9 ms·

If only there were a durable music format that had absolute perfect quality, didn't need special handling, no DRM, no compression artifacts, was stereo, and han

If only there were a durable music format that had absolute perfect quality, didn't need special handling, no DRM, no compression artifacts, was stereo, and handled frequencies all the way down and all the way up to where humans can hear. Oh, the CD!

electrograv 7y ago
I agree that if we’re pursuing sheer audio fidelity, CD quality is objectively superior to vinyl in every way. However (as others mention), many vinyl listeners are not after objective sound fidelity perfection: For them, the flaws are part of their “retro” charm. However, one note about CD quality — it may not be as perfect as you think! A peer-reviewed meta-analysis has shown that humans can hear the difference between CD quality (44khz/16bit) and “high-res audio” recordings (e.g. 192khz/24bit)! The perceptual difference is relatively small, but measurable (assuming high quality speakers and signal chain): https://phys.org/news/2016-06-people-difference-high-resolution-audio.html https://phys.org/news/2016-06-people-difference-high-resolut... I doubt 44khz sampling rate is a problem, but fixed point 16 bits per sample does seem fairly constraining, given how our perception of linear audio loudness corresponds to exponential increases in signal strength. Also, if anyone tries to test it yourself, beware that it is actually quite hard to do so properly: 1. Any listening tests in a web browser will just resample to CD quality automatically anyway, because they just play into your OS’s shared audio mixing system, which mixes all audio sources before they reach your DAC, which usually resamples them all to CD quality in this process. 2. The above point applies to ANY app that doesn’t take exclusive control over your PC’s audio output capability, and even then there are many pitfalls where you can almost accidentally trigger a default CD quality resampling stage somewhere in the pipeline. 3. Be careful to ensure the audio file you’re playing wasn’t just a regular CD quality file that was simply upsampled to 192/24 or whatever high res rate it claims to be. Sadly, this happens a lot. Your audio file MUST be recorded AND mastered (edited) in the studio at every stage using high res formats. 4. Make sure your audio signal path doesn’t have any components introducing dynamic range (loudness) compression (many default to this, these days), or any other resampling, equalization, etc. stages. 5. Your DAC may not even support anything higher than 44/16 data streams, so resampling may be inevitable! 6. Make sure you played the audio samples on extremely high quality speakers (often costing many thousands of dollars, making this whole point moot/irrelevant for most people anyway). The vast majority of consumer headphones and speakers can’t render a low vs high bitrate MP3 very differently, let alone the subtle differences we’re talking about here.
- cosmotic 7y ago
  Agreed; The default signal processing and lack of transparency on the sample rate and depth conversions through the whole system are a pretty frustrating aspect. The dust/scratch factor of vinyl has a much bigger impact than 16 vs 24bit or much of the signal processing issues.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  Do you know where to find the actual meta analysis that article is talking about? They mention the journal, but not the title. I'm not really sure what their criteria were. To me, it would seem that in order to compare the two, you would basically need to resample the 24/192 recording, with dither, and then resample it back to 24/192; and you would need to choose a high quality resampling filter. Anything other than that I wouldn't really consider a comparison. Furthermore, given that the measured sensitivity is more likely on the frequency front than on the dynamic range front, did they establish a distinction between 44.1kHz and 48kHz?
  - ddeck 7y ago
    The study is here: (pdf) https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/13493/Reiss%20A%20Meta-Analysis%20of%20High%20Resolution%202016%20Published.pdf https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/134...
    - microcolonel 7y ago
      Thank you! It really is interesting, it seems like there's an opening for a better-designed experiment. Wonder if there's anyone at the local universities interested in that sort of thing.
- archontes 7y ago
  In addition to this, audio engineers mastering albums often have different masters for vinyl vs. CD resulting in different dynamic ranges. It's not just a matter of reproduction. Humans make the products different.
TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
> durable ... Oh, the CD! In my experience CD’s are anything but durable.
- jonhohle 7y ago
  I have CDs from the early 90s that still play fine. I have vinyl from the 70s that plays fine as well. I can resurface the CDs, not so much the vinyl.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
    If we’ve got data, let’s go with the data. If all we’ve got is opinions, let’s go with mine: None of the CDs I’ve ever bought still works. I’m probably not as careful with my things as you are, so there’s that.
    - jonhohle 7y ago
      Your original comment was of your experience, so I shared mine. Unfortunately, due to manufacturing defects there are discs that will or have oxidized, so the durability of CDs (or other optical media) is not always as reliable as advertised. But as the sibling post to yours points out, CDs provide error correction and along with oversampling provides means of creating effectively bit perfect copies that can be as durable as the current state of the art (redundant, solid state, geographically diverse, etc.)
  - Godel_unicode 7y ago
    You can also make an infinite number of perfect replicas of your CDs. You can carry backups of every CD ever made on a flashdrive that fits in your jeans pocket, then recreate any of them at any time with no degradation in quality. There are some quasi-plausible arguments for vinyl, but arguing that durability is one of them is hilariously myopic.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
voldacar 7y ago
What does this comment add to the conversation here?
lagadu 7y ago
CD quality isn't that good (sample rate is fine, bitrate isn't) and it definitely has compression artifacts at the low end but that's a nitpick. That said, the biggest problem with the CD is that good CD transports are few and far between and pretty much all CD players have garbage-tier DAC implementations. edit: to be clear, a CD will have far more resolution and technical capacity available than a vinyl ever will, I'm just saying that CDs have their own issues and aren't perfect.
- simias 7y ago
  You'd have to come up with a good source to convince me that 16bits per sample is not good enough for consumer audio (or that you could tell the difference even in perfect conditions. So might be able to hear it, the vast majority of people won't) but beyond that it doesn't really matter in this discussion because vinyls have a much worse fidelity. If you sample vinyl audio at more than 16bits you'll just be sampling noise anyway. >pretty much all CD players have garbage-tier DAC implementations. A true audiophile I see, anything consumer-grade is "garbage" in order to justify the purchase of ridiculously overpriced equipment. The truth is that it's very cheap to design a decent quality DAC or ADC these days, mainly thanks to digital processing and the fact that those chips are made in huge quantities. Digital filters are high quality these days and the use of oversampling makes it a lot easier to design good analog filters. Audiophiles are very hard to take seriously because the hobby is 95% snake oil and 5% reasonable engineering. I'm sorry if you're part of the 5% and I overreacted but it's one of these hot buttons for me. I've spent so much time arguing with people that, no, it made to mathematical sense to want 32bit samples or 160kHz audio...
  - lagadu 7y ago
    > A true audiophile I see, anything consumer-grade is "garbage" in order to justify the purchase of ridiculously overpriced equipment. Actually I'm rather fond of the $80 SDAC and it stands tall among other, more expensive stuff I have (I'm listening to it as type this in fact). It's miles ahead of any CD player DAC. Seriously, a CD transport into a cheap DAC will sound very noticeably better. Admittedly I've only sampled about a dozen or so supposedly good players and eventually lost interest so it's not a big sample pool. I'm with you in that I also agree that it's dumb how most amplitude-signal DACs market "32bit/768khz" despite that sample rate being effectively useless and the noise floor in DS chips being at around ~20 bits worth of resolution and that's a best case scenario. edit: honestly when it comes to amps and dacs, in my experience, there is no spec or measurement that correlates with how good it sounds so with those I pretty much gave up on anything other than my ears.
deadbunny 7y ago
CDs are durable and don't need special handling? Pull the other one.
bitwize 7y ago
Sorry, but if you want your music to sound like God, it's analog from mic to speakers or GTFO.

