Vinyl versus CD

[spam]

Originally posted by picanin
Spam go compare an vinyl copy of an album playing against a DDD one and you will hear - unless tonedeaf - that the DDD copy sounds cold, flat and lifeless. CD's inferior sound quality in comparison to vinyl has been proven time and time again in listening tests using real ears! Scientific measurement will never be a good marker of sound quality. However with the new formats of SACD and DVD-A the sound quality is comparable with vinyl unlike CD. Over the next five years these formats will become standard and CD as we know it will die out.

Spam do yourself a favour and go into a hi-fi shop with a cheap £200 turntable and compare it to a decent Linn, Rega, Pro-jekt or Roksan and you will hear the difference in quality that a good turntable, arm and cartridge make. The amount of information that is retrieved from the grooves is amazing.

Picanin, technically there can be no comparison....purely from the different techniques used. A stylus is an electro mechanical device, therein lies its downfall, A good DDD CD will knock the spots off a vinyl reproduction particularly after a year or two's worth of playing.
Just be practical about it.....with CD's these days you get superb sound quality without having to spend a fortune on equipment, you get the low end frequency response without needing tons of power, and clarity is second to none....as I said elsewhere listen to something like Claptons Layla unplugged on DDD and then go listen to it on vinyl.......tthere is no comparison, the clarity of the CD is outstanding. I fail to see how you can say the sound of a CD is "cold" the frequency range is equal to the best turntables around (at a fraction of the cost) you do not have any of the inherent noise that a turntable generates, minor disc imperfections do not affect the record quality, CD's are immune to dust and minor scratchings.....lets face it, it if were an inferior quality then there would be no way the investment would have been made in the technology.

[picanin]

Originally posted by spam
Picanin, technically there can be no comparison....purely from the different techniques used. A stylus is an electro mechanical device, therein lies its downfall, A good DDD CD will knock the spots off a vinyl reproduction particularly after a year or two's worth of playing.
Just be practical about it.....with CD's these days you get superb sound quality without having to spend a fortune on equipment, you get the low end frequency response without needing tons of power, and clarity is second to none....as I said elsewhere listen to something like Claptons Layla unplugged on DDD and then go listen to it on vinyl.......tthere is no comparison, the clarity of the CD is outstanding. I fail to see how you can say the sound of a CD is "cold" the frequency range is equal to the best turntables around (at a fraction of the cost) you do not have any of the inherent noise that a turntable generates, minor disc imperfections do not affect the record quality, CD's are immune to dust and minor scratchings.....lets face it, it if were an inferior quality then there would be no way the investment would have been made in the technology.

Spam all that I can infer from the above is that you have never listened to decent quality vinyl on a decent turntable. Your argument flies in the face of opinions from people involved in the audiophile industry. Even people involved in making the most esoteric digital equipment - CD players and offboards DAC's costing thousands of pounds - strive to get the same quality and realism from their products which can be obtained via turntable.

Spam the reason why the market has seen so much investment is simple. Most people used inferior turntables to play back vinyl and so were not getting the quality. SA in particular had the worst quality vinyl in the world to make things worse. The music companies adopted D for its ease of use as well as for the greater profits that were to be made. It costs far less to produce CD than to press vinyl. A guy listening to music on a substandard turntable from companies like Kenwood, Teac, Pioneer etc would have thought that CD sounded better because he was using inferior equipment. As such he was an easy target for the marketting of CD. I do agree though that in order for you to hear decent sound from a turntable you do need to buy a decent deck. And nothing that comes from a Japanese company is up to the job. The best turntables in the world come primarily from UK, US and a few European companies. Spam if ever you are down this way I will organise a demo at my local dealers for you to hear exactly what can be achieved with vinyl. And maybe then you will also understand why the vinyl market is once again growing.

[spam]

Originally posted by picanin
Spam all that I can infer from the above is that you have never listened to decent quality vinyl on a decent turntable. Your argument flies in the face of opinions from people involved in the audiophile industry. Even people involved in making the most esoteric digital equipment - CD players and offboards DAC's costing thousands of pounds - strive to get the same quality and realism from their products which can be obtained via turntable.

