Why do records sound so much better than digital?

[Robin L]

Totally off topic - I remember hearing the name Gary U.S. Bonds on the radio when I was a kid, but I never knew what song(s) he played (and I remember thinking, "What a dumb name").

But he's on a concert DVD called Rock'n'Roll Party (Honoring Les Paul). He comes out for one song, takes over the stage like a big star, and does a GREAT performance! So I bought a greatest hits CD. The sound quality was disappointing and just not enjoyable to listen to. It doesn't seem to be overly compressed, just typical early 60's recordings.

BTW - I reject the premise of the thread title!

This is ultra-compressed, you can hear the pumping on the drums as the song starts. Once the tune is underway, there's no dynamic difference:

 

[Robin L]

And if this isn't compressed, I don't know what is:

 

[Mart68]

I have 54 years.
I did not know vinci and the business practices of the time.
The parallel with vinci seems strange to me.
But

Da Vinci was commissioned so he was getting paid, he couldn't just paint whatever he wanted unless the brief was 'Just surprise me' and even then there would be limits (size, time, money) so in effect he had similar commercial constraints as the producer of a recording.

But we don't complain about Da Vinci, we don't say 'Well he could have done that differently, he, could have made 'The Last Supper' look a bit better.' We just accept them for what they are.

 

[Robin L]

Da Vinci was commissioned so he was getting paid, he couldn't just paint whatever he wanted unless the brief was 'Just surprise me' and even then there would be limits (size, time, money) so in effect he had similar commercial constraints as the producer of a recording.

But we don't complain about Da Vinci, we don't say 'Well he could have done that differently, he, could have made 'The Last Supper' look a bit better.' We just accept them for what they are.

Yeah, but seriously, he should have used a more durable paint. My understanding is that he used all sorts of experimental formulas resulting in more than average levels of flaking and damage.

 

[Mart68]

Yeah, but seriously, he should have used a more durable paint. My understanding is that he used all sorts of experimental formulas resulting in more than average levels of flaking and damage.

Analogous to Steely Dan and their problems with the DBX on 'Katy Lied.'

That's the trouble with these geniuses, too smart for their own good.

 

[HorizonsEdge]

dragging a rock along a plastic trench

Thank you for this awesome turn of phrase!

I laughed
I cried
I experienced a wide range of emotion

 

[Jim Shaw]

I'm not just imagining it; this discussion has gone clear off the rails and deep into the weeds.
The audio science has been replaced by pub-speak. Ciao.

 

[mhardy6647]

Minor update -- I've randomly* selected one of the old Sonys (Sonae? ) to bring upstairs. It is warming up (literally) in the hifi/junk room even now.
Further details as events warrant -- I shall start a new thread.

_______________
* actually only pseudo-randomly -- I got out the one that was on top; i.e., easier to get to! If it doesn't work/doesn't work right, I'll have to go spelunking again downstairs. Stay tuned...

Heh, heh, heh. I have - finally - made good (sort of) on my threat/promise of this past April and fired up the CDP-102!
I will be posting a separate thread, in case anyone's interested.

 

[Sal1950]

Heh, heh, heh. I have - finally - made good (sort of) on my threat/promise of this past April and fired up the CDP-102!
I will be posting a separate thread, in case anyone's interested.

Finally, perfect sound forever.
Please post a link here to your thread.

 

[mhardy6647]

Finally, perfect sound forever.
Please post a link here to your thread.

Yeah, yeah -- I'm getting there! Had to make lunch for Mrs. H and me...
Gimmee a minute... I mean, heck, it was April when I started on this.


EDIT: here's the link. Manage your expectations.

This is not a review of a vintage Sony CDP-102 CD player

With a nod to the metaphysics of René Magritte and The Treachery of Images... This isn't a review, but it might, ultimately lead to one. :) Back in April, there was one of those analog vs. digital (or vinyl vs. polycarbonate, more to the point) reproduction threads that had a countermelody...

www.audiosciencereview.com

DSC_0802 (2) by Mark Hardy, on Flickr

 

[levimax]

For those interested I just started a thread where I posted 7 pairs of song samples from an LP and a CD for comparison and comments.

