for the printing process..... All this quality ruining, expensive and time consuming , not to say crazy, procedure just because the clients were nervous, with the idea of making their mind, looking at a computer monitor.
lol. i know very little about that process but that sounds pretty crazy!
@APMastering Simply because art directors, clients, even some photographers were not familiar with the new tools.... They were used to look at diapositives on a light box, or prints. Actually ektachroms, with their poor dynamic range, colors shifts, compared to negative films, were just used because it was more convenient and cheap.... More I think about it, more I see parallels between our two domains.
As an "audiophile" I remember listening to my first "realTime digital recording" (1982 Miller & Kreisel Sound Corporation), acoustic jazz on my JBL 4310, it was great. This guys seemed to know how to use the new tools, at least to my ears... 🙂
@APMasteringit was very comparable, and equally stupid.
Hey I'll give them some credit. Early digital cameras were pretty low res and film was realistically well over 4K in many cases. It's why we have remasters of shows like Star Trek in 4K because of film. Sadly doesn't work with tape though...
Technology Connection even has a video on it because of how everyone freaked out from a commercial from the 80s that someone re-uploaded in 4K.
The loudness war is what caused audiophiles to prefer records.
That's an interesting thought. There was also a problem in the early days of CD mastering. In the mad rush to get CDs mastered and pressed, they were taking the tapes with RIAA equalization and going with those. I don't know how many, but there were discs getting to consumers with a huge high frequency boost; the EQ that makes vinyl LPs sound good. I'm a fan of vinyl, but I would never say that it's best. The 33 1/3 LP is an amazing example of materials science and engineering from CBS in the late 1940s.
The RIAA curve has never been part of the tape. It's simply a fixed curve used for every cutting process.
@@scottgfx Very early consumer DAC chips were not linear and were actually 14 bit and not 16. Basically Philips has to select every TDA1540 they made for linearity. The most linear were used in Marantz CD players, the other in Philips ones. Then they made the TDA 1541 that at leas was 16 bit. Linearity problem were solved in the SAA7321 that used 1-bit "PWM" bitstream the linearity problem was solved. So early CD players, epecially if used with a system designed for vynil sounded with a lot of high frequencies and tinny.
@@ksteiger You are probably right. It was something I remember hearing in the confluence of stuff going on back then. Perhaps an excuse?
I think you are probably correct. Im a recovered addicted audiophile - ive had £50k CD systems and £50k Vinyl and there is no way CD is more enjoyable to listen to. I could put on an LP and listen for 8 hours. CD Im tired before the end of the CD. BUT 24 BIT FLAC is a whole different ball game. My dislike is CD...!!!
Now that may not be the technology - it may be how people used it. CD was amazing the second you turned it on, and it was great for low cost systems.
As an engineer with 40 years in the biz, I learned early on that you can't reason with the unreasonable but I give you props for trying. I think many people get confused because in the studio we use analog devices to add flavor in the creative process. It does not help that when trying to explain digital you are fighting against an entire industry that benefits from maintaining the myth of analog.
Do you think any of the cable claims are true? Some people say they can hear the differences between copper and silver, or solid core vs stranded wire. As an engineer, do you think there's anything to that argument?
I can't find any good references that are based in science that would either confirm or deny these claims. I guess that what I'm trying to ask is, if I went to school to become an engineer, am I going to come across information that would imply, yes, it is possible differences in cables may be heard, or not? One of the things that make me very skeptical is, even if there isn't any formal science that can be referenced, setting up a listening test that meets the requirements needed to be considered legitimate science is not that difficult. Simply, is there a difference between A and B? Yes or no. So, even if we can't explain why there is a difference, we can at least prove if there is a difference.
@@052RC audiophiles need to probe the super powers in A B... but🤔 don t show up😕
A/B tests over a short time period are notoriously faulty.
There can be differences in cables and similar equipment, but those differences will evidence themselves over time, not in a 10 minute test.
It sounds contradictory to say we use analog devices to add flavor and then for others to say you can’t A/B between an analog and digital source and tell the difference. Obliviously this is admission analog DOES color the sound to some extent.
As long as the "unexplained" difference makes YOU pay more.. that absolutely ok with me.
Don't come back and cry after that..
Thank you! Finally someone who articulated a lot of what's been in my head but unable to easily put into words for the last 15-20 years (but with even more detailed tech explanation).
During the loudness war era (late 2000s + early 2010s especailly) I'd buy an album on vinyl, unwrap it and the first use would be recording it off a USB deck to computer, then I'd use that as my digital version, in preference to CD/mp3. Had the higher dynamics but obviously it'd also get a bit of surface noise and crackling which would annoy me and make me wish that version of the master was made digitally available somehow.
When HDTracks website came about, I thought this would finally be that...but nope, turned out to be lossless versions of the same digital master.
There's definitely a market there for a digital release of the HDR master.
100%
CD is my preferred way to listen to music. But I did discover that there are some issues with older recordings. I remember when I got a Procol Harum album on CD, Shine on Brightly I believe, the CD songs were all slightly shorter and pitch shifted a bit higher than my vinyl copy. After looking into it I discovered that the original studio recorded for several months with a mis-calibrated reel-to-reel deck. The newest CD remaster of the album (at that time) didn't take this into account. Fortunately I was able to find an older release that was done correctly. But other than weird instances like that, vinyl will be hard pressed to beat digital.
I completely agree with you on this. I stopped using vinyl about 15 years ago and sold my turntable. I started selling my records for a while but it was a drag to package and post them. I recently bought a high quality direct drive turntable on a whim and started playing my remaining vinyl. It was wonderful to hear music leap from these records, which hadn’t been played for over 20 years. I really regret selling some of them and it has been fun to play them again. I agree that vinyl doesn’t have a special sound but it is a wonderful medium.
I should add that it’s the medium I grew up with. Buying the latest 7 inch singles then moving on to saving pocket money for albums.
I went through a similar transformation. A Tom Petty box set came with a record and I wanted to play it so I refurbished my old turntable and liked the experience so much I dove head first back into vinyl with many new albums and upgraded turntable.
When you buy a really expensive turntable with a good needle and clean your vinyl with some fancy machine the lp can sound almost as good as a cheap cd.
a "cheap" cd?
@@hazardeur Well, the vinyl record is likely more expensive, I think the poster aimed at that? I try to read forgivingly, with text being highly lossy and such.
