Exactly, how much does vinyl suck less than it did 30 years ago? This needs to be quantified.

[Robin L]

This distorts history. Development of 'CD' (digital audio for consumers) was *driven* by the acknowledged inadequacies of analog product. 'Classical' music recording engineers were among its earliest and strongest proponents for a reason.

I was a vinyl diehard until I started recording concerts (and, later, sessions for CDs) around 1990. Though I had access to a 1/2 track, 15 ips capable reel to reel tape recorder that could take 10 1/2" reels, DAT machines started to appear with far lower tape costs and greater portability. They also were sonically superior to anything I'd get from that Tascam 32 analog recorder. I was recording classical concerts almost exclusively. The difference in the noise floor was immediately obvious. So was the retention of high frequency sounds as the dynamics went up. Basically the sound of the recording was the same as the sound of the mixing board which was not the case with the Tascam 32.

 

[DSJR]

We then-young rock music people couldn't understand the people in the 80s and 90s ditching all their 'classical music' LPs and replacing them with as many CDs as they could afford. We just didn't suffer as much, the surface noise, ticks and plops in quiet passages the same. I was once told that more than one orchestra had 'learned' to moderate their own 'dynamic range' to cater for vinyl, playing slightly louder in quiet passages and toning down the crescendi, apparently.

I once lusted after (and eventually owned one of my own) a high speed Revox two-track B77 tape deck. An old friend used to go out recording his local orchestra and the results were very good indeed - until he got a DAT recorder... I do still love seeing the tape reels spinning around, but domestically, I had no use for my B77mk2 and sold it eventually (many people love the magic of steam trains and vintage cars for example and these days, I think the love of vinyl - shellac even - and tape for many is kind-of related to this - mostly a male hobby-thing I suspect?)

 

[krabapple]

We then-young rock music people couldn't understand the people in the 80s and 90s ditching all their 'classical music' LPs and replacing them with as many CDs as they could afford.

Yes, we could, and did. CD sales exploded pretty early on, due to pop and rock on CD.

Don't know where you live, but all of my buddies , in their 20s in the 1980s, switched to CD as fast as they could.

 

[rdenney]

We then-young rock music people couldn't understand the people in the 80s and 90s ditching all their 'classical music' LPs and replacing them with as many CDs as they could afford. We just didn't suffer as much, the surface noise, ticks and plops in quiet passages the same. I was once told that more than one orchestra had 'learned' to moderate their own 'dynamic range' to cater for vinyl, playing slightly louder in quiet passages and toning down the crescendi, apparently.

I once lusted after (and eventually owned one of my own) a high speed Revox two-track B77 tape deck. An old friend used to go out recording his local orchestra and the results were very good indeed - until he got a DAT recorder... I do still love seeing the tape reels spinning around, but domestically, I had no use for my B77mk2 and sold it eventually (many people love the magic of steam trains and vintage cars for example and these days, I think the love of vinyl - shellac even - and tape for many is kind-of related to this - mostly a male hobby-thing I suspect?)

From my own orchestra recording experience, the 10 dB improvement from a Teac open-reel deck to a VHS-HiFi deck (from 60 to 70 dB or thereabouts) was transformative--the latter sounded exactly like the live sound through the sound system. But the 20 dB difference from VHS-HiFi to DAT was not nearly so noticeable. That told me that the threshold needed to sustain realism was closer to 70 than 90 dB dynamic range. Even in headphones the noise floor at 75 dB was unhearable when the listening level was set for the loud bits. Ambient noise in the recording space was significantly greater.

I've reported this before: Someone from S'Phile posted a YouTube comparing their vinyl setup to their CD setup--I don't recall the details of the comparison and it may well have been about the speakers. It was a recording of speaker sounds, however, so the room noise in the listening space was definitely audible. I recall the microphone was a binaural arrangement of something really fancy, as would be expected. I think it was Fremer, though I suppose it could have been Dudley.

The point of the story was that the samples from the vinyl source were immediately detectable from the surface noise--the vinyl roar. The notion that it was all the same is simply ridiculous. That does not mean, however, that once the music starts and the noise is masked, the music cannot be fully enjoyed. But there's no doubt that Redbook CD has the potential for greatly reduced noise levels.

