All this to compete with a turntable?
Join Our Community Subscribe to Paul's PostsIn response to Ted Smith’s video explaining DSD, a viewer posted a great remark that is the title of today’s post. I just couldn’t resist writing about it.
Indeed, when digital audio first came on the scene in the early 1980s, the intent of designers was clear. Outperform the turntable. From day one their goals were met in terms of fixing vinyl’s many weaknesses: degradation over time, mechanical interface, ticks and pops, surface noise, limited dynamic range, stunted frequency response, mechanical nightmare.
For most, the advent of the CD was all they needed to retire their vinyl collection. Few looked back with regret.
Of course, our sector of the market reacted rather differently. We were horrified with the one aspect most important to us. Sound quality. Compare an old CD to the same in vinyl and it’s easy to see why.
Today, the situation has flip-flopped. While vinyl’s still a great sounding medium whose popularity has soared once again, digital has long ago exceeded our expectations for sound quality. Consider that nearly every new vinyl release of the last few decades was recorded on a digital system before transferring to vinyl. That what modern purchasers of vinyl are hearing is a second-generation copy of a digital master.
Sometimes change happens without our even noticing it.
What are the criteria defining “sound quality”, Paul? And which manipulations are made by the sound engineer when creating a mix based on an analog tape compared to the manipulations made for the digital recording both intending to mask the recording’s deficiencies? Most probably that the simple digitization of the analog recording didn’t work without having available the today’s digital plugins of modern digital mixing consoles!?
From memory, Denon released their first commercial digital recording machine in 1973 and it was fairly commonplace by the late 1970s, so certainly with classical for the last years of vinyl we were listening to lots of digital recordings. The Sony/Philips CD project was launched around 1979 and fronted by Karajan, the leading recording artist of the time, to facilitate digital playback of the existing digital recording process. The first CD players suffered from jitter, but this was largely resolved by the end of the 1980s, mainly by Marantz. I was listening to Trevor Gilbert’s WTK the other day, one of the first CDs issued in 1983, and the quality is phonomenal and it remains a reference recording.
The initial weakness of CD was the players, not the recordings, as digital recording was a mature process. The key issue was to make the machines affordable. I recall the first players were about £400, but a single CD cost about £16, about double the cost of the same LP. Of course you got more music, as a design goal was for Karajan to get Beethoven 3 on one disc with uninterrupted playback.
I’m not sure of Paul’s point, but the demise of the record player was written long before the CD player was conceived.
I am quite sure that the majority of my first CDs was labeled AAD and ADD and rarely DDD! And even the ADDs from Sheffield labs sound lifeless compared to the direct cut vinyls from Sheffield lab. A good example: Thelma Houston: I’ve got the music in me (Sheffield lab CD-2).
Thought the goal was Beethoven’s 9th…but I could be wrong
I was delighted when CD came along – Vinyl had the potential for wonderful sound, but the inconsistency of it – dust, cracks, SO easily damaged, and the paranoia of playing equaling very slight degradation of sound each time meant each LP had to be recorded, first on HQ cassette, then reel-reel, so I only played the safety copies.
CD changed that.
SQ / Mastering was a crap-shoot, but so had it been for all the LPs I had bought over the past 5 or 10 years, and probably for the same reasons – money. Capitalism. Commercial interests. Call it what you will. All of which equal greed, but more importantly a blatant disrespect for the consumers discernment of these issues. Thinner and thinner LPs. recycled vinyl. Using stampers for hundreds or thousands of pressings.
I got tired of taking LPs back to the shop to try and find a better pressing.
I still complain daily at the naff mastering on some CDs (and hearing the dropouts on the old and poorly stored master tapes), but at least it doesn’t deteriorate and has the potential to sound really really good on gear that doesn’t cost a house.
So whilst the original commenter may be right, Vinyl is not a memory of perfection to me, just a memory of frustration.
Nowadays when I do play a bit of vinyl, it’s enjoyable because I know it is not my primary source, so I can cope with the issues 🙂
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Couldn’t have said it better myself. I’ll add that I was even more delighted when SACD came along.
Pleased to see the CDSC* hasn’t completely disappeared.
*Compact Disc Supporters Club
Paul has a point, but there are a couple things to add here:
1) Yes, many vinyl reissues today are from digital masters, but the DACs the record companies have are often quite a bit better than what most audiophiles have – full dCS Vivaldi stack owners don’t count. 🙂
2) Even then, original pressings still most often sound much better than recent reissues; the problem is finding one in good condition. Strangely, the more popular the album, the harder that is with so many beat-up copies available on the used market.
