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Don't lump CDs in with MP3s. They should never be lumped together as "digital". There's great sounding digital (a well-mastered CD) and crappy lossy digital (any MP3). A well-mastered CD is still the best sounding physical medium available due to it's lack of noise, it's wider dynamic range, and it's wide frequency reproduction. But note the caveat: WELL-MASTERED.
Totally agreed. I have some recently published or remastered CDs that sounded just horrible!! Overly compressed and loud and just awful. The CDs from the mid 90's were great. They sounded better, more robust, and weren't too loud.
@@yolielin4143 *NO!* Have you ever heard Oasis - Definitely Maybe? It was overcompressed to original tapes worse than digitally compressed and it was released in the mid 90's (1994 exact year)
Ive chatted with a lot of older guys that love their vinyl and think digital is all crap and then have a 1080p TV and blue ray player hooked to a surround sound reciever in the living room.....
@@moscasucio1686 I'm certain you can hear the difference between CD and MP3. Sure. Are you in the market for a bridge? I have a warehouse full of some named Brooklyn.
Maybe that's because they're into sound quality more than video and some epic classic rock albums and concerts are on DVD audio and video and SACDs still being released today. Not to mention, the new 4k disc players and AVR's are disposable garbage compared to the hay day of these players in the mid to late 90's. My cheap 4k player stopped being supported after 4 years and won't play new 4k disks as a result so I don't buy movies but I can stream them and optical in to my old 90's Denon 4806 with hdmi and native SACD decoding from a compatible Denon DVD audio/SACD player. My Blueray player is Pioneer Elite which none of today's players can match in quality and I got primo examples off ebay for pennies on the dollar (about 2k vs. 6.5 it would have cost in 90s). I have modern equipment streaming through a tube dac as well and this old gear makes great digital transport as well since it was built to such a higher standard back when this stuff was state of the art and in demand. Try spending that same 2k on a modern AVR and 4k disc player and the difference in sound quality will be huge and the cheap new crap will be bricked when the updates cease. Sometimes mixing old and new technologies gives you the best of both worlds! Yes, I'm single and run dozens of cables of various types, lol! But I can play just about any type of digital or analog media. Depending on the album, the old reel to reel sounds best followed by vinyl for analog and I have to give streaming hi res a tie with SACD, Blueray audio, and DVD audio. Streaming through a good dac has come a long way in recent years but your not gonna hear Toys in the Attic and many others in surround which many are mind blowing good.
I have to say your very good at making your point and i agree with you 100%! I’m 55 and been DJING from the age of 17 in clubs big clubs with some very large systems! One place i played at has to break the concrete to separate the 4 technique 1200s from the building to stop the feedback from the bass! I played there 10 years! Other place had The turn tables on springs! Last one Hung chains from the ceiling hooked to i table with no legs just to stop feedback! So now i love not having to deal with that problem any longer! Great video
Simple test: Find a recording where you have both the vinyl record and the CD. Make a digital recording of the vinyl record and then compare the sound from playing the vinyl record to the sound you recorded to your computer (or whatever other digital recording you make) and then also compare the recording from the CD itself. When I did this I recorded to a FLAC file - not a MP3 file as FLAC is lossless while a MP3 is missing information in order to reduce it's size. But, just for fun - I made both a MP3 and a FLAC recording of the vinyl record. Now, listen to the Vinyl record, the Mp3 from the vinyl record, the FLAC file from the vinyl record and the CD and see if you can hear the difference. You MAY be able to hear the difference between the CD and the vinyl record (or the recordings from the vinyl record) but can you tell the difference between the vinyl record and the FLAC file you made from it - or even the MP3 file you made from it? I will guarantee that you can't reliably say which is the vinyl record and which is the FLAC file. If you get it right 50% of the time - that's the same result as a random guess. If you can detect the difference between the FLAC file and the vinyl record more than 75% of the time then I'm prepared to admit that maybe your ears are better than mine and maybe there is a difference. Make sure that the volume (loudness) of the tracks are the same when comparing them. If one is louder than the other they will sound different and if the FLAC is always played back at (say) twice the volume of the vinyl record you'll be able to detect which is which every time but not because one sounds better - just because one sounds louder. The reason I suggested making a digital recording of the vinyl record is because then you will be making a recording of the coloured sound from the vinyl record - so if you prefer the coloured sound of a vinyl record then you will still have the coloured sound of the vinyl record but just in a digital recording. Vinyl records may sound "warmer" than a digital recording but that is really because the recording and playback process "colours" the sound - it alters the sound - particularly the frequency response. You may prefer the "warmer" sound of a vinyl record but that isn't because it's more accurate than the sound from the CD - it's because it's LESS accurate than the sound from the CD. So, you might be able to play the CD through a graphic equaliser and adjust the equaliser to sound closer or identical to the vinyl record. Recording something digitally does NOT change the frequency response. It does drop off all frequencies above 20,000Hz but you can't hear those frequencies anyway. You can feel infra noise (very low frequency sounds) that you ears may not be able to detect but there is no way for you to be able to detect of feel frequencies above 20,000Hz. There is more crosstalk in the music from a vinyl record - you can hear some of the right channel sound through the left channel and vice versa. You can duplicate this for a CD which doesn't have the same issue by putting a variable resistor between the left and right channels. The lower the value of the resistor the more crosstalk you are introducing. If the value of the resistor is zero ohms then you will hear a mono signal - the same sound tough both speakers. When I bought my first CD player (a A$2,000 DENON DCD-1800) I also bought a couple of Telarc demo CDs which sounded MUCH better than my vinyl records due to the lack of clicks and pops, wider dynamic range etc So I was convinced that CDs sound better. Recently I digitally recorded all of my vinyl records so that I could listen to them in my car and the thing that really surprised me was how good they sounded. There weren't even that many clicks and pops because I looked after them and once I applied a click and pop filter they almost totally disappeared anyway. Now, I'm MUCH older now as well so my hearing isn't as good so maybe that's why I found that when I listened to a digital recording of one of my vinyl records and compared it to the CD version - I still preferred the CD version due to the extra dynamic range and lack of crosstalk. Then there is the other argument that a valve (tube) HIFI sounds better than a transistor (solid state) HIFI. But the argument is the same, Valve amplifiers cannot reproduce sound as accurately as solid state amplifiers. You may prefer the coloured sound of a valve amplifier but that doesn't make it more accurate or better. You can achieve the same thing by running you music through the valve amplifier and the making a digital recording of the result. Again you will have the coloured sound from the valve amplifier - just in a digital recording. I simply do not believe the arguments that valve is better (or more accurate) than solid state or that vinyl is better (or more accurate) than digital. I'll only accept that if someone does a true double blind scientific test of this using my suggestion above where they can find someone who can say accurately (at least 75% of the time) which is which.
Here is another test for you: Play guitar through a tube amp vs a digital plug in. As you play, it's night and day that the tube amp has more dynamics, feel, sustain, etc etc. over the plug in. However, once recorded, they sound similar. How can that be??? It's about the real and now. We are humans not robots. Here is another thing to think about. In the digital world, speed and sample rates will increase forever. However, in thr real world there are always limitations, like the speed of light. Maybe that's why we enjoy vinyl over digital, there are limits, and engineers make the best of those limits.
@@Brian-qg8dg you're absolutely right, but you're talking about the creation of music as opposed to the reproduction of it. A speaker that was designed with a cabinet just like a violin would sound terrible. But the shape of the wood cabinet the violin is put in drastically affects the sound of the violin in a very positive way. Same with a guitar. As a musician myself I firmly believe tube amps are better than solid state amps for guitars, but that's because they are part of the sound of the instrument when you use them. But when it comes to the reproduction of music, you don't want the electronics in the path or even the speakers for that matter to change the sound any more than they have to due to the technological limitations. They're not there to add to the sound or color the sound. They are there to faithfully reproduce it. And the less color they add the better.
Agreed. I have a semi-professional digital recorder in my hifi system specifically for digitising records and tapes. The resulting recordings are indestinguishable from the original. I feel sure that would not be the case if I owned a vinyl cutting lathe and cut a record from a CD!
Marvelous explanation. I have a very high end system and prefer the vinyl experience. I 100% agree with your conclusions. they are different not better. For me the key factor is the experience of playing the record, looking at the cover combined with a sound that I prefer. This does not make it better. Your presentation is very compelling. I think that anyone arguing that vinyl is better than digital is failing to understand the recording, mastering and production process.
Better at some things, worse at others. And remember it depends a LOT on the quality of your turntable or DAC, and the rest of the stereo. Where money is no object, digital is already beating vinyl quite handily. For the average consumer using a lossy delta-sigma DAC, a good mid-fi turntable with a nice stereo is still a much more musical experience, even before we consider the "romantic factors" like covert art and spinning records and so on.
Best explanation I've ever heard- I love the sound of old vinyl- the crack and the pops are so unique. However that was good for all my old music. Today I'd much rather have high quality digital. Also vinyl records today are like $30 each - that is insane.
No different than spending $30 for a hat that you'll wear for a year and then throw out or lose it. Or going out to eat for $30 ....at least with the vinyl you can have it for the duration of your life if you take care of it . Certain albums will always be worth money and collectible making it a hobby such as a comic book.
Vynyl advantage is that you hear what older music sounded like when it came out and it what it was designed for. Not saying it's better but a different experience.
I've always been for better playback. Mono is the way I want to hear, as example, "Beatle" singles. And other recordings intended to be mono. But I can do without the distortions, which has always been the aim.
I have a few vinyls out there in the wild, white labels obviously, I found myself grouping layers for the predicted vinyl eq curve, however with cd I would render all layers out to a wave(.wav) file back in mcmxcvii as digital playback would playback like the computer did right. I said all that to push the point that sounds harsh to say this but maybe the reason why older music has stayed with is longer is because extra work went into deciding what layers would be grouped and put through some fx chain once more. Even with tape, because some of us grew up with it we wouldn't mind or notice if the dolby noise reduction was on or off (pink noise) I call it that because when I was young and no google was about that's what it was, I'm sticking with it. Oh just remembered, I think it's called background noise today, how intelligent.. #djlnr
Great video. Amazing explanations. Really enjoyed every second of it. Very very interesting and informative. This video deserves much more likes and views.
You're the first explaner I've run onto who gave a clear, concise, and easy to understand side by side comparison between vinyl and digital file. You are also correct in stating it's up to the individual listener which he chooses to like. Great job!
Yeah: I love the vinyl purists who totally ignore that the distortions added to playback of vinyl is the equivalent of looking through a dirty window. The only "purity" is in the uninformed self-deception.
Great video! Around Christmas 2019 I posted a long "essay" on "The truth about vinyl" about how the frequency response in cartridges create most of the differences we hear when vinyl records sound different. In my experience with remastering music and messing around with an equalizer, volume level and frequency response account for the vast majority of the differences we hear between components and different media. In short, most cartridges have a dip in the harshness region, a spike around 10-15 kHz, and perhaps a slight boost in the bass as well. These last couple of days I've also started to look at measurements of tonearms, and all tonearms have resonances, often around 100 Hz, but frequently going up to 1 kHz, and this will boost the bass as well, giving the impression of a "fuller" and "warmer" sound, although, like with the non-linear frequency response of the phono cartridge, it's actually a colourization, although it might sound very pleasant.
And everything recorded in a studio is manipulated too. Even listening to someone play live, the dynamics, sound EQ and ambiance is based on the room, and so much more. If it sounds better to the ear, than so be it. I guess
Another reason people may like vinyl better is because if you went to a live show, orchestra, opera or rock concert, you would not hear everything. While that is also true of vinyl, vinyl has a more "forgiving" quality akin to live music. Perhaps you covered this when you talked about distortion. Sometimes imperfections can actually be more pleasant and desirable. I think "accurate" can be open to some debate. Mind you I use and love both! Peace!
I got rid of most of my records in 1990. I was sick of dust pops and scratches, and completely embraced CD's. In January we moved, and circumstances encouraged me to play some of the old records. I'd forgotten how much I loved the experience. I started buying vinyl Lp's again. I bought an album on bandcamp, and immediately downloaded the wav files. I'd listened to it 10X by the time the record arrived. I thought it sounded so good that I A/B'd it with the digital files. They sounded nearly identical, but the vinyl had a certain something it took me a couple months to put my finger on. Besides the album cover, and dropping the needle, I realized that every time you play the record is a unique analog physical performance, which you can hear, whereas the digital file is exactly the same every time, making it feel ever so slightly more canned. I still play CD's, and have 2T's of wav files in my computer. They're all good.
The difference is that vinyl recorded from analogue includes the ultrasonic frequencies that are emitted by musical instruments. A CD does not include those ultrasonic frequencies. That is why vinyl is more satisfying to listen to. Music with ultrasonic frequencies has been shown to have a positive effect on the human mind. You can also add ultrasonic frequencies to low quality digital files which is what I do.
@@dtz1000 it's because on vinyl the music is smoothered in strawberry sause - ie the pink noise swoosh of the needle rubbing against the surface - creating 'analogue warmth' which really means a kind of bike stabiliser wheels for audio.....its a added sound to all vinyl playback....all of it. Take out all the issues imaging bleed, degredation of music quality as the grooves get tighter near the centre hole, having the base taken out and added back in by the RIIA curve (bit like taking the water out of milk to add it back later)....don't even include them in comparisons....just say pink noise is added to the whole frequency spectrum....it ends it as a faithful sound reproduction medium. the LP was the future, now its a expensive way to see album covers.
@@1998mchpAhh yes, I forgot about the pink noise. (I always just thought of it as "vinyl noise": the sound of a diamond rubbing against a plastic surface....)
How do we store digital for future archival and longevity? The compact disk was sold to us as the last medium you would have to buy and would last forever if you took reasonable care of them. Fact is the aluminum layer where the pits are stored start to oxidize and degrade after 20 years. The laser inside the player will slowly dim in output and may not be available anymore when it dies. Flac files, Wave files, AIFF, MP3, etc... where to store them, the cloud? Memory device? Solid State or mechanical hard drive?
On servers, the Library of Congress has started doing this. That's the beauty of digital, the data remains the same irregardless of the number of times it's copied to other mediums, the same can't be said for analog mediums. Even original analog master tapes are being digitised as a way of backing up.
Really like how you kept it scientific! Only thing I felt you left out is the immense impact of childhood conditioning vinyl has on the enthusiasts. The crackles that appear when putting the needle on the record triggers the placebo effect which makes the track sound more pleasing.
You are being very polite here and I can tell by your mannerisms that you are holding back. If you were the maximize both mediums with an ideal mastering of the vinyl and the"first play" of the disc versus a professionally compressed digital version, the sound difference would be HUGE in favor of digital. Todays speakers and amp circuitry can reproduce fully-formed sounds well out of range of any master disc's ability to record/playback. If you used speakers and amps from the 1970's you may have a point that vinyl sounds better... but that was 50 years ago. Vinyl is great, fun, esoteric, enjoy all the aspects of it, but please don't try to convince me it's more accurate or "a warmer, richer, fuller sound" because it's just not - but it doesn't matter. It's made to enjoy so please enjoy it anyway you like.
Yes! Boom! That makes sense! Low rumble feedback is a huge variable, plus the stereo imaging of a stylus blending some pan carryover, makes a great argument regarding coloring characteristics! Yeah man, thanks for explaining that! I discovered this last night with my system. It was the hardest I pushed my system since getting it all together a month ago. As the volume went up, there were some serious coloration bleeding out into the room. Likely some frequencies were getting snuffed out along with some feedback reentering into the vibe of the stylus. May have to experiment with a beefy turntable mat to absorb some resonance and construct a egg-carton foam box cover to enclose the turn table and see if I hear a difference at high volume. There are so many variables to calling anything the best. The resolution by witch we examine characteristics of determining the very best goes on and on. The law of Variables will eventually cause the most rigid person to say “good enough”. The pursuit of such detail is the money maker, or in some cases of perspective, the “money taker”.
Man this is the best explanation of this I have found! I never understood the steady hum I was getting when I turned my subwoofer up until now. Makes perfect sense! Thanks!
I owned 5 record decks through the 70's and 80's gradually upgrading finally to a Mitchells turntable with a moving coil cartridge. Yet to preserve the records I always recorded the albums on to cassette immediately after purchase, to avoid the pops and scratches caused by dirt, scratches and my clumsiness, especially when I was in my cups. In fact I damaged three styli which needed replacement at quite a substantial cost. I changed to CD straight away and sold my record deck after a year or so and I have owned 8 models of CD player so far. I also had a 5 or so year musical affair with Mini Disk in the 90's. I now also listen to flac's using a half decent Digital Audio Player. On top I have a few SACD's I enjoy using a blu ray player. I have toyed with going back to vinyl, (I still have 500 or so LP's in the loft), but when I remember all those cracks and pops, oh and having to change sides, the nostalgia disappears in a puff of reality. For me, what really counts, is the recording you have, in whichever format you have it. Just get it going and listen to the music. Once it's playing I get on with enjoying the music and not trying to analyse if I can hear the tiny nuances that some people with an obsessive compulsion disorder seem to prefer to detect.
@Leon Anderson CDs all day everyday! Why would anyone want to put more money into an obsolete technology when you have superior tech to use. I switched to CD in the mid 80's and I would NEVER EVER go back to vinyl EVER!!!
I appreciate your consideration of objective facts rather than just subjective opinions. The only thing I would add to your proposed listening tests is that they should be at equal volumes (as determined by a sound level meter) and double-blind -- controlled by another person. Unequal factors such as volume and confirmation bias are rampant in these controversies when tests are conducted.
