Why CDs May Acutally Sound Better Than Vinyl

[waveheavy]

I had just the opposite experience when CD's came out. They really didn't have the higher bit rates yet, the technology just wasn't there yet. The highs actually hurt my ears, they were too crisp and sounded like noise to my ears.

I still prefer analog to digital today. One engineer explained it this way: with analog, the highs are not as well defined, but the lows and mid range are well defined. With digital, the highs are well defined, but the mids are less defined. Folks who had been missing the clarity of the high end simply fell in love with digital; they had something new they'd been missing.

[mojobone]

I had just the opposite experience when CD's came out. They really didn't have the higher bit rates yet, the technology just wasn't there yet. The highs actually hurt my ears, they were too crisp and sounded like noise to my ears.

I still prefer analog to digital today. One engineer explained it this way: with analog, the highs are not as well defined, but the lows and mid range are well defined. With digital, the highs are well defined, but the mids are less defined. Folks who had been missing the clarity of the high end simply fell in love with digital; they had something new they'd been missing.

Your 'engineer' is misinformed. I could write a book about why, but simply put, digital is the superior format.

[Len911]

Ideally, with perfect analog and perfect digital, there wouldn't be a difference.
https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/digital-myth

Reel-to-reel tape is the new vinyl https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/5/9409 ... udio-trend

And then there's the debate of which tape brand.

Most all digital begins with an analog source, however theoretically, although almost entirely unlikely,lol, you could program, just by working with the header and format of a wav or aif, the binary with 16 bit using 32,767 amplitude levels each side of the zero axis, both positive and negative, and 44,100 of those samples a second, and produce or reproduce any sound or musical piece known to man with a level of perfection almost not known, lol! All just by editing your binary numbers. See "hex editor"!

That's kinda why synthesizers sound synthy, to make a complex waveform complex enough to mimic an actual instrument you need more complexity than anyone has the time to produce. However maybe that's the future of "sampling", to develop an algorithm to analyze the binary and organize patterns of a large number of files of specific instruments and make a model of an instrument based on those analysis? Maybe that's the basis of a lot of emulation software, I don't know.

Analog is always the source or inspiration, there isn't a digital without an analog, just like there isn't a song without there first being an idea. Digital isn't a sound, it's an implementation, and of course the same can be said of analog. But to be fair, if we are going to compare analog to digital today, you would probably want the best to compare of each offering, so it would likely be one of those really expensive a/d converters from Weiss, Lavry, Prism ?? and a really expensive modern tape machine, I don't know any,lol, not that they don't exist.

[waveheavy]

Tape recorders (Studer, etc.) are still available in major studios today. It just depends on who wants to use it. I still have my TASCAM 38 8 track recorder, and it still works, and the heads are still like new.

I would love to have Prism converters, or Lavry. I'd settle for an SSL board over that though.

[shoodBworkin]

Back in the day I A/Bd Edwin Starr's "War" on CD & Vinyl and found the vinyl to sound much better. In comparison the CD sounded thin and brittle. I read an article about Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, who were so disgusted with the sound of vinyl nowadays they went out and spent something like a hundred grand on their own lathe, now they cut their own masters. Said nowadays most houses just cut the vinyl from the digital files to save money. Uncool. Here's the article if you can access it:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-vinyls ... 1500721202

[mojobone]

This is why nonprofessionals shouldn't do comparison tests; one record can't tell the whole story. An acetate, straight off the cutting lathe can sound virtually indistinguishable from a 30 IPS master tape, but a commercially reproduced vinyl disc is at least two generations down and some amount of signal is lost with each generation as you make the stampers. For this reason and about half a dozen others, vinyl is never gonna be a more accurate representation of the artist's music/vision than any CD.

The reason the CD sounds 'worse' in your particular case is that when vinyl was the final consumer format, mastering engineers anticipated generation loss and lifted (pre-emphasized) the trebles. When the transfer was made from the vinyl masters to CD, many record labels didn't bother to make any adjustments; in some cases, they didn't even bother to decode masters that had various flavors of Dolby noise reduction, which also included a ton of pre-emphasis. See at that point, collectors were replacing all their vinyl, re-buying titles they owned and maybe not even listening to the new versions right away, and later being really disappointed in the new 'better' format. For many companies the new digital format was just a big money grab, when it should have been an amazing ear-opening experience, hearing the music in all its glory revealed for the first time ever, and for many of us it was, but if you were buying catalog...you had to be careful.

[ochaim]

+1 Mojo

[funsongs]

FWIW: I clearly remember the time walking onto a construction site (of a home I had designed) and a worker's truck - equipped with huge stereo & CD gear -
was blasting out Madonna's "Live To Tell" - the pristine sound of those drums/hi-hats/cymbals/electric guitars, was some of the coolest ear-candy I'd heard from recorded music up to that time. This You Tube link doesn't really do it justice

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzAO9A9GjgI

wish there was a clearer example.
It's amazing that today, the listening experience is nearly comparable via a tiny set of earbuds.
I guess chalk it up to progress; eh?

[mojobone]

Regarding the vinyl you can buy today, an old-school vinyl mastering engineer of my acquaintance says there are only four lathes in the US that are even capable of cutting to a professional standard; two are in Nashville, a fifth is in Berlin, so if you buy vinyl at a show, make sure it comes with a high-res digital download. If you need to cut vinyl, go see the guys at Welcome to 1979; Third Man records has one, but it's not for hire.

[mojobone]

FWIW: I clearly remember the time walking onto a construction site (of a home I had designed) and a worker's truck - equipped with huge stereo & CD gear -
was blasting out Madonna's "Live To Tell" - the pristine sound of those drums/hi-hats/cymbals/electric guitars, was some of the coolest ear-candy I'd heard from recorded music up to that time. This You Tube link doesn't really do it justice

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzAO9A9GjgI

wish there was a clearer example.
It's amazing that today, the listening experience is nearly comparable via a tiny set of earbuds.
I guess chalk it up to progress; eh?

Chalk it up to she hired the best mixers and engineers in the business. Those records are very much 'of their time', but they still sound amazing. Everyone should have a copy of "The Immaculate Collection" as a baseline to test their speakers.