How can Vinyl still sound good compared to digital?

[semente]

1 minute ago, STC said:

I am just telling that your example of the notch wouldn’t be known to exist with the graph. And you would even hear if it’s adding reverbs with the explanation provided by the designer. 

 

A speaker which requires a notch filter to sound flat but doesn't have one will not sound like a flat speaker.

 

How can you tell that it doesn't sound flat (through listening)?

You have to compare it with other speakers and use recordings that are meant to sound realistic.

Ideally you measure.

[semente]

20 minutes ago, STC said:

That is not true. I like music to sound like you are hearing them in the best acoustic and I my room natural RT is 0.28s. I brought up a little later because it was too dead. 
 

The most detailed solo vocal sound so clean in such room. You don’t like ambiance. You choose the right ambiance. Otherwise, concert halls shouldn’t exist. 
 

I wonder why Audiophile’s got no problem with diffusers, absorbers and all kind of room tuning device but when I use real active ambiance where I can control the perfect ambiance that no audiophile could even dream off, it is becoming a joke. 

 

Because it screws up other aspects of sound which for me/us are more important than ambience.

 

A well executed 2-channel recording of a classical music recital will capture both the direct sound from the instrument, the reflected sound and the reverberation:

 

 

A pair of stereo loudspeakers in a reasonably damped room will recreate some of the illusion of being in the venue. Stereo has its limitations but for some people that's good enough.

Others who are looking for a more immersive experience prefer omni-speakers which interact more with the room, go multi-channel or use DSP to create an echoey effect.

[STC]

13 minutes ago, semente said:

You have to compare it with other speakers and use recordings that are meant to sound realistic.

Do you need side by side comparison when listening live to know it sounds good to the ears?

[STC]

3 minutes ago, semente said:

 

Because it screws up other aspects of sound which for me/us are more important than ambience.

 

A well executed 2-channel recording of a classical music recital will capture both the direct sound from the instrument, the reflected sound and the reverberation:

 

 

A pair of stereo loudspeakers in a reasonably damped room will recreate some of the illusion of being in the venue. Stereo has its limitations but for some people it's good enough.

Others who are looking for a more immersive experience prefer omni-speakers which interact more with the room, go multi-channel or use DSP to create an echoey effect.

I have heard a pair of stereo speakers in 0.3 to 5s reverbs room. Have you? 
 

Before that reading stuff also made me think that was wrong. Perfect and accurate sound should always be from the two stereo speakers irrespective what the inventor Blumlein told in the patent what it couldn’t do and what it was wrongly doing. 

[fas42]

11 minutes ago, semente said:

 

Because it screws up other aspects of sound which for me/us are more important than ambience.

 

A well executed 2-channel recording of a classical music recital will capture both the direct sound from the instrument, the reflected sound and the reverberation:

 

 

Turns out that all recordings have captured enough information to tell the listener what's happening in the space - a live track of Ike and Tina Turner, on vinyl, engaging in banter, and the audience reacting; you can nail the location of each interjection with ease ...

[semente]

Just now, fas42 said:

 

Turns out that all recordings have captured enough information to tell the listener what's happening in the space - a live track of Ike and Tina Turner, on vinyl, engaging in banter, and the audience reacting; you can nail the location of each interjection with ease ...

 

Sorry Frank, you're wrong.

When vocals or instruments are mic'ed close no spatial information is captured.

The space you are talking about is either fabricated in the mixing desk by pan-potting, EQ'ing, compressing, adjusting gain, adding reverb, etc. or is the result of sound picked up by an ambience mic which was subsequently added to the mix.

 

[semente]

18 minutes ago, STC said:

I have heard a pair of stereo speakers in 0.3 to 5s reverbs room. Have you? 
 

Before that reading stuff also made me think that was wrong. Perfect and accurate sound should always be from the two stereo speakers irrespective what the inventor Blumlein told in the patent what it couldn’t do and what it was wrongly doing. 

