Lies about vinyl vs digital

[firedog]

3 hours ago, GUTB said:

@gmgraves revealed the truth behind the LIE of vinyl noise that even I bought into without thought -- the noise floor of vinyl isn't a floor in the digital sense, it just the level of spurious noise.

 

If a digital recording peaks out, it sounds awful. We've all heard it. I have yet to hear my LPs peak out...a crashing crescendo, screaming vocalist, etc., is very loud but no evidence of bumping into a ceiling is present -- obviously you need an amp with enough muscle to follow your speakers through these peaks, but we're talking about the source here. Some of my CDs obviously peak-limited, some are obviously compressed / processed to be loud. Soft sound following by loud sounds is an indispensable component of enjoyable hi-fi -- that's preaching top the choir I suspect, but why are my LPs good at this while my digital sucks at it?

 

Okay guys, help me out. What CDs or digital albums feature powerful dynamics / transients?

Actually, @gmgraves didnt' reveal the lie of vinyl noise, if you follow the conversation instead of cherry picking the bits you think back you up.

 

Try just about any modern hi-res recording of Mahler or Shostakovich symphonies. I just bought the new release of Shostakovich Symphonies Nos. 4 & 11, Boston Symphony, Nelsons. It has about as much dynamic range as anything you will find. 

 

[gmgraves]

3 hours ago, Nordkapp said:

It's a CD. I own it.

https://www.discogs.com/Tchaikovsky-Erich-Kunzel-Cincinnati-Pops-Orchestra-Tchaikovsky-1812/release/2375701

I own it too. In fact I have two copies. One is a SACD and the other a DVD-A. If they offered it as a CD (and it looks like they did), I didn't know about it. 

[esldude]

3 hours ago, gmgraves said:

snippage..........Turns out most people don't want wide dynamic range music. It's a great idea and a high-fidelity ideal, but the truth is that people don't want to keep raising and lowering the volume of their playback to keep from blasting the family and neighbors on crescendos or to adequately hear the triple pianissimos.

 

This is a key point that some will overlook.  There is a level of moderate compression that will make most recordings sound more dynamic than one not compressed.  Our problem in the loudness wars is compression way beyond that making it all loud without any appreciable dynamic range. 

 

LP for many reasons must do a a little compressing to fit thru the envelope of the LP medium.   As George is saying, most people would not want and do not find a completely uncompressed recording to their liking.  A little bit of compression will make it seem more dynamic although it really has less dynamic range.  Digital allows someone to mess it all up all the way around in ways that LP can't allow to even happen.  

 

As stated elsewhere, the issue of dynamics isn't a problem with the digital format, it is a problem elsewhere in the production.  LP isn't superior by nature, it simply places a limit on how badly you can muck up the dynamics.  

[gmgraves]

2 minutes ago, esldude said:

LP isn't superior by nature, it simply places a limit on how badly you can muck up the dynamics.  

Well Said!

[fas42]

5 hours ago, GUTB said:

 

Okay guys, help me out. What CDs or digital albums feature powerful dynamics / transients?

 

This soundtrack album,

 

 

has probably the most extreme dynamics, in popular music, I've come across - the YouTube clips barely hint at how it actually comes across, when played from the CD.

 

I only found out about it, because friends brought a copy to try out - it sounded so terrible on their system, they wanted to know if the recording "was broken" ...

 

Another clip,

 

 

[The_K-Man]

38 minutes ago, esldude said:

 

This is a key point that some will overlook.  There is a level of moderate compression that will make most recordings sound more dynamic than one not compressed.  Our problem in the loudness wars is compression way beyond that making it all loud without any appreciable dynamic range. 

 

LP for many reasons must do a a little compressing to fit thru the envelope of the LP medium.   As George is saying, most people would not want and do not find a completely uncompressed recording to their liking.  A little bit of compression will make it seem more dynamic although it really has less dynamic range.  Digital allows someone to mess it all up all the way around in ways that LP can't allow to even happen.  

 

As stated elsewhere, the issue of dynamics isn't a problem with the digital format, it is a problem elsewhere in the production.  LP isn't superior by nature, it simply places a limit on how badly you can muck up the dynamics.  

 

I could not have said it better!  Make this a sticky!

[Don Hills]

8 hours ago, The_K-Man said:

 

Yes, even on a pocket transistor, or its modern equivalent: the tinny smart phone speaker, a dynamic, well-mastered song will sound far better than something over-compressed and peak-limited to the point of clipping, sounding like a dial tone backed up by a vacuum cleaner.

