The Truth About Vinyl Records

[Aerith Gainsborough]

If someone replaced your digital set up with a turntable and records...how would you "feel" about that?

PISSED.
Because he just degraded the quality and ease of use of my playback system by an order of magnitude.

Frankly: I do not give a rats rear end about the medium or the technology involved when it comes to listening to music. All I expect that:
a) it's perceptually transparent in terms of quality
b) convenient to handle

I'm not one of these people that makes a ritual out of everything and is attached to "how things were".

 

[Newman]

You are a true AUDIOphile.

 

[MattHooper]

PISSED.
Because he just degraded the quality and ease of use of my playback system by an order of magnitude.

Exactly! Makes total sense.

Frankly: I do not give a rats rear end about the medium or the technology involved when it comes to listening to music. All I expect that:
a) it's perceptually transparent in terms of quality
b) convenient to handle

Given the choices we are comparing, that's a bit like saying "I don't give a rat's ass what color my speakers are, as long as they are black, otherwise I'll be royally pissed!"

In other words: I'm sure that given the alternatives, only one actual choice - the digital medium - would satisfy your demand. So it's digital or bust. And clearly you will really care that your music medium is digital. Which is obvious once someone proposes to replace it with any other existing alternative.

I'm not one of these people that makes a ritual out of everything and is attached to "how things were".

Fair enough. Though your response helps make my point.

Also, I think there is a selection bias issue to consider here regarding justifications.

Vinyl enthusiasts are constantly having to justify their choice in a way that people using digital media are not.

For many years there have been pretty much weekly (if not daily) articles on The Vinyl Revival. (It blows me away you can google it right now, and still see some news stories treating it like it's a new thing). And virtually ALL of them have the same theme "Why Vinyl?" Why when vinyl records died out, for seemingly good reason, in an age of ubiquitous and easy-access digital music, would anyone choose vinyl? Why the comeback of a format so cumbersome and full of compromises?

Hence...so long as one is paying any attention...there is almost a constant flood of "The Reasons People Give For Getting In To Vinyl." So of course there will be this constant murmur regarding the enthusiasm for selecting the medium itself. When something is new especially, like when digital streaming was new, there were tons of articles about the great revolution and tons of talk about how liberating the new medium was for music lovers. But once it becomes the default, it's taken for granted by many and you no longer bother having to justify it. It's only people "swimming against the tide" who generally do so. That's why here you'll always see someone "admitting" they play records still along with their justification for why, given the alternative.

And of course, at least for a certain ASR coterie, admitting you play records is fine...so long as it's along the lines of "nostalgia" or comes with sheepishly admitting how poor they sound relative to digital. Just don't be *too* enthusiastic about enjoying vinyl, and heaven forbid, don't enthuse about the sound quality!

 

[MattHooper]

First, just another thanks for creating this thread, as well as your other fine threads!

A friend and colleague of mine who recorded live music for decades goes all warm and fuzzy when he remembers listening to the first band he recorded on ADAT. The contrast between the 1/4 inch tape recordings and this digital medium , for him, was transformative. The digital medium eliminated so many deficiencies of analog tape, tape hiss, tape saturation and compromised frequency response.

I spent many years doing film sound on tape. I have zero warm and fuzzies for the analog medium for my profession.

(That said, while the sound quality improved, the transition to digital wasn't exactly an immediate sea-change to convenience. There was a fair amount of clunkiness involved in operating some early digital equipment. That was especially true of the early DAWs during the transition from tape to digital...about which I'm not super nostalgic either. But once early issues were resolved...no looking back for me).

However, the brilliant minds and inventors didn't sleep, they looked for ways to make music recording better and better. We live in an era now where the original sound that hit the microphone is now so close to what we can hear on our equipment that there's almost no difference. How good is that??!!

I never take it for granted.

