|
Post by trinhsman on Feb 10, 2015 7:17:10 GMT -5
do records really sound better than a good well recorded cd? With a quality turntable and electronics.......YES! But IMHO the ERC3 against most turntables under 2000 dollars will win out.
|
|
KeithL
Administrator
Posts: 9,945
|
Post by KeithL on Feb 10, 2015 11:39:50 GMT -5
A well recorded CD is more likely to be more neutral (less colored) than even the best possible vinyl recording. While a record can store frequencies somewhat higher than a standard sample rate CD, the frequency response of a CD is much flatter, the THD of a CD is much lower, and the S/N ratio of a CD is much higher. (The frequency response of vinyl, with a special cartridge, extends to about 45 kHz, which is about equivalent to that of a 96k digital file, but there are lots of places in the signal chain where major errors in flatness creep in.) However, some people insist that, even though a digital recording measures as being much more accurate, and the higher levels of coloration and distortion in a vinyl recording are equally easy to measure and demonstrate, they find "digital distortion" to be much more annoying, and so prefer the way the vinyl sounds. Other people simply like the way vinyl sounds (without worrying about whether it's coloration we're talking about or not). The point is also often moot because vinyl and CD versions of even the same content are usually mastered somewhat differently, so you'll rarely if ever get a chance to make a comparison of identical content anyway. Unfortunately, there seem to be a lot of NOT very well recorded CDs out there (not nearly as many are well mastered as we would like) and many producers and engineers seem to favor deliberately adding unpleasantly high levels of compression and other processing that make them sound pretty bad. (I seem to recall there being a lot of really awful sounding records out there in the old days as well, but a lot of vinyl fans seem to forget that part.... ) do records really sound better than a good well recorded cd?
|
|
|
Post by jmilton on Feb 10, 2015 15:06:03 GMT -5
Unfortunately, there seem to be a lot of NOT very well recorded CDs out there (not nearly as many are well mastered as we would like) and many producers and engineers seem to favor deliberately adding unpleasantly high levels of compression and other processing that make them sound pretty bad. (I seem to recall there being a lot of really awful sounding records out there in the old days as well, but a lot of vinyl fans seem to forget that part.... ) do records really sound better than a good well recorded cd? It might be an oversimplification to blame engineers for deliberately making bad masters. Nearly all master digital studio recordings are made at higher sample rates and bit depths than a CD can handle, even if it’s only 48kHz. For example, Keith Johnson at Reference records all their materials at 176.4kHz/24 bits and nearly every recording studio is making masters at 96kHz/24 or higher. When a recording engineer is making a master recording of a group, a copy of a master analog tape etc. he is naturally going to make that master at the best possible resolution he can. Not at the lowest needed.So what happens when we want to go make a CD version of that master tape? The original master is downsampled to 44.1kHz/16 bits through a sample rate converter. Depending on what the engineer started with, downsampling clearly loses some of what was in the original recording in the process. Downsampling may be one of the worst things to ever happen to the CD and one of the central reasons we judge it so harshly. It may also partially answer why we can make a digital copy of an analog event without much in the way of loss. We don’t have to mess with the final result of the conversion, just play it back at whatever sample and bit rate we recorded it at.
|
|
|
Post by deltadube on Feb 10, 2015 15:16:43 GMT -5
Quick update. The bass is starting to warm up and along with the smoothness of the moving coil this cartridge is simply amazing. I'm starting to have that unconscious smile feeling that comes during critical listening moments that are impressive. nice turn table!!!
|
|
|
Post by deltadube on Feb 10, 2015 15:28:55 GMT -5
A well recorded CD is more likely to be more neutral (less colored) than even the best possible vinyl recording. While a record can store frequencies somewhat higher than a standard sample rate CD, the frequency response of a CD is much flatter, the THD of a CD is much lower, and the S/N ratio of a CD is much higher. (The frequency response of vinyl, with a special cartridge, extends to about 45 kHz, which is about equivalent to that of a 96k digital file, but there are lots of places in the signal chain where major errors in flatness creep in.) However, some people insist that, even though a digital recording measures as being much more accurate, and the higher levels of coloration and distortion in a vinyl recording are equally easy to measure and demonstrate, they find "digital distortion" to be much more annoying, and so prefer the way the vinyl sounds. Other people simply like the way vinyl sounds (without worrying about whether it's coloration we're talking about or not). The point is also often moot because vinyl and CD versions of even the same content are usually mastered somewhat differently, so you'll rarely if ever get a chance to make a comparison of identical content anyway. Unfortunately, there seem to be a lot of NOT very well recorded CDs out there (not nearly as many are well mastered as we would like) and many producers and engineers seem to favor deliberately adding unpleasantly high levels of compression and other processing that make them sound pretty bad. (I seem to recall there being a lot of really awful sounding records out there in the old days as well, but a lot of vinyl fans seem to forget that part.... ) do records really sound better than a good well recorded cd? thanks for the feed back Keith.. any news when the emo turn table be coming?
