It is easier to bring up the LUFS on modern song than orchestra. Limiting orchestra peak will bring unpleasant dynamic feel. That is other big topic. That why I never mention the modern song on LP. For orchestra, you can heard the soundstage, layering ......etc on vinyl better than CD even it has underlying hiss, pop, cracks. When I was in hifi show decade ago, a vinyl setup easily won than any digital media using orchestra material. $3,000 turnable beaten any CD player 3 time and above price. Even budget Project Debut turntable won any CD player 3 times the price. That why the format war DVD-A vs SACD. If Red Book was great, it wouldn't need the format war till MP3 reset the ball game. All the references first presented on your boring centuries old music on these "high resolution" format. During that time not all, if not none of the historical analogy master reel tape were transfer to Red Book and get rid of tapes forever. After that I never followed the outcome after the format war.
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High Resolution Audio: Does It Matter?
- Thread starter amirm
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The format war was mostly about copy protection.
danadam
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Was it a war though? Seems like just a skirmish to me
It is demonstrably true that the extra noise of LP playback gives an impression of a bigger sound stage.
As a person with 4 record players, all of them reasonably high end, I can not agree at all with your assertion.
CD is better in every way than LP and whilst I have some LPs that sound fabulous and some CDs which sound dire that is because of recording quality not format.
Orchestral music needs far less manipulation to make a CD than it does to allow cutting an LP (which can't do high levels at high frequencies or near the end of a side and can't do loud stereo bass since that would result in an intermittent "groove", obviously).
Ironically because most people listen to music files on ear buds or a tiny Alexa speaker or similar the record companies release recordings with that in mind, not for audiophiles using wide dynamic range equipment.
Since nobody is going to listen to LPs that way they can be cut accordingly, so you can in practice get a better sounding LP than digital file even though the potential of LP is nowhere near CD (equivalent to about 11-bit resolution)
radix
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Adding noise to make something more pleasing is also true for image editing. It's pretty common, for example, that after making a series of photoshop edits, one adds noise to smooth it all together and make it easier on the eye. Perhaps it's a basic truth of human perception that we're drawn to discontinuities or sharper transitions.
"Adding extra noise..." Years ago, I listened to Brian Eno "in colloquy", from the audience. Asked about digital audio and CDs, he said that when CD was new, it didn't sound right to him. He was using CD as background music for an exhibit. He hooked up a cassette deck and mixed the noise from a blank into the sound system to make it sound better to him, for the exhibit.
I have to congratulate you.
Your posts are about the most completely wrong ones I've seen posted here in the 6 years since Amir opened it
Nope, you got DRM right after Apple introduce it in iTune.You could copy digital SACD and DVD-A physically since the copyright protection level is about the same as physical CD. There is no DRM on these disc.
Not until the PS3 was hacked, quite some years later.
If vinyl was great, they wouldn't have needed CD's.
I enjoy my turntables, but am not confused about whether Redbook is pretty much better in every meaningful way to vinyl.
D
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I agree. There was a golden age for CDs in my opinion, before loudness war started (mid 90's) but after converters quality issues of the early 80's was fixed. Some music was great too, according to my taste, even though most of it was already crap. Not as bad as today, though.
While it's true that music needs to be compressed for LPs, it is also true that for at least a good quarter of a century CDs have been made with even less dynamic range than the one possible with LPs.
There are a few notable exceptions, though. Mostly semi-obscure music labels like Chesky, or remaster projects done right, like MFSL or (to a lesser extent, in my opinion) DCC.
But on the whole it mostly over-compressed stuff today.
They actually don't even care about avoiding clipping, now. They haven't for a while.
To avoid skipping and get a decent playing time of music into an LP mastered as a modern CD you would have to make it sound much quieter than a 'normal' LP master.
So the -35 dB separation was the crosstalk of an excellent cartridge? Or was the cross-talk added artificially?
Interesting. So you couldn't hear it during quiet passages, but when music played it was making it sound wider? Were these tests double-blind?
No you wouldn't. It would be stupid and pointless to cut at a very high level but the resulting recording would be "louder" than normal.
Everything was done digitally. The idea was to add LP shortcomings to digital signals to hear the extent of their audibility. IME digital recordings are indistinguishable from the microphone feed and have been since I first used a digital recorder (a StellaDAT) whereas no tape machine I had ever used was.
Did I write that? I don't trhink so. The noise level was set to be LP like so just audible on quiet bits but apparently masked on the louder parts but found to give this impression of a bigger, particularly in depth, sound stage.
