Vinyl is digital. Get over it!
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- čas přidán 16. 05. 2024
- Digitally-recorded vinyl records have existed since 1971, and became common over 40 years ago. Digital audio was touted as a major advancement in sound quality, but now some audiophiles hate it and prefer a pure analog listening experience. Does digital "defeat the purpose" of listening to vinyl, or is this another audiophool myth?
A detailed article on the history of early digital audio recording:
www.aes.org/aeshc/pdf/fine_da...
Time flow:
0:00 Introduction
2:28 First digital LP in 1971
3:44 1979, the year of digital
8:35 Digital in the 1980s
10:27 Why audiophiles hate digital
12:44 The pure digital myth
13:34 Conclusion
#vinyl #digital #audiophile - Věda a technologie
Here's the full "Made In Japan" song if you want to hear it in all of its 1983 digitally mixed and mastered glory: czcams.com/video/MajjFCF_oAE/video.html
Cool song, your musical taste is part of why I like your channel :)
@@alfredklek Same here.
I have a question for you? Do different Cd-R brands sound different from each other when burning music on them? im buying some old single CD-r's that come in a single jewel case on ebay that were released in the 90s and early 2000s to test them out but i wish you would try this. I was told that some actually do sound better from another like the Fuji Cd-r's from Japan. it's a big subject really with the whole different colors of dye the cd's recording surface use to use back then from today and how the technology has changed. can you make a youtube video on this? Thanks
@@Nickword1 That makes little sense. The audio data on CDs is stored digitally and losslessly, so if the same recording is pressed/burned on two different CDs, they are going to sound identical. The "dye color" is totally irrelevant.
The appeal of vinyl is the tone that it transplants onto the music, which is affected by things such as the typeof needle, but I'm sure you think that it's all snake oil. Also, there's a lot of vinyl that was made directly from analog tape masters, so it's a bit disingenuous for you to claim that all vinyl is digital.
“Audiophiles don’t use their equipment to listen to your music. Audiophiles use your music to listen to their equipment.” - Alan Parsons
That's a great quote from Alan Parsons. Actually anything produced by Alan Parsons *would* be worthy of testing your audio equipment!
Aha!
That was ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ by Joni Mitchell, a song in which Joni complains they ‘Paved paradise to put up a parking lot’, a measure which actually would have alleviated traffic congestion on the outskirts of paradise, something which Joni singularly fails to point out, perhaps because it doesn’t quite fit in with her blinkered view of the world. Nevertheless, nice song.
Yes that’s true , it’s something you can lose sight of as you upgrade equipment.
@@Daijyobanaihow does a parking lot alleviate traffic congestion?
That's true only for a small percentage of rich/obsessed audiophiles. Audiophiles in general are the best music listeners, since they love music so much that they are trying to get the most out of it. The "listening to their equipment through music" quote is just a generalization made by anti-audiophile people (usually those who haven't tried the sport, or can't afford it).
As a self-diagnosed idiot, I like vinyl cuz the pretty pictures are bigger, and it goes around and around.
Honestly, that "goes around and around" is one of the reasons I love listening to records. I mean don't get me wrong, I still buy CDs, but I love records, partly because they're really also a visual medium. You can watch the label revolve. Can't do that on a CD unless you have some kind of see-through CD player, and even in that case, CDs spin at, what? 1500rpm or something?? Not conducive to watching. :)
@@mal2ksc I have a bunch of 50th-anniversary archival sets that do come like that -- The Doors' recent reissues, Déjà Vu, etc.
Those are 100% legit reasons to love vinyl.
This reminds me of Dankpods saying "you know what? It doesn't sound as good as digital. But you know, it's a whole ritual to get it going, and you get to watch it spin"
speeeeeen
As soon as I showed my dad spotify about 10 years ago he gave me his entire record collection citing he would never grab a record again after being able to just click the track so quickly and easily. I now have an insane collection of 70s records!
I turned my cassette radio recording mix tapes from the 80's into CZcams playlists. Every so often I would have to hear a song to make sure I am linking the correct version to what I had recorded back in the day. Waiting for a cassette to fast forward or rewind to search for that song was so annoying and I forgot how inconvenient it was.
Yeah! I can understand. I showed my dad the IVF technology and he said "If i knew about this earlier, I would never have slept with your mom".
Hahahah you have a great dad lol
An unrelated question where do you live and do you perhaps have some form of home security.
His loss 😂 I love Spotify but you don't wanna replace a great record collection with it.
This is an outstanding video by VWestlife. I remember going to a fancy-pants classical music shop in the early 1980s, not long after CDs started to be available, and being truly shocked upon hearing a CD recording for the first time in my life. It sounded so real, like the musicians were in the shop. Now, forty years later, it made such an impression on me that I still remember this like it was yesterday.
As much as I consider audiophiles clowns and this has nothing to do with it, but I hate the clean and separated sound of modern classical recordings compared to the warm melasses that are the old (pre 1980s) recordings. Doesn't have much to do with analog or digital as it has with general improvements made in recording and it may have a lot to do with me listening to a lot of old American big band pop music as a kid. The modern recordings just sound really bright and in your face as opposed to the quaint and restrained old stuff. Of course I have to imagine if you lived in a time where only the latter was availeble, hearing the hi-fi versions must have been pretty mindblowing and refreshing.
@@NONAMEACCESSIBLE The passage of time means people have either forgotten (if sufficiently old) or do not know (if too young) about the poor quality of analogue media, in the sense of manufacturing and materials. Often you would buy a very expensive record or cassette tape, only to find the recording marred by scratches, crackles, rumble, hiss, and woolly sound, simply because it was badly made, then end up returning the thing to the shop. They were also physically fragile, as were the devices. CDs solved all of that; it is rare to get a faulty one. Of course, if you wanted a more mellow sound, then you could always downgrade the quality by adjusting the equalization, etc. on your reproduction device, but I think most people were happy that they could finally hear clear recordings.
@@cdl0 Digital is digital in basic sense because playing is else "1" - means full quality music or "0" - means total silence when some digits are missed. Zero - one is perfect digital.
Analog has all the span of qualities from best to crap but it in most cases may be corrected by cleaning and aligning which requires effort. Quality in old analog hangs on posesing the ideal speaker amplifier set It alowes to mantain perfect quality without hearing high level of noise Digital is noiseless and for that reason it is so easy to manatin high tones by upbeating them without noise trauma.
Too real for the 80s. Not as real now, real now weighs more than 2 gb per album. That sounds really real.
with mp3s ipods and streaming, imagine that now you're now going to get the same experience as a CD, with terrible artifacts. you probably listened to it on a very good stereo system
Nothing beats a well mastered/produced album regardless of the format it's played back on.
This tbh ... I love the older vinyl-style mastering ... but it's totally possible to do exactly the same in FLAC.
Nothing beats a great song regardless of how well it's mastered/produced.
All of these comments are true
@@Unfunny_Username_389but on the other hand you can certainly ruin my enjoyment of great music by exceptionally shit mastering. Looking at you Death Magnetic or Gold & Grey
Science also shows human really can't recieve fidelity beyond 16 bit and 44khz, so if you get 24 bit music then you're already at the pinnacle of human hearing.
Your equipment and what you use to listen to it matters far more.
I think the biggest reason why this older music sounds so much "clearer" than modern music, clearly isn't because it was analog, but really it's because this older music wasn't so busy, it had room to breathe, with some sections being totally quiet for a second at a time, with less music backing
That is true. Take the classic "Pet Sounds" album by the Beach Boys, with a radically ambitious sound for its time with immense arrangements and lush arrangements. In its original, analog-recorded, analog-mixed and mastered, Mono form: It sounds so low fidelity! Brian Wilson absolutely overestimated the technology of the time. There's a reason the sound of the music being made back then was usually kept simple. Once it was remixed in Stereo in the 90s, the difference is outstanding. It now sounds so pristine and modern. Truly ahead of his time.
And because dynamic compression wasn't so over-used.
@@inthefade ppl out here putting 19 compressors on every track
Yep, yhe early CD era gave rise to this myth because production sucked for a while.
@@almendramanok Patrick bates
When vinyl started to go through its resurgence in popularity, I was constantly telling people who were going on about its analog superiority, that unless they were buying old albums from before the early 80s, it was digital at some stage. I remember when the transition was under way, albums used to be marked with AAA, AAD, ADD or DDD to indicate the methods used at the stages of recording, mixing and mastering.
This is a misleading point, as the in-studio "digital" is at sampling rates which are so incredibly fast that there is no difference between analog and digital. The consumer product, however, doesn't have file-sizes in the gigabytes for each song, it has been reduced in sampling rate the limits of audibility, and at this point, discerning listeners can hear digital effects. You should never say studio digital is "digital", because it's resolution is so high, that it is effectively analog.
@@annaclarafenyo8185 most software even professional defaults to 48khz 32 bits per sample, which is as high as you will ever need imo, though 96khz is also widely available, and probably more common. 64 bits though? that is completely unnecessary.
btw that's 6.144 megabits per second!
@@annaclarafenyo8185 Umm no ? supersampling (higher than needed sampling resolution) is done to make file editing easier and reduce kickback resonances. end product will have what the studio hears as the end product and any lossless format will perfectly recreate that. limits of audibility sampling rate is 44k hz, double the max frequency humans can hear. CD used that. Any difference between what studio hears and what you hear after the file has been mastered is caused by quality of the sound system and acoustics of the room, accepting the file is not corrupted.