@@hazardeur you can get most modern music for €15-€20 on CD, on vinyl it’s about 3x the price.
absolutely true.
i think a lot of what people like about vinyl are the flaws. for instance, i think "musicality" is dynamic stylus drag. high torque turntables sound "dead" or *gasp* "digital" because they have accurate and consistent speed.
the more accurate your playback... the more it sounds like the digital which is either accurate, or not playing.
@@hazardeur Cheap CD player.
Also, very few multi-track recordings issued commercially since the 1960s ever involved recording the sound of a group of musicians playing together at the same time in a single room. Every instrument may have been recorded and processed (including electronic/digital echo, pitch and rhythm correction, etc.) independently. There was no group performance at all, just a whole bunch of separately altered fragments edited and layered into a polished track. No ensemble ever performed "I Am the Walrus" or Beyonce's "Cowboy Carter," so there is no "what it sounded like in the room." You're listening to a carefully assembled collage of many sounds captured in bits and pieces by various means in different places under different circumstances at different times. It only exists as playback, not as performance.
why is that good or bad?
@APMastering It is neither good nor bad. It's just the way it is. So, when people say they want to reproduce what happened between the musicians in "the room," they're imagining something that never happened.
Literally all of classical music recordings and much of jazz involve the sound of a group of musicians playing together at the same time in a single room. Also, virtually all live concert recordings of most any genre. It's funny how people tend to generalise and talk in absolute terms when all they have to go by is their own bubble.
There are exceptions. Audio Lab Japan issued consistently amazing recordings, usually "direct to disc" (one take) and they did capture an actual performance of a group. These were usually small jazz ensembles or a solo pianist. Some of the jackets show you the arrangement of the players in the recording space and the playback seems to match this (as much as two speakers can attempt to replicate it). All that said, I am pretty sure that Audio Lab Japan used digital processing, and the DBX encoded versions require processing through a hardware device.
@@jdraven0890 Yes, there are definitely specialized "audiophile recordings" being made in various quarters, in the USA and overseas. Those are the exceptions, not the rule. I was referring to run-of-the-mill mainstream commercial popular music aimed at the general audience.
I recall when at Opus One, we techs loved when CD's came out. All the issues we had with turntables went away.
I posted this as a response on facecrack...
I eventually got a comment from Larry Boden stating - " I wrote the book “Basic Disc Mastering” and you have nailed the flaws of disc playback perfectly. My had is off to you, sir. Well done."
I don't mean to be a Debbie Downer, but vinyl/turntables suffer from quite a few issues:
- tangential tracking error caused by a pivoting tone arm - masters are cut radially... Unlike the cutting head of a mastering lathe - which travels at a perfect 90d tangent to the groove - a stylus is constantly changing its addressing angle to the groove walls. So the modulations of the groove are not faithfully reproduced since the playback stylus is always moving at a non-perpendicular direction as to how it's cut.
Pivotal tone arms also lead to:
- Skating. As a disc rotates it impinges forces on a contacting surface that cause it to be drawn to the center of the spinning disc. In the shop, we had blank records with no groove that we'd use to set the antiskate mechanisms (usually a spring or weights) that would try to counter act that force. Problem is under compensation causes the stylus to ride up on the side closest to the hub (the left channel) and proper compensation causes the groove closest to the outside (the right channel) to have to drag the stylus against the antiskating force, which causes the stylus to ride up on the outer wall of the groove. It's a real problem that's very hard to deal with.
- low frequency modulation caused by the slight warpage - causes the woofers of a system (or the panels in planar speaker like an Acoustat or Magnepans) to modulate signals above it. You can see it on a Lissajous display on an oscilloscope. it cause the center dot on a blank groove to bounce. You can also see it in larger woofers moving at super low freq (~1-10Hz).
- mismatched RIAA equalization curves - this is the reason you hear about how records sound "warm". That warmth is a mismatch between the RIAA curve that was used to cut the master, and the inverse one used in the consumer's gear. See Larry Boden's book. The RIAA curve was developed to increase the play time on an album side. So during cutting it rolls the bass off and increases the treble. On playback, the consumers reproduction system is supposed do the opposite - increase the bass and roll the treble off. Unfortunately, getting two filters to do a perfect inverse is impossible. Just won't happen. See this
- Reduced elasticity of the groove walls on subsequent passes of a stylus. You see, records are made with polyvinyl materials that have plasticizers mixed in. The problem becomes that as the tiny radius of the stylus impinges on the groove wall, it compresses it. That can be an issue if enough time has not elapsed on subsequent plays of the same section of the groove. That can lead to fracturing of the groove wall, since it's already compressed.
- Asperities in the surface of the vinyl. These cause the noise heard. It's because there's no way to make a perfectly uniform material, so slight variations in the surface are unavoidable.
- Limited channel separation - a few issues lead to this - one the aforementioned skating forces in addition to the limitations of the groove geometry. An groove with stereo information that is in-phase and monophonic swings the stylus left to right. Channel information is realized by a 45d up pitch of the stylus movement - which is limited so it limits the separation of the left/right signals.
But what's really bad is left and right channel signals that are out-of-phase. This causes the cutter head to move vertically. If significant low frequency information is out-of-phase in the audio signal it can cause lift out of the groove path which leads to skips in the groove.
Note this is what happened to an early pressing of an early Led Zeppelin release.
Why we used scopes set to show Lissajous/X-Y when mixing
- Decreasing circumference as the groove goes toward the center of the record. This is obvious as the record is spinning at a constant RPM (revolutions per minute) so that means less material is available for groove modulation.
So yea - records suck - sorry. Even the guy that won seven Grammy's for engineering Steely Dan -- the stuff all the golden ears vinyl people seem to like (and it is really good, analog or digital) - hated vinyl - Roger Nichols. He wrote an article called "Snap, Crackle, Pop" that explained the reasons for his becoming an audio engineer (he was originally a nuke engineer).
Where:
Snap, Crackle and Pop Music
A tale of the (wrong) tape when remastering
By Roger Nichols
"I originally got involved in recording music because I hated clicks and pops on record. I figured that the only way that I was going to get good quality recordings to play was to record them myself. I could then bring home two-track 15 ips copies to play on my stereo. Much better than the Rice Crispy sound of vinyl LPs."
After I posted this, Larry called me up and reminded me of one issue I forgot - the decreasing radius as you go towards the center.
