Why do records sound so much better than digital?

[dscottj]

I
I don't know why I still keep hundreds of CDs. Sentimentality, I guess. And the wall of them behind the system make a decent baffle with the spines staggered.

That's exactly how I use my CD collection nowadays.

 

[Mart68]

Christmas 1987 was the first time I heard CD. A neighbour had just got a brand new Akai stacking system. Amp, tuner, tape deck, CD player, spectrum analyser, 12 band EQ and a linear tracking turntable that slid out like a draw.

He only had 4 CDs, Bruce Springsteen 'Tunnel Of Love', Floyd 'Dark Side Of The Moon' and two others I forget. I listened to 'Money' from DSOTM.

 

[Mountain Goat]

Yeah, after Marley "Legend", "Dark Side of the Moon" was the 3rd CD I bought. That is one album that really shined CD vs LP.

The second CD I bought was Sly and Robbie "Language Barrier". There wasn't a lot of reggae to choose from at the time in the little Midwestern college town I'd travel 30 miles from the farm to to buy music in, and listening to that opened my ears to different styles of reggae.

 

[Severian]

The summing of bass stereo in mono occurs an electronic comb filtering.
You find this better?
The bass are cut at 50 Hz on the vinyl.
The Vinyl digitalized has the same sound than the vinyl, i never find the bass on the vinyl are beautiful.

I'm not saying it's better in any absolute sense, I'm hypothesizing that it may, in a non-rigorous and casual way, sound better on a typical 2.0 channel home stereo system enjoyed by a typical vinyl collector.

 

[Sal1950]

Last night I was sitting here listening to Steven Wilson's new The Future Bites in full 5.2.4 24/96 Atmos playback. This is about the 10th time I've played it and the Atmos presentation once more had my jaw on the floor. At that time this thread and the many others like it came to my mind and had me thinking. Why oh why would anyone invest the first dime in ancient LP playback gear before they had put together a rig capable of reproducing 2021 SOTA sound? If you had a fully modern system at hand and wished for an additional toy to play with, that's kool. But to spend the kind of money it takes to get good vinyl playback before having a top flight 22sd century HiFi at hand, will just never add up to me?

 

[manokaiser]

I wonder if your post will trigger the vinyl enthusiasts, but there is indeed reason to believe that everything is discrete.

Dialectic, you got the point Fundamentally, it's a digital universe. If we dig further down the rabbit hole, it only exists in and through our consciousness. It is also very much efficiency driven, when there isn't consciousness involved to perceive matters (that includes the measurements), things don't even exist in reality, they are merely possibilities.
What that means in this case of analogue vs digital audio is that most probably what comes in our ears as analogue sound is no more than what our perception can digest and analyze, at best. That's approximately 50-60 Khz of digital sound. Any further resolution is indistinguishable by our perception, it doesn't even exist, unless we measure it of course, and then only because we act on that measurement.

Here's more to look up if you're interested> https://www.my-big-toe.com/

 

[audio2design]

Vinyl got merc'd! Case closed.

I don't think we can close the case for 2 reasons, one that the digitized vinyl version always rated lowest. My digitized vinyl is almost impossible to tell from the original, if not impossible.


2, this statement, "An obvious disadvantage of using remote, internet-based blind testing, is that there is no possible way to ensure the correct configuration ofthe participants’hardware and therefore to be certain ofthe integrity of the audio signals being rated. It is also highly likely that headphones used will be of varying brands and quality, which would of course have direct consequences for sound quality assessments"

I don't believe that headphones are suitable for a psychoacoustic comparison of this type. Headphones don't enable many of the mechanisms that humans use for placement of sounds and perception of an acoustic space/event.

I have a theory, which I have tested on 7 test subjects so far (Covid is getting in the way), that aspects of vinyl, which I assume to be primarily crosstalk but perhaps not exclusively, have a psychoacoustic advantage when used in the typically pretty awful acoustic environment (limited/no reflection control) of the average audiophile. For all their massive spend on equipment, most of their rooms are atrocious! I have a purpose built listening/theater room, with arguably excellent acoustic properties, and a fairly good system in our totally untreated living room. I don't have the benefit of perfect copies in vinyl and digital of the author, but have tried to use music that I believe are fairly similar on both. Yes I level match at 1KHz.

In the purpose built room, the digital version is was almost always preferred. In the living room, the vinyl version was often picked. The DACs are the same in both systems. The turntable setup in the purpose built room is arguably quite a bit better. I believe that both turntables are properly setup (test records, oscilloscope, distortion meter), and I am the pedantic type that opens up phono stages and tunes the loading for flat but not over-damped response.

Obviously it is not an ideal comparison, and I don't know if I care to optimize the test any further, but it has tweaked by curiosity so perhaps someone wants to pick up the ball and run with it.

