Vinyl, LPs, Turntables Oh Boy! Listening to analog is joy!

[Notes_Norton]

Vinyl, LPs, Turntables Oh Boy! Listening to analog is joy!

It's been a long time. My old turntable broke wellover a year ago, and I finally decided to get a new one. I didn't get top-of-the-line, a Music Hall USB-1 for about $200 by the advice of a sales rep at Crutchfield.

I know there are different kinds of distortion with digital and analog vinyl. Is one better than the other? Depends on what kind of distortion you want. Both color the sound differently and neither one sounds like a good Tascam, Studer or Ampex studio machine.

So I pulled a random LP out of the pile which happened to be "The Baddest Turrentine" by the great tenor sax player, Stanley Turrentine with an all-star cast of the finest jazz men of the 1970s. I have this on CD as well.

As soon as the needle dropped, I was in ecstasy. BIG, FAT, WARM sax tones, round acoustic Ron Carter bass sound, mellow George Benson jazz guitar and so on for all the other great musicians.

I don't care what anybody says, I like analog better.

But I'll probably still listen to the CD more often, because of convenience.

Insights and incites by Notes

 

 

[Kurre]

Vinyl have a slightly different timbre than digital.

My guess is, it have to do with overtones that is filtered out of the digital music.

Vinyl just sounds "more".

[Notes_Norton]

I read an article in a trade mag from one of the guys on the team that invented the CD. He said the CD adds high harmonics to the sounds.

That's why Stan Gets and Stanley Turrentine sound like themselves on LP and edgier on CD.

I'm not saying analog is better. Two different kinds of distortion. It depends on which one you want to listen to.

For a symphony, I'll choose CD, for serious saxophone listening I'll choose LP.

Notes

[Starise]

I always liked the sound of LPs. I have an old turntable in my attic. I'm pretty sure the belts on it melted because of the heat up there. Could probably be revived. My plan was to get it working again or get another turntable. There was a window or opportunity where vinyl was cheap and accessible. That window might be narrowing. In some places you might stumble across  great deals on good records. If you already had an old record pile laying around I guess you are ahead of the game. Playing records takes a little bit of know how concerning what can happen if you use the wrong needle, to know which rig to get to have the best sound within a given budget. Those cheap little players you see at large stores probably aren't a very good listening experience.

To me CDs still are pretty good. A lot of the upper harmonics can likely be EQd away. I was looking at the Bose systems and ended up buying  this KEiiD to put in my kitchen. Close to Bose in sound. 

Don't laugh until you hear it , it's a Volkswagon head unit modified to use a remote and fitted with speakers.  If and when I get my turntable working I plan to plug it into this. 

 

[craigb]

I'm going to guess that another contributing factor is that it was recorded with far more headroom than most CD's.

I, for one, do NOT miss all the clicks, pops and annoyingly short album sides.

[Kurre]

Hmm...that click and pop argument is very common wording people use to fend off old ways of listening to music.

I don't get it.

WTF are people doing with their vinyl. Only way for me to hear that is if i have a scratched vinyl. And no, it doesn't scratch easy.

[Starise]

Dust is the enemy here. They make record cleaner. Years ago when I listened to records I never cleaned them....and yeah, I would get those pops and clicks. Pretty common actually to get them here and there. I admit to not taking very good care of my records back then.

[Wibbles]

No matter how hard I tried to look after my vinyl ...

[RBH]

I listened to AJA awhile back on Vinyl . No question that the record album mix is THE essential reference to the correct levels , dynamics and equalization. I listened to several other albums from around the same period as well. It's not about the fidelity or sonic purity  or anything else - it just that the medium is how the producer engineers and artist initially intended the output to be, and that's the best it can be IMHO.

[Wibbles]

1 hour ago, pwalpwal said:

Bigger cover art

Better for skinning-up on.  

[craigb]

Vinyl LP's go flat with repeated play.  I was a DJ for four years from 1980 thru 1983 and we were always looking across the edge.  If it was dull and grey, into the trash it went.  If it was black and shiny, we kept playing it.  Anyone caught being an idiot back then and "scratching" an album would be fired.

I had at least a couple thousand albums when CD's came out.  I tried a couple on my really nice stereo system and the sound was SOOOO much better that I sold my albums immediately and began replacing my collection (starting with "Best Of's" then filling in the rest).

[Kurre]

11 minutes ago, craigb said:

Vinyl LP's go flat with repeated play.  I was a DJ for four years from 1980 thru 1983 and we were always looking across the edge.  If it was dull and grey, into the trash it went.  If it was black and shiny, we kept playing it.  Anyone caught being an idiot back then and "scratching" an album would be fired.

