Nov 13 2008
Thoughts on Vinyl and Analog
Dave Allen has a fantastic article on his blog about vinyl, analog, digital formats, and tying it all together to a new generation. Real good stuff, check it out.
Excerpt:
Digitizing music has made music more affordable and provided ease of use in portability but at the huge expense of having the emotional range, the highs the lows the rumbles, removed in the process. What we have been hearing on CD is a compressed version of a digital slice of the possible range of sound available to our ears. At live shows the bass sub woofers in the PA system allow you to literally ‘feel’ the bottom end, on CD or MP3 that experience is simply not available to you. Yet, when you play a vinyl record through a great hi-fi system you can experience it in a recording.
Read more here.
Jason, I love your blog. I just wish you would post more, so I hate to be the one to tell you but this is just plain wrong. There is no frequency or sound in the realm of human hearing that a CD can not reproduce. I am a huge vinyl fan and will never give up collecting them but the “better” sound you get from them has nothing to do with which frequencies it is capable of reproducing. Now, if you’re talking about transients, then that’s another story. 44.1 simply has no room for full spectrum transients, but then neither did vinyl records. The fact of the matter is that if you want a sound system with say 15Hz – 25KHz then you need specialized audio formats, specialized media players, specialized speakers, and specialized amplifiers. And even then you better have a @$%^ well trained ear to “feel” the difference that no one else will be able to enjoy. The difference in sound “quality” between vinyl and cd that Dave Allen is hearing is simply his preference for the coloration (albeit minimal) of vinyl records: that is that they can HOLD some transient capability while 99% of most records were recorded before they even knew how this stuff works. That’s why we hear stories of playing a Bela Bartok record on a high-end system and suddenly you can “hear” the chairs creak in the orchestra. That sound wasn’t intended to be there, therefore the “higher” quality is really just a perceived difference. One has to remember the limitations and widespread acceptance of formats determines how something was “supposed” to sound, NOT THE HIGHEST QUALITY GEAR AVAILABLE YEARS LATER. Funny enough, I bet half the time he’s at a live show, that same 44.1 format is delivering the bass he claims is unavailable on CD format! Besides all that 20Hz-30Hz and 18KHz-20KHz ARE transients to most ears.