None of the listening panel knew what they were listening to of for during the test and all of us has some surprises, those weere my two.
D
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It wouldn't be pointless. It would be impossible.
A louder sounding LP would be in line with a louder sounding CD, according to the "louder is better" principle of the loudness war, and if they could do it, they would.
Modern LP masters are already quite louder than 70s LP masters.
But they can only make an LP master that much more compressed than usual before either the amount of music in it gets either too little, more lacking in bass than usual, or actually sounding quieter, due to accommodating both increased bass content and lack of dynamics at the same time. If they tried to make it too loud (at the same volume setting as a regular LP) most of the consumer turntables wouldn't be able to keep the head from skipping.
Modern LP masters are the sweet spot between making it sound louder compared to older LPs and avoiding the problems above.
That's the inherent benefit of mastering for LP, in my opinion. With all its technological shortcomings as a medium and how much worse it sounds than a CD, in the end, over the past 20/25 years, an LP may actually sound better than what the loudness war forced its CD version to sound like. Because of the limit imposed to how compressed you can make a master for LPs.
Agreed. Figuring out what the signal that the mic recorded should really sound like is the tricky part (a problem that binaural mics try to overcome), but yes, CD quality (when using well designed ADCs and DACs) is able to encode whatever it is that the mic senses and transduces into voltage, and play it back, within margin of errors no human can hear, at regular listening levels. No doubt.
Oh, ok. I misread. The way you put it it sounded to me like they added noise that one wouldn't be able to hear during no music playing, but would add stage width during music playback.
This makes much more sense to me now.
I bet. I would be surprised too if the added stage width normally thought to be a characteristic of better recorded CDs turned out to be a consequence of more noisy recordings.
I'm still curious to see whether this still applies to binaural recordings. I'll have to do some tests. The problem is they wouldn't be double blind.
Any idea what the added noise level to mimic an LP noise was at?
Do you know if they they also modified the bass region to be more in line with a typical LP record (high pass and mono below 100 Hz or so) or was it just the white noise at -X dB that they added?
Sorry for the many questions you may not know the answer to, but this is very interesting to me, given my interest in binaural recordings and the way those are able to reproduce a wider soundstage in their own way.
NO.
Recording a very dynamically compressed signal onto an LP is trivially simple, far easier than cutting anything like full dynamic range, then how loud it is only depends on the volume setting and if you have enough power. Level matched it would sound far more like the CD than would be possible with genuine dynamically un-compressed music, and use the same amp power.
Unless records are physically cut differently to when I was involved in the 1970s which, apart from the delay for spiral pitch being digital rather than analogue, I doubt.
Perhaps you are confusing dynamic compression with cutting level? You could make a "loudness wars" compressed CD at a lower level too if you wanted.
Mono bass like an LP was one of the tests.
I don't remember the detail of the noise but there were two tests, one LP level of noise and the other "music correlated noise" whatever that is.
I know nothing about binaural and dislike headphone listening so have little experience there but since the effect of the added noise being the impression of soundstage getting bigger I would imagine it is perhaps sort of emulating concert hall background noise. ????
D
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No. Of course if you adjust the volume you can make any recording sound louder or softer.
I was referring to cutting an LP with masters that lack too much dynamic range. You can't do that without getting either less bass, less playing time, or less loudness (at same volume knob setting).
Quite. That is why we have a volume control. That is all we need to match level.
D
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I'm glad we finally understand each other.
Unfortunately, it seems like for a good 25 years producers thought it was a great idea to embed a couple clockwise turns of the volume knob into the recording.
I wonder how bad sound quality needs to get, before the majority of people start complaining too, and not just a few purists like us, which nobody cares about..
We do have to quit making the loudness war the whipping boy for bad sounding recordings.
There are many excellent sounding DR10 recordings and many crappy sounding DR14 ones.
There's more to SQ than it's DR.
But yea, the over use of compression has to end, I think it slowly is. But for much of todays modern dance and club music, metal, grunge, etc that's the way it's intended and probably should be.
There are many excellent sounding DR10 recordings and many crappy sounding DR14 ones.
There's more to SQ than it's DR.
But yea, the over use of compression has to end, I think it slowly is. But for much of todays modern dance and club music, metal, grunge, etc that's the way it's intended and probably should be.
I'd like to keep up the whipping
I have watched a few movies that using surround and dynamic range effectively, Yesterday was excellent. It's hard to tell how much is due to a good recording, the surround format, and/or dynamic range though.
- Rich
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