And before anyone asks, you wont get kickback resonances if you listened to a 44k hz sr recording if it was mastered in higher srs.
@@alqualonde2998 The 44Khz is for the average listener, it's a Fourier transform, so even double the maximum frequency leads to audible differences, although it requires a very sensitive ear. I don't personally hear a difference, but I am believe a good listener that claims he or she does hear a difference, because when the final transfer is done to CD, there is a loss in sampling rate and it isn't negligible. The oversampled in-studio sound is perfect, however.
@@annaclarafenyo8185 22k is the limit of human hearing... and that's for young woman at most.
If you sample it at double frequency you can perfectly recreate the analog signal that was in studio.
Not a digital signal, an analog signal that is perfect.
You can hear the difference between mastering a piece at 44.1k and let's say 96k sample rate. But you can't tell the difference between a playback at 44.1k and 96k.
You probably can if you are a dog or a cat but not if you're a human.
Loss in sample rate is such a misnomer. Sample rate determines the amount of data points for a sine wave we have. With increase bits in each sample getting a higher signal to noise ratio in exchange of doubling the data . 44.1k Hz sampling rate with 16 bit sample size playback is superior to all but live listening in an acoustic room analog experience in all objective ways.
Studios use higher hzs for resonance and editing reasons.
Anyone who says otherwise is either trying to sell you something or has been sold something by the previous person.
Real quality of an audio lies in a strong DAC, noise isolation, room acoustics and well built speakers. My hifi system can play a mp3 from an 10 yo CD ( well kept) in a 10 yo CD player better than any analog system I own. I still love my analog systems don't get me wrong. I even own a German made stylus head lol. Probably spent more on analog than digital, mostly because once you get a well built digital system you simply can't get it any better without spending extreme amounts of money.
I had one of my dad’s friends tell me that “vinyl is so much better than digital, digital sucks!”, so I asked her why. She had no idea and assumed they made the record in the booth. It’s a great show of the positive experience bias and placebo effect.
Well, they used to, sorta. Back in the early days, the recording would be directly etched into the record. They literally had to re-perform the song in order to make another copy. Of course, this was a LONG time ago, back in the phonograph cylinder days, long before vinyl LPs.
@@fireaza "every copy of X is personalized" strikes again
@@LazyJesse Look up Thomas Eddison Cylinders. It's true. They didn't have the technology to copy cylinders yet. They very quickly developed that technology, of course.
Lol. And vinyl still puts CD’s to shame.
This video is so missleading and stupid at the same time. LOL people have no clue what they are talking about. Digital is trying to copy analog at it's best by adding and subtracting bits but in the long run it can't replicate the analog and it's impossible. When you groove in a vinyl the vibrations which passed on to the needle that cut the record are automatically transformed into analog as the vibrations and wave form becomes curved as it should be.
I once got to see a mentor preparing an indie release for vinyl, and his words were exactly "If people only knew all the stuff we have to take out for this!" While cutting out bass and highs because of vinyl's limitations. It's mostly in the mastering. [Edit] couldn't have said it better than the ending!
You're pretty much right. Vinyl DOES usually have superior fidelity and dynamic range to digital (at least from my experience), but that's mostly because it's mastered better (especially old vinyl), not because of any inherent technical advantage vinyl has over digital -- because it has none.
Yeah. I keep seeing people say that vinyl is more dynamic than digital, but that’s simply not true in terms of format itself. You can’t go too dynamic with vinyl or else the needle would keep popping out of the groove (not to mention the limitations of the format itself). There’s going to have to be some compression and some EQing needed for even the most dynamic of vinyl masters.
He could master the songs on the quieter side and keep the bass/highs the way he wanted. The problem is that nowadays everyone wants to hear louder songs, and drc on digital media is less perceptible than on vinyl
@@MysteryMii Ironically, it's the technical limitations of vinyl that make it sound better in practice. You can't use loudness war hypercompression on vinyl like you can on digital. And many digital file formats (like MP3) require compression for size anyway, which means that vinyl is objectively better sound quality than those.
if they had to cut low end in this case I feel theres still plenty when listening to most if not all other vinyl pressings
One thing I will say about the connecting to a Bluetooth speaker is that anything connecting to a Bluetooth speaker will more than likely sound worse. The lower-end codecs compress the hell out of the input source and that is more of the problem, not analog/digital.
you are right, of course, but the key word is lower-end. i find that the aptx codecs are much better than the standard sbc. to my ears, the worst part of bluetooth speakers is that most of them are tuned for dramatic impact and they quickly become fatiguing.
I recently added a turntable to my office as an alternative to streaming music while I work and it’s been such a great change for me, but it’s nothing to do with audio quality and everything to do with the act of selecting an album and letting it play through rather than constantly jumping from thing to thing on a streaming service. There’s something satisfying about limiting my choices. I own hundreds of records, but now I keep a rotating selection of about 20 LPs in my office to choose from, and I find that so much more satisfying than being faced with the debilitating infinite possibilities of a streaming platform. I love streaming music, but the feeling of choosing a record from a shelf and putting it on your turntable is hard to beat.
I’ve recorded my Vinyl tracks on a Reel to Reel tape recorder.
You still have the same warmth and Dynamic.
Is also beautiful to see this giant wheel rotating and look at the needles of the Vu Meters moving.
@@phillipbanes5484that’s not the point. Most the time people are streaming they’re doing it on their phone! So it’s not just about intimate choices and not knowing what to play, it’s an utter distraction because then people’s short attention spans are dealing with social media and emails and everything else that comes with having a phone. The only time I ever stream is when I’m driving and even then I’m constantly asking Siri the play the next song on shuffle! I never keep still in the moment unless I’m spinning records
@@phillipbanes5484 Limiting yourself, or pretending to be limited is not the same as Being limited for real.
I have experienced the loudness war firsthand. I got a 1991 Japan CD copy of Scorpion's Love at first Sting, and Still Loving You sounded so much better in it than the new 2015 remaster CD I got later. A quick peek at the waveform in audacity showed exactly why; the remaster was dynamically compressed to the point where everything was the same level, which was not how this song was supposed to sound!
I totally agree with you. Loudness war is the worst thing that could happen to music after MP3 .
Yes, normalizing they made in greek cds I have after 2010 with flat waveform destroys the songs it gives the impression that bass is so hard and closed sound, also from 2013 at least here in Greece all old remastered songs have gain 98-99 that makes distortion , same with greek re-releases of old vinyls.
Also vinyls from Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish that one friend of mine has, and they are very expensive, sound like a bad mp3, they make much distortion and I can't listen to these vinyls the high frequencies.
Rust in Peace's re-release vs original too, the re-release is a damn travesty
That can depend. Coolio put out a re-recording of some of his old hits. Still same guy but had a drastically different feel in sound and beats. I think depends when it comes to remastered.
This is interesting to think about, I tend to hate 80s recordings because they just don't sound well mixed all the time to me and now Im wondering if hearing these songs in different mixes would change my mind of some of them
I think it's a blessing that we have digital media because unlike analog digital can be replicated perfectly
Don't tell Michael Fremer. He is said to be able to listen to a vinyl record if the recording originally comes from a digital master or an analog master tape
what do you mean by perfect Does PCM sound like DSD and Does DXD sound like DSD And finally Does any of them sound like unrecorded audio
@@Andersljungberg What I mean is that when you digitize a peice of media (movies, music etc.) you can copy that data as many times as you want without it getting altered
What? The very word "analog" is a reference to how it's a perfect (or near perfect) replica of the original sound.
@@hotwax9376no it doesn't. Analog and digital is the way that the signal is stored. VHS for example is an analog signal(NTSC or PAL) and you can't store FULL HD or 4k video on it. VHS has a shit quality and is analog
I have restored a bunch of Sony PCM F1 recordings from the 1980 that were stored on Beta tapes on the video track. The greatest advantage of these recordings is that even though the tapes have aged, none of the audio quality was lost.
I remember the video Technology Connections did on PCM and how they used video tapes to store digital audio.
The PCM F1 allowed compact disc quality at a Prosumer price before CD was even released. I have read that they were popular for Classical recordings where Multi-Tracking typically isn't used and they just wanted to accurately capture the sound someone in the prime position at a concert would hear.
Yep, some people prefer the defects of vinyl audio, but it doesn't sound as much as if you were listening live in the studio.
First time I heard 'proper' digital was the BBC recording of a classical concert using a Sony PCM-F1. Outstanding for the time.
Due to human hearing being band limited to 20Hz-20kHz, there are a finite number of sounds that the human ear can hear, digital can perfectly reproduce every one of them.
yeah and no. There are basically unlimited frequencies between even 20Hz and 21Hz, since a frequency doesn’t has to be exactly a full Hz. It can also be, for example, something like 20,001003Hz (or 20.001003Hz if your native language is something like english) or 20,9867324Hz. Thats why resolution (bitrate and samplingrate) CAN matter, if your hearing is trained enough or you just know a track good enough. In this regard it is more like „Digital can reproduce a every sound so closely that the human hearing, especially with high-res files, is worse than the audio file“.
