Can anyone explain the vinyl renaissance?

[Newman]

A more accurate statement might be 'In terms of accurately replicating original recordings, it approaches [which is a way of saying that it falls short of] CD or hi-res a 2-channel restricted version of mp3-128 digital audio.

Fixed it to be even more accurate.

 

[Sal1950]

Fixed it to be even more accurate.

Your a very generous person Newman.

 

[Open Mind Audio]

It brings a connection to the music utterly missing from a digital collection and makes listening to music more of an event rather than just a background activity.

Nice observation. I’m mainly digital (like 99.9%), and I make that an event, but I respect this aspect of vinyl-philia.

 

[Talisman]

I understand some of the motivations of vinyl lovers very well.
Having the record collection, the ritual of putting on a record, watching it spin, hearing the music spread, sitting down and listening to THAT Record, really listening to it, is something I understand very well and that makes perfect sense in the context of a passion.
In my little self, as a digital native of music, I keep buying the CDs of the albums I like and my favorite artists, I like to own them, I like to put on that CD and listen to it, even if the exact same file (or better) I can stream it with equal or better quality from amazon music.
It is part of my passion for music

 

[Sal1950]

In my little self, as a digital native of music, I keep buying the CDs of the albums I like and my favorite artists, I like to own them, I like to put on that CD and listen to it, even if the exact same file (or better) I can stream it with equal or better quality from amazon music.

The problem with streaming is normally there's only one version of an album available, maybe 2, stereo and multich now.
For the music I love, I like to have the best master that's been done, so I buy that CD and then burn it to my hard-drive.
I love the convenience of having my own digital library containing the best possible sources.
The best of all worlds IMHO.

 

[atmasphere]

I understand some of the motivations of vinyl lovers very well.
Having the record collection, the ritual of putting on a record, watching it spin, hearing the music spread, sitting down and listening to THAT Record, really listening to it, is something I understand very well and that makes perfect sense in the context of a passion.

This act allows you to be present to the music. I often hear customers comment about how digital is so easy that they treat it more like a commodity. To me as a musician that's a real shame since to record something that's really worth listening to usually requires a lot of work.

 

[SuicideSquid]

Sure it does. If it didn't, conversations like this wouldn't exist! There would be no 'record' stores. And so on. A more accurate statement might be 'In terms of accurately replicating original recordings, it approaches [which is a way of saying that it falls short of] CD or hi-res digital audio.

I appreciate your point but I don't think my comment was hyperbolic.

Compared to any other common means of audio reproduction - reel to reel tape, CD, MP3, various lossy or lossless streaming formats, Dolby Digital, Atmos, even cassette tape, vinyl deviates the most from the original master recordings and it's not particularly close - it has the highest noise floor, introduces the most artifacts, has problems like wow and flutter that are significantly diminished in other analog reproduction techniques and simply do not exist in digital.

Even in optimal conditions - playing on a several thousand dollar turntable that's got a lot of complicated engineering to reduce wow and flutter as much as possible, playing a brand new, heavy vinyl record using a high-end stylus to reduce surface noise and preserve high frequencies - the amount of noise, distortion, and artifacts being produced by that system is several orders of magnitude higher than a CD - for example, typical surface noise on vinyl is around -30dB (though that will vary based on the record and the stylus, it doesn't get much better than that), around 60dB higher than 16 bit digital (60dB is the entire dynamic range of reel to reel tape, fwiw).

It can still sound good - even great - but that's a statement on the limits of our ears and what kinds of aberrations our brains find pleasing, rather than a statement about the fidelity of vinyl records.

 

[mglobe]

This act allows you to be present to the music. I often hear customers comment about how digital is so easy that they treat it more like a commodity. To me as a musician that's a real shame since to record something that's really worth listening to usually requires a lot of work.

