Serena? I'm there? Bottle of Cote du Rhone? Or something white and a tad dryish? . . . I've got a very early Benny Goodman double set I play to kick out the "jams" . .works every time. Jackie du Pre doing her thing with the Cello Concerto (Mendelssohn?).

Grazie

The first records I played were 78 rpm. I broke a lot of them as a kid. I still don't know how my dad put up with it -- he'd had some of them since HE was a kid. When 33 rpm came along, it also came on this new material -- vinyl -- and you couldn't break it. Obviously the sound was a whole lot better, but being able to play a record without having worry about an encounter with dad if I happened to break it -- THAT was a real blessing.

As for the sound, vinyl certainly has a different quality. You can spend many pleasant evenings arguing about whether it is "better" or worse than later technologies.

One thing for sure: we've all taken a big step backward in sound quality as more and more of our listening experience involves compressed audio. MP3, WMA, the various iPod format -- all of them introduce horrendous sonic imperfections. Having lived through 78 rpm, then Hi-Fi, then Stereo, then Quadraphonic, Surround, and 5.1 -- all trying to improve the quality of the listening experience, it is amazing how we've all been willing to sacrifice so many of those sonic gains in order to get a more convenient listening experience.

My ears are starting to degrade, but as long as they are still in reasonable shape, I will spend my listening time with the best source material and the best equipment I can afford.

And, like you, that still includes vinyl.

Yes, it's curious that convenience seems to have become more important than quality, or it seems so for many people. Of course running with a record player doesn't work, although it would increase the amount of exercise. I'm generally surprised at how good mp3 players sound, in much the same way that I'm surprised watching an ant tugging along the body of a wasp. Analogue recordings do contain the whole waveform (let's assume high fidelity apparatus) whereas as it has to be reconstructed from digital, so it's not too surprising if analogue systems can produce sound with fewer artifacts. But of course as the bitrate increases and resolution goes deeper in digital recordings so the difference between original and reconstructed diminishes. However all our systems are built around compromises, as is obvious when you look at the prices of high-end HiFi gear!
It was a nice afternoon sitting down listening, with the glass or two (thanks Grazie!) instead of just having a CD playing in the background.

I recently transfered some 78s for a client to CD, yes he still has a wind up gramophone. So what he does know is he winds up the gramophone, puts the appropriate 78 on, lets the 78 spin, while he listens to the CD!

I do transfer a LOT of tape, the stuff from back in 80s recorded with Dolby SR does sound wonderful, the badly done 7.5ips stuff that's a few two generations away from the now lost masters thats been played a few times too many is pretty horrid.

Actually this is kind of topical as only last night I was reading a review of a tape emulator box, as the reviewer reminds us, with digital you buy the gear and just keep using it. With tape keeping it going right was a daily chore. With digital I can backup everything with no loss, something that cannot be done with analogue tape. Editing analogue tape required great skill and patience. I'm not disputing that the very best analogue recording rival the very best digital, just the sheer amount of work it took is so easily overlooked in the nostalgia. But I still find working with tape so much more relaxing. You can't hurry it up and those big reels turning are very calming not matter what's on them.

Ah, and I forgot to mention print through! I'd have thought it common knowledge back then how masters should be stored but sadly not, thankfully judicious use of a gate sort of cleans it up.

And then there's my old friend, sticky shed , thank you Ampex, I just love baking your tape.

Bob.

Gosh there Bob, hope it didn't seem that I was suggesting that analogue was always perfect! A great many home movies shot on film were dreadful in all respects and same for audio. Digital has all the benefits you mention. I started out remarking that the vinyl disks I played today sounded very snappy (after not hearing any for a long time) and that lead us onto the benefits of analogue recording; the difficulties involved were a matter aside!

Let's see ...

MP3: some very slight and barely, if at all, noticeable compression artifacts.

Analog: surface noise, dust, scratches, static pops, limited dynamic range, distortion, warble, wow, flutter, tape stretch, needle wear, groove wear, print through, magnetism acculating on the tape heads and guides slowly erasing the tape with every pass, media breakage, signal degredation with age ... etc, etc, etc.

Yep, that MP3 experience is really awful compared to the good ol' days, isn't it?

Sorry,
bit twitchy lately!

Almost a solid week editing, never done anything so intense for so long, think I need to take a leaf out of your book and put my legs up for a while.

Bob.

Chienworks, if you had said

"CD-some very slight and barely, if at all, noticeable compression artifacts."

I would have been with you, but I have not heard an MP3 yet that I felt did not affect the quality of the original recording. Usually in the dynamic range area.

But if you just compare the sound of the vinyl to the sound of even a CD (ignoring the media limitations), vinyl still has a feel that can't be matched.

