Lies about vinyl vs digital

[Ralf11]

Here is one thing: a lot of $$$ can be saved on a TT if you just use it for needle drops to a digital file and not for loud SPL playback.

 

I'm pretty sure that $200 is not enough tho - maybe for the TT alone (no cartridge & no AtoD or pre-pre) as long as you bought one used back when prices were so depressed.  Actually, I sometimes wish I'd bought one then...

[lucretius]

6 hours ago, AudioDoctor said:

@k-man my point is that there are ZERO adjustments and futzing needed for a CD player where all those adjustments are necessary for a turntable to even begin to sound decent and not destroy records. If you want the best sound possible you have to set up all the parameters as precisely as possible, clean the record, get rid of static, make sure it’s rotating as precisely as possible, etc...  it’s nearly endless. To play a cd you put it on the platter and press play. 
 

As an analogy, a CD is a Keurig, a Turntable is a French Press. 
 

that makes a turntable inherently more difficult to get good sound out of than a CD player which has zero adjustments. 

 

To be fair, that is a bit of an exaggeration.  I haven't adjusted my TT since swapping the cartridge and before that only adjusted it when I first acquired it.  And, I can pull out a record I haven't touched in a few years and it is clean and static free.

[Mercman]

I have been enjoying the same turntable since 2002. The only maintenance has been a belt replacement. The vinyl rituals to play a record are quite funny, but the darn thing still sounds good today even without “perfect” setup.

[k-man]

7 hours ago, AudioDoctor said:

@k-man my point is that there are ZERO adjustments and futzing needed for a CD player where all those adjustments are necessary for a turntable to even begin to sound decent and not destroy records. If you want the best sound possible you have to set up all the parameters as precisely as possible, clean the record, get rid of static, make sure it’s rotating as precisely as possible, etc...  it’s nearly endless. To play a cd you put it on the platter and press play. 
 

As an analogy, a CD is a Keurig, a Turntable is a French Press. 
 

that makes a turntable inherently more difficult to get good sound out of than a CD player which has zero adjustments. 

@AudioDoctor , FAO @The_K-Man

[lucretius]

17 minutes ago, k-man said:

@AudioDoctor , FAO @The_K-Man

 

Why 2 IDs  @k-man / @The_K-Man ?

[k-man]

4 minutes ago, lucretius said:

Why 2 IDs?

I joined back in 2010, but it’s really no big deal to me for such a generic sig, to have others to be similar. I’ll be out of this discussion as it’s out of my scope. Just alerting Audiodoc for discussion continuity.

[The_K-Man]

35 minutes ago, k-man said:

@AudioDoctor , FAO @The_K-Man

 

"FAO"?

[k-man]

For the attention of..

[marce]

Give up your digital, give up your CD's, give up your LP's... Cassettes is where its at, my Technics twin cassette deck will beet the lot of you on SQ, even blind you know you are listening to a well played cassette, and after a head clean and a bit of de-magnetisation, audio nirvana.

 

[John Dyson]

48 minutes ago, marce said:

Give up your digital, give up your CD's, give up your LP's... Cassettes is where its at, my Technics twin cassette deck will beet the lot of you on SQ, even blind you know you are listening to a well played cassette, and after a head clean and a bit of de-magnetisation, audio nirvana.

 

Reminds me of my BIC T4M, all tuned up for the best metal tape.  It could do some amazing things WRT signal levels and bandwidth, but the tape at 2X speed was just too little running time.  It would have been really-really great with DolbyC and HX, but sadly didn't have DolbyC or HX. -- I seem to remember it was birdy free at 20kHz++ (24kHz?) and 0dB.  That was a long, long time ago in the late 80's though --  back before I gave up on the audio quality issues.

 

John

 

[StephenJK]

9 hours ago, Ralf11 said:

Here is one thing: a lot of $$$ can be saved on a TT if you just use it for needle drops to a digital file and not for loud SPL playback.

