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I never understood the hype for vinyl records -- they aren't that much better than CDs when compared to shellac...

by dukoid 7y ago

blattimwind 7y ago
Vinyl is better than CDs?
- dukoid 7y ago
  It has to be for some people in some aspect, otherwise there wouldn't be any demand?
  - KozmoNau7 7y ago
    Nostalgia and the visceral tactile experience of the playback ritual. Anyone who claims it's about sound quality is deluding themselves.
numpad0 7y ago
CD is way overrated. Terrible, even. Like, if you compare film to digital photography, but film was represented by ISO160 monochromatic Kodak, and all the digital photographic technology was represented by a 640x480 prototype camera from 2001, instead of a RED or even a yesteryear phone, then it’ll be immediately obvious that analog far outperforms digital full stop. That’s how vinyl remains “superior”. CD is terrible, not digital quantization playback in general, but because it represents “digital” somehow anyway, analog wins.
- sterwill 7y ago
  This doesn't make any sense. You haven't explained how CD is "terrible"; you just made some comparison to an obsolete digital camera. You put the CD in, press play, and a nearly perfect representation of the source signal with enormous dynamic range and clarity comes out of your DAC. How is this like a 20 year-old digital camera?
  - sterwill 7y ago
    The more I think about it, the better metaphor is: CD is the RED 32K camera from 2025 whose product is video indistinguishable from seeing it with your own eyes, but it came out in 1982 and all the theaters can project it.
  - numpad0 7y ago
    Well, at very least, Compact Disc is a 1980 standard... not like 20 years old, more like 40 years old. I don't understand why statement like above is met with a response like yours. It's a shitty '80s format that beat vinyl in affordability, why defend it as if CD is the pinnacle of digital recording technology? It is not, never was. Just say yeah CD sucks you gotta try DSD, and move on. Anecdotal but I feel some sort of acoustic 'odor' to CD, that no other digital formats have: CD rips and even CD-DSD conversion has distinct tone that tells the data had been on a disc. Something's wrong with the standard and/or its mastering.
    - cormacrelf 7y ago
      CD may be 40 years old, but human ears didn't change at all in that time. If you can tell CD from other recordings, it is almost certainly because the mastering (which is not something intrinsic to the standard) was deliberately changed for CD because it could reproduce sound better, so no format-specific mastering hacks were needed to make it sound good. Face it, you don't have golden ears. For example, if a studio today were to master something for cassette, it would dramatically turn up the high end to compensate and probably bypass some saturation or exciters because the format has its own. Similarly, any studio not tweaking their masters for the perfection of CD was probably doing the material a disservice. Heck, today, some tracks are deliberately mastered to sound good on iPhone earbuds. (The usual article cited in these discussions is https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html, which happens to make this point briefly under "Different media, different master" and "Better masters". Edit: another fun article is https://www.soundguys.com/high-bitrate-audio-is-overkill-cd-quality-is-still-great-16518/ https://www.soundguys.com/high-bitrate-audio-is-overkill-cd-..., with the fantastic pull quote, "There is no safe listening level to hear the difference between these files".) CD doesn't need to be the pinnacle of digital technology, because our ears don't know any different beyond it.
- toast0 7y ago
  If you were to redo CD today, really the biggest change would probably be upping to 48kHz, not that it makes a noticable difference, but to better align with DVD (also 48k) and digital telephone (8k) to avoid sampling jitter when playing across other formats. Possibly actually supporting 4-channel audio (it's in redbook, but afaik, unused) and adding 1-channel audio so you could have longer audiobooks.
  - KozmoNau7 7y ago
    Standardizing everything to 48kHz and then scale down in clean multiples of 8 would be the logical way to do it. Offering more than 2 channels in a pure audio format has been tried countless times and failed every time. It doesn't do anything for headphones, and surround-mixed music has always been a gimmick at best. 1-channel can already be done on existing CDs, the left and right channels are fully discrete and can each contain a separate mono track. This trick was used on VCDs, to have two different languages on the same disc. The player can be set to only play one channel. Here's a Techmoan video about using two mono tracks to squeeze twice the amount of music onto a CD: https://youtu.be/5fG1crhGqI0 https://youtu.be/5fG1crhGqI0

