The antique tech shortage that hurts the vinyl boom

boing
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Mastering with an analog format can provide much better results than digital - when an analog copy is made. Mastering with a digital format can provide much better results than analog - when a digital copy is made. Whatever your preference the simple truth is that source makes the biggest difference. Couple that with the fact that most people can’t hear the difference and it all seems a wash.

A quality analog source transferred to vinyl (with the first pressings) can produce a beautiful sound, up to 4 channels, and with no audible hiss or pops when played back on a quality turn table, with a quality cartridge and using analog (tube) amplifiers. The same can be said of digital recordings when using quality all digital equipment.

Yet, in the end, sound is analog and the signals driving the magnets in your speakers are analog. For this reason alone, due to the need to convert digital signal to analog at the final leg of the playback process, I feel that pure analog playback produces a (marginally) better result. But of course, I’m old enough to carry a bias towards records and 1/2" tape so there is that to consider. I may be hearing what I want to hear. I suspect that if you have a preference, you may be too.

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Raw Power is kind of a unique edge case though, given the circumstances behind its recording and mixing. The reasons it sounds fucked up don’t have much to do with the mastering. I haven’t compared but maybe later remasters were trying to “fix” the production?

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Not all new albums are recorded digitally. Well-known analogue studio example 1, slightly less well-known analogue studio example 2.

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That strongly depends on the quality of the ADCs. 24 bits at 96 kHz samplerate has the quantization and sampling artefacts WAY outside human perception.

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Any amplifier will clip if pushed beyond its output range. It’s just that the analog ones may start losing gain as they approach their limit, which somewhat resembles a compressor. If they are of high linearity, they won’t do this and will clip hard, like their digital brethren.

Just look at the transfer function.

Or take a scope and look yourself. A sound card with a sound editor (Audacity, for example) can serve as low-frequency poor man’s scope, too; should be enough for this use. Careful with the setup, though, so you can be sure that the artefacts you see are the artefacts of whatever you are checking out, not of the data acquisition rig.

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Fuck, am I a damn hipster?

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And why yes, I am playing wilco.

Eta

Eagle eyes will also notice my Laphroaig membership, and the hand made french hood in the corner.

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Okay fine, sure, Steve Albini is always the exception. But my question still stands. As does a corollary- all these vinyl repressings of classic albums… are they really pure analog transfers? Or is someone digitizing them along the way and then back to vinyl? I get very suspicious with all these repressings coming out and no explanation anywhere as to the process…

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Not all of them :smile:
(I know, this is super helpful)

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Did you mean to say DAC? A digital system creates the signal to drive a speaker with a Digital Analog Converter not an Analog Digital Converter.
In any case, my take is that the weakest point in a digital music system is the final step where a discrete-time and discrete-amplitude digital signal is converted to an analog line level output. Even with a low pass filter the true original analog sound will almost never be accurately reproduced by a digital system when using an analog source.

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Most of your masters (from major labels) from the late 50’s until the mid 90’s are going to be 1/4" or 1/2" tape (especially stereo and multi-track recordings). So when they re-master them for vinyl they will be an analog to analog process when done purely to vinyl (see the work of Pink Floyd for some fine examples of re-mastering from tape) and an analog to digital and back to analog again when a re-issue is done for both a vinyl and digital re-release at the same time. It’s kind of a crap shoot to be honest.

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We can agree here completely here: Digital clipping=BAD

But digital clipping happens because of operator error or in pursuit of maximum apparent loudness like you mentioned.
If you track too hot to an analog medium, the resulting recording is not ruined like it (potentially) is in digital, (a small number of digital overs can be acceptable if they occur within a very small amount of time). Now, just because analogue is not ruined doesn’t mean that the result is necessarily good. Tracking hot to tape adds compression and saturation which fundamentally changes the character of the audio. This CAN be used to great effect, but it can also be used to the detriment of the audio.

The only thing I would contest is that brickwall limited sound is “popular” just because its omni present, the loudness wars were fought by recording execs who correctly understand the psychoacoustic phenomenon where while listening to two identical tracks at different volumes, people will tend to prefer the louder version. Then that same exec will wrongly assume that making the apparent level of a track higher at the expense of dynamics is a good business practice.
The loudness wars were the result of business decisions, not technical ones.

My point is that digital is prone to errors if you have someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing directing the recording, mixing and or pre mastering stage. The loudness wars were fought on digital so we got to see the ugly side of pushing digital too hard, if these business decisions to attempt to maximize loudness on analogue tape or vinyl had happened before digital, we’d get to see the ugly side of compressing audio on analogue, which is its own kind of bad.

As to what I mean by aesthethic differences, some people love to record to tape even today, they can get the sound they’re going after that way, awesome. But the benefits of tape come with trade offs too, there’s loss of fidelity just by playing it back then by bouncing even before it gets to mastering. If each medium has a sound (which I don’t claim it does) then choosing one or the other will allow you to get different results, choose the one that gives you the result you want.

The real ridiculous thing is that a lot of people are tracking and mixing on cubase or pro tools and then mastering to vinyl and somehow, there are people, I don’t mean you necessarily, that believe this last step does something magical to the sound.
-But it will sound great on an expensive system! :unamused:

This rant, (Oh god, its a rant isn’t it?) isn’t because I don’t like vinyl, people should buy their vinyl, I’m all for it, its just that there seems to be a grave missconception about the pitfalls of digital that somehow get magically understood to mean that analogue mediums is somehow better even in today’s modern world.

/rant.

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Yes, I am mistaking these two acronyms often. (Here I actually meant both, as the music has to get from analog realm to digital anyway and artefacts can be introduced in either step.)

I’d say that both the ADC and the DAC step possess these risks.