 

I'm pretty sure that $200 is not enough tho - maybe for the TT alone (no cartridge & no AtoD or pre-pre) as long as you bought one used back when prices were so depressed.  Actually, I sometimes wish I'd bought one then...

By $200 for a turntable, I meant one of those new supermarket specials, not something like an SL-1200 that you picked up and that with a bit of work can still sound great.  

 

I disagree, however with your comment that recording LPs to digital should be with anything less capable than what you would use for every day quality playback.  A poor recording will always be that.  

[StephenJK]

6 minutes ago, John Dyson said:

Reminds me of my BIC T4M, all tuned up for the best metal tape.  It could do some amazing things WRT signal levels and bandwidth, but the tape at 2X speed was just too little running time.  It would have been really-really great with DolbyC and HX, but sadly didn't have DolbyC or HX. -- I seem to remember it was birdy free at 20kHz++ (24kHz?) and 0dB.  That was a long, long time ago in the late 80's though --  back before I gave up on the audio quality issues.

 

John

 

It was a Revox B77 for me - bought it new in the early 80's.  It was more of a "home" version machine with 3 3/4 and 7 1/2 ips on a quarter track.  It was the only way of having high quality recordings of LPs with a SNR of 120 dB.  I think with 3,600 ft reels on the slow speed I could get a bit over 3 hours a side - great for recording classical music. 

 

A few years later Sony came out with the first versions of DAT but that was more on the commercial side. Maybe I should have paid more attention to that option, but we all have a budget.

 

I ran that B77 for close to 15 years, but had no regrets when parting with it.  My wife wouldn't touch it.  She hit rewind one time and came back into the room to find over 3,000 ft of tape cheerfully spitting out of the machine all over the room.  For anyone who's ever had a top end reel to reel, you'll know how fast those reels can spin.

[John Dyson]

When backing up something from vinyl to digital, I did something similar back in the 80s' onto the 3 3/4" cassette -- it is important to do the best job possible with the vinyl playback.  Any defect will become more and more apparent over time.  When playing vinyl, there will always be consistent problems, but also random troubles.  When playing back the same errors over and over again, the defects become more obvious and irritating.

It is very worthwhile to do the best for a pristine conversion.  If possible, brand new vinyl (or played only a very few times), everything about the turntable/cartridge set-up perfectly, and levels watched with proper headroom (on tape) or avoid ANY clipping (on digital.)

 

Every time I heard a defect on ANY media, it always seemed to get more pronounced everytime I played the material -- even if it was technically identical in level.  It is the darned expectation of the defect and making the frustration worse and worse everytime.

 

John

 

[John Dyson]

1 minute ago, SJK said:

It was a Revox B77 for me - bought it new in the early 80's.  It was more of a "home" version machine with 3 3/4 and 7 1/2 ips on a quarter track.  It was the only way of having high quality recordings of LPs with a SNR of 120 dB.  I think with 3,600 ft reels on the slow speed I could get a bit over 3 hours a side - great for recording classical music. 

 

A few years later Sony came out with the first versions of DAT but that was more on the commercial side. Maybe I should have paid more attention to that option, but we all have a budget.

 

I ran that B77 for close to 15 years, but had no regrets when parting with it.  My wife wouldn't touch it.  She hit rewind one time and came back into the room to find over 3,000 ft of tape cheerfully spitting out of the machine all over the room.  

Back then, I should probably have gotten an R2R, and could easily afford one -- but something stopped me.  I wanted one, but never made that final decision to purchase.  I have no idea which one I would have gotten, but one of my friends had the Revox and liked it.

I didn't realize the extreme evils of the NR systems back then (well knew about the DBX noise pumping -- I had one of those things), but had no concept of the dynamic distortions.  I knew about modulation but never did the realization that the damage was occuring on NR systems.

 

Recognizing that (the distortions from DolbyB/C) would probably have pushed me over the threshold of getting an R2R.