Dave T2

Now really Chienworks, I think you're being contrary for the sake of it. Obviously, if you ever worked with analogue, it was with crummy equipment poorly maintained. This thread began with a light comment on how good vinyl could sound, and with some thoughts about possible reasons that analogue might indeed have the benefits that one hears said for it. But I guess you've had a bad day, wish to express something about bad experiences, or some other hobby horse of your own. That's OK, hope your "blow" makes you feel better.

Gees, for a minute there I thought I was on the Klipsch forum. There was also off center holes in the records, bass rolled off 12 db because it would go into the next groove, the neighbors short wave set being picked up by the cartridge, excessive hiss at loud levels, wait 20 minutes before playing the record again for the groves to return to within 98% of their original shape, typical rounded off square wave response because of the mechanical contact, ( do a side by side with record versus cd even though cd''s are mastered with tape--instead of a sharp cymbal hit it sounds thuddy), and lastly---a pain in the neck to select, operate, clean, and store. Now lets talk about tubes and SS.

JJK

JJK, interesting. Put your feet up and tell me all about it.

Anyway,
All that really matters is how YOU feel it sounds. Even my wife remarked how much she enjoyed me playing some vinyl, not because it sounded better or worse but because it feels, well, it's just a different experience. And the other thing good about vinyl was there was enough room to put decent artwork on the sleeve and type that you didn't need a magnifying glass to read.
Ah, maybe that's the thing, you could SEE the record being played and you didn't need a degree to understand how it worked, we could relate to the process, unlike 1 & 0s which really aren't a part of our makeup.

One day I'm going to build a recording wax cylinder dictaphone, the idea is so simple and elegant and I can explain how the things works.

Bob.

Serena, actually my post was very light-hearted. I'm sorry if it didn't come across that way. I know analog can sound very good, and yes i have used some very well constructed and well maintained audio equipment. I've recorded and mastered a number of analog demo albums for local musicians that sound as good as anything the digital studios put out.

I will mention though that even the absolute best hi-fi analog equipment suffers from every defect i mentioned. True, the best equipment suffers from these defects to a very tiny degree, but the defects are still there. And, i'll also point out that the start of this thread was about the home user listening experience, not about listening to the orignal masters in the studio sound booth. Very few home users have the highest quality equipment. A lot of the expense and craftsmanship of quality analog equipment is there in an attempt to overcome the faults and shortcomings inherent in analog media. Today's cheap consumer digital equipment can rival the quality of some of the best of the analog equipment simply because it doesn't have to deal with all the analog problems.

So yes, i've enjoyed my analog days. I have a treasured collection of vinyl, cassettes, even 1/4" tapes that i enjoy and appreciate. I'm also glad i don't have to deal with the analog problems anymore unless i wish to for my own personal enjoyment.

Kelly's point is important to understanding why we've taken what I described earlier as a "step backwards." And that point, if I am understanding it correctly, is that the "average" home listener has (or had) vinyl records that had not been handled well; were never stored in dust jackets; were stored flat; were played on worn styli; etc. The result is that, for most of them, playing records meant listening to pops, having the occasional skip, and possibly listening to background hiss resulting from a buildup of crud in the grooves. By contrast, the MP3 sounds just as good (or bad) on the first listen as it does later on.

BTW, as much as I don't like the sound of MP3, I have found that you can get much better quality NOT through the usual advice of using a higher encoding rate than the "normal" 128kbs, but instead by finding an encoder that lets you adjust the "quality." If you set this to "high," on most Fraunhofer encoders, this will dramatically increase the encoding time (3-5 times), but the result will lose much of the "raspiness," "echo," and "edginess" that I find so irritating.

Serena,

I had your weekend experience a few years ago, but decided to record my favorite LPs, not to CD, but to 48 kHz DAT (with a Rosetta A/D). On a very high-end system, the difference in sound quality was infinitesimally close to what came out of the ICU-level care and the "DigiBeta turntable" and $3K RIAA pre-pre-amp.

No worries about wear, dust, static electricity, etc. Btw, I still have my LP washing machine, same as used at many major studios and radio/TV stations, willing to blow it out to somebody on this forum for $100. It's in new condition and only weighs 5-10 lbs, so easy to ship. It really makes a difference, and of course it doesn't harm the treasures.

Today it would perhaps be most effective to record LPs to 24-bit 96 kHz uncompressed computer audio, with a good RIAA and A/D of course.

Before I started doing what I do today, I was in the audio recording business. I had been working with analog for quite some time when digital came on the scene.

When CDs first came out, I had the opportunity to compare them to first- rate vinyl, along with several other folks who offered their opinions. The main comment was "some of the instruments are missing!" - and it sounds "gritty", and "harsh".

