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The previous generation talks about how vinyl sounds better ("warmer") than CDs. Tape is our generation's vinyl. Eventually when CDs are no longer widely prod

The previous generation talks about how vinyl sounds better ("warmer") than CDs. Tape is our generation's vinyl. Eventually when CDs are no longer widely produced (44.1kHz sample rate isn't ideal for the high end) and everyone has switched over to 96kHz or 192kHz at 24 or 32 bits or whatever the 4K TV equivalent in audio is, the next generation will wax nostalgic over CDs and the horrendous loudness wars that made everything sound "better" through dynamic range compression. I mean, I wouldn't bet THAT much money on it. But it definitely seems like the next cycle of the trend.

earlz 11y ago
CDs are digital though.. I mean, sure there is the mastering, but you don't get the same analog subtleties that everyone pines for, be it tape or vinyl. I don't think CDs will ever be regarded as a "better format" for listening. I'm surprised tape is, since it's more limited than vinyl. Vinyl can theoretically encode higher quality audio than CDs in it's own analog way.. of course, it'll all vary with the actual precision it was cut with as well as the precision of the turntable needle. On top of this, some inherit restrictions in Vinyl actually made the loudness wars impossible. I don't recall the exact thing that causes it, but apparently if the signal is poorly mastered for vinyl (ie, too loud), the needle can literally jump out of the groove of the record.
- msandford 11y ago
  I believe the driving force of this phenomena is nostalgia and envy of the experiences that those older than you had. I don't think actual superiority makes any sense at all, because during the early days of CDs they were mastered well and sounded amazing; The Dark Side of the Moon is an album that hasn't embraced the loudness wars and it's clearly superior to tape or vinyl. But if you really like some "historic" band that your elders got to listen to on the radio and go to their shows as they were coming up, and listen to their albums as they were released, you're never going to be able to have those experiences. But you can listen to them on the same format that they originally released their work. It might be argued that the band, producer, studio, mastering guys, etc would have optimized the album for the media it was originally released on, but I suspect that the differences are fairly small. As your ability to reproduce sound gets better, no information is lost. It's lost during mastering for a lower fidelity medium, not in the transfer from a lower fidelity medium to a higher one. This is a psychological phenomena not a technical one.
- mikeash 11y ago
  Can vinyl really encode higher quality audio even in theory? I seem to recall that the noise floor for vinyl is around 60dB, while the quantization noise imposed by a CD is 96dB. It looks like the grooves on a record are a few tens of micrometers tall. If we say they have 65µm of potential variation, then you'd need to be able to resolve features down to a single nanometer to match a 16-bit digital source. I don't think a needle can get anywhere close to that, and I don't even know if the molecules would be that small.
  - msandford 11y ago
    If you played it with a laser, maybe. But I suspect that as soon as the needle's been over it a few times it's polished any of the really fine details right off. These machines exist, but they are NOT cheap. http://elpj.com/ltfeaturesandspecs/ http://elpj.com/ltfeaturesandspecs/
bweitzman 11y ago
~44kHz is actually pretty ideal, anything significantly higher can actually be harmful to the audio quality: http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html
- msandford 11y ago
  > All signals with content entirely below the Nyquist frequency (half the sampling rate) are captured perfectly and completely by sampling. Not even close to the truth. It captures the presence of the signal, but only through blind luck does it capture the correct amplitude of the signal. Why? The phase angle of the signal versus the phase angle of the sampler actually matter as you approach the Nyquist frequency. Why is this? You have a sine wave. You sample it once at the top, and once at the bottom, which is just in line with Nyquist. Perfect. This is because your sampling phase angle and your signal phase angle are aligned so that you get accurate amplitude. But what if you then shift the relative phase angles by 90 degrees? Suddenly your signal is gone completely! Because you happen to be sampling when the sine wave is crossing zero. This is the inaccurate amplitude I talked about earlier. The range of amplitudes is between 0 and the real amplitude. But if you 2x oversample instead of using the Nyquist frequency, what's the worst-case scenario? You sample at 45, 135, 215 and 305 degrees and don't quite capture the full amplitude of the signal. But at this point you're off by at most 30% or so. And of course it might be spot on, but the max error is 30%. Now what happens when you 4x oversample? The max possible error goes down again. People who suggest that 192kHz audio is worse than 44.1kHz or 48kHz need further education in actual signal processing. Also using equipment that was designed to properly low-pass the 192kHz DAC output properly (you don't really need to do this with 44.1!) would eliminate the theoretical problems that are outlined in the article.
  - bweitzman 11y ago
    I don't know enough about DSP to get into a debate about this, but I'm going to trust that Monty, who is one of the foremost experts on digital audio, is correct with what he's talking about. Plus the wikipedia article on the nyquist-shannon sampling theorem [0] suggests the same. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli...

