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

[GXAlan]

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.

Agreed 100%.

This is not directed to you, @rdenney , but to everyone else who doesn’t have an appreciation of how things were mixed “back in the day”.

Take the time to listen to this recording that was put out by JBL in the 1970s. Think of it like a TED talk. Have patience, play it back on your highest fidelity setup, knowing that YouTube compression is probably able to capture a lot of what the vinyl captured.

 

[krabapple]

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.

I doubt the word 'systematic' was even in our vocabularies.

Don't know where you came up, but from all that I could see the people around me doing, living in and around NYC then in Ann Arbor for about half and half the 80s, you and your friends were outliers. By the mid-late 80s people bought LPs only when there was no CD (and then bought the CD when it finally came out). There ws no 'system', just a general embrace of the glitch-free, easy-to-play, 'new thing' and abandonment of the old thing, whose well-known 'quirks' hadn't yet been nostalgized into virtues. Your friend's brother-in-law was the norm, in my experience . Which tracks the sales figures for CDs vs LPs in the 1980s.

Krab 'America, what a country' apple

 

[DSJR]

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

Umm, it only seems like yesterday that you were peddling valve amps from Italy and fancy-foo turntables. Maybe that was twenty years ago though (all but yesterday for me now )

 

[krabapple]

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.

The adding of reverb to a product was something we'd already seen in the vinyl era (Beatles, anyone?)

But it isn't something that has much marked digital . Remastering rarely involves adding reverb.

(But I'm guessing you are again talking mainly about 'classical' music releases?)

Anyway, remastering typically involved/involves steps like this (some of which are optional) 1) source choice (if the source is on tape, with restoration/repair if needed) 2) correct tape playback 3) digital transfer 4) EQ tweaks 5) noise/glitch amelioration 6) level adjustment (which can include compression)

Rarely, there are things like pitch correction

I would bet these days that many 'remasters' start from a previous digital transfer -- the 'archival' transfer -- rather than a new digital transfer from analog tape.

 

[krabapple]

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.

14 bit audio has a dynamic range of ~84 dB.

It's probably where most people stop hearing bit-depth difference.
I doubt you did blind level-matched A/B tests of CDPs back then when you were part of The Resistance.

 

[Timcognito]

My friend has new/used record store on the SF peninsula, CA. He told me that in the late 90s early 2000s a week did not go by where he would open the store and a large box of used records (10-50) would be sitting there. As that began to dry up he began trading store credit for boxes of records. Now he searches Craigslist and Ebay to find and buy large collections to fill his shelves.

 

[DSJR]

Agreed 100%.

This is not directed to you, @rdenney , but to everyone else who doesn’t have an appreciation of how things were mixed “back in the day”.

Take the time to listen to this recording that was put out by JBL in the 1970s. Think of it like a TED talk. Have patience, play it back on your highest fidelity setup, knowing that YouTube compression is probably able to capture a lot of what the vinyl captured.

Oh bloody hell, I HAVE this double LP. I can't get to my records right now, but I should dig it out as proof - not played it in thirty plus years...

 

[DSJR]

14 bit audio has a dynamic range of ~84 dB.

It's probably where most people stop hearing bit-depth difference.
I doubt you did blind level-matched A/B tests of CDPs back then when you were part of The Resistance.

UK FM radio is thirteen bit I recall and background noise on a clean transmission was basically inaudible, the venue 'atmosphere' easily masking it on a good live broadcast or general 'studio noise' on a speech programme, this before heavy compression kicked in (radio 4 held out the longest and may still be 'clean' that way). The brickwall filtering at 15kHz was all but inaudible too in reality. I do feel sad for those beautiful top-model Accuphase, Revox and Yamaha tuners of old, so good on a decent broadcast back in the day, now having to reproduce the compressed-to-hell muck the BBC and commercial FM stations churn out these days

 

[rdenney]

14 bit audio has a dynamic range of ~84 dB.