At first I thought that CDs were far worse than vinyl... Then I thought about the "real-world" situation. While a record in good shape easily sounded "better" than the CD - and much closer to the original master tape, if you leave a CD and an LP on the sofa overnight, which will sound better in the morning. -The CD wins!

In the beginning, people were blaming the A-D converters, and the mastering and all sorts of things, which have pretty much been fixed, but what has really happened is that we've accepted the "digital" sound. Every once-in-a-while, at an AES convention, or some-such event, someone will arrange a playback of "original" master tapes from the analog era. Be sure to go listen if you can. You will hear a "magical" sound that cannot be reproduced on a 16-bit 44.1 CD.

Because I do a lot of recording in various studios (I make my living as a V-O Guy) I do get to hear audio both at 44.1 and 48kHz. -- I CAN hear a difference- even on a simple voiceover track.

My hope is that higher quality audio formats (96kHz 24-bit, etc.) somehow becomes the standard.

Note what's happened to music since "CD” quality media has been our primary source for listening. Music has become very "raw" - "sophisticated" (classical, etc.) music is disappearing, and there has not been a single "universal" hit song (One that everybody knows) for decades - since "CD quality" has been the standard.

John, quite correct. I usually use 192Kbps, but at any bit rate, the difference between "medium" and "high" quality is startling. Sadly, most encoders default to low because the users want fast encodes and don't know any better. Probably most of the stuff encountered online is from the low quality setting. Those of you disappointed with MP3 should try even the encoder built in to Vegas or Sound Forge and set it to high quality. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. I've found that even 64Kbps at high quality sounds better than 320Kbps at low. Am i arguing that MP3 is a faithful medium? No, of course not. But it's close enough for most folks, and often far better than consumer grade analog.

Then again, why confine ourselves to MP3? Most households now have CD players and that's uncompressed so there are no compression artifacts. I think what is often the case when "old-timers" (and lest you think i'm pointing figers, i'm probably above median age in this forum) compare analog to CDs is that they have gotten used to the analog sound which is not quite so accurate. The variable EQ response of analog media which is never exactly corrected for imparts what many call a "warmth" to the music which is missing when listening to a CD. The younger generation that has grown up with the accurate sound of digital often finds analog to be muddy in comparison. Which group is right? Both of them, of course. Each prefers what they're used to.

And, as one final point, i'll ask why if analog is so good aren't most studios still using it? Surely the pros wouldn't abandon analog en masse if digital was substantially inferior.

The variable EQ response of analog media which is never exactly corrected for imparts what many call a "warmth" to the music which is missing when listening to a CD.

Kelly, that is a VERY interesting point.

I didn't follow very closely the LP vs. CD debate back in the late 80's when it became fashionable to trash CDs as being harsh and lacking warmth. To the extent I did follow the discussion, most of it focused on the effects of sampling and whether 44.1 kHz was sufficient, etc. However, knowing something about both the math and the practice involved, that never made much sense to me. By contrast, your point about the EQ response makes perfect sense. I actually designed and built my own preamp years ago, and while there were lots of "cookbooks" on how to produce a "perfect" RIAA turnover/rolloff curve, whatever you actually created turned out to be an approximation. And, of course, in the days of 78s, there was no such standardization, and the preamps used to have "rolloff" and "turnover" knobs so you could adjust the equalization to approximate what each different manufacturer used.

"All that really matters is how YOU feel it sounds."

Quite right Bob! I think all the formats have their place. I only use mp3 for emailing purposes. I bought the 60GB Ipod so I encoded all of my music to apple's lossless codec and it sounds great. I figured why spend hundreds of $$'s on a player and then squish all the music to hell? :o)

Any way, I'm glad you had a fun LP day Serena. I just got home from Canada and I'm going to go play with my new little toy (HC3) that arrived from B&H while I was gone....taking a page out of your "let's do something fun today." I'm thinking Malibu ocean waves and sunsets would be a good place to start. Derek

Every once-in-a-while, at an AES convention, or some-such event, someone will arrange a playback of "original" master tapes from the analog era. Be sure to go listen if you can. You will hear a "magical" sound that cannot be reproduced on a 16-bit 44.1 CD.

Snif, yessss.

For most people it will be easier to listen to more live music.

To me, the most astonishing difference is with string instruments. There is no lossless recording of those as far I have been able to find, and I suspect we have a lot left to learn about sound...

Even the human voice can be pretty astonishing live without amplification, but this is for obvious reasons rarely available.

I sing publicly a few times per month, but in very small, intimate venues, and I listen to others do the same just as often (I'm inspired by my two sisters whose voices can fill a whole church a cappella (with no instruments to hide imperfections), gotta be pretty brave to do that.

Can't help wondering why the sound of singing seems to get less deteriorated by recording than the sound from string instruments?