@@Honigball You're still going to run into limits both analog (in how small of a difference humans can discern), and digital (sample rate of the audio). I'd be surprised if anyone could tell the difference between 999.999hz and 1000hz. I'm sure there's double-blind listening studies done on this somewhere, but I never looked.
@@HonigballBut the Nyquist-Shannon-theorem shows that a sampling rate of 2n can reproduce every frequency of 0 - n Hz perfectly.
Firstly, you're both incorrect. Human hearing range DOES Infact reach below 20hz. And so does audio sampling - I am often listening to music below 15 Hz (down to 11) on my custom built headphone, over BLUETOOTH. and there really is no noticable latency.
And before you start the argument about how my speakers cannot possibly reach that low, I'm actually shaking the skin with a very high quality transducer to get that low, and lower.
I love my vinyl and my cassettes. I think I just got fed up of Spotify, it felt like it was making music and albums kinda meaningless. So when I inherited an 80s hifi system I was very happy and went off buying second hand LPs.
I had assumed they were entirely analog from recording to pressing and didnt think much about it until I found a 1978 recording that very proudly boasted about its digital nature, complete with a long description of how digital recording works and its advantages.
Its a good job I didnt primarily get into it for the warm tone or whatever! As long as I can still get vinyl, second hand and new releases, I'm happy!
And its damn cool that on the vinyl itself it is essentially analog, in the sense you can see the grooves and so on, even if it is a kinda analog representation of an original digital recording. I like the physicality, in a world of invisible digital bits :)
You can put a vinyl record in your mouth and spin it on a needle and it will play the sound inside of your own brain through bone conduction, meaning it is fully analog and not at all digital
Try to get an reel to reel machine and try some reel tapes 4 track in 7 ips, you will see
You know what's also invisible? Music that you hear
The issue is more a case of remasters with compressed dynamics now whether that be on CD or Vinyl. That's what is ruining the long term listening experience in many cases. The loudness wars still plague us with many recordings being too hot for instant initial gratification.
Just uncompress the audio and all well be fine.
As someone who runs a video game music radio show, I can attest to this. It can be really crazy when you’re including stuff that’s ripped directly from the games with vocal songs from recent releases.
That's literally the sound of digital
digital can be uncompressed. A lot of artists are redoing they're earlier "remasters" with more dynamic range.@@Texan1048
Red Hot Chili Peppers' Californication is an example of the "loudness wars." Great album, but so much compression to the point of distortion especially on early CD releases. At least that's what I've read up on. I can hear it every time I listen to the album. I wonder what the cassette release of the album would sound like.
Whether analog or digital, if you like what you hear, that's best.
I just think it's wonderful how people have devised so many ways to record, store, and play audio (as well as so many other types of information). The way vinyl records work is amazing to me, but so is the way a CD works, or a cassette tape, or a music player, like an iPod, or now just our smartphones. All of these things have a certain magic to them, and I find that sense of wonder only increases the more I understand how they work.
Guess I'm gonna have to buy the White Album again.
My favorite classics are the cylindrical records and the old pneumatic paper piano scrolls.
Audio is so cool
@@onradioactivewaves I guess those paper piano scrolls are in a way a digital format with the player piano being a very physical D to A converter.
@@keithAstansell very true, much like the old punch cards used for time clocks or how the first personal computers were programmed, I would argue that the scrolls were even a bit of a mix of analog and digital, as there was also speed control ( and I don't recall if there was any other controls). Very nostalgic to me, my great grammie would put them on and sing some of the songs.
I think why a lot of audiphile say vinyl sounds better is because it's probably the first time theyve invested into good quality speakers, and a good quality amp that isnt fed a heavily cmpressed mp3 from limewire.
13:27 this reminded of a message that was commonly printed in the 1980's CD pressings booklets: "The sound of the original records has been preserved as closely as possible, however, due to its high resolution, the compact disc can reveal limitations of the source tape."
Marketing aside, this may explain why artists were migrating to digital recording.
That text is shown at 12:57
Funny that the reverse of this disclaimer is true. I have several same albums on cd & LP spanning from 70s to 90s & most (if not all) of the time, i find the LP version to sound far far better than the cd version. What i mean by better is that the LPs sounded WAY more open, transparent & musical. The CD version would always sound muffled, compressed & lacking in dimension & detail. That to me is the definition of better. For some people, being less transparent & open is better. I recall comparing the same album on LP & CD to a friend but he preferred the CD. He told me LP simply sounded brighter & not better. Hahaha. And he owns a hifi system that cost in excess of usd100k.
@@ganck1147that is likely a difference in mastering. With digital audio came the desire to have everything louder, so many CDs are super compressed-sounding. That's not a fault of the medium. Master with less compression, the CD will sound better, but you have to turn it up more.
@@ganck1147once again, this is a mastering issue. Please watch the video. I have experience working on records, and having them pressed to LP after a quality vinyl master. 9 times out of 10, the width of the master disappears on vinyl, and it becomes a narrow colored version of the proper master. "Width" is mainly a product of extreme top end (15k and up). Sometimes these frequencies are called "air" frequencies. Not only are these frequencies not cut into vinyl, but most people past the age of 45 can barely hear those frequencies.
Man my world just got shattered big-time I have an original 1983 original pressing of Michael Jackson's Thriller on CD and it sounds much better then the later digitally remastered special edition version from 2001 and I also have the re-release of the same album on vinyl from 2015 and it sounds pretty much like the CD version from 1983 and it sounds pretty good.
I've both the CDs, and you're right.
This album is a great demo of the early state of things. In those early days, CD mastering was almost a direct transfer of the stereo mix. The down side of that is they sounded fairly week, but had good dynamic range. The "digital remaster" was squished like any 90s/early 00s release. Sounds louder, but kick drum and bass seem weaker.
The vinyl version is a huge part of this album's lore. The first test pressings of the album were terrible. Vinyl has a quality that wasn't mentioned in this video: groove size. The size effects the dynamic range. If you put too much material on a side, the only way to fit it is to make the grooves smaller. Smaller grooves make it harder to avoid the stylus jumping out of the groove, so you need less dynamic range, so roll off low frequencies, squish it with a compressor, etc. This was the problem they had with early pressings of Thriller: no dynamic range. They had to go back and resequence the album. That's how Lady In My Life lost the second verse, and how Thriller lost part of the rap. That, and a few other smaller edits brought the time down enough to back off the compression a bit. The vinyl still sounds way more squished than the CD, but I kinda like it.
Anyway, most audiophiles are idiots believing in snake oil. Most of what makes their beloved vinyl sound better is the EQ and compression, which makes vinyl sound a bit more like the radio, squished. Pop from the 60s is even worse. Motown stuff was the loudness wars of their day, but people will go on and on about how great those 45s are.
@@SarcasticTruth77 "Motown stuff was the loudness wars of their day" You talking about the wall-of-sound fad?
I recommend checking out the MFSL 2022 SACD release of Thriller, it's easily the best version of the album I've ever heard, even compared to earlier CD releases, and it really retains all the dynamics of the mix.
@@Echo-Head It's fucking brilliant. I've heard accounts that it's a bit too relaxed and not "danceable". I wholeheartedly disagree, and while I'd like to try the supposedly superior Sony SACD someday, I suspect most of that talk is from people who built flat, boring systems. It's also been criticised as being less faithful to the original sound of the album due to the same differences, but I personally consider that a less positive.
The later one sounds crappy because it's a bad remaster, NOT because it's DIGITAL. Crappy analog remasters of records exist too.
I often think that apart from the physics aspect vinyl lovers are actually in love with the sound produced by the high pass filter during recording to vinyl and the reversal of that during playback. A necessity for vinyl to stop the needle flying off the record.
RIAA curve.
There was an experiment performed on a certain segment of millennials and it turned out they prefer audio with mp3 compression artifacts over high quality audio.
Haha, that's just brilliant!@@vytah
@@vytah Must have been either bad mp3 + bad taste, or a badly executed experiment.
@@SaHaRaSquador maybe just familiarity?
This is my favorite video from you to date. I’m an audio engineer by trade myself so I’m in heaven seeing iconic early digital recording systems! Great one! 👌🔥
I couldn't agree more with the sentiment of this video. Too many audio snobs out there blowing a lot of smoke. Digital is one of the best things to happen to media as a whole.
It seems as though the more you spend on music, the more you feel you have to act like your shit don't stink.
Plus, with digital you can make exact duplicates of master recordings for redundancy, in case you have a corrupted hard disk or something during the mastering process. Analogue media would degrade too much to make usable backup copies, plus there's little technical issues like the azamith of the master machine used on "Blinded By The Light" by Manfred Man.
There's also a lot of ignorant millennial's who are quick to jump on the "digital is better than analog" bandwagon, having never actually listened to an analog recording before. They like to parrot anything they hear from their friends and peers, who have also never listened to any analog recordings.
@SSJfraz Speaking as a millennial who grew up listening to vinyl records, I can safely say that digital is far superior to analogue. I totally understand the desire to hang on to the past, and have a physical format that you can hold in your hands and appreciate, but that doesn't mean that analogue is better. I agree that there are a lot of fantastic analogue recordings that are worth listening to, but I've rarely ever hear an analogue recording that was superior to digital, and the overwhelming majority of listeners would never hear the difference.