 

[atmasphere]

@atmasphere I reckon you are way out on a limb. Focusing on vast irrelevancies (inaudible bandwidth above 20 kHz…oh, and while on that point, how flat is the FR of a typical MM at 30 kHz, and how low is the distortion?) and twisting statements to suit yourself (“most digital files have less bandwidth” — kind of ignores ignores every single A/D digital recording since decades being much wider than 30 kHz… plus again, only interesting to bats…)

You're talking about supersonic frequencies? Why? If you're a male over 40 your perception of frequency is pretty well done by 10KHz so even any reference to the old 20Hz to 20KHz range of human hearing does not have any relevance. People are never going to hear 30KHz on a vinyl LP regardless of the quality of their reproduction equipment because it was never there in the first place if the RIAA equalisation was applied to the master as it was cut on the lathe.

FWIW, your last sentence here is false. RIAA pre-emphasis boosts high frequencies on a 6dB slope, which is also why noob mastering engineers will blow up a cutter head sooner or later (personal experience...). My mastering setup imposed a 6dB rolloff in the cutter amplifier at 42KHz; the cutter head is capable of bandwidth past that but gets 'risky' due to the pre-emphasis...

FWIW, its not just males over 40 that listen to music. Getting the highs right is good for other people too

@Newman I suspect you are attaching meaning where none existed on my part. I was merely pointing out that LPs have a lot more bandwidth than most people think; bandwidth is one of the requirements for 'hifi'. There were some comments that the LP isn't 'hifi'...

What was the point?

I'm sure the point was to listen to music.

Unfortunately there is no way to know either way other than listening to the end result



Assuming that no "digital mastering engineer" f*&*ed with it by the time it was released to the public - Which is the point you are making above.

What's my point?
When an LP is cut with the involvement of " a good number of LP mastering engineers" that know this, the end product has a better chance of being "better" than whatever "a digital mastering engineer" mangeld up and relased as"Digital" .

The "debate" has never(?) been about the "medium" but the "ease" or "convenience" or "screwing around" with the original master before it's released.

This situation is analogous to what's been going on with software development over the years.
When you had to commit to producing a few thousand floppies for distribution, "someone" had to "do their best" the released software
a) will install b) won't break everything.
Fast forward to online updates....all bets are off. The "best effort" is still there....but the safety .net (!) is there , to release an update as soon as a flaw is discovered. No one has ever said software was better because it was recorded on a floppy. It was better because it was released on a floppy with all the logistical and $ nightmare it involved.

Yes! However I suspect that a good number of people on this thread will take you to task on this comment:

The "debate" has never(?) been about the "medium" but the "ease" or "convenience" or "screwing around" with the original master before it's released.

I sold my LP mastering system recently and got a nice price for it. Not looking back either. My post above was mostly to correct the usual misinformation that surrounds denigration of the LP. It was not an attempt to say it was superior. I do find it amusing though that so many have responded negatively when confronted with the facts. To any of those I have a recommendation: get an LP lathe and see what it really can do. A lot of the misconceptions I had (and see on this thread) died an ugly death after I sorted my lathe out (a process of about 20 years sorting out various bits of the system...). I really don't miss it.

No comercial bias there. Also how people set up the disc mastering. You forgot to mention half a dozen other problems with Lp like speed variations etc. that digital doesn't have.

Yes. Getting the lathe to behave in terms of noise it made and its speed stability was an on-going challenge. After several years of operations, a friend of mine turned up with an ancient RCA LP Mastering studio manual, and there is was in black and white: 'Allow the lathe 20 minutes of operation prior to recording"... sheesh. I was pulling the platter off and re-greasing the bearings every week...

This I think is the singular technical strength of LPs over Red Book. It's a slight advantage over 48kHz and is beaten by 96kHz. However, there's no guarantee that content at these frequencies sounds right:

1. Nobody knows (not even 5 year olds) whether a monitoring system at the mastering lab sounds correct at these frequencies! A frequency tone and meter are not the same as music (NB this is the same for 96kHz of course )
2. There are multiple MM playback tip/stylus resonances at these frequencies and a great deal of rising distortion. You have no way of knowing how good the sound really is at 25kHz. This is not the case for digital at 96kHz!
3. Can such high frequencies be reliably reproduced towards the centre of the LP?
4. How long does this material survive playing before it is no longer reproducible

I think you got most of what I was talking about.