 

Yes, indeed. It reminds me of an old signature line I used for a while in posts:

"Remember when you were younger, you would hear a song that you liked on your cheesy little transistor radio with the half flat batteries, all tinny and distorted. You would go and buy the record, and you could hardly wait to get it home because you knew it was going to sound so much better cranked up on your stereo. Nowadays you hear a song that you like on your little transistor radio as before. So you buy the CD and take it home and put it on your stereo and... it sounds just like it did on your transistor radio."

 

I should update it for the smartphone/download/streaming age.

[vmartell22]

7 hours ago, gmgraves said:

Turns out most people don't want wide dynamic range music. It's a great idea and a high-fidelity ideal, but the truth is that people don't want to keep raising and lowering the volume of their playback to keep from blasting the family and neighbors on crescendos or to adequately hear the triple pianissimos.

 

yeah -  over at the TalkClassical forum, a couple of members were complaining about that:  they  turned it up for the ppp passages,  only to get blasted by the fff passages - some where actually asking on how to brickwall -  REALLY.  My advice to them was,  go to the loudest section, set it at a comfortable level or a bit higher if you wanna rock and leave it there. Let the ppp be ppp - I mean, if you are in the hall, those passages will be quiet... let them be...

 

noobs

 

v

[sandyk]

3 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

This soundtrack album,

 

 

has probably the most extreme dynamics, in popular music, I've come across - the YouTube clips barely hint at how it actually comes across, when played from the CD.

 

I only found out about it, because friends brought a copy to try out - it sounded so terrible on their system, they wanted to know if the recording "was broken" ...

 

Another clip,

 

 

 

 I would love to see him play Telarc's 1812 on Vinyl in comparison with the CD , or " Grace Jones-Nightclubbing " from the Blu Ray in 24/192 .

[fas42]

8 hours ago, gmgraves said:

Turns out most people don't want wide dynamic range music. It's a great idea and a high-fidelity ideal, but the truth is that people don't want to keep raising and lowering the volume of their playback to keep from blasting the family and neighbors on crescendos or to adequately hear the triple pianissimos.

 

Interesting ... I tend to run a system on the maximum level it can comfortably handle - if competent, the quiet passages work exactly as intended; and the crescendos just do what they're intended to do - provide some exclamation marks(!!!) to the moment. Raising and lowering the volume while playing ... what a strange concept ...

[PeterSt]

2 minutes ago, fas42 said:

8 hours ago, gmgraves said:

Turns out most people don't want wide dynamic range music. It's a great idea and a high-fidelity ideal, but the truth is that people don't want to keep raising and lowering the volume of their playback to keep from blasting the family and neighbors on crescendos or to adequately hear the triple pianissimos.

 

Interesting ... I tend to run a system on the maximum level it can comfortably handle

 

No. I have brought it forward more often : Supertramp's Crime of The Century in "original" CD fashion. This is unplayable for it's way too wide dynamics and it doesn't even use half of the digital space (so go figure). You can't play this without changing the volume (thus you can't play this at all).

Btw, the dynamics are also NOT forceful. They are only crazily steep.

 

Most of the CD's I own show better dynamics than their vinyl counterparts, but pick them (remasters are never among it). Most of the CD's I own are way more forceful which also is genuine (the "force" on vinyl is not that). Maybe this one is the most excessive on both at the same time (the balance of it is perfect) :

 

 

Turtle Records generally are all the most dynamically recorded (without the necessity to touch the volume knob) and which technically *is* so, which can be noticed by my playback software because it trips on it (protection against static).

 

 

[vmartell22]

21 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

Interesting ... I tend to run a system on the maximum level it can comfortably handle - if competent, the quiet passages work exactly as intended; and the crescendos just do what they're intended to do - provide some exclamation marks(!!!) to the moment. Raising and lowering the volume while playing ... what a strange concept ...

 

YES - my point in my reply above.  If you are sitting, let's say, in the back of the orchestra section, those pianissimo passages will be quiet - otherwise the composer would have marked it forte.

 

It reminds me some forums I read somewhere (I wish I could remember so I could link it) where someone wrote about how he corrected the Culshaw/Parry recording of Solti's Ring, by tweaking the EQ  OF THE RECORDING using plugins... he went on and on about Culshaw and Parry's "mistakes"... really

Guess is the same thinking that makes the people described above wanting to brickwall... missing the point

 

v

 

 

[PeterSt]

14 minutes ago, PeterSt said:

Turtle Records generally are all the most dynamically recorded (without the necessity to touch the volume knob)

 

In the end it is all worse (more difficult to judge);

Ever back I used a few tracks of this album to let people jump to the ceiling because of the sudden bursts (which are short, opposed to Crime of The century which gets louder and louder and then drops back to about zero level). Today this is not so any more. How come ?

Well, you make the playback less lean (in my case the DAC) and you tune the software to be less dynamic (this is XXHighEnd and its million settings). So now this Dean Peer album is as beautiful as you might expect from Vinyl. It also really shows all the characteristics (specially about the "forceful" parameter). And what changed on this CD ?