He told me that as you get closer to the label/groove runout, you actually start erasing things you just previously cut. He mentioned a story when he was working as a mastering engineer of trying to convince the label that "Frankenstein" on "They Only Come Out At Night" should be one of the outer tracks since it had such wide spectral content.
Nope, they wanted it at the end of the side. Larry was bummin' from what our conversation sounded like.
Oh well...
As to MC cartridges that have lower moving mass than their MM counterparts (because having the coil on the cantilever results in less inertia) I had a story of a guy with a Thorens table and a Linn-Sondek tonearm with a Supex MC cartridge.
One day a KA-7 unit came down to the shop - at Opus One, we had a lift that would go between the fancy showroom and the dingy shop/warehouse in the basement. On it was the service tag that read, " Picks up Radio Moscow on right channel" ...
I was like WTF? I went up to Phil - a sharp well versed sales guy that wrote the ticket. As I was starting to say this is nutz, he mentioned that the customer ran the electron microscope at CMU... so he wasn't a neophyte to technology.
I tell them the only way I can troubleshoot this is to go to the customer's house.
Being a broadcast engineer I was familiar with various atmospheric conditions that can affect radio propagation - such as how the sun angle can change the ionization over the period of a day depending on the time of year - this is why some AM stations are called "daytimers" and have to change power levels at different times of the day depending on the date - - s
So I get to the guy's house about 5PM and he takes me downstairs to his stereo set up. It's near a window/outside wall. I then put on some headphones, turn on the KA-7, set it to MC and just leave the tonearm on his Thorens on the tonearm rest.
Sure enough, I eventually hear the BBC station, then Air Canada, and many other longwave transmissions dancing around in the stereo field. It was quite interesting as they'd pan and fade out as another would appear.
So I looked out the window and saw a longwire - it's an antenna that looks like a typical clothes line everyone used to use to dry clothes. But it's made of wire and is used by enthusiasts known as DX'ers - - DX stands for "distant station" in amateur radio lingo
So I ask him if he's a DX'er ... sure enough he is. I then as him what he's using for lightning protection for the longwire. Turns out he was connecting to the ground lug of the outlet right outside the room that his stereo is plugged into. If you may recall turntables have a separate ground wire that is usually tied to a terminal on the back of the preamp which is at ground potential.
I go outside and notice that the insulators for his longwire have mold growing on them which is also present on the lightning arrester (basically an airgap) which is bridging across to the ground terminal.
This gives you an idea as to how low-level the signal on a cartridge is.
Appreciate this. But one thing to consider regarding vinyl cut from a digital file is that it usually has different mastering than the digital counterpart. Some people may prefer the sound of the vinyl mastering, particularly in cases where the digital counterpart is overly compressed, which has been a trend for a lot of digital albums for almost 30 years (loudness wars)-you touch on this but I don’t think you specifically called it loudness wars.
It’s a completely different story for albums recorded fully analog-in my experience they typically sound better on vinyl or tape, but I’ll let someone more equipped explain how transfers to digital have typically been done and why some of them have been subpar from a sound quality standpoint.
CD sounds fantastic, especially the early CD issues. Vinyl has a distorted sound that’s more elastic and less accurate. I love both and have been buying vinyl and CD for 40 years now.
Vinyl is now being pressed from high definition digital files because it’s far easier to do this rather than use a complete analog path.
The Nightfly was recorded on a 3M digital machine.
ABBA had one from 1981 onwards, The Power Station recording studio in New York had one that Nile Rogers liked to use.
There are many flaws with vinyl, inner groove distortion is incredibly annoying, especially for songs you love, CD excels here. Clicks, pops in the wrong places are torture too. CD is accurate, powerful and transparent.
What I hate about CD remasters is the loud compressed audio that’s going on for the last 25 years. Compressed modern vinyl is even worse as it’s now €40 a pop! Expensive rubbish.
Actually, ABBA, The Visitors, was the FIRST commercially produced CD, not the first sold that was Billy Joel (and was an analog recording), but ABBA was the first produced, and it was digital end to end, it was also the LAST CD they did before their break up, they have since issued an album more recently Voyage in 21'.
@ As far as I know, the first 3 tracks of the Visitors were analog, then digital from there on. There’s a definite snappiness to the drums that’s not on the first three songs.
I have a “Red Face” 1983 CD of The Visitors and The Singles double CD.
@@KRAZEEIZATION I was not aware, I'm from the industry and was always told it was D end to end, but I was not at the sessions and never saw the mix, so you could be correct, D was not super wide spread yet in 80/81 other than perhaps with classical recording, they seamed to start earlier.
@ I read that about Visitors a while back. I’m obsessed with music and recording so I’m always annoyed when album details are not comprehensive enough for me!
From Wiki-
The members of ABBA and their personnel have memories of the recording sessions for this album being rather difficult. To begin with, their sound engineer Michael Tretow had to become accustomed to using the new 32-track digital recorder that had been purchased for Polar Music Studios. He said, "Digital recording...cut out all the hiss, but it also meant that sounds were sharply cut off below a certain level. The sound simply became too clean, so I had to find ways of compensating for that". The first three tracks for the album had already been recorded using analogue tape and therefore Tretow had to transfer all subsequent tracks from digital to analogue and back again to avoid a difference in quality.
@@KRAZEEIZATION Excellent!! I love that you have passion for the industry, I'm no longer active, but I listen to my huge collection of virtually all media types every single day. Nothing gives me so much enjoyment!
Stevie's Hotter Than July was cut on a Sony digital machine in 1980 I think and sounds great. Likewise, Dire Straits' Brothers in Arms was tracked to a Sony digital multitracker and sounds fab; crisp, clean, yet warm and not at all "digital" sounding, if such a sound exists. It's often used by the analogue fans to slate digital recordings as "cold", "sterile" or "brittle".
The needed 20 Neve EQ in Line too make IT Sound Not digital ( Brothers in Arms )
I have occasionally listened to Brothers in Arms lp on a serious hiend equipment on an exhibition. It sounded big, detailed, but: digital, glassy cold poored timbres etc. I was wondered (I even asked the man there if he knew if they have possibly used any digital stuff on this record) and then later I read, that the whole LP was recorded into digital and Knopfler was so proud of that. I knew nothing of this album history previously, as I am not a fan of DS.