@@ReedsRedactions Digital would have sounded considerably better to most people when it came out, because the vast majority of people listened to vinyl on horrible cheap turntables with terrible styluses which were often not even set up properly. I remember the first time I bought a turntable and had it all set up correctly with a decent stylus. I let the more senior folk in my family give it a listen and they said vinyl never sounded that good to them when they were younger, for that very reason.
I remember back in the late 80’s I was in Uni and was working for a business that did a lot of audio and visual work. One day I went down to the audio section and a lad was demonstrating his new CD Player and till this day I remember being completely blown away by how amazing it sounded. It was just phenomenal. I was sold right there. I saved up and bought a CD player (which were very expensive back then.) The first CD I played on it was a Quincy Jones - Back On the Block which was gifted to me. I was stunned with how amazing the sound was coming from my very mediocre stereo system. Still so vivid in my memory.
My friend had the first cd player (pioneer) among us. We’d go to his house salivating 😂 playing certain parts to songs over and over. It was insane. My biggest thing to do on a Friday night back then was go to the music shop
I've got some ELO and David Bowie on disk for my pioneer deck in my car. The digital to analog converter is the weakest link in an audio setup. Disk and a good player is best short of using a dedicated dack and headset.
Oh, and another thing. Just as a laugh, I do have the Fast and the Furious Tokyo drift soundtrack on disk. The bass on the cd mix is so much better than the same tracks on Spotify. I don't know who's crushing the audio between the source and the streaming service, but this has me on the path to hunting down original releases of modern songs on disk. And, the artists earn more when you buy on disk!
The Loudness Wars ruined CDs reputation as being better
@@VIDSTORAGE to be clear, cd’s ( though I like vinyl for whatever reason) will always and irrevocably kick major ass for the lord.
That’s bottom line.
That’s hands down.
And that’s word to your mother.
I did CD mastering in the early 2000’s and never learned vinyl mastering. It wasn’t difficult to master a CD well, as you’re not fighting loss characteristics of the medium. It was the ‘FM Radio Car Test’ that made mastering in the 2000’s challenging - a key driver behind the loudness wars. But, that didn’t last - lossless encoding and later streaming became a thing, and a whole new era of fighting playback medium began. I exited to the profession about the time that started becoming a thing, so I can only imagine the challenges today to keep music sounding great.
I recently went to the Re-release of the Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense in IMAX and the sound quality of that film is amazing. The 1983 concert audio was recorded on a digital multi-track recorder and is a great testament to how well digital, even in the early days, could capture the full clarity and dynamic range of a performance.
I'm an older Gen-X guy and know that digital gets a bad rap these days just from my own memories of when it was introduced. When CDs came out, it was amazing. They gave us no hiss at all, no pops or crackle and the convenience of longer no-flip playback. They were durable if relatively well taken care of, and sounded so clear and fresh. I remember early demo listening stations in stores that would have the same album on CD and LP next to each other. The difference was night and day in the quality. Headphones and speakers at the time were advertised as "digital ready" because they had the capability of going all the way up to the 22khz frequency that CDs could reproduce and our (younger) ears could possibly hear.
I now have around 600 CDs on shelves in my basement, many purchased new in the mid 1980's. Most of them sound as good now as the day I bought them. A few years ago I ripped them all to FLAC files, and the ripping software showed me how well they have endured. Almost all of those old disks copied over with 100% of the original bits intact. Only the really scratched ones had some loss (but nothing audible). The sound quality from those early days of digital audio is clear, noise free and not distorted.
Poor mastering and lossy low bandwidth files have given digital audio a bad reputation. Thanks for this video reminding people that the quality of pure analog over digital is a bit of a myth and that digital can and has proven to be a high quality method of recording music, as long as it is handled and presented to the listener with care.
I still have the first CD release of Derek and the Dominoes "Layla". It gives you listener fatigue pretty quickly which annoyed me no end because the vinyl LP didn't do that. I think you nailed it when you said the two formats are mastered differently and mistakes were made in the early days.
And mistakes are still made now. Google "loudness war" if you don't believe me.
I'll give the LP a try lol. I couldn't understand why I prefer the Spotify version over the CD.
This has been common knowledge in the audio community for years at least among those of us that don't act like digital is the devil. Though it was nice to have someone bring it up so people maybe not as entrenched in the community/hobby are aware of it and stop paroting that "Digital is shrill and Hollow"
Record the cd to tape. That should fix it.
@@nicholascortez728 I certainly don't belong to the "digital is the devil" crowd.
You'd think people would understand that vinyl is just a delivery format for the music. It doesn't impart any magical quality to it, just like a cd doesn't magically worsen it. Like you said, it's all about the mastering.
Well, I've upgraded my listening experience...
...from a Xiaomi Android mobile phone with Bluetooth headphones I bought from Lidl to a Sony Android mobile phone with the same Bluetooth headphones I bought from Lidl!
Who needs hi-res FLAC when your listening through downsampled SBC?
It requires special mastering and adds distortion. it does sound different quite often
And mastering is the entire reason why vinyl usually sounds better than digital despite no real technical advantage.
@@hotwax9376the simple fact that they can't just slap the overly boosted digital files onto it is the main reason. Vinyl has been the one medium that has by virtue of its limitations been able to stay out of the loudness war.
I have so many albums on both CD and vinyl and the only reason the vinyl version is superior is because the tracks aren't boosted to hell and back. I would prefer if they would master the tracks properly on both releases, but until they do that I'm happy to record and digitize the vinyl copy.
Vinyl though, /does/ worsen it. If it's really well-made vinyl played on decent equipment, it's not noticable. Indeed, the very best vinyl playback equipment around can even approach the fidelity of a thirty-quid CD player from Argos.
My grandpa had a huge reel to reel tape player from the late 70s and as a kid I was blown away from the audio quality, because I listened to cheap cassettes before - so whenever I hear an audiophile person praising the quality of vinyl I say “hold my grandpa‘s reel player“ 😅
Not only you gave excellent arguments against those misconceptions, but you also made a very passionate retrospective on digital recording.
Thank you very much for this video!
I've been following you for at least 10 years. It's nice to see how your channel has become more and more popular!
I've said this a million times but the difference is not analogue v. digital, it's how well the record was mixed and mastered. I have good sounding and bad sounding LPs and CDs in pretty equal proportion. Of course LPs are objectively inferior to CDs when it comes to frequency response, dynamic range and distortion.
Agreed. My 80's pressed Simon and Garfunkel'greatest hits sounds extremely bad, flat and horribly mixed and mastered while my Ghost - Impera record is one of the most clear and fantastic sounding records in my collection.
Maybe in theory, but not in practice. In reality, it's CD that is generally inferior to vinyl in all those categories because of loudness war hypercompression. In short, vinyl sounds better because it's mastered better, not because of any inherent technical advantage.
@@hotwax9376 you just confirmed what most are saying, it's in the MASTERING not the format. Agree with the consensus while pretending to disagree with it.
@@kwd-kwd Not really. He said vinyl was inferior to CD if that was true in both theory and practice, when in reality it's the opposite in practice due to the loudness war.
@@hotwax9376 I said that CDs have measurably better performance, which is just true. And then I said that you can't say that either CDs or LPs are categorically better mastered than the other format.
Fantastic video. My mind has been circling around some of these subjects for a long time, but seeing it all wrapped up and neatly presented like this is so satisfying. Thank you!
I had a friend who insisted vinyl was superior. Even though I pointed out the various ways digital was better, he refused to change his mind. If he hadn't died a couple of years ago, I would show him this video.
BTW, I first came across digital audio in 1975, when I worked as a tech for a telecom company. One thing the phone companies had to do was insert a bit of noise, as some people thought they didn't have a connection, when the line was so quiet.
The noise thing you are talking about is still a thing. Not sure if it is a generational thing, but i get flustered if there is no noise, thinking the connection dropped.
What's cool about Moroder's E=MC2 is in the titular song at the end of the album actually has Moroder reading the album credits out through a vocoder. There is indeed a part where he says 'recorded live to digital'. But great video. I've been telling people that most popular records have come from digital masters for years.
I'm a heathen with a Sony ES CD player with a tube amp built in replacing the stock amp. To me that is the ideal way to listen to music. CDs are just so much more convenient than records. CDs don't wear from playing the same track over and over. CDs are cheap, etc.
They get scratched and they can stop working after 10 years…become hard to read. If you want something that lasts, try tape. I’ve got cassettes still playable after 30 years.
CDs hardly go bad. When they do it's usually CD-Rs or they were stored in a damp location which corrodes the aluminum layer.
@@shitmandood i have only had 1 LD rot on me. My oldest CDs are from the early 80s and they all work. I never scratch them and if I do, I buy another. I also have a lot of surviving tapes too, but I need to re-cap my tape recorder and can only play them on old Panasonic Walkmans. On the go I use FLACs anymore on my S9+. Every CD I own I have ripped myself and I also love CDs because they are easy to rip.
If we played the 2 inch tape on an analog reel to reel, would it be weird dial up sounds like back when they used cassettes for computer data? Love the videos as always V.