The basic pattern i've noticed for myself is that i prefer things that were recorded analogue to be played on analogue (LP or good quality tape); electronic music, or music that was digitally recorded or recorded on 'digital' (versus acoustic) instruments, i prefer to hear a high bitrate digital recording of. There are some interesting exceptions to this, like the George & Giles Martin work from the mid-90's forward, and certain bands like Depeche Mode really know how to work both mediums really well. Also, sometimes i'm listening for 'analytical' reasons, and other times i'm listening in a sensory way, like trying to 'recapture' a moment with someone associated with memories of that song, and for analysis, digital is best, but because of my age, analogue feels more 'correct' for the context of re-creating original experience with some music.
Think that the differences in mixing and saturation of the mix between "then" and "now" is one of the reasons that old vinyl gets the reputation of being better. Its closer to what the listener hears in a live performance. This is mentioned in the video at the 2/3rd mark. Different dynamics driven by fashion.
The problem is, how can we put an end to this "loudness war"? Especially when most music consumers don't really seem to care about things like mastering levels and dynamic range....
I love it all, vinyl, cassette, reel to reel, 8 track, cd, sacd, dvd audio, blu ray audio, streaming, files, live in person. Depends on which version on which medium on what equipment in which room I am listening as to which sounds best on that day. I wish it was as easy as pick 1 thing and that is the best. I would save a small fortune if that were the case.
Very well explained. To summarize what he said, digital is more sterile than analog. Digital has a more definitive way of mirroring the master recordings and can be put to any media whether it's vinyl, magnetics, cdd's or any digital files at a more accurate and flawless transfer. I grew up with vinyl, 8 tracks and cassettes and I can relate to the sound quality of analog. The drag of the needle on vinyl, the drag of the magnetic tape on special alloy heads, color the sound quality of analog media. Some of the rumblings in vinyl comes from the platter that the record is placed on, some from the wear. The more you spend on a turntable, the more dampening the equipment has for a more enjoyable listening experience. As for digital, as sterile as it's reproduction, you can color it with bbe sound enhancements or audio control's phase couple activator for that extra sub harmonics frequencies to add warmth that us old schoolers crave or missed.
When did he say that digital is sterile? If you record violinist playng concert and hear frim vynil noise, rummble, clics, why should that be beter than original?
to me it is about how a CD is mastered, vinyl sounds way better, but not because it is vinyl, it is the mastering. I am a musician and played on a lot of records. I know what they are doing in the studio, I did it myself. Compression and limiting is the problem. The rest on vinyl vs CD would be hard to detect, possible, but hard. So guess what, I collect vinyl:-)
Mate, i love this finally some objective comparison its a no brainer for me as a pro audio engineer(sse audio group) that digital is as close to transparent and repeatable a format as we have ever had I relate it to the stupid factor Because analogue seems simpler and obvious to people when compared to needing a degree to fully understand digital audio i think people default to analogue and then assert this idea that its superior to support there decision especially when spending ridiculous amounts of money on insane hifi to optimise a compromised limited format such as vinyl . I mean your dragging a needle through material right!?!? That fact alone must interfere with the spectral content when cutting a disc Any way I’m glad you made this video I’m going to use it to educate a few colleagues
It is the "stupid factor". "I LIKE deceiving myself that a vinyl LP for which I paid $30.00 [over against $3.99 when first issued] sounds better than the equivalent CD without all the befogging distortions!"
I think it all depends on the mastering process. Some albums sound better on vinyl LP and some sound better on CD or other digital uncompressed format or mediums. In my (short) experience, "old" stuff (like Pink Floyd, ACDC, Dire Straits, The Doors, etc...) or new stuff recorded using analogue tapes (like RAM from Daft Punk) usualy sounds best on vinyl. However, I own a copy of Californication from RHCP which sounds like a 64 kbps MP3 on this particular vinyl copy whereas the CD version is far more listenable. As I'm rather young (22), I'm not subject to the nostalgia factor. I love both technologies for what they offer. Digital is far more convenient, Analogue is far more engaging. Digital brings details and durability, Analogue brings warmth, air and presence. I own multiple CDs, multiple vinyls and multiple cassettes, and I can't choose one format to delete from my life over the other two!
I do audio mastering and restorations. Both formats have their pro and cons. No matter how flat I make the sound, a persons speakers or eq choices change the fidelity. The one aspect I would add is mastering. A well mastered cd with a nice dac, it's warm.
Yes. Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab transfers Analog tape to CD, SACD the correct way. No hard limiting. All dynamics preserved. A bit spendy though. You can find the CD's on ebay now, but you can still get SACD's and Vinyl's from their website.
Vinyl for the speakers, digital for the headphones for me!! With headphones the crackles can get annoying. but with speakers you won't notice it. Also i try to get non-remastered CDs as they don't tend to be compressed like modern day CDs.
You get that same warmth if you copy the vinyl to CD or Hi-Rez because digital doesn't really have an EQ curve like vinyl which why it's superior at reproducing music, which is the point of the video.
Very good video. The fact is that the majority of people don’t have “golden ears” so can’t perceive much differences. I love cds - one euro now at the charity shop and on a good system simply sound great! 👍
26" is fine. Hadn't heard about the 29". And I haven't time for the metric sizes that Eurobuff freaks jabber about. Wheels go round and round regardless size.
Pri, thanks for making the time to fully explain the difference for all significant angles. Well Done! I learned... Have you done a comparison between CD and "high-resolution streamed audio"?
Here’s the issue (or a few) with your thought experiment….. 1…. Time periods matter as things recorded in the 60s vs the 80s vs today… in the 60s, most of the equipment was analog, in the 80s, things were mostly digital, and now, it’s virtually ALL digital. So, today, what they do is what I’ll call “analog smoothing” where they take the complete digital recording and try to smooth out those edges that you showed in the beginning of your video. Although it is better than just taking that digital signal and pressing it to vinyl…. As then you still have a digital signal pressed into a record (which is issue number 2 in your thought experiment)… if you take a CD of Thriller and just press it to a record, in theory, it won’t sound much different than the CD as you are still listening to a digital signal… it still has the choppy squared off edges you showed and wont be smooth like the analog signal you showed. You couldn’t just “press it to vinyl” and have it become smooth on it’s own, you’d need that analog smoothing I mentioned earlier….. However, YES… taking a record and recording it to CD would convert it from analog to digital….. But going back to problem 1…. Original recording equipment will make a huge difference….. once again, take something that was recorded in the 60s and take something that was recorded today, even with analog smoothing, the recording from the 60s is going to be a much truer analog signal, as “most” of the equipment used to record was analog gear in the first place vs today. Now, the whole argument can never be settled…. Because not only, as you mentioned, are the turntables and the cartridges ALL different, we have different phono preamps, that all sound different, we have different cabling which can all sound different (in an analog format, digital, not so much…. But then we also have the conversation of scam cables that are out there and how people fall for “snake oil” based on pseudoscience… another conversation for another day)…. But even when comparing digital AND Analog, all speakers sound different, all rooms from a acoustics standpoint sound different….. I love how a lot of people won’t use EQs because “it’s not how the artist wanted you to hear it”… that;’s insane as you could have a room that swallows mids or highs, or dynamics or whaever, and that makes it “NOT the way the artist wanted you to hear it”…. You could definitely argue that using an EQ HELPS restore the audio to the way the artist wanted you to hear it. The issue is that there are so many variables even when analog and digital are in their own rights, that it becomes even vastly more complicated when you start comparing the two to each other….
Back in the day, audio engineers called this the "end-user problem": no matter how perfect your mix is, you can't predict how the listener's equipment and/or room might alter what they hear....
Tape would be the source recording anyhow especially long ago, the it gets put onto Vinyl and CD.. In the last thirty years majority have been using a pc as the input source to the vinyl cutter rather than the traditional tape or dat machine.. Besides dirt and magnets messing with tape I would say tape is the superior way to edit / store / playback sound overall. USB(hard drives) and cd are great and sound beautiful until one thing goes wrong the whole thing is messed up etc maybe thousands of tracks.. A messed up needle or tape head cannot cause damage to their media unless in the tape cassette's the playback device is a digital tape player meaning it may be messed up to the point when the play button is pressed regardless of the record safety tab being in place the player still goes into record mode which tries to erase or record over any cassette placed within it, vinyl seems to come out on top as the one to less maintain so it's a join venture tape & vinyl. I've had vinyl since I was young and those are the vinyls that give me feelings, it's a lie that people buy an old vinyl now and feel something , no no no, it has to be your old vinyl with your old writing on it somewhere, great feeling, priceless. Infact I think vinyls that are second hand, in okay condition and have first owners writing's on them should be worth more than a blank clean label, the person who wrote on it was a real person and they liked the track enough to write on it, they may not be with us anymore, priceless... #djlnr
I'm with digital, I concur with the statements in the video. I've played vinyl for 14 years and 9 years with cd's and digital. I've been hearing so much rubbish over the past 10 years that I'm shocked to the core to actually find a person that gets it. Vinyl is very clumsy to carry, it gets too old quickly, it crackles from the get go and it's basically toxic, those are major dealbreakers to me and they were from day 1. I never got to understand why people preferred vinyl for the 'better sound' because it never sounds like a master recording to begin with. I know because I produce myself, it doesn't even come close. CD was real fun to play with, but I had to waste too much time compiling and burning CD's with a worn down pc. Playing digital agrees with me, it's way more functional than the other 2 solutions. Digital means more control over my collection, every track being in the right place to make quick selections for gigs possible. No more heavy weightlifting is needed, I used to carry vinylbags weighing 60kg on my back sometimes 10km far, that's just nuts! Setting up the gear is sometimes a bit of a hassle but I'm a patient man and just deal with it. DJ-ing digitally gives you more time to look for the appropriate music, to check if the sound is right, even talk to someone if you so desire. The only vinyl lovers I get are the 'nostalgic' ones, they want to 'feel' the record, the old technology did it for them. I'm fine with that, as long as they don't claim 'sound superiority', which is frankly just an uninformed opinion with no factual basis. My experiences on the 'sound' of formats: mp3: only 320kbs is acceptable but only in small venues like bars and cafes, only smaller soundsystems like hifi and slightly larger ogg vorbis: great carrier, bitrate over 550-650 is okay but you can even go higher which is even better flac: similar to ogg vorbis, really good alac: never go apple, their time is gone wav: not good for dj-ing, sometimes dj-programs make a highpitched hard noise at the beginning/end of a track, it's really loud. Use them as masters in a collection, make flac's with them other formats: I wouldn't recommend them vinyl: better than mp3's 320kbps in very small venues, but the bigger the sound is the more it's crap, mp3 also has this but for a different reason (needletremmors versus amplifier sound shredding) Recreating 'vinylsound': It is not a big problem to recreate the warmth and softness of a vinyl record with equalisers, this can even make 'loudness wars' music sound aggreable. I use a Huawei mate20lite with a seamless eq app connected to a Native Instruments audio2 external soundcard that is plugged into a pioneer mixer which I also use as a secondary equaliser. In theory you shouldn't do it like that but reality often doesn't agree with that. The rules for the 'vinyl sound' are very simple: Never ever play in the red or the sound will go dead, don't equalise above 0 because that's filtering, keep the bass and 'relax' all else especially the mid-tone. That's for my setup which is fairly simple. Professionally I would recommend at least a dual 20band equaliser, maybe even a dual 30band if affordable to your wallet, just don't ever buy a cheap eq. Everything from 16k onto higher frequencies should look like a 'fade out', 16k being just a tad lower than 0. The midtones should even be lower than 16k's position in a shallow valley. Around the lower mid-tone and higher bass there is a slider on the eq that needs to be approximately 33% down from 0.. Bass at 0, don't set the rest of the bass above 0 especially newer music, older music is less problematic when it comes to filtering. That's my 2cents about creating a warm sound with digital. Thanks for the upload!
"ogg vorbis: great carrier, bitrate over 550-650 is okay but you can even go higher which is even better" If you're going that high with the bitrate you might as well just use FLAC. For that matter, considering how cheap storage is these days, there's no reason to ever use anything other than FLAC. I just bought a SanDisk 1 TB USB flash drive for $100, which is about half the size of a pack of gum. At a typical FLAC bitrate of about 900 kbps, you could fit nearly 40,000 songs on a 1 TB drive, which is way more than you'd ever need for a gig, or your entire career, for that matter. "flac: similar to ogg vorbis, really good" FLAC isn't at all similar to Vorbis. FLAC is lossless; Vorbis is lossy. "wav: not good for dj-ing, sometimes dj-programs make a highpitched hard noise at the beginning/end of a track, it's really loud." What does that have to do with WAV files? If FLAC is good for DJing, then so are WAVs, because a FLAC made from a particular WAV is the exact same thing (bit-for-bit identical) as said WAV when it's decoded/played. That's what "lossless" means. "Use them as masters in a collection, make flac's with them" There's no need to keep the WAV files after making FLACs from them, since, like I said, the FLAC is a lossless copy of the WAV. If you want backups, then just make copies of the FLAC files. Keeping WAV files just uses extra space on your drive in exchange for absolutely zero benefit. It would be like ZIPing or RARing a file and then keeping the original file too; makes no sense. It is easy to prove that FLAC files are indeed lossless. All you have to do is make a FLAC from a WAV, then decode the FLAC back to WAV. Then put the original WAV and the second WAV that you just got by decoding the FLAC file, into a folder; name them something like 1.wav and 2.wav. Then open CMD.exe, navigate to that folder, type... _fc /b 1.wav 2.wav_ ... and press enter. This will do a binary comparison of the two files, looking for any differences. Your result will be: _Comparing files 1.wav and 2.wav_ _FC: no differences encountered_ That, of course, proves that no information was lost when you made a FLAC from the WAV. And when you play a FLAC file, it gets decoded in real-time back to its original WAV information, so a WAV and a FLAC made from said WAV sound identical when you play them, because they _are_ identical.
Thanks for bringing less biased and more technically sophisticated viewpoints to DJing discussions! Being on both ends of records, making them as well as playing them on different formats I've found the whole signal chain to be important in this VS question. Every digital-2-analog or analog-2-digital conversion is a massive degradation in the chain so first of all if in the studio the track had a digital ("in the box") mixdown the digital version is automatically better & closer to the original. One thing a LOT of DJs, even so called vinyl purist ones don't understand is almost all modern mixers, from all post TTM-56 Rane to any Pioneer mixer ever are digital mixers. Just hooking up a turntable to any of these mixers means you've already lost the battle. Of course the CD-version digitized straight from the master tape will sound better than your now digitized vinyl version, which for vinyl's limitations was already a narrowed down version of that same master tape. That's why i found it funny when Rob Swift did a "Digital vs Analogue DJing"-video stressing how important analogue is while using a 57mk2. Analogue recordings on vinyl straight to the amp or in DJ use thru a Xone:62/92 or a rotary? Definitely better. Unless they were crammed full like the first pressing of "3 Feet High and Rising" or otherwise neglected like old Trax-records.
Great comment, I remember about 20 years ago when my friend bought turntables with line level outputs, not the standard phono - I remember asking my mate what was that all about when setting them up, I found out when I tried to scratch on them! After wondering why it sounded bad and some noises just didn't work I looked at the turntable again, read the manual and finally realised they were actually DIGITAL turntables... for some unknown reason the audio from the vinyl was converted inside the turntable and all records sounded different on it (I remember some being awful and others actually being clearer but still weird). Ever since I have looked out for and tried to avoid hardware that converts to digital "unnecessarily" (for our use at the time there was absolutely no valid reason for digital signal/line level output from a turntable as there was no such thing as timecode vinyl or controllers that understood it in general production! I think it was just to make the mixers that went with the decks cheaper to produce as they removed the pre amp???) Your point about the mixers is spot on and many, many DJ's will be caught out there - I've seen Rob's video as well haha! I am very glad I chose to get a standalone DJ controller with jogwheels rather than replace my DJ mixer with a digital one so now I still have a "traditional" set up to mix vinyl and the seperate unit for mixing digital files on my laptop and of course I just plug the controller in to my old mixer.
Whether one sounds better or not, the good thing about digital is its inability to degrade which is unavoidable with media such as vinyl (and tapes). A disc player, MP3 player, or digital file can be replicated perfectly without losing any clarity or quality. However, records and tapes degrade every time they are played and recorded from, or merely touched, taken out of and put away into their containers, or are touched by a stylus or playing head, etc. The stylus and playing head which touch them therefore degrade, too. Records will scratch by virtue of being handled, period. Tapes will rip from getting thinner from wear due to being played. If you like vinyl, enjoy its great frequency range but deal with its inherent physical limitations; it's made of plastic.
It's not entirely true that digital doesn't degrade. It's true for your original copy on the hd where you put it first, but every time you copy a track, some bits get lost, eventually your 320kbs mp3 degrades to an unbareble mess. Always be careful with cut/pasting tracks. Make sure you know where your masters are and keep them on a safe hd or ssd. I personally use highspeed sd cards these days, I find it to be more practical.
@@ljuboizsiska5448 maybe read the OP again, you might find the answer. I'm not using mp3 (I use flac & ogg) I only gave an example for digital fomats, mp3 just degrades quicker so it's easier to tell the difference. Same goes for flac and ogg btw, small degredations occur when copy pasting.
@ReaktorLeak you will lose something, thinking otherwise is faulty. Even if you don't copy it and you put a hd in a vault you might lose a few bits. Digital isn't perfect.