Rick "but vinyl roar is at low frequencies and most music is much higher" Denney

 

[rdenney]

Yes, we could, and did. CD sales exploded pretty early on, due to pop and rock on CD.

Don't know where you live, but all of my buddies , in their 20s in the 1980s, switched to CD as fast as they could.

CD's in those days were expensive, and many of us already had shelves full of vinyl LPs that we had paid real money for. I bought my first CD player in 1985, give or take, and all new acquisitions of music after that were on CD. But I did not seek to replace my vinyl LPs with CD versions for many subsequent years, and still have only done that in a very few cases.

Rick "who had cars to buy (success) and girls to impress (fail)" Denney

 

[Multicore]

I'm not sure the premise is correct, what with Shure being out of the pickup game.

 

[Robin L]

Yes, we could, and did. CD sales exploded pretty early on, due to pop and rock on CD.

Don't know where you live, but all of my buddies , in their 20s in the 1980s, switched to CD as fast as they could.

1984/1987 I was working at Tower Records, Berkeley California. This was the start of the CD era, with many issues of older recordings transferred warts and all to expensive silver discs. I recall that we got "Brothers in Arms" in an import version that wasn't, strictly speaking, legal to sell in the states at the time. There was some controversy regarding the sound quality of the silver discs, some finding the sound harsh and unnatural, but those who embraced the format were very enthusiastic. Meanwhile, the cut-out bins were rapidly filling up with discontinued titles on 12" discs. Leopold's, next door to Tower, was still doing a brisk business in 12" singles. Amoeba recently opened up further south on Telegraph, mainly competing with Rasputin's, both very big stores still doing a brisk business in vinyl.

A few years after my time at Tower I was working at The Musical Offering, a store that combined a cafe with an exclusively classical stock of CDs and a number of in-store events involving classical musicians. When I started there, we were down to a single 12" x 12" box of imported LPs. Those disappeared within a few months. Harmonia Mundi made a few releases as LPs during those years, but otherwise the LP era was over for Classical music, because digital recording became so much cheaper thanks to DAT recorders and desktop editors. There was a flood of new recordings of old music, in particular "Early Music"—Bach and pre-Bach. Lots of releases on little labels and "Vanity" productions. I was involved with a number of those.

By 2001 I was working at a Borders Books and Music. They had the biggest inventory of CDs in town during the peak years of sales of CDs. Then came Napster. By 2006 the CD bubble had burst, and we were down to only a few bins of CDs.

I continued to buy LPs right up to 2018, but mostly was listening to CDs as they became ludicrously cheap by 2010 or so. By then I was living in Fresno and Rasputin's had an outpost with many CDs on sale for less than $1 each. Really unnerving to find CDs I had worked on either as a recording engineer or as an editor tucked in with other CDs selling for $1 or even less.

 

[rwtooley]

Really unnerving to find CDs I had worked on either as a recording engineer or as an editor tucked in with other CDs selling for $1 or even less.

I honestly can't imagine what it was like for anyone in the industry once Napster/illegal downloads were the norm. must have felt like a kick in the crotch! People dumped on Metallica and other bands for going after pirates but I 100% understood.

 

[Robin L]

I honestly can't imagine what it was like for anyone in the industry once Napster/illegal downloads were the norm. must have felt like a kick in the crotch! People dumped on Metallica and other bands for going after pirates but I 100% understood.

Yes, some folks working in places that sold physical audio-visual media could see the writing on the wall. Not me, in 2001 I was still convinced that LPs sounded better than CDs and LPs were here to stay. Ironic, now that I'm a confirmed advocate of streaming (on Tidal right now—Theolonius Monk, "5 x 5").

Another factor is that it simply became too easy to produce a CD. There were some sessions where I showed up with my gear to record a soloist. They would take it upon themselves to produce what I captured on DAT cartridges. Sometimes this didn't work out so well. We'd hammer out editing in my basement studio and send the edited tape along to someone (usually a small label like Koch) to produce the results on a small run of CDs. Loads of CDs that wound up in Rasputin's $1 bins were like this, lots of folks making these sorts of "vanity" issues where having a CD was more important than selling CDs—this was the easiest way to send an example of their playing to concert promoters. These days the Classical CDs that were produced by big labels like DGG, BMG and Sony are in the $1 bin, the ultimate result of Napster birthing multiple streaming platforms like Tidal (paid them my $12.06 this morning), Spotify and others.