I never understood the hype for vinyl records -- they aren't that much better than CDs when compared to shellac...

by dukoid 7y ago

I never understood the hype for vinyl records -- they aren't that much better than CDs when compared to shellac...

blattimwind 7y ago

Vinyl is better than CDs?

dukoid 7y ago
It has to be for some people in some aspect, otherwise there wouldn't be any demand?
- KozmoNau7 7y ago
  Nostalgia and the visceral tactile experience of the playback ritual. Anyone who claims it's about sound quality is deluding themselves.

numpad0 7y ago

CD is way overrated. Terrible, even. Like, if you compare film to digital photography, but film was represented by ISO160 monochromatic Kodak, and all the digital photographic technology was represented by a 640x480 prototype camera from 2001, instead of a RED or even a yesteryear phone, then it’ll be immediately obvious that analog far outperforms digital full stop. That’s how vinyl remains “superior”. CD is terrible, not digital quantization playback in general, but because it represents “digital” somehow anyway, analog wins.

sterwill 7y ago
This doesn't make any sense. You haven't explained how CD is "terrible"; you just made some comparison to an obsolete digital camera. You put the CD in, press play, and a nearly perfect representation of the source signal with enormous dynamic range and clarity comes out of your DAC. How is this like a 20 year-old digital camera?
- sterwill 7y ago
  The more I think about it, the better metaphor is: CD is the RED 32K camera from 2025 whose product is video indistinguishable from seeing it with your own eyes, but it came out in 1982 and all the theaters can project it.
- numpad0 7y ago
  Well, at very least, Compact Disc is a 1980 standard... not like 20 years old, more like 40 years old. I don't understand why statement like above is met with a response like yours. It's a shitty '80s format that beat vinyl in affordability, why defend it as if CD is the pinnacle of digital recording technology? It is not, never was. Just say yeah CD sucks you gotta try DSD, and move on. Anecdotal but I feel some sort of acoustic 'odor' to CD, that no other digital formats have: CD rips and even CD-DSD conversion has distinct tone that tells the data had been on a disc. Something's wrong with the standard and/or its mastering.
  - cormacrelf 7y ago
    CD may be 40 years old, but human ears didn't change at all in that time. If you can tell CD from other recordings, it is almost certainly because the mastering (which is not something intrinsic to the standard) was deliberately changed for CD because it could reproduce sound better, so no format-specific mastering hacks were needed to make it sound good. Face it, you don't have golden ears. For example, if a studio today were to master something for cassette, it would dramatically turn up the high end to compensate and probably bypass some saturation or exciters because the format has its own. Similarly, any studio not tweaking their masters for the perfection of CD was probably doing the material a disservice. Heck, today, some tracks are deliberately mastered to sound good on iPhone earbuds. (The usual article cited in these discussions is https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html, which happens to make this point briefly under "Different media, different master" and "Better masters". Edit: another fun article is https://www.soundguys.com/high-bitrate-audio-is-overkill-cd-quality-is-still-great-16518/ https://www.soundguys.com/high-bitrate-audio-is-overkill-cd-..., with the fantastic pull quote, "There is no safe listening level to hear the difference between these files".) CD doesn't need to be the pinnacle of digital technology, because our ears don't know any different beyond it.
toast0 7y ago
If you were to redo CD today, really the biggest change would probably be upping to 48kHz, not that it makes a noticable difference, but to better align with DVD (also 48k) and digital telephone (8k) to avoid sampling jitter when playing across other formats. Possibly actually supporting 4-channel audio (it's in redbook, but afaik, unused) and adding 1-channel audio so you could have longer audiobooks.
- KozmoNau7 7y ago
  Standardizing everything to 48kHz and then scale down in clean multiples of 8 would be the logical way to do it. Offering more than 2 channels in a pure audio format has been tried countless times and failed every time. It doesn't do anything for headphones, and surround-mixed music has always been a gimmick at best. 1-channel can already be done on existing CDs, the left and right channels are fully discrete and can each contain a separate mono track. This trick was used on VCDs, to have two different languages on the same disc. The player can be set to only play one channel. Here's a Techmoan video about using two mono tracks to squeeze twice the amount of music onto a CD: https://youtu.be/5fG1crhGqI0 https://youtu.be/5fG1crhGqI0