[Closed] Digital or Vinyl?

Totally disagree that decent reproduction has nothing to do with good music. Clearly the two aren't mutually exclusive. For me the medium is less important than having a decent hi-fi, and having a decent hi-fi is less important than having a decent music collection. It's still nice though, and does add to my enjoyment of the music.

As I said convenience for me everytime, but I thought this was interesting.

Been reading this thread with interest, as someone who knows a fair bit about the subject I can categorically say this thread is worse than a rigid Vs FS thread, or a what tyres for thread in terms of subjectivity. You are all (with possible exception of one or two people) ignoring the science behind the whole situation.

Vinyl is a compressionless format, hence the reason it's still loved by audiophiles. In pure sound quality terms, there is nothing commercially available that can touch vinyl with a pristine copy of a well produced track, on a mega expensive turntable playing through top end Hifi amp and speakers (or Studio reference monitors). The sound will have depth and clarity that can easily get lost with many digital formats.

However... Vinyl is a PITA (I know, I've got probably 2000 records or more taking up tonnes of space in my Dad's garage), it is fragile, it gets damaged easily, it's bulky, it weighs a lot, and whilst it does usually come with some very pretty album sleeve that makes the ownership experience a lot nicer, it has too many detractors for most consumers these days.

Now the issue with "digital" music is a little less clear cut. To most people these days, "digital" means 128kbps MP3 files, listened to on an mp3 player, or a cheap home stereo setup. Forgetting the convenience factor for a second, one of the plus points of MP3's for most people is the fact that as it is a digital file, it isn't fallible to any analogue noise distortion (such as tape hiss or clicks and pops on a worn vinyl). Now combine that with the equipment most people use to listen to their chosen media being of such low quality you wouldn't be able to discern between any musical sources when played through the same speakers, and you have the situation for most people where MP3's inherent negative points (significant drop in quality Vs an original recording, heavy amounts of compression etc.) aren't an issue. Over a £20 set of computer speakers, I'd defy almost anyone to tell the difference between a vinyl record, a CD or an MP3 being played through them, I'd certainly struggle!

Obviously, once you move onto better equipment, the differences become apparent straight away... The best way to describe an MP3 is an "approximation" of the original recording, as even at 320kbps the MP3 loses a lot of information in the pursuit of file size reduction. You are at best listening to something that sounds very much like the original, but not quite as good quality, a bit like when you photocopy something. It is to all intents and purposes, good enough for most people most of the time, but it's not an original.

Moving away from digital meaning MP3's for a moment, as not forgetting that CD's are indeed digital, as are many other audio formats. I'm still a great lover of the CD myself, as despite it not being as convenient as MP3's, it does offer many benefits in terms of audio quality, the fact it's still something you can own physically, and the fact that these days they're pretty cheap to buy. I firmly believe that despite the format being almost 30 years old now, if it was invented today, many people would be going crazy about it as it offers such (relatively) great performance, without being as large and impractical as vinyl. As a DJ, I can't bring myself to move over to DJing on my laptop at all cos I still love CD's, and in particular here for me as someone with a very visual memory, the album art makes a big difference still when you're sifting through your music collection in a DJ booth trying to find a particular track.

CD's aren't without their faults obviously, and they're not totally compressionless so their sound will never be quite as rich and warm as a well recorded vinyl is, but it's a lot better than MP3's are.

Now... The biggest issue we face today when it comes to music formats making an impact on the way we listen to things is something called the "loudness war".

The people who produce popular music these days have succumbed to the loudness war, as when you are listening to music on cheap equipment, "louder" usually gets mistaken for "better". So if you're Simon Cowell, and you want your latest piece of manufactured tripe to sound better on the radio (broadcast at a max of 96kbps usually!) than the competition, you get your studio engineers to make the final mix as loud as possible, with as little dynamics as possible. This makes for terrible quality recordings for anyone wanting to listen to a good quality recording (vinyl or CD) on a decent Hifi system. Basically, the likes of Cowell and co are making music to sound good on MP3 players, and that is it!

OK, you often (if you still buy a CD) get the full length version of any tracks, which will usually be much less heavily compressed and more dynamic, but most people only listen to music that has no dynamics to speak of, and is just very loud! It is IMO an unspeakable crime, and is responsible for the way people buy music these days. I was lucky enough the other week to meet the Editors of Sound On Sound Magazine, and had a Q&A session with them. When I asked about the whole loudness war thing, predictably their view on it was not favourable...

Anyway... In short... If you've got the equipment, and the space to listen to it, and the well produced and recorded music on a pristine condition vinyl record, vinyl will always return the best results sonically. If you've not got that, CD comes a close second place in terms of delivering the quality, but of course for most people MP3's win out because of the significant convenience they bring, and the fact on most people's speakers/stereos/MP3 players you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between sources anyway.