It's probably where most people stop hearing bit-depth difference.
I doubt you did blind level-matched A/B tests of CDPs back then when you were part of The Resistance.

I certainly could never tell the difference between my Magnavox CDB650 (nominally 14-bit TDA1541 DAC) and my later players.

Rick “recalling Philips had some mitigation strategy using over-sampling” Denney

 

[DoctorRobert]

I certainly could never tell the difference between my Magnavox CDB650 (nominally 14-bit TDA1541 DAC) and my later players.

Rick “recalling Philips had some mitigation strategy using over-sampling” Denney

Actually, the first Philips 14-bit 4-times oversampled DACs were effectively 16-bit (because of the oversampling). (The last 2 bits were basically spread over the additional samples.) With the added bonus of requiring a much simpler filter because the Nyquist frequency became 88.2 kHz instead of 22.1 kHz. The early Sony CD-players struggled with this because they used a 16-bit non-oversampling design. Their Nyquist filter affected the audio band.

 

[Mojo Warrior]

Back in the 1970s vinyl music reproduction was good enough to enjoy music. Technically, was it inferior ? Definitely.

 

[sergeauckland]

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

Me too. I even started a HiFi business on the strength of CD...

I sold my Gyrodec and all my LPs in the early 1990s, but started again 10 years later, and now am buying more LPs every month than I did during the LP era.

Probably 95% of my purchases are used LP from the 1970s, but the few new pressings I've bought have been quite good. Whether it's because it's now a premium product, (on the other hand so much of the knowledge has been lost) I don't know, but the LPs I've bought, both old and new are as I remember them.

I think what's happened is that the mass-market volume 'Hit-Parade' albums have gone away and all albums pressed now are for more upmarket buyers, so a bit more attention can be given to the pressing quality without volume pressures, and stampers wearing out.

S.

 

[Robin L]

14 bit audio has a dynamic range of ~84 dB.

It's probably where most people stop hearing bit-depth difference.
I doubt you did blind level-matched A/B tests of CDPs back then when you were part of The Resistance.

I've got a DDD Denon CD, released in 1987 (as a CD) but recorded in 1975. Denon was experimenting with the first* commercial digital recordings. Denon's first digital recording is "Something" by Steve Marcus and Jiroh Inagaki, December 1970. By the time my copy of Denon 33CO-1586—Beethoven, "Archduke Trio" performed by the Suk Trio—was recorded, Denon's engineers were using a 13-bit, 47,25 kHz recorder. The sound quality is really good, which points more to the players, the venue and the microphones than the recording medium. My guess is a trained ear could pick out this from a Redbook standard recording, but all of the other virtues of digital record/replay remain; absolutely steady pitch, no increase in distortion as volume increases, none of the issues with speed irregularities from analog sources.

*An AES paper on the dawn of digital recording:

https://www.aes.org/aeshc/pdf/fine_dawn-of-digital.pdf

 

[AndyMorris]

Doesn't work for me - at that point I lose all the benefits of playing vinyl - ritual/nostalgia - and might as well stream digital. (Which I do as well of course anyway)

Thats fair enough, unfortunately I have 15 ft of records and only about 6 ft of shelves, so I haven't had them nicely ordered and available for years. I am about to splash out on a massive bookcase of all the LP and a large amount of cd's so I might get that pleasure again. Or I may just get the sleave out to contemplate while I stream it.

Not all records are on Spotify. It does matter to me that I have and am listening to records that I bought, either recently, or as a kid, or that my Dad bought in the 40s when he was a kid, or something that I found 2nd hand. And somehow it matters that I am listening to the grooves of the record that I have. Thats more a philosophical or psychological thing that anything to do with audio quality, but it matters to me. Yes, I am listening to a copy, but it's my copy of my record.

Finally Visual Studio can do a fantastic job of getting a decent sound out of old, well-loved records. I even managed to get the sound off an old 78 that had broken in two. And its great to able to listen to my records in the kitchen or while travelling.

I do miss the covers.