I suspect the sound of rubbing taut sheep intestines with horse tails is way more complex. Anyone else find the same thing?

Well, I think we got there in the end. The essential matter is that none of our systems are perfect and in the end we opt for compromises that suit our purposes and pockets.
One should enter any such discussion with recognition that digitising a waveform discards information at the recording stage. That it can be lossless though subsequent processes is nice, but that doesn't put back anything not recorded. The better the equipment, the higher the sampling frequency and the greater the resolution so less is the information discarded. Where in that process is the point of vanishing error? Depends on your criteria and listening environment. Now analogue is a continuous recording process so stuff we might think is unimportant to fidelity is still recorded. But analogue processes have different limitations and inherently have potential problems with mechanics and various system compromises that are intended to compensate. Analogue systems are much less convenient, suffer generational losses, and all the rest of it.
Back in my tiny days when I built my first 3 valve amplifier I soon understood High Fidelity to mean that the reproduced sound was indistinguishable from the original (which my first amp didn't satisfy). Later all home player systems became HiFi, which didn't mean that they were high fidelity (just an improvement on the old radiogram). All early solid state HiFi gear used B-class drivers and generally introduced nasty cross-over distortion (my first was returned very quickly). Those problems were overcome and I haven't had a valve amp for a very long time (of course the solid state stuff is still mostly analogue with a digital input device). So you might deduce that my "vinyl experience" wasn't via a 60s radiogram and nor were my vinyl disks anything but pristine. So when I mentioned that the transparent quality surprised me, this wasn't nostalgia for the old times but rather curiosity that maybe I've been wrong to dismiss people who claim vinyl is superior. Consequently I wondered why this might be so.
So you might see why people coming into the discussion with talk of print through, wow, holes off centre, warping, and so on seemed very much off the point. An ant nest of MP3-lovers had been stirred to defend those lovely little iRiver devices ideal for listening to the low fidelity stuff that now passes for music. Which was really the crux of Grazie's post - there is a lot of great music from times past. But standing in the long queue at the film festival my iRiver provides fine enough sound to pass the time.
The issue of quality/convenience/cost is something I would expect people here to approach quantitatively and I've always been surprised how easily the general public discards quality as being of least importance. Those early camcorders were dreadful compared to film, less compact, but were cheaper to run and you could see results immediately. Never did understand why being able to review stuff immediately was such an attraction, so that might be just one of the reasons I'm not wealthy. I thought Polaroids were great for checking set lighting, but I never wanted one for personal use; my short term memory isn't that bad.
So my basic somewhat philosophical question hasn't been answered (is there something in the 'analogue is better' argument?). I emailed my vinyl observation to a "golden-eared" friend whose life is professional audio and he replied: "Analogue sound is better because it is 100% total in-out continuity compared with sampled 'grabs' (albeit thousands per second)". I replied: "I know that -- but can you HEAR the difference?" Still waiting for his definitive response.
Actually I'm not all that happy with the "All that really matters is how YOU feel it sounds" because HiFi today is all smoke & mirrors. There was a time when performance judgements had to be justified quantitatively, with the caveat "but trust your ears". Now it doesn't seem to matter that effects can't be measured, so there are many wonderfully expensive things available for improving audo; exotic materials for speaker cable, for example.

Ahhh, another ant's nest i can stir ... ;) Analog isn't really continuous, it's actually discrete, but at the quantum level, both in time and intensity. Sorry, just had to point that out. :) True, the quantum level is TINY, but it is there. And just as mismatched sample rates and digital effects/mixing/volume changes can degrade a digital signal through rounding errors, analog goes through an "analagous" process when moving through each stage of the process, even all within the same generation. These little errors build up and produce artifacts, albeit very small ones.

Not particularly on the off topic topic, but let me relate one of my early experiences as a hired cameraman. Back when i was working at the video rental store my boss purchased an early Panasonic with an external VHS deck. He hire it and me out at $40/hour. I'd shoot whatever and we'd split the money 50/50. My first job was a small wedding. I took along a little 5" color TV so i could monitor easier while recording and check the tape after each segment.

After the wedding while the photographer was rounding up the wedding party for posed pictures, i was sitting in the back reviewing the recording. The couple's parents gathered around to look too. The bride's mother just gasped and said, "how did you get that developed so fast?" The bride's father just laughed and laughed and asked to see various parts over and over again. The groom's mother was shocked and distressed and scared. She announced that i should be sent home because this was a Christian gathering and my ... well, whatever it was, she couldn't think of a word for it ... wasn't welcome. I'm guessing she was thinking something like magic or witchcraft. Fortunately she was outvoted and the pastor calmed her down. I did avoid her for the rest of the day though.

It's very amusing comparing various reactions to technology.