Nothing of course.

 

Moral : We can't even judge these aspects well, because we all have different systems and they are quite crucial.

And oh, I was informed from trusted source that GUTB's digital system is the worst. So he is not allowed to join the party.

Oh wait, it is his thread. 

[esldude]

16 minutes ago, PeterSt said:

 

No. I have brought it forward more often : Supertramp's Crime of The Century in "original" CD fashion. This is unplayable for it's way too wide dynamics and it doesn't even use half of the digital space (so go figure). You can't play this without changing the volume (thus you can't play this at all).

Btw, the dynamics are also NOT forceful. They are only crazily steep.

 

snippage...........

 

 

 

 

What?  I happened to have listened to this earlier this evening.  It sounded very nice, and I never touched volume once.  

[PeterSt]

1 minute ago, esldude said:

What?  I happened to have listened to this earlier this evening.  It sounded very nice, and I never touched volume once.

 

Then you must have listened not to this "original" version. From the top of my head : 15dB or so more dynamic headroom (used) and that at half of the space (so could have been 21dB).

[acg]

I've not read this topic from the start, but if I had on $1k or $2k to spend on a system I would start with a cheap Project TT, a pair of cheap 2 way standmounts and a cheap SS phono pre.  Better sound from that setup than any cheap streaming or digital source that I know about.

 

Digital is difficult to get to sound right, analogue not so hard.  I am not talking about low THD or high channel separation or any number you can falsely assign as a measure of "quality", I am talking about musical enjoyment and engagement, and vinyl just has that at a cheaper price point.  Both mediums are just as tweaky and fiddly as the other, neither is necessarily more convenient than the other, and both can be improved remarkably if you take the time and effort.

 

I like them both.

[esldude]

Just now, PeterSt said:

 

Then you must have listened not to this "original" version. From the top of my head : 15dB or so more dynamic headroom (used) and that at half of the space (so could have been 21dB).

From the original CD I purchased back when it was a newly released album.  I also have Breakfast in America, but it is an MFSL.  

 

I do sort of have things calibrated here. I set it up like David Katz suggested.  Single channel of pink noise at 83 db SPL.  I actually listened 3 db below my reference setting.  It gets pretty loud, and there are soft parts.  Which btw, would leave me with theoretically 21 db headroom the way I have it set up currently.  

[PeterSt]

30 minutes ago, PeterSt said:

33 minutes ago, esldude said:

What?  I happened to have listened to this earlier this evening.  It sounded very nice, and I never touched volume once.

 

Then you must have listened not to this "original" version. From the top of my head : 15dB or so more dynamic headroom (used) and that at half of the space (so could have been 21dB).

 

I just looked : the difference between that orginal and the "best one" regarding this, is 13.5dB (hard to explain in my terms, but say this is the difference between a DR of 19 and 14 or so).

The "best one" still shows a 6dB or so more than what I'd call "high dynamic".

 

 

This is the worst one. The dynamic headroom is here spread over the full digital space (the 32768). This is *not* the original I am referring to. That is this one :

 

 

This is what I referred to as "half of the digital space" (which is not really so, but significantly less than max (the 27381).

 

 

This one is the best one for listening and not wanting to change the volume under way (it stil sounds poor).

Mind the SPL number in there.

 

Bonus (close eyes) :

 

 

This one sounds the most normal (IIRC).

 

And FWIW : a 24/96 Vinyl rip :

 

 

The digital headroom has been (ADC) set nicely and this normalizes 7.5dB better than the worst digital one (first two in the list above). So this should be the real norm as it ever landed on LP. And I don't recall that the LP was unlistenable. But possibly my system wasn't that dynamic at my age of 15 or whatever it was.
Edit : The figures for this one have been remapped to 16 bits (so comparison is possible).

[PeterSt]

 

 

This one again. You can see that there's really not much difference and that this one is only 3dB less "dynamical" than the worst Crime of The Century. But here you can also see how "DR" as a phenomenon failes. Thus, difference between loud and soft is much larger on the COS album while both show say 50% of it (soft vs loud). Not so with the Dean Peer album, which is moderate level in general (but say at 25%) with regular burst to 100%. These burst (on an electric bass) are just that. Play it toggling, vs strike it hard. The bursts are terrifying (and very forceful) also because they come at an unexpected moment. Anyway, the SPL of this say equals that of COS, but in a harmless way (OK your speakers may burst if you tune it in too loud).

 

 

 

[sandyk]

9 hours ago, Nordkapp said:

It's a CD. I own it.

https://www.discogs.com/Tchaikovsky-Erich-Kunzel-Cincinnati-Pops-Orchestra-Tchaikovsky-1812/release/2375701

 I owned the one in the attached photo.