You will never get a fully accurate reproduction. The resolution of human senses (any sensing system, in general) is however finite, so if you get below that threshold the “good enough” becomes indistinguishable from “perfect”.

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And that’s the crux of it, isn’t it? Some will say that the inaudible ranges effect tone and harmonics or what some describe as warmth or airiness or even presence. Those folk are often in the analog crowd. And perhaps there is something to be said of it. All else being equal, it seems the wider frequency range production of analog may allow your sound system to produce sounds that while are inaudible are still perceptible.
I have a old NEC 21" down firing sub woofer which includes a built in crossover that I like to use for action flicks. The crossover has a 20 Hz cutoff option so it only reproduces sound that is inaudible to the human ear. But boy oh boy does it make explosions better. The house shakes and you can feel it in your chest. So, my experience is that the inaudible ranges can definitely add to the playback experience. That said, I don’t have even a single analog movie so those sounds are part of a digital playback. I can only conclude that digital and analog recordings can produce non-audible sounds which effect the listening experience. The question then becomes does current digital recording and playback tech, though limited in frequency range, reproduce enough of the ephemeral portion of the track to be indistinguishable from analog. I think that it’s still a bit short of that goal but because of my bias, I couldn’t say. How does one measure or quantify the ineffable?

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Not only that, but early vinyl was SUPER heavy and very fragile because it was glass with an emulsion layer over it.

/old formats nerd

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That’s two different matters right there.
Attempting to record things with as much fidelity as possible and attempting to reproduce things with as much fidelity as possible.

There are people who attempt to do this, but most music, like most movies aren’t actually even trying to reproduce reality, they are actually trying to recreate an experience. The art of foley gives this away. Take audible sharpness for example: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AudibleSharpness

When swords are drawn in a movie they do so with a characteristic sound we’ve come to expect which draws attention to the action and gives weight to the threat of violence. Even tiny little pocket blades audibly hint at their sharpness.

Like I said, there are purists that attempt to capture a musical performance so when you reproduce it, you get the feeling you are there, but most music is actually trying to create its own space where your senses take the audible cues and reproduce a feeling for people listening on tiny earbuds in a crowded street, at a small gathering of friends through a cheap cellphone, in the club at ear piercing volumes and in quiet listening rooms with 10,000 dollar audiophile quality speaker cables.

If you listen to a song and it makes you want to cry or shake your booty, you are not missing anything that would have been revealed to you if only you had a better amp. You won’t cry harder.

Music is fake the same way movies and plays and stories in books are fake. A leather bound book will enhance the reading experience in ways that don’t matter to the plot but can’t make a crappy story come alive.

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That’s a completely different subject. You are talking about the art of production not the differences between analog and digital.
When I used the sub 20 Hz as an example, it was to illustrate in a concrete manner that sounds outside human hearing effect the listening experience. It had nothing to do with foley or the work of the sound crew. Rather, I’m attempting to illustrate that there are qualities of playback which are difficult to quantify. The sub example is simply a crude example that’s easy to grasp and not a true example of the difference between analog and digital recording and playback.
When I talk of the ineffable, I’m not talking about foley or experience recreation but rather the quality of the sound which audiophiles say is missing from digital media. I’m not saying it definitely exists but that there are those who swear it does. I believe I can feel the difference if not actually hear it but as I’ve said, I do recognize my own inherent bias on the subject.
Not that they are actually realated in any sense other than the ephemeral but consider a guitar amp. It could be analog using tubes or transistors or a fully digital amp. While they all do the same thing, the tonal quality is different between the three. It is that difficult to quantify difference that is the heart of the matter.

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At 48 kHz samplerate, maaaaybeeee. At 96 or even 192 kHz, no way. I’d believe that only if a blind test shows so with enough statistical significance to not be random.

The analog crowd is often rather misguided. I think I heard about a test where a clotheshanger wire was compared with a superexpensive speaker cable, and blind tests shown no difference.

Yes, it definitely works at the lower range. The whole body can feel the vibrations at low frequencies. With increasing frequency the vibrations aren’t felt as such but become sound instead, perceived with ears only instead of the haptic sensors. With yet increasing frequency
there are no known-to-me ways how humans could perceive the higher-frequency ultrasound. The cochlear mechanism will cut off the high frequencies. There is then no mechanism to transform the vibrations at those frequencies to nerve signals that the brain can perceive.

If you know about such alternative mechanism, please let me know. Otherwise I won’t believe.

Does the experience from the infrasound range transfer seamlessly to the ultrasound one? The mechanism involved in the former does not operate in the latter frequency range.

The digital samplerate does not apply at the infrasound frequencies; the difference between the signal frequency and the sampling rate is way too high. The number of quantization levels does not apply as well as such signals are of very high amplitude in comparison with the higher frequencies.

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Wasn’t it shellac?

Edit: It could also be a glass-core acetate disc.

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My friend’s dad has quite a few 78s in his collection that are glass based, yeah.

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Isn’t the sample rate how many discrete data points exist and not the frequency range of the recording? i.e. 192 kH is a wave made up of 192,000 data points for 1 second of sound. This determines the accuracy of the wave and not the frequency range. Am I wrong about that?

I’m going to need some salt to take that. I’ve measured the difference in signal loss over distance using cheap radio shack and quality speaker cable myself in school. It is a objectively measurable and quantifiable difference. Are you sure it’s the analog crowd who is misguided?

Then perhaps it is our knowledge that is lacking. Just as you can feel the lower frequencies but not hear them, perhaps you can perceive the higher in a different manner. To think that our knowledge is so great that our current models will never need to be updated when new information is found might not be the best idea. Try this out Ultrasound directed at human brain improves sensory perception

That’s a narrow study. Last I checked we have other senses as well and the capability of a given sense varies greatly from person to person.