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Vinyl is not as bad as I expected.
- Thread starter abdo123
- Start date
Ramon Cota
Member
So to summarize the discussion :
If brickwalled digital track is used to make vinyl it will add some noise and fake DR that will cheat the meter to show higher reading as per Ian Shephard's example.
If unbrickwalled digital track is used , then actual dynamic range will stay the same or even be slightly lowered as per Maxicut's example [ and many examples from that dr.loudnesswar site where early cd versions and corresponding vinyl have the same DR values ]
Am i getting this right ? Seems a little sketchy...
If brickwalled digital track is used to make vinyl it will add some noise and fake DR that will cheat the meter to show higher reading as per Ian Shephard's example.
If unbrickwalled digital track is used , then actual dynamic range will stay the same or even be slightly lowered as per Maxicut's example [ and many examples from that dr.loudnesswar site where early cd versions and corresponding vinyl have the same DR values ]
Am i getting this right ? Seems a little sketchy...
The Vinyl mastering do not be the same the mastering cd.
The mecanic read can not work with the loudnesswar prerequisite.
The bass on vinyl are in mono. Occuring an electronic comb filtering.
The pitch on the vinyl can no be constant. The Vinyl can not reproduce the piano.
The vinyl centering is often deficient and apart from a nakamichi, no turntable corrects it
The Vinyl full doesn't sound same near the center
All things make the vinyl sounds differently as the digital.
Add the Fetishism and the vinyl become gold and the digital the lead
There is usually a bigger difference between the recording quality of the various recordings we buy than there is between the various bits of equipment we use to play it on.
With record players the variability is quite big, so this is maybe not always true.
The potential dynamic range is certainly more with CD than it can be with LP.
and needs meticulous setup to get anywhere near - and a parallel tracking arm to reduce distortion, of course.
With record players the variability is quite big, so this is maybe not always true.
The potential dynamic range is certainly more with CD than it can be with LP.
In what way? it has potentially higher frequency limit than CD, but given the difficulty of both cutting and reading these frequencies and the generator distortion and geometric distortion any very high frequency information coming out of a phono stage is mainly distortion and for physical reasons can't be cut loud enough to hear anyway.
The output below around 20Hz on a record player is always in error because of the physics of the way a seismic transducer works (and that is what a pickup cartridge is), so is best filtered out even if you have a flat record. It is generated by the cartridge body bouncing on the cartridge suspension, not the groove. The output of the cartridge becomes mainly due to the groove at around 2x the natural frequency of the effective mass on the cartridge compliance. This is just a fact of how cartridges work. This seems to be a fact that is little understood. I can explain in a hopefully simple enough way to be understood by people not versed in the physics if you are interested.
Mine is too, an Ortofon A90, and it has a quite flat frequency response, which is not that common with high end cartridges funnily enough, but still nowhere near as flat as my CD player
and needs meticulous setup to get anywhere near - and a parallel tracking arm to reduce distortion, of course.
tuga
Major Contributor
What you are saying is that the DR meter only really works with unprocessed "real stereo" (mic pair) recordings, not multi-mic'ed, multi-track stereo mixes.
JP
Major Contributor
I think for general interest it'd be great if you would.
AnalogSteph
Major Contributor
Cartridge compliance and effective moving mass essentially form a spring-and-mass resonator. This results in a substantial resonance peak in frequency response (fundamental resonance, 8-10 Hz typ) before it drops off.
For accurate bass reproduction, you obviously want to steer clear of the audible band with fundamental resonance. However, go too low and you have to amplify a lot of the ever-increasing surface noise (which has a 1/f kind of spectrum) with linearity potentially becoming a problem. Typical tonearms with overhang also have a habit of partially translating sideways movement into lateral movement, so content around fundamental resonance can frequency modulate your audio signal (FM distortion, jitter).
This also tends to influence potential issues with acoustic feedback (which is what I'd suggest investigating if "flabby bass" is a problem, there are some setup techiques to address it).
For accurate bass reproduction, you obviously want to steer clear of the audible band with fundamental resonance. However, go too low and you have to amplify a lot of the ever-increasing surface noise (which has a 1/f kind of spectrum) with linearity potentially becoming a problem. Typical tonearms with overhang also have a habit of partially translating sideways movement into lateral movement, so content around fundamental resonance can frequency modulate your audio signal (FM distortion, jitter).
