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Hah. Hah. Most people talking about "accurate" have no idea wtf they're talking about. I'm a musician, and I've produced records. At best, vinyl vs digital rep

by beat 10y ago

Hah. Hah. Most people talking about "accurate" have no idea wtf they're talking about. I'm a musician, and I've produced records. At best, vinyl vs digital reproduction aren't "better" than one another, just different. But personally, I think vinyl can be more true to the music. Start with dynamic range, since that's one of the spots where the "But it's more accurate!" people get it wrong. In theory, cd has far more dynamic range than vinyl. In practice, it has great deal less! This is a result of modern "loudness war" mastering. Most modern albums have less than 6db of actual dynamic range. Listen to something with more range than that, and it sounds flat and lifeless. Vinyl is usually mastered with significantly more dynamic range, but sounds more open and breathy - the way more dynamic range should sound. And why is this? Because either way, most audio reproduction equipment is in no way able to reproduce the sound of instruments in an "accurate" way. You cannot shove the massive sound of a 100 watt Marshall stack through a pair of iPod earbuds, any more than you can look accurately at the Grand Canyon through a pinhole. So records are a miniature of a real sound. The entire recording, mixing, and mastering process is built around trying to capture the essence, the spirit of the original sound (or an ideal sound) in a way that can be reproduced on car stereos, cheap headphones, and the like. And the sound itself isn't exactly accurate, not on a record where the acoustic guitar is as loud as the drum kit! Accuracy. Hah.

Nition 10y ago
I'm in audio too, and while what you say is true, it feels kind of like saying digital photography is worse than film if everyone's shooting with their exposure set five stops up. Then you can say "digital's clearly worse - look how blown out it all is!" The loudness war is unfortunate, but a CD can be used properly to have plenty more dynamic range and plenty less noise than a record. There are other benefits to analogue formats though, like soft clipping.
- beat 10y ago
  Well, yeah. But that's a different issue than the "accuracy" line that's brought up by dudes who don't play instruments and have never mixed a song (or alternately, have little experience at professional-level photography and couldn't tell you the three factors of exposure if you asked).
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- thatcat 10y ago
  >There are other benefits to analogue formats though, like soft clipping. Couldnt soft clipping be applied after digitalsignal is converted back to analogue for playback. My NAD amp does this. It seems the major differences are introduced by playback equiptment rather than the storage media itself. Its quite a bit easier to 100% accurately rip a cd, but idk if this is due to some additional metadata saved on the disc (checksums) or just better software existing for imaging cds than for vinyl.
nordsieck 10y ago
"In theory, cd has far more dynamic range than vinyl. In practice, it has great deal less! This is a result of modern "loudness war" mastering. Most modern albums have less than 6db of actual dynamic range. Listen to something with more range than that, and it sounds flat and lifeless. Vinyl is usually mastered with significantly more dynamic range, but sounds more open and breathy - the way more dynamic range should sound." Garbage in, garbage out. What you're really saying is that good masters beat bad masters - nothing to do with vinyl at all. In the context of the larger discussion, this is disingenuous; the return of vinyl means that the new stuff will have the same "loudness war" problems that the digital stuff has. Unless you're claiming that artists are saving a super-duper special master just for their vinyl customers. In a larger sense, this comment exemplifies the fallacy of gray[1]. Just because neither of them are perfectly accurate doesn't mean that CDs aren't more accurate. [1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/mm/the_fallacy_of_gray/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/mm/the_fallacy_of_gray/
- beat 10y ago
  To be absolutely clear here - I don't give two shits about "accurate". I care about reproducing the emotional content of the music. As a musician and a recording engineer, I take this stuff very seriously. I find the arguments for "accurate" to be utter nonsense 99% of the time, completely removed from the experience of music creation by people who have zero experience actually making music. As for the fallacy of gray and the idea of loudness wars in vinyl mastering... nope. Two reasons. First, the loudness wars are a function of competitive reproduction on the radio or television. That competition doesn't really exist in the vinyl world, where listeners tend to listen to an entire album in a sitting. Second, it's not physically viable to make vinyl records much louder than they already are. High RMS volumes can make the needle jump the groove, or introduce a lot of downstream distortion (not the pretty kind). Rather than fallacy of gray, this is more like saying you should eat with a bucket rather than a spoon because a bucket can hold larger bites. It doesn't matter if digital is technically "better" if there's no good way to take advantage of the additional benefits in can provide in practice. (This all said, I'll record in digital rather than on tape, any day. The editing and management benefits are tremendous.)
- Nition 10y ago
tel 10y ago
This same argument has been made forever in photography too. There's no hope for "accuracy". Even if you ignore the obvious facts like 2-dimensional representation and tiny form, even just the light itself is something that is at best interpreted artistically by the photographer. Good photography is about producing a piece of art which represents and evokes a scene the photographer saw. Film is a tool for doing that and the entire process surrounding it influences the choices the photographer/developer/printer makes in their interpretation of the scene. Digital is just another tool and has it's own downsides (its own "loudness war" for that matter, too).