 

I've heard speakers in many different rooms and also outdoors, so probably yes.

[fas42]

16 minutes ago, semente said:

 

Sorry Frank, you're wrong.

When vocals or instruments are mic'ed close no spatial information is captured.

 

That's what the recording engineers hope for ... 🙂. Truth is, the sense of the space that the microphone was in is still picked up, and one can clearly hear that it's a tiny recording booth, say - the better the playback, the more defined this becomes, and each separate mic'ed sound element has its own attendant sound space - a visual counterpoint would be watching actors on the stage, where each person has a set of spotlights trained on them, different intensity, colour, widths of beams for each individual.

 

Quote

The space you are talking about is either fabricated in the mixing desk by pan-potting, EQ'ing, compressing, adjusting gain, adding reverb, etc. or is the result of sound picked up by an ambience mic which was subsequently added to the mix.

 

The space may be constructed artificially, or be the result of an ambience mic - but to the hearing sense it makes sense. It's one of the delights of non-classical music, to be aware of the often highly complex interplay of auditory spaces - becomes an essential part of the listening experience, and if the playback is not up to it, then it's quite disappointing to listen to ...

 

 

[semente]

25 minutes ago, STC said:

Do you need side by side comparison when listening live to know it sounds good to the ears?

 

Reality is reality, there's no "sounds good" or bad.

 

We are discussing reproduction, not reality.

 

One of these images was taken from the wikipedia, the other from the VG Museum website.

One is more realistic than the other.

To evaluate realism you need to reproduce the recording (a photo) with a computer display.

A more accurate display will reproduce both recordings (photos) better.

This will in turn allow you to determine which of the two version looks more realistic by comparing it with the original painting.

 

 

[STC]

11 minutes ago, semente said:

 

I've heard speakers in many different rooms and also outdoors, so probably yes.

Just a few posts ago you mentioned about comparisons. You even illustrated your point with some graphs. Now how is it even possible that listening to different speakers in different rooms can be a valid comparisons? And they are no where would reach 2 RT without sounding muddy and boomy. 

 

 

[semente]

12 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

That's what the recording engineers hope for ... 🙂. Truth is, the sense of the space that the microphone was in is still picked up, and one can clearly hear that it's a tiny recording booth, say - the better the playback, the more defined this becomes, and each separate mic'ed sound element has its own attendant sound space - a visual counterpoint would be watching actors on the stage, where each person has a set of spotlights trained on them, different intensity, colour, widths of beams for each individual.

 

A recording booth is semi-anechoic, add mono close-mic'ing and there won't be any sense of space left to record.

This allows the engineer to place an instrument or vocals anywhere in the "soundstage" and by using EQ he can prevent the sound from becoming muddled by removing overlapping frequencies from the different instruments (you can read about this on the Shure website, or look on YouTube).

 

 

12 minutes ago, fas42 said:

The space may be constructed artificially, or be the result of an ambience mic - but to the hearing sense it makes sense. It's one of the delights of non-classical music to be aware of the often highly complex interplay of auditory spaces - becomes an essential part of the listening experience, and if the playback is not up to it, then it's quite disappointing to listen to ...

 

I agree that if playback isn't resolving enough (low-level) ambience will be lost, regardless of whether the recording was documental or a studio mix.

[STC]

8 minutes ago, semente said:

Reality is reality, there's no "sounds good" or bad.

[semente]

9 minutes ago, STC said:

Just a few posts ago you mentioned about comparisons. You even illustrated your point with some graphs. Now how is it even possible that listening to different speakers in different rooms can be a valid comparisons? And they are no where would reach 2 RT without sounding muddy and boomy.

 

You said nothing about comparisons in your message. But evaluating performance is not just about comparisons.

 

Different rooms have different sounds (affect the reproduction differently). A more accurate speaker will reproduce the recorded signal more accurately regardless of the room.