CD is wonderful for convenience and overall sound quality, but especially for older LPs, the soundstage width and depth differences between CD and LP aren’t even close – the vinyl is much better.
However that may be due much more to the quality of the CD in question, and certainly I have some horrible sounding LPs.
A digital recording does NOT necessarily sound better just because it was pressed on vinyl; somehow the 45 RPM MoFi “Brothers in Arms” manages to be one that does, and there are others where the CD has been compressed into oblivion and the LP wasn’t. Taylor Swift’s “1989” is one such album where the CD is squashed horribly and the LP sounds natural and open.
As the majority of my vinyl collection is from the pre-digital age which I’m generally happy with. I still search out all analogue recordings all well. As far as digitally mastered vinyl is concerned its a mixed bag in my opinion but I don’t discount it. I’m also more concerned with recording quality without over compression and the loss of dynamic range. (I find dynamic range on vinyl good enough on my system). The record buyer has to be so careful nowadays, its a minefield. Oddly enough you can generally guess from about a minute in from the lead-in groove if you’ve bought a pup.
I have the DS 45rpm box set and it is exceptional because Knopfler has his own state of the art studio. The original Dire Straits 33rpm album, on very thin (120?) vinyl, still sounds fabulous. You can get a clean original copy for $5 because they sold about 4million of them.
I love Ted’s description of DSD in his video, but why are you then talking about CD?
I’m getting awful tired of seeing PCM Digital lumped into discussion with 1 bit PDM which is a different process for audio capture.
Paul, I won’t expect to convince you, but, having just gotten the Stellar Phonostage, I’m playing a bunch of Water Lily records with on Ortofon moving magnet cartridge, through the same system I’m listening to my DirectStream DAC with – and the LP smokes the digital.
Wait until PSA builds a record player and a cartridge … 😉
Probably no preference change but possibly more balanced communication;-)
Indeed, as most do. But it’s a matter of mastering not medium.
The Water Lily LP‘s and digital versions should have been mastered by the same engineer, right? So this is probably one of those examples with the smallest mastering differences possible.
Maybe the analog source is reason for the superiority of vinyl in this case (usual imo with all analog sources)
Good point. I have heard the original masters of Kavi’s work and they are excellent. I’ll bet Dan’s comparing the LP version to the CD version. I’ll ask him.
As we don’t know Dan’s setup, we even don’t know if the vinyl version just sounds better than the CD in his individual setup.
It really needs carefully defined conditions to make valid comparisons between vinyl and digital versions, thats why I don’t like lump-sum statements in either direction.
IMO the statement or the suggestion that vinyl versions made from digital masters are inferior to their digital production media is equally wrong as the opposite.
Assumed digital and analog gear is on eye level (doesn’t mean equally expensive) IMO the only statements which have a more broad valid character are:
most vinyl masterings done by an individual mastering engineer not equal to the one for the digital release sound better on vinyl than the same album on digital
probably all vinyl masterings done from analog sources sound better than the same masterings done for digital media
most masterings done from digital sources sound extremely similar either on vinyl or digital media (or just own the characteristics of the individual record or CD player)
exceptions always present
Correct but a little biased imo as usual 😉
Isn’t it comparable to put the digital master either on a disc or vinyl, so that both processes lead to similar „2nd generation“ copies (which in fact they both are not imo, as no copy is made, it’s just mastered in both cases and put on a physical storage)?
And isn’t it a well known opinion of several mastering engineers that the process of manufacturing a customer ready digital format or storage medium is degrading the sound more than manufacturing an analog storage medium?
I don’t want to speak of the few clearly superior vinyls mastered in the analog domain from digital masters.
Anyway, when we speak of a customer available digital master (unmastered and not on disc), Paul‘s right definitely imo.
Gee, Paul, I could have sworn that PS Audio recently introduced a brand new phonostage, to great fanfare.
We did and it’s great! Not sure what that has to do with anything. Can you enlighten me?
My snarky comment was supposed to directly follow your original post but I’ve not figured out how to do that.
Paul, seriously, was the main design intent to outperform the turntable? I take that statement as one relating to sonics. Or was it to provide a simpler playback system (more attractive to consumers), immune to clicks and pops (not fully achieved), which would have far fewer returns of the discs due to defects (reduce costs to increase profits)?
