5 ms·

The funky EQ is the RIAA curve[1] - by essentially rolling off the bass and boosting the treble you can fit more on a disc, it attenuates some of the clicks and

The funky EQ is the RIAA curve[1] - by essentially rolling off the bass and boosting the treble you can fit more on a disc, it attenuates some of the clicks and pops and is kinder on the vinyl and needle. It's trivial to invert in software, and as another response points out, there is indeed a working laser record player - although the record needs to be extensively cleaned before playback or it doesn't work very well. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization

dehrmann 6y ago
This is part of what people hear when they say "vinyl sounds better."
- andrewzah 6y ago
  That doesn't make any sense. RIAA EQ is a serialization format, that is then decoded by your audio equipment. That's what the phono jack is for on a receiver, pre-amp, etc. What people "hear" regarding LPs is generally their biases + their particular analog setup. My setup is going to sound totally different than yours, regardless if it's from a CD or an LP. There are some cases where an LP had a better -master- than a CD for the same release, but that is due to the publisher/owner of the master tracks and not the actual medium itself.
  - Yaa101 6y ago
    I found out when digitizing vinyl that LP's before 1977, when digital mixing and mastering was not the norm that there is more data in the frequencies between 20 and 50kHz. I do my recording standard at 192kHz and analogue LP's often reach 48kHz of data while digital mastered ones do only 22kHz. After that date often the frequency is cutoff at 20-22kHz, probably to save memory room. Only after 2000-2010 there is enough memory to record at insane sample rates and bits per sample. Most awful are cds having only 16 bits and 41kHz sample rate, by modern standards really poor.
    - andrewzah 6y ago
      "Most awful are cds having only 16 bits and 41kHz sample rate, by modern standards really poor." 44.1kHz is all that one needs for -perfect fidelity-, given that humans cannot hear higher than ~20kHz. See: Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem. [0] 16 bits of quantization gives a Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) of 96dB, and noise dithering increases that [1]. More bits are not necessary unless one is doing music production with that audio and warrants the extra headroom, before mixing back to 44.1kHz/16bit for distribution. [1] The only thing that higher bits/sampling rates do for a listener is waste CD and drive space, so it is odd to lament 44.1kHz/16bit as being "really poor". Even if your speaker setup can actually output extremely high frequencies, only your dog will be able to hear it... [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20181109203430/https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html https://web.archive.org/web/20181109203430/https://people.xi...
      - kurlberg 6y ago
        There is an extremely nice "Digital show and tell" video by Monty at https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml (part 1 at https://xiph.org/video/vid1.shtml https://xiph.org/video/vid1.shtml is also very well worth watching.)
      - h2odragon 6y ago
        Some humans can hear much higher than 20khz. Very little of our recording and playback equipment does well above that point, however, so efforts to reproduce that part of the spectrum most often fail miserably. CD's are certainly good enough for now.
        pezezin 6y ago
        The only source I could find about humans hearing above 20 kHz is this paper reporting that some people could detect tones up to 28 kHz: https://asa.scitation.org/doi/10.1121/1.2761883 https://asa.scitation.org/doi/10.1121/1.2761883 But that is for a pure tone under perfect laboratory conditions. Also, they report that the minimum hearing threshold at those frequencies was above 90 dB. So I don't think any human in this planet can actually hear anything above 20 kHz under normal circumstances, much less for music.
- bluGill 6y ago
  There are one of several things. Most likely, CDs just don't get mastered right. The music is compressed and so even though the format is better, the music is worse. Vinyl is sold to people who care about sound, in their living rooms so they get better mastering. Digital is for people out and about, in your car you need compression even though it destroyes the music you can't even hear 3/4ths of the sound without it. This isn't the fault of the format, but the result remains, digital music is objectively worse. Vinyl is able to get a slightly better S/N ratio in perfect conditions. So if the record is new it might be better (every time you play the record you wear it just a bit). Odds are it isn't, as almost nothing has enough dynamic range for this to matter. They are used to worse sound and prefer it. CDs are perfect - vinyl often introduces imperfections that people like to hear. By objective measurements the music isn't perfect, but they like that imperfection. Most likely it is the first. It is by far the most significant difference.
  - andrewzah 6y ago
    "Vinyl is able to get a slightly better S/N ratio in perfect conditions." No. Compact Discs have an SNR of 96dB. Vinyl typically has an SNR of 60-70dB. The physics of these mediums aside, CDs are a newer technology... Why would we have gone for inferior distribution mediums? "Most likely, CDs just don't get mastered right. The music is compressed and so even though the format is better, the music is worse" Compression like that has more to do with radio play + the genre of music. Thankfully, the loudness wars are mostly over, but generally speaking the actual distributed master would've been the same. "This isn't the fault of the format, but the result remains, digital music is objectively worse." Please provide such objective citations. Mixing and mastering engineers do their best to make music that sounds good on a variety of audio systems. When I worked in a studio, we would mix on $8k genelec monitors, some cheaper monitors, and also test the mix in our cars and on our phones. Part of the art and difficulties in that was producing a mix that sounded good on great to average systems, and passable/decent on like mono phone speakers. Music and music hardware has never been more accessible than today, so I find it hard to believe that everyone a few decades ago had such amazing systems compared to today. "Vinyl is sold to people who care about sound" Citation needed. There are people who just want vinyl because it looks cool (especially the colored limited releases), and they go play it on a $50 Victrola all-in-one. There are CD enthusiasts who have systems worth > $200k. "CDs are perfect - vinyl often introduces imperfections that people like to hear." This is totally subjective. A CD is a bit-for-bit perfect representation of what the author wanted to distribute. The actual things like "warmth" that people talk about depend much more on the pre-amplifier, amplifier, and speakers. There is nothing wrong with liking LPs (I collect them myself), but they are in no way, shape, or form better than the bit-for-bit perfect distribution of CDs (that also don't degrade every time you play one).