|
|
KeithL
Administrator
Posts: 9,945
|
Post by KeithL on Feb 10, 2015 16:39:27 GMT -5
We've been trying to figure out a way to deliver a turntable of the quality we and our customers would like - and at a reasonable price.... we're still working on it. We'll let you know when we get closer. A well recorded CD is more likely to be more neutral (less colored) than even the best possible vinyl recording. While a record can store frequencies somewhat higher than a standard sample rate CD, the frequency response of a CD is much flatter, the THD of a CD is much lower, and the S/N ratio of a CD is much higher. (The frequency response of vinyl, with a special cartridge, extends to about 45 kHz, which is about equivalent to that of a 96k digital file, but there are lots of places in the signal chain where major errors in flatness creep in.) However, some people insist that, even though a digital recording measures as being much more accurate, and the higher levels of coloration and distortion in a vinyl recording are equally easy to measure and demonstrate, they find "digital distortion" to be much more annoying, and so prefer the way the vinyl sounds. Other people simply like the way vinyl sounds (without worrying about whether it's coloration we're talking about or not). The point is also often moot because vinyl and CD versions of even the same content are usually mastered somewhat differently, so you'll rarely if ever get a chance to make a comparison of identical content anyway. Unfortunately, there seem to be a lot of NOT very well recorded CDs out there (not nearly as many are well mastered as we would like) and many producers and engineers seem to favor deliberately adding unpleasantly high levels of compression and other processing that make them sound pretty bad. (I seem to recall there being a lot of really awful sounding records out there in the old days as well, but a lot of vinyl fans seem to forget that part.... ) thanks for the feed back Keith.. any news when the emo turn table be coming?
|
|
KeithL
Administrator
Posts: 9,945
|
Post by KeithL on Feb 10, 2015 17:42:23 GMT -5
When I say "deliberately" I'm not referring to a deliberate intent to make garbage - but more to a different choice of priorities. Nobody overcompresses music because they want it to sound bad; they do it because, by compressing it, they can raise the average level, which makes it sound better in noisy cars and on cheap ear buds with poor isolation, even though, at the same time, it sounds worse on good equipment. (In other words, to the majority of their target audience, they've improved the quality - just not to us.) He is also quite possibly at the mercy of producers, and even performers, who want their music to punch through ("we'd like everything a little louder than everything else, please"). There's also the tradeoff involved with processing in general. There are all sorts of cool effects you can do these days, but many of them come with a price in terms of quality (just like doing a lot of Photoshopping on a picture can make it look artificial). Because some of those effects are so much fun, and so easy to do, sometimes people make the wrong decision about how much processing to do to the music ("we don't need to hire a chorus with twenty guys; we'll just get three singers to do the track, chorus it in the chorus plugin, phase it a bit in the phaser, then add some reverb in the super reverberizer; it'll sound almost as good and we can get it done today - and under budget"). In the old days you didn't have as many choices, which made the process of making the important choices easier. (Unfortunately, all those processing options do also make it easier for even a thoroughly mediocre engineer to turn out tolerable sounding content, even when maybe we'd be better off without it.) I don't consider the downsampling process itself to be a problem, and I'm not convinced that even the limited bandwidth available on CDs is really a problem either. While it's true that downsampling loses information (obviously), I don't consider the "debate" about whether the CD format is "good enough" to be decided. While it is true that a lot of CDs don't sound especially good, I have heard enough that DO sound really good to be quite convinced that the format itself is much better than most people think. I've got a few CDs that sound every bit as good as the best 24/96 content I own, and even one would prove that the quality CAN be there, if you don't mess it up along the way. Having access to higher sample rates and bit depths is actually probably more valuable at the mastering stages, where it allows an engineer to not worry about adjusting levels multiple times, or mixing content from very different sources, because it gives him extra "safety margins"; then, once he's got things just the way he wants them, he can "lock them in" and do a carefully optimized conversion to the final output sample rate and bit depth. While I'm sure there are some sample rate converters out there that do a poor quality job, most of the ones used by folks who do serious mixing are actually quite good, and doing a single conversion to a lower sample rate rarely damages the audio quality (beyond the actual loss of information entailed in reducing the sample rate); it's multiple conversions back and forth that really trash sound quality. (It's like editing pictures; you always want to do all your editing in a high-resolution lossless format; however, once you're done editing, you can do a single conversion and end up with a really good looking JPG version - as long as you don't try to edit it again after you convert it.) I'm more inclined to credit the reason it is, as you say, easy to make a "simple digital recording" that sounds very good with the simple fact that you probably avoided applying things like limiting, and compression, and all sorts of other effects and processing to it. I've made live recordings at 24/44 (CD sample rate - but with a higher bit depth so as to be more forgiving of badly set levels), and they also sounded very good. Take one of those good sounding recordings (at a higher sample rate) and do a single conversion to 16/44.1 . I think you'll be surprised at how close it sounds to your original. (And I think you'll agree that the