 

John

 

[StephenJK]

2 hours ago, John Dyson said:

Back then, I should probably have gotten an R2R, and could easily afford one -- but something stopped me.  I wanted one, but never made that final decision to purchase.  I have no idea which one I would have gotten, but one of my friends had the Revox and liked it.

I didn't realize the extreme evils of the NR systems back then (well knew about the DBX noise pumping -- I had one of those things), but had no concept of the dynamic distortions.  I knew about modulation but never did the realization that the damage was occuring on NR systems.

 

Recognizing that (the distortions from DolbyB/C) would probably have pushed me over the threshold of getting an R2R.

 

John

 

I bought into the DBX compression/expander thing and went through a number of them.  I can't remember model names and numbers but it doesn't really matter.  As you know, and perhaps not many here may appreciate, it was all about having a better signal to noise ratio on cassette or open reel tape, at home primarily from LP recordings. 

 

If you can't do anything about the noise level, then push that floor down as low as it can go.  If the medium can't take a wide dynamic range, then squish it down to record and pump it back up on playback.

 

LP playback was always my preference, and I ended up phasing out cassette in the early 80's and R2R in the early 90's.  I didn't really start with digital until the mid-80's after we were well into third and fourth generation CD players.

 

Interestingly, I still have a DBX 21 that I use for playback with quite a number of DBX records that I still own.  They've been recorded, but I see no reason to get rid of them.  You still see comments online of how "This record sounds terrible!" and then that whole conversation about needing that little box starts all over again.

[The_K-Man]

On 1/15/2020 at 4:03 AM, semente said:

 

The problem is not just remasters, many rock and pop and other genre newly produced albums are being released with poor mastering.

This is Radiohead's "Nude":

 

 

The remastering of legacy(pre-1990) material was in response to the louder mastering of newer material from the late 1990s to present.  The original CDs or LPs of material before 1990 would sound 'too quiet' next to newer releases, which prompted the whole late-1990s-2000s remastering craze.

 

 

Once mastering engineers found out, by mid-'90s or so, that they didn't have to preserve every single peak from the recording sessions, and this schitt...

started happening on newer releases(think: Oasis 'WHAT'S THE STORY') - heavy peak-limiting combined with DRC - all bets were off. And they haven't looked back since! 

 

Try accomplishing  ^THAT^ in the analog domain, and it'll come off sounding like having an elephant fart while your head is up it's a$$!

[Ralf11]

8 hours ago, marce said:

Give up your digital, give up your CD's, give up your LP's... Cassettes is where its at, my Technics twin cassette deck will beet the lot of you on SQ, even blind you know you are listening to a well played cassette, and after a head clean and a bit of de-magnetisation, audio nirvana.

 

 

Hey who wants my old Nak 680 deck??

[fas42]

8 hours ago, John Dyson said:

Every time I heard a defect on ANY media, it always seemed to get more pronounced everytime I played the material -- even if it was technically identical in level.  It is the darned expectation of the defect and making the frustration worse and worse everytime.

 

John

 

 

That's precisely the approach that allows one to evolve an audio playback system to a highly optimised state. Shame you gave up the battle for best audio quality - because it is there, always waiting to be unearthed.

 

What most call a system "signature", I call a defect. As I listen to a rig, any rig, a sense of its "signature" builds up, and it comes through, on everything that's played - it's imposing its "personality" on everything it presents. I'm less kind - this is distortion, pure and simple ... and you have to get rid of it.

 

If I can't get rid of the "makeup" of the playback, then I suffer your problem: meaning, having the "darned expectation of the defect and making the frustration worse and worse everytime.

[fas42]

49 minutes ago, The_K-Man said:

 

 

Once mastering engineers found out, by mid-'90s or so, that they didn't have to preserve every single peak from the recording sessions, and this schitt...