 

[audio2design]

Last night I was sitting here listening to Steven Wilson's new The Future Bites in full 5.2.4 24/96 Atmos playback. This is about the 10th time I've played it and the Atmos presentation once more had my jaw on the floor. At that time this thread and the many others like it came to my mind and had me thinking. Why oh why would anyone invest the first dime in ancient LP playback gear before they had put together a rig capable of reproducing 2021 SOTA sound? If you had a fully modern system at hand and wished for an additional toy to play with, that's kool. But to spend the kind of money it takes to get good vinyl playback before having a top flight 22sd century HiFi at hand, will just never add up to me?

Because as exciting as modern surround sound can be for listening, it creates as many issues as it solves w.r.t. recreating a real live acoustic event (not amplified 2 channel live). While surround sound can create exciting ambience, it can also destroy the already fragile timing and frequency cues that are used to accurately place sounds primarily in front of us (assuming any attempt was made to embed them in the recording). Dolby Atmos is not, as far as anyone can tell (that I have read), a true ambisonic implementation. There does not appear to be any concerted effect to reduce crosstalk between stereo channels that would allow our brain to extra additional placement cues to more accurately place sounds. To that end, odds are it makes it worse. I would be interested in hearing other people's thoughts on this closer to the technology.

 

[Frgirard]

The vinyl is a fashion. No needs to search metaphysics concepts.
The loudnesswar disqualified the CD from the audience.
The plastic box of the cd made artificial sound.
The Vinyl object is sensual.
The Vinyl is a sign of class.
The media have launched the fashion and the shop followed.

This audience that listens the boule shit commercial industrial music on Spotify tuned to loud.

The bad sound quality of the vinyl the public doesn't take care.
When the lp was the major support, the first or two thousand disks are destroyed because they used to tune the press.
Now this vinyl are sold.

A planet of deaf.

 

[restorer-john]

My digitized vinyl is almost impossible to tell from the original, if not impossible.

And how did you come to that conclusion? How did you DBT your ripped version against your LP playing in real time? Or didn't you actually ever do it?

Everytime you play your vinyl, it will have different surface noises to the previous time. It's never the same. The ripped and digitized version stays the same. Easy to discern which is which.

I know what you mean though. The digitized vinyl rip sounds just as good you think, but unless you do multiple ABX tests (which you can't do with a live vinyl record playing) it's just conjecture.

 

[Frgirard]

The vinyl digitized sounds same the original.

 

[restorer-john]

The vinyl digitized sounds same the original.

I'm sure it likely does sound similar, but you cannot ABX the vinyl vs digital rip unless it is done in a linear fashion which means A, B and X are never playing the same piece at the same time. You can only A-B.

 

[Sal1950]

Everytime you play your vinyl, it will have different surface noises to the previous time. It's never the same.

Yep, LOL

 

[Newman]

Yep. Imagine celebrating the sound of breakages.

 

[MusicNBeer]

I love vinyl and now I know why, I love Rice Crispies!

 

[audio2design]

If it is truly surface noise, the change will be very minimal from play to play. Surface noise is not random. I think you vastly over estimate the noise on a well taken care of, cleaned, quality pressing played on a high end system.


Of course, you also assumed that the same passage must be played repeatedly as opposed to both queued at the same point and switched back and forth. While not quite as robust, the effective outcome is still highly robust.

 

[diddley]

Yesterday i heard vynil for a first time in a long long time.It was the beatles lp.
Full of hiss crackling and pops.

I was so happy when the cd arrived, finally done with l.p's and cassette tapes.It was progress.
I still buy c.d's and cherish them.
It was nice to hear the Beatles again, but I'm gonna buy a cd of them.

 

[audio2design]

It is easy to take the approach the the preference for vinyl is purely nostalgia and there is absolutely an element of that one could say evident by the average age of those that prefer vinyl. However, one can also take the approach that perhaps there is something in the playback of vinyl that, at least for a set of people, is preferable. The goal is not the highest accuracy, the goal is the highest average end-user satisfaction.

 

[Mart68]

If it is truly surface noise, the change will be very minimal from play to play. Surface noise is not random. I think you vastly over estimate the noise on a well taken care of, cleaned, quality pressing played on a high end system.
.

Yes this is true. Whilst I don't think the game is worth the candle, it is possible to get outstandingly good sound quality from vinyl records.

 

[rdenney]

It is easy to take the approach the the preference for vinyl is purely nostalgia and there is absolutely an element of that one could say evident by the average age of those that prefer vinyl. However, one can also take the approach that perhaps there is something in the playback of vinyl that, at least for a set of people, is preferable. The goal is not the highest accuracy, the goal is the highest average end-user satisfaction.

Sure. It’s been said many times in this thread. Some of the weaknesses in vinyl playback might be pleasurable to a few, or inaudible to others.

But it’s a question of doing things on purpose, not based on falsehood. The notion that vinyl is objectively better has been promulgated widely, not just the notion that it is subjectively preferred.

Carefully done testing has shown the opposite in both cases for ranges of listeners, but there are indeed outliers.

Rick “who can hear through vinyl’s weaknesses, but who knows they are there” Denney