I had at least a couple thousand albums when CD's came out.  I tried a couple on my really nice stereo system and the sound was SOOOO much better that I sold my albums immediately and began replacing my collection (starting with "Best Of's" then filling in the rest).

Ok, you win.

Obviously i have an inbuilt filter in my head that removes all bad things.

I shall go and enjoy my Led Zeppelin II (first edition) on vinyl now.

[Notes_Norton]

Yes I know vinyl degrades, and no matter how well you look after them, there are often a few pops and clicks.

So which distortion do I want. Surface noise or tinny tone? It's picking the lesser of the two evils.

I wore out a couple of "Focus" by Stan Getz LPs, bought it on CD, and it's not the same. Edgier tone, harsher, just the wrong mood entirely.

I listen to it on CD. I have others that I bought or recorded myself from LP to CD and listen there when casually listening, that makes the LPs last longer. When it's time for serious listening, sometimes the LP is best. It depends on the music.

If it's a symphony orchestra, I'll usually go for the CD. The harmonics don't seem to bother me on violins as much. Perhaps because I don't play violin so I'm not as intimate with the tone as I am with saxophone and a few other instruments.

After listening to a lot of sax and vocal jazz albums on CD for a couple of years, the difference in sound is in my face (or ears) and I'm loving it. Since I took care of the LPs and on all but the oldest, I've always used a good light tracking tone arm there aren't any scratches. High humidity in Florida minimizes any static.

It's too bad higher bit-rate SACD or other formats didn't take off. A SACD played on my DVD/Blu-Ray player have much better tone.

Insights and incites by Notes

[Wibbles]

Many people feel a bit of hiss and crackle can give music more of a vibe. Hip Hop sample packs quite often have loops of vinyl hiss and crackle to add a bit of dirt back into otherwise over-clean beats,

The real test would be a random double blind test of a pristine vinyl version and a well-mastered CD version of the same album.

If you are interested in a bit of light reading, there are some articles here on vinyl and CD comparisons and in the differences in the way they are often mastered: https://productionadvice.co.uk/?s=vinyl

 

[Notes_Norton]

Thanks. Interesting article.

Of course any demos on the Internet aren't valid because the Internet is both digital and the audio on the Internet videos is compressed.

I did a single blind with my wife, who is also a musician. I didn't tell her which one was playing and I muted the first note so the needle dropping on the groove wouldn't be heard.

I did this with two commercial releases, "Focus" by Stan Getz and "The Baddest Turrentine" by Stanley Turrentine.

The difference is obvious and she preferred the recordings.

Now that is with saxophone, my primary instrument.

On the Getz album strings accompany the sax, and there isn't a great difference in the sound of the strings.

The Turrentine album you could hear the difference even in Ron Carter's bass as well as the entire sound of the jazz group.

Now I don't know how well-mastered the commercial releases are, but Verve and CTI are good labels who's owners care about music, so I assume they are at least good quality mastering, probably taken from the original analog masters and recorded to CD.

Notes

 

[craigb]

How about ripping the new album?  Then you get a digital version that you won't wear out.

[Wibbles]

7 hours ago, Notes_Norton said:

I didn't tell her which one was playing and I muted the first note so the needle dropping on the groove wouldn't be heard.

How do you know you didn't tell her? Not all communication is verbal. That's why we have double-blind testing (sorry, I was a statistician in my past*). But I'm not disputing your findings, though. 

It's a very long time since I've listened to any vinyl. My CDs rarely get an outing these days either. Most of my listening is of MP3 files and youtube videos on my computer, through a cheap pair of headphones.

I really enjoy those occasions when I do listen to CDs through my hi-fi. It's good to get a bit of air moving. But due to just single brick walls between my neighbours on either side and I, those occasions are ( in the interests of fostering cordial relations) kept to a minimum.

I still have not met Jumbly Grindrod though.

 

[Notes_Norton]

8 hours ago, craigb said:

How about ripping the new album?  Then you get a digital version that you won't wear out.

I rip all my albums that I want to listen to often, unless I can buy a factory produced copy. That way I have the choice of convenience or sound. I play digital more often, it's convenient, and it saves my LPs. I put the LPs on when I want more serious listening, especially for my favorite sax players and vocalists.

-------------------------------------

Wibbles, I understand what you are saying. There is no way to do a double blind test. The person playing the CD and the LP needs to know.  

BTW, she sat with her back to me, and I didn't say a word, but I admit, we do have a mental connection. However the difference on sax tone is so obvious, no one needs to be cued.

Perhaps the reason why I'm so sensitive to vocals and saxophones is because they are my primary instruments, and I work on the nuances of those tones and have done so all my life (so far).

Or else, some instruments take the digital treatment better than others.