electrograv 7y ago

I agree that if we’re pursuing sheer audio fidelity, CD quality is objectively superior to vinyl in every way. However (as others mention), many vinyl listeners are not after objective sound fidelity perfection: For them, the flaws are part of their “retro” charm. However, one note about CD quality — it may not be as perfect as you think! A peer-reviewed meta-analysis has shown that humans can hear the difference between CD quality (44khz/16bit) and “high-res audio” recordings (e.g. 192khz/24bit)! The perceptual difference is relatively small, but measurable (assuming high quality speakers and signal chain): https://phys.org/news/2016-06-people-difference-high-resolution-audio.html https://phys.org/news/2016-06-people-difference-high-resolut... I doubt 44khz sampling rate is a problem, but fixed point 16 bits per sample does seem fairly constraining, given how our perception of linear audio loudness corresponds to exponential increases in signal strength. Also, if anyone tries to test it yourself, beware that it is actually quite hard to do so properly: 1. Any listening tests in a web browser will just resample to CD quality automatically anyway, because they just play into your OS’s shared audio mixing system, which mixes all audio sources before they reach your DAC, which usually resamples them all to CD quality in this process. 2. The above point applies to ANY app that doesn’t take exclusive control over your PC’s audio output capability, and even then there are many pitfalls where you can almost accidentally trigger a default CD quality resampling stage somewhere in the pipeline. 3. Be careful to ensure the audio file you’re playing wasn’t just a regular CD quality file that was simply upsampled to 192/24 or whatever high res rate it claims to be. Sadly, this happens a lot. Your audio file MUST be recorded AND mastered (edited) in the studio at every stage using high res formats. 4. Make sure your audio signal path doesn’t have any components introducing dynamic range (loudness) compression (many default to this, these days), or any other resampling, equalization, etc. stages. 5. Your DAC may not even support anything higher than 44/16 data streams, so resampling may be inevitable! 6. Make sure you played the audio samples on extremely high quality speakers (often costing many thousands of dollars, making this whole point moot/irrelevant for most people anyway). The vast majority of consumer headphones and speakers can’t render a low vs high bitrate MP3 very differently, let alone the subtle differences we’re talking about here.