dehrmann 6y ago

This is part of what people hear when they say "vinyl sounds better."

andrewzah 6y ago
That doesn't make any sense. RIAA EQ is a serialization format, that is then decoded by your audio equipment. That's what the phono jack is for on a receiver, pre-amp, etc. What people "hear" regarding LPs is generally their biases + their particular analog setup. My setup is going to sound totally different than yours, regardless if it's from a CD or an LP. There are some cases where an LP had a better -master- than a CD for the same release, but that is due to the publisher/owner of the master tracks and not the actual medium itself.
- Yaa101 6y ago
  I found out when digitizing vinyl that LP's before 1977, when digital mixing and mastering was not the norm that there is more data in the frequencies between 20 and 50kHz. I do my recording standard at 192kHz and analogue LP's often reach 48kHz of data while digital mastered ones do only 22kHz. After that date often the frequency is cutoff at 20-22kHz, probably to save memory room. Only after 2000-2010 there is enough memory to record at insane sample rates and bits per sample. Most awful are cds having only 16 bits and 41kHz sample rate, by modern standards really poor.
  - andrewzah 6y ago
    "Most awful are cds having only 16 bits and 41kHz sample rate, by modern standards really poor." 44.1kHz is all that one needs for -perfect fidelity-, given that humans cannot hear higher than ~20kHz. See: Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem. [0] 16 bits of quantization gives a Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) of 96dB, and noise dithering increases that [1]. More bits are not necessary unless one is doing music production with that audio and warrants the extra headroom, before mixing back to 44.1kHz/16bit for distribution. [1] The only thing that higher bits/sampling rates do for a listener is waste CD and drive space, so it is odd to lament 44.1kHz/16bit as being "really poor". Even if your speaker setup can actually output extremely high frequencies, only your dog will be able to hear it... [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20181109203430/https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html https://web.archive.org/web/20181109203430/https://people.xi...
    - kurlberg 6y ago
      There is an extremely nice "Digital show and tell" video by Monty at https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml (part 1 at https://xiph.org/video/vid1.shtml https://xiph.org/video/vid1.shtml is also very well worth watching.)
    - h2odragon 6y ago
      Some humans can hear much higher than 20khz. Very little of our recording and playback equipment does well above that point, however, so efforts to reproduce that part of the spectrum most often fail miserably. CD's are certainly good enough for now.
      - pezezin 6y ago
        The only source I could find about humans hearing above 20 kHz is this paper reporting that some people could detect tones up to 28 kHz: https://asa.scitation.org/doi/10.1121/1.2761883 https://asa.scitation.org/doi/10.1121/1.2761883 But that is for a pure tone under perfect laboratory conditions. Also, they report that the minimum hearing threshold at those frequencies was above 90 dB. So I don't think any human in this planet can actually hear anything above 20 kHz under normal circumstances, much less for music.
bluGill 6y ago
There are one of several things. Most likely, CDs just don't get mastered right. The music is compressed and so even though the format is better, the music is worse. Vinyl is sold to people who care about sound, in their living rooms so they get better mastering. Digital is for people out and about, in your car you need compression even though it destroyes the music you can't even hear 3/4ths of the sound without it. This isn't the fault of the format, but the result remains, digital music is objectively worse. Vinyl is able to get a slightly better S/N ratio in perfect conditions. So if the record is new it might be better (every time you play the record you wear it just a bit). Odds are it isn't, as almost nothing has enough dynamic range for this to matter. They are used to worse sound and prefer it. CDs are perfect - vinyl often introduces imperfections that people like to hear. By objective measurements the music isn't perfect, but they like that imperfection. Most likely it is the first. It is by far the most significant difference.
- andrewzah 6y ago
  "Vinyl is able to get a slightly better S/N ratio in perfect conditions." No. Compact Discs have an SNR of 96dB. Vinyl typically has an SNR of 60-70dB. The physics of these mediums aside, CDs are a newer technology... Why would we have gone for inferior distribution mediums? "Most likely, CDs just don't get mastered right. The music is compressed and so even though the format is better, the music is worse" Compression like that has more to do with radio play + the genre of music. Thankfully, the loudness wars are mostly over, but generally speaking the actual distributed master would've been the same. "This isn't the fault of the format, but the result remains, digital music is objectively worse." Please provide such objective citations. Mixing and mastering engineers do their best to make music that sounds good on a variety of audio systems. When I worked in a studio, we would mix on $8k genelec monitors, some cheaper monitors, and also test the mix in our cars and on our phones. Part of the art and difficulties in that was producing a mix that sounded good on great to average systems, and passable/decent on like mono phone speakers. Music and music hardware has never been more accessible than today, so I find it hard to believe that everyone a few decades ago had such amazing systems compared to today. "Vinyl is sold to people who care about sound" Citation needed. There are people who just want vinyl because it looks cool (especially the colored limited releases), and they go play it on a $50 Victrola all-in-one. There are CD enthusiasts who have systems worth > $200k. "CDs are perfect - vinyl often introduces imperfections that people like to hear." This is totally subjective. A CD is a bit-for-bit perfect representation of what the author wanted to distribute. The actual things like "warmth" that people talk about depend much more on the pre-amplifier, amplifier, and speakers. There is nothing wrong with liking LPs (I collect them myself), but they are in no way, shape, or form better than the bit-for-bit perfect distribution of CDs (that also don't degrade every time you play one).