 

[krabapple]

CD's in those days were expensive, and many of us already had shelves full of vinyl LPs that we had paid real money for. I bought my first CD player in 1985, give or take, and all new acquisitions of music after that were on CD. But I did not seek to replace my vinyl LPs with CD versions for many subsequent years, and still have only done that in a very few cases.

I'm not talking about rich youths. We were guys from da Bronx, who graduated from college into a recession.
We all bought CD versions of the LPs we owned. We eagerly waited for them to appear. (Some of us also listened to classical.)

I'd say you were an outlier?



Krab "an outlier, on ASR? I'm shocked, shocked" apple

 

[Timcognito]

Yes, some folks working in places that sold physical audio-visual media could see the writing on the wall. Not me, in 2001 I was still convinced that LPs sounded better than CDs and LPs were here to stay. Ironic, now that I'm a confirmed advocate of streaming (on Tidal right now—Theolonius Monk, "5 x 5").

Another factor is that it simply became too easy to produce a CD. There were some sessions where I showed up with my gear to record a soloist. They would take it upon themselves to produce what I captured on DAT cartridges. Sometimes this didn't work out so well. We'd hammer out editing in my basement studio and send the edited tape along to someone (usually a small label like Koch) to produce the results on a small run of CDs. Loads of CDs that wound up in Rasputin's $1 bins were like this, lots of folks making these sorts of "vanity" issues where having a CD was more important than selling CDs—this was the easiest way to send an example of their playing to concert promoters. These days the Classical CDs that were produced by big labels like DGG, BMG and Sony are in the $1 bin, the ultimate result of Napster birthing multiple streaming platforms like Tidal (paid them my $12.06 this morning), Spotify and others.

Yes I remember when Tower went under, and then the Warehouse which had clearance centers, I bought loads of CDs at both companies fire sales at 20% of original. It wasn't until I got everything on my NAS that I realized how many I had not even listened to. Streaming has all but curtailed my many visits to Amoeba and Rasputin's here in the SFBA and even quick stops at garage sales and Goodwill to forage have drastically diminished.

 

[waofner]

When I gave up buying vinyl in the 90s, the rule of thumb was that the standard LP had a dynamic range of around 45 to 50dB on a brand new major label recording. Some were better and some were worse.

The only exception to this when it came to popular music was Mobile Fidelity. Their releases would give you about 10 dB less noise and distortion. Also, usually they would last longer because the discs were so thick, but this was not always the case.

I only owned a few of MFs albums, but I was very crestfallen when my copy of Sergeant Pepper’s by The Beatles got a huge pop on one of the tracks after only a dozen playings. For me, that was the turning point where I decided that I would never buy vinyl again unless it was for a recording that was not available on CD.

This all being said, I’ve been hearing all of this PR crap about the Vinyl Renaissance. Is the product being made today any better than what was offered 30 years ago?

Has anyone actually tested what the sound to noise ratio and distortions are being produced by modern vinyl and the systems used to play them back (other than photo preamps)?

One of my hobbies is not only designing loudspeakers, but also audio engineering since I’m also a musician.

One of the reasons that I moved to digital audio from R2R tape is that digital offered greater fidelity and much less noise & distortion. Also, tape requires a lot more maintenance… And, oh, there was the fact that tape was/is really expensive.

So, you guys measure stuff here. Any thoughts about taking a modern vinyl recording and comparing it through software to its digital release? Give them a serious, objective measurement based comparison to show the difference between them.

I’d think that acoustic music would yield the best results and it would be optimal if the source was recorded digitally and released in a hi-res, 24 bit format.

I imagine someone will have done this in the past, but I’ve not seen it.

My experience makes me think that Vinyl will lose to Digital worse than the Chiefs lost to the Eagles at the Superbowl (BOOM!) this year. (Go EAGLES… yeah, I said it)

Sorry, got carried away.

Anyway, a delicate, hi-res mastered, acoustic music recording compared using the best of both formats. Run them through the best competitor software and see what the results are. Then, release the proof to the world.