The first time I heard a CD I immediately liked it for its improved clarity among other things. It was the same reason I liked the solid state amplifiers better than tubes. But there were some flaws that industry had to solve. I realized this after I started shopping and listened more carefully. Both had an unpleasant harsh shrillness. In the case of transistors it was crossover notch distortion and their propensity to blow up. In the case of CDs it was the brick wall filter just above 20 khz. It took a few years for industry to work them out so I waited. After my father’s experience with an Edsel when I was still a child I’m never the first to try anything new. Lesson learned.
Still I must admit that despite the technical limitations of phonograph records there is a fascination with collecting them, watching them spin round and round, and best of all watching mechanical contraptions that play them automatically. I was fascinated and jealous of my uncle’s record changer by the time I was 3 or 4 years old. Thorens had a model that delivered records from one stack to the platter and then to another stack so that only one record was on the platter at a time resulting in the correct vertical tracking angle every time. The Fisher Lincoln played both sides of a record just the way the old Capehart players did. Those original Capehart record players were beautiful works of art and were packed with what for their day were state of the art electronics. You can see the genesis of McIntosh styling in the Capehart control panel with backlit colored lighting on black glass. Then there was the ADC Accutrac record player that could play different bands on records the way we play different tracks on CDs and even had a remote control. One last one worth mentioning was Seaburg who built a juke box for LPs. Records are fun even if their technology is inferior in every way to CDs.
Can LPs sound better than CDs? Yes for any one or combination of a number of reasons but it has nothing to do with the capabilities and limitations of their respective technologies. The more I learned about RBCD the more impressed I was by how well thought out it is. It will probably be replaced by streaming and other electronically stored files but IMO RBCD will not be bettered for storing and retrieving electrical signals that are supposed to be analogs of music.
In this episode of Columbo, the murderer played by Theodore Bikel, a member of a very high IQ group kind of like Mensa uses an Accutrac record player as the key element of the murder weapon to establish an alibi.
The Bye-Bye Sky High IQ Murder Case. If you can find it on the web it’s season 6 episode 39 or 40.
Lots of talk about digital quality here, but to me, the title of the post suggested the complexity, not just of the hardware to play back CDs, but also the added complexity of digital storage, and now digital streaming that has changed the financial landscape of the entire music industry, especially the musicians themselves. Guess I forgot to turn right.
It’s really simple. We don’t need to debate which one is better so as to kill the other format. There’s pros and cons to both. Just keep both formats and go with the one you prefer as your reference.
The situation has not changed. No flip flop. CD has improved a lot since it was introduced as perfect sound forever when in fact it was imperfect sound. If digital was perfect then why have people wasted more than a quarter century improving perfection ? As for the long list of imperfections mentioned for vinyl they are completely over blown. They would hold good only for vinyl terribly abused. With just a small amount of that kind of abuse a CD would be completely unplayable while the most abused vinyl can still be played. As for pristine vinyl it is still definitely superior to digital in every way except convenience.. As for digital mastering of vinyl it is not because it is better. Absolutely not. It is because it is cheaper and easier to do. Also when people fell hook line and sinker for the CD hype vinyl recording lathes were moth balled. To come up with new ones is very expensive and there are not enough good recording engineers available who can do a really good job of using the limited number of lathes that are available . Digital recording is something any one can do with a little knowledge. Quite the opposite of all analogue recording. The fact that digiphiles still run vinyl down on one hand and use vinyl sound as the goal to attain for digital just proves that vinyl is still the king. Regards.
“Digital recording is something any one can do with a little knowledge”.
That’s funny 🙂
…and totally incorrect.
BTW the only folks who said CD players provided perfect sound forever were advertisers (and folks who were taken in by the advertisers).
RBCD format, on the other hand, could be described as “perfect” if you define perfect as max 20 kHz bandwidth and set some sort of arbitrary noise floor, the time since then has been spent trying to improve on the _implementation_ of RBCD format. They are getting closer all the time (and will likely never reach it, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle will probably have the last laugh 🙂 higher and higher resolution digital files just make that job easier).
I enjoy both formats, but can rely on Digital rather more, for rather less budget 🙂
I’m not a digiphile, the various recording methods using digital techniques are a tool, just like analogue recording in its various guises, hopefully to bring us all pleasure 🙂
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To my surprise, the last two cars I have purchased have no option for a CD player. 2 USB inputs, a mini-plug and Bluetooth have been included as well as SiriusXM. What? No phone preamp? lol.
