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Why do records sound so much better than digital?

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Sal1950

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I think that for some people, vinyl is in effect a way to tune their system to sound right to their ears - something which is not possible with digital unless you use DSP. They are effectively using it as an analog equaliser, a way to add or subtract frequency anomalies, correct for perceived flaws - all to achieve the sound that they want.
It's just as easy to EQ digital in the analog domain post DAC conversion,, it doesn't have to be done digitally.
Just sayin. ;)
 

dlaloum

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Yes. I should have also mentioned that when the record is cut, they apply RIAA equalisation. When it is played back, it is corrected with HOPEFULLY an exact inverse of the filter used. In reality it is probably not an exact match because of the sheer number of cartridges / phono stages / and the near infinite permutations of these combinations along with impedance matching, etc. thereof.

Which brings me to another point I should have added to the post. Vinyl enthusiasts know that certain cartridges sound "brighter" or might have better dynamics, etc. so they mix and match cartridges and play with impedance settings until they get the sound they want. Not to mention adjust the VTA, tracking force, etc. I think that for some people, vinyl is in effect a way to tune their system to sound right to their ears - something which is not possible with digital unless you use DSP. They are effectively using it as an analog equaliser, a way to add or subtract frequency anomalies, correct for perceived flaws - all to achieve the sound that they want.

The problem is not with using cartridges and loading etc... as an EQ, it is the combination of audiophile puritanism, wherein even tone controls on integrated amps and preamps were/are rejected, combined with an ongoing ever changing parade of alternating cables, components, cartridges and cartridge loadings in a search for Nirvana.... effectively an attempt to apply "tone controls" (ie: EQ) without ever calling it what it is.
The hypocrisy of the puritan is universal to all varieties of puritanism - including the audiophile varieties.

And like mackerel in moonlight.... they shine and stink.

And for those interested in authentically playing back irreplaceable recordings from vinyl, it requires a lot of work in tuning the cartridge loading etc... to achieve a proper linear response, to then attempt to reproduce the original recording, as recorded.

And yes - digital EQ makes that potentially much easier!

And yes - the room and the DSP requirements there to achieve the same thing, is a whole other can of worms, and something which remains a bit of a holy grail! (looking forward to the release of Dirac SRC, and the potential it has to get closer to NIrvana)
 

Keith_W

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It's just as easy to EQ digital in the analog domain post DAC conversion,, it doesn't have to be done digitally.
Just sayin. ;)

Yeah, then you get minimum phase behaviour. As the article I linked to above says, it does introduce distortion into your signal, but it's not necessarily a bad thing provided you like that kind of sound.
 

Keith_W

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The problem is not with using cartridges and loading etc... as an EQ, it is the combination of audiophile puritanism, wherein even tone controls on integrated amps and preamps were/are rejected, combined with an ongoing ever changing parade of alternating cables, components, cartridges and cartridge loadings in a search for Nirvana.... effectively an attempt to apply "tone controls" (ie: EQ) without ever calling it what it is.
The hypocrisy of the puritan is universal to all varieties of puritanism - including the audiophile varieties.

You don't think you are an audiophile purist? I mean, all this pursuit of perfect adherence to target curves, low SNR/SINAD, low jitter measurements, all sounds like another form of puritanism to me. I have no issue with purists. I mean, am one myself because the description I just gave applies to me. So if you think i'm a mackerel which shines and stinks, well that's me. And not to mention my other "purist" habits, e.g. using a fountain pen, mechanical watches, wooden furniture, and petrol cars with manual gearboxes. Yes I know that the modern equivalents are better in every respect but I still cling on to all those old things because they are more interesting.
 

dlaloum

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You don't think you are an audiophile purist? I mean, all this pursuit of perfect adherence to target curves, low SNR/SINAD, low jitter measurements, all sounds like another form of puritanism to me. I have no issue with purists. I mean, am one myself because the description I just gave applies to me. So if you think i'm a mackerel which shines and stinks, well that's me. And not to mention my other "purist" habits, e.g. using a fountain pen, mechanical watches, wooden furniture, and petrol cars with manual gearboxes. Yes I know that the modern equivalents are better in every respect but I still cling on to all those old things because they are more interesting.
Well, a purist and a puritan are two differing things...

Puritanism is a beast of a different feather.
 

egellings

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I think that the fiddly nature of vinyl is what makes it attractive. Arms, carts, preamps etc. can be endlessly changed around. With digital, well, it's a shiny object.
 

MattHooper

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Vinyl is a relatively poor facsimile where some of the original intended dynamics of a track get lost.
Been there done all of these parts of the recording process .. it's easy to verify with just an ordinary pair of ears.

I don't discount anyone who has compared vinyl versions vs digital version and found the digital version to sound better. I get that - there's technical reasons why, and have found the same, subjectively, numerous times myself.

It seems that we always have to breach the gap between quantifying and qualifying, though. That is, how "big" or significant a difference this is perceptually will be a more subjective call.