Regarding your point 2) above, to get a MM cartridge to perform, it must be properly loaded (unlike a LOMC cartridge)! Here's a handy loading calculator (keeping in mind that the cable capacitance and input capacitance of the phono section must be included; this is part of why LP reproduction is so variable):
cartridge loading
WRT 3), so far I've no evidence that bandwidth is particularly limited at the end of an LP. I was able to cut and playback 20KHz tones in the inner grooves with ease. So I've come to the conclusion that old saw exists entirely due to early stereo phono cartridges, which by comparison to what's available these days were a bit of a turd.
WRT 4) LPs I own from the 1950s still seem to be just fine despite a lot of play (a lot depends on treatment); its been my theory that if the pickup does not mistrack, the information remains stable. The Library of Congress did an archival study back in the 1980s that concluded that the longest lived media at the time were LPs and their stampers, whose storage time could be well over a century if properly stored.

 

[JP]

WRT 3), so far I've no evidence that bandwidth is particularly limited at the end of an LP. I was able to cut and playback 20KHz tones in the inner grooves with ease. So I've come to the conclusion that old saw exists entirely due to early stereo phono cartridges, which by comparison to what's available these days were a bit of a turd.

Simple geometry - r needs to fit.

 

[atmasphere]

Simple geometry - r needs to fit.

I get that, apparently not a concern at 20KHz. You have to ask yourself- how was a measurement of an LP like the one you posted measured? Put another way, how do you know its accurate (internet and all...)? How accurate was the RIAA de-emphasis, was the cartridge (if MM) properly loaded and so on. The curves suggest that there is something else influencing the FR besides geometry! This tells me that the measurement didn't include all the variables.

Again, this is the advantage of digital- the performance of the media isn't placed in the hands of the user (which can and does result in inaccuracies even if the user is supposed to know what they are doing). Its plug and play.

 

[JP]

The curves suggest that there is something else influencing the FR besides geometry!

Pray tell.

 

[atmasphere]

Pray tell.

Sure. Look at the curves. All of them show a drop just before 20KHz, but other than that stay fairly flat to 20KHz regardless of the styli or distance from the center spindle. Thus the distance from the center spindle is not an explanation. You'll also see a variety of peaks and dips that are not explained by a lack of space. Something else is obviously going on. It looks like sloppy setup, a geometry problem with the arm, issues with EQ and no attention paid to cartridge loading; not knowing anything about the providence of this graphic, it looks like there is a resonance at 45KHz, which shows up on all the waveforms (so we can see that there is bandwidth well past 20KHz in the inner grooves...). The graph also does not show the modulation, which plays an enormous role. It merely shows a '0' level, which one might take to mean 0VU?? but no way to really know.

 

[Newman]

Pray tell.

I’m starting to suspect that “the performance of the (vinyl) media is in the hands of the user” is going to be used as a ‘gotcha’ defence of vinyl, ie the medium itself is fantastic so it has to be always ‘the user’ ie the setup that is the cause of any poor results and vinyl issues.

We were set up.

 

[JP]

Sure. Look at the curves. All of them show a drop just before 20KHz, but other than that stay fairly flat to 20KHz regardless of the styli or distance from the center spindle. Thus the distance from the center spindle is not an explanation. You'll also see a variety of peaks and dips that are not explained by a lack of space. Something else is obviously going on. It looks like sloppy setup, a geometry problem with the arm, issues with EQ and no attention paid to cartridge loading; not knowing anything about the providence of this graphic, it looks like there is a resonance at 45KHz, which shows up on all the waveforms (so we can see that there is bandwidth well past 20KHz in the inner grooves...). The graph also does not show the modulation, which plays an enormous role. It merely shows a '0' level, which one might take to mean 0VU?? but no way to really know.

This measurement method takes Fs/100 slices of the audio and runs an FFT on each slice grabbing the largest bin and averaging those values within 100Hz buckets. Lower frequencies have more bins to average being a log sweep. It's a bit more revealing than the typical octave smoothing plots or manual plots that are plentiful, and substantially more revealing than the chart-recorder plots of yesteryear.