earlz 11y ago

CDs are digital though.. I mean, sure there is the mastering, but you don't get the same analog subtleties that everyone pines for, be it tape or vinyl. I don't think CDs will ever be regarded as a "better format" for listening. I'm surprised tape is, since it's more limited than vinyl. Vinyl can theoretically encode higher quality audio than CDs in it's own analog way.. of course, it'll all vary with the actual precision it was cut with as well as the precision of the turntable needle. On top of this, some inherit restrictions in Vinyl actually made the loudness wars impossible. I don't recall the exact thing that causes it, but apparently if the signal is poorly mastered for vinyl (ie, too loud), the needle can literally jump out of the groove of the record.

msandford 11y ago
I believe the driving force of this phenomena is nostalgia and envy of the experiences that those older than you had. I don't think actual superiority makes any sense at all, because during the early days of CDs they were mastered well and sounded amazing; The Dark Side of the Moon is an album that hasn't embraced the loudness wars and it's clearly superior to tape or vinyl. But if you really like some "historic" band that your elders got to listen to on the radio and go to their shows as they were coming up, and listen to their albums as they were released, you're never going to be able to have those experiences. But you can listen to them on the same format that they originally released their work. It might be argued that the band, producer, studio, mastering guys, etc would have optimized the album for the media it was originally released on, but I suspect that the differences are fairly small. As your ability to reproduce sound gets better, no information is lost. It's lost during mastering for a lower fidelity medium, not in the transfer from a lower fidelity medium to a higher one. This is a psychological phenomena not a technical one.
mikeash 11y ago
Can vinyl really encode higher quality audio even in theory? I seem to recall that the noise floor for vinyl is around 60dB, while the quantization noise imposed by a CD is 96dB. It looks like the grooves on a record are a few tens of micrometers tall. If we say they have 65µm of potential variation, then you'd need to be able to resolve features down to a single nanometer to match a 16-bit digital source. I don't think a needle can get anywhere close to that, and I don't even know if the molecules would be that small.
- msandford 11y ago
  If you played it with a laser, maybe. But I suspect that as soon as the needle's been over it a few times it's polished any of the really fine details right off. These machines exist, but they are NOT cheap. http://elpj.com/ltfeaturesandspecs/ http://elpj.com/ltfeaturesandspecs/

bweitzman 11y ago

~44kHz is actually pretty ideal, anything significantly higher can actually be harmful to the audio quality: http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

msandford 11y ago
> All signals with content entirely below the Nyquist frequency (half the sampling rate) are captured perfectly and completely by sampling. Not even close to the truth. It captures the presence of the signal, but only through blind luck does it capture the correct amplitude of the signal. Why? The phase angle of the signal versus the phase angle of the sampler actually matter as you approach the Nyquist frequency. Why is this? You have a sine wave. You sample it once at the top, and once at the bottom, which is just in line with Nyquist. Perfect. This is because your sampling phase angle and your signal phase angle are aligned so that you get accurate amplitude. But what if you then shift the relative phase angles by 90 degrees? Suddenly your signal is gone completely! Because you happen to be sampling when the sine wave is crossing zero. This is the inaccurate amplitude I talked about earlier. The range of amplitudes is between 0 and the real amplitude. But if you 2x oversample instead of using the Nyquist frequency, what's the worst-case scenario? You sample at 45, 135, 215 and 305 degrees and don't quite capture the full amplitude of the signal. But at this point you're off by at most 30% or so. And of course it might be spot on, but the max error is 30%. Now what happens when you 4x oversample? The max possible error goes down again. People who suggest that 192kHz audio is worse than 44.1kHz or 48kHz need further education in actual signal processing. Also using equipment that was designed to properly low-pass the 192kHz DAC output properly (you don't really need to do this with 44.1!) would eliminate the theoretical problems that are outlined in the article.
- bweitzman 11y ago
  I don't know enough about DSP to get into a debate about this, but I'm going to trust that Monty, who is one of the foremost experts on digital audio, is correct with what he's talking about. Plus the wikipedia article on the nyquist-shannon sampling theorem [0] suggests the same. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli...