VINYL is BACK and you can thank Sonos for that Vinyl has been the music format that wouldn’t die for the best part of three decades. Not since Kenneth Williams quipped “Infamy! Infamy! They've all got it in for me!” has a death scene seemed so protracted. Now, however, it seems the format is officially in remission. Pioneer PL-510 and PL-117D turntables The song remains …
Too bloody right! I love my vinyl but for example I have an early Dire Straits LP on which the groove is not properly centred. The music does not benefit from what sounds like a doppler effect as the needle veers half an inch this way and that each time the record goes round.
And on Jon Lord's Gemini Suite (original issue) I have never been able to get rid of what sounds like the second violins having a nice fry-up in the middle of the orchestra.
I get the impression that CD was introduced for the classical world, having no crackle during the quieter parts of the music.
But the 16-bit 44.1Khz sample resolution is archaic.
44.1 was chosen due to the mastering hardware using some video timing or something. 16-bit was obviously the best they could do at the time.
So while many question why you need to go beyond 16-bit for music, I'd say we can easily put to rest the audiophile arguments about lost harmonics with CD if we have higher resolution audio.
Even the soundtrack of your blu-ray films are recorded at a higher resolution (although with lossy compression doh).
I found this video very informative. I think I stumbled across a link to it in the comments pages of this site a few months ago.
Agreed.
I really don't understand this Vinyl nostalgia, I had records (audible quirks and damage), then tapes (quirks and noise), then CDs (wow!). I find that properly recorded digital audio on CDs, Digital video, Flacs and MP3s, without stupid compression (too common for signed bands), sloppy clipping or poor sample rates, sounds far better than any Vinyl I heard, and doesn't need stupid expensive equipment to play it at best quality, including archaic Valve or Class A amplifiers (class D is excellent now); even tablets and phones often have quality audio chipsets now, and high quality PC sound cards sound even better.
Frankly, quality digital audio played through decent DACs (e.g. Burr Brown), with quality amplification stages or direct to Class D, and a smooth power supply blows away Vinyl and other obsolete analogue tech. much like the even older wax cylinders I've also heard played.
Some of the nostalgia comes from listening to records that never got released on CD at all. Heck, I bought plenty of close-out records in the early 1980's, and so they were already "out-of-print" at that point. Then again, I was also surprised to find a super-clean downloadable copy of "Hi-Fi Sounds for Hounds", and that was out of print since the mid 1960's.
44.1KHz isn't a problem. Actually today with oversampling and then DSP you can extend the response of real analogue content closer to the 22.05KHz limit. Almost no-one can hear the difference between 192kHz sampling where content is limited to 16kHz and limited to 24kHz on 48K playback.
The 44.1 and 48k chosen to make life easier for analogue anti-aliasing filters. But now with 192KHz sampling only a simpler filter is need and DSP can raise the limit from 12khHz / 14kHz (analogue anti-aliasing) to close half the storage/broadcast sample rate. Then the playback DAC interpolates and uses higher rate play back to allow simpler and better low pass analogue filters on analogue out.
I'm not sure that Blu-Ray is even Lossy any more, it's only lossy if you use a legacy decoder.
DTS-MA, for example, is a Lossless encode, but it's clever in that it's a lossy encode (DTS) with a Diff from the lossless added, so a normal DTS decoder sees the lossy DTS stream, but a DTS-MA decoder sees the whole lossless piece.
Dolby TrueHD is also Lossless - it uses the properly good Meridian Lossless Packing (MLP) which used to be used on DVD-Audio but only at 9.6Mbits/s. MLP on Blu-Ray via the TrueHD stream is 18Mbits/s
The given reason for the Red-Book standard being as it was, was partially as you say due to the PCM encoding of video also being 44.1Khz (the masters of CD's used to be stored on Videotapes) and the length was due to the VP of Sony arbritarily setting the length of a CD to 74 minutes because that was the length of a specific version of Beethoven's 9th Symphony - although Philips seem to imply that may be urban legend :)
The given reason for the Red-Book standard being as it was, was partially as you say due to the PCM encoding of video also being 44.1Khz (the masters of CD's used to be stored on Videotapes)
Nonsense. CDs were originally mastered on high-quality analogue tapes, and then on digital systems. There was some equipment that could record digital audio onto videotape, which was used by some people for portable work and by some small studios, but it was developed long after CDs became common.