Well said. And to add to that about 10 years ago I did a recording seminar at a local recording studio. The guy was telling a story about how he had a band he wanted to mixmaster and record everything analog tape since he had to tape machine. They got through the whole process went to submit for oppressing and the company they contacted said send us the CD… But it's mastered to tape! Which means they had to digitize and send, as at that time most if not all facilities had transferred to a digital system. Everything has to do with the mastering!
would be an interesting test for audiophools, play AAD, ADD, & DDD recordings & see if they can tell the difference
No need, they won't have a clue
A lot of tests like that have been done by audiophiles. At least those that actually care about things like that. I did them myself. As long as the resolution of ADC and DAC is high enough, it takes a long time to spot problems. For example, grab a recording, play through mediocre dac at 24bit 48khz, into a ADC at same resolution (or higher). Repeat. It takes about 16 times before it starts sounding off. You can spot deterioration from step 1, by inverting the signal and merging (it is not a flat line). But audibly it can't be heard in ABX till a long way down the chain. With good enough DAC and ADC though you get it perfect first time and can repeat as many time as you want, you get the same file every time.
The problem is - we don't have recordings that were made at the same time that have all three. A great recording engineer can make great digital while lousy engineers can masacre analog. There has not been a test to date that can hold all variables as the same. Putting a piece of music on and then proclaiming that you can't tell if it's AAD, ADD or a DDD recording is stupid. It actually proves the opposite - that digital can't be distinguished from analog when done right. So, which is the best? The analog or the digital? The equation can't go oly one way - they can't tell so digital is great without putting in - they can't tell which means that analog is superior. I don't have anyone who has heard my system be able to tell that a recording was coming from my vinyl (recorded with a full analog chain like Kevin Gray does) player over my digital player. I have heard that my system is the best audio they have ever heard. When I play Carly simon's Anticipation and they hear the drums come in from an OG recording off of LP they look at me and ask, "How do they do that? How come the drums are so real? How come it sounds so good?" They have never experienced audio on the level they experience and then they are believers in vinyl even if they have a $70 Sharp turntable and cartridge.
It would have to be of the same recording for a meaningful comparison, so it's unlikely to exist.
@@JackBealeGuitar Snake oil only works when u know you're taking it.
The real issue isn’t the playback medium, but whether or not the music was recorded, mixed and mastered digitally, and it’s not necessarily inherent to that medium. Music today is terribly produced, there’s no stereo imaging, everything is pushed to the front and made loud, and people aren’t doing things by ear, they’re going by waveforms on a screen. There’s also way too many effects and tomfoolery. Recording on analog tape makes it MUCH harder to muck around. The real solution is to go back to old school style production, not necessarily analog, but it definitely helps. If I’m a recording artist, I’m insisting on recording on tape.
lol, you have no idea of what you are talking about, the level of audio engineering these days is light years ahead of what it has ever been.
@@lo2740 Things can most definitely be light years ahead in time while at the same time be terribly produced.
@@lo2740 that’s one of the many problems. Overproduction is a massive issue. You’ll end up with a sound that’s way too sterile, without the slightest hint of liveliness or warmth. It’s why bad production from the 1970s, like the early KISS albums, sounds so much better than “good” production today. One example of this is reverb. The idea of natural reverb, that is, reverb that isn’t an effect but the result of recording in an enclosed space that doesn’t have soundproofing foam, is extremely foreign and bizarre to modern producers because it goes against everything they’ve been taught.
@@lo2740 I also forgot to mention albums with stripped down production that’s meant to be intentionally bad like the British metal band Venom. Raw production is their specialty, it’s a part of their sound.
Nowadays you push a button, get sound, cut/paste it where you want. Bsck inthe day they spent hours, days, weeks, trying to create a sound effect they were looking for. Real creativity like that is dead, and music suffers for it.
My problem with the audiophile community has always been this obsession with the idea that quality of equipment makes this wildly of a difference...when in reality, the biggest issue is and always will be listening environment and sound quality. The majority of modern, even really cheap stuff, equipment will provide the same quality as relatively high end equipment from the 80s and 90s. The biggest ways you could improve your listening experience in today's world are things audiophiles are largely uninterested in. A key example in my experience being multi-channel or positional surround audio.
Pretty much every album is in 2 channel stereo though. Anything over 2 channels can’t make a difference. If you have a 5.1 surround system, it will only play through the front two speakers and the subwoofer
What exactly do you mean by equipment? I will mostly agree with dac/amp/cables, but speakers absolutely make an audible difference irrespective of the listening environment. A 300$ speaker completely blows a 100$ speaker out of the water. Similarly 1000$ can get you significantly better sound compared to 300$. There is a point where you will have diminishing returns, but you can't deny that there can be easily identifiable differences between speakers.
Yes, speakers make a huge difference.
Speakers are tuned and made differently by every manufacturer out there. Some are more bass heavy, others offer more clarity between sounds, and some are just muffled garbage. You get what you pay for with diminishing returns on speaker equipment, be it headphones, ear buds, bookshelf speakers, computer speakers, and Bluetooth equipment. Certain compression methods can actually be heard if you have excellent hearing and train yourself to notice little differences. Do you listen to music with a bunch of instruments creating a huge harmony of sounds or do you listen to simple pop songs? Genre also has an impact on what speaker equipment you really need for the fullest experience.
I used to rock skullcandy fullmetal jackets thinking they were the greatest, then I got DUNU DN2000s for 4x the price and it was a night and day difference in overall sound quality and experience. Same thing can be said about old bookshelf speakers being better than my higher-end logitech computer speakers, which both get blown away by my Monoprice studio monitors. These days I'm satisfied with my Sennheiser HD58x jubilees I got off the massdrop for over ear audio and my monoprice speakers for normal daily use. Premium sound without the huge price tag. I used to be repulsed with Bluetooth audio but these days it's getting better. Still not quite to the level of hardwired sets though.
You mention multichannel and positional audio, I assume you're talking about spacial and 3d audio. I had a headset that was designed for this kind of stuff. It was only ever really useful when playing video games that utilize spatial audio. Most music is not produced to be played this way but it would be amazing if it were. I'd love to feel like I was in the center of an orchestra being blown away from all sides with beautiful sounds.
In the end, it's all about your ears, genre, and what you want out of music. If you want to hear every little detail with extreme accurate reproduction and clarity, you need better output devices and probably a decent dac/amp. Even then, you may be able to get by without those. My headphones get driven just fine by my phone and computer because they were designed that way and my studio monitors have built-in amps. Could the experience be better? Maybe, but do I need it? No. Would it be nice to have down the road? Sure why not.
One final note I have to say and it's a little story of mine. Had a coworker that used cheap headphones from Walmart and thought that was all she ever needed because it sounded fine to her. She insisted she didn't need anything else because its just speakers and the phone processes the music. When she tried my sennheisers out for the first time her mind was blown. She heard sounds she never knew existed in her music because it was muffled and mixed in with other sounds. It brought a whole new meaning to her love of her favorite songs. Idk what it was she was listening to, never asked. But I do know that quality can make a difference if it impacted her that much. It's too bad dedicated audio shops are a rare find these days, I'd totally recommend going out and trying new equipment before buying.
the audiophile community is populated with OCD nut jobs
Awesome summary. You touch almost every reason why I'm actually into vinyl and sourcing records from (mostly) the 80s. They are mastered very well and often sound more livelike than the CDs of the same albums. First ruined by a dull "uncolored" mixing, later the loudness wars. If you're into 70s and 80s music, a record player is really a must and of course need to stick with the original presses, not the later remastered ones which suffer from a lot of the mistakes from modern releases in general.
One aspect you didn't touch (which was probably out of the scope for your video anyway), is that when you play a record you usually play it from beginning to end, getting the full experience. It becomes the activity and grabs your full attention, making you listen to the songs you'd usually skip, only to realize that if they made the cut for the album, they actually do deserve to be listened to :)
I was not aware that so much of the mastering took place digitally already in the 70s and 80s, so that's an argument I'm going to take along into the next "vinyl is better than CD because analog rules"-discussion :)
Awesome history lesson on the wonders that is digital sound. I'm now going to listen to some of these awesome tracks you played snippets of ... on steaming! *GASP*
I recently got a copy of Oingo Boingo's 1994 album 'Boingo'. It's a new release having never been put out on vinyl before. It sounds staggeringly good. One of the best sounding records in my collection. And of course, it was digitally produced.
This is definitely one of your best videos to date for the record collector enthusiast.
As for someone who has been listening to music on vinyl since age 4.
I highly enjoyed the detail and the many classic albums you put into it.
Definitely a great video you can come back to for a second or third helping.😎
Thank you for the interesting video. From a production PoV, digital recording makes things so much easier and moldable (maybe a bit too much, but that's another topic). From a pure listener's PoV, some times analog media is better and sometimes digital media is better.. depends on the recording/mastering, as you said.
With that said, I am 80% vinyl at this point because .. I have the time and means to indulge in that ritual experience at this stage of life. Many of the albums are digitally recorded, for sure. But, I prefer the whole musical/visual experience of watching a record spin... crackles and pops (and the hum of the tube amp transformer) included. I personally find it more immersive, for whatever reason.
I can verify this firsthand. I have a high-end (from the '80s) stereo. It costed
another factor is that a lot of people since the early 2000s listen to music through lossily compressed formats, which sound significantly worse when the volume is low
@@TorutheRedFox That is also correct. Yes, loudness war is a thing, but also other compromises that had to be taken into consideration.