Spam the reason why the market has seen so much investment is simple. Most people used inferior turntables to play back vinyl and so were not getting the quality. SA in particular had the worst quality vinyl in the world to make things worse. The music companies adopted D for its ease of use as well as for the greater profits that were to be made. It costs far less to produce CD than to press vinyl. A guy listening to music on a substandard turntable from companies like Kenwood, Teac, Pioneer etc would have thought that CD sounded better because he was using inferior equipment. As such he was an easy target for the marketting of CD. I do agree though that in order for you to hear decent sound from a turntable you do need to buy a decent deck. And nothing that comes from a Japanese company is up to the job. The best turntables in the world come primarily from UK, US and a few European companies. Spam if ever you are down this way I will organise a demo at my local dealers for you to hear exactly what can be achieved with vinyl. And maybe then you will also understand why the vinyl market is once again growing.

Not at all....
Scientifically, CD's are superior, so is the retrieval system. You state that vinyl has been proven to be better but your results are unscientific...they are the subjective views of a number of people, all with different hearing properties, probably listening in different environments on different systems with little or no chance of repeatability. Technically speaking with repeatable benchmarks and standards the digital signal is far better...purely because it will not suffer from analogue imperfections, that is why everything is moving over to digital as things like S/N ratio, noise, interference. Sadly I think the argument is similar to the old one that arose with the advent of the transistor...the old guard swore blind that valve sound was better....to their ears maybe....but technlogically not.
The next point I have to make is that you are basing your comparison on equipment that costs the price of a car. Yes anybody that has money to throw around can get excellent results from vinyl, whereas Joe Bloggs can spend a few hundred and get excellent sound. Should you compare top of the range digital equipment then you will not tell the difference.

[spam]

Originally posted by Jangar
In my in-expert opinion it all boils down to the fact that digital (CD) is either on or off whilst analouge (vinyl) has grey areas... The tip of the diamond vibrates while jumping between the bumps in the groove whereas the laser beam hits either an on or off...

That is oversimplifying the process. What actually happens is that the analoguge signal is sampled at twice the maximum audio frequency and the signal in that instance in time is given a digital value of up to 16 bits (dependent on the system) which represents the analog signal at that time.

[picanin]

Originally posted by spam
Not at all....
Scientifically, CD's are superior, so is the retrieval system. You state that vinyl has been proven to be better but your results are unscientific...they are the subjective views of a number of people, all with different hearing properties, probably listening in different environments on different systems with little or no chance of repeatability. Technically speaking with repeatable benchmarks and standards the digital signal is far better...purely because it will not suffer from analogue imperfections, that is why everything is moving over to digital as things like S/N ratio, noise, interference. Sadly I think the argument is similar to the old one that arose with the advent of the transistor...the old guard swore blind that valve sound was better....to their ears maybe....but technlogically not.
The next point I have to make is that you are basing your comparison on equipment that costs the price of a car. Yes anybody that has money to throw around can get excellent results from vinyl, whereas Joe Bloggs can spend a few hundred and get excellent sound. Should you compare top of the range digital equipment then you will not tell the difference.

Spam here is a scientific question for you? Do you listen to music with scientific measuring instruments or with your ears? At the end of the day no matter how good specs might look it is the way something sounds to the ear that decides its clarity and quality. No scientific measuring device can tell you what is good or not in terms of sound quality . Only your own ears can. Go take alisten yourself to a vinyl based system costing around £1000 and a CD based one and you will hear the difference in quality. Ditto on a £500 system. Even into stratospheric prices CD is still the poorer software medium. HAve you ever listened to players by companies like Krell or Jeff Rowland or Linn? Your experience of decent quality vinyl equipment is obviously as limited as mine is of amateur radio equipment. Once you have listened to the equipment then come back and tell me that vinyl is the poor relative.

[Tara]

Picanin, I have to agree with you on the quality of vinyl compared to CD. Even though I have a Rotel sound system with a Rotel DVD player, with Royd speakers, the CD's still come out second best. Give me good old fashioned Vinyl any time.

I find the same with DVD (also Rotel) versus Video, with DVD's coming out very *flat* and without depth.

[spam]

Originally posted by picanin
Spam here is a scientific question for you? Do you listen to music with scientific measuring instruments or with your ears? At the end of the day no matter how good specs might look it is the way something sounds to the ear that decides its clarity and quality. No scientific measuring device can tell you what is good or not in terms of sound quality . Only your own ears can. Go take alisten yourself to a vinyl based system costing around £1000 and a CD based one and you will hear the difference in quality. Ditto on a £500 system. Even into stratospheric prices CD is still the poorer software medium. HAve you ever listened to players by companies like Krell or Jeff Rowland or Linn? Your experience of decent quality vinyl equipment is obviously as limited as mine is of amateur radio equipment. Once you have listened to the equipment then come back and tell me that vinyl is the poor relative.

