IDM Mailing Archive

At 12:40 23/03/96 -0800, you wrote:

quoted 13 lines On Sat, 23 Mar 1996, Sugatis actually turned not out to have wrote:

> > >On Sat, 23 Mar 1996, Sugatis actually turned not out to have wrote: > >> >Vinyl just plain sucks, unless you're one of those hopeless romantic types >> >that thinks anything from the past is so much better than the present that >> >you can ignore the facts and convince yourself otherwise. >> > >There's a lot more to buying vinyl than sound quality. These days vinyl >has become an artpiece of sorts. You get cool music and a much larger canvas >for the artwork which is often stunning. CD artwork just doesn't do it >for me like vinyl, and the sound quality difference isn't all that great.

What everyone forgets is that quite a lot of techno stuff is cut from nothing more than TDK SA90s in the first place - so bollocks to people who say CD sounds better than vinyl - quite often it doesn't sound better than a good tape recording. You are limited to the crap frequency range on compact cassette ~50 -15,000 Hz. (hey even worse than 20-20k! Sorry, cheap shot, but I couldn't resist.) I find this thought quite amusing when people spend thousands of pounds at their end of things on hifi (me included (but not thousands alas!)). The artist has thoroughly buggered them before they even take posession of the music. g.

| CDs don't have pops, or surface noise, or rumble. And they can | reproduce bass way lower than vinyl. I don't want to argue here, because I know the specs. But I have a question for all the vinyl DJs out there: why do some people I know claim that vinyl has a better bass response than CD? Is this due in part to lazy CD mastering? There must be something going on for certain DJs to prefer vinyl for its bass response (ignoring the other, more obvious reasons to choose vinyl). | Have you ever listened to a 12" without the RIAA filter? That's | what vinyl REALLY sounds like. Have you ever listened to a CD without the D/A converter? ... even without the decimation/lowpass filter? That's what digital really sounds like. What I'm really saying is that it is not fair to rate an RIAA encoded sound unless you undo all the crap that was done to doctor the sound up before cutting it on the vinyl. A more interesting test would be to record uncompensated audio onto vinyl and listen to how much it degrades after cutting losses and playback losses. | Yes, I'll grant you that an album cover presents a larger tableau | for the cover art. I'm buying music, so sound quality is the most | important thing, and the cover art is just icing. Frank Zappa agreed with you. But even he admitted that a significant portion of the buyers require something to "fondle" while they listen. | CDs suck thusly: [...], poor dynamic range (96dB is better than | vinyl & tape, but not as good as ears), poor frequency response | (0 to 20kHz is better than vinyl & tape, but not as good as ears), | and THEY COST TOO DAMN MUCH, even though they're cheaper to | produce than quality vinyl or tape (the whole reason they were | invented). I agree. CD was designed 10 years too early for the technology that was available when it was finally introduced (welcome to "design by committee"). And because it was introduced AFTER record companies had become super-big-business, the emphasis was on marketing CDs as perfectly indestructible sound, and charging a price based on the perceived value (a perception conveniently placed in the public's mind by corporate-backed advertising and promotion of the new CD format), instead of actually going the extra few steps that could have made digital compact disc an even better quality standard without the drawbacks you listed above. By the way, I just explained why I "boycotted" CD for several years before finally giving in. :-) | CDs suck, but not as much as vinyl. Yep. There's certainly room for both. I just have no use for mass-produced cassettes... (not that I want to start another "barely-musical" topic) Brian Willoughby

I'm not a DJ, but here's my take on it: Vinyl gives a boost around 100-150Hz a lot of the time. This corresponds to the peak in most smaller speakers, and I think this is the frequency area many people think of as "bass". Frequencies lower than that are more difficult to hear, and more difficult (and/or expensive) to reproduce. Listen to some speakers with deep, even bass response and you will find it is a much different experience to really -hear- a deep tone rather than infering it from information in somewhat higher frequencies.. Plus, you typically lose some high end with vinyl ... more perceived bass boost.

quoted 5 lines I don't want to argue here, because I know the specs. But I have a question

> I don't want to argue here, because I know the specs. But I have a question > for all the vinyl DJs out there: why do some people I know claim that vinyl > has a better bass response than CD? Is this due in part to lazy CD mastering? > There must be something going on for certain DJs to prefer vinyl for its > bass response (ignoring the other, more obvious reasons to choose vinyl).

quoted 2 lines response (0 to 20kHz is better than vinyl & tape, but not as good as

>response (0 to 20kHz is better than vinyl & tape, but not as good as >ears)

A scientific note... Actually, that goes slightly beyond the human hearing range. And a 96 db signal to noise ratio is absolutely grande (my player sez it gets 100+ db though). Anyway let's not fight about this vinyl thing okay? Just forget that anyone said anything, before it's too late.

| >response (0 to 20kHz is better than vinyl & tape, but not as good | >as ears) | | A scientific note... Actually, that goes slightly beyond the human | hearing range. And a 96 db signal to noise ratio is absolutely | grande (my player sez it gets 100+ db though). Oops, careful with the "scientific" there. 20kHz is an average, set long ago in the dark ages. True: many people can barely hear 15kHz, but that doesn't mean there aren't those of us who can hear beyond 20kHz. It's only one more octave to 40kHz, you know. Besides, scientists had the speed of sound wrong for years because nobody bothered to recheck the math until a couple of years ago. Research is showing that humans can distinguish the effects of frequencies well above 20kHz; our ears aren't digital - there is some gray area in any subjective human measurement. On signal to noise: the human brain has the ability to distinguish and interpret faint sounds significantly below the noise floor. With digital, those sounds are completely missing while analog reproduces them along with a higher volume of noise. CD players even cheat by turning off the converters between tracks to mask how much noise is really there due to quantization noise. Brian Willoughby