cosmotic 7y ago
Agreed; The default signal processing and lack of transparency on the sample rate and depth conversions through the whole system are a pretty frustrating aspect. The dust/scratch factor of vinyl has a much bigger impact than 16 vs 24bit or much of the signal processing issues.
microcolonel 7y ago
Do you know where to find the actual meta analysis that article is talking about? They mention the journal, but not the title. I'm not really sure what their criteria were. To me, it would seem that in order to compare the two, you would basically need to resample the 24/192 recording, with dither, and then resample it back to 24/192; and you would need to choose a high quality resampling filter. Anything other than that I wouldn't really consider a comparison. Furthermore, given that the measured sensitivity is more likely on the frequency front than on the dynamic range front, did they establish a distinction between 44.1kHz and 48kHz?
- ddeck 7y ago
  The study is here: (pdf) https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/13493/Reiss%20A%20Meta-Analysis%20of%20High%20Resolution%202016%20Published.pdf https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/134...
  - microcolonel 7y ago
    Thank you! It really is interesting, it seems like there's an opening for a better-designed experiment. Wonder if there's anyone at the local universities interested in that sort of thing.
archontes 7y ago
In addition to this, audio engineers mastering albums often have different masters for vinyl vs. CD resulting in different dynamic ranges. It's not just a matter of reproduction. Humans make the products different.

TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago

> durable ... Oh, the CD! In my experience CD’s are anything but durable.

jonhohle 7y ago
I have CDs from the early 90s that still play fine. I have vinyl from the 70s that plays fine as well. I can resurface the CDs, not so much the vinyl.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
  If we’ve got data, let’s go with the data. If all we’ve got is opinions, let’s go with mine: None of the CDs I’ve ever bought still works. I’m probably not as careful with my things as you are, so there’s that.
  - jonhohle 7y ago
    Your original comment was of your experience, so I shared mine. Unfortunately, due to manufacturing defects there are discs that will or have oxidized, so the durability of CDs (or other optical media) is not always as reliable as advertised. But as the sibling post to yours points out, CDs provide error correction and along with oversampling provides means of creating effectively bit perfect copies that can be as durable as the current state of the art (redundant, solid state, geographically diverse, etc.)
- Godel_unicode 7y ago
  You can also make an infinite number of perfect replicas of your CDs. You can carry backups of every CD ever made on a flashdrive that fits in your jeans pocket, then recreate any of them at any time with no degradation in quality. There are some quasi-plausible arguments for vinyl, but arguing that durability is one of them is hilariously myopic.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]

voldacar 7y ago

What does this comment add to the conversation here?

lagadu 7y ago

CD quality isn't that good (sample rate is fine, bitrate isn't) and it definitely has compression artifacts at the low end but that's a nitpick. That said, the biggest problem with the CD is that good CD transports are few and far between and pretty much all CD players have garbage-tier DAC implementations. edit: to be clear, a CD will have far more resolution and technical capacity available than a vinyl ever will, I'm just saying that CDs have their own issues and aren't perfect.

simias 7y ago
You'd have to come up with a good source to convince me that 16bits per sample is not good enough for consumer audio (or that you could tell the difference even in perfect conditions. So might be able to hear it, the vast majority of people won't) but beyond that it doesn't really matter in this discussion because vinyls have a much worse fidelity. If you sample vinyl audio at more than 16bits you'll just be sampling noise anyway. >pretty much all CD players have garbage-tier DAC implementations. A true audiophile I see, anything consumer-grade is "garbage" in order to justify the purchase of ridiculously overpriced equipment. The truth is that it's very cheap to design a decent quality DAC or ADC these days, mainly thanks to digital processing and the fact that those chips are made in huge quantities. Digital filters are high quality these days and the use of oversampling makes it a lot easier to design good analog filters. Audiophiles are very hard to take seriously because the hobby is 95% snake oil and 5% reasonable engineering. I'm sorry if you're part of the 5% and I overreacted but it's one of these hot buttons for me. I've spent so much time arguing with people that, no, it made to mathematical sense to want 32bit samples or 160kHz audio...
- lagadu 7y ago
  > A true audiophile I see, anything consumer-grade is "garbage" in order to justify the purchase of ridiculously overpriced equipment. Actually I'm rather fond of the $80 SDAC and it stands tall among other, more expensive stuff I have (I'm listening to it as type this in fact). It's miles ahead of any CD player DAC. Seriously, a CD transport into a cheap DAC will sound very noticeably better. Admittedly I've only sampled about a dozen or so supposedly good players and eventually lost interest so it's not a big sample pool. I'm with you in that I also agree that it's dumb how most amplitude-signal DACs market "32bit/768khz" despite that sample rate being effectively useless and the noise floor in DS chips being at around ~20 bits worth of resolution and that's a best case scenario. edit: honestly when it comes to amps and dacs, in my experience, there is no spec or measurement that correlates with how good it sounds so with those I pretty much gave up on anything other than my ears.

deadbunny 7y ago

CDs are durable and don't need special handling? Pull the other one.

bitwize 7y ago

Sorry, but if you want your music to sound like God, it's analog from mic to speakers or GTFO.