44.1 was chosen because human hearing goes up to 20kHz, and so you have to sample at twice that (the Nyquist rate) at least to ensure that you get accurate reproduction. An analogue filter with a perfect (brick wall) cutoff at 20khz would be complex and expensive, so they settled for a more practical filter which rolled off less steeply at 20kHz, and then sampled at 44.1. That gave them the best compromise between filter cost, CD length, and anti-aliasing performance.
"Nonsense. CDs were originally mastered on high-quality analogue tapes, and then on digital systems. There was some equipment that could record digital audio onto videotape, which was used by some people for portable work and by some small studios, but it was developed long after CDs became common."
Really? I always was told 44.1Khz was chosen because it fitted U-Matic's horizontal sync rate. It could quite easily have been they chose U-Matic because it was convenient.
For AAD discs, very true about Analogue. You'd bounce down from your Multi-Track Analogue (In our case a 48-track Otari) to a 2-track analogue tape (Tascam) and bung it out via courier. But not when people started to insist on DDD mastering.
Initially we used to send masters to DADC Austria on U-Matic tapes. There was a PCM unit linked to a U-Matic video which recorded the PCM mixdown output the mastering team did from the Sony DASH multi-track.
The U-Matic was soon replaced by DAT tapes, and the Sony replaced by Alesis ADAT and ultimately by Hard Disk storage when it was reliable enough.
actually studios used to use sony video decks as a cheap dig' second backup to the tape version master, but the sony's recorded at 48k, HHB in london started modding the sonys to 44.1 for studios. studio dat's were initially 48k, like my denon i had imported from japan, again it took time until 44.1 dats appeared. This was long before people commonly had consumer cd players and when vinyl was still king.
From John Watkinson, The Art of Digital Audio, 2nd edition, pg. 104:
"Video recorders... were adapted to store audio samples by creating a
pseudo-video waveform which would convey binary as black and white
levels. The sampling rate of such a system is constrained to relate simply
to the field rate and field structure of the television standard used, so that
an integer number of samples can be stored on each usable TV line in
the field.
Such a recording can be made on a monochrome recorder, and these
recording are made in two standards, 525 lines at 60 Hz and 625 lines at
50 Hz. Thus it is possible to find a frequency which is a common multiple
of the two and is also suitable for use as a sampling rate.
The allowable sampling rates in a pseudo-video system can be deduced
by multiplying the field rate by the number of active lines in a field
(blanking lines cannot be used) and again by the number of samples in a
line. By careful choice of parameters it is possible to use either 525/60 or
625/50 video with a sampling rate of 44.1KHz.
In 60 Hz video, there are 35 blanked lines, leaving 490 lines per frame or
245 lines per field, so the sampling rate is given by :
60 X 245 X 3 = 44.1 KHz
In 50 Hz video, there are 37 lines of blanking, leaving 588 active lines per
frame, or 294 per field, so the same sampling rate is given by
50 X 294 X3 = 44.1 Khz.
The sampling rate of 44.1 KHz came to be that of the Compact Disc. Even
though CD has no video circuitry, the equipment used to make CD
masters is video based and determines the sampling rate.
" the length was due to the VP of Sony arbritarily setting the length of a CD to 74 minutes because that was the length of a specific version of Beethoven's 9th Symphony - although Philips seem to imply that may be urban legend"
Well it was certainly true that Sony drove the length (CDs were to be originally 60 min) and the size "Must fit in a (Japanese) shirt pocket"
Given that the first big market for CDs was classical music there's a lot of milage in them deciding that the longest common piece should play in its entirety without changing discs.
The dataset could have been _much_ smaller if the samples were defined as deltas rather than absolutes but the processing technology of the time simply wasn't up to it (original preproduction demonstrations used several racks of equipment and had noticeable artifacts in the playback)
I can still remember playing my first CD purchase in 1984 (Dire Straits "Making Movies") and nearly blowing the cones off a pair of Kef C60s when the guitar solo kicked in at the start of "Tunnel of Love" I instantly fell in love, because despite what the naysayers were putting about, the sound was clean and clear and lacking all that dust crackle + tracking distortion (no tonearm _ever_ tracks a groove tangentially from leadin to leadout) everyoine was used to. It wasn't so much listening to a recording as sitting in the studio whilst they were making it. (Many other discs since were badly made and sounded awful).
24 bit is not higher resolution that 16bit. It potentially allows for more dynamic range of 144dB compared to the 96dB "archaic" CD format, but that's not the same as resolution.
For playback, if anything the loudness wars have resulted in less dynamic range being needed , not more.