As I've said before, I've compared a number of albums that were carefully produced from the same original master, to produce both the digital and vinyl version.
And I find the technical advantages for digital translate to often very, very small differences, in detail, dynamics, etc. So much so that it seems understandable why one person may prefer the vinyl, another the digital, but in the end...not a big difference.

The larger difference I find is the variation for the vinyl source is bigger - the way vinyl can obviously come with varying degrees of artifacts, background hiss, pops ticks, worn down copies, etc. But in terms of the fundamental capabilities of each medium, when carefully produced...I'm not finding any huge difference.

Speaking as a pianist, analogue is laughable. I never heard an analogue recording, played back on vinyl, which represents a grand piano with enough pitch stability to make it sound credible.

Funny but piano is one of the instruments I found I immediately enjoyed from records. I've never really been very happy with the reproduction of piano. It's so easy for the sound to slip in to this sort of glassy/plastic/plinky glazed sound, and lacking the resonant body of the piano. So it was a surprise to me as a pianist/keyboardist myself (we grew up with 3 pianos in the house, along with many other instruments), I actually found many piano recordings on vinyl quite compelling. While I of course can hear some of the deficits that might drive you more crazy - pitch instability being an obvious one - I'm often able to listen past those to the qualities I like.
 

earlevel

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Without this crosstalk, it's what the producers of the music intended. So, even if crosstalk improves it...should we advocate to music producers to add crosstalk? I don't think so—they produce the sound they want to convey in the studio, I think they'd want to maintain that authority. At best, if you're a person who like increased crosstalk, then I suppose it might be one reason you're attracted to it. (I wonder if there is a market for crosstalk boxes to add this feature to a digital listening environment, or amps/preamps or even DACs with this feature, in order to win back people from vinyl?)
Actually there is a market for crosstalk DSP which are mostly available as VST plugins. If you have playback software capable of hosting VST plugins (e.g. JRiver) some of them are free to try. Most of these plugins are for headphone users, but they also have an effect on your home system. As for a DAC with this feature, there is the RME ADI2 FS. In a home system there is already crosstalk from the speakers and you can adjust the crosstalk by moving and angling the speakers. Adding crosstalk upstream to the speakers seems to have a subtle effect on my system but the result subjectively seems to focus the soundstage more towards the center and reduce the width.

Yes, I've had Nx, then CLA Nx (better), for years. It depends on the mix of the source material whether it's an improvement, a detriment, or just different. It's especially good for mixes that have significant hard left/right elements that depend on the channels mixing in the air to sound right. For instance, Dire Straits' You and Your Friend sounds wrong on headphones, but with the virtualization it's sounds awesome. But, there is a lot more than just crosstalk going on. Anyway, my comments were specific to "what the producers of the music intended", as I noted. Obviously, it's unlikely that those responsible for You and Your Friend feel they made some mistake that needed fixing—even if I like it better with virtualization when listening with headphones.

And there's the other thing—you can't switch off the added crosstalk of vinyl playback. And not everything improves with it, though I don't think it does much damage. ;)

Also, "that to some engineers is too unnatural", how many is "some"? Audio engineers work almost exclusively in digital audio, and I don't think many of them struggle with it due to sounding unnatural. Most talk about how incredibly good their premium converters sound. And if it's the difference between premium and typical, they both would be using linear phase most often, so I doubt it's "minimum phase" that's the secret.
Don't know. The experiment is easy enough to replicate provided you have access to an audio system like mine, where the crossovers are generated in a PC and hosted in a convolution engine. It would take me an hour to make a minimum phase filter instead of the linear phase that I am currently using. TBH I never did do that experiment to hear the difference between minimum and linear phase, I just read that linear is superior, implemented it, and that was that. I should go and set it up and hear for myself what difference there is. To be fair, linear phase does have its issues and not just with "unnatural digital sound". You need more computing power (which brings its own problems with expense, cooling, and fan noise), and you have pre-ringing.
"You need more computing power": But that's like saying a car needs more power if you have three bags of groceries in the trunk instead of two—while true, the car already has enough power, nothing really changes. High order IIR filters also require a lot of computing power, and luckily FIRs have pretty good efficiency near half the sample rate, a special case that is a huge win (it would be a different story for filters of arbitrary cutoff frequencies, particularly very low ones). Any modern DSP (or via FPGA) has more than enough horsepower for either, with no change in cooling (my DX7 Pro has no fan, has choices of linear or minimum phase, and it's just above room temperature to the touch). And if you really want to go insane with filtering (super long FIRs), to appease audiophile sensibilities, you can move to the frequency domain. Convolution reverbs are just insanely long filters.