@@sfgylk34u_57 Personally I like it but I think the argument for digital being cold and glassy would only maybe hold water in the early days of digital. Nowadays, the quality of recording and mastering AD/DA converters is incredibly good to the point where the likes of Bob Ludwig can't tell the difference between the analogue master and the digital clone.
@@CANKRAFTWERK True, but as far as I know, it was a DDD job - digital tracking, mixed to digital and mastered to digital so there's a fair old bit of digital for the Neve to contend with and yet still it sounds good to my ears.
The digital sound is neutral. Just neutral. It has NO sound.
It spits back what is recorded on it, that is all.
In the early 1980's, recording and mastering engineers, freed for the first time from the "limitations" of vinyl, in other words the rules one has to follow to cut a record (no giant treble boost, etc.) went totally nutsy and with parametric EQ, boosted the treble, shaved off the bass cloud and generally made really ****ty sounding CD's.
Everyone thought, digital is harsh.
It really isn't at all. People know this by now but they still fall into that old cult thinking all the time.
You want proof? Something you can do yourself?
If you have a CD recorder or whatever, needle drop a song from your favorite vinyl album.
Now, play it back synced up with the actual record.
See how it is almost 100% exact when switching back and forth?
The digital recording has captured all of the vinyl magic and is reproducing it without adding any "digital harshness" because there is NO SUCH THING.
As soon as a digital delay line was available, most mastering facilities started using them to cut masters. This goes back to the late 70s.
@@SiloSoundStudios this is really interesting.. so this lathe delay device, it actually digitizes the signal chain?
@CS-iq4xn yes.
Yes. I am not one of the hi-fi fanatics. But I also mix and master music, and one thing: Master track (also digital) to Vinyl sounds better than Master track -> compressed to Mp3 -> compressed to streaming, like it's especially the case for smaller bands in modern times. It's all about the information loss. And yes, there is no huge 'detail' difference between a CD and a Vinyl, but not all positive aspects of Vinyl comes from the record itself! The way the sound is created in a vinyl player sounds different to how it is created by a PC or a CD player. That's not so much a matter of source material, but rather of the actual technique it's played. The music on my studio monitors may share almost the same information as a CD (not as streaming, streaming has noticeably less), but the way this information is forged into a sound sounds different. It creates another experience, one that I prefer over CDs. That's also why I prefer tape over CDs. A listening experience is more than just the pure audio of the source material.
You are absolutely correct in stating that the listener, who is interested in sound quality,
wants the non slammed Hi-Res Wavefiles.
I really hope the industry will provide them sometime in the near future, because I am tired
of seeing so many classic rock/pop re-issues (on CD or even Hi-Res) being brickwalled, compressed or peak limited.
if i means anything, I collect CD's for modern pop and electronic releases and I have noticed that the trend has been reversing. CD's I've had in the last 5 years have had great DR and mastering, sans completely one-man indie releases. If anything, I'm annoyed that 'anniversary' releases are being produced with vinyl being the ONLY physical release, with the digital files being a downloadable link. I would like labels not to discount CD's as being forgone, they can have their own unique packaging materials and goodies as well! Economically easier to ship as well.
You don't need the Hi-Res files if they just released good masters on CD (or streaming for that matter). You don't want un-mastered raw files, mastering is a good thing but they seriously need to stop slamming everything into one block of loudness.
For me, to get the absolute best sounding mastering of an album, 75% of the time it's on vinyl. Yes, it's a vastly inferior medium, but the medium for all it's faults often gets the better mastering. Example - I have the SACD of Dark Side of the Moon, but my mass produced vinyl release from 2016 is much more dynamic sounding to me. It's actually easier to find the exact version you want with vinyl vs. streaming. Trying to find the exact master you want via spotify is a crapshoot and you don't know if they are actually using different files for different re-masters. Edit - At 14:00 or so he makes my point. And yes, if producers and studios gave us the "non-slammed" files I would flip to mainly digital listening in a heartbeat!
The digi guys are the ones that killed music since 98
I agree. I prefer the way music is mastered for vinyl. The last 30 years of loudness wars due to the higher dynamics of digital to me sounds terrible.
Also, not really on topic but related to new tech is the pitch correcting and auto-tuning which makes everything nowadays sound sterile. Old music on vinyl is preferable to me. It's more real and sounds fresh.
@dgross2009 it makes them sound sterile, and it makes everyone sound the same as well.
Funny how he does not know, or care to mention that init? Kids...they know it all.
you know you can download vinyl rips right
A love letter reads better by candlelight than under cold fluorescent light. You hit the spot on that's it's about the experience. You draw terrible though :D
my drawing is indeed especially bad
We all love you. Please don't stop.
You're greatly appreciated. It's just fear, probably no hate at all and possible that hate isn't even real.
Go, music!
There’s also a shitpile of cash invested in turntables, tape decks, amplifiers, preamps, speakers etc. by audiophiles that massively bias (conscious or unconscious) opinions.
The playback is analog. It's also a feedback loop. It loops sound back into the playback. Footsteps. Bass. Etc cetera.
This adds a "familiar" feeling into the playback. The room is added in at a low level. "Realism" is boosted by familiarity.
Each playback will also sound slightly different.
That, big art and the fact it's actually moving during playback makes it a hit.
How dare you have an opinion backed up with facts!!
Great video! I thought the album Steely Dan fans and audiophiles used as a benchmark was Aja, not Nightfly. I think it was recorded 5 years earlier in the mid-70’s.
sure they are both considered references. i have aja on vinyl too
He chose the right fan base to mock about this, wrong album
I treat vinyl like an opportunity to buy some sweet art that happens to have strange useless plastic trash inside. We should just normalize bands selling art prints and little booklets. Better for literally everyone.
This argument of digital vs analog and how analog maintains the information that is being lost by digital sampling process has been around for ages. It is technically true that some information is being lost but this not the information humans would be able to perceive anyway. All the high end digital equipment samples at 96kHz. This means it can accurately capture frequencies up to 48kHz. This over double the frequency what human ear can register. Even if you "only" sample 44.1kHz (CD) it's still gonna capture all the frequencies humans can hear. It's almost like the original engineers chose this sampling rate on purpose based of this fact. I think most people don't realize they always are listening to analog because analog is what comes out of speakers. Resulting sound wave will be exactly the same from digital or analog source (minus the noise).
The value to vinyl is space for album art and other inserts. Even 16/44k is audibly transparent. I'm actually working on a digital vinyl preamp with switchable response curves for pre-RIAA-standard records, and known publisher-house-specific response curves.