If you really want to reproduce the experience of going from absolute silence to a formula 1 car at full throttle driving by, then by all means go 24bit.
85db is where damage can start to occur to hearing, 127dB permanent damage starts. A couple of minutes at 141dB is going to make you nauseaus.
Once your hearing starts to go, it doesn't come back. Although seen as nanny state interference, there's a reason good why the EU introduced limits to personal audio equipment headphone levels to 85dB, which takes some people permanent hearing loss to appreciate.
44.1 khz is an appropriate choice for the technology when CDs were invented. (No, I do not know why 44.1 rather than 44.8 or some other number). Today you could certainly do better. 16 bits likewise. (Perhaps if 6-bit bytes had won out in the 1970s we'd have had 18-bit CDs, with a maximum play time about 12% less)
The relevant maths is Shannon's sampling theorem. 44.1 kHz perfect sampling allows encoding of input frequencies up to 22.05 kHz. Higher frequencies get "aliased" so input at 23kHz would get reproduced as noise at 21.10kHz (ie wrapped back along the audio spectrum from 22.05kHz). Which is fairly OK because the highest frequency you can hear is around 20KHz and the highest you can appreciate musically is half that or less. So they put a sharp analog filter in the input signal (prior to sampling) to attenuate frequencies above 20kHz.
Contrast this with the garbage generated by lossy mp3 and similar coding, with tonal artifacts inserted across the entire audio spectrum. Music encoded onto and back from a CD remains musical. Music encoded as lossy-mp3 and decoded is horribly degraded. In my case, I can't regard the resulting noise as properly musical. So I'll stick to CDs, and hopefully before they stop making CDs they'll offer losslessly encoded downloads as standard.
As to vinyl? Well, in basic form it introduces only musical distortion (mostly 3rd harmonic "warmth") and ignorable neutral noise (hiss, clicks from dust or damage). If you never, ever touch the recorded part of the vinyl surface, and never played your vinyl with anything except a deck and stylus of the highest quality, and don't ever play it more than a couple of dozen times, and change the stylus often enough, and provided the master was cut by an expert, and providing the sub-masters weren't used to press too many vinyl disks, and provided you've got sufficient decoupling between your deck and the loud bass from your speakers, ... vinyl can give a CD a decent run. But the price in money and convenience is higher than most are willing to pay.
"(No, I do not know why 44.1 rather than 44.8 or some other number)"
Simple: it's mathematically related to BOTH the PAL and NTSC linerates used by u-matic derived digital mastering recorders of the time. More detail than you ever wanted to know at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/44,100_Hz
Please refer to a previous post of mine (no search function, sorry!) regarding the interpretation of the 44.1 kHz sampling, it is more complex than simple aliasing. Shannon's mathematics were for a perfect phase signal.
I also had a link I found to a nice engineering explanation that was well explained. I seem to recall giving an empirical example too form my practical experience.
I believe that 44.1 kHz was chosen because of the data storage limitation of the original CD format which was supposed to be able to contain the longest compositions available at the time.
Vinyl has one MASSIVE advantage - it is a direct measurement of the sound being reproduced.
The problem with digital is not the approximation, we know how to make it all sound perfect. The problem is, in the name of "copyright protection" some CDs are DELIBERATELY corrupted to inhibit transferring to another media. Yes that's right, if it sounds crap if might have been nobbled on purpose.
Fortunately the same mathematics that permits us to setup perfect reproduction, also allows us to remove the shallow attempts to illegally (IMHO) ruin a purchase.
P.
Vinyl has one MASSIVE advantage - it is a direct measurement of the sound being reproduced.
It's an approximation, an analogue copy representing an electrical signal in the limited resolution of a piece of plastic. That's why it has limited dynamic range, roughly equivalent to 12-13 bit digital and various forms of harmonic distortion appear both above and below the frequencies being reproduced.
A photocopy is an analogue copy - look at a fourth or fifth generation photocopy, or listen to a tape to tape to tape to tape copy, then consider the record manufacturing process of analogue copies of master tapes -> disc master -> father copy -> mother copy -> stampers -> vinyl. At each stage there will inevitably be some deterioration in the reproduction, albeit much less than the two examples given here. That's what happens in the analogue world as you progress from one generation to the next.
Vinyl may offer "a direct measurement of the sound being reproduced" but it's a flawed one, and what is digital audio if not a "measurement of the sound being reproduced"?