[Jud]

1 hour ago, STC said:

That is not true. I like music to sound like you are hearing them in the best acoustic and my room’s natural RT is 0.28s. I brought up a little later because it was too dead. 
 

The most detailed solo vocal sound so clean in such room. You don’t like ambiance. You choose the right ambiance. Otherwise, concert halls shouldn’t exist. 
 

I wonder why Audiophile’s got no problem with diffusers, absorbers and all kind of room tuning device but when I use real active ambiance where I can control the perfect ambiance that no audiophile could even dream off, it is becoming a joke. 

 

That's avoiding the main question and the thread topic.

 

However you prefer your digital sound, are you saying it doesn't sound as good as vinyl to you?

[semente]

16 minutes ago, Jud said:

 

That's avoiding the main question and the thread topic.

 

However you prefer your digital sound, are you saying it doesn't sound as good as vinyl to you?

 

It looks as though he's trying to make a point that vinyl sounds more realistic because it adds distortion which is perceived as reverb or spaciousness and then extrapolate that to DSP-processed space enhancement.

[STC]

28 minutes ago, Jud said:

 

That's avoiding the main question and the thread topic.

 

However you prefer your digital sound, are you saying it doesn't sound as good as vinyl to you?

I am a digital man and always will use digital for my setup because my setup requires digital process to do convolution. However, the main speakers format can be anything and it doesn’t matter to me. 

 

This is not about me. It is about vinyl and why Audiophile’s still like them despite their inferior measurements.  I think it is more than pops and ticks with vinyl. in the past I was obsessed with digital and thought vinyl could come close to a good digital setup but I have to admit there is always something different with the sound which makes easier to listen which is in away what I do with the digital files. 

[semente]

1 minute ago, STC said:

However, the main speakers can be anything and it doesn’t matter to me.

 

This says a lot about where your priority lies.

[STC]

6 minutes ago, semente said:

 

It looks as though he's trying to make a point that vinyl sounds more realistic because it adds distortion which is perceived as reverb or spaciousness and then extrapolate that to DSP-processed space enhancement.

It is actually the other way round. Anyway, the point is despite whatever claim that audiophile make about hires and ultra high measurements, a vinyl spec is good enough. Otherwise, no audiophiles would be buying turntables. 

[STC]

2 minutes ago, semente said:

 

This says a lot about where your priority lies.

Read the edited version again. I am not the one using Sharp speakers. 

[tmtomh]

7 hours ago, STC said:

In short the sound heard by us need to be too pristine to be perceived as natural?

 

While I personally prefer digital and prize (and enjoy!) accuracy over distortion-induced "warmth," I would say that many people seem to prefer the sound "softened" in some of the ways that vinyl tends to create.

 

A somewhat related analogy: I recently moved into a new house, where I now have a music-listening room that is about twice as large as my previous one. It also has double drywall, concrete floors (under carpet), and fewer windows than my old space. The result is that the new space is less resonant than the old one and allows for more flexibility with speaker placement. While working on speaker placement and room treatments in the new space, I realized that bass resonances (aka room modes aka standing waves) were contributing to the sound in my old space more than I was aware at the time. Initially in the new space, this produced some unpleasant surprises, as some of my music did not sound as warm or have as much apparent bass impact as I remembered from my old space. I have since been able to pretty well "dial in" the sound in the new space, achieving better, cleaner bass than in the old space - but it took awhile to find speaker placement that simultaneously gave me enough bass and also did not do so via artificial bass resonances like my old space had.

 

I would suggest that this is similar to the vinyl/digital divide: a good number of folks simply like the types of distortions/nonlinearities introduced by the vinyl medium and playback chain - and when it comes to the particular kind of crosstalk I discussed above, that type of nonlinearlity is as far as I know unique to the vinyl medium. (And yes, crosstalk produces reduced channel separation, as you say above - but I would add that vinyl crosstalk produces reduced channel separation with specific characteristics - frequency dependent and out of phase.)