FWIW, much as I hate what MP3's have done to the music we buy, mostly the music I listen to is on MP3 these days as it's just so much more convenient! Good music is good music, whatever the format it is played on, but good music can sound great if it's on the right format, in the right environment with the right equipment... 😳

(This was the short "non techy" version of my answer by the way!) 😉

seosamh77

That's interesting you post that video, a couple of months ago I had to write an essay on the differences in quality between various different digital formats, and their frequency responses, and used a similar spectrum analyser to do so.

The human ear can't hear anything above 20KHz, and due to [url= http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem ]Nyquists Theorem[/url] we need to sample at twice the rate of the highest frequency we want to hear or greater, which dictated the 44.1KHz frequency that CD's are recorded at.

For an extreme example where getting away with a massive reduction in sample rate still works ok, look at a common household telephone. They generally sample at a max of 4KHz, cos most human voices don't produce any frequencies above 2Khz...

CD for me or these days CD ripped losslessly to FLAC and played through a little media streamer which gets really close to my Cyrus CD player and beats it hands down on convenience.

I have a Linn LP12 and lots of vinyl which can get close to CD but there's always the clicking in quiet passages and the getting up to swap sides every 15-20 mins and I find digital bass deeper and cleaner than analogue.

I play compressed files on my phone but no way would I pay for compressed music

In pure sound quality terms, there is nothing commercially available that can touch vinyl with a pristine copy of a well produced track, on a mega expensive turntable playing through top end Hifi amp and speakers (or Studio reference monitors).

I've listened to the same music (Radiohead King of Limbs) on family car priced sources and couldn't say which was better. The design engineer I was with at the time felt the comparison was pointless, since the mastering process was different for both formats 😆

Mboy, thank you for putting up a far better post than the one I had intended to write. One thing about vinyl, though; while it's not in itself a compressed format, the stereo master tape used to cut the metal stampers is nearly always EQ'd, the dynamic range effectively reduced or compressed to avoid a number of problems like high frequencies causing 'ringing' and making the cutting head on the mastering lathe overheat, and also to try to avoid large transients running into the adjacent groove causing jumping.
12" singles never had this problem, so they always sound better. Quality of the stereo master makes a big difference; I have vinyl like [i]Love Over Gold[/i] or [i]Hearts And Bones[/i], where, if you look on the run-out groove there's the word 'Masterdisc', usually mastered by [i]the[/i] Master, Bob Ludwig. I have others, where it says Masterdisc on one side, but Stirling or something else on the other. That means that the metalwork had been damaged, and someone in the UK, like Stirling Sound have been sent a copy of the safety master to cut new metal. Already the sound is compromised, EQ'd to start with, then a copy tape of a copy tape used to produce the vinyl. This is largely why early CD's sounded poor, they were mastered from studio stereo masters EQ'd for vinyl, instead of a new stereo master EQ'd for the greater dynamic range of CD.
FWIW, I now tend to listen to music either on my iPod Classic through Shure SE215, UE TripleFi 10 Studio or M-Electronics M6P canalphones, and the music is ripped at 320Kb. At home I listen using the same files played from my Mac Mini through my Yamaha A/V amp via fibre optic TOSLink. I'm perfectly happy with what I'm hearing, and I do listen to albums from beginning to end, often letting the music segue from one album to the next by a particular artist. On the pod it's always on shuffle, my perfect personal radio station;12000 tracks randomly played is always causing surprises.
I would recommend to everyone here the book [i‘Perfecting Sound Forever. The Story Of Recorded Music[/i], by Greg Milner, a brilliant, and very informative book.
BTW, most of what I've written was picked from this book, and [i]Hi-Fi News and Record Reviews[/i], back when I used to sell HiFi, and Ken Kessler's editorials about recording quality have stuck with me ever since.

You are all (with possible exception of one or two people) ignoring the science behind the whole situation.

The question was "which do you prefer?" not "which is better?" - just saying.

The design engineer I was with the time felt the comparison was pointless, since the mastering process was different for both formats

Fair point, all things being equal though and the mastering processes being the same... CD is still capable of stunning results after all, it is still subject to the limitations of a 16bit/44.1KHz format though. You have to be more than a slight bit anal (as you'll know) to be able to appreciate anything beyond that level of quality, and maybe some certain music styles lend themselves better to higher quality recordings than others, but certainly I have in the past when producing my own music, listened to a 24bit/48KHz digital recording (the highest quality I can achieve on my software), and then listened to the same recording but recorded at 16bit/44.1KHz. The difference was absolutely miniscule, but as you might expect upping the bit depth from 16 to 24, volume changes were very slightly smoother throughout the recording. Nothing like the difference going from 8bit to 16bit of course, but you could just tell a very slight improvement.