Here’s an idea, release the non slammed wav files and call it “vinyl version”
a couple years back, NIN digitally released TWO masters for the same album (hesitation marks). a CD mastering and an "audiophile" mastering closer to the vinyl pressing. when you bought the record, you could download either, or both.
their vinyl masters typically sound a bit different than their CDs. some of the distortion relies on limiters, which don't work well on vinyl.
and, like, except for his first album, everything is recorded, produced, mixed, and mastered entirely digitally. the first album is actually a straight analog process... of nearly 100% digital instruments. it also happens to sound way better than the CD, but i think that's down to late 80s CD mastering and whatever they were doing that made everything sound a bit tinny at the time
Ive always tried to explain to people that it only really makes sense to buy vinyl if its an original analog source that is being reproduced. But I still buy vinyl when it's not. Why? Because I love engaging with my music. Its a wonderful experience, and a lot of fun. A great set up is a great set up, if you're enjoying it, who cares if it's digital or analog. But the need to convicne yourself of "superiorirty" is ridiculous and toxic. First and foremost, listening to music should just be fun
Vinyl CAN sound better.... depends on the mix/master of each audio format. Plenty of vinyl releases sound like trash compared to digital. Visa versa also. The limited DR on vinyl seems to tame the "loudness war" on properly mastered records... FOR ME. Regardless, analog colors a sound, sometimes favorable, sometimes junk, so many variables that analog makes it fun to experiment with IE different cartridges, heads, preamps, and of course "synergy". Analog is great for playing, digital (file or streaming, I don't do optical media) is great for the efficiency/lazy/convenient reasons, again, for me.
As a TV engineer, I confirm the crusty jack fileds and miles of NOT "audiophile" cable through my tours of recording and radio studios.
It's well known that tube amps are really horrible from a technical standpoint. If you measure them, they're absolutely atrocious compared to modern amps. But they sound good in a way and a lot of people like them....
i like vinyl because the combination of crackling, surface noise and the different master create a warmer more pleasant sound to my ears. it obviously doesnt sound "better" and anyone who thinks that lives in a fantasy world.
there are actually a couple albums i own that i can only listen to on vinyl because the digital master is really harsh and treble-heavy but the vinyl is much softer on my ears.
plus, big art and pretty colors :)
Man, I love your analysis in this video and the many I have watched previously. I was a club dj in LA for many years and collected way too many vinyl records until my wife told me it was getting out of control (taking over the house and occupying storage space). I sold off much of my collection a decade ago and used the money for more practical things. I can tell you it becomes an obsession with some of us and it is hard to have your vinyl purist world collapse when you do blind listening tests with digital transfers of said vinyl records. Of course well mastered cds have superior dynamics, frequency range and low noise floor. One time Adrian Sherwood, famed reggae and dub producer from the UK came to our club to spin a set including his private recordings and other classic dub plates. The house crew were highly anticipating to drool over his "legendary" rare vinyl collection and almost shit their pants when he pulled out a sampler loaded with his recordings and proceeded to mash up the dance. This was a club where no CDJs were allowed, but this was Mr. Sherwood so he was given pass. I asked him if he had any qualms about digital sound recordings and his answer: It sounds like what I hear in the studio and I'm too old to break my back with crates of records through the airport every time I go to play a gig. When I asked him to sign my Pounding System record, he laughed and said, these give me more space to scribble on.
Yep....100 % true.
Lots of analog/vinyl enthusiasts don't know that little detail: most of mastering studios in the 80s had the Studer A80 that converts the signal to digital before cutting the vinyl 😅
Digital is defined by 0s and 1s, you cannot write 1s and 0s to a piece of material, nor does it interpret them - thus technically analogue.
But yet lots of vinyl collectors buy records made before the 80's.
@@willnorth6339 how the Studer A80 with a digital delay line works:
1. Analog (from the tape recorder) →
2. Digital (in the delay unit) →
3. Back to Analog →
4. Then engraved onto vinyl.
The digital conversion was done at 12-14 bit, 44.1KHz (not even CD quality)
Almost every major release after 1980 was done at a mastering house that used this way of mastering.
So, no more analog, since the vinyl was cut from a digital signal
@@OrangeMicMusic Again, vinyl is an analogue playback medium - once you’ve pressed from an originally digital source (in your example) to an analogue medium it becomes analogue. There is no longer any samples containing bits of information, the pressing become a continuous path of sonic information - an analogue vibration.
Your example is like taking water, freezing it to ice and then still calling it water.
@@willnorth6339 the discussion in this video (and the comments here) is about having an all analog path from recording to vinyl. Once an audio signal was converted to digital and back to analog, that path it's no longer 100% anlaog
You explain everything so simple
Not if a vinyl collection is pre 1980 though ~ Which the majority of mine is.
well the first digital record on vinyl was 1971
@APMastering Oh really, which album was that ? Out of curiosity.
@@GrahamDyson-h9z "Steve Marcus & Jiro Inagaki - Something". And it's 32 kHz and only 13 bits Less than CD. And it sounds wonderful.
Thank you for showing some of the obscure stuff regarding vinyl. I was never very interested in it as I already knew it's an obsolete technology. But seeing the details of the process was fun and informative!
I am SO GLAD you talked about the digital delay aspect. Everyone upset with Mobile Fidelity needed to hear this.
Also super glad to see Paul's setup. I heard about it from Bonati but he never showed me photos.
Finally someone understands.
Loudness wars really hyped up vinyl to the insane degree.
I've been saying for years, all 'new' vinyl is ultimately digital.. Unless it's originally 80s or earlier mastered.
Having said that, there is still a noticeable difference even with modern records recorded from a digital source.
Never mind the audiophools.
I completely agree that it’s important to debunk the myths. Of which there are a lot. I work with video and film and I see it more like that industry. In the process of shooting a movie these days there’s a lot of digital stuff going on, but most movies, although shot digitally, will spend A LOT of money adding film grain back in to the finished movie. There’s all sorts of processes, but one is literally just recording the finished and edited movie onto a film, and then digitising it again. In that process it picks up real film grain that behave the way real film grain does, I.e. more present in the shadows, moving at the same frame rate as the movie, slowing down for slow motion shots etc. And this genuinely makes for a more enjoyable film although all we’re doing is adding analogue noise. Most big movies will do this, because digital is more convenient but they want it to look like analogue film. We have digital cameras that can recreate flawless images but we add flaws to make them more beautiful and enjoyable.