difference is much less than can account for how bad most modern CDs sound.) I would suggest that one of the reasons "we judge CDs so harshly" is that many early CDs really did sound pretty bad, and so did many of the early CD players and DACs, but that was not because the sample rate and resolution were inadequate, but because the technology itself simply didn't work very well, and so failed to deliver all of the potential of the format. Personally, I believe that, while "technically reasonable", the choices they made were strategically poor - because they forced poor compromises to be made. In other words, choosing a 44k sample rate, and so a 22 kHz bandwidth limitation, was reasonable considering the limitations of human hearing; the problem was that the technology of the day wasn't capable of fitting music into that bandwidth without screwing it up in the process. So the process, which had been specified with very little margin for error, was carried out with technology that wasn't able to entirely live up to the requirements, and so the results weren't very good. (To convert full spectrum audio to a full quality CD, with no "unfortunate side effects", requires that you pass it through a filter that can pass everything up to 20 kHz perfectly flat, and without causing any obvious phase anomalies, but reduce everything above 22 kHz by at least 80 dB; this was simply impossible with the analog filters of those days. Since then, we've developed much better digital filters, and the process of oversampling was developed to sidestep the problem quite neatly, but neither was available when those early CDs were being made.) Of course, since we now have plenty of bandwidth available, we also have no need to carefully fit our music into the absolute minimum amount of space that can hold it - so we don't need to make difficult decisions like that. (When CDs were first invented, the reason why their bandwidth was limited was really mostly the size limitation of the disc - and the fact that "the guys who got to decide" were quite certain that they couldn't sell a disc which held only 30 minutes of music on it instead of an hour, regardless of how good it sounded.... which is why they chose a format that was "just barely good enough"... much as Apple decided to use compression for their iTunes offering so you could fit "10,000 songs" on your iPod instead of "2,000 songs" .) Unfortunately, there seem to be a lot of NOT very well recorded CDs out there (not nearly as many are well mastered as we would like) and many producers and engineers seem to favor deliberately adding unpleasantly high levels of compression and other processing that make them sound pretty bad. (I seem to recall there being a lot of really awful sounding records out there in the old days as well, but a lot of vinyl fans seem to forget that part.... ) It might be an oversimplification to blame engineers for deliberately making bad masters. Nearly all master digital studio recordings are made at higher sample rates and bit depths than a CD can handle, even if it’s only 48kHz. For example, Keith Johnson at Reference records all their materials at 176.4kHz/24 bits and nearly every recording studio is making masters at 96kHz/24 or higher. When a recording engineer is making a master recording of a group, a copy of a master analog tape etc. he is naturally going to make that master at the best possible resolution he can. Not at the lowest needed.So what happens when we want to go make a CD version of that master tape? The original master is downsampled to 44.1kHz/16 bits through a sample rate converter. Depending on what the engineer started with, downsampling clearly loses some of what was in the original recording in the process. Downsampling may be one of the worst things to ever happen to the CD and one of the central reasons we judge it so harshly. It may also partially answer why we can make a digital copy of an analog event without much in the way of loss. We don’t have to mess with the final result of the conversion, just play it back at whatever sample and bit rate we recorded it at.
|
|
|
Post by jmilton on Feb 10, 2015 18:58:10 GMT -5
From what I read, best I can tell it was a simple holdover from the original PCM video recorders which couldn’t handle anything higher than 44.1kHz/16 bits (the minimum required for 20Hz to 20kHz reproduction).
|
|
|
Post by adaboy on Feb 10, 2015 19:38:51 GMT -5
Quick update. The bass is starting to warm up and along with the smoothness of the moving coil this cartridge is simply amazing. I'm starting to have that unconscious smile feeling that comes during critical listening moments that are impressive. nice turn table!!! Thanks delta!
|
|
KeithL
Administrator
Posts: 9,945
|
Post by KeithL on Feb 11, 2015 11:18:42 GMT -5
That makes sense, and I've heard several variations on it... apparently the standard evolved around an encoding mechanism that was based on the one they used for digital tape... and of course that, in turn, was designed around being able to cover "the audible frequency range of 20 Hz to 20 kHz". (I don't think it was thought of as "the CD will be as good as the PCM recorder" but more of "we can use the same electronics for the CD standard as we're already using for the PCM recorder".) The unfortunate thing, however, was that using that sample rate, with a Nyquist frequency only 10% above the top frequency they wanted to record, placed some very stringent requirements on the design - and the technology of the day wasn't able to meet those requirements without serious compromises (compromises of the type that lead to audible issues). They could have avoided these problems very easily, resulting in better sound, and easier and cheaper design and manufacturing of players, by simply doubling the sample rate (but that would have halved the paying time). I definitely recall articles of the day mentioning the hour playing time as being considered to be "a necessary thing" for a successful consumer format (the idea that it would take two CDs to hold one album being totally unacceptable). From what I read, best I can tell it was a simple holdover from the original PCM video recorders which couldn’t handle anything higher than 44.1kHz/16 bits (the minimum required for 20Hz to 20kHz reproduction).