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"IMO the two problems with vinyl are that normal use wears it out (unlike CDs --- I know they won't last forever, but each play doesn't wear it down) and that you have to be very careful with the needle."
I've often wondered just how much the "warmth" of vinyl would change if you used a laser "needle" to play? It would seem to placate both groups; those who want the wider audio range of vinyl, and those who prefer the crisp, clearness of digital. Then throw in the elimination of friction wearing and it seems to be a total package.
You can get one - it's made by a Japanese Company called ELP. (Not Emerson, Lake and Palmer) and it costs you, ahem, $16,000 plus shipping from Japan. And if you want a wood finish, then it's a bit more. And need to read 78's? Another $3k.
http://www.elpj.com/
It's not digital though - even though it uses a laser. It just measures the reflection angle and converts that to analogue audio. So the downside is unless your record is amazingly clean it does pick up dust and everything else on the record.
I put about 200 LPs on a spindle, stuckem in the bath with a 40khz transducer and some mild detergent - the shit that floated off them (along with the labels) was astonishing - as was the sound difference.
Its amazing how much crud a few parties can deposit on your vinyl - and shellac!
Laser "cartridge" sounds an intruiging idea. But don't forget that the sound of a vinyl record is heavily influenced by the turntable that's spinning it (platter material, resonance, inertia, motor and transport mechanism, suspension, etc) as well as by the cartridge (compliance, tracking weight, inertia, coil mechanism etc) and arm (bearings, sonic reflectivity etc). A laser would eliminate some of these things and measure the others more accurately (perhaps). A record player is, ultimately, a record transport device and a measurement system.
Well, that's part of the point of vinyl, innit? You're not just hearing the artist's music in high fidelity, but also the scratches, clicks and pops generated by the needle scraping over your dead skin cells collected in the grooves of the vinyl.
ELP turntables are a nice idea with a lot lacking in the execution.
A stylus melts the vinyl under it as it passes (like an ice skate melts water), resulting in high frequency bits flattening out with each play and dust being pressed into the material - but they tend to ride the same point of the groove (which is where Stereohedrons used to claim an advantage by riding a wider spot).
An old trick for recovering decent sound off rare records was to use a different size stylus to ride a different level of the groove. The laser systems could theoretically read the entire groove and average out dust/gouges, but the ELPs don't and they don't sound particularly good.
FWIW the contact pressure with 1 gram tracking force is several tons per square inch - and one should never leave a stylus sitting in a stationary groove as it melts a little dimple into the groove which results in a "pop" being there forevermore (although most pops are stuff like fly shit sitting on the surface and banging off the sides of the stylus as it rides by)
"I've often wondered just how much the "warmth" of vinyl would change if you used a laser "needle" to play? "
A lot of the "warmth of vinyl" is acoustic feedback coupled into the tonearm. If you play a record with the lid up and the volume set high enough it can act as a sounding board and start howl-around.
There are lasertracking turntables but the prices are extremely high and they're not particularly reliable. Some wags have scanned LPs at 1000dpi and claimed to be able to decode stereo audio from the resulting image.
The simplest way to demonstrate the turntable feedback issue is to place a coin on the stationary platter and rest the cartridge stylus on the coin.
Connect a (cassette ?) recorder to your amplifier's tape output socket.
Play a music CD (or whatever) via another amp and speakers at normal volume.
The sound recorded via the cartridge and turntable will pretty faithfully reproduce the music you played in the background. This even works with softly suspended turntables -- though the suspension should reject sound at frequencies below that of the suspension's resonant frequency.
It is not surprising that the first successful softly suspended turntable was built by Ed Villchur, originator of the AR infinite baffle (i.e. sealed) loudspeaker who had a greater understanding of such things than turntable makers whose origins were in making musical boxes (Thorens) or rotating window displays (Garrard).
" if you used a laser "needle" to play"
There's an ELP laser turntable to do that, if you have the odd 16 grand to spare. It also tracks dirt, fluff and dust VERRRY accurately, so you'll need some sort of wet cleaning system to make sure your vinyl is squeaky clean. Not so sure about the wider audio range though. Physical cutting will be limited by how fast the cutting head can move within the medium, as well as how accurately the pressing reproduces the original cut. I have some vinyl that sounds bloody good, but is generally surpassed by the equivalent digital version.
Unless some cloth eared engineer has 'normalized' the dynamic range to 'just a tiny bit, all at the top' of course.
Although It's hardly ever the engineer's fault. You wouldn't believe how many acoustic and classical producers will demand that they can REALLY HEAR that triangle.