With vinyl I think it’s the same thing, it doesn’t matter if there’s some digital processing in the chain, especially if it’s transparent. As long as we can still hear some analogue noise, because it makes it feel more beautiful and enjoyable.
I go to some audiophile listening parties and I noticed when some hip hop was being played that there was a huge difference between how songs that were recorded in the 90s sounded compared to 2000s. I can’t remember the songs but they were played back to back. The 90s songs was sample based and so I imagine was sampling analogue sources, vinyl. The other song had less samples and some FM synths and was more modern. Both being played from vinyl and I could really feel a warmth from the older song. The newer song felt cold and sterile but also had a harsher distortion to parts of it. I could have just been the mastering on the newer one but I assumed it was because of their most likely being more analogue elements in the older one. That’s when I first really noticed a big difference. So even though it was being played from vinyl, it sounded too digital, by that I mean clean but then with harsher distortion when it did distort.
When I’m making music, I’ll play an analogue synth through a digital amp and it will sound a thousand times better to me than when I play a digital synth from Ableton or an FM hardware synth.
So, personally, I don’t care if there’s som e digital stages in the process, as long as that hasn’t removed the analogue noise and as long as it hasn’t added any digital distortion.
Hey, great video. I feel bad for some peeps though because what the vinyl fam think they're hearing as "superior" is actually harmonic tape distortion and saturation, which makes an audible tangible difference to the sound. The medium of vinyl carries that harmonic tape distortion in a really natural sounding way which gives the music a very realistic representation of the original recording, and that combination is what I am personally talking about when I say vinyl is superior to digital. My DAC is great when I'm listening to it, but the vinyl copy has always fundamentally just sounded better with recordings that were captured on tape or included tape saturation in their mastering process. Also, the fact it goes through a digital conversion at the end of a signal chain is irrelevant, that's a given and assured for reproduction in the sample rat. The effect of the track being mastered for and cut to the limitations vinyl is where the sonic magic so many people swear by happens. Another thing people misunderstand when talking about analogue signal chains is that it's the sonic character of those chains we want - the signal can end in a high res digital capture because at that point we already have the pure tone.
Digital is not really transparent though. It is a series of very fast snapshots of a waveform. There are pros and cons to both analog and digital. Also, many have stated that long listening sessions that are many hours long leave one more relaxed after an analog session vs a digital one. Just throwing it out there.
Yeah. 44100 thousand snapshots per second minimum. That's quite a lot.
I’m an audiophile but try not to be an audiophool! I also think you are 100% right. I prefer vinyl (I have around 2000 LPs) and tube amps, but don’t pretend they are of a higher fidelity than digital, ‘cos they are not. If you add up all the distortions in the vinyl playback process it would not be pleasant reading…I haven’t as, for example I don’t actually know how far out my stylus offset is from optimum, but even it was exactly optimum it’s only ever “correct” in two places: I haven’t measured crosstalk from the stylus: I know what my valve amp adds and generally it’s less than 1%, higher at low frequencies…and I suspect the distortion would be several thousand times the distortion from a digital source using a solid state amp (which I expect is close to zero). I also don’t fall for the speaker wire or the power cord fantasies and other audiophile snake oil…I obviously don’t have a sufficiently resolving system to hear any difference ;)
@@Alex-cw7xf at 66 I didn't even know you had different styli shapes!
This was my comment in respect of the "loudness war" being the core of this problem: I think you are probably correct. Im a recovered addicted audiophile - ive had £50k CD systems and £50k Vinyl and there is no way CD is more enjoyable to listen to. I could put on an LP and listen for 8 hours. CD Im tired before the end of the CD. BUT 24 BIT FLAC is a whole different ball game. My dislike is CD...!!!
I PREFER to listen to vinyl on tube amplifiers and I am not bothered if its better or worse, its more enjoyable for ME. Im happy to listen to 24 Bit FLAC. I dont like CD.
" I also don’t fall for the speaker wire or the power cord fantasies". Yeah, I did some tests on this. It turns out that every speaker wire filters out a different part of the spectrum. No need to spend a fortune on high end speaker wires - just run 5 different low-end speaker wires - even use CAT 5 internet cable and household electrical cable.
You can easily test this - just go buy a few meters of the hard wire you use in your house walls and run it in parallel to the existing wire - I promise you it will sound better. If it does not just ignore this internet ***** LOL
Power cord you just need a thick cable and clean connectors - what will make a difference is you are using tube amplifiers is to use a separate GROUND. Buy a copper ground connector and bank it into the ground outside the house and then run a cable to the chassis of your tube amplifier. Tube amplifiers NEED a really good ground and most houses don't have one. There is usually +/-20 v to +/-50v on the ground of a house
@@piccalillipit9211 I like CD, and streaming, but Vinyl most of all because it is so visually and aesthetically pleasing…vinyl reminds me of days long ago (I’m 67 now, so very very long ago). I recently bought a fairly old and inexpensive CD player, purely as it had a great transport which I use straight via Toslink to my DAC, sounds great to me.
@@piccalillipit9211 I think once you have spent around $100 dollars on speaker wire, you have as good as it gets. Better…ensure you match impedances between speaker and amp (esp valve amps) to ensure the amp is driving the speaker effectively, impedance of the cable between the two is negligible.
I have this controversial motto: I listen to music, and appreciate the actual music.
@@WoodworkingWombat what's the point of that?
Imagine that
Responding to the description:
Thank you for sharing your insights. As someone who works as a mastering engineer for vinyl, I can relate to some of the challenges and misconceptions you’ve highlighted. Vinyl mastering is often romanticized, and many people overlook the technical complexities and compromises involved.
The notion that vinyl has a "magical" or "warm" sound is more a matter of perception than reality. Vinyl has inherent physical limitations-like restricted dynamic range and susceptibility to distortion-so achieving great sound often comes down to how well the mastering and cutting process is handled. As you mentioned, digital delays are a standard part of vinyl cutting today, even in many so-called "all-analogue" processes. Few people realize that analogue purism has been heavily diluted since the late '70s, especially with the advent of digital tools used to optimize cutting.