 

As a side note, the fact that this cartridge-induced crosstalk can easily be captured in a recording of vinyl playback is why vinyl rips do tend to capture most of the "feel"/experience of vinyl playback. And it's also why a shocking number of self-described vinyl purists somehow manage to love the SugarCube - which is a click-and-pop removal tool that adds an A-D-A step to their precious pure-analogue vinyl playback chain but in their minds somehow does not make the sound "digital."

[semente]

14 minutes ago, STC said:

It is actually the other way round. Anyway, the point is despite whatever claim that audiophile make about hires and ultra high measurements, a vinyl spec is good enough. Otherwise, no audiophiles would be buying turntables. 

 

mp3 is good enough for 99% of the population.

 

I think that vinyl-sound lovers can live with the format's downsides or actually enjoy what it does to sound, other audiophiles can't/don't.

 

Regarding nonlinearlities, you may enjoy reading this:

 

Multidimensional Audio

by Henning Moller, Bruel & Kjaer

(...)

Apodization

When all the objective and subjective local parameters are to be evaluated, "apodization" will probably play an important role. To apodize means "to remove the feet". In physics it means to remove the side lobes in the well known (sin x)/x spectrum indicated in Fig. 1 5.

From the Fourier theory we know that a pure sine, that starts at -∞ and goes on to + ∞ in the time domain, by the Fourier transform can be seen as a single line in the frequency domain. This is actually an example of the "global to local" transformation (section 1). If only a part of the sine is present - and after all that is the case in real life a "smear" is created in the frequency domain. The side lobes have a (sin x)/x nature. The shorter the tone burst the wider the frequency spectrum. Actually the relation has an extremely simple nature that T= 11/13. If the time domain gets very sharp like a transient the frequency domain gets very broad. The extreme is a unit impulse with a flat frequency spectrum from -∞ to + ∞.

The "truth" is always somewhere in between. Therefore the practical version of Apodization is to find the optimum compromise between the sharp extremes by smoothing things out.

It is always a good question to ask when a certain measuring parameter is improved: What then is getting worse? Unfortunately there has been a trend in the Audio industry to discover the extremes without mentioning what it costs. Just think of Phase, TIM, feedback, High Compliance, Noise reduction, Bass Reflex etc, as examples. A few years ago the advertisements said: "Unmeasurable distortion due to heavy feedback". Today they say: "Unmeasurable TIM due to low feedback". Obviously the optimum is somewhere in between. The "Gauss weighting" is probably the best compromise since this has the property of being the Fourier Transform of itself.

There are many practical examples of this "philosophy". In Fig.5 and Fig.11 we saw that a meaning could be seen by overview of a reasonable number of curves. Generally it means that if one is too close to the domains where things are very small it is impossible to see a meaning. And, if one is too far away, like in the infinite space, it is also impossible to see a meaning. This is obvious, but it is not much used in Audio.

Another example of how apodization, or smoothing improves things is shown in Fig.16. This is a 3Dmeasurement made by JVC (Ref. 17) of the transient response of a softdome tweeter compared with a harddome tweeter. The soft dome will not try to move air with a sharp step function. Therefore it will ring less and have a better transient response than the stiff hard dome.

The same can be seen for the simple closing of a door. If it is closed with a bang it is not as desirable as if it is closed smoothly. When a car is stopped, especially if the road is icy, the optimum way of braking is with a Gauss function. Fortunately humans do not think about it, they just do it.

If an optical lens is blurred around the edge, the image is sharper. If the gap of a tone head in a tape recorder is rounded, the frequency response is improved. If a loudspeaker or a microphone is rounded it sounds better, etc. Apodization in Audio is very

important when the various local domains are combined.
The essential thing in the "apodization philosophy" is to realize that if a parameter gets better in one domain it simultaneously

gets worse in another. If, for instance, a sharp filter is used in the frequency domain it gives ringing in the time domain. If the transient distortion is improved by a low pass filter the phase response is degraded, or in other words, the transient distortion can be "improved" by taking the transients away.