@@justapeasant8949 I don't think that IS correct. I spent a lot of time comparing compression algorithms back in the early 2000s. I compared a lot of MP3 compression utilities, and compared bitrates, and then did it all again when I got my first iPod and had access to AAC.
What I can tell you is, with LAME encoding MP3s at max quality, a 160kbps stream usually sounds good enough, but complex material can be troublesome. At 192kbps, it's good enough for anything but critical listening. At 256kbps, it's all but completely transparent. At 320kbps, good luck identifying the difference between that and raw PCM.
With AAC, I found that 128kbps was a fine compromise between space and quality for on-the-go listening. iTunes started selling 256kbps, which is close enough to perfect that it doesn't matter anymore.
Compression algorithms weren't ever really a problem. The implementations had to be good (I found some encoders that made 320kbps MP3s that were unlistenable.. just awful..), and at least for a long long time (not sure about now), nothing could touch the iTunes encoder for AAC quality. I kept trying FAAC, and kept going back to iTunes.
Now, about all those people listening on tiny devices... That's absolutely true. But the thing that drives me nutty: You don't have to ruin it for everyone else! All those tiny devices are already putting everything through massive amounts of DSP. Just compress the dynamics on playback, and leave the source material alone! Then, if you HAVE a nice stereo, you can still take advantage of it. But no. Everything is mastered to be played from something with less fidelity than an alarm clock radio, and expensive equipment just plays the same awful sound, except louder.
The reason I like digital is that a dirty "1" is still a "1" and can be rendered back to its original clarity without the "dirt."
Even minor data loss if its brief enough it can interpolate the result, which you wont be able to hear that its slightly wrong.
Can't say I like the sound of a skipping CD...
@@alexatkinSome players do a better job than others
@@Faxie83Skipping is not a dirty 1, that's multiple missing 1s
What I've said when it comes to music about digital vs. analog is that digital is perfect within its standards, but it is limited by those standards, while analog has the ability to be tweeked for better and better sound but there will always be distortion.
Good video that hits most of the points I would make. Audio quality is primarily down to good production (record/mix/master) and, especially for vinyl, manufacture. Too many studios since the 1990s have lost the ability to master music with good soundstage and without turning all the knobs to 11. I wouldn't likely use a Bluetooth audio device for critical listening (BT audio typically uses lossy compression; may as well just listen to an mp3 copy off your phone), but it's fine for casual listening or at a party or something.
Loved hearing about all the examples and the chronology of digitally-recorded releases. However I was waiting to hear you mention Flim & The BB's, but alas! Had you heard about them before? Iirc They got wrapped up in 3M's early digital recording equipment test and appear to have recorded the first digital non-classical album. They arranged a direct-to-disc analog session for their first album in 1978, with a prototype 50.4kHz machine as backup. They wound up preferring the sound of the "backup" and released that instead, and for some reason didn't keep either the acetate master nor the digital information, so that first one can't be re-pressed in any fashion. Someone uploaded a vinyl rip to youtube, at least!
I have some rock/pop CDs from the mid-80s, on smaller labels, that were obviously just straight digitizations of the analogue master tapes - you can hear the tape hiss, the print-through, the drop-outs. It adds to the charm.
Most labels, like Polydor did the same thing. Releases for 80's sound great.
The problem was that a lot of them had pre-emphasis for LP (The RIAA phono curve). That’s why people thought CD’s were thin and shrill.
@@5roundsrapid263 RIAA is like Dolby NR, correction is applied before pressing, and mirrored curve is applied during playback. All Phono preamps should do this de-emphasis process.
@@mateuszorlinski7334 Yes, but CD players don’t use a mirrored curve. Some early CD releases forgot to take the phono curve off, and the treble was way too high.
@@5roundsrapid263 I guess you're talking about late 80's releases, becouse it would be weird, that somebody in PolyGram labels (owned by Philips) would forget about the phono curve before mailing the masters to the only pressing Plant in Europe
Wow, these enormous digital recording consoles used so much hardware. Now, you can practically consolidate them into a small box or even a mobile device...
Yeah, isn't it awful? Give me clunky buttons any dang day of the week.
You make some very good and salient points regarding vinyl produced from the 80's onward. However, by far the vast majority of my collection and of many others was produced and even purchased prior to the move to digital mastering. Plus, in my case, my playback equipment also dates back to the 1970's. That said, at my age, I am fortunate enough in the hearing department to still be able to enjoy a CD or vinyl recording but would be hard pressed to tell the difference, LOL!
So many folks in these comments have never been in a studio, mixed a record, or listened to differences between digital recordings and analog records in that environment. There are so many minuscule details which can effect the ultimate playback sound quality. More than anything else, where this becomes audible is in the mixing and mastering stage. There is also something we refer to as euphonics, or pleasing distortions that are entirely impossible in digital space. Also missed from this take is that 2” magnetic tape remained the standard mix down, even when the multitrack recording may have been recorded digitally.
Just like many people still (or again) like to buy vinyl, I like to buy CD's every once in a while. In the digital domain, the bits stay 0 and 1 unless you really go crazy, and I think the location where they get translated to analog should be as close to my ears as possible. But I certainly understand how vinyl can have a nostalgic impact on people. Every once in a while I see an ad or a video on a channel like this and I think: wouldn't it be nice to have a record player again? But then I remember I don't own any vinyl anymore, and I remember why 🙂.
It just doesn't sound as good as a properly mastered CD. Even if that CD is from an analog recording. Everyone who says vinyl sounds better than CD is either listening to the wrong music (or the wrong extra loud remaster version) on CD, or maybe they think the snap crackle and pop of the record player *is* the music?
CDs just don't last. At least with my handling. I own vinyl records which I bought new as a kid in the 1970s and they survived all the teenage parties and being played thousands of times on crappy turntables. They still work. All the CDs I bought in the late 80s and 90s are scratched up, broken or lost...
@@albinklein7680 Unless you scratch the label side where the data is, CDs can handle a surprising amount of polish. You're not wrong though, the digital nature of CDs means that they either work or don't.
@@albinklein7680 Handle them better dude, all my CD's from the 90's still look and play like new.
@@Alabaster335 i just stay with vinyl records and flac. CDs never caught on to me. Sorry. I just don't like that format.
A lot of good masters do not exist in any format but vinyl. Record companies are scraping them off in order to prolong royalties and shit, for example on streaming sites you only get the last master (which is usually the worst). A lot of real good music has never been transferred to CD. Only way to enjoy it is to hunt down the old records.
Not to mention the Mobile Fidelity debacle where the supposedly all- analogue pressings actually have a digital (DSD) stage. Good video
When I was in my teens I had some high end audio equipment hooked up in many of my old cars. Multiple poi amps, alpine tape decks, and high end Kenwood tape decks. I listened to a great deal of rap and r&b tapes. I still believe to this day the bass response on tapes back then was just superior to anything. I don’t know if this was just because I had huge subs in my cars back then, or I was just not deaf yet from all that booming bass over the years? When I put my first CD deck in the car, the best sounding CD I still own today is Toni Braxtons first album produced by Laface Records. I think this review is spot on the money. It all comes down to how the music is mastered in the studio that makes all the difference. I’m old and pretty tone deaf now after all those years of heavy bass, so it would really take some high end equipment on really loud for me to even notice a difference these days. 😆🤦🏼♂️
Audiophile/audiofoolery has always entertained me. As an electronics engineer seeing people spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on speaker cables, interconnects and mains leads always tickled me, because I knew that on the inside of their amps were cables not even as good as bell wire. It's like when you put expensive oil in your car, you feel that your car is faster, it isn't but you have to fool yourself otherwise you'd feel like a chump. For 99.9% of people, the most robust playback system is what's important. That 0.1% that guarantees from start to finish the signal has not been degraded, most expensive equipment, records stored in climate-controlled underground bunkers may then correctly say their system sounds better. Digital improved/introduced music to the masses.
I think the biggest excuse/misconceptions today revolve around the mastering process. Taking a master from the 60 or 70s and remastering for cd is not a fair comparison to how good cd can sound. A better comparison is to actually listen to the same song mastered for vinyl compared to it mastered for cd. Problem is, you can't replicate that for the 60s 70s music since the studio setup and half the musicians don't exist anymore.
I honestly have more beef with MP3 than vinyl. There are so many different encoding options for MP3 it's a dice roll if I'm going to find a 128Kbps CBR or 320Kbps VBR MP3, so I don't know what I'm going into until I look at the bit rate. Vinyl is constant, yeah it might wear over time, but it's not a dice roll of decent compressed audio at 320Kbps, or just ever so slightly distorted 128Kbps MP3. Personally I still use CDs and rip them to FLAC so I can make copies with proper CD-TEXT data. For portable situations I use a combination of OPUS and MP3 when actually listening to music. I keep the FLAC files because I have a good source file to transcode to when needed. I wouldn't consider myself an audiophile, but I do prefer to put a bit more effort into not purposely ruining the experience.
For me Vinyl has always been an aesthetic choice and I don’t think there’s anything objectively superior about it.
I like listening to vinyl records because I enjoy the physical act of placing the record down and positioning the tone arm. It’s just so much more satisfying to me than bringing up Spotify on my phone (which I also use).