I’ve seen firsthand how digital masters, when prepared carefully for vinyl, can translate beautifully onto the format. In fact, I often adjust compression, EQ, and stereo imaging specifically to account for vinyl’s physical constraints. To me, what makes vinyl special isn’t that it’s inherently "better" or "warmer" than digital-it’s the craftsmanship and thoughtfulness that go into adapting the music for the format.
As for ABX tests, I’d love to see more discussions based on actual blind listening tests rather than subjective claims. Most listeners might be surprised at how subtle (or even imperceptible) some of the differences are between vinyl and digital when played back on properly calibrated systems.
Ultimately, I agree with you: chasing "purity" in vinyl is a bit of a rabbit hole. At the end of the day, it’s all about how the music makes us feel, not whether it adheres to some purist ideal.
So are modern records benefiting from better convertors for the delay process?
Why so much dislike for Vinyl? To each their own does it really matter. Different strokes for different folks. In the end it’s a matter of preference. Let it be who really cares.
If retailers would give consumers a choice. Most big retailers that most people frequent are selling only vinyl.
It's like to Hell with people who prefer CDs.
I have no clue what this weasel's point he's trying to make. I only heard half of it. I have vinyl and CDs. This load of nonsense just came on my feed.
@@jimmymelendez1836 All vinyl since the 70s is "polluted" by a digital delay step. So vinyl can not be better than digital. Are you proud you don't understand something so simple?
The point is to debunk all the vinyl purists who hate on digital because they think they're better than everyone else. When in fact vinyl is also digital.
@@jimmymelendez1836 You sound pretty dumb. You didn't listen and you called him a weasel. Wanna see a weasel? Go look in the mirror.
“Listening to vinyl when you were still in liquid form” is definitely going to be the craziest sentence I’ll read all month.
lol yeah I was pretty shocked by that one too lol
😅
Most vinyl masters have been pushed through a-d/d-a during cutting since early 1970's. It was trying to be a 14 bit chain, but maybe 12 or 13 bits actual. It still rawked! 13 bit audio can be VERY VERY GOOD, and still a few dB quiter than the best vinyl record playback. If recordists and mastering of CD's were intent on best s:n and lowest distortion, not overall mostest-loudest, CompactDisc would never have had the hate, and older cd's would sound EVEN BETTER as newer-cheaper-better d-a converters got into $1000 consumer stereos. Loudness War remastering was a crime against consumers of music.
I would say this though, I personally really like the sound of AAD or ADD chain studio production. In fact I believe mixing and mastering analogue tape recordings in high-resolution digitally really helps capture the warmth and 'grit' of the 1st stage and reproduces it in way that is closest to hearing how the music sounds in a studio environment.
I am synthesist and got over the analog/digital things years ago. I have a pile of VST synths and defy anyone to hear the difference if you are a decent programmer. Good VST sound beyond incredidble and appreciate people like you who don;t wallow in sentimentality.
I think that everyone that is my age or older, that lived through the change from analogue to digital in the 80's, knows that the statement that vinyl is better, is BS. As is buying gold plated 365% oxygen free copper cables for your speakers for hundreds of euros per meter, and rediculously expensive interconnects that prevent digital jitter when connecting your cd player to your aplifier to get the purest bits.
The good thing at my age is that my ears are getting worse so the requirements for my hi-fi equipment get lower. It's a win win situation 😂
I used to DJ in clubs with vinyl, then moved to digital. It’s obvious that digital is far superior. Sooooo many club goers and music nerds would argue the vinyl is better trope. So funny, all of the music we were playing in those clubs was made on computers. 😂
You can't compare the excitement of an MC shouting out "dubplate business" and a dubplate where maybe a couple exist to a digital file. Also as a nerd I like hearing mixing on vinyl but that's low down the list.
@Louuns mixing on vinyl is also very satisfying and fun to do as a DJ for sure. Unfortunately I found as more people were moving to digital that clubs were no longer keeping their turntables well maintained. Shame really. Dubplates, sure the culture and process around them is super cool. Sadly that cultural practice is well and truly over.
This lad is proper funny. He knows how to play the algorithm game by trolling. He doesn't care if one thing sounds better than another, he knows they're just different. But he has more fun triggering people to get views and comments that get him more money.
Top lad
What do you think of just buying cds and Blu-ray?
Vinyl, to me meaning the player, amp, speakers, EQ etc. is a sort of filter. I like that (my) filter.
The vinyl hoards hate facts!
Não existe som digital, mas apenas arquivos digitais. Não existe áudio digital. O áudio é analógico. O computador nos dá uma simulação, nada mais. O mundo digital é virtual, não é real. O analógico é real e o digital é virtual.
very true! this could form the basis for an entire video
I wonder why some sort of people have to call you offensive names, just because you have a different point of view on a technical topic ☹
the internet is a strange place
They've invested significant amounts of their personal income to reinforce their deeply held beliefs. Anything that contradicts those beliefs can feel like more than just an insult to their audiophilia; it becomes a direct challenge to their personal identity. Tribalism is alive and well.
@APMastering yet you are the one insulting people.
You made a great point about how people don't actually hear the recording live in studio, so they have no comparison. I was thinking about this kind of thing lately and I realized, the only comparison I really have is classical music concerts vs recordings. That's not even a strict comparison unless I heard it played by the same orchestra or at least in the same concert hall as the recording.
A perfectly summarized and exceptionally valuable addition that serves as a guiding light for both beginners and those lost in confusion or misinterpretation. It not only provides clarity in a sea of conflicting philosophies and misconceptions but also elevates us with its comprehensive and empathetic approach. This contribution maintains the essence of its message while presenting accurate, unambiguous facts and insights that are immensely useful. Without a doubt, this is one of the most enriching and inspiring discussions I have come across in the past two to three years.
After immersing myself in the world of digital-to-analog converters (DACs) and navigating the enchanted forest of their sweet, syrupy synonyms, I find myself back in reality, swimming through deceptive specifications. Now I must process and comprehend this new layer of meaning, trying to grasp the magnitude of its significance-what is worth embracing and what is not. And above all, it was refreshing to receive such a concise and illuminating explanation, even on the topic of analog formats.
I met Ry Cooder outside the Sweetwater in Mill Valley, CA in 1987 and he autographed my Bop Til You Drop cd (Ry added the year to his autograph, that's how I can be sure of the year it happened). His son was with him and asked what that was, the cd. Ry replied something along the lines of "Oh that's a format that will soon be obsolete."
That's a great room to play in! I bet that show was great.
