Vinyl sound quality?

[aliasa]

Stuart Hawkes disagrees with you

" Vinyl is an extremely high quality medium "
http://redbullmusicacademyradio.com/shows/1141/

Is there a transcript for the show?

[deadly_habit]

oh look it's this thread again...

[murky21]

Vinyl's have undeniable warmth and if mastered correctly and all the variables are as they should be something about them just sound dope..

thank god for Serato so i dont have to categorically choose...

as for 320's they are pretty much the minimum for me, but as I have more shit to buy nowdays than just vinyl iv had to make a cost saving but just downloading FLAC or WAV which are both 1400+ kbps mosta the time and are noticeably better than 320's even on the most gutless of systems...

[danoldboy]

Stuart Hawkes disagrees with you
" Vinyl is an extremely high quality medium "
http://redbullmusicacademyradio.com/shows/1141/

It is colourisation. Nothing more, nothing less. Vinyl is a high quality medium, but assuming it magically makes electronic music sound better is just nonsense.

Acoustic or analogue music is a different story entirely. But the moment you introduce digital into the chain, you can forget about any benefits it offers.

It's got nothing to do with magic, it's to do with the limitations of digital technology in it's representation of waveforms especially at 44.1/16

[dr h]

Stuart Hawkes disagrees with you
" Vinyl is an extremely high quality medium "
http://redbullmusicacademyradio.com/shows/1141/

It is colourisation. Nothing more, nothing less. Vinyl is a high quality medium, but assuming it magically makes electronic music sound better is just nonsense.

Acoustic or analogue music is a different story entirely. But the moment you introduce digital into the chain, you can forget about any benefits it offers.

It's got nothing to do with magic, it's to do with the limitations of digital technology in it's representation of waveforms especially at 44.1/16

yes, i know. now tell me how this makes a pre-rendered digital file sound better. i'll make it easy for you - it doesn't.

[badger]

At outlook this year they were using thier own rig they'd brought over from the uk along with serato SL3 I believe. If they felt vinyl sounded better i'm sure it wouldn't be much of a struggle to bring over a couple of crates along with the rig.

the advantages of why people use serato over vinyl are an entirely different debate and have little to do with sound quality

[101010]

Stuart Hawkes disagrees with you
" Vinyl is an extremely high quality medium "
http://redbullmusicacademyradio.com/shows/1141/

It is colourisation. Nothing more, nothing less. Vinyl is a high quality medium, but assuming it magically makes electronic music sound better is just nonsense.

Acoustic or analogue music is a different story entirely. But the moment you introduce digital into the chain, you can forget about any benefits it offers.

Stuart Hawkes one of the worlds most respected mastering engineers vs dr h off of dubstepforum
I know whos opinion I trust.

[manuel]

when swapping between vinyl and 320s on serato i can instantly tell the difference in sound quality and i've hardly got what you would call a trained ear

Im not going to get in to this debate but this is the reason I sold my Serato. When mixing from a vinyl to an MP3 the MP3 just sounded shit.

Im not saying one is better than the other. All I'm saying is in my opinion vinyl will always be number one. The serato playing record just sounded terrible in comparison.

[dr h]

Stuart Hawkes disagrees with you
" Vinyl is an extremely high quality medium "
http://redbullmusicacademyradio.com/shows/