Pre-ringing: I have serious doubts about this being a real problem. It may be, I've done no scientifically rigorous testing, I just doubt it. First of all, you need significant energy at the filter cutoff to get significant ringing, where music typically has less energy (yes, I understand we'd probably want to pay most attention to transients), AND the ringing will be at the cutoff frequency. I'm not going to hear it, maybe teens can, but on top of that it will be occurring while music is playing. I know how audiophiles like to say they can—or at least suspect they might be able to—sense things that are unnatural even if they can't outright pass a test proving they can hear it, but I'm just saying that I personally doubt the pre-ringing issue is a problem. Of course, with minimum phase, you get post-ringing, and more of it. If any of that is really a problem, it would be hard to argue it's still a problem with higher sample rates. (I'm not saying we must have the higher sample rates, but, for instance, does 96k shut people up who feel that digital sounds unnatural? Not all of them, certainly.)
 

dlaloum

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And there's the other thing—you can't switch off the added crosstalk of vinyl playback. And not everything improves with it, though I don't think it does much damage. ;)

It might be a bit nit-picky, but crosstalk can indeed be cancelled out, and there are a number of DSP algorhythms that do just that!
 

pablolie

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Why anyone would keep replying to a topic with such an obvious troll title is beyond me. But I am sure you'll collectively agree and prove the fallacy. :)
 

MattHooper

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Why anyone would keep replying to a topic with such an obvious troll title is beyond me. But I am sure you'll collectively agree and prove the fallacy. :)

I think the answer is that an OP does not necessarily determine the quality of the replies, or the direction taken in the conversation. Nobody has to adopt the OP's strawman, nor continually reply to it. Once other more reasonable folks reply, the conversations build from there. This thread moved on pretty quickly to quite reasonable discussions of the differences between digital and vinyl. Even from a few pages in some members began contributing useful or interesting information on the issues with vinyl (and discussions of digital sound).
 

Tom C

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I think the answer is that an OP does not necessarily determine the quality of the replies, or the direction taken in the conversation. Nobody has to adopt the OP's strawman, nor continually reply to it. Once other more reasonable folks reply, the conversations build from there. This thread moved on pretty quickly to quite reasonable discussions of the differences between digital and vinyl. Even from a few pages in some members began contributing useful or interesting information on the issues with vinyl (and discussions of digital sound).
Yes, this is so. Another thing to consider is that people will always make false accusations about this site and it’s members, but it’s important to not let falsehoods go unchallenged.
 

pablolie

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I think the answer is that an OP does not necessarily determine the quality of the replies, or the direction taken in the conversation. Nobody has to adopt the OP's strawman, nor continually reply to it. Once other more reasonable folks reply, the conversations build from there. This thread moved on pretty quickly to quite reasonable discussions of the differences between digital and vinyl. Even from a few pages in some members began contributing useful or interesting information on the issues with vinyl (and discussions of digital sound).
On why vinyl records sound so much better than digital? Nope to anything you said to try to rationalize it. :) Nothing whatever can prove the title line, ever.

I let people enjoy whatever they enjoy, when they call it a universal truth I call it for the BS it is.
 

Newman

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Correct. And other than “digital imperfections are inaudible whereas vinyl ones are audible”, and “vinyl productions without overcompression are often preferred to digital productions with overcompression”, what has this thread’s 129 pages given us that isn’t nonsense followed by corrections of said nonsense?
 

levimax

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Why anyone would keep replying to a topic with such an obvious troll title is beyond me. But I am sure you'll collectively agree and prove the fallacy. :)
Correct. And other than “digital imperfections are inaudible whereas vinyl ones are audible”, and “vinyl productions without overcompression are often preferred to digital productions with overcompression”, what has this thread’s 129 pages given us that isn’t nonsense followed by corrections of said nonsense?
Click bait works
 

Galliardist

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Correct. And other than “digital imperfections are inaudible whereas vinyl ones are audible”, and “vinyl productions without overcompression are often preferred to digital productions with overcompression”, what has this thread’s 129 pages given us that isn’t nonsense followed by corrections of said nonsense?
And the right answer is on page 1, at that!
 

Keith_W

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Pre-ringing: I have serious doubts about this being a real problem. It may be, I've done no scientifically rigorous testing, I just doubt it.

You certainly can hear pre-ringing. Look for tracks that start with a very loud transient and there will be slight noise just a poofteenth of a second before the music starts. But within the music, I struggle to hear it / or I can't hear it at all. But knowing that it is there somehow bothers me :p:p:p
 

MattHooper

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On why vinyl records sound so much better than digital? Nope to anything you said to try to rationalize it.

No. Didn't you read what I wrote?

I pointed out that no one needs to accept that strawman. And it's also good to address false claims, right?

And the other main point is that people "don't keep responding to the OP." That's not how many long threads work. The conversation moved on from discussing this with the OP long ago. The vast majority of posts in this thread are responding to posts made by people other than the OP. Many of the posts if not by far the most, giving reasons why digital is superior, and discussing what type of audible consequences the vinyl process can have on the sound accuracy. Hence all sorts of interesting conversations (if someone isn't interested, why are they posting in this thread?)

If you keep puzzling over this as "why do people keep talking about vinyl sounding better" you will have missed most of the conversation.


I let people enjoy whatever they enjoy, when they call it a universal truth I call it for the BS it is.

What percentage of the posts in this thread do you imagine are making B.S. claims for vinyl - i.e. based on demonstrably false claims?

Not many, it seems.
 
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