This is not an analog is always better post.

Again it's a matter of which distortion do I want to listen to:
CDs add high frequency harmonics that weren't present in tone of the instrument
LPs add surface noise and suppression of some harmonics

For symphonies I prefer CDs, for serious Jazz and Pop music I like LPs, and for non-serious, chewing-gum for the ears music a good mp3 is fine.

The biggest difference is in the tone of Stan Getz and Paul Desmond. I've heard both these sax players in person and on LP their tone is instantly recognizable. On CD it's still recognizable, but with an added edge that was not present when I heard them live. BTW, we "opened" for the Dave Brubeck Quartet when I was a young man on a Jerry Lewis Telethon. We played during the commercial break and didn't get on TV. Paul Desmond was very kind and encouraging to the young rock and roll sax player. A true gentleman.

But that's besides the point. On CD Stan Getz sounds more like Zoot Sims.

Insights and incites by Notes

 

 

[craigb]

Although almost on-topic, this is a bit of a side-nerd-journey...

When computers first started having color the most popular was 8-bit (256 colors), then the resolution kept increasing (32-bit being most common now, but 48-bit is available) and, therefore, the number of colors that could be represented became more and more. 

The next limitation was the pathetic resolution of the monitors.  Since they originally adopted the television NTSC standard of 640 x 480 (where 480i, for interlace, or 480p, for progressive, came from), everything looked blocky.  The PAL standard, common in Europe, was 625 lines instead of 480, but not much better.  Side note, both actually produced the same TV image because power frequency needed to be taken into account to produce a correctly managed frame (50 Hz vs. 60 Hz).  For decades, computer users were stuck having to buy stupidly expensive "monitors" because TV's were stuck with the lower resolution.  When TV's finally became "high-def," their resolution started to catch up and pass most monitors (1920 x 1080 for HD TV's versus 1600 x 1200 for monitors).  Now, the bleeding edge for TV's has hit what they call "16k" (with a bunch of stupid names after it like "Quad Ultra High Definition").  This equates to 15,360 horizontal pixels by 8,640 vertical pixels.

Now, while the human eye can purportedly see about 7 million colors, even 24-bit can create over twice that (16,777,215 colors).  There's also a big debate whether humans can really tell the difference between "normal" sized 4k TV's and 8k let alone 16k (i.e., 80" or less - not Samsung's 292" monster)!

Unlike visual information, it seems like we've stopped trying to go beyond human limits with sound.  Obviously, the resolution and sampling rate are what controls just how much of the recorded source makes it into a digital medium.  While there was a push starting all the way back in the 80's to improve the sound (24-bit with 96k or even 192k sampling rates), it seems like we're going backwards.  Now most people (including me) tend to listen to .mp3's that have had areas of the sound removed to  save disk space (but that's gotten soooo much cheaper now...).  I've also observed that most people listen on devices that are nowhere near the "hi-fidelity" gear we used to use.

The part I think is funny is when people say vinyl sounds better.  Sure, it's all subjective (and I think how we heard things when we were young definitely colors what we like now) but, for the past couple of decades, almost all vinyl LP's have been made from the same master that the CD's are created from.  I think the issue is that CD's have both better sound in some areas AND worse in others.  We lose the headroom that vinyl provides, but we gain more frequencies and harmonics that can seem foreign to our ears.

So, what's my conclusion?  I think it's time to up the resolution of digital material AND master them differently so they more accurately represent the original sound.  Just because you can alter the original doesn't mean you should.

Side-note 1 - From my PhD work I know that humans actually CAN process frequencies much higher than the ever-publicized 20k Hz.  Experiments with frequencies up as high as 100k have shown increased learning and memory.  I have some devices capable of working with audio at this level (which came from studies originally used when trying to understand dolphins - lol).  I also know a couple of subjects who were able to play back songs much easier when heard with the higher frequencies included.  I'd love to play around with this area more someday, though I'm not sure how (I'm guessing most audio tools have no way of handling more than the usual range of frequencies - very curious!).

Side-note 2 - Here's an interesting site I just found that also says some of the above: Myths (Vinyl)

*Puts on fire-proof clothing and waits for the inevitable.*  ?

[Wibbles]

52 minutes ago, craigb said:

*Puts on fire-proof clothing and waits for the inevitable.*  ?

OK then. 

52 minutes ago, craigb said:

We lose the headroom that vinyl provides, but ...

Vinyl has a dynamic range of 70 db. CDs have a dynamic range of about 90 db. Or am I misunderstanding what you are saying?

I suspect there is a certain amount of bias confirmation from the vinyl sounds better brigade. That's not to say there aren't examples where it is true. And if all you've got are really shitty master tapes in the first place, ...