Just a thought about recording the vinyl and listening it back from your PC: if you record a vinyl onto your computer, the signal will have to go through your computer's sound card twice! Once while recording and once again while played back. To obtain a faithful recording of the vinyl and then to play it back faithfully you must have a really special soundcard with completely flat characteristics both ways. I'm quite sure that soundcards like this are really expensive and those found on the motherboard of a PC are far from it, as well as most mass-produced sound cards. So, most people won't hear the same sound from the vinyl and the PC, therefore they will make the conclusion that digital is inferior to analog. I don't say if it is or not, but I say that most people WILL hear a difference between the vinyl and it's recorded digital counterpart.
I totally agree and I think the video misses that point largely (for such a long video, disappointingly). However! Not to disagree with you, but just to add - there are frequencies outside of CONSCIOUS human perception that may nonetheless still change how one 'feels' or is affected by the music. CDs can't reproduce those (inaudible) frequencies, this was known and widely talked about when CDs first started becoming the new standard.
@@kronossonork6994 I think it's less the fact that you can't hear the high frequencies, but that the high frequencies might have an effect on the sounds you can hear, like change them in some way. But I have a feeling it likely doesn't do much, especially for highly controlled studio recordings (tho I'm no expert so don't quote me). Also I don't think it's that digital is incapable of recording and producing super high or low frequencies, but that they jusy cut off the frequencies at the highest and lowest points just so the computer has some reasonable place to stop in the digitizing process.
@@jnagarya519 Can you perceive different frequencies of light, and know how much UVA, UVB and UVC is in it? I think not, and yet it will still affect you. The same with the moon and the tides, do you think the water consciously observes what the moon is doing and reacts accordingly, or is it unconscious cause and effect?
Well done. I love vinyl, but I buy this explanation. There is no doubt that CDs are a cleaner signal, less noise and do not degrade but subjectivity aside there are some cases where a vinyl "just has more". The explanation that this is due to the engineering process tailoring to a loudness war and not as a byproduct of the medium make sense. In other words, a CD has the capacity to have just as much dynamic range (maybe more) as vinyl but it doesn't due to the demand for MORE LOUD.
@@SPAZZOID100 so do you think theres any point on buying vinyl anymore if this is the case? Cos were not getting the full range of a supposed analogue recording?
Excellent video and technically accurate. It's very rare to have this kind of quality on youtube... Many people talk about this subject without having the technical knowledge. As en electrical engineer, i read so many false claims and plain wrong stuff... So thanks for this great video!
Some of the Classic Vinyl Albums, especially progressive Rock type, Floyd, Yes, Rush sound way better than todays digital versions. It is clearly down to the mastering and sound engineers of the time and being pressed from the Master Tape which had not degraded over time through use from a pressing taken of of it back in the 70's compared to a commercial remaster to CD from it today or one sold to download in Digital format. Kind of slightly different from the angle you talked about yes but for example i have some classic Floyd albums which are ripped from Original First Vinyl pressings and in one case straight from the original Master Tape to a lossless Digital Flac file and they sound considerably better in every single way imaginable to what you would get on a CD version of said Album released today/recently. Again down to degradation over time of the original analogue and maybe todays sound engineers not feeling that 70's vibe/not actually as good as the engineers involved originally in the moment ect. Long story short, does this all apply to modern EDM music, maybe a little but not so much imho. Good video bro :)
@@jnagarya519 I think you completely drew the wrong conclusion from what i said. The Final Product from many Albums of Yester Year on Vinyl sound better than some of todays. Not all, that would be silly to say but 'some' do like i stated above, the Original Michael Jackson 'Thriller' album is another, the original Vinyl has H U G E Dynamic Range in comparison to a Digital Versions of Today because the quieter parts have been remastered Louder so the whole Album is louder but loses a lot of Dynamic Range and subtlety. Do some research on The Loudness Wars, so much Music was ruined for a Time because of that alone.
@@jnagarya519 we are humans not robots. Distortion is life. The engineers now spend more time creating distortion so the music isn't so harsh. Backnib the day they spent more time trying to lower the distortion. At medium to loud volume, I've never had ear fatigue when listening to vinyl, with digital the music gets tiresome somewhat quickly. But just another guy with human ears opinion. Same with playing guitar, I can play for hours through a tube amp. Touch sensitive, feel, dynamics, warmth, distortion etc etc etc. Play through a plug in or even a non tube amp, the love dies quickly. However, when all three are recorded, the sound really isn't that different. 🤔 try explaining that with math. Haha. Also, the universe has rules, vinyl has rules, digital in theory has no limitations. Maybe we enjoy vinylnrecords because the engineers had much more limitations to work with, and so do we.
I ripped one side of Metallica death magnetic vinyl to WAV at 44.1khz 16bit and the digital rendering retained the cracks and pops and a kind of representation of the warmer tone, though it did sound flat in comparison to the vinyl. This is likely due to the lower quality of my equipment however. I think a similar comparison may be watching a film in 70mm and then watching the same film in 4k digital, 70mm tends to be more holographic and the colours more organically lucid and warm while the 4k rendering of the 70mm elements although stunning, do have less dimensionality though on the upside reveal more perceivable detail from the film negative.
Totally fascinating video. You put so much research and effort into this. Also well explained, you touched on very important points and your narration is well paced. Bravo
Do you guys prefer to read a paper book or an e-book on a Kindle? Which is "better"? Yeah sure, the digital Kindle is like a library that takes the space of a 25 pages book. Yeah sure, it can reproduce more accurately and in a more efficient way the original information (letters/words). Yeah sure, we can zoom, adjust the font, etc. Yeah sure, the technology is better and newer but how does it really feel to buy and read the greatest book on a Kindle? Is it a different experience (from the intial buying process to the storage in your collection)? Maybe we just lack a bit of materiality in our way to enjoy art right now? Maybe enjoying the "Ultra HD live sessions" sitting at our computer during this 2020 pandemic was a bit shitty if we compare that to live performances (even with bad room acoustics, etc.)... This kind of debate is endless. We cannot separate the art from all the context/experience elements that surround it and for a lot of people those "vinyl elements" are better. Maybe it's more engaging, active, material, sentimental, etc. Maybe it's just a question of great mastering - more pleasant because less clean and cold... But for the majority of those persons, digital is very nice and useful in the daily life too (driving the car, working at the computer, etc.) and it's fine if they prefer vinyl (in an "irrational" way) when they really want to pay attention and enjoy music. Probably their turntable sound system is better than their "pods" or shitty computer speakers... Maybe they listen differently when it's a vinyl... Maybe a lot of things. And maybe people love to take shortcuts in their thinking process (i.e. vinyl has better "quality" instead of "I prefer the experience of listening to a vinyl"). Your video is very great but it's also a "cold" and rational approach. It's great because it can give informations for some important questions about the capabilities of the digital/analog medium, etc. Thanks for your great work on that. Really! As we know, culture and the human relation to art are complex thematics. In this "cloud era", it is not so strange that people are returning to those sexy old pieces of vinyl with great art covers and to their 50 years old turntables that are still capable of playing their favourite music with just a little of maintenance while their computers will be at the junk yard in 5 years and while they pay monthly to access their monumental digital music collection that is stored in a Spotify server and that they cannot enjoy having it sitting in their living room as a reminder that artists worked a lot for all those pieces of joy. Keep it up music lovers!
compressed music, no matter which support it's recorded on, still remain compressed, vinyl (re-issue, 180gr), CD, SACD. It depends a lot from the master and from the guy who decided to go louder.
With digital, we never get turn table rumble, no tics and pops, nor any pre and post groove echo. And repeated use of a compact disc won't physiclly wear it out.
To say analog vinyl sounds better that a wave or Mp3 compression files is not a stretch, but 24-bit 192kHz digital has a dynamic range of 144dB, where the average vinyl pressing has a range of 58dB. Modern THX and DSP technology can reproduce accurate fidelity down to adjusting minute faze linearity of three way speakers on as many as 12 separate audio channels. That kind of fidelity is unimaginable with analog stereo vinyl. In fact even the most ultra high end stereo analog preamps have audible signal distortion, but they disguise and gentrify it by using the pleasant term "coloration".
"but 24-bit 192kHz digital has a dynamic range of 144dB," That is true but this 144 dB of dynamic range is far above the capabilities of the human ear. It is like trying to listen to the steps an ant makes while standing behing an 747 engine running at full power.
@@elkeospert9188 LOL, Funny analogy Eike! Jets will always drown out the atns no matter what, but that's not the point of having a broader dynamic range. Think of the sound wave in a given audio format being contained between a floor (quietest ant) and ceiling (loudest jet). With greater dynamic range there's more space to reproduce accurate frequency detail from floor to ceiling, aka higher fidelity. With less dynamic range, one frequency bleeds into the next and detail is lost. My human ear can hear the difference between a brand new pressing of Pink Floyd's The Wall on vinyl, and the digitally remastered Blu-ray version played on the same sound system.
@@Datsun510zen "With greater dynamic range there's more space to reproduce accurate frequency detail from floor to ceiling, aka higher fidelity." The human ear has its own floor and ceiling. You will never hear the steps an ant makes on normal ground and you should not try to listen to a 747 engine at full power in short distance without heavy ear protection. Greater dynamic make senses but not if it is greater than the dynamic of the human ear. "My human ear can hear the difference between a brand new pressing of Pink Floyd's The Wall on vinyl, and the digitally remastered Blu-ray version played on the same sound system." Of course you can hear that - the mastering for vinyl has to consider the many limitations vinyl has which play no role in a CD or Blu-ray version. I can also hear the difference between a song played on my AM-radio and the same song from CD. That does not mean that my AM radio has better quality. The real question is if you could hear the difference between vinyl and a digital recording of that vinyl....
I'm a long time 60 years, LP guy. I recently got a decent DAC, and Tidal. My wife heard me yell "holy shit " on 1st listen. I hear things and separation I never heard with LPs
You laid it out very well. Thank you. I've always believed in the potential of digital. I was, and still disappointed on what the "Loudness Wars" did to the digital medium. That explains the vinyl resurgence of lately. The truth of the story on "new" produced vinyl is too many are "mastered" from digital sources! Only vintage recordings were recorded onto high speed tape machines using analog technology. So, the vinyl crowd might want to rethink the superiority of the older medium with current digital in CD format? Particularly with a respectable DAC in its signal path. I've also experienced CD with artist recordings from vinyl. Now that is a real disappointment for me! I believe the same argument can be made with transistors vs tube. Tubes have long been known to "romanticize" the signal as compared to transistors. Let's include film to digital. Film does not have the luminous dynamic capabilities of digital. Funny thing, digital can mimic either analog or film! Which is best? It all boils down to preferences. *I will say, sound staging/imaging in stereo on vinyl with its inherent bleeding is more satisfying and dear I say more natural sounding than digital's 100% separation capabilities. Depth perception with two human ears does not allow total 100% left right separation in nature. Probably why analog recordings' depth retrival sound more convincing than digital. But, digital can sound more "entertaining", with it's broad separation with two loud speakers! (I personally, never fully embraced multi-channel music recordings) Too gimmicky. More enjoyable in a home theater environment. I guess I'm a traditionalist? 😁 Preferences.
I think it all depends on the music you listen to. The only comparison I made is with"Bluebird" by ELO. I have the best of ELO. I also have the album "Secret messages." I compared the two. There's a part where there's tamborines. You can hear them more on the vinyl. But other than that, I don't hear any difference. So the difference is very minute. As far as the stereo separation, if you have to make that kind of test, thast's not important and stereo separation is important to me. I have the vinyl of CCR's first album. On Suzie Q the first verse comes from the right, the 2nd verse comes from the left. The CD version I heard John's voice cmes from both speakers. WhenI heard that, I thought it was the CDs that had limitations on stereo. Again, I don't believe there's a huge difference. In have both a turntable and a CD player. And now a 3rd choice, a laptop where you can bring up almost any song you want. I now always put the word vinyl in front of the title and 95% of the time you can bring up the vinyl with some very expensive and nice sounding turntables.
Music is subjective, and it’s reproduction depends upon the quality of equipment and also people’s hearing, it’s also affected by the acoustics of the room. Both have there advantages, vinyl does sound good, but it’s fragile and bulky, problems with scratches and pops. Digital is very convenient and easy to use and store. So it’s a personal choice, I personally use both mediums.
@@stevenclarke5606 "Music is subjective". The rest of your comment concerns the objective. The creative process is "bringing chaos into order" -- transforming the subjective into the objective. The idea that "music," or "art" generally, is "subjective" is intellectual laziness. There are objective criteria, rules, by means of which to assess "art" and its qualities and demerits. But the video is an objective discussion of two objective media, and the objective characteristics of each, not of "subjectivity," which latter DODGE avoids the objective discussion altogether.
The only way to tell if vinyl or CD sounds better someone needs this: 1) a copy of an album released on CD and vinyl prior 2000 (meaning, before mastering process added brickwall limiters to make it sound louder) 2) perform a double blind test between the two (meaning, someone else would switch between them)
@MF Nickster 100 % right. And still, even if someone cannot test it your way, a CD mastered without brick-wall compression would sound better than vinyl in a blind test.
And everybody forgets that lots of people are frequently listening it while heavily intoxicated with their hearing capabilities consequently severely impaired
Wow, I've never seen a better agumentation. Thank you very much for this upload and your knowlage. Especially the last part with anolog to digital and digital to analog. Awesome work. You got the point exactly. I'm already keen to show your video to some audiophiles who prefer vinyl, because it sounds "warmer". 😀
Read my long information correction comment elsewhere here, and you'll get an even better and more truthful explanation. He only scratched the surface and unfortunately quoted some dangerous misinformation.
Good video, I’m not going to say that one sounds better than the other but my personal preference is vinyl. I started buying music on vinyl in 1982 and stopped in 1998. I Dj’d using vinyl for years then went to CDJs and now use Serato Dj or Scratch Live. I really can’t tell what it is that I like so much about the sound of music on vinyl but I just do. And this is not coming from some kid that just wants to be cool so decided to get into vinyl because it’s trendy.
The reason some digital can sound worse is how compressed it is because digital creates stair stepping high enough quality and this goes away, plus most vinyl records these days are from a digital sound source telling the machine to imprint the grooves so like it or not your listening to the CD anyway on almost all modern records lol. Plus records have static and white noise. Also the comment on panning sound digitally you dont have to pan it completely over lol just pan a little bit if you want it on both.
FlyingAce1016 the video I referenced refers to a study where the human brain cannot distinguish the stair stepping or better described as aliasing in audio as low as 22khz. I would argue 44.1 is adequate. You won’t hear it until you slow it down. In fact, that’s when it matters in recording when you’re doing time stretching.
Actually there aren’t any „stair steps“ if you record a signal digitally it doesn’t alter the sound. That’s why digital reproduces sound more accurately than any analogue medium.
I can understand all those who love vinyl. Because when you have real collection that you can touch physically, then you get attached to it. It’s real human psychology, we always value real things more than those files which exist only in digital media. For me personally vinyl is unaffordable and non-portable. There is no way for me to put 500 vinyl EPs in my pocket. But huge respect for those who loves music so much that they prefer physical media, this is romantic
scupakus They do, a few, and they’re like $300 per tape. Plus keeping the decks in shape can be really expensive if you’re not an expert at it yourself.
That's why the first 4 "Beatles" LPs were not "stereo". The standard was to record all the music on one track, and all the vocals to the other. That's why the "hole in the middle". They were PR-MIXED MONO. On vinyl the "hole" is still there, but there is some bleeding.
Fantastic explanations. You've kicked a lot of vinyl purist's arses with this and they'll hate you for it I'm sure. I believe that the vinyl resurgence is being brought about by mostly old men desperate to try and relive their youth. It's Flac all the way for me.
What about master tape?,I have watched a video that claimed that 1/4th of an inch,2 track 15ips is the best sound format out there,I am not an audiophile but I find these discussions interesting.
You are not taking into account the original 'master tape' from the analog era (prior to digital only albums). Here's my response to his video: "You forgot to mention this. The ONLY way, as an example, I'm going to hear Pink Floyd's - Dark Side Of The Moon as it was originally intended in 1973 from the 'UK' Master Tape, is to have an original UK or German pressing. There's no possible way to hear that specific mastering of the album without having a copy of the Vinyl record from that era. Considering the original UK/German pressings (A2/B2 or A3/B3 as examples) are considered the very best this album ever sounded, you'll have to own a pressing with that in the deadwax/runout. The US pressings are different mastering, the Japanese pressings are a different mastering and so on. For my example, there's simply no way to hear a 'digital' version of this album with the original UK mastering unless you own the original UK/German pressings. Also, the master tape ages with time, a copy of the master tape in 1973 is going to sound different then a copy of the master tape in 2021 simply because of age and wear on the tape. Wanted to provide my 2 cents on this."
@@bobbyjones1055 I am sorry that was hard to understand, what I get is that it is nearly impossible to produce an original tape by yourself. Looking at discussions, which rarely got to the point asked by the one who made the forum discussion, most people who have heard tape prefer it over vinyl, but as of yet for me there seems to be no proof that vinyl or 1/4inch 15 ips tape can copy sound more accurately from the musical band than digital, like CD-r or wav files. Once again I have no experience with hi rex sound which is silly,but most people who do feel very biased /emotional on the other hand.
Small details on noise floor. Digital also has a noise floor defined the scale of the first bit which is not zero. Dithering algorithms deal with this but thats a different story. CD quality audio flat dynamic range is 96db. Some very high quality vinyl can come close to that on the first play with a virgin needle.