EDT: Curses! Beaten to it on the ELP! Must try harder
That might be factually accurate, but it's not going to happen in your life time. I've got thousands of 12" that have been played thousands of time, man-handled in clubs and left to rot in Attics for decades. The only deterioration is from the bad storage - a problem you're likely to suffer no matter the format.
not for a million years when nano crystal come along in the shops, DAC usb connections send data packets, so no frequencies are lost when travelling through cables and needing different AWG`s with different number of strands, which the RMS peak level is for so the input and output does`nt clip, because the RMS peak level is the maximum amount of evergy the standard cable will manage
In a recent talk to promote his new book Jimmy Page talked about the benefits of the digital format and how much he enjoyed doing the original 'Remasters' releases for the CD/FLAC format. According to him, back in the day, he was forced to 'dial-down' the original mixes due to limitations with the vinyl medium - the needle kept jumping straight out the groove on the test presses!
Would be interested to know from anyone here how that technical issue has been addressed.
It's true about the limitations of the grooves on a record. But that's what the RIAA curve fixes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization
It's sort of hard to argue for the sound quality of vinyl when you store the audio in such a processed state.
"Stick a bit of blue tack on the top of the needle?"
For those records that needed it, my approach was to use a tiny amount of that to stick a penny on top.
Although I have no way to play them, I do still have all my LPs and 12" singles - and I have bought more vinyl as recently as last year.
My sister used to sellotape a 2p coin to the cartridge end of the arm of her Dansette 'to make the needle last longer'.
When I found out I started locking my record case and carrying the key around with me.
Unfortunately I reckoned without her skills with a hairpin.
He specifically mentioned the limitations of analogue recording equipment too (in another interview). The proper music kit (>96kHz, 24 bit etc..) made a massive difference when it was introduced. If you don't believe me listen to music recorded before and after approx 1981/2. e.g. The Police (who were known for being at the cutting edge, apparently), recorded at Monseratt has a very different sound. It's why Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and all those bands have sounds that are so diverse - modern gear is really, really clean!!
I built some effects pedals when I was at school, and from experience making noise tuneful is complex. I have some of the new LZ and Beatles (FLAC) reissues ; they are very, very good.
P.
...if Vinyl was ever really dead or was it just hiding in the CD boxes of cub DJs and in people's spare room cupboards?
The resurgence of Vinyl has been in motion for some time and recently I've even seen articles on how to give your Vinyl a "deep clean" using wood glue!
It's lovely to dig through a stack of albums, admiring the front cover, flipping it over and reading the track list on the rear. Record covers can often be iconic, from Pink Floyd's Storm Thorgerson designed Dark Side of the Moon design to the Beatles Heinz Edelmann designed Yellow Submarine cover, instantly recognisable by anyone over 40! Each record almost has a masterpiece value attached to it too, the detail is Santana's Abraxas album is one such example.
It's good to see that the fragile 12" platters are making a comeback, but a decent turntable is needed to exploit the wonderful capabilities of Vinyl and it's good to see they're becoming a little easier to source too.
I've seen many cheap and cheerful USB turntable/software bundles for converting Vinyl to USB, horrible devices with a ceramic stylus and no wow/flutter adjustment, but decent pure analogue turntables have always been available. Sure, you'll never see them in a front display, but most decent Vinyl focussed record shops also flog mid-range to high-end turntables and they don't come cheap, it's the decent digital/analogue units that have been bastards to find...
The question is, would I want to "digitise" my Vinyls? Yes and no, there are some rarities that just cannot be sourced on CD/MP3, so these are candidates for ripping, but a majority of the music I enjoy is available digitally.
However, I still love playing Vinyl records, removing the album from its sleeve carefully, placing it upon the turntable, lifting the tone arm over the start and lowering it...
Listening to the static and feint scratches on the record, which are soon ignored by the ear... without having my father screaming at me to "turn that noise down"...
Back in the 70s/80s I used to buy and use a commercial product that worked as described for the wood glue deep clean, but much quicker. By wood glue, they mean PVA glue*. However, unlike PVA glue, the commercial product was water soluble after drying, so if you had a problem where a piece wouldn't detach from the vinyl, you could always wash it away. I can still remember the tall black plastic bottle that it came in, but not the name. Am I paranoid to think that PVA might end up stuck in the grooves?
*not other common wood glues like Cascamite, Titebond, etc!
Mines the one with the Zerostat in the pocket.
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