Some Questions About Vinyl

[Steven West]

Hefty and Cookie and many more make great points.
Now just to be the 'devils advocate', let me ask 'What about centrifulgal force' on vinyl? Wouldn't there be a bias to the right side (looking at the deck from the front) as the grooves pull in a gravity controlled arm? And of course worse at 45 and 78rpm. I'm just thinking that a lacquoring lathe has a mechanical arm much like the control of a CD lense, and would cut a precise V indentation. However, left to gravity and weight of a playing arm on a 'picnic player' to a profossional ReVox - there always must be just a slight bias causing an accenuation of tone and amplitude characteristic's?

The Catch 22 is, at slow speeds of say 5rpm - you'd get perfect representation of the groove, BUT pick up all the anomalies and imperfections of the plastic as well. Higher speeds reduce the anomalies, but causes the arm to be 'pulled in more' and thus 'right side bias'.

Ain't I stinker.

[The Chase]

Both vinyl an CD's have a frequency band much wider than what you can hear - It doen't matter.

That's not true. A person with good high-frequency hearing can definitely hear frequencies higher than those a CD is able to capture. The old myth about humans not hearing above 20 kHz is a gross oversimplification of the truth. When it comes to hearing response, there is a fair amount of variation from individual to individual, and also some changes are brought on by illness (sometimes enhancing high frequencies, sometimes attenuating them.) Even if you pick a particular person's hearing response as the "standard", the high-end doesn't simply hit a brick wall at some "magical" "textbook number" such as 20 kHz. The high end of human hearing frequency response generally falls off much more gradually, therefore it is quite possible to hear frequencies beyond the "cutoff point", albeit at reduced sensitivities.


take care,
McLilith

CD's knock off at something WAY above 20KHz anyways, don't they?

Fun Stuff: Test it for your own results:

1)Put on headphones with a good high freq range
2)Open up Audition (good ol' Cooledit)
3)Select "Generate/Tones..."
4)make a sine wave at 10000Hz (you will hear this easily)
5)Keep making tones higher and higher until you can't hear it anymore

It turns out i lose it at about 21Khz, but i wouldn't be suprised that the average is around 20, because an ordinary Television Tube emmits around 15Khz, and a lot of people don't hear that.

What drives me crazy is at school, i have a teacher who will turn on a TV (modern TV's bluescreen, not fuzz, so the freq is clear), then talk to the class for 15 min before tuning it to a movie, and i don't pay attention to his lecture because of the f*cking bothersome 15KHz ringing through my ears, not to mention that you guys care about this whole paragraph.

[The Chase]

The Catch 22 is, at slow speeds of say 5rpm - you'd get perfect representation of the groove, BUT pick up all the anomalies and imperfections of the plastic as well. Higher speeds reduce the anomalies, but causes the arm to be 'pulled in more' and thus 'right side bias'.

Ain't I stinker.

Yes, but wouldn't the original peace of vinyl be cut with that "right side bias"?

[McLilith]

CD's knock off at something WAY above 20KHz anyways, don't they?

They're supposed to quit slightly above 20 kHz, because they want to avoid aliasing problems that occur above the Nyquist frequency, which would be 22,050 Hz in this case.

Fun Stuff: Test it for your own results:

1)Put on headphones with a good high freq range
2)Open up Audition (good ol' Cooledit)
3)Select "Generate/Tones..."
4)make a sine wave at 10000Hz (you will hear this easily)
5)Keep making tones higher and higher until you can't hear it anymore

It turns out i lose it at about 21Khz, but i wouldn't be suprised that the average is around 20, because an ordinary Television Tube emmits around 15Khz, and a lot of people don't hear that.

I actually just got through trying this. My soundcard was set to a 96 kHz sample rate. I used a spare piezo tweeter I had laying around, as the speaker for this test. I managed to get to 25 kHz. I might have gotten farther, if it weren't for the fact that my cheap amplifier is very hissy and makes it difficult to discern high frequency test signals.

I really need a decent amp. I can't stand all this hiss much longer. It's really about to drive me up the wall.

What drives me crazy is at school, i have a teacher who will turn on a TV (modern TV's bluescreen, not fuzz, so the freq is clear), then talk to the class for 15 min before tuning it to a movie, and i don't pay attention to his lecture because of the f*cking bothersome 15KHz ringing through my ears, not to mention that you guys care about this whole paragraph.

What drives me crazy is mentioning the annoyance to said teacher and explaining that the sound isn't coming from the TV speaker, but vibrations in the flyback transformer, etc. Then they turn the volume down on the speaker, expecting all your pain to go away. Actually, they usually only want to avoid your complaints, not help you relieve the pain. When you tell them that it still bothers you, they get annoyed with you. So, you start out with a headache and an annoying boob tube--then you end up with a bigger headache, the same annoying boob tube, and now an even bigger annoying boob thrown in to add insult to injury!

Idiots!

Why does nearly everyone assume that turning down the TV volume will solve everything, even after being told that the sound that bothers you isn't coming from the speaker? Why does nearly everyone become annoyed when some simple non-essential activity of theirs (ie, playing the TV) is causing you intense physical pain, (whilst they feel no pain at all), and you dare to mention this more than once?

Idiots!
We live in a world surrounded by...
Idiots!
...and permeated by...
uncaring assholes!











It's a good thing that I can remain calm while talking about this. Yes, I think I've made quit good progress adapting to the constant infernal ringing of my CRT monitor, and the incessant roar of my computer's several inexpensive fans. No, I don't think the headaches are affecting me at all anymore. They've become an uninvited, but welcomed, "old friend" at this point.



McLilith

[C00kie]

Is there a difference in the sound coming from CD and vinyl? Sure! Both vinyl and CD are quite capable of reproducing HiFi sound. Although both are compromises and have technical limitations that will never satisfy the true audiophiles, I don't see why a CD should sound completely different from vinyl.

I personally think the main difference in sound comes from the mastering process. It's manual labour so the result depends on the craftmanship of the guy/gal doing it. There are a lot of CDs brought out nowadays that imho sound totally crap due to lousy & neglected mastering.

When mastering for vinyl one has to make sure the needle doesn't jump etc, so a lot of effort is going into EQing and dynamics processing. One can do miracles or do a total screwup. Becoming a Mastering Master takes skills, talent and preferrably passion for the job.

But when mastering for CD the emphasis seems to be on brick-wall limiting (LOUDER IS BETTER [not!]) and quickly building a Q-track, and then quickly on to the next cheap 80's/90's compilation disk. The raw audio material seems to be taken for granted (especially when already delivered digital) which is a completely waisted opportunity on improvement.

To me it seems like talent, passion and taking time to do a proper job is no longer in the job description for CD mastering engineers. Sure there are good lads there, but it's a total different trade compared to vinyl mastering. Plz correct me if I'm wrong ...

[McLilith]

I think that one problem is some recordings were not remastered at all for digital, and they used the same master that was used for the vinyl pressings. I don't know, but I've heard this used to happen a lot. Maybe it still happens?

I do agree that individual mastering should be done for each medium a recording is released in.

I also despise those CDs which are compressed to death. To be honest, I don't really like compression much at all. I can see some uses for it on individual tracks in a mix, but it's far too easy to ruin a recording by applying compression to the sum of all the tracks.

What the hell's wrong with having some dynamics in the final product? If the target is radio airplay, don't worry. The boys at the radio station will compress the crap out of your song anyway.


later,
McLilith