Quite simply these are plots of the outer-most left channel sweep track and the inner-most left channel sweep track on a copy of TRS-1005 done sequentially one session. There's no treble emphasis and laybacks were done flat. The table below is by the numbers and illustrates the differences at 10kHz and 20kHz for the different minor radiuses. The 1000LT and 1000E are the specimens of interest being HOMC and seemingly identical aside from the styli on the cantilever.

I agree the raggedness of the outer groove test track is interesting, and I've earlier plots of it with different cartridges that are a lot smoother so it may be tracing damage. Regardless, the point was to show relative difference between inner and outer on the same setup with different r, and this clearly does that, not that it was really needed - plenty of info out there on this. It doesn't equate it to typical program levels, though being 3.54cm/s @1kHz and no emphasis it's pretty far from being an outlier test.

 

[JP]

I’m starting to suspect that “the performance of the (vinyl) media is in the hands of the user” is going to be used as a ‘gotcha’ defence of vinyl, ie the medium itself is fantastic so it has to be always ‘the user’ ie the setup that is the cause of any poor results and vinyl issues.

We were set up.

Shouldn't be a "gotcha" but can have validity. Roughly 75% of the setups of forum posters (not ASR) that I've heard in person had extremely obvious issues in setup, broken equipment (bad arm bearings, etc.), or worn out styli. Shockingly bad.

It's the main reason I tend to not take anything seriously unless there's a way to calibrate. That goes both ways - "Rice Krispies" as well as "dead quiet".

 

[Galliardist]

Regarding the claim for bandwidth with vinyl… I distinctly remember this claim being put to the test somewhere, where a well specified setup was recorded with various supposedly audiophile LPs and they looked at output at 24-25 kHz.

They found - noise. No more, no less.

In fact MQA is better in this regard, in practice. (Does ASR have a witness protection program- I’m going to need it).

Of course I can’t find that test at the moment, but if you think about it it has to be true given the amount of signal in most recordings at that frequency. They probably used recordings from analogue tape to compound the results.

Modern pressing practices may not help.

 

[posvibes]

So I hooked up my speakers, Ariston RD80se same set up as before but swapped out the Cambridge for AIYMA 07 amp, and as I surmised earlier the results were a lot better than on headphones (why is that?).

My set up is still pretty good and didn't make a dogs breakfast of the recordings. Purely subjectively it was all very pleasant and I enjoyed the experience very much, not in a nostalgic way, but in an audiophiley way it passed muster. All of the stated objections to vinyl remain the same and I still consider it somewhat of a fad, and CD revival awaits just around the corner.

For me a non audiophile-audiophile much of the quality differences of the sound are at the margins either way and I cannot quite trust myself to really judge but I still prefer digital but can listen to my records without cringing.

But I certainly will not be adding to my record collection by buying a single additional record.

 

[MattHooper]

I think the way I feel about digital physical media is similar to how many feel the way about older analog physical media.

At one point I thought CDs were cool and owning a "collection" was awesome. Now I view them as cumbersome unnecessary carriers of what I really care about: the 1s and 0s representing the music. The physical part has no added value for me. Give me streaming.

I've come to feel the same way about my movie collection. I'm a movie nut and so I built up a sizable DVD then Blu Ray (and even gawd help me HDDVD) collection. For quite a while this gave me a real buzz. The idea that I now own so many movies I've loved. How cool is that? But with the convenience of streaming movie content, and with the quality of streaming becoming so good, I found less value in owning the movies. Now, for me, physical Blu-Rays hold no particular romance or aesthetic/tactile benefits. I view them as cumbersome old-school ways of getting to the digits on that media. I'd happily get rid of all my
physical movies if I could access them all via streaming. Unfortunately I can't - many either seem unavailable on streaming services, or they are spread across the inventory of several streaming services and I'm not paying for 4 different services (or more). So, stuck with a bunch of physical movies for now.