I abandoned vinyl shortly after I bought my first CD player, then went to an iTunes library of music. Now I’ve got a Roon server, Qobuz, and a turntable again. It’s part nostalgia, part enjoying the process of queuing up a record, and mostly sitting down and REALLY listening. My adhd often won’t let me sit through a full album that is digital. With a record I listen to music like I did 50 years ago. REALLY listening. I recently picked up Nathanial Ratliff live at Red Rocks 2020 and sat through all four sides of the album. I’d never do that with digital. Yeah digital is better quality, but I don’t give a rats ass about that at times. It’s also fun to see that the old tech, while not equal to the latest, is still pretty damn good. Oh and my turntable goes through a miniDSP with Dirac, and D class amps. Yeah digital is awesome. Vinyl is fun for me.

 

[MattHooper]

I appreciate your point but I don't think my comment was hyperbolic.

Compared to any other common means of audio reproduction - reel to reel tape, CD, MP3, various lossy or lossless streaming formats, Dolby Digital, Atmos, even cassette tape, vinyl deviates the most from the original master recordings and it's not particularly close - it has the highest noise floor, introduces the most artifacts, has problems like wow and flutter that are significantly diminished in other analog reproduction techniques and simply do not exist in digital.

Even in optimal conditions - playing on a several thousand dollar turntable that's got a lot of complicated engineering to reduce wow and flutter as much as possible, playing a brand new, heavy vinyl record using a high-end stylus to reduce surface noise and preserve high frequencies - the amount of noise, distortion, and artifacts being produced by that system is several orders of magnitude higher than a CD - for example, typical surface noise on vinyl is around -30dB (though that will vary based on the record and the stylus, it doesn't get much better than that), around 60dB higher than 16 bit digital (60dB is the entire dynamic range of reel to reel tape, fwiw).

It can still sound good - even great - but that's a statement on the limits of our ears and what kinds of aberrations our brains find pleasing, rather than a statement about the fidelity of vinyl records.

That all seems fair to me. My comment related more to your final sentence. We can talk in terms of technical differences but in the end what matters is what we can hear and how we perceive things. For instance even if you look at lossy codec/compression, for audio or pictures etc, "on paper" the difference can seem pretty large - loss of original info anywhere from 5 to 70% or so - and yet audio/pictures can seem surprisingly close to the original in terms of what we perceive.

For the same reason, while discussions of technical differences and liabilities between digital and vinyl are useful, in the end I care about how things sound (just as I'm not chasing the greatest SINAD numbers either). As you indicate, vinyl CAN sound surprisingly "great" despite what looks on paper like too many hurdles to clear. And as I've said, having done plenty of comparisons, I have found a good quality vinyl record sounds very close in quality to the digital version. (And someone recently posted files from a digital and vinyl version of a track - while differences could be heard, even those sounded quite similar).

Of course when asking "how big or important is the difference you are hearing?" that becomes pretty subjective. But as noted, I find that in terms of sonics, a statement like "cannot come close to CD" seems hyperbolic. Lots of my vinyl IMO seems to come plenty close to CD and sounds fantastic.
YMMV.

 

[Peterinvan]

In the 70’s it was fun to “rip” my LPs to make cassette play lists for mobile listening. Now that I am retired, I enjoy creating and curating playlists on Tidal, for both home and mobile consumption. I rarely add a whole album to a playlist, rather I cherry pick my favourites. As I listen to my playlists, I often delete a song if it no longer pleases.

I confess that 50% of my listening is “dedicated” like we used to listen to LPs, and 50% multitasking listening.

 

[Wunderphones]

Here's an analogy that I think is useful:

There's no way a bath is going to get you as clean as a shower, but there are perfectly good reasons that some people prefer to take a bath. Those people just need to stop making the obviously false claim that baths can cleanse just as well as shower.

 

[Robin L]

Here's an analogy that I think is useful:

There's no way a bath is going to get you as clean as a shower, but there are perfectly good reasons that some people prefer to take a bath. Those people just need to stop making the obviously false claim that baths can cleanse just as well as shower.