|
|
|
Post by vcautokid on Feb 11, 2015 11:27:42 GMT -5
From what I read, best I can tell it was a simple holdover from the original PCM video recorders which couldn’t handle anything higher than 44.1kHz/16 bits (the minimum required for 20Hz to 20kHz reproduction). Hmmm, not quite Jim as the ADAT format and even DTRS formats could record effortlessly to 48khz, and more. The Tascam DA-98HR could record DSD as well as an option.
|
|
|
Post by jmilton on Feb 11, 2015 12:15:48 GMT -5
we had a situation where Sony and Philips were pushing hard on the 44.1kHz Compact Disc standards and the pro and film markets were happy with a slightly higher sample rate of 48kHz. It is widely rumored that the Compact Disc 44.1kHz standard evolved in order to allow a double album’s worth of music to be placed on the small silver disc. One story even suggesting the head of Sony demanded Beethoven’s entire 9th symphony fit onto the small disc (about the same length as a double album). Others debunk both stories as absurd since all the engineers would have to do to fit this much data with 48kHz is make the CD larger – about the size of a 45 rpm vinyl disc – and then the Sony marketing people wanting to have no relationship in size, color or look of anything vinyl making the decision.
On the pro and film side the now common place 48kHz sample rate, a defacto “standard”, appeared on a growing number of pro-side tools and equipment and used without a lot of question. Popular lore had it that the film industry used (and still uses as the DVD standard) 48kHz to “synch” to the standard film rate of 24fps (frames per second), but as I think about this I cannot even envision how this would matter at all – being just a convenient doubling of 24. Synchronizing the audio to the video is essential, but the relationships between 24fps and 48kHz doesn’t seem to actually have any merit – other than that’s what everyone does.
So, in the end, we wind up with two very similar yet different primary sample rates, 44/1kHz and 48kHz. From these two numbers come all other PCM sample rates and that, my friends, is why we have 6 types of sample rates on DACS today. Three would be just fine, but because of the double standards of 44.1 and 48, we have 6. Go figure
|
|
KeithL
Administrator
Posts: 9,945
|
Post by KeithL on Feb 11, 2015 13:01:50 GMT -5
I've seen variations on that story where someone had a plant ready to produce the 5" discs and didn't want to have to re-tool (while their competitors would have liked nothing better than to have that production time advantage erased by changing the spec)... remember that standards are never developed in a vacuum, so there are always conflicting requirements and "nice to haves". When they talk about "synching to the video", they're not talking about it's being easier to line the audio up with the video because they picked a clock that "fits easily" with the video frame rate. What they're talking about is using some sort of even multiples or sub-multiples of the same master clock for both, which means that they don't have to generate two different clocks, which then means that they don't have to worry about the two clocks drifting in relation to each other. (Modern clocks are accurate enough that this isn't a big issue today, but it was back then.) we had a situation where Sony and Philips were pushing hard on the 44.1kHz Compact Disc standards and the pro and film markets were happy with a slightly higher sample rate of 48kHz. It is widely rumored that the Compact Disc 44.1kHz standard evolved in order to allow a double album’s worth of music to be placed on the small silver disc. One story even suggesting the head of Sony demanded Beethoven’s entire 9th symphony fit onto the small disc (about the same length as a double album). Others debunk both stories as absurd since all the engineers would have to do to fit this much data with 48kHz is make the CD larger – about the size of a 45 rpm vinyl disc – and then the Sony marketing people wanting to have no relationship in size, color or look of anything vinyl making the decision. On the pro and film side the now common place 48kHz sample rate, a defacto “standard”, appeared on a growing number of pro-side tools and equipment and used without a lot of question. Popular lore had it that the film industry used (and still uses as the DVD standard) 48kHz to “synch” to the standard film rate of 24fps (frames per second), but as I think about this I cannot even envision how this would matter at all – being just a convenient doubling of 24. Synchronizing the audio to the video is essential, but the relationships between 24fps and 48kHz doesn’t seem to actually have any merit – other than that’s what everyone does. So, in the end, we wind up with two very similar yet different primary sample rates, 44/1kHz and 48kHz. From these two numbers come all other PCM sample rates and that, my friends, is why we have 6 types of sample rates on DACS today. Three would be just fine, but because of the double standards of 44.1 and 48, we have 6. Go figure
|
|