by beat 10y ago

Nition 10y ago

I'm in audio too, and while what you say is true, it feels kind of like saying digital photography is worse than film if everyone's shooting with their exposure set five stops up. Then you can say "digital's clearly worse - look how blown out it all is!" The loudness war is unfortunate, but a CD can be used properly to have plenty more dynamic range and plenty less noise than a record. There are other benefits to analogue formats though, like soft clipping.

beat 10y ago
Well, yeah. But that's a different issue than the "accuracy" line that's brought up by dudes who don't play instruments and have never mixed a song (or alternately, have little experience at professional-level photography and couldn't tell you the three factors of exposure if you asked).
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
thatcat 10y ago
>There are other benefits to analogue formats though, like soft clipping. Couldnt soft clipping be applied after digitalsignal is converted back to analogue for playback. My NAD amp does this. It seems the major differences are introduced by playback equiptment rather than the storage media itself. Its quite a bit easier to 100% accurately rip a cd, but idk if this is due to some additional metadata saved on the disc (checksums) or just better software existing for imaging cds than for vinyl.

nordsieck 10y ago

"In theory, cd has far more dynamic range than vinyl. In practice, it has great deal less! This is a result of modern "loudness war" mastering. Most modern albums have less than 6db of actual dynamic range. Listen to something with more range than that, and it sounds flat and lifeless. Vinyl is usually mastered with significantly more dynamic range, but sounds more open and breathy - the way more dynamic range should sound." Garbage in, garbage out. What you're really saying is that good masters beat bad masters - nothing to do with vinyl at all. In the context of the larger discussion, this is disingenuous; the return of vinyl means that the new stuff will have the same "loudness war" problems that the digital stuff has. Unless you're claiming that artists are saving a super-duper special master just for their vinyl customers. In a larger sense, this comment exemplifies the fallacy of gray[1]. Just because neither of them are perfectly accurate doesn't mean that CDs aren't more accurate. [1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/mm/the_fallacy_of_gray/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/mm/the_fallacy_of_gray/

beat 10y ago
To be absolutely clear here - I don't give two shits about "accurate". I care about reproducing the emotional content of the music. As a musician and a recording engineer, I take this stuff very seriously. I find the arguments for "accurate" to be utter nonsense 99% of the time, completely removed from the experience of music creation by people who have zero experience actually making music. As for the fallacy of gray and the idea of loudness wars in vinyl mastering... nope. Two reasons. First, the loudness wars are a function of competitive reproduction on the radio or television. That competition doesn't really exist in the vinyl world, where listeners tend to listen to an entire album in a sitting. Second, it's not physically viable to make vinyl records much louder than they already are. High RMS volumes can make the needle jump the groove, or introduce a lot of downstream distortion (not the pretty kind). Rather than fallacy of gray, this is more like saying you should eat with a bucket rather than a spoon because a bucket can hold larger bites. It doesn't matter if digital is technically "better" if there's no good way to take advantage of the additional benefits in can provide in practice. (This all said, I'll record in digital rather than on tape, any day. The editing and management benefits are tremendous.)
Nition 10y ago

tel 10y ago

This same argument has been made forever in photography too. There's no hope for "accuracy". Even if you ignore the obvious facts like 2-dimensional representation and tiny form, even just the light itself is something that is at best interpreted artistically by the photographer. Good photography is about producing a piece of art which represents and evokes a scene the photographer saw. Film is a tool for doing that and the entire process surrounding it influences the choices the photographer/developer/printer makes in their interpretation of the scene. Digital is just another tool and has it's own downsides (its own "loudness war" for that matter, too).