Vinyl has physical limitations such as low frequencies and high frequencies. The needle is a fixed size and if the frequencies are low the needle can bounce off the grove and cause sound loss. Also the same apples for high frequencies. The needle can't physically fit in the grove causing sound loss. So now you know the truth.
The ‘channel bleeding’ isn’t actually bad at all since a real stereo mix is suposed to sound like you are there, and when you’re listening to a orchestra or some jazz concert you don’t hear some instruments on one ear and the others on the other ear.
I have no idea about which is “better” but I don’t really like the pops & crackles of vinyl. Also, to the vinyl purists, I heard if you buy one of those 180 gram records that have become popular in the last few years, they’re actually recorded from a digital master!
That all depends on the label’s quality standards. There are certainly labels out there using digital as the source material. However, the difference is obvious to my ears, at least. There’s typically a compression and “coldness” to the overall sound. I guess it’s very similar to the whole “your eyes can only perceive 60fps and any more is unnoticeable” BS. Some even argue the difference of 30 to 60 being unnoticeable, which is a ridiculous statement. I (and countless others) can detect the difference between 60-75. Ever since I upgraded to a 144Hz monitor, 60Hz looks like compete shit. This is all to say, there will always be people who haven’t experienced analogue properly, or hell maybe they really can’t tell the difference, OR they just don’t give a damn and would rather enjoy free music.
especially on modern equipment that is sensitve to detail itll not even look dirty but once you see dust on your needle sound quality goes to crap especialy in vocals
When I copy a vinyl record to digital, the first thing I ALWAYS do is gently run a piece of soft tissue paper over the needle to make sure there isn't any dust on it....
The loudness war has been going on for almost the entirety of vinyl's existence. Apparently Ahmet Ertegun's brother gifted his daughter a Bob Ludwig pressing of "Zeppelin II" and it skipped on her really cheap record player during Jimmy's solo
Everyone knows that digital is better sound wise, but that’s not the point, the point is that the experience is so much better. Taking it out of the sleeve, placing it on the table, the little imperfections and static, it is an experience
It is not objective that vinyl sounds more accurate and faithful to the original recording then digital if the digital recording is a victim of the loudness war and is overly compressed. That is not objective, that is a fact.
Well yeah, an original issue/non remastered LP is going to sound better than a remastered recording, but that doesn't 100% mean vinyl is better than cd.
@@connorm955 Oh, please. There have been many crap-mastered "original" LPs released. Check out all the fake "stereo" LPs released during the 1960s. Sometimes remastering is the cure -- back to mono, as example, from the fake "stereo". BTW: REMASTERING and REMIXING are NOT THE SAME.
30+ years ago my brain said CD must be better than vinyl but my ears said vinyl sounded better (if good quality LP on very high quality equipment). With the advent of hi-res format like SACD, DSD and so on, it is undeniable that digital is better than analogue. I have many hundreds of CD's in my collection but it has been many years since I last played them because hi-res format, whether SACD or streaming are much better. I am affected neither by the vinyl revival nor the CD revival.
I've digitized all of my LP's and generally the sound of the digitized version of the LP is indistinguishable from the LP , except no pops, since I apply a pop filter. Digitizing LP's permits pleasure without confinement.
@Charles Ludwig By digitising it you lose the frequencies above 20 kHz. These frequencies cannot be heard but are still very important. You have downgraded your music by moving it to digital.
@Sleep Cube...What an arrogant POS you are. No, i have not read the nyquist paper. However, everything i have said is based on fact. Studies, that i can easily point to, have shown that high frequency ultrasonic sound does have a positive effect on the brain of listeners. Have you read those studies? Most digital music does not operate above 20,000hz but if you can show I'm wrong then go ahead and show your evidence. All anyone has to do is to google mp3 frequency range or cd frequency range to see that the maximum frequency for CDs and MP3 is no higher than 20khz. So please don't talk crap. But if you can show that mp3 or cd goes above 20khz then i await your evidence.
Nonsense mp3 320kbps usually cut around 20khz, but lossless formats like flac, alac, wma, waw... have much higher frequencies! Digital is much more superior over vinyl if mastering is done properly!
@Emil Fender...If flac is recorded from a lossy format like mp3 or CD then it's not going to be lossless and will be no better than the format it was converted from.
thats the point, what is more accurate. And if you want cd sound as vinly as you described with teh steroe, but some guitar sounbding bit on the wrong speaker, you an record this way. But point is - it has to reproduce how the author wants the record to sound. But stereo is just small thing. Bigges thing for me feels like it might be imposible to right so perfectly into plastic plus overtime plastic wears. While when you play digital from SSD - nothing has worn.
don't forget that the placebo effect works for more than just medicines. If one goes into it with the attitude or belief that vinyl sounds 'better', it will. But if you prefer the enhanced bass response and more limited stereo spread of vinyl to the digital recording, you are in effect remixing the recording to your own preferences. Now it is NOT what the artists originally intended to present. You can listen any way you wish, but don't try to tell us vinyl is more 'accurate' or faithful to the original. The science and the numbers say otherwise.
22:50 the problem with this argument is that the massive dynamic range offered by hi-res digital audio is far too loud for a human being to safely listen to. This is why 16-bit audio is the industry standard for the end user experience. The additional headroom offered by 24 and 32-bit audio is pointless from a pure listening perspective because it would be physically dangerous to listen to, rendering it totally pointless. The only use for that larger dynamic range is in the recording and production process, prior to doing your mixdown.
There is one thing not mentioned in this video: the inherently analog issue of generation loss. Anyone who has copied material from a cassette tape to another tape has experienced this phenomenon to some degree; each copy sounds a little less clear (especially in the high end) than the tape it was copied from. I strongly suspect that the "warmth" that vinyl fans think they're hearing is (at least partially) from the fact that a vinyl copy of any master tape is at least one generation down from the source tape. (Back in the day when everything was analog, it could be even more; as record companies were pretty casual about whether they were using the original or a copy tape. Or a copy of a copy....) As the owner of an original Teac 144 Portastudio, I can tell you that this was something that always had to be considered; you could only submix one or two times before you ended up with a muddy mess....
I just started getting into vinyl. The difference to me seems to be akin to the difference between reading a book on an e-reader and reading a physical book. The physical medium including the warm glow of the op amp tubes and the occasional pop, all add to the atmosphere of the music listening experience.
Yep it's true. Until you buy a good multibit or R2R DAC and never look back. But vinyl will probably always be superior to the delta-sigma "cheater" DACs that flood today's consumer market. They're absolute trash.
very intersting stuff. i have old beatles records are hard panned, you can be djing and dependant on the sound system set up you can end up with an instrumental on one side of the room and vocals on the other
They are not "panned". Easy to find is George Martin's "All you Need is Ears". It is essentially a plain-English explanation of the evolution of recording technology (includes his hearing the "advanced" THREE-track mono recording at Capitol Records).through his twenty-five years in the business up to and including when "The Beatles" appeared. NOT "panning": the standard was to record all instruments on one track, and all vocals on the other track. That was PRE-MIXED MONO -- MONO was the market, and the goal radio airplay, which was MONO. That is why the "hole in the middle" (with some bleeding). He was PISSED when EMI, after "The Beatles" hit in England, and without consulting with Martin, released the PRE-MIXED MONO as "stereo". He essentially said that the PRE-MIXED MONO sound like "shit". "PANNING" is in the MIXING. If one records a sound on one of two tracks, the volume of that sound can be increased or lowered -- but cannot be "panned," which requires that the sound be recorded to BOTH tracks. Listen to both the mono and stereo releases of "The Young Rascal's" "Good Lovin'," which begins, "1-2-3-4". For one, the mono has PUNCH. For another, the "1-2-3-4" of the stereo release are each panned left-right-left-right -- which takes the "steam" out of the mix. That was released in 1965, and now exposes stereo is still being pretty much a gimmick. The first "Beatles" LP consciously intended as stereo was "Help!" -- and it was Martin's first time with stereo. It was primitive, and he wrote that the mix was a mess. Still -- he wrote that "The Beatles" didn't "get" the idea of TWO monitor speakers -- the focus was MONO up to and including "Sgt. Pepper's". Though "The Beatles" (aka "White Album") was released in the UK in both mono and stereo, it was only released in the US as stereo: that was in November, 1968. Before that MONO was the standard and the market. There is much confusion in the various terms -- such as "panning" -- by pseudo-aficionados. Which is all balled up with the claim that vinyl is "warmer," when in fact it is not 'warmth" but DISTORTION. (Some of the distortion, pre-digital, was introduced by the preamp and amp tubes, including during recording.) Again, read George Martin's "All You Need is Ears".
Depends on what your used to hearing. Vinyl, 8 Tracks, Cassettes, WAV, or MP3. Some tracks I like on Vinyl others Cassette, but WAV I’ll take for everything. Digital Studio Recordings like WAV are clean. I will always have a passion for tracks pressed on Vinyl. We all have different tastes / preferences.
If vinyl is so great, then why does the master tape recording have to be mastered and massaged to minimized the inherent limitations of vinyl? That “warm” sound you are hearing is a compromise of the vinyl medium. The master tape doesn’t have that “warm” sound, so you have already compromised the audios accuracy.
If you play that thriller album the recent releases and play an OG of thriller you will be blown away. It really come down to mixing. That being sound as musician i just like records more to me because the sound ImO sounds more natural.
Experiment Results for Vinyl ripped to digital file (Using RME Studio grade AD converter for the recording): Digital File at 192khz/24 Bit: Indistinguishable from original Vinyl playback. Digital File at 44khz/16 Bit (CD Format): Very very close to original Vinyl playback. Minimal differences in the "openness" of complex high frequency sounds. Digital File at 320kbs (High Res MP3): Similar to CD. Digital File at 128kbs (Low Res MP3): Unsurprisingly this gives a strong audible loss in overall quality versus the original Vinyl playback which is easy to tell in blind listening. When blind listening I can tell the difference between the 192khz/24 Bit vs the 44khz/16 Bit (CD) recording but I can not tell the difference between CD and High-Res MP3. The 128kbs MP3 is noticeable worse than the vinyl playback. So much so, that I find this quality unacceptable to my ears. For blind listening I used RME DA converter - headphone pre-amp - AKG 701 headphones. Conclusion of the experiment: - At 192khz/24 Bit a digital recording basically is identical sounding to its "Master". At least for me, not even the slightest differences are audible. - At CD as well as High-Res MP3 digital quality there ARE audible differences to the "Master". They are extremely slight however - and only audible in direct comparison. - 128kbs (Low Res MP3) breaks the sound. My advice would be to use a minimum of 256kbs MP3 - even for low end. If you want to try yourself: oppodigital.azurewebsites.net/hra/dsd-by-davidelias.aspx There you can find various digital quality of the same song to compare - 24-bit / 88.2kHz, CD quality and High-Res MP3. Differences are very hard to tell - and only if you use very good monitoring equipment. With standard "home" equipment you probably will not be able to tell a difference. As for me, I can hear a difference between 24-bit / 88.2kHz and CD, but not between CD and High-Res MP3 - similar as my result from my own recording test. So is vinyl really better than digital? If I have to answer this exact question I will refuse - because digital has strongly varying quality - so the answer depends on the digital resolution. If the question was: Is vinyl really better than 192khz/24 Bit digital? Then the clear answer is NO. 192khz/24Bit is better than vinyl. If the question was: Is vinyl really better than CD/High-Res MP3? Then my answer would be that this discussion is justified but my personal preference is vinyl. If the question was: Is vinyl really better than low-quality 128kbs MP3? Then the answer is YES, Vinyl is better than Low-Res MP3.
Good vid! One thing I gotta say regardless of Analog or Digital recording there will always be loss signals either through wiring and or the time the sound travels from the instruments (including voice) to the microphone. That is just nature period. Is it perceivable? Probably not as you mentioned.
They both have advantages, Listing to music is an emotional thing so there is no right or wrong here. For easy care, I would opt. for CDs since it's less work keeping them in good shape without quality loss. Vinyl is more work-intensive for caring but more rewarding. Some masterings will be better on vinyl (high frequency) and CDs over-compressed; in other cases, CDs will be better without over-compressing. I collect both formats and shake my hand with both ;)
@@priyonjoni All and every specs are in favour of Cd medium. For me I can't hear specifications. I just hear presence in vinyl that CD don't have. You can talk specs, noise, rumbles etc to the cows come home. Vinyl and analogue just trumps digital CD medium. Simply Comes down to this. Sound is infinite like a circle. You can't chop it up into 44.1K pieces, rejoin it and expect not to hear any differences. 22 divided by 7 continues on indefinitely.... Just bring a simple humble Revox B77 to record a live performance and nothing beats it (probably except a direct cutting vinyl lathe).
@@davidrw61 I’m an admirer of music no matter which format that it is presented. To this day I find that digital just can’t replicate the delicate nuances of real music. Be it by vinyl or master reel to reel tapes. Don’t know. Digital music is perfect as a medium in every aspect but just lacks realism. Furthermore our ears as rough measurement instruments as they are, i.e not the most reliable, we /our brains have the abilities to pickup these differences yet at the same time our brains are also easily fooled by external equipment and equalisation techniques via digital. A slightest difference in the high frequencies can make the drums sound a bit more faster and crisp vs analogue sound. Try test for yourself. Everything is superior is digital format yet every single CD player manufacturer sounds different? What gives? Should they all sound the same if they were replayed by digital medium? Anyways this topic has been beaten to death back in the 80/90’s! Just spewing my 2 cents worth as I’m doing the number 2 toilet atm… i was bored …
@@yogi9631 I'm not sure what your definition of "real music" is. If you mean live music, then it's true that no recording (no matter how good) will be the same as actually being there. But I have never heard an analog recording that fooled me, even briefly, into thinking that I'd heard the real sound. I did experience that illusion once with a digital recording; although, in fairness, it was a true stereo recording (two microphones, one for each channel) and I was listening in headphones. (And, admittedly, it was a brief illusion- the sound of a door slamming. But for half a second, I thought that someone in the room had actually closed a door- and couldn't locate the door in question....) Besides, in today's world, even live music is usually subject to electronic manipulation of some sort (if only a mixer/ PA system). As to different CD players sounding different, that's a function of the playback equipment, not the recording. A Beethoven symphony is going to sound different on a cheap boombox than it would on a high-end system even though it's the exact same track....
Impulse perception from speaker cone to ear is different when the signal is fed into an audio interface. ya know this. After recording, you have to mix and master. Same reason why mic'ing a guitar amp is still a gold standard vs plugging in even using ampsims.
Check out these vinyl turntables for DJs:
Pioneer DJ PLX-500 direct drive turntable www.zzounds.com/a--3970758/item--PIOPLX500
Pioneer DJ PLX-1000 direct drive turntable: www.zzounds.com/a--3970758/item--PNRPLX1000
I have a PLX1000 with a Denon 103R moving coil cartridge. Cost $700 + $340. Money well spent!
Don't lump CDs in with MP3s. They should never be lumped together as "digital". There's great sounding digital (a well-mastered CD) and crappy lossy digital (any MP3). A well-mastered CD is still the best sounding physical medium available due to it's lack of noise, it's wider dynamic range, and it's wide frequency reproduction. But note the caveat: WELL-MASTERED.
Totally agreed. I have some recently published or remastered CDs that sounded just horrible!! Overly compressed and loud and just awful. The CDs from the mid 90's were great. They sounded better, more robust, and weren't too loud.
In my world anyway 😂😂😂
Lmao 😂
@@yolielin4143 *NO!* Have you ever heard Oasis - Definitely Maybe? It was overcompressed to original tapes worse than digitally compressed and it was released in the mid 90's (1994 exact year)
@@yolielin4143 blah blah your stupid cds were not horrible!! cause u can play it on a ps1 ps2 ps3 xbox xbox 360 xbox one dvd player
Ive chatted with a lot of older guys that love their vinyl and think digital is all crap and then have a 1080p TV and blue ray player hooked to a surround sound reciever in the living room.....
IowAudio Review 🤣 gold
Yeh sounds like you match beats visually. mp3s are crap
@@moscasucio1686 I'm certain you can hear the difference between CD and MP3. Sure.
Are you in the market for a bridge? I have a warehouse full of some named Brooklyn.
@@jnagarya519 if you can't here the difference then your not paying attention.
Maybe that's because they're into sound quality more than video and some epic classic rock albums and concerts are on DVD audio and video and SACDs still being released today. Not to mention, the new 4k disc players and AVR's are disposable garbage compared to the hay day of these players in the mid to late 90's. My cheap 4k player stopped being supported after 4 years and won't play new 4k disks as a result so I don't buy movies but I can stream them and optical in to my old 90's Denon 4806 with hdmi and native SACD decoding from a compatible Denon DVD audio/SACD player. My Blueray player is Pioneer Elite which none of today's players can match in quality and I got primo examples off ebay for pennies on the dollar (about 2k vs. 6.5 it would have cost in 90s). I have modern equipment streaming through a tube dac as well and this old gear makes great digital transport as well since it was built to such a higher standard back when this stuff was state of the art and in demand. Try spending that same 2k on a modern AVR and 4k disc player and the difference in sound quality will be huge and the cheap new crap will be bricked when the updates cease. Sometimes mixing old and new technologies gives you the best of both worlds! Yes, I'm single and run dozens of cables of various types, lol! But I can play just about any type of digital or analog media. Depending on the album, the old reel to reel sounds best followed by vinyl for analog and I have to give streaming hi res a tie with SACD, Blueray audio, and DVD audio. Streaming through a good dac has come a long way in recent years but your not gonna hear Toys in the Attic and many others in surround which many are mind blowing good.
I have to say your very good at making your point and i agree with you 100%!