 

[Sal1950]

"You Can Never go Down the Drain" (1996) - Mister Rogers' Neighborhood

misterrogers.org

 

[Robin L]

"You Can Never go Down the Drain" (1996) - Mister Rogers' Neighborhood

misterrogers.org

Well, like, that's just your opinion, man.

 

[atmasphere]

Compared to any other common means of audio reproduction - reel to reel tape, CD, MP3, various lossy or lossless streaming formats, Dolby Digital, Atmos, even cassette tape, vinyl deviates the most from the original master recordings and it's not particularly close - it has the highest noise floor, introduces the most artifacts, has problems like wow and flutter that are significantly diminished in other analog reproduction techniques and simply do not exist in digital.

This might surprise you to know this statement is false. Its a common mistake to conflate one's personal experience with that of the media. The actual noise floor of the LP is quite low. When the lacquer is cut and the mastering engineer did his job properly, the resulting groove can be so quiet that the playback electronics are the noise floor. This is the sort of thing that sometimes has to be seen to be believed. A variety of things affect the noise of the groove- stylus temperature, stylus condition, the cut angle and so on.

When the lacquer is transferred to LP, the biggest noise source then becomes the pressing machine. Vibration in the machine is what causes surface noise for the most part. QRP (Acoustic Sounds) sorted this out a few years ago and applied damping to reduce vibration, resulting in LPs that rival a lathe cut for silence.

One source of ticks and pops that isn't well understood is the input of the phono preamp. It can be overloaded by RFI and/or ultrasonic noise, resulting in a tick or a pop if it has either poor rejection of those issues, poor high frequency overload margins or both. This sort of thing is a lot more common than one might think and IME is endemic in less expensive phono preamps such as found in a lot of vintage amps and receivers.

In older LPs, some of the noise floor is the master tapes themselves, which are not nearly as quiet as LPs are on their own. The LP also has wider bandwidth; wider than any microphone or reel to reel system both in the bass and in the highs (typically good to 40KHz). IME the dynamic limitations are in playback, not record- for this reason, the mastering engineer has to be careful to make sure the cut does not exceed the abilities of playback. Typically the cutter amps have about 10X or more power than would ever be needed for any cut that could ever be made. In this way they can't be overloaded or pushed to any sort of higher distortion.

There is a feedback circuit that helps keep the cutter head linear, but also benefits the rest of the cutter head electronics. In my system that feedback is 30dB and is 30dB at all frequencies (no Gain Bandwidth issues). This means that on the record side the distortion is actually quite low! Tape typically has much higher distortion.

However LP mastering is expensive because of the engineering! To save time (and thus cost) there are things like out-of-phase bass detection and processing, limiters and compression. But you really don't need any of them if you just spend enough time with the project- usually you can find a way around a problematic passage by changing the cutter level, the depth of the groove and so on.

 

[Sal1950]

This might surprise you to know this statement is false. Its a common mistae to conflate one's personal experience with that of the media. The actual noise floor of the LP is quite low. When the lacquer is cut and the mastering engineer did his job properly, the resulting groove can be so quiet that the playback electronics are the noise floor. This is the sort of thing that sometimes has to be seen to be believed. A variety of things affect the noise of the groove- stylus temperature, stylus condition, the cut angle and so on.

When the lacquer is transferred to LP, the biggest noise source then becomes the pressing machine. Vibration in the machine is what causes surface noise for the most part. QRP (Acoustic Sounds) sorted this out a few years ago and applied damping to reduce vibration, resulting in LPs that rival a lathe cut for silence.

One source of ticks and pops that isn't well understood is the input of the phono preamp. It can be overloaded by RFI and/or ultrasonic noise, resulting in a tick or a pop if it has either poor rejection of those issues, poor high frequency overload margins or both. This sort of thing is a lot more common than one might think and IME is endemic in less expensive phono preamps such as found in a lot of vintage amps and receivers.