100% agree. Pulling out a Sinatra album, playing it on my grandparents' 1961 Webcor hi-fi, it's not about the sound (which is great) but all about the experience. Choosing the album, the physical act of putting it on the turntable, the warm-up of the tubes, the glow of the Webcor emblem light on the front of the speakers, it's all about the experience. No digital device containing millions of songs replicates that experience.
Always comes down to how it's mixed and mastered.
A fantastic video as always
Boom! Three minutes in, just fantastic and SUBSCRIBED. Thank you.
I figured a lot of LPs nowadays are digitally-sourced because they want to use the aging, fragile original tapes as little as possible. I remember reading somewhere that the Byrds' master tapes became so worn out from constant reissues that they had to go back to the multi-tracks and create new mixdowns in the mid-90s.
I bet some audiophiles are losing their mind.
They have nothing to lose 😂
Their
As an audiophile, I can confirm that I have lost my mind.
“there”
Another classic upload amigo ! You always sound good from here 😊
Great video. This is something that just was hammered into me as an electrical engineer. (Analog) signal processing means that in every step of the way, you're going to introduce some noise. Ambient noise, noise from your play head, noise from whatever you're applying to the sound, noise from the record head, and so on. In digital signal processing, you do not lose anything unless you apply an operation that destroys some part of the information in the signal (clipping being the most easily understandable). The only part of the audio you lose is a) from the noise of the ADC itself, and b) from the lowpass you use before utilizing your ADC to cut off signal that would produce image frequencies per Nyquist-Shannon. And, seriously, what, audiophiles think they can hear if a song has a 22kHz lowpass applied to it? I mean, today, even my cheap ass audio interface can do 192kHz sampling - way, way more than any human could possibly ever hear.
Digital is THE way to go, and the technology behind it all is just amazing; I can take just my laptop and audio interface to band practice and get the same sound quailty you would've needed a studio for just 40 years ago, saving as many takes as I want, being able to non-destructively edit the recording as many times as I please - yet people want to go back to banging rocks together with 'superior analog'.
Just to note: Nothing against Vinyls, as you said in the end yourself. It's just fun to hold this thing in your hand that has all the information inscribed into it in a physical way. It's also a great way to support Artists, and you get beautiful artwork with it to boot. It's also just an experience to listen to a vinyl, because the process is more involved than just pressing play on your phone; but that has nothing to do with the whole digital-analog thing :)
I still remember clear as day hearing my first true digitally recorded album on a digital media somewhere around 1988, Stevie Nicks's Belladonna (one of my favorite albums), on CD, after having only known the LP version from when the album was first released, and WOW what a huge difference compared to the LP. It was jaw dropping. To this day still can't quite wrap my head around how or why the two sounded so different since CD is still technically an analog playback when it gets to the speakers by way of the DAC. Don't think that was the first CD I'd ever heard (first might have been a Hollies re-release??? Don't remember) but it was definitely the first time anyone around me had ever heard that huge of a difference between formats.. And that experience was the start of the end of vinyl for me. CD's it was, for albums I cared about, when budget allowed, those didn't come cheap!
For what it's worth I honestly believe the only time vinyl ever sounded better than something else was during the cheap-cassette era of the 80's and by cheap tape I mean the kind you bought because they were at least a few bucks cheaper than the LP where a few bucks actually meant something in the 80's, for you youngsters out there! Not that cassettes were inferior in any way, there were just inferior-made casettes to choose from over others, at the time meant to be created and sold for a price.. $5 re-releases on tape intended to play in your cheap portable tape player where sound quality wasn't really the main focus, portability & price was. There were a few cases where the expensive casette version (if there was one) sounded better than the CD. Anyhow that was a long way of saying sometimes there were tapes so crap that the cheaper LP version might have actually sounded better. That was the 80's for ya
Funny enough today in the not so roaring 20's the only thing roaring is my tinnitus so it doesn't matter anyway, they all sound about the same to me *now* 🤣😂
What turntable were you using and what CD player ?
@@cirenosnor5768 oh hell, I can't really remember. Me and the sibs went through a lot of record players, stuff got traded around. I know one of the good ones we had at one point was a Technics but we had some crap ones too. And I think the CD player was JVC.. That one might actually still be around in someone's attic
@@cirenosnor5768Good question. People act as if the playback equipment somehow doesn't matter. Even a cheap CD player should deliver good sound, but a turntable requires careful setup. I cringe now at the times my friends and I would change our own cartridge by merely placing it on the tonearm in a random position without alignment.
@@minkwelder I can follow that up with something just as trite. Are you listening to the music with your equipment, or are you using music to listen to your equipment?
I am so glad you posted this. It’s insane what gets posted in the Record Collector Facebook groups. There is such a disdain for “crappy” digital music. Vinyl sounds better. The only thing vinyl offers over properly mastered digital music is surface noise, crackle, pops and ticks.
It’s insane the amount of time, money and space the vinyl snobs allocate to their “hobby”.
Which further pushes the argument that the vast majority of audiophiles don't understand anything about audio.
Amazing content. I love that you demonstrate it with real examples.
The only reason I see for playing music in an "entierly analog way", is the pure philosophical-emotional feeling you sometimes have _knowing_ it's like that. The same way your home brewed beer brewed in your grandfathers old container feels different than one you bought from some craft beer company. The same way a CNC-made piece of wood feels different than the one genuinely carved with simple tools. There may be now decernable difference, but your knowledge of the process _may_ be part of your experience. (This is not contrary to anything you said in the video, I just want to point out that the way we humans experience things may be influenced by aquired data about the _way_ we got to this experience)
And as many others have pointed out: There are still many reasons to play LPs. The big pictures, the noises of the pickup meeting accumulated dust, the turning disc, the smell etc. And I think many appreciate these simpler physical formats in a very "digital world", where most "things" are not physical except the phones or PCs or tablets you happen to use or consume the "things" on.
Excellent content! I remember some friends who worked on one of the first Canadian all-digital recordings from the group Saga's 1981 album Worlds Apart.
They were using the Sony PCM betamax encoder and decoder, to one-inch C-format, as a mix-down master.
And this is why i love your videos, you make great points in all of them including this one! thanks for making it clear for alot of people to understand!
I feel like we are reliving the 70's and 80's when I see vinyl spinning on the turntable. Great, where are the 45's at?
While were at it, where are the reel projectors and top loading VCRs and landline phones on the wall? And tube TVs? See, these jack*sses are all suffering from "selective nostalgia." They will shamelessly use the latest technology for everything BUT their music, which is mostly just 1 or 2 genres and usually the low-IQ kind.
A huge factor in the outcome seems to be how well the recording was engineered.
I had a friend that as an EE was on the research team that developed GE's MRI machines presumably in the late seventies or the early eighties. Unlike me who hardly ever listens to music & with little interest in equipment my friend Mike had a professional reel to reel tape machine & an equally impresive turntable he had restored to factory new.
One day he asked me if I'd like to hear the difference where he intended on using a 15 inch per second 1/4 inch master tape recording, quality vinyl recording & CD recording of a presentstion on stereo imaging as the demonstration.
Honestly, I was blown away by how fabulous the master tape sounded compared to the rest. He did say vinyl quality can vary and perhaps it sounded better than the digital recording, but it was very close to the CD and I do not have good hearing.
I was so impressed by the high speed master tape that I spent some money on Super Audio CD equipment to hopefully have a similar experience.
Well, was it worth it. Yes & no. I found what really made a difference for me was being able to turn the compression off with respect to the SACD and if the recording had significant dynamic range the outcome was very much more pleasing to my ears. On the other hand if the recording had little dynamic range to me it was why bother.
Anyway, during my visit I asked what was his gripe against CD recordings and he said aliasing or artifacts due to aliasing.
Later I looked into this subject and as a pure mathemstician I am able to understand the mathematics that were the basis of the often quoted Shannon Nyquist quotes.
Ok, with the above in mind if you want to remove all possibilities for having any aliasing in the audible range of hearing you indeed need two samples, but not in just the complete cycle of the given frequency, rather in the half cycle. As I remember having two samples in the complete frequency can start to allow for aliasing somewhere around 13 khz.
Now, I am not an audio engineer or EE, rather I was formally educated at the graduate level in pure mathematics with probability being my focus, so I have no idea what is done to prevent aliasing if anything. None the less I would hardly think it would make much of a difference and I suspect the difference I heard those years ago could have been due to compression or sound engineering means and methods.
Incidentally, after being blown away by the hearing the master tape which was nearly as big a difference as hearing a tiny portable radio in comparison to a home stereo I asked Mike what he thought would produce an even better analog recording than a wide audio tape at high speed. His answer was a silver based wide film recorded at high speed using the entire width of the film.
Very good and informative video on digital vs analogue I've personally watched/heard in a while. Thank you.
i have come to realize that digital application has become better over the years of its introduction.
Where it's failings are, you addressed here. Dynamic range.
Digital recording engineers, I'd say dropped the ball with their dedication to the "Loudness War". Pretty much a reversal on the true potential of digital's 90+ db of noise reduction componded with excessive compression.
That's where and when vinyl edged ahead of the CD.
Now we have Streaming. That did not, for the most part reduce the usage of compression originating from the Loudness Wars.