 When I went to play it after purchasing it, I found deep gouge marks across it. The store obviously didn't believe that I hadn't done this, but reluctantly replaced it.

 I presume that a staff member in the store had borrowed it and blown  up their speakers because he /she didn't heed the clear warning on the cover.

[fas42]

2 hours ago, PeterSt said:

 

No. I have brought it forward more often : Supertramp's Crime of The Century in "original" CD fashion. This is unplayable for it's way too wide dynamics and it doesn't even use half of the digital space (so go figure). You can't play this without changing the volume (thus you can't play this at all).

Btw, the dynamics are also NOT forceful. They are only crazily steep.

 

 

 

Like Dennis, I'm a bit surprised by you saying this, Peter. Guess what? I "missed" the Crime of The Century album when it came out, I only know the hits that were plugged mercilessly - and just had a listen to some of the other tracks ... oh dear, what I've missed out on!

 

OK, will need to acquire a copy - and will go for the original. Even on the laptop it's clear what the potential is, what it should sound like on a good rig - I want my dynamics!!

[Rexp]

15 hours ago, The_K-Man said:

 

The format has nothing to do with what is brickwall limited and made louder, or is not.

 

All redbook CDs are 16bit 44.kHz resolution.

You stated the lack of brickwall limiting is the reason vinyl sounds better, the above example suggests this in not the case.

[Fokus]

13 hours ago, gmgraves said:

professional analog tape recorder running at 15 (or even 30) IPS (inches per second) ..., should be good for +3 dB of over-modulation based on 200 nW of fluxivity as 0Vu.

 

With 200nWb/m as 0dB level I assure you that you can peak much higher than +3dB!

 

13 hours ago, gmgraves said:

As I said in another post, cutting a lacquer master for an LP is not trivial.

 

Analogue recording, and especially disc cutting, does not tolerate incompetence.

 

With digital recording nothing breaks if you do it wrong. This, together with the mind-blowing democratisation that digital brought to studio gear, resulted in zillions of people getting into the recording business who would have been spat out by it in the analogue days.

 

It's all very double-edged.

 

13 hours ago, gmgraves said:

Most lathes have a groove-width control that uses a "preview" head on the disc mastering source tape machine to look ahead at the music that's coming "next" to either lower the number of grooves/inch or mm

 

That's what the vinyl fans love to think. And up to the seventies this was indeed the case.

But from then on the expensive and cumbersome preview replay machines were gradually replaced by digital delay lines. Cheaper in purchase cost, cheaper in operation (no longer two identical effects racks needed), cheaper in maintenance.

 

Of the many LPs I have recorded and then inspected (my collection starts from 1975 or so), the majority have a tell-tale digital filtering ridge at ~20kHz.

 

 

13 hours ago, gmgraves said:

To prevent this, the playback on the cutting master tape is set so that the maximum record level found on the source tape, and not the standard Zero Vu is the maximum level that can be safely cut. This insures that that the lacquer is successfully mastered.

 

You can also be assured of the presence of last-ditch limiters in the path to the cutter head.

 

 

 

[Fokus]

14 hours ago, GUTB said:

@gmgraves revealed the truth behind the LIE of vinyl noise that even I bought into without thought -- the noise floor of vinyl isn't a floor in the digital sense, it just the level of spurious noise.

 

And as said before: this is wrong. The noise of dithered PCM behaves exactly the same as the noise in an analogue channel. Dither has been known since the 1940s. And if you would care to inspect the circuit diagrams of early pro digital ADCs (such as Sony PCM16*0 series), you would see the dither source sitting there nicely before the quantiser.

[semente]

19 hours ago, mordante said:

 

I might be an idiot. No I know I'm an idiot but I really like the inconvenience of vinyl. With digital sources it's too much a press play and forget. So when I listen to my ripped CDs (don't have a streaming service) I tend to go and do other things. Read Facebook troll on 9GAG etc. Because with vinyl I have to stay focused I tend to enjoy the music more.

A LP is normally 20 minutes per side. I like that. Because it gives you the opportunity to get some coffee, cognac, beer water etc. With digital playback you don't have that. What sounds better is not interesting to me. Since I enjoy vinyl more I spend more money on it. 

 

I keep the laptop close to the system. I have to stand up, browse with iTunes, drag-drop into HQ Player. I don't use playlists.

 

I'd hate having to flip a record, clean it and zap it with an anti-static gun every 20 minutes. I'd hate it even more if I had to do this in the middle of a musical piece...

 

Besides, vinyl is not eco-friendly (see here) and downloading avoids delivery which in Europe is mostly done using not so modern delivery vans with diesel engines.