 

[posvibes]

What I really like about streaming is I haven't gone down the road of chasing old favourites and collecting once again the same recordings. I have a liked songs collection on Spotify full of music from a wide variety of genres and artists and performances, that I add to without going as far as curating a particular collection.
Some get deleted along the way, others are a single track that will spur me to investigate later and check out the other stuff of the artist. I love the links of players or composers which expands the universe of a group or a stable of players and groups of a particular label.
I am glad to be alive at this time.

 

[Aerith Gainsborough]

Given the choices we are comparing, that's a bit like saying "I don't give a rat's ass what color my speakers are, as long as they are black, otherwise I'll be royally pissed!"

In other words: I'm sure that given the alternatives, only one actual choice - the digital medium - would satisfy your demand. So it's digital or bust. And clearly you will really care that your music medium is digital. Which is obvious once someone proposes to replace it with any other existing alternative.

If we demand transparency from our audio gear, there is no substitute for digital in the consumer realm.
Add in the "anytime, anywhere, on the go" factor and you merely cement that. No analog medium I know of can keep up with these demands. Even a portable CD player will start to act up once you try to use it while jogging, not to mention the pathetic data density compared to a smartphone with half a TB of storage. We really live in an insane time, given how easy it is to take your entire collection with you in a frikken lossless data format, nonetheless!

You can try to discredit my stance as much as you want, the above are simple facts of modern life.

Given the love of this community for absurd overkill SINAD and engineering, it comes as no surprise that objectively inferior technology, such as vinyl, is not perceived as a valid alternative anymore.

Why the comeback of a format so cumbersome and full of compromises?

Simple: humans are irrational and emotion driven creatures. Listening to audio can go beyond perceptual transparency and objective quality. 95% of the people I know don't give a flying intercourse about sound quality at all. FFS, my dad listens to music on a smartphone speaker and proudly presents it to me as "sounding good"! ..... While my ears start bleeding from all the distortion.

To them, the act and the ritual of vinyl may be part of the experience and enjoyment.

Can Vinyl sound great? Oh it absolutely can, if it's a great master and a fresh pressing. Can it sound objectively better than digital, given the same source data? Not a chance, because vinyl is created by a digital base file. It always amuses me when people say "digital sounds lifeless/artificial" and then praise their vinyl, that was created from what?
A DIGITAL FILE.

Yaaah, we humans are weird indeed. I realize, that not everyone is as emotionless and detached as I am.

and with the quality of streaming becoming so good, I found less value in owning the movies. Now, for me, physical Blu-Rays hold no particular romance or aesthetic/tactile benefits.

Aye, same boat here.
Only difference: objectively, the picture and sound quality of a UHD Disk is still notably superior to streaming services.
Another perk: Disks work when your Internet is on the fritz.

Still convenience vs quality... sometimes a hard choice. And lets not forget the non trivial financial expense of 25€ per UHD disk vs. e.g.: 9€ for a monthly Disney+ sub.

 

[MaxwellsEq]

Simple geometry - r needs to fit.

View attachment 272318

Great to see empirical evidence of something we've all known mathematically for years.

 

[Newman]

Yeah, nice.

 

[Cote Dazur]

Given the love of this community for absurd overkill SINAD and engineering, it comes as no surprise that objectively inferior technology, such as vinyl, is not perceived as a valid alternative anymore.

I still enjoy listening to music on my LPs very much, but not as an alternative. it is not a valid alternative.
I think we all agree on that. If I had to decide between one or the other, it would be digital only, for quality and convenience, but I do not have to choose. I can and will enjoy both and I am glad to be able to. Glad vinyl was and still is available, for any one to enjoy if they like.
To be honest, I am not one of ASR member in love with absurd overkill SINAD or any other spec. I love to be aware of the objective facts so I can make better decision based on what is important to me, enjoying listening to music.
When sitting in my audiophile chair in my audiophile room on my audiophile set up, either digital files or vinyl can do that for me.
If one link in my chain is objectively weaker than an other link but my chain is still strong enough to deliver the result I am after, it does not matter to me, my goal is not testing links, it is using the chain for what I need it for.