But you are not asking a scientific question, and therein you have made my argument...if you wish to compare the quality you have to do it scientifically and with repeatable accuracy. My hearing compared to yours is no basis for a proper evaluation. It is like stating a sylus can reproduce 10Hz to 25 Khz...big deal....most people start losing audio perception between 18-30 KHz, few would even hear 25. Normal speech is a mere .3-3.4 Khz....
You are stating that vinyl is better to YOUR ears...and you are also using audio equipment outside the financial realms of most. A comparable amount of money spent on digital would give better results. What sound good to you will probably not even begin to sound good to others, furthermore you are comparing CD sound of the early days, sample rates have increased as well as the recording technology. As an example, you go and stand close to a musical instrument being played and then go and stand further away, you will find that it sounds better some distance away....original CD recordings were made with microphones close up to the source and were detecting sounds and harshness not detectable further away. Hence the same effect being passed onto the recording...that is all changed...

Bottom line, if digital was so bad, then the massive change to digital would not be happening...digital signals easily match the range of analogue and more, are far more easily manipulated, are virtually immune to hiss, scratch and rumble, have a far superior S/N ratio.....and therefore general acceptance by recording industries, broadcasters etc world wide.

[edmonsta]

Originally posted by spam
But you are not asking a scientific question, and therein you have made my argument...if you wish to compare the quality you have to do it scientifically and with repeatable accuracy. My hearing compared to yours is no basis for a proper evaluation. It is like stating a sylus can reproduce 10Hz to 25 Khz...big deal....most people start losing audio perception between 18-30 KHz, few would even hear 25. Normal speech is a mere .3-3.4 Khz....
You are stating that vinyl is better to YOUR ears...and you are also using audio equipment outside the financial realms of most. A comparable amount of money spent on digital would give better results. What sound good to you will probably not even begin to sound good to others, furthermore you are comparing CD sound of the early days, sample rates have increased as well as the recording technology. As an example, you go and stand close to a musical instrument being played and then go and stand further away, you will find that it sounds better some distance away....original CD recordings were made with microphones close up to the source and were detecting sounds and harshness not detectable further away. Hence the same effect being passed onto the recording...that is all changed...

Bottom line, if digital was so bad, then the massive change to digital would not be happening...digital signals easily match the range of analogue and more, are far more easily manipulated, are virtually immune to hiss, scratch and rumble, have a far superior S/N ratio.....and therefore general acceptance by recording industries, broadcasters etc world wide.

I think you're missing the point of Pic's first post here....

In a nutshell:

Yes, Cd's are great, technologically wonderful, easy to use, difficult to destroy and cheaper to make. That's why CD's are in and Vinyls are out.

But

To the naked ear, Vinyl sounds better. Full stop.

Correct me if I am wrong here, Pic, but the discussion is not about which is cheaper, easier, longer lasting, more difficult to scratch, or makes a better frisbee, but simply which sounds better.

The answer is Vinyl.

[spam]

Originally posted by edmonsta
I think you're missing the point of Pic's first post here....

In a nutshell:

Yes, Cd's are great, technologically wonderful, easy to use, difficult to destroy and cheaper to make. That's why CD's are in and Vinyls are out.

But

To the naked ear, Vinyl sounds better. Full stop.

Correct me if I am wrong here, Pic, but the discussion is not about which is cheaper, easier, longer lasting, more difficult to scratch, or makes a better frisbee, but simply which sounds better.

The answer is Vinyl.

No I am not missing the point....the fact remains that pic is talking about listening to virgin vinyl on equipment that would feed the average family for 3 months. Pitch his vinyl against £7000 worth of digital system and maybe we can start comparing. What you are saying is that vinyl is better...only to your ears but vinyl and analogue cause you to lose many of the sounds that are being reproduced with digital sound. I could argue that valve sound is better than transistor and there are still those that would argue the point....but on a scientific basis and that is what pic was expecting from me, digital sound is technically better...

[party boy]

i have to agree with cd's are better, records maybe have a deeper sound but cd's have a much wider frequency response, and there is no way to compare a video to dvd audio, even the best NICAM video machines sound cant compare to the cheapest DVD player.