I use ELO’s Discovery CD and LP to demo the difference between a horrible CD and a much better LP. My partner has no interest in audio equipment but when I did the comparo, she immediately said “Why is the CD so bad?”
I haven’t bought a CD in over 8 years, but I do download hi-res tracks from HDTracks and my smartphone is an LG V40 ThinQ with an upgraded DAC. It sounds better than every DAC I have ever had in my home system (except my current PS Audio Stellar Gain Cell DAC).
Bottom line? Hardware makes a big difference, and source material is even more important. Buy what sounds good.
I dragged my heels a bit … didn’t buy a cd player until 1987. I used to think the cd mastering/engineering process was the cause of all the issues with the sound quality. But those same old ripped cds sound so much better now due to the much improved music servers I use. And the DS dac 🙂
Everyone seems to think CDs last forever whereas vinyl doesn’t, let me tell you that isn’t necessarily the case. Here are a couple of links to my google drive with pics to prove it. Yes, those really are holes in the metal inside the plastic, without corresponding holes in the plastic. I have a whole bunch of discs like this, all of which were in a case that I carried everywhere I went – I’ve always liked music when I work. Completely unplayable, not scratched or gouged in any way.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/12Gnf65MAYhYrUw5HPUWR_pPjs-_pk3p6/view
https://drive.google.com/file/d/12KP-8VYIBwzXR5LP4oz0cwwZAkKMXqyl/view
Ah, so-o-o subjective this is. I can only comment on the vinyl pressings that were available in the country in which I reside; they were more than not, disappointing. They were, as I called them, ‘Snap Crackle Pop’ recordings. No matter how much I treated them like the proverbial raw eggs; no matter how many times I passed my pristine 1,000,000 brissle DECCA record cleaning brush through all those grooves, the result was always the same…a fire side recording (the sound of an open fire crackling in the mid-ground) that was not improved by higher-end styli, cartridges, arms or turntables. So, when CD’s arrived on the scene I was in heaven & yes the original $400-$600 players may have sounded a little ‘digital’ but today’s basic $600-$1,000 machines (inboard DACs) are so good that you can easily distinguish between a bad, average, good or stunning recording. In fact some of todays ‘basic’ players can expose music that you love, recorded very poorly. But the main irritant (S, C, P) has long ago been vanquished from my loudspeakers & what a blessing that is. Two years ago I heard, & this has happened only once, the sound of vinyl that made my jaw drop; it was an MFSL ‘platter’ played on a MoFi turntable & cartridge, & it was stunning, but for me, cost prohibitive…I’m not going to buy all my vinyl back at between $45-$90 a pop. Bottom line; everyone enjoy the music that you love on/in whatever format you prefer, for your own reasons.
Years ago a famous Indiana rock musician and his producer wanted to audition KEF’s top of the line 107. In his home.
I was the KEF factory rep. I met the artist and his producer, set up the speakers in his billiard/music room, and we listened.
Curiously to me at the time, we listened to 3 vinyl test pressings of the same release.
One with almost no compression, one with moderate compression, one with heavy compression.
I was not a fan of this artist at the time, but the intimate and ‘live’ sound of the vinyl with no compression made me an instant convert. At least for this recording.
The moderate compression vinyl was still better than most rock LPs I’d heard. The heavy compression version was virtually unlistenable.
The pressing with almost NO compression was a revelation.
As a (mediocre at best) drummer myself, I was in awe that certain kicks punctuated HARD, while others danced and teased, coordinated with the high hat cymbal. This was especially noticeable on one cut that would become a mega hit single.
Yet when listening to the highly compressed version, all of those subtleties disappeared. The dynamic differences between the hard and softer hits had turned into one homogenized thumping sound. The heart of the artist no longer communicated.
In the words of BB King, the thrill was gone.
Worse, the producer told me the high compression version would likely be released on vinyl, on CD and to the radio stations.
Just hypothesizing; if that uncompressed master was released by HD tracks, the “digital is better” folks would all compare it to the original LP to prove they were right.
If those who owned the original CD (the high compression master) could hear the uncompressed vinyl test pressing, they would understandably conclude vinyl is superior.
Both of those two examples needed a little or a lot more information to draw any definitive conclusions.
Without knowing which of the initial three versions they were hearing, any possible conclusions would be useless, “like paper in fire…”. 🙂