You can even give Vinyl a mulligan by running the digital signal through a DAC and capture it with the input ADC.

Your thoughts?

why the rude headline?

 

[Sjkrabbe]

just today I ordered Supertramps Crime of The Century in the Abbey Road halfspeed master for the purpose af compairing itn with the original LP, the CD, the remaster CD and the Tidal version of the album. And I will record them all in 96kHz/24bit from the output of my preamp. Then its compairable

 

[waofner]

i am more annoyed about the increasing number of remasterings obviously done without respect for the original vinyl release.
regardless the inferior dynamic range.

 

[rdenney]

I'm not talking about rich youths. We were guys from da Bronx, who graduated from college into a recession.
We all bought CD versions of the LPs we owned. We eagerly waited for them to appear. (Some of us also listened to classical.)

I'd say you were an outlier?



Krab "an outlier, on ASR? I'm shocked, shocked" apple

Not among my friends. One of my best friends of that era just gave me his Linn Axis because he just bought a Linn Majik to replace it. He also has a Rega CD player, and thousands of CD's in addition to his thousands of LPs, even after significantly downsizing his collection. My brother-in-law gave away his LPs even before buying CD's, because his tastes had changed. He gave them to me and I still have them. He doesn't want them back, but only because he knows I'll take care of them. My audio-biz friend still has his turntable and LPs, though I don't think he listens as much to recorded music from that era. We were all employed but certainly not rich. We all did, however, have competent equipment for both LP and CD playback.

But here we have the usual problem of extrapolating to the population from our own sample. I suspect the largest number of people were more like my brother-in-law--they weren't that interested in the stuff they had collected on vinyl and simply got rid of it altogether, and the CD's they later bought reflected their changing preferences. But nobody I know attempted anything resembling the systematic replacement of their LP's with CD's.

None of us, of course, held any fantasies about the superiority of vinyl.

Rick "who graduated into the same recession you did and spent 13 years in low-paying public-sector jobs" Denney

 

[rdenney]

i am more annoyed about the increasing number of remasterings obviously done without respect for the original vinyl release.
regardless the inferior dynamic range.

Yes, absolutely, but I'm not sure this is related to the shift from vinyl to digital as much as the shift from dry acoustics with minimal processing to modern remastered versions with added processing for room effects (reverb) and average loudness. Yup, even when they were distributed on media with limited dynamic range, they still exhibit more punch and less boom. The early CDs from those same masters kept the mastering concepts intact, at least my examples seemed to. Later ones tried to "fix" them, in some cases using egregious tools like pitch correction. That's a digital shift, but would have happened no matter what the distribution technology. I suspect the tools for processing have just gotten too easy and seductive.

It's sorta like somebody scanning old Ektachrome color slides and then trying in Photoshop to make them look like Fuji Velvia. I see it a lot. They often end up as a posterized mess.

Rick "loud, louder, loudest" Denney

 

[DSJR]

Yes, we could, and did. CD sales exploded pretty early on, due to pop and rock on CD.

Don't know where you live, but all of my buddies , in their 20s in the 1980s, switched to CD as fast as they could.

I was deep into the UK 'flat earth' back then - vinyl ruled and as for CD - 'Is this a lemon?' was the slogan from a certain Scottish company... I resisted CD until I heard the first one that didn't give me listener fatigue and which I felt was a step up from the standard '14 bit' machines, a Meridian MCD-Pro. For a year or so, I duplicated some album purchases (my CD of Brothers in Arms had the channels reversed over my LP...) and then went almost totally to CD, wrecking my credit card in the process I remember.

 

[Purité Audio]

I adopted CD straight away, just sounded better and obviously so much more convenient i don’t think I purchased another record, but did buy again most of my collection on CD!
Keith

 

[skankhobag]

why the rude headline?

Sorry that your sensibilities are so delicate.

 

[HoweSound]

I adopted CD straight away, just sounded better and obviously so much more convenient i don’t think I purchased another record, but did buy again most of my collection on CD!
Keith

The vinyl Renaissance has been a boon. I have haunted the used record stores. While the hipsters search for elusive vinyl treasures, I fill the gaps in my collection and grab obscure, unusual and rare CD's for $8 - $10 each. My problem now is the large backlog of music waiting to be ripped to Flac.