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...-vinyl-vs-cd-can-you-hear-a-difference.27497/

 

[don'ttrustauthority]

For those interested I just started a thread where I posted 7 pairs of song samples from an LP and a CD for comparison and comments.

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...-vinyl-vs-cd-can-you-hear-a-difference.27497/

This should be an easy question to resolve. Do records have more samples per second than digital? Measure the number of modulations in the groove and compare it somehow to a 44.1khz sampling rate. How? I dunno.

 

[j_j]

This should be an easy question to resolve. Do records have more samples per second than digital? Measure the number of modulations in the groove and compare it somehow to a 44.1khz sampling rate. How? I dunno.

That doesn't mean anything, sorry.

LP's distort more. Some people like the sound. Some don't.
LP's can't be overloaded to death like CD. Often this means the LP sounds better than the crushed-to-death CD version.

Neither reflects entirely on the actual medium, rather on how the medium was mastered.

 

[Sal1950]

LP's distort more. Some people like the sound. Some don't.
LP's can't be overloaded to death like CD. Often this means the LP sounds better than the crushed-to-death CD version.

j_j I find it interesting how some can bring up the poor choices of recording engineers in the heavy handed use of compression to make a claim of "LP sounds better than the crushed-to-death CD version"?
Does the inclusion of 3-5 points of DR remove all the,

Surface noise
Tick and pops
Wow and flutter
Inner groove distortion
Mono'd base below 500hz
Rolled off highs to avoid groove distortion
Vocals being "De-essed" as needed
All the tweako adjustments needed to make a table/arm track a pressing properly.

There's more but the bottom line is that,
You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

 

[krabapple]

From your description you'd think LPs necessarily sound unlistenable....a 'sow's ear'. That all those things are always so audible as to be unbearable.

It's demonstrably not true for everyone. Vinyl has managed to become quite popular again. Major acts now feel it necessary to release on that format. And of course there has always been an 'audiophile' contingent that loved it.

So why do you find that 'curious'? It's a matter of what sounds good to a person, and their priorities for what makes for 'good'. I can very, very easily envision a nice LP mastering of a release sounding better than a DR-smashed mastering on a digital release of same. Even if I hear surface noise on the LP. For me there'd be other tradeoffs that might dissuade me from routine vinyl listening -- like the simple tedium of playing and maintaining the technology. (It would make me likely to transfer the LP to digital tout de suite, which is what I've done whenever what's out on LP sounds distinctly better to me than what's available on digital)

The only relevant issue for audio science reviewers here should be when vinylphiles make erroneous technical claims for the medium, as 'proof' that it's better. The always-troublesome 'why' of it. That's the realm of fact, not preference.

 

[Descartes]

Vinyl is for many a taste of a slower lifestyle!

 

[Robin L]

Thing is, one cannot tell someone their observations/opinions/preferences are "wrong". One can ask why one has preferences and attempt to quantify those aspects that make a particular sound pleasant to one person but potentially obnoxious to another. But ultimately, people have preferences, we cannot be inside their heads to hear what they hear.

The Firesign Theater put it very well in "High School Madness":

[Principle Poop]: "What do I hear?"

[random student in the bleachers]: "That's metaphysically absurd! How can I know what you hear?"

I can't claim engineering expertise. However, I have loads of practical experience with LPs, CDs, recording and turntables. The range of possible outcomes with LP playback is very wide. Lots of my experience with LPs was with cheap systems with cheap turntables, flip-over stylus for 78 or 33/45 on a ceramic cartridge. And a lot of my experience was with turntables such as AR XA, Thorens, Technics direct drive, and other decent examples of the type. I have heard LP based systems do things [that pleased me] that I didn't hear digital systems do. I know that LP playback, weirdly enough, can sound extraordinarily real and palpable in a way that I have yet to hear from an all-digital system.