And as vinyl isn't subject to bit depth, or frequency response, vinyl ultimately will win out, given the right recording, equipment and environment...

So there Mr "I make Hifi's for a living me" Penny... 😉 hehehe 😛

DezB - Linn LP12's you have to take the turntable off, fit another gear, and replace turntable before it goes at the correct speed for 33/45rpm. Some of the newer one's or as an upgrade you can get little PS boxes which cost a lot to do it for you.

Don't know what that deck pictured was, look similar to some Michell products I used to look through the window of a hi-fi shop in York back in the 80's.

Fair point, all things being equal though and the mastering processes being the same...

Well, in the example I gave you both sources cost about £15k. How much do you have to spend for vinyl to demonstrate this superiority? You know there are a few parameters where CD is technically superior to vinyl, no? Still, not many of these technical details are what finally convince people of the suitability of a format, as this thread proves!

the operating frequency range of a CD is wider than the human ear can detect (both directions) and remember that you lose the ability to hear the top frequencies as you get older

the signal to noise ratio on CD is significantly better and the hippies excuse about it sounding cold is just the lack of the background noise, the sound of accuracy

How much do you have to spend for vinyl to demonstrate this superiority?

All said tongue in cheek of course, but being serious now, I think when you're comparing sources on proper Hifi equipment rather than studio reference kit, the Hifi kit adds in its own colouration to the sound which is going to add or detract (depends on your point of view) to the original source that you are comparing. The whole point of a good Hifi is that it flatters any recording, making it sound as good as it possibly can, whereas good studio equipment kinda does the opposite. It's designed to make the original recording sound as accurate and revealing as possible, showing up any flaws in the recording.

So how much do you need to spend? Well I'd say that with Hifi kit, the more you spend, the less you're going to be able to tell the difference in the source equipment most probably, it will all sound incredible past a certain price point!

You know there are a few parameters where CD is technically superior to vinyl, no?

Completely. I love vinyl, but as I said it's a big PITA. CD's are brilliant, and like I said I think even if it was invented today we'd still be raving about how good a format it is. But if it was the ultimate evolution of the species so to speak, they'd never have tried to surpass it with inventions like SACD and DVD Audio would they... ANY digital format is subject to limitations imposed by sample rate and bit depth, which an analogue source quite simply isn't. Digital audio formats don't suffer from analogue sound colouration though (tape hiss, pops and clicks on vinyl etc.) which is of course where it's vastly superior, but that can make it (to some people's ears) sound sterile which is where the "warmth" of vinyl is often romanticised about by the vinylista's...

But then you know all this already, so really all we're doing is educating the others on this thread! 😉

I think the point about the mastering process etc is very valid. I have CD's that quite frankly sound appalling, even more so when played on a decent bit of kit (like my Uniti). I point directly at Californication by RHCP, i mean whoever mastered that CD had earmuffs on, it clips, it has insanely bad volume changes and then the actual music itself is sh1t too. But anyway, all very interesting. I do enjoy a nice listen to something well recorded.

I think the point about the mastering process etc is very valid.

I have both the CD and vinyl of The Arcade Fire's latest album - the CD was clearly mastered by someone who thinks louder = better, the LP was clearly mastered by someone who understands dynamic range and clipping. I am beginning to wonder whether or not modern CDs tend to sound horrible is because they're mastered for the iPod generation, not a decent HiFi.

Music quality aside, that's why R1 sounds horribly compressed and R3 does not - R1 is designed for listening to in the car, R3 for relaxing with a port and cigar!

Jeez, you bores. If it's rock music, loudness is better!

Mboy...you say cds are compressed....how so?

You also mention distortion on vinyl...you mean noise?

While I couldn't care less what you use to listen to music, the idea that because I use mp3 I'm not listening properly is insulting and snobbish

While I couldn't care less what you use to listen to music, the idea that because I use mp3 I'm not listening properly is insulting and snobbish

It's neither insulting nor snobbish. Your previous argument however:

emsz - Member
I love the idea that you can't do a proper listening experience unless it's vinyl. Lol that's such crap.

was both naive and inaccurate.

By listening to an MP3, you're only listening to a fraction of the sound that was produced by the artist. Ergo, you're not listening properly. Though as has been discussed, the only real way to listen to music is live, but as much as I'd like to have The Arcade Fire in my living room, I think they'd get in the way a bit after a while....

Oh, and er, wunundred!

god this thread has turned out even more ****y than I expected.

By listening to an MP3, you're only listening to a fraction of the sound that was produced by the artist. Ergo, you're not listening [s]properly.[/s] [i]to all of the sound produced by the artist[/i]. Though as has been discussed, [s]the only real way to listen to music[/s] [i]the only way to listen to all of the sound produced by the artist[/i] is live, but as much as I'd like to have The Arcade Fire in my living room, I think they'd get in the way a bit after a while....