In older LPs, some of the noise floor is the master tapes themselves, which are not nearly as quiet as LPs are on their own. The LP also has wider bandwidth; wider than any microphone or reel to reel system both in the bass and in the highs (typically good to 40KHz). IME the dynamic limitations are in playback, not record- for this reason, the mastering engineer has to be careful to make sure the cut does not exceed the abilities of playback. Typically the cutter amps have about 10X or more power than would ever be needed for any cut that could ever be made. In this way they can't be overloaded or pushed to any sort of higher distortion.

There is a feedback circuit that helps keep the cutter head linear, but also benefits the rest of the cutter head electronics. In my system that feedback is 30dB and is 30dB at all frequencies (no Gain Bandwidth issues). This means that on the record side the distortion is actually quite low! Tape typically has much higher distortion.

However LP mastering is expensive because of the engineering! To save time (and thus cost) there are things like out-of-phase bass detection and processing, limiters and compression. But you really don't need any of them if you just spend enough time with the project- usually you can find a way around a problematic passage by changing the cutter level, the depth of the groove and so on.

Uh huh.

 

[atmasphere]

Uh huh.

What elicits this response?

I picked up the mastering lathe in 1991 or so and spent a few years getting it running and making sure the electronics met spec. During this time a lot of impressions I had about the LP died a nasty death. From your response I have to assume they are still alive with you. I recommend getting a lathe and seeing for yourself or spending some time with someone who has one. Its educational.

 

[Wunderphones]

What elicits this response?

I picked up the mastering lathe in 1991 or so and spent a few years getting it running and making sure the electronics met spec. During this time a lot of impressions I had about the LP died a nasty death. From your response I have to assume they are still alive with you. I recommend getting a lathe and seeing for yourself or spending some time with someone who has one. Its educational.

It's pretty simple logic: in the case of digital playback, you have a device that only has electrical noise. In the case of phonographic playback, you have a device that adds physical noise to the equation, and that physical noise is run through a phono preamp, which by necessity has to provide a LOT of gain, which means that the physical noise gets boosted significantly. This means that when a phonograph is playing "silence," it's not silent. It just can't be. No matter how good the pressing is.

 

[atmasphere]

It's pretty simple logic: in the case of digital playback, you have a device that only has electrical noise. In the case of phonographic playback, you have a device that adds physical noise to the equation, and that physical noise is run through a phono preamp, which by necessity has to provide a LOT of gain, which means that the physical noise gets boosted significantly. This means that when a phonograph is playing "silence," it's not silent. It just can't be. No matter how good the pressing is.

I don't think that is why he responded that way, although I've been wrong many times! I certainly don't argue your point though, however if the stars are aligned (IOW a with a properly produced LP) what it comes down to is getting the playback electronics quiet enough that the LP becomes the noise floor. I know that for most people that is the case all the time, but that isn't the fault of the media as it is that of the people that produced it.

Its just the same as some CDs sound crisp and hard and then saying therefore all CDs sound crisp and hard. Its a failure of logic.

 

[Wunderphones]

I don't think that is why he responded that way, although I've been wrong many times! I certainly don't argue your point though, however if the stars are aligned (IOW a with a properly produced LP) what it comes down to is getting the playback electronics quiet enough that the LP becomes the noise floor. I know that for most people that is the case all the time, but that isn't the fault of the media as it is that of the people that produced it.

Its just the same as some CDs sound crisp and hard and then saying therefore all CDs sound crisp and hard. Its a failure of logic.

I really don't understand what you could mean by this. We can't meaningfully discuss the noise level of an LP in the absence of the electronics that will extract the signal (and the noise) from the disc. I mean, obviously, a properly recorded LP is dead silent if you don't get the electronics involved--but so is a poorly recorded LP! Records sitting on a motionless platter aren't making any noise--and they aren't making any signal, either.

But when you fire up that electric motor, and the needle starts abrading the surface of the disc, and you send all that stuff through even a spectacularly quiet phono preamp, well...that's going to yield a noise floor much higher than I get coming out of my DAC.