This "philosophy" seems to have similarities to the general principle of uncertainty. For instance, the position and the momentum for a particle cannot be measured simultaneously with high accuracy. If one is '"clear" the other is "smeared".

Really apodization might be as general as time and space. We do not understand that an event can have happened in no time, or that the universe has been there all the time. We do not understand the infinitely big universe or the infinitely small particles, but the apodized version (somewhere in between) is intuitively easy to understand.

 

Moller_Multidimensional-Audio.pdf

[STC]

6 minutes ago, tmtomh said:

 

While I personally prefer digital and prize (and enjoy!) accuracy over distortion-induced "warmth," I would say that many people seem to prefer the sound "softened" in some of the ways that vinyl tends to create.

 

A somewhat related analogy: I recently moved into a new house, where I now have a music-listening room that is about twice as large as my previous one. It also has double drywall, concrete floors (under carpet), and fewer windows than my old space. The result is that the new space is less resonant than the old one and allows for more flexibility with speaker placement. While working on speaker placement and room treatments in the new space, I realized that bass resonances (aka room modes aka standing waves) were contributing to the sound in my old space more than I was aware at the time. Initially in the new space, this produced some unpleasant surprises, as some of my music did not sound as warm or have as much apparent bass impact as I remembered from my old space. I have since been able to pretty well "dial in" the sound in the new space, achieving better, cleaner bass than in the old space - but it took awhile to find speaker placement that simultaneously gave me enough bass and also did not do so via artificial bass resonances like my old space had.

 

That is a good observation. I too suffered similar fate when my newly designed room based on golden ratio and double wall for studio 0.28 s RT. Somehow, I thought it sounded accurate but not real. 
 

We are very good in disregarding reverbs although that’s what add to naturalness and music in a live room provided no execute boom is more desirable than a dead room.  I will quote again in my other topic related to ambiance.
 

6 minutes ago, tmtomh said:

 

I would suggest that this is similar to the vinyl/digital divide: a good number of folks simply like the types of distortions/nonlinearities introduced by the vinyl medium and playback chain - and when it comes to the particular kind of crosstalk I discussed above, that type of nonlinearlity is as far as I know unique to the vinyl medium. 

 

It is that but also could be the lack of channel separation. Try adding ticks and pops, little wobble to a digital file so that it sounds like a vinyl. But it will never feel like listening to a vinyl recording. The only thing that will be different here is the channel separation. 

[Jud]

1 hour ago, STC said:

a vinyl spec is good enough. Otherwise, no audiophiles would be buying turntables. 

 

Umm, no. I have a thousand or so LPs from before the digital audio era that I occasionally like to listen to. My old turntable was showing some wear and tear after 30 years, so I bought a new one. This has nothing to do with any comparison to digital, and everything to do with the fact that I don't want hundreds of albums I have enjoyed for decades sitting there useless. Very simple.

[marce]

I use to enjoy vinyl till one of the cats ate my tone arm. well gave it a good chewing... One day I'll sort it out. But music is music I enjoy cd's vinyl, even got an OLD Kenwood CD player that we sometimes use, very smooth and sound like there is less resolution compared to ripped and more modern CD players, its nice for quite listening some evening as a change.........

[d_elm]

1 hour ago, Jud said:

 

Umm, no. I have a thousand or so LPs from before the digital audio era that I occasionally like to listen to. My old turntable was showing some wear and tear after 30 years, so I bought a new one. This has nothing to do with any comparison to digital, and everything to do with the fact that I don't want hundreds of albums I have enjoyed for decades sitting there useless. Very simple.

I have had the same vinyl rig for about 15 years and not played vinyl much as my digital chain got better.  But now there is new hope for playback of my vinyl collection with DS Audio's optical cartridge DS-E1 and perhaps DS-W2.  EMM Labs or Meitner will be providing an equalizer for the DS Audio cartridges in addition to or replacing DS Audio's equalizers.