Fix that for you. To say anything more than that is snobbish.
Is-ought, Hume and all that.

[i]the only way to listen to all of the sound produced by the artist is live[/i]

I must say that is pretty clueless. Live the artist plays the songs in a live format.
When they record them, they sit in a studio, usually with a producer and tweak the songs into a recorded format. So the only way to listen "the sound produced by the artist" (more ****), is to sit in the studio while they listen to the final recordings on the monitors.
ie. you can't.

Fix that for you.

Well scuzz, you didn't fix it at all, you broke it.

You can watch a film whilst arguing on STW, but you're not watching it properly unless you give it your full attention on a decent sized screen, or preferably at the cinema. That's not snobbish, that's common sense.

I must say that is pretty clueless.

To use the vernacular that this thread seems to have degenerated into: bollocks. LOL

Proper: [url= http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/proper ]to suit.[/url]
Sitting in a dark room with your DACs, Quads and KEF references is wonderful. It is not the only way to listen to (or enjoy) music. While it's horrible listening to low-bitrate, loudness-war'd to hell modern tracks on laptop speakers with onboard sound, it is suitable for a LOT of situations.

While I agree that people who haven't heared what music CAN sound like may be missing out, I wouldn't go so far as to say they aren't doing it 'properly'. MP3s suit their needs, and as such are 'proper'.
Some people genuinely don't care and are just enjoying listening to their music.

How come people on here don't get so excited over the comparison between digital and analogue watches?

Personally I don't think you're [i]really[/i] telling the time unless you've got an analogue watch.

You're not [i]really[/i] reading unless it's carved on slate.

But we can all agree on one thing:

You aren't really riding, unless you're on a mountain bike.

Ah yes, at least we can all agree on that eh?

😆

Mboy...you say cds are compressed....how so?
You also mention distortion on vinyl...you mean noise?

Ok, technically they aren't... It was just easier to write that than go into how and and why the 16bit depth and 44.1KHz sample rate they are recorded at, can miss out information that might otherwise be captured on an analogue source, and how slight volume step changes may occur in differences in quantisation levels within the digital recording. CD is not compressed as such, it just misses out some of the recording in the first place (the parts we can't hear anyway, but they can still affect dynamics), and introduces 65536 levels of different volume compared to analogue where there are no volume steps.

As for vinyl, yes I meant noise, slip of the tongue.

A completely subjective view: I prefer vinyl for playing music for other people, but digital for listening to music.

I used to DJ and whilst I can play with CD and MP3 decks, I just prefer vinyl. It feels more interactive and there's just something about the way that a record slips out of the sleeve, about the way that you need to give it a gentle brush to get rid of fluff, the cueing up.

Happy memories.

When it comes down to it though, MP3s are easier. You can fit a lifetime's supply of music on a laptop, and not have to worry about carrying a hernia-inducing record bag up an escalator on the way to some club.

I really should get round to ripping all my vinyl, but it just seems a bit wrong. I just can't bring myself to buy decks again though.

But we can all agree on one thing:

You aren't really riding, unless you're on a mountain bike.

Rigid fixie 29er, presumably?

I really should get round to ripping all my vinyl

It took me six months just to listen to all the music on my iPod.

Even listening just once to every piece of vinyl I own, never mind ripping it, would take much longer. And I'm sure some of it wouldn't be as good as I remember.

nothing comes close to physically dropping vinyl into a mix.

when i've saved some pennies, i'm splashing out on some decks and serato gear.

used to own Final Scratch + 1210's years ago... no idea why i sold it all!

out of interest, how many of the people on here who prefer the [b]sound[/b] of vinyl (just sound, [b]not[/b] the experience) are DJs or ex-DJs?

yes.

Ripping is way quicker than listening.

Ripping is way quicker than listening.

To rip vinyl you've got to actually play it to record it and get it in the digital domain. Ripping therefore takes at least as long as listening. I suppose you could play a 33 at 45 and then slow it down again once ripped 😉

Not when you have vinyl. Not unless I want to run everything at 45rpm and then slow it down in software.

I remember, back when I was actually trying to make my own Hard House tracks, just how much time I was spending sat in front of my computer with the sampler software. I'd sit down, play with a few samples, mix in some effects, have a listen, then it would be midnight. Time would magically go.

That's probably the reason that I can't bring myself to start all that again. I can't handle late nights as well as I used to these days.

As for the sound of vinyl, I'm not sure. MP3s and CDs are clean, so the sound of the music hits your ears pretty much as it left the instruments. Vinyl has those little extra bits, the slight crackle, the odd pop, maybe a background hiss. it's that little bit of imperfection that sets it apart. Live music vs. studio sort of thing.

Anybody enjoy the first few seconds of crackle on a vinyl mix?

Ah - I'd missed my coffee, thought the discussion was re. cds...