I’m 55 and been DJING from the age of 17 in clubs big clubs with some very large systems! One place i played at has to break the concrete to separate the 4 technique 1200s from the building to stop the feedback from the bass! I played there 10 years! Other place had The turn tables on springs! Last one Hung chains from the ceiling hooked to i table with no legs just to stop feedback! So now i love not having to deal with that problem any longer!
Great video
Simple test:
Find a recording where you have both the vinyl record and the CD. Make a digital recording of the vinyl record and then compare the sound from playing the vinyl record to the sound you recorded to your computer (or whatever other digital recording you make) and then also compare the recording from the CD itself. When I did this I recorded to a FLAC file - not a MP3 file as FLAC is lossless while a MP3 is missing information in order to reduce it's size. But, just for fun - I made both a MP3 and a FLAC recording of the vinyl record.
Now, listen to the Vinyl record, the Mp3 from the vinyl record, the FLAC file from the vinyl record and the CD and see if you can hear the difference.
You MAY be able to hear the difference between the CD and the vinyl record (or the recordings from the vinyl record) but can you tell the difference between the vinyl record and the FLAC file you made from it - or even the MP3 file you made from it?
I will guarantee that you can't reliably say which is the vinyl record and which is the FLAC file. If you get it right 50% of the time - that's the same result as a random guess.
If you can detect the difference between the FLAC file and the vinyl record more than 75% of the time then I'm prepared to admit that maybe your ears are better than mine and maybe there is a difference. Make sure that the volume (loudness) of the tracks are the same when comparing them. If one is louder than the other they will sound different and if the FLAC is always played back at (say) twice the volume of the vinyl record you'll be able to detect which is which every time but not because one sounds better - just because one sounds louder.
The reason I suggested making a digital recording of the vinyl record is because then you will be making a recording of the coloured sound from the vinyl record - so if you prefer the coloured sound of a vinyl record then you will still have the coloured sound of the vinyl record but just in a digital recording.
Vinyl records may sound "warmer" than a digital recording but that is really because the recording and playback process "colours" the sound - it alters the sound - particularly the frequency response. You may prefer the "warmer" sound of a vinyl record but that isn't because it's more accurate than the sound from the CD - it's because it's LESS accurate than the sound from the CD. So, you might be able to play the CD through a graphic equaliser and adjust the equaliser to sound closer or identical to the vinyl record. Recording something digitally does NOT change the frequency response. It does drop off all frequencies above 20,000Hz but you can't hear those frequencies anyway. You can feel infra noise (very low frequency sounds) that you ears may not be able to detect but there is no way for you to be able to detect of feel frequencies above 20,000Hz.
There is more crosstalk in the music from a vinyl record - you can hear some of the right channel sound through the left channel and vice versa. You can duplicate this for a CD which doesn't have the same issue by putting a variable resistor between the left and right channels. The lower the value of the resistor the more crosstalk you are introducing. If the value of the resistor is zero ohms then you will hear a mono signal - the same sound tough both speakers.
When I bought my first CD player (a A$2,000 DENON DCD-1800) I also bought a couple of Telarc demo CDs which sounded MUCH better than my vinyl records due to the lack of clicks and pops, wider dynamic range etc So I was convinced that CDs sound better. Recently I digitally recorded all of my vinyl records so that I could listen to them in my car and the thing that really surprised me was how good they sounded. There weren't even that many clicks and pops because I looked after them and once I applied a click and pop filter they almost totally disappeared anyway. Now, I'm MUCH older now as well so my hearing isn't as good so maybe that's why I found that when I listened to a digital recording of one of my vinyl records and compared it to the CD version - I still preferred the CD version due to the extra dynamic range and lack of crosstalk.
Then there is the other argument that a valve (tube) HIFI sounds better than a transistor (solid state) HIFI. But the argument is the same, Valve amplifiers cannot reproduce sound as accurately as solid state amplifiers. You may prefer the coloured sound of a valve amplifier but that doesn't make it more accurate or better. You can achieve the same thing by running you music through the valve amplifier and the making a digital recording of the result. Again you will have the coloured sound from the valve amplifier - just in a digital recording.
I simply do not believe the arguments that valve is better (or more accurate) than solid state or that vinyl is better (or more accurate) than digital. I'll only accept that if someone does a true double blind scientific test of this using my suggestion above where they can find someone who can say accurately (at least 75% of the time) which is which.
Here is another test for you:
Play guitar through a tube amp vs a digital plug in. As you play, it's night and day that the tube amp has more dynamics, feel, sustain, etc etc. over the plug in. However, once recorded, they sound similar. How can that be??? It's about the real and now.
We are humans not robots.
Here is another thing to think about. In the digital world, speed and sample rates will increase forever. However, in thr real world there are always limitations, like the speed of light. Maybe that's why we enjoy vinyl over digital, there are limits, and engineers make the best of those limits.
@@Brian-qg8dg you're absolutely right, but you're talking about the creation of music as opposed to the reproduction of it. A speaker that was designed with a cabinet just like a violin would sound terrible. But the shape of the wood cabinet the violin is put in drastically affects the sound of the violin in a very positive way. Same with a guitar. As a musician myself I firmly believe tube amps are better than solid state amps for guitars, but that's because they are part of the sound of the instrument when you use them.
But when it comes to the reproduction of music, you don't want the electronics in the path or even the speakers for that matter to change the sound any more than they have to due to the technological limitations. They're not there to add to the sound or color the sound. They are there to faithfully reproduce it. And the less color they add the better.
@@Brian-qg8dg well thats because its recorded?
TLDR
Agreed. I have a semi-professional digital recorder in my hifi system specifically for digitising records and tapes. The resulting recordings are indestinguishable from the original. I feel sure that would not be the case if I owned a vinyl cutting lathe and cut a record from a CD!
Marvelous explanation. I have a very high end system and prefer the vinyl experience. I 100% agree with your conclusions. they are different not better. For me the key factor is the experience of playing the record, looking at the cover combined with a sound that I prefer. This does not make it better. Your presentation is very compelling. I think that anyone arguing that vinyl is better than digital is failing to understand the recording, mastering and production process.
Better at some things, worse at others. And remember it depends a LOT on the quality of your turntable or DAC, and the rest of the stereo. Where money is no object, digital is already beating vinyl quite handily. For the average consumer using a lossy delta-sigma DAC, a good mid-fi turntable with a nice stereo is still a much more musical experience, even before we consider the "romantic factors" like covert art and spinning records and so on.
Best explanation I've ever heard- I love the sound of old vinyl- the crack and the pops are so unique. However that was good for all my old music. Today I'd much rather have high quality digital. Also vinyl records today are like $30 each - that is insane.
Yeah, $30 for an obsolete technology which is retarded! That's like charging big bucks for VHS tapes, who the hell wants it?
People who want it.
No different than spending $30 for a hat that you'll wear for a year and then throw out or lose it. Or going out to eat for $30 ....at least with the vinyl you can have it for the duration of your life if you take care of it .
Certain albums will always be worth money and collectible making it a hobby such as a comic book.
@@manchesterexplorer8519 my point as well. Absolutely incredibly correct!!!
@@redbishop71 I know right , people forget what $30 actually gets you these days....not much.
Vynyl advantage is that you hear what older music sounded like when it came out and it what it was designed for. Not saying it's better but a different experience.
I've always been for better playback. Mono is the way I want to hear, as example, "Beatle" singles. And other recordings intended to be mono. But I can do without the distortions, which has always been the aim.
That was before loudness war. Peacefull listening back in the days.
Yes. Correct. There's more factors but that's the overall main one..
I have a few vinyls out there in the wild, white labels obviously, I found myself grouping layers for the predicted vinyl eq curve, however with cd I would render all layers out to a wave(.wav) file back in mcmxcvii as digital playback would playback like the computer did right.
I said all that to push the point that sounds harsh to say this but maybe the reason why older music has stayed with is longer is because extra work went into deciding what layers would be grouped and put through some fx chain once more.
Even with tape, because some of us grew up with it we wouldn't mind or notice if the dolby noise reduction was on or off (pink noise) I call it that because when I was young and no google was about that's what it was, I'm sticking with it. Oh just remembered, I think it's called background noise today, how intelligent..
#djlnr
Great video. Amazing explanations. Really enjoyed every second of it. Very very interesting and informative. This video deserves much more likes and views.
You need a magnifying glass to skip to the next song... and a surgeons wrist
If you need these, you're probably wearing diapers.
You're the first explaner I've run onto who gave a clear, concise, and easy to understand side by side comparison between vinyl and digital file. You are also correct in stating it's up to the individual listener which he chooses to like. Great job!
Yeah: I love the vinyl purists who totally ignore that the distortions added to playback of vinyl is the equivalent of looking through a dirty window. The only "purity" is in the uninformed self-deception.
Great video! Around Christmas 2019 I posted a long "essay" on "The truth about vinyl" about how the frequency response in cartridges create most of the differences we hear when vinyl records sound different.
In my experience with remastering music and messing around with an equalizer, volume level and frequency response account for the vast majority of the differences we hear between components and different media.
In short, most cartridges have a dip in the harshness region, a spike around 10-15 kHz, and perhaps a slight boost in the bass as well.
These last couple of days I've also started to look at measurements of tonearms, and all tonearms have resonances, often around 100 Hz, but frequently going up to 1 kHz, and this will boost the bass as well, giving the impression of a "fuller" and "warmer" sound, although, like with the non-linear frequency response of the phono cartridge, it's actually a colourization, although it might sound very pleasant.
And everything recorded in a studio is manipulated too. Even listening to someone play live, the dynamics, sound EQ and ambiance is based on the room, and so much more.
If it sounds better to the ear, than so be it. I guess
@@galus14436 Vinyl: dump tar on tape. CD: tape.
Another reason people may like vinyl better is because if you went to a live show, orchestra, opera or rock concert, you would not hear everything. While that is also true of vinyl, vinyl has a more "forgiving" quality akin to live music. Perhaps you covered this when you talked about distortion. Sometimes imperfections can actually be more pleasant and desirable. I think "accurate" can be open to some debate. Mind you I use and love both! Peace!
I got rid of most of my records in 1990. I was sick of dust pops and scratches, and completely embraced CD's. In January we moved, and circumstances encouraged me to play some of the old records. I'd forgotten how much I loved the experience. I started buying vinyl Lp's again. I bought an album on bandcamp, and immediately downloaded the wav files. I'd listened to it 10X by the time the record arrived. I thought it sounded so good that I A/B'd it with the digital files. They sounded nearly identical, but the vinyl had a certain something it took me a couple months to put my finger on. Besides the album cover, and dropping the needle, I realized that every time you play the record is a unique analog physical performance, which you can hear, whereas the digital file is exactly the same every time, making it feel ever so slightly more canned. I still play CD's, and have 2T's of wav files in my computer. They're all good.
The difference is that vinyl recorded from analogue includes the ultrasonic frequencies that are emitted by musical instruments. A CD does not include those ultrasonic frequencies. That is why vinyl is more satisfying to listen to.
Music with ultrasonic frequencies has been shown to have a positive effect on the human mind.
You can also add ultrasonic frequencies to low quality digital files which is what I do.
@@dtz1000 I'll buy that and continue enjoying the vinyl.
@@dtz1000 it's because on vinyl the music is smoothered in strawberry sause - ie the pink noise swoosh of the needle rubbing against the surface - creating 'analogue warmth' which really means a kind of bike stabiliser wheels for audio.....its a added sound to all vinyl playback....all of it. Take out all the issues imaging bleed, degredation of music quality as the grooves get tighter near the centre hole, having the base taken out and added back in by the RIIA curve (bit like taking the water out of milk to add it back later)....don't even include them in comparisons....just say pink noise is added to the whole frequency spectrum....it ends it as a faithful sound reproduction medium. the LP was the future, now its a expensive way to see album covers.
@@1998mchpAhh yes, I forgot about the pink noise. (I always just thought of it as "vinyl noise": the sound of a diamond rubbing against a plastic surface....)
How do we store digital for future archival and longevity?
The compact disk was sold to us as the last medium you would have to buy and would last forever if you took reasonable care of them. Fact is the aluminum layer where the pits are stored start to oxidize and degrade after 20 years. The laser inside the player will slowly dim in output and may not be available anymore when it dies.
Flac files, Wave files, AIFF, MP3, etc... where to store them, the cloud? Memory device? Solid State or mechanical hard drive?
Great question.
On servers, the Library of Congress has started doing this. That's the beauty of digital, the data remains the same irregardless of the number of times it's copied to other mediums, the same can't be said for analog mediums. Even original analog master tapes are being digitised as a way of backing up.
Really like how you kept it scientific!
Only thing I felt you left out is the immense impact of childhood conditioning vinyl has on the enthusiasts.
The crackles that appear when putting the needle on the record triggers the placebo effect which makes the track sound more pleasing.
Macke Mint the effects of nostalgia is covered in the video I referenced
You are being very polite here and I can tell by your mannerisms that you are holding back. If you were the maximize both mediums with an ideal mastering of the vinyl and the"first play" of the disc versus a professionally compressed digital version, the sound difference would be HUGE in favor of digital. Todays speakers and amp circuitry can reproduce fully-formed sounds well out of range of any master disc's ability to record/playback. If you used speakers and amps from the 1970's you may have a point that vinyl sounds better... but that was 50 years ago. Vinyl is great, fun, esoteric, enjoy all the aspects of it, but please don't try to convince me it's more accurate or "a warmer, richer, fuller sound" because it's just not - but it doesn't matter. It's made to enjoy so please enjoy it anyway you like.
Yes! Boom! That makes sense! Low rumble feedback is a huge variable, plus the stereo imaging of a stylus blending some pan carryover, makes a great argument regarding coloring characteristics! Yeah man, thanks for explaining that!
I discovered this last night with my system. It was the hardest I pushed my system since getting it all together a month ago. As the volume went up, there were some serious coloration bleeding out into the room. Likely some frequencies were getting snuffed out along with some feedback reentering into the vibe of the stylus.
May have to experiment with a beefy turntable mat to absorb some resonance and construct a egg-carton foam box cover to enclose the turn table and see if I hear a difference at high volume.
There are so many variables to calling anything the best. The resolution by witch we examine characteristics of determining the very best goes on and on. The law of Variables will eventually cause the most rigid person to say “good enough”. The pursuit of such detail is the money maker, or in some cases of perspective, the “money taker”.
Try it with headphone
Man this is the best explanation of this I have found! I never understood the steady hum I was getting when I turned my subwoofer up until now. Makes perfect sense! Thanks!
I owned 5 record decks through the 70's and 80's gradually upgrading finally to a Mitchells turntable with a moving coil cartridge. Yet to preserve the records I always recorded the albums on to cassette immediately after purchase, to avoid the pops and scratches caused by dirt, scratches and my clumsiness, especially when I was in my cups. In fact I damaged three styli which needed replacement at quite a substantial cost. I changed to CD straight away and sold my record deck after a year or so and I have owned 8 models of CD player so far. I also had a 5 or so year musical affair with Mini Disk in the 90's. I now also listen to flac's using a half decent Digital Audio Player. On top I have a few SACD's I enjoy using a blu ray player. I have toyed with going back to vinyl, (I still have 500 or so LP's in the loft), but when I remember all those cracks and pops, oh and having to change sides, the nostalgia disappears in a puff of reality.
For me, what really counts, is the recording you have, in whichever format you have it. Just get it going and listen to the music. Once it's playing I get on with enjoying the music and not trying to analyse if I can hear the tiny nuances that some people with an obsessive compulsion disorder seem to prefer to detect.
@Leon Anderson
CDs all day everyday! Why would anyone want to put more money into an obsolete technology when you have superior tech to use. I switched to CD in the mid 80's and I would NEVER EVER go back to vinyl EVER!!!
I appreciate your consideration of objective facts rather than just subjective opinions. The only thing I would add to your proposed listening tests is that they should be at equal volumes (as determined by a sound level meter) and double-blind -- controlled by another person. Unequal factors such as volume and confirmation bias are rampant in these controversies when tests are conducted.
I came here because of that Michael Jackson album in your thumbnail
Vinyl is just better
The basic pattern i've noticed for myself is that i prefer things that were recorded analogue to be played on analogue (LP or good quality tape); electronic music, or music that was digitally recorded or recorded on 'digital' (versus acoustic) instruments, i prefer to hear a high bitrate digital recording of. There are some interesting exceptions to this, like the George & Giles Martin work from the mid-90's forward, and certain bands like Depeche Mode really know how to work both mediums really well.
Also, sometimes i'm listening for 'analytical' reasons, and other times i'm listening in a sensory way, like trying to 'recapture' a moment with someone associated with memories of that song, and for analysis, digital is best, but because of my age, analogue feels more 'correct' for the context of re-creating original experience with some music.
if i play classic music on my clarinet, and record it on vynil, i realy dont want to hear noises, cracles which are mot present on my original playing
Oh absolutely--no need to introduce noise needlessly on new music, unless it's for aesthetic effect or something.@@zorancalic65
Think that the differences in mixing and saturation of the mix between "then" and "now" is one of the reasons that old vinyl gets the reputation of being better. Its closer to what the listener hears in a live performance. This is mentioned in the video at the 2/3rd mark. Different dynamics driven by fashion.
Excellent explanation, very illustrative, thank you very much !
A lot has to do with the loudness wars cds. They made people go back to vinyl.
No. Those who wanted to be "different" went vinyl. And they are paying through the nose for their foolish snobbery.
@@jnagarya519 Oh so the loudness wars and crappy sounding cds is just my imagination.
