Re: The Old Vinyl vs. CD Debate

I never said vinyl was "better" than digital. 'Better' is a broad term
and digital has many obvious advantages. I have a good cd player that
sounds better than many analog systems.
One personal reason I think vinyl may sound superior to some people is
that the ultrasonics captured in recording produce their audible
frequencies in the room of the listener using the rooms natural
acoustics. These ultrasonics are of course not present in cd, only the
audible result which is naturally defined by the original recording
environment.
Regarding tape grain slow down a 2" recording to a very low speed, I
find the sound is rich strange smooth complex and beautiful. Slow down a
digital one and the result is just nasty, lacking body with all kinds of
foreign generated sounds suddenly audible. I will take tape grain any
day over digital aliasing and artifacts. A personal choice, my ears tell
me it's a more musical sound.
It's funny how some flaws in analog such distortion, tape grain,
compression (drop outs, wow, flutter noise are of course excluded) sound
musical and have found a place in modern music as an actual expressive
tool even to the point where there are now digital devices that add
these 'defects'. I can't think of any digital defects that sound good or
add anything to the sound. One also has to wonder why there are far more
digital emulations of analog equipment on the market than original
digital devices. Digital distortion anyone? Didn't think so. It is
precisely these defects in analog and vinyl that make it sound good, and
for someone as my self who has a quasi philosophical attitude to live
and recorded music being distinct entities actually desirable.
I personally think it's a mistake for recordings to try and recreate
the perfect concert, recordings should sound like recordings. and not
try and be something they are not, something digital spends a lot of
it's time doing, with endless recreations of vintage analog equipment
and artificial spaces.
(Although this is not strictly relevant there are no digital synthesis
systems that get near their analog counterparts, there is simply no
comparison. And as I said, the Moog filter would fail on paper due to
its flaws, but it sounded great, despite the science saying otherwise.
Thtas what made Moog superior as a designer, he trusted his ears, not
the maths, and why he still build analog devices to this day, believing
as I do that they still surpass their digital clones. (It has been shown
that we can hear the difference in time between sounds arriving at our
ears as little as 15 microseconds apart, far higher than 44 khz allows.)
So in that area I suppose I am an 'analog buff'.
The reason digital audio is rampant is not that it sounds better or
worse (not only talking about vinyl here) is that it is cheaper and
easier to use in professional recording environments. (I believe the
ability to edit to a high degree may be having a negative influence on
musicians attitude to studio recording technique but thats another
issue) But it's usually the case, as you win you often also lose.
To the ultrasonic masking question, the point was in reference to SACD,
where the artificially high boosted energy of the ultrasonics due to the
nature of the SACD system is said to heat the speaker coils effecting
the output. I have no first hand experience of this. It's is also
possible these Ultrasonics produce frequencies that mask audible ones as
in common masking.

best elm

>Andrew Rose at Pristine Audio <andrew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


> >
> Analogue buffs who go on about quantization talk as if vinyl is
> perfectly smooth and magnetic tape particles are infinitesimally small -
> though if they were they'd still be the least of analogue's inherent
> problems...
.

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