@@snakeyengel I didn't get into the show. It was some sort of star studded get together, maybe a tribute or celebration, no chance of getting ticket, tiny club only room for the luminaries and their entourages. I made the 2 hour round trip drive strictly in hopes of getting Ry's autograph. I did see many other great shows there, though. Alos, had a memorable make out session in the alley adjacent with my later-to-be wife.
@@sh1tster The show was probably a Village Music party...
That is why vinyl lovers look for early first presses. Most of us don't buy new music because it sucks.
well i think some digital remasters sound better than the first pressing
@APMastering I agree. Some albums got no love at all from the label, artist or pressing plants. I have heard some pretty terrible music on cds as well.. I know a ton of people wish Jimmy Page would let go of some tapes so they could be remastered and put on vinyl because the latest mixes Jimmy put out are stale.
@APMastering And?🙄🤦
@APMastering Yes, but only "some".
Hahahahahaha! I took a twelve-week mastering course and have read a few books on the topic, and never learned this. That's hilarious! :)
This is even funnier than the Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs scandal a few years back, when all the purists found out that many of their treasured MoFi productions were digitized. Wait, you couldn't hear the inherent digital-ness? but I thought digital was cold and soulless... LOL
If you play a vinyl record which contains material from a digital source, it will sound 'warmer' than a straight digital copy. A bit of surface noise and saturation will creep in, imparting 'soul'. Sorry!
Going in the opposite direction, I saw a documentary about the creation of a digital (then modern) version of the Mellotron (a 1960s sampling machine which used tape, most famously used in Strawberry Fields by the Beatles), the M4000D. They said when they recreated and recorded the sounds digitally they sounded too good so in order to make them sound more like the 1960s version they copied the digial recordings onto 1/4 inch reel to reel tape as an analogue recording (like home enthusiasts had) then digitised a playback of the reel to reel recording. That was what was then put into the machine ROM. This added the analogue warmth people prefered.
For the variable grove spacing, I am surprised they stated it was cheaper to buy a digital delay unit which would have been very expensive at the start of the 80's than it was to put an extra playback head in the tape recorder. The head for the predicitive signal wouldn't even need to be very good.
It seems like hell will freeze over and pigs will fly before record companies release hi-rez digital downloads of their music catalogs that aren’t LOUD/SLAMMED and have all the beautiful dynamics that music lovers want.
I will pay to buy albums all over again if they do this.
I’m SO tired of wanting to turn up my music but it’s too loud, harsh, and in your face. I HATE IT! Ugh 😩
If this ever happens maybe more mainstream listeners will realize dynamic music sounds better and record companies can make more money… because we all know thats all they care about.
Crazy. Since most of my LP’s were made when digital didn’t exist I suppose you are wrong. Do you really believe that most who listen to vinyl only listen to vinyl manufactured after 1980? The newer vinyl I buy mainly comes from Kevin Gray and I can assure you that there isn’t anything digital about them…
yes most people who listen to vinyl do not predominately have only pre 70s cuts. if you do, then you probably have a boring collection
@APMastering
Most of today's kids don't even know music existed before 2000! Look around the "reactions" channels at all the guys faking hearing older music for the first time, you'll get the idea... right now Sultans of Swing seems to be the favourite.
@@Douglas_BlakeHow do you know that they do a fake reaction?
@@jimmymelendez1836
Look at the songs they'r reacting to... Some of the most played music ever... Sultans of Swing has over 1,000,000 plays on Spotify, alone. Do you really believe they've never heard it before?
Vinyl is essentially a facetime filter for the original piece of music.
I am 51years old. I see it like this! The people in the days of playing vinyl, played vinyl or tapes because that was all they had. In my younger days I played cassette tapes as I preferred them over vinyl but not by a lot. I later obtained a DAT recorder but getting my hands on a good reliable Betamax video recorder was not easy without paying out a lot of money. Sony made ones for studio use at 4000 plus pounds. Not so long after that I purchased a CD player. This I loved. Clear reliable sound easy to use over vinyl or cassette.
By the way the filter settings in a AD/DA converter does color the sound by nature.
Thank you so much for speaking the truth on these subjects. I recently came across your channel and find it so refreshing that you're willing to just lay it all out there with solid facts. I genuinely appreciate your insight and look forward to your videos.
true.
plot twist : all digital is analog at its core!
Many people here won’t get that….
😂
ALL electrical signals are analog at core ... what matters is how you produce and interpret them. Hint: try listening to raw digital signals sometime.
Sounds like Lou Reed’s MMM.
@@Douglas_Blake Try listening to the jack cable coming out of a bass... Mind blowing analogue fidelity
Thank you!
I’ve had this argument with people before about how most vinyl in existence is cut from a digital file but I wasn’t aware of the digital lathe used since 1979 and I also hadn’t really thought about the fixed groove process before that and how it would essentially HAVE to be a forced compression of the recording.
This makes me curious what in my collection may be truly analog, because I didn’t know it went back that far. But I’d love to know who is diluted enough to assume anything post-CD is truly analog. It doesn’t matter anyway, so many artists record/mix now knowing their media will be consumed via 128k and/or through a small speaker.
Vinyl is a labour of love, it means you’re willing to own something that speaks to you in physical form, and you want to spend the extra time consuming it. For me, it also means I can pitch my music 1.5-3%, which is so much fun.
Whilst you are factually correct, you may be missing a key factor.
My faith in the inferior quality of vinyl (as an unfoolable sound engineer/producer) was shaken only once, when listening to an orchestral recording featuring nicely recorded strings. They sounded AMAZING! I checked the CD against what I was hearing, and the CD version of those strings was simply ordinary (in other words, accurate).
So, what you might be missing is that the nature of vinyl, whether because of some kind of crappy stylus, poor pre-amplification or inaccurate frequency response, sometimes leads to more musical outcomes. Less accurate, yes. The result of flaws in the reproduction, yes. But sometimes sounding "nicer".
have you heard the brass section on Savoy Truffle? do you think it would have sounded better recorded digitally with buckets of headroom? probably not. So I agree distortion can do something cool, but it is a creative mix choice and not really something that you should be merely subjected to at random.
@APMastering True, but nevertheless I do think it explains some of the voodoo around vinyl.
@APMastering Regarding the brass on Savoy Truffle, if memory serves it always sounded terrible on the original 60s vinyl, but then so did everything!