 

 

 

Note that this recording is quite 'recoverable' - I've seen this style of waveform many times, and have done the exercise,  a number of times, of restoring the peaks, using my own techniques ... the resultant waveform looks to have good integrity, and sounds much better ...

[tmtomh]

1 minute ago, fas42 said:

 

Note that this recording is quite 'recoverable' - I've seen this style of waveform many times, and have done the exercise of restoring the peaks, using my own techniques ... the resultant waveform looks to have good integrity, and sounds much better ...

 

I've had good results with so-called de-clipping software - but only in some cases. One cannot look at a waveform and determine the extent to which it is "recoverable." It depends how much conventional compression was used (in the mixing, the final mastering, or both) in addition to the peak-limiting used at the final mastering stage. And it depends on how hard the mastering engineer rode the peak limiter. 

 

To be clear, it's always possible to undo at least some of the peak limiting - that's not the issue. The issue is whether it's possible to restore the peaks so you have both (a) a natural-looking range of amplitudes in the de-clipped file, and also (b) a sonic result that does not unduly distort the frequency balance of the original. I've tried to de-clip/de-limit some material where the only way to significantly restore the peaks is to set the de-clipping threshold to a sufficiently low amplitude that the de-clipped result lacks bass impact. Because bass frequencies have so much energy, bass is vulnerable to being "scooped out" if you set the de-clipper too aggressively. But for some mastering jobs, if you set the de-clipper more conservatively, the buzzcut original waveform still looks like a buzzcut, but at lower level and with a smattering of "stray hairs" (restored peaks) sticking out.

 

In my experience, de-clipping works about half the time.

[fas42]

Yes, there are no guarantees - the more "clever" the mastering, the harder it will be - I haven't noticed any frequency balance issues with anything I've done; but you have to nail the levels that the compression was set at, in that final peak limiting. Get that even slightly wrong, and you can hear it ... there is a 'sweet' set of parameters which will give a best result, and I largely do a trial and error zeroing in on what they are - go either side of the optimum, and the decompression is worse ... this is something that clever software could deal with - something for the future ...

[semente]

I've linked for the video to start at 6:22 when it describes the limitations of vinyl as a medium:

 

[esldude]

On 1/16/2020 at 3:13 PM, The_K-Man said:

 

The remastering of legacy(pre-1990) material was in response to the louder mastering of newer material from the late 1990s to present.  The original CDs or LPs of material before 1990 would sound 'too quiet' next to newer releases, which prompted the whole late-1990s-2000s remastering craze.

 

 

Once mastering engineers found out, by mid-'90s or so, that they didn't have to preserve every single peak from the recording sessions, and this schitt...

started happening on newer releases(think: Oasis 'WHAT'S THE STORY') - heavy peak-limiting combined with DRC - all bets were off. And they haven't looked back since! 

 

Try accomplishing  ^THAT^ in the analog domain, and it'll come off sounding like having an elephant fart while your head is up it's a$$!

Doing it digitally just sounds like the pure shit instead of gas.  I don't commend either result. 

[The_K-Man]

1 hour ago, esldude said:

Doing it digitally just sounds like the pure shit instead of gas.  I don't commend either result. 

 

Try convincing the popular music industry of that.

 

Ever wonder why albums like Fleetwood Mac's 'RUMOURS' are in high rotation in my playlists?

[StephenJK]

48 minutes ago, The_K-Man said:

 

Try convincing the popular music industry of that.

 

Ever wonder why albums like Fleetwood Mac's 'RUMOURS' are in high rotation in my playlists?

You’re setting yourself up with that one. 
 

Fleetwood Mac were a great AM radio top 40 band. They were good musicians who managed to find that formula for success that relied on that steady back beat fronted by a sultry California blond and one of the greatest and inventive lead guitarists of our times.

 

But it’s pop music that will never stand the test of time.  
 

The litmus test is this - whether they play their music in the supermarket. 
 

Rumours?  Absolutely, 24/7.