4 ms·

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

by 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/

by earlz 11y ago

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/