U are right. I listen music to relax. No war.. Peace.. Vinyl is symbol of peace.
Absolutely true mostly, I stopped buying CD's when that happened. Sad
The problem is, how can we put an end to this "loudness war"? Especially when most music consumers don't really seem to care about things like mastering levels and dynamic range....
Awesome video, I felt totally included and you are well versed. Thank you
I love it all, vinyl, cassette, reel to reel, 8 track, cd, sacd, dvd audio, blu ray audio, streaming, files, live in person. Depends on which version on which medium on what equipment in which room I am listening as to which sounds best on that day. I wish it was as easy as pick 1 thing and that is the best. I would save a small fortune if that were the case.
Very well explained. To summarize what he said, digital is more sterile than analog. Digital has a more definitive way of mirroring the master recordings and can be put to any media whether it's vinyl, magnetics, cdd's or any digital files at a more accurate and flawless transfer. I grew up with vinyl, 8 tracks and cassettes and I can relate to the sound quality of analog. The drag of the needle on vinyl, the drag of the magnetic tape on special alloy heads, color the sound quality of analog media. Some of the rumblings in vinyl comes from the platter that the record is placed on, some from the wear. The more you spend on a turntable, the more dampening the equipment has for a more enjoyable listening experience. As for digital, as sterile as it's reproduction, you can color it with bbe sound enhancements or audio control's phase couple activator for that extra sub harmonics frequencies to add warmth that us old schoolers crave or missed.
So you prefer distortion to actually hearing the source material unimpeded.
When did he say that digital is sterile? If you record violinist playng concert and hear frim vynil noise, rummble, clics, why should that be beter than original?
to me it is about how a CD is mastered, vinyl sounds way better, but not because it is vinyl, it is the mastering. I am a musician and played on a lot of records. I know what they are doing in the studio, I did it myself. Compression and limiting is the problem. The rest on vinyl vs CD would be hard to detect, possible, but hard. So guess what, I collect vinyl:-)
Yep
Mate, i love this finally some objective comparison its a no brainer for me as a pro audio engineer(sse audio group) that digital is as close to transparent and repeatable a format as we have ever had
I relate it to the stupid factor
Because analogue seems simpler and obvious to people when compared to needing a degree to fully understand digital audio i think people default to analogue and then assert this idea that its superior to support there decision especially when spending ridiculous amounts of money on insane hifi to optimise a compromised limited format such as vinyl . I mean your dragging a needle through material right!?!? That fact alone must interfere with the spectral content when cutting a disc
Any way I’m glad you made this video I’m going to use it to educate a few colleagues
It is the "stupid factor". "I LIKE deceiving myself that a vinyl LP for which I paid $30.00 [over against $3.99 when first issued] sounds better than the equivalent CD without all the befogging distortions!"
I think it all depends on the mastering process. Some albums sound better on vinyl LP and some sound better on CD or other digital uncompressed format or mediums. In my (short) experience, "old" stuff (like Pink Floyd, ACDC, Dire Straits, The Doors, etc...) or new stuff recorded using analogue tapes (like RAM from Daft Punk) usualy sounds best on vinyl. However, I own a copy of Californication from RHCP which sounds like a 64 kbps MP3 on this particular vinyl copy whereas the CD version is far more listenable.
As I'm rather young (22), I'm not subject to the nostalgia factor. I love both technologies for what they offer. Digital is far more convenient, Analogue is far more engaging. Digital brings details and durability, Analogue brings warmth, air and presence. I own multiple CDs, multiple vinyls and multiple cassettes, and I can't choose one format to delete from my life over the other two!
I do audio mastering and restorations. Both formats have their pro and cons. No matter how flat I make the sound, a persons speakers or eq choices change the fidelity. The one aspect I would add is mastering. A well mastered cd with a nice dac, it's warm.
I've been remastering for years. Does it matter? to us Dj's it does, doing gigs they could care less, all they want to do is dance.
Yes. Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab transfers Analog tape to CD, SACD the correct way. No hard limiting. All dynamics preserved. A bit spendy though. You can find the CD's on ebay now, but you can still get SACD's and Vinyl's from their website.
I love both, as both have PRO's and CON's.
I like the fidelity and channel separation of digital, but I love the warm, gentle sound of analog!
Vinyl for the speakers, digital for the headphones for me!! With headphones the crackles can get annoying. but with speakers you won't notice it. Also i try to get non-remastered CDs as they don't tend to be compressed like modern day CDs.
@@krypto_9872 I haven't tried vinyl on headphones in over 20 years! :))
@@krypto_9872 Remastering and remixing are not the same thing. These are basics. Compression is in the mix, not in the remastering.
You get that same warmth if you copy the vinyl to CD or Hi-Rez because digital doesn't really have an EQ curve like vinyl which why it's superior at reproducing music, which is the point of the video.
Very good video. The fact is that the majority of people don’t have “golden ears” so can’t perceive much differences. I love cds - one euro now at the charity shop and on a good system simply sound great! 👍
Coming from a mountain bike background this sounds exactly like 26” vs 29” wheels Jesus Christ every hobby is full of crazies
26" is fine. Hadn't heard about the 29". And I haven't time for the metric sizes that Eurobuff freaks jabber about. Wheels go round and round regardless size.
Pri, thanks for making the time to fully explain the difference for all significant angles. Well Done! I learned... Have you done a comparison between CD and "high-resolution streamed audio"?
You’re a genius. Thank you for such nice and yet hard fact video. I’m more in love now with vinyls.
Here’s the issue (or a few) with your thought experiment….. 1…. Time periods matter as things recorded in the 60s vs the 80s vs today… in the 60s, most of the equipment was analog, in the 80s, things were mostly digital, and now, it’s virtually ALL digital. So, today, what they do is what I’ll call “analog smoothing” where they take the complete digital recording and try to smooth out those edges that you showed in the beginning of your video. Although it is better than just taking that digital signal and pressing it to vinyl…. As then you still have a digital signal pressed into a record (which is issue number 2 in your thought experiment)… if you take a CD of Thriller and just press it to a record, in theory, it won’t sound much different than the CD as you are still listening to a digital signal… it still has the choppy squared off edges you showed and wont be smooth like the analog signal you showed. You couldn’t just “press it to vinyl” and have it become smooth on it’s own, you’d need that analog smoothing I mentioned earlier….. However, YES… taking a record and recording it to CD would convert it from analog to digital….. But going back to problem 1…. Original recording equipment will make a huge difference….. once again, take something that was recorded in the 60s and take something that was recorded today, even with analog smoothing, the recording from the 60s is going to be a much truer analog signal, as “most” of the equipment used to record was analog gear in the first place vs today. Now, the whole argument can never be settled…. Because not only, as you mentioned, are the turntables and the cartridges ALL different, we have different phono preamps, that all sound different, we have different cabling which can all sound different (in an analog format, digital, not so much…. But then we also have the conversation of scam cables that are out there and how people fall for “snake oil” based on pseudoscience… another conversation for another day)…. But even when comparing digital AND Analog, all speakers sound different, all rooms from a acoustics standpoint sound different….. I love how a lot of people won’t use EQs because “it’s not how the artist wanted you to hear it”… that;’s insane as you could have a room that swallows mids or highs, or dynamics or whaever, and that makes it “NOT the way the artist wanted you to hear it”…. You could definitely argue that using an EQ HELPS restore the audio to the way the artist wanted you to hear it. The issue is that there are so many variables even when analog and digital are in their own rights, that it becomes even vastly more complicated when you start comparing the two to each other….
Back in the day, audio engineers called this the "end-user problem": no matter how perfect your mix is, you can't predict how the listener's equipment and/or room might alter what they hear....
Tape would be the source recording anyhow especially long ago, the it gets put onto Vinyl and CD..
In the last thirty years majority have been using a pc as the input source to the vinyl cutter rather than the traditional tape or dat machine..
Besides dirt and magnets messing with tape I would say tape is the superior way to edit / store / playback sound overall.
USB(hard drives) and cd are great and sound beautiful until one thing goes wrong the whole thing is messed up etc maybe thousands of tracks..
A messed up needle or tape head cannot cause damage to their media unless in the tape cassette's the playback device is a digital tape player meaning it may be messed up to the point when the play button is pressed regardless of the record safety tab being in place the player still goes into record mode which tries to erase or record over any cassette placed within it, vinyl seems to come out on top as the one to less maintain so it's a join venture tape & vinyl.
I've had vinyl since I was young and those are the vinyls that give me feelings, it's a lie that people buy an old vinyl now and feel something , no no no, it has to be your old vinyl with your old writing on it somewhere, great feeling, priceless.
Infact I think vinyls that are second hand, in okay condition and have first owners writing's on them should be worth more than a blank clean label, the person who wrote on it was a real person and they liked the track enough to write on it, they may not be with us anymore, priceless... #djlnr
I'm with digital, I concur with the statements in the video. I've played vinyl for 14 years and 9 years with cd's and digital. I've been hearing so much rubbish over the past 10 years that I'm shocked to the core to actually find a person that gets it. Vinyl is very clumsy to carry, it gets too old quickly, it crackles from the get go and it's basically toxic, those are major dealbreakers to me and they were from day 1. I never got to understand why people preferred vinyl for the 'better sound' because it never sounds like a master recording to begin with. I know because I produce myself, it doesn't even come close. CD was real fun to play with, but I had to waste too much time compiling and burning CD's with a worn down pc. Playing digital agrees with me, it's way more functional than the other 2 solutions. Digital means more control over my collection, every track being in the right place to make quick selections for gigs possible. No more heavy weightlifting is needed, I used to carry vinylbags weighing 60kg on my back sometimes 10km far, that's just nuts! Setting up the gear is sometimes a bit of a hassle but I'm a patient man and just deal with it. DJ-ing digitally gives you more time to look for the appropriate music, to check if the sound is right, even talk to someone if you so desire. The only vinyl lovers I get are the 'nostalgic' ones, they want to 'feel' the record, the old technology did it for them. I'm fine with that, as long as they don't claim 'sound superiority', which is frankly just an uninformed opinion with no factual basis.
My experiences on the 'sound' of formats:
mp3: only 320kbs is acceptable but only in small venues like bars and cafes, only smaller soundsystems like hifi and slightly larger
ogg vorbis: great carrier, bitrate over 550-650 is okay but you can even go higher which is even better
flac: similar to ogg vorbis, really good
alac: never go apple, their time is gone
wav: not good for dj-ing, sometimes dj-programs make a highpitched hard noise at the beginning/end of a track, it's really loud. Use them as masters in a collection, make flac's with them
other formats: I wouldn't recommend them
vinyl: better than mp3's 320kbps in very small venues, but the bigger the sound is the more it's crap, mp3 also has this but for a different reason (needletremmors versus amplifier sound shredding)
Recreating 'vinylsound':
It is not a big problem to recreate the warmth and softness of a vinyl record with equalisers, this can even make 'loudness wars' music sound aggreable. I use a Huawei mate20lite with a seamless eq app connected to a Native Instruments audio2 external soundcard that is plugged into a pioneer mixer which I also use as a secondary equaliser. In theory you shouldn't do it like that but reality often doesn't agree with that. The rules for the 'vinyl sound' are very simple: Never ever play in the red or the sound will go dead, don't equalise above 0 because that's filtering, keep the bass and 'relax' all else especially the mid-tone. That's for my setup which is fairly simple. Professionally I would recommend at least a dual 20band equaliser, maybe even a dual 30band if affordable to your wallet, just don't ever buy a cheap eq. Everything from 16k onto higher frequencies should look like a 'fade out', 16k being just a tad lower than 0. The midtones should even be lower than 16k's position in a shallow valley. Around the lower mid-tone and higher bass there is a slider on the eq that needs to be approximately 33% down from 0.. Bass at 0, don't set the rest of the bass above 0 especially newer music, older music is less problematic when it comes to filtering. That's my 2cents about creating a warm sound with digital.
Thanks for the upload!
"ogg vorbis: great carrier, bitrate over 550-650 is okay but you can even go higher which is even better"
If you're going that high with the bitrate you might as well just use FLAC. For that matter, considering how cheap storage is these days, there's no reason to ever use anything other than FLAC. I just bought a SanDisk 1 TB USB flash drive for $100, which is about half the size of a pack of gum. At a typical FLAC bitrate of about 900 kbps, you could fit nearly 40,000 songs on a 1 TB drive, which is way more than you'd ever need for a gig, or your entire career, for that matter.
"flac: similar to ogg vorbis, really good"
FLAC isn't at all similar to Vorbis. FLAC is lossless; Vorbis is lossy.
"wav: not good for dj-ing, sometimes dj-programs make a highpitched hard noise at the beginning/end of a track, it's really loud."
What does that have to do with WAV files? If FLAC is good for DJing, then so are WAVs, because a FLAC made from a particular WAV is the exact same thing (bit-for-bit identical) as said WAV when it's decoded/played. That's what "lossless" means.
"Use them as masters in a collection, make flac's with them"
There's no need to keep the WAV files after making FLACs from them, since, like I said, the FLAC is a lossless copy of the WAV. If you want backups, then just make copies of the FLAC files. Keeping WAV files just uses extra space on your drive in exchange for absolutely zero benefit. It would be like ZIPing or RARing a file and then keeping the original file too; makes no sense.
It is easy to prove that FLAC files are indeed lossless. All you have to do is make a FLAC from a WAV, then decode the FLAC back to WAV. Then put the original WAV and the second WAV that you just got by decoding the FLAC file, into a folder; name them something like 1.wav and 2.wav. Then open CMD.exe, navigate to that folder, type...
_fc /b 1.wav 2.wav_
... and press enter. This will do a binary comparison of the two files, looking for any differences. Your result will be:
_Comparing files 1.wav and 2.wav_
_FC: no differences encountered_
That, of course, proves that no information was lost when you made a FLAC from the WAV. And when you play a FLAC file, it gets decoded in real-time back to its original WAV information, so a WAV and a FLAC made from said WAV sound identical when you play them, because they _are_ identical.
Thanks for bringing less biased and more technically sophisticated viewpoints to DJing discussions!
Being on both ends of records, making them as well as playing them on different formats I've found the whole signal chain to be important in this VS question.
Every digital-2-analog or analog-2-digital conversion is a massive degradation in the chain so first of all if in the studio the track had a digital ("in the box") mixdown the digital version is automatically better & closer to the original.
One thing a LOT of DJs, even so called vinyl purist ones don't understand is almost all modern mixers, from all post TTM-56 Rane to any Pioneer mixer ever are digital mixers. Just hooking up a turntable to any of these mixers means you've already lost the battle. Of course the CD-version digitized straight from the master tape will sound better than your now digitized vinyl version, which for vinyl's limitations was already a narrowed down version of that same master tape. That's why i found it funny when Rob Swift did a "Digital vs Analogue DJing"-video stressing how important analogue is while using a 57mk2.
Analogue recordings on vinyl straight to the amp or in DJ use thru a Xone:62/92 or a rotary? Definitely better. Unless they were crammed full like the first pressing of "3 Feet High and Rising" or otherwise neglected like old Trax-records.
Great comment, I remember about 20 years ago when my friend bought turntables with line level outputs, not the standard phono - I remember asking my mate what was that all about when setting them up, I found out when I tried to scratch on them! After wondering why it sounded bad and some noises just didn't work I looked at the turntable again, read the manual and finally realised they were actually DIGITAL turntables... for some unknown reason the audio from the vinyl was converted inside the turntable and all records sounded different on it (I remember some being awful and others actually being clearer but still weird). Ever since I have looked out for and tried to avoid hardware that converts to digital "unnecessarily" (for our use at the time there was absolutely no valid reason for digital signal/line level output from a turntable as there was no such thing as timecode vinyl or controllers that understood it in general production! I think it was just to make the mixers that went with the decks cheaper to produce as they removed the pre amp???) Your point about the mixers is spot on and many, many DJ's will be caught out there - I've seen Rob's video as well haha! I am very glad I chose to get a standalone DJ controller with jogwheels rather than replace my DJ mixer with a digital one so now I still have a "traditional" set up to mix vinyl and the seperate unit for mixing digital files on my laptop and of course I just plug the controller in to my old mixer.
Whether one sounds better or not, the good thing about digital is its inability to degrade which is unavoidable with media such as vinyl (and tapes). A disc player, MP3 player, or digital file can be replicated perfectly without losing any clarity or quality. However, records and tapes degrade every time they are played and recorded from, or merely touched, taken out of and put away into their containers, or are touched by a stylus or playing head, etc. The stylus and playing head which touch them therefore degrade, too. Records will scratch by virtue of being handled, period. Tapes will rip from getting thinner from wear due to being played. If you like vinyl, enjoy its great frequency range but deal with its inherent physical limitations; it's made of plastic.
It's not entirely true that digital doesn't degrade. It's true for your original copy on the hd where you put it first, but every time you copy a track, some bits get lost, eventually your 320kbs mp3 degrades to an unbareble mess. Always be careful with cut/pasting tracks. Make sure you know where your masters are and keep them on a safe hd or ssd. I personally use highspeed sd cards these days, I find it to be more practical.
@@andredeketeleastutecomplex why are you using MP3? It is a shity format.
@@ljuboizsiska5448 maybe read the OP again, you might find the answer. I'm not using mp3 (I use flac & ogg) I only gave an example for digital fomats, mp3 just degrades quicker so it's easier to tell the difference. Same goes for flac and ogg btw, small degredations occur when copy pasting.
@ReaktorLeak you will lose something, thinking otherwise is faulty. Even if you don't copy it and you put a hd in a vault you might lose a few bits. Digital isn't perfect.
@ReaktorLeak nope, wrong again, people use backups for that. What trust?
Just a thought about recording the vinyl and listening it back from your PC: if you record a vinyl onto your computer, the signal will have to go through your computer's sound card twice! Once while recording and once again while played back. To obtain a faithful recording of the vinyl and then to play it back faithfully you must have a really special soundcard with completely flat characteristics both ways. I'm quite sure that soundcards like this are really expensive and those found on the motherboard of a PC are far from it, as well as most mass-produced sound cards. So, most people won't hear the same sound from the vinyl and the PC, therefore they will make the conclusion that digital is inferior to analog. I don't say if it is or not, but I say that most people WILL hear a difference between the vinyl and it's recorded digital counterpart.
Excellent. If more CDs were made from " for vinyl" master recordings, more people would rethink the notion that vinyl sounds better.
I totally agree and I think the video misses that point largely (for such a long video, disappointingly).
However! Not to disagree with you, but just to add - there are frequencies outside of CONSCIOUS human perception that may nonetheless still change how one 'feels' or is affected by the music. CDs can't reproduce those (inaudible) frequencies, this was known and widely talked about when CDs first started becoming the new standard.
@@kimchi_b That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. How can a human perceive anything which is inaudible?
@@kronossonork6994 I think it's less the fact that you can't hear the high frequencies, but that the high frequencies might have an effect on the sounds you can hear, like change them in some way. But I have a feeling it likely doesn't do much, especially for highly controlled studio recordings (tho I'm no expert so don't quote me). Also I don't think it's that digital is incapable of recording and producing super high or low frequencies, but that they jusy cut off the frequencies at the highest and lowest points just so the computer has some reasonable place to stop in the digitizing process.
@@kimchi_b False.
@@jnagarya519 Can you perceive different frequencies of light, and know how much UVA, UVB and UVC is in it? I think not, and yet it will still affect you. The same with the moon and the tides, do you think the water consciously observes what the moon is doing and reacts accordingly, or is it unconscious cause and effect?
Well done. I love vinyl, but I buy this explanation. There is no doubt that CDs are a cleaner signal, less noise and do not degrade but subjectivity aside there are some cases where a vinyl "just has more". The explanation that this is due to the engineering process tailoring to a loudness war and not as a byproduct of the medium make sense. In other words, a CD has the capacity to have just as much dynamic range (maybe more) as vinyl but it doesn't due to the demand for MORE LOUD.
Great video! I prefer the sound of analog but I would not say it's "better" as that is subjective
getliquified most new vinyl is made from music recorded DIGITALLY.
Define "better"
@@SPAZZOID100 so do you think theres any point on buying vinyl anymore if this is the case? Cos were not getting the full range of a supposed analogue recording?
Excellent video and technically accurate. It's very rare to have this kind of quality on youtube... Many people talk about this subject without having the technical knowledge. As en electrical engineer, i read so many false claims and plain wrong stuff... So thanks for this great video!
Some of the Classic Vinyl Albums, especially progressive Rock type, Floyd, Yes, Rush sound way better than todays digital versions.
It is clearly down to the mastering and sound engineers of the time and being pressed from the Master Tape which had not degraded over time through use from a pressing taken of of it back in the 70's compared to a commercial remaster to CD from it today or one sold to download in Digital format.
Kind of slightly different from the angle you talked about yes but for example i have some classic Floyd albums which are ripped from Original First Vinyl pressings and in one case straight from the original Master Tape to a lossless Digital Flac file and they sound considerably better in every single way imaginable to what you would get on a CD version of said Album released today/recently.
Again down to degradation over time of the original analogue and maybe todays sound engineers not feeling that 70's vibe/not actually as good as the engineers involved originally in the moment ect.
Long story short, does this all apply to modern EDM music, maybe a little but not so much imho.
Good video bro :)
So your preference for distortion is everyone else's fault that the distortion isn't repeated on CD.
@@jnagarya519 I think you completely drew the wrong conclusion from what i said. The Final Product from many Albums of Yester Year on Vinyl sound better than some of todays.
Not all, that would be silly to say but 'some' do like i stated above, the Original Michael Jackson 'Thriller' album is another, the original Vinyl has H U G E Dynamic Range in comparison to a Digital Versions of Today because the quieter parts have been remastered Louder so the whole Album is louder but loses a lot of Dynamic Range and subtlety.
Do some research on The Loudness Wars, so much Music was ruined for a Time because of that alone.
@@jnagarya519 we are humans not robots. Distortion is life. The engineers now spend more time creating distortion so the music isn't so harsh. Backnib the day they spent more time trying to lower the distortion.
At medium to loud volume, I've never had ear fatigue when listening to vinyl, with digital the music gets tiresome somewhat quickly. But just another guy with human ears opinion.
Same with playing guitar, I can play for hours through a tube amp. Touch sensitive, feel, dynamics, warmth, distortion etc etc etc. Play through a plug in or even a non tube amp, the love dies quickly. However, when all three are recorded, the sound really isn't that different. 🤔 try explaining that with math. Haha.
Also, the universe has rules, vinyl has rules, digital in theory has no limitations. Maybe we enjoy vinylnrecords because the engineers had much more limitations to work with, and so do we.
I ripped one side of Metallica death magnetic vinyl to WAV at 44.1khz 16bit and the digital rendering retained the cracks and pops and a kind of representation of the warmer tone, though it did sound flat in comparison to the vinyl. This is likely due to the lower quality of my equipment however.
I think a similar comparison may be watching a film in 70mm and then watching the same film in 4k digital, 70mm tends to be more holographic and the colours more organically lucid and warm while the 4k rendering of the 70mm elements although stunning, do have less dimensionality though on the upside reveal more perceivable detail from the film negative.
Totally fascinating video. You put so much research and effort into this. Also well explained, you touched on very important points and your narration is well paced. Bravo
Always love your objective opinion and explanation, keep it 👆
Very well done. More logic, science, and rational explanation. Less dogma. Good job!
Do you guys prefer to read a paper book or an e-book on a Kindle? Which is "better"?
Yeah sure, the digital Kindle is like a library that takes the space of a 25 pages book. Yeah sure, it can reproduce more accurately and in a more efficient way the original information (letters/words). Yeah sure, we can zoom, adjust the font, etc. Yeah sure, the technology is better and newer but how does it really feel to buy and read the greatest book on a Kindle? Is it a different experience (from the intial buying process to the storage in your collection)? Maybe we just lack a bit of materiality in our way to enjoy art right now? Maybe enjoying the "Ultra HD live sessions" sitting at our computer during this 2020 pandemic was a bit shitty if we compare that to live performances (even with bad room acoustics, etc.)... This kind of debate is endless. We cannot separate the art from all the context/experience elements that surround it and for a lot of people those "vinyl elements" are better. Maybe it's more engaging, active, material, sentimental, etc. Maybe it's just a question of great mastering - more pleasant because less clean and cold... But for the majority of those persons, digital is very nice and useful in the daily life too (driving the car, working at the computer, etc.) and it's fine if they prefer vinyl (in an "irrational" way) when they really want to pay attention and enjoy music. Probably their turntable sound system is better than their "pods" or shitty computer speakers... Maybe they listen differently when it's a vinyl... Maybe a lot of things. And maybe people love to take shortcuts in their thinking process (i.e. vinyl has better "quality" instead of "I prefer the experience of listening to a vinyl").
Your video is very great but it's also a "cold" and rational approach. It's great because it can give informations for some important questions about the capabilities of the digital/analog medium, etc. Thanks for your great work on that. Really! As we know, culture and the human relation to art are complex thematics. In this "cloud era", it is not so strange that people are returning to those sexy old pieces of vinyl with great art covers and to their 50 years old turntables that are still capable of playing their favourite music with just a little of maintenance while their computers will be at the junk yard in 5 years and while they pay monthly to access their monumental digital music collection that is stored in a Spotify server and that they cannot enjoy having it sitting in their living room as a reminder that artists worked a lot for all those pieces of joy.
Keep it up music lovers!
compressed music, no matter which support it's recorded on, still remain compressed, vinyl (re-issue, 180gr), CD, SACD. It depends a lot from the master and from the guy who decided to go louder.
@Mike P dynamic range compression
With digital, we never get turn table rumble, no tics and pops, nor any pre and post groove echo.
And repeated use of a compact disc won't physiclly wear it out.
No, but discs do degrade with time (OK it may be decades if you're lucky) so that you can't play them at all anymore.
@@kimchi_b - I'll be dead before that day arrives, decades. And even so, a CD won't degrade all that much, if at all.
To say analog vinyl sounds better that a wave or Mp3 compression files is not a stretch, but 24-bit 192kHz digital has a dynamic range of 144dB, where the average vinyl pressing has a range of 58dB. Modern THX and DSP technology can reproduce accurate fidelity down to adjusting minute faze linearity of three way speakers on as many as 12 separate audio channels. That kind of fidelity is unimaginable with analog stereo vinyl. In fact even the most ultra high end stereo analog preamps have audible signal distortion, but they disguise and gentrify it by using the pleasant term "coloration".
"but 24-bit 192kHz digital has a dynamic range of 144dB,"
That is true but this 144 dB of dynamic range is far above the capabilities of the human ear. It is like trying to listen to the steps an ant makes while standing behing an 747 engine running at full power.
@@elkeospert9188 LOL, Funny analogy Eike! Jets will always drown out the atns no matter what, but that's not the point of having a broader dynamic range. Think of the sound wave in a given audio format being contained between a floor (quietest ant) and ceiling (loudest jet). With greater dynamic range there's more space to reproduce accurate frequency detail from floor to ceiling, aka higher fidelity. With less dynamic range, one frequency bleeds into the next and detail is lost. My human ear can hear the difference between a brand new pressing of Pink Floyd's The Wall on vinyl, and the digitally remastered Blu-ray version played on the same sound system.
@@Datsun510zen "With greater dynamic range there's more space to reproduce accurate frequency detail from floor to ceiling, aka higher fidelity."
The human ear has its own floor and ceiling.
You will never hear the steps an ant makes on normal ground and you should not try to listen to a 747 engine at full power in short distance without heavy ear protection.
Greater dynamic make senses but not if it is greater than the dynamic of the human ear.
"My human ear can hear the difference between a brand new pressing of Pink Floyd's The Wall on vinyl, and the digitally remastered Blu-ray version played on the same sound system."
Of course you can hear that - the mastering for vinyl has to consider the many limitations vinyl has which play no role in a CD or Blu-ray version.
I can also hear the difference between a song played on my AM-radio and the same song from CD. That does not mean that my AM radio has better quality.
The real question is if you could hear the difference between vinyl and a digital recording of that vinyl....
I'm a long time 60 years, LP guy. I recently got a decent DAC, and Tidal. My wife heard me yell "holy shit " on 1st listen. I hear things and separation I never heard with LPs
You laid it out very well. Thank you.
I've always believed in the potential of digital. I was, and still disappointed on what the "Loudness Wars" did to the digital medium. That explains the vinyl resurgence of lately.
The truth of the story on "new" produced vinyl is too many are "mastered" from digital sources! Only vintage recordings were recorded onto high speed tape machines using analog technology.
So, the vinyl crowd might want to rethink the superiority of the older medium with current digital in CD format? Particularly with a respectable DAC in its signal path. I've also experienced CD with artist recordings from vinyl. Now that is a real disappointment for me!
I believe the same argument can be made with transistors vs tube.
Tubes have long been known to "romanticize" the signal as compared to transistors.
Let's include film to digital. Film does not have the luminous dynamic capabilities of digital. Funny thing, digital can mimic either analog or film!
Which is best? It all boils down to preferences.
*I will say, sound staging/imaging in stereo on vinyl with its inherent bleeding is more satisfying and dear I say more natural sounding than digital's 100% separation capabilities. Depth perception with two human ears does not allow total 100% left right separation in nature.
Probably why analog recordings' depth retrival sound more convincing than digital. But, digital can sound more "entertaining", with it's broad separation with two loud speakers! (I personally, never fully embraced multi-channel music recordings) Too gimmicky. More enjoyable in a home theater environment. I guess I'm a traditionalist? 😁
Preferences.
I think it all depends on the music you listen to. The only comparison I made is with"Bluebird" by ELO. I have the best of ELO. I also have the album "Secret messages." I compared the two. There's a part where there's tamborines. You can hear them more on the vinyl. But other than that, I don't hear any difference. So the difference is very minute. As far as the stereo separation, if you have to make that kind of test, thast's not important and stereo separation is important to me. I have the vinyl of CCR's first album. On Suzie Q the first verse comes from the right, the 2nd verse comes from the left. The CD version I heard John's voice cmes from both speakers. WhenI heard that, I thought it was the CDs that had limitations on stereo. Again, I don't believe there's a huge difference. In have both a turntable and a CD player. And now a 3rd choice, a laptop where you can bring up almost any song you want. I now always put the word vinyl in front of the title and 95% of the time you can bring up the vinyl with some very expensive and nice sounding turntables.
Depends on what your meaning of the word better is.
Is a brand new mustang better than a classic one?
One you might prefer driving more than the other
Music is subjective, and it’s reproduction depends upon the quality of equipment and also people’s hearing, it’s also affected by the acoustics of the room. Both have there advantages, vinyl does sound good, but it’s fragile and bulky, problems with scratches and pops. Digital is very convenient and easy to use and store. So it’s a personal choice, I personally use both mediums.
@@stevenclarke5606 "Music is subjective". The rest of your comment concerns the objective.
The creative process is "bringing chaos into order" -- transforming the subjective into the objective.
The idea that "music," or "art" generally, is "subjective" is intellectual laziness. There are objective criteria, rules, by means of which to assess "art" and its qualities and demerits. But the video is an objective discussion of two objective media, and the objective characteristics of each, not of "subjectivity," which latter DODGE avoids the objective discussion altogether.
The only way to tell if vinyl or CD sounds better someone needs this:
1) a copy of an album released on CD and vinyl prior 2000 (meaning, before mastering process added brickwall limiters to make it sound louder)
2) perform a double blind test between the two (meaning, someone else would switch between them)
@MF Nickster 100 % right.
And still, even if someone cannot test it your way, a CD mastered without brick-wall compression would sound better than vinyl in a blind test.
And everybody forgets that lots of people are frequently listening it while heavily intoxicated with their hearing capabilities consequently severely impaired
Wow, I've never seen a better agumentation. Thank you very much for this upload and your knowlage. Especially the last part with anolog to digital and digital to analog.
Awesome work. You got the point exactly. I'm already keen to show your video to some audiophiles who prefer vinyl, because it sounds "warmer". 😀
Read my long information correction comment elsewhere here, and you'll get an even better and more truthful explanation. He only scratched the surface and unfortunately quoted some dangerous misinformation.
Can't believe we are still having this argument 40 years later. Just listen to whatever you think sounds best.
Good video, I’m not going to say that one sounds better than the other but my personal preference is vinyl. I started buying music on vinyl in 1982 and stopped in 1998. I Dj’d using vinyl for years then went to CDJs and now use Serato Dj or Scratch Live. I really can’t tell what it is that I like so much about the sound of music on vinyl but I just do. And this is not coming from some kid that just wants to be cool so decided to get into vinyl because it’s trendy.
I bought my first 45 in 1962. My first LP in 1963. Have a ton of vinyl that is occupying valuable space that might be better used as empty.
The reason some digital can sound worse is how compressed it is because digital creates stair stepping high enough quality and this goes away, plus most vinyl records these days are from a digital sound source telling the machine to imprint the grooves so like it or not your listening to the CD anyway on almost all modern records lol. Plus records have static and white noise.
Also the comment on panning sound digitally you dont have to pan it completely over lol just pan a little bit if you want it on both.
FlyingAce1016 the video I referenced refers to a study where the human brain cannot distinguish the stair stepping or better described as aliasing in audio as low as 22khz. I would argue 44.1 is adequate. You won’t hear it until you slow it down. In fact, that’s when it matters in recording when you’re doing time stretching.
Actually there aren’t any „stair steps“ if you record a signal digitally it doesn’t alter the sound. That’s why digital reproduces sound more accurately than any analogue medium.
I can understand all those who love vinyl. Because when you have real collection that you can touch physically, then you get attached to it. It’s real human psychology, we always value real things more than those files which exist only in digital media. For me personally vinyl is unaffordable and non-portable. There is no way for me to put 500 vinyl EPs in my pocket. But huge respect for those who loves music so much that they prefer physical media, this is romantic
High end Reel to reel is the best playback medium
Amen. If only it weren't so expensive and hard to find music for.
Its not.
when was the last time someone relaesed music on reel to reel?
@@andreasleonlandgren3092
@@scupakus Andreas does not care about your question because you asked the wrong person. Andreas is answering the ORIGINAL comment :)
scupakus They do, a few, and they’re like $300 per tape. Plus keeping the decks in shape can be really expensive if you’re not an expert at it yourself.
That's why the first 4 "Beatles" LPs were not "stereo". The standard was to record all the music on one track, and all the vocals to the other. That's why the "hole in the middle". They were PR-MIXED MONO. On vinyl the "hole" is still there, but there is some bleeding.
Fantastic explanations. You've kicked a lot of vinyl purist's arses with this and they'll hate you for it I'm sure. I believe that the vinyl resurgence is being brought about by mostly old men desperate to try and relive their youth. It's Flac all the way for me.
What about master tape?,I have watched a video that claimed that 1/4th of an inch,2 track 15ips is the best sound format out there,I am not an audiophile but I find these discussions interesting.