At the same time, I know that I can hear things with my current system that were buried in sonic murk that I did not notice before. Though I have heard some great LP reproduction, inner voices in symphonic works or dense mixes are easier to hear via my current system.

My presuppositions about audio reproduction were turned on their [my?] head when I was recording concerts for radio, grants and a few CDs. The audiophile concept is: 'we want perfect reproduction, we want to hear the string quartet in our living room exactly as it sounded in row AA, center aisle of the local concert hall'. This is the sort of hyperbole I found in all the musical and audio reviews about "demonstration quality sound reproduction". This led to the notion of "The Absolute Sound", and that such a thing was possible, that people were experiencing it. So, when I'd l listen to a recording that failed to sound as good as the review suggested, I naturally assumed that the fault was on my end.

In the course of recording concerts and sessions, I came to understand that microphones are all colored in sound quality. Usually not as much as speakers, but colored sonically in similar ways for similar reasons. Transducers have their own resonant behavior, which can mask the resonant qualities of the music, the ring of the bell of a French horn, the steep dynamics and rattle of a snare drum, the "sound" of the room the music is recorded in. Speakers, microphones, phono cartridges and LP cutting heads are all transducers. Audiophiles work their way around this in various ways. A number of people here have suggested that system feedback [some from the sound of the speakers interacting with the turntable] could be part of the "jump factor" of great LP reproduction.

I got a taste of the potential realism of a turntable 'n' tubes system with a Strathclyde 305-m turntable, SME III arm, Shure 97xe cartridge, a Scott 299B integrated amp [tube, 1962 or so] and RTR mini-tower speakers. That sense of presence applied more to vocal recordings, like Frank Sinatra, Dinah Washington and Ella Fitzgerald. Not to mention Maria Callas. Is it possible that this particular combination has a collection of distortions that enhanced the musical experience? Maybe? However, I wouldn't go back, as orchestral recordings were uniformly a mess and I'm hearing all sorts of things on these old recordings now that I didn't hear before, things that are musically meaningful, like individual instrumental lines previously buried in the mix.

At the same time, it is useful to note that very few turntable systems can suspend disbelief in this fashion. A $300 of off the shelf, plug and play turntable + cartridge + phono pre + usb out will sound miserable by any reasonable standard.

Hopefully, this post will confuse everyone.

 

[j_j]

j_j I find it interesting how some can bring up the poor choices of recording engineers in the heavy handed use of compression to make a claim of "LP sounds better than the crushed-to-death CD version"?
Does the inclusion of 3-5 points of DR remove all the,

Surface noise
Tick and pops
Wow and flutter
Inner groove distortion
Mono'd base below 500hz
Rolled off highs to avoid groove distortion
Vocals being "De-essed" as needed
All the tweako adjustments needed to make a table/arm track a pressing properly.

There's more but the bottom line is that,
You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

But when you put too much compression on something and then distribute it in 24/96, you've just made a wild boar's ear out of it, no matter what it is. For hoots, get out your copy of octave freeware and take a histogram of levels on a modern CD, and the prevalence of intersample overs on a modern CD. Try it. Yeah, you've got 96dB of dynamic range there, and they're using 5% of it. Seriously.

Surface noise is not good, but it does not necessarily distract from the music. Ditto most any of the problems, with any decent LP table, don't met me wrong, LP is anything BUT accurate, I'm not saying otherwise. On the other hand, the M/S intermodulation can sound "good" and enhance the sound stage, the rising distortion with level can create a false (but real to the hearing apparatus) sense of higher dynamic range, the interchannel leakage (often out of phase in mid-frequencies) can create "air". All of this is *NOT* accurate, but it can sound good, in limited quantities. There are even digital processors that do this for you, now.

What we're addressing here is PREFERENCE. If people prefer the illusion, it's none of our business. In fact, it's not too hard to add in the distortion mechanisms that make LP's "sound good" digitally, and make a CD with the various exaggerations of LP. This is all a QUESTION OF TASTE.