This also tends to influence potential issues with acoustic feedback (which is what I'd suggest investigating if "flabby bass" is a problem, there are some setup techiques to address it).
G
With modern DSP a "new" wrinkle regarding acoustic feedback is in play and I was wondering how this effects things. I am using FIR filters for RIAA EQ / Room EQ / Subsonic Filtering. It works great but I use a lot of "taps" so there is a 2 second time delay with the filter. Theoretically does this make acoustic feedback issues worse or better or ?
It... doesn't? I didn't say that. But speaking from experience here, a vinyl master and a CD master are rarely the same. Vinyl has some medium limitations that digital does not, one of them being a much more limited loudness vs low end problem.
Pretty well all the output around resonance is due to cartridge body bounce and is spurious rubbish. The output approaches actually transducing the groove accurately by about 2x the resonant frequency. This is the case with all these types of transducer - I have designed a few, and the pickup cartridge is not a very good example of the type since the optimum location of the damping is difficult to use, so almost never is.
It is poor engineering not to have a high pass filter at around 20Hz because everything below that is inaccurate and pointlessly wastes amp power and moves the driver around into non-linear parts of its magnetic circuit.
I'll try.
Basically a seismic transducer works by having a mass on a spring. The type used for record players works above resonance.
At extremely low frequencies the mass moves with the stylus - which is just as well since if it didn't we wouldn't be able to track a record
As frequency increases the movement of the mass starts to be greater than that of the stylus as resonance is approached, there is considerable potential output from the cartridge but it is caused by the cartridge body bouncing on the suspension. At resonance the body bounce is at its maximum, how much depends on damping. There is a 180 degree phase shift and as frequency continues to increase the bounce starts to decrease.
By about 2x the resonant frequency the body mass has become stationary relative to the stylus so the output of the cartridge is a fairly accurate transduction of stylus movement.
More damping reduces the amplitude at resonance but also increases the frequency at which the transducer body can be considered stationary and transduction is slightly less accurate.
Since the output of the cartridge is proportional to the movement of the stylus relative to the cartridge body this output is only a good representation of the groove once the body has become stationary relative to the record - ie at about 2x natural frequency.
Good engineering would be to have a 20Hz high pass filter in the phono stage to remove the spurious output.
Its like when you meet the GF parents, it can be ok , even great , best fear the worst and be pleasantly surprised.
Like vinyl the parents have limited 'dynamic range ' for you but you might never find that out , until the divorce!
Like vinyl the parents have limited 'dynamic range ' for you but you might never find that out , until the divorce!
Here is an analysis regarding LF noise using one 10 g and one 4 g effective mass tonearm.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/c47wosw9ux38nij/Tonearm mass and noise LP playback.pdf?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/c47wosw9ux38nij/Tonearm mass and noise LP playback.pdf?dl=0
The vinyl DR issue is not that vinyl adds DR or that digital doesn't have the potential to have much dynamic range. This issue is that many modern recordings and modern remasters use a look ahead compressor to REMOVE DR from the digital files. These digital files with super low DR will play fine through a DAC but they are "too hot" to be cut into a vinyl groove so due to the physical limitations of vinyl some recordings end up less compressed on vinyl.
AnalogSteph
Major Contributor
It'll be different at least. Control theory says that inserting a delay in a feedback loop generally makes it less stable. Only two conditions need to be fulfilled for oscillation to occur, a roundtrip gain of >1 and phase of 360° and multiples. With an over 2 second delay, phase basically makes a 360° roundtrip every ~1/2 Hz, which is so dense a grid that existing acoustic resonances would only be shifted a bit at best.
This may seem a bit hard to imagine but it would essentially be similar to microphone - speaker feedback, just much lower in frequency.
It is obviously not just tonearm fundamental resonance that may give trouble - in many cases I imagine room modes would be the biggest culprits. Flattening those out in DSP should actually prove beneficial since then the gain wouldn't ever make near critical regions to begin with. And you can always add a subsonic filter as well. So ultimately you may end up with a net benefit.
If the original recording has for example a DR of 15 and it is run through a compressor to lower it to DR 5 for the digital release but for the Vinyl release the DR was only lowered to a DR of 10 I am not sure how that is "fake". It is not a questions of "adding" anything, it is a question of "reducing" the original DR of the recording less in order to make it work on a record.
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