All and all, digital is superior to analogue, but has forfeited it's advantages with the fatiguing application of excessive compression..of which not even digital radio benefits!
The exact same technique is pushed over when they are mastering and pressing vinyl records, so these days you get all the disadvantages of analogue together with disadvantages from digital.
@@brugj03 Yes. Remastered vinyl are often sourced by digital transformations. Not by original 1/2 inch tape masters.
No gains to vinyl or CD or streaming. I agree.
Once the signal is compressed, its just about impossible to reverse. That requires the original masters before the mixing and editing!
I have a couple of Direct to Disk recordings that are more true to the original event, than multi-track recording techniques. The dynamic range is more believable without that annoying pumping effect of compression release.
Great video. I still have old CD's that say AAD, ADD and DDD for the way it was mastered. I was more into CD's as I was born in the 70s.
Or DDDD for albums produced by Digital Synthesizers, Mixed in Protools and pressed on CD or released on DAT. Removing the last analog link the microphone :)
@@mspysu79 I think Switched on Bach 2000 has DDDD on the label. The first time DAC it hits is yours. ;)
@@mspysu79 I thought DDD was a far as it went. Good to know.
@@Tommi-Cand you're right, quadruple-D is entirely unofficial 😉
@@MsZiomallo I thought you were right. There is always odd stuff that you never hear about that some companies use. 👍
In my opinion, this is your best video so far. 👍🏆
What an amazing, interesting, and informative video! That was super enjoyable, and I learned a lot. Thank you very much!
Well researched and well explained. Thank you.
Not surprised that arch-perfectionist Fagen would have been an early adopter of digital. The Nightfly is such a great-sounding album.
Thank you guys!
Excellent explanation and useful with providing the full context
I just got a 7” reel to reel and I’m really starting to question why vinyl is the “be all end all” of quality
There's a strong urge by the audiophile ecosystem to create and sustain the illusion of analog superiority, because both the audiophiles (who have spent ridiculous amounts of money in the hobby) and the audio companies (who have strong sales due to audiophiles themselves) depend on this environment to thrive. As soon as these people start to say things like "warmth", "3D" or "life-like" terms when describing analog formats, you know it's all snobbish gibberish.
I recently watched a video of a guy who took a 'high end' power filter/ distribution system (or power strip, as some say) and gut the filter and several other components from it.
He said that his new power filter unit (which no longer contained a power filter) made the music come alive!
The physics behind this, he explained, was the special acoustic star configuration of the solid core wired ground connection.
For this service he was charging 3 or 4 hundred bucks... Plus the cost of the original unit!
Great video and great points. I think that conflating digital with the CD format is the crux of the issue. Digital equipment in studios and mastering houses is many times better in terms of quality than the average home CD player, or even CD players that cost a couple of grand. The fact that the program audio can be squashed to achieve maximum loudness on CDs has just made things worse, as cheap op amps and DACs are pushed beyond their limits during playback. I helped my mom replace her turntable recently which presented the opportunity to compare a symphony she owns on LP with the same symphony she also has on CD. The difference was minimal. The LP did indeed have a more pleasing lower midrange 'warmth' and had a touch more dynamic range than the CD. You had to listen closely to tell, though. It was a fun exercise for me but she just wanted a new turntable to play LPs she has held onto for decades.
Great video VWestlife! What has always amazed me is why did they never make a digital LP, as in encoded in digital and playback requires a digital to analog decoder as well. That would get rid of any of the noise problems on the analog side I would think, they did it with magnetic tape.. And a similar thing with the HIFI VCR sound systems....
The other point of the digital CD was the oversampling of the machine to not have skips was lacking in the early models as well as the MASH filter not being there.
We also listen in a analog form, and some people can hear or kind of hear the spaces of the digital bits... Not as noticeable with tape hiss or LP background noise.
"why did they never make a digital LP"
What does that even mean? And why would anyone make a 12 inch CD??
@@RobertR3750 Actually I do recall somewhere I, I think here on CZcams someone had a vinyl record of computer program....
Nice video,you have so much knowledge about these things.👍🏼
Yep, CD is perfectly capable of all the audio quality you could ever wish for. It’s just the mastering engineer that stands between you and it!
and your CD player as well.
Yes it’s just sad we are getting brick walled or loudness war cd releases and vinyl releases can actually have better dynamics. It’s a crazy world, if I was a conspiracy theorist, I would think it would be a perfect reason to up charge vinyl which they are doing. Selling people the inferior format because it actually can be better. It’s such a strange world. That being said I’m going to try to go down the vinyl rabbit hole but I love high quality digital files and CDs if done well. If only we had Dolby atmos CDs I think everyone would win. The audiophiles that want the best dynamic range, and the vinyl purists can still have their thing. But as of now , we are stuck in a very strange place where the best mixes of songs can be on only a couple streaming services or actually vinyl? Whaaa
So many great recordings in this video with clear stereo images. I sure love well recorded and mastered music!
Excellent analysis! I learned all the stuff like wow, flutter, THD etc WRT to records back in 1972 or so. I couldn't afford high-end gear, but I did have the best components I could afford, not even a tuner, rather than an off-the-shelf "system" which I thought was for the undiscriminating (Oh dear!). But by the early Nineties, I realised CDs sounded so good I went out and bought a full CD, Cassette, Amp/Tuner system that still had a phono pre-amp input, and kept the turntable I still have. As a telecommunications tech, I knew most people were already being digitised on their phone calls, how it was done, and what the dynamic range, frequency response and noise figures meant. I had no doubt digital was better, but I still wanted to be able to play my old records.
Then in the mid-nineties, I went mad on Flamenco and was glad I could hoover up old Flamenco LPs for peanuts to play on my old turntable. For that I cared not a whit about quality, it was the music I cared about. Well, I cared enough to tape all the LPs so that I could archive them with no further plays.
Now here I am, hardly ever playing records, cassettes or CDs, on CZcams unable to judge its quality with my tired old ears!
THANK YOU. I've been saying this for years.
I remember walking into a Radio Shack years and years ago and they had there playing on the shelf a CD player. I had never heard one, there were headphones attached which was a great opportunity. I was used to LP's, reel to reel tapes, and cassette tapes. Interestingly my ears were excellent back then and I could hear some artifacts in the CD recording, but I had to listen hard to notice them. It was plainly better than LP or tape. Tape you could always hear the surface of the tape, even with Dolby controlling the hiss there was that unevenness, LP's you could hear the roughness of the grooves that developed quickly with wear and of course the dirt and scratches. CD has none of that plus low (but not zero) distortion and a spectacular dynamic range (that no one uses any more).
They use it now to sell HD remasters, which basically just means they didn't compress the crap out of them, not that its inherently any better than CD quality if mastered the same. Though you have to be careful where you listen even then as things like Tidal "HiFi" as MQA is a garbage codec that actually alter the audio. Even they seem to be finally adopting FLAC which hopefully fixes that. But its such a con when the CD quality can sound just as good, if they use the good master.
@@alexatkin A friend of mine is a jazz aficionado but not an audiophile. He's returned "remastered" jazz CD's because they don't sound as good as the original non-remastered CD. He was unable to say in what way they didn't sound as good, but I can guess. Next time I speak with him I'll ask for specific examples.
Fantastic video. Thank you for clearing up some misinfo!
loved the Video. Very Informative. Thank you so much for your video!
Excellent piece, dude - I've always said that it isn't the medium, it's how it's used. If you have well mastered digital, it's going to to sound fantastic. Same with analog. I'm a lover of MUSIC, and I don't care what medium it's on as long as the quality is there, and these days most of the time it is, no matter how it was recorded.
It makes me sad the number of times I've heard a song in a movie and it sounded night/day better than the CD, because for movies they have to follow rules for dynamic range set by Dolby, etc. Even a lossy Dolby track often sounds better, though I can usually tell the better dynamics from a lossless one.
This is another thing that makes me sad today, so much stuff streaming only where the audio bitrate is way too low resulting in a flat audio track.
It’s all about the mix and mastering!
One other thing worth mentioning is that vinyl was almost always cut on a delay from the playback of the master. This was so the cutting engineer could continually monitor and adjust the groove spacing to compensate for any drastic loudness changes that would potentially ruin a cut. More often than not this was achieved with a digital delay line, even going back to the 70s. Vinyl has a very pleasant sound, but most audiophile "wisdom" is bullshit. Edit: just re-watched this and must have missed the part at 7:50
Nice assumption overlord. Many many times they used the digital side by to monitor and CUT from the analog. Research things first maybe.
@@user-yk4gd1fl4zand how would that work? The engineer has to be able to preview what's about to hit the cutting head in a couple of seconds. Only way to do that is by having a delay. Which, by the end of the 70s, was usually digital.
I didn’t even have to watch the video. I’ve been collecting Vinyl for about 13 years now and I’ve always and still do think most CD/Digital sounds better than vinyl. It’s so clear. And matter how new your vinyl is, there’s still gonna have background noise and it only it’s worse each time you play. I still love Vinyl more for the collecting and all the different variations of pressings and releases(for The Beatles especially), and it’s fun placing the vinyl on the turntable and moving the needle, watching it spin around.
But if I want the best/clear sound possible, I go for digital.
I thought I was the only one