Neither you nor I are in a position to direct others' taste.

As to some of the processing, you're a bit off base there, too.

De-essed is proper for the CD as well. Rolled-off highs from too-close miking, ditto. Mono bass below 150Hz, not 500. I understand you dislike LP, but an accurate rendition of music squished into toothpaste is still an accurate rendition of music that has been put through a high-speed blender on "puree" and has come out sounding like white noise with some periodicity. I suspect you've not worked with a lot of artists, or a lot of recording engineers. Is that the case?

Now:

Producing a CD with reasonable compression (yes, LP's are compressed, but you simply can NOT squish an LP like you can a CD, the mechanisms won't let you) is entirely possible. Don't blame the recording engineers, blame the people who refuse to let them do their job the right way.

Yes, all the LP problems exist. Yes, production can even be worse. Four of one, two less than a 6-pack of the other.

As to "poor choices" you are clearly uninformed. The engineer is most often forced to squeeze the life out of things by an A&R person who is under orders to "make this the loudest CD yet". The choice given the engineer is "wreck the recording or quit the job and go work at McD's".

I know some folks who were financially able to have in fact just up and walked away from the job.

 

[j_j]

Thing is, one cannot tell someone their observations/opinions/preferences are "wrong".

That. All of that. in 96 point bold sans serif.

A preference is a preference.

 

[MattHooper]

But when you put too much compression on something and then distribute it in 24/96, you've just made a wild boar's ear out of it, no matter what it is. For hoots, get out your copy of octave freeware and take a histogram of levels on a modern CD, and the prevalence of intersample overs on a modern CD. Try it. Yeah, you've got 96dB of dynamic range there, and they're using 5% of it. Seriously.

Surface noise is not good, but it does not necessarily distract from the music. Ditto most any of the problems, with any decent LP table, don't met me wrong, LP is anything BUT accurate, I'm not saying otherwise. On the other hand, the M/S intermodulation can sound "good" and enhance the sound stage, the rising distortion with level can create a false (but real to the hearing apparatus) sense of higher dynamic range, the interchannel leakage (often out of phase in mid-frequencies) can create "air". All of this is *NOT* accurate, but it can sound good, in limited quantities. There are even digital processors that do this for you, now.

What we're addressing here is PREFERENCE. If people prefer the illusion, it's none of our business. In fact, it's not too hard to add in the distortion mechanisms that make LP's "sound good" digitally, and make a CD with the various exaggerations of LP. This is all a QUESTION OF TASTE.

Agreed. I might put on an LP I like and if I was listening with someone utterly allergic to surface noise, that person may immediately designate the LP as unlistenable or low quality sound, because of his tuning in to the record noise. Whereas I may not be bothered and listen through the slight noise to the other aspects of the sound I like. Depends what one is sensitive to or what we like about the sound.

Reminds me that I used to have a movie-going pal who was so sensitive to ANY noise around him in the audience we had to start sitting in the back row for movies - which I hated. Then we had to go only on weekday afternoons, when there'd be few people in the audience. Then eventually he mostly stopped going to the movies, and I went back to my usual sit closer to the screen and being absorbed in the movie, whether someone was sipping their drink a row over or not. Our different sensitivities rendered our movie going experience as quite different - one experience would be "god awful" for him due to some extraneous noise that seized his attention, wheres for me it was utter immersion and wonderful. In fact I loved the buzz of being in an audience, it added to my experience. Where he hated the intrusion of an audience around him. Certainly some parallels there for the type of artifacts and/or manual labor enjoyed by vinyl enthusiasts vs digital enthusiasts who find the same issues off-putting.

That said, for most of my LPs if there is surface noise or pops and ticks, it is very rarely audible or noticeable while the music is actually playing.

Finally, I find the "sound quality," broadly speaking across all my vinyl and digital collection to rest more on the source/mastering/production etc than in which medium, digital or LP, I'm listening to. Which I think is consistent with JJ's post here.