You are not taking into account the original 'master tape' from the analog era (prior to digital only albums). Here's my response to his video:
"You forgot to mention this. The ONLY way, as an example, I'm going to hear Pink Floyd's - Dark Side Of The Moon as it was originally intended in 1973 from the 'UK' Master Tape, is to have an original UK or German pressing. There's no possible way to hear that specific mastering of the album without having a copy of the Vinyl record from that era. Considering the original UK/German pressings (A2/B2 or A3/B3 as examples) are considered the very best this album ever sounded, you'll have to own a pressing with that in the deadwax/runout. The US pressings are different mastering, the Japanese pressings are a different mastering and so on. For my example, there's simply no way to hear a 'digital' version of this album with the original UK mastering unless you own the original UK/German pressings. Also, the master tape ages with time, a copy of the master tape in 1973 is going to sound different then a copy of the master tape in 2021 simply because of age and wear on the tape. Wanted to provide my 2 cents on this."
@@bobbyjones1055 I am sorry that was hard to understand, what I get is that it is nearly impossible to produce an original tape by yourself.
Looking at discussions, which rarely got to the point asked by the one who made the forum discussion, most people who have heard tape prefer it over vinyl, but as of yet for me there seems to be no proof that vinyl or 1/4inch 15 ips tape can copy sound more accurately from the musical band than digital, like CD-r or wav files.
Once again I have no experience with hi rex sound which is silly,but most people who do feel very biased /emotional on the other hand.
@@eliahaj2233 The tape crossing the playback head introduces distortion.
love your stuff man.
Small details on noise floor. Digital also has a noise floor defined the scale of the first bit which is not zero. Dithering algorithms deal with this but thats a different story. CD quality audio flat dynamic range is 96db. Some very high quality vinyl can come close to that on the first play with a virgin needle.
Vinyl has physical limitations such as low frequencies and high
frequencies. The needle is a fixed size and if the frequencies are low
the needle can bounce off the grove and cause sound loss. Also the same
apples for high frequencies. The needle can't physically fit in the
grove causing sound loss. So now you know the truth.
I did not know that
@@Titoroski187 Most recordings are made from digital masters, so it may be on vinyl, but it mastered in digital then converted to analog.
The ‘channel bleeding’ isn’t actually bad at all since a real stereo mix is suposed to sound like you are there, and when you’re listening to a orchestra or some jazz concert you don’t hear some instruments on one ear and the others on the other ear.
we have to get into physics
that kind of analysis i haven't seen
I want to see the results of sound comparison by double blind test.
Amazing video. Cheers 🍻 The world needs more factual information for audiophiles and music enthusiasts. This is great information.
I have no idea about which is “better” but I don’t really like the pops & crackles of vinyl. Also, to the vinyl purists, I heard if you buy one of those 180 gram records that have become popular in the last few years, they’re actually recorded from a digital master!
That all depends on the label’s quality standards. There are certainly labels out there using digital as the source material. However, the difference is obvious to my ears, at least. There’s typically a compression and “coldness” to the overall sound.
I guess it’s very similar to the whole “your eyes can only perceive 60fps and any more is unnoticeable” BS. Some even argue the difference of 30 to 60 being unnoticeable, which is a ridiculous statement.
I (and countless others) can detect the difference between 60-75. Ever since I upgraded to a 144Hz monitor, 60Hz looks like compete shit.
This is all to say, there will always be people who haven’t experienced analogue properly, or hell maybe they really can’t tell the difference, OR they just don’t give a damn and would rather enjoy free music.
especially on modern equipment that is sensitve to detail itll not even look dirty but once you see dust on your needle sound quality goes to crap especialy in vocals
When I copy a vinyl record to digital, the first thing I ALWAYS do is gently run a piece of soft tissue paper over the needle to make sure there isn't any dust on it....
The loudness war has been going on for almost the entirety of vinyl's existence. Apparently Ahmet Ertegun's brother gifted his daughter a Bob Ludwig pressing of "Zeppelin II" and it skipped on her really cheap record player during Jimmy's solo
Everyone knows that digital is better sound wise, but that’s not the point, the point is that the experience is so much better. Taking it out of the sleeve, placing it on the table, the little imperfections and static, it is an experience
As a young child we had 78s (except new-format 45s on cheap players for young children). Grew up with vinyl. Vinyl sucks.
Sound of both depends on your playback equipment
It is not objective that vinyl sounds more accurate and faithful to the original recording then digital if the digital recording is a victim of the loudness war and is overly compressed. That is not objective, that is a fact.
Well yeah, an original issue/non remastered LP is going to sound better than a remastered recording, but that doesn't 100% mean vinyl is better than cd.
There are plenty of overly compressed tracks available on vinyl. There is no relation to the medium.
@@connorm955 Oh, please. There have been many crap-mastered "original" LPs released. Check out all the fake "stereo" LPs released during the 1960s.
Sometimes remastering is the cure -- back to mono, as example, from the fake "stereo".
BTW: REMASTERING and REMIXING are NOT THE SAME.
30+ years ago my brain said CD must be better than vinyl but my ears said vinyl sounded better (if good quality LP on very high quality equipment). With the advent of hi-res format like SACD, DSD and so on, it is undeniable that digital is better than analogue. I have many hundreds of CD's in my collection but it has been many years since I last played them because hi-res format, whether SACD or streaming are much better. I am affected neither by the vinyl revival nor the CD revival.
I've digitized all of my LP's and generally the sound of the digitized version of the LP is indistinguishable from the LP , except no pops, since I apply a pop filter. Digitizing LP's permits pleasure without confinement.
@Charles Ludwig By digitising it you lose the frequencies above 20 kHz. These frequencies cannot be heard but are still very important. You have downgraded your music by moving it to digital.
@Sleep Cube...What an arrogant POS you are. No, i have not read the nyquist paper. However, everything i have said is based on fact. Studies, that i can easily point to, have shown that high frequency ultrasonic sound does have a positive effect on the brain of listeners. Have you read those studies?
Most digital music does not operate above 20,000hz but if you can show I'm wrong then go ahead and show your evidence. All anyone has to do is to google mp3 frequency range or cd frequency range to see that the maximum frequency for CDs and MP3 is no higher than 20khz. So please don't talk crap. But if you can show that mp3 or cd goes above 20khz then i await your evidence.
Nonsense mp3 320kbps usually cut around 20khz, but lossless formats like flac, alac, wma, waw... have much higher frequencies! Digital is much more superior over vinyl if mastering is done properly!
@Emil Fender...If flac is recorded from a lossy format like mp3 or CD then it's not going to be lossless and will be no better than the format it was converted from.
@@dtz1000 Original music CD's are lossless they are not mp3, mp3 are lossy, who will convert mp3 into lossless this is nonsense!
thats the point, what is more accurate. And if you want cd sound as vinly as you described with teh steroe, but some guitar sounbding bit on the wrong speaker, you an record this way. But point is - it has to reproduce how the author wants the record to sound. But stereo is just small thing. Bigges thing for me feels like it might be imposible to right so perfectly into plastic plus overtime plastic wears. While when you play digital from SSD - nothing has worn.
don't forget that the placebo effect works for more than just medicines. If one goes into it with the attitude or belief that vinyl sounds 'better', it will. But if you prefer the enhanced bass response and more limited stereo spread of vinyl to the digital recording, you are in effect remixing the recording to your own preferences. Now it is NOT what the artists originally intended to present. You can listen any way you wish, but don't try to tell us vinyl is more 'accurate' or faithful to the original. The science and the numbers say otherwise.
great vid - while i collect vinyl myself for fun, i can’t really see a large gap in quality between a hi-res digital recording and an analog one.
22:50 the problem with this argument is that the massive dynamic range offered by hi-res digital audio is far too loud for a human being to safely listen to. This is why 16-bit audio is the industry standard for the end user experience. The additional headroom offered by 24 and 32-bit audio is pointless from a pure listening perspective because it would be physically dangerous to listen to, rendering it totally pointless. The only use for that larger dynamic range is in the recording and production process, prior to doing your mixdown.
There is one thing not mentioned in this video: the inherently analog issue of generation loss. Anyone who has copied material from a cassette tape to another tape has experienced this phenomenon to some degree; each copy sounds a little less clear (especially in the high end) than the tape it was copied from. I strongly suspect that the "warmth" that vinyl fans think they're hearing is (at least partially) from the fact that a vinyl copy of any master tape is at least one generation down from the source tape. (Back in the day when everything was analog, it could be even more; as record companies were pretty casual about whether they were using the original or a copy tape. Or a copy of a copy....) As the owner of an original Teac 144 Portastudio, I can tell you that this was something that always had to be considered; you could only submix one or two times before you ended up with a muddy mess....
I just started getting into vinyl. The difference to me seems to be akin to the difference between reading a book on an e-reader and reading a physical book. The physical medium including the warm glow of the op amp tubes and the occasional pop, all add to the atmosphere of the music listening experience.
Yep it's true. Until you buy a good multibit or R2R DAC and never look back. But vinyl will probably always be superior to the delta-sigma "cheater" DACs that flood today's consumer market. They're absolute trash.
very intersting stuff. i have old beatles records are hard panned, you can be djing and dependant on the sound system set up you can end up with an instrumental on one side of the room and vocals on the other
They are not "panned". Easy to find is George Martin's "All you Need is Ears". It is essentially a plain-English explanation of the evolution of recording technology (includes his hearing the "advanced" THREE-track mono recording at Capitol Records).through his twenty-five years in the business up to and including when "The Beatles" appeared.
NOT "panning": the standard was to record all instruments on one track, and all vocals on the other track. That was PRE-MIXED MONO -- MONO was the market, and the goal radio airplay, which was MONO. That is why the "hole in the middle" (with some bleeding). He was PISSED when EMI, after "The Beatles" hit in England, and without consulting with Martin, released the PRE-MIXED MONO as "stereo".
He essentially said that the PRE-MIXED MONO sound like "shit".
"PANNING" is in the MIXING. If one records a sound on one of two tracks, the volume of that sound can be increased or lowered -- but cannot be "panned," which requires that the sound be recorded to BOTH tracks. Listen to both the mono and stereo releases of "The Young Rascal's" "Good Lovin'," which begins, "1-2-3-4". For one, the mono has PUNCH. For another, the "1-2-3-4" of the stereo release are each panned left-right-left-right -- which takes the "steam" out of the mix. That was released in 1965, and now exposes stereo is still being pretty much a gimmick.
The first "Beatles" LP consciously intended as stereo was "Help!" -- and it was Martin's first time with stereo. It was primitive, and he wrote that the mix was a mess. Still -- he wrote that "The Beatles" didn't "get" the idea of TWO monitor speakers -- the focus was MONO up to and including "Sgt. Pepper's". Though "The Beatles" (aka "White Album") was released in the UK in both mono and stereo, it was only released in the US as stereo: that was in November, 1968. Before that MONO was the standard and the market.
There is much confusion in the various terms -- such as "panning" -- by pseudo-aficionados. Which is all balled up with the claim that vinyl is "warmer," when in fact it is not 'warmth" but DISTORTION. (Some of the distortion, pre-digital, was introduced by the preamp and amp tubes, including during recording.)
Again, read George Martin's "All You Need is Ears".
Depends on what your used to hearing. Vinyl, 8 Tracks, Cassettes, WAV, or MP3. Some tracks I like on Vinyl others Cassette, but WAV I’ll take for everything. Digital Studio Recordings like WAV are clean. I will always have a passion for tracks pressed on Vinyl.
We all have different tastes / preferences.
If vinyl is so great, then why does the master tape recording have to be mastered and massaged to minimized the inherent limitations of vinyl? That “warm” sound you are hearing is a compromise of the vinyl medium. The master tape doesn’t have that “warm” sound, so you have already compromised the audios accuracy.
If you play that thriller album the recent releases and play an OG of thriller you will be blown away. It really come down to mixing. That being sound as musician i just like records more to me because the sound ImO sounds more natural.
Experiment Results for Vinyl ripped to digital file (Using RME Studio grade AD converter for the recording):
Digital File at 192khz/24 Bit: Indistinguishable from original Vinyl playback.
Digital File at 44khz/16 Bit (CD Format): Very very close to original Vinyl playback. Minimal differences in the "openness" of complex high frequency sounds.
Digital File at 320kbs (High Res MP3): Similar to CD.
Digital File at 128kbs (Low Res MP3): Unsurprisingly this gives a strong audible loss in overall quality versus the original Vinyl playback which is easy to tell in blind listening.
When blind listening I can tell the difference between the 192khz/24 Bit vs the 44khz/16 Bit (CD) recording but I can not tell the difference between CD and High-Res MP3.
The 128kbs MP3 is noticeable worse than the vinyl playback. So much so, that I find this quality unacceptable to my ears.
For blind listening I used RME DA converter - headphone pre-amp - AKG 701 headphones.
Conclusion of the experiment:
- At 192khz/24 Bit a digital recording basically is identical sounding to its "Master". At least for me, not even the slightest differences are audible.
- At CD as well as High-Res MP3 digital quality there ARE audible differences to the "Master". They are extremely slight however - and only audible in direct comparison.
- 128kbs (Low Res MP3) breaks the sound. My advice would be to use a minimum of 256kbs MP3 - even for low end.
If you want to try yourself: oppodigital.azurewebsites.net/hra/dsd-by-davidelias.aspx
There you can find various digital quality of the same song to compare - 24-bit / 88.2kHz, CD quality and High-Res MP3.
Differences are very hard to tell - and only if you use very good monitoring equipment. With standard "home" equipment you probably will not be able to tell a difference.
As for me, I can hear a difference between 24-bit / 88.2kHz and CD, but not between CD and High-Res MP3 - similar as my result from my own recording test.
So is vinyl really better than digital?
If I have to answer this exact question I will refuse - because digital has strongly varying quality - so the answer depends on the digital resolution.
If the question was: Is vinyl really better than 192khz/24 Bit digital? Then the clear answer is NO. 192khz/24Bit is better than vinyl.
If the question was: Is vinyl really better than CD/High-Res MP3? Then my answer would be that this discussion is justified but my personal preference is vinyl.
If the question was: Is vinyl really better than low-quality 128kbs MP3? Then the answer is YES, Vinyl is better than Low-Res MP3.
For my money, MP3 is to CDs what cassette tape is to vinyl-a lower quality format, but more portable.
Good vid! One thing I gotta say regardless of Analog or Digital recording there will always be loss signals either through wiring and or the time the sound travels from the instruments (including voice) to the microphone. That is just nature period. Is it perceivable? Probably not as you mentioned.
They both have advantages, Listing to music is an emotional thing so there is no right or wrong here. For easy care, I would opt. for CDs since it's less work keeping them in good shape without quality loss. Vinyl is more work-intensive for caring but more rewarding. Some masterings will be better on vinyl (high frequency) and CDs over-compressed; in other cases, CDs will be better without over-compressing. I collect both formats and shake my hand with both ;)
Tonal warmth and 3 dimensional space are what I find CD mediums lack.
This is a fact you can verify with any sound engineer. Stereo imagining and dynamic range are less on a vinyl record.
@@priyonjoni All and every specs are in favour of Cd medium. For me I can't hear specifications. I just hear presence in vinyl that CD don't have. You can talk specs, noise, rumbles etc to the cows come home. Vinyl and analogue just trumps digital CD medium.
Simply Comes down to this. Sound is infinite like a circle. You can't chop it up into 44.1K pieces, rejoin it and expect not to hear any differences. 22 divided by 7 continues on indefinitely....
Just bring a simple humble Revox B77 to record a live performance and nothing beats it (probably except a direct cutting vinyl lathe).
@@yogi9631Well, no. Sound is not infinite. There's a little something called the inverse square law....
@@davidrw61 I’m an admirer of music no matter which format that it is presented. To this day I find that digital just can’t replicate the delicate nuances of real music. Be it by vinyl or master reel to reel tapes. Don’t know. Digital music is perfect as a medium in every aspect but just lacks realism. Furthermore our ears as rough measurement instruments as they are, i.e not the most reliable, we /our brains have the abilities to pickup these differences yet at the same time our brains are also easily fooled by external equipment and equalisation techniques via digital. A slightest difference in the high frequencies can make the drums sound a bit more faster and crisp vs analogue sound. Try test for yourself.
Everything is superior is digital format yet every single CD player manufacturer sounds different? What gives? Should they all sound the same if they were replayed by digital medium? Anyways this topic has been beaten to death back in the 80/90’s! Just spewing my 2 cents worth as I’m doing the number 2 toilet atm… i was bored …
@@yogi9631 I'm not sure what your definition of "real music" is. If you mean live music, then it's true that no recording (no matter how good) will be the same as actually being there. But I have never heard an analog recording that fooled me, even briefly, into thinking that I'd heard the real sound. I did experience that illusion once with a digital recording; although, in fairness, it was a true stereo recording (two microphones, one for each channel) and I was listening in headphones. (And, admittedly, it was a brief illusion- the sound of a door slamming. But for half a second, I thought that someone in the room had actually closed a door- and couldn't locate the door in question....) Besides, in today's world, even live music is usually subject to electronic manipulation of some sort (if only a mixer/ PA system). As to different CD players sounding different, that's a function of the playback equipment, not the recording. A Beethoven symphony is going to sound different on a cheap boombox than it would on a high-end system even though it's the exact same track....
Amazing video!!! Congrats!!
Impulse perception from speaker cone to ear is different when the signal is fed into an audio interface. ya know this. After recording, you have to mix and master. Same reason why mic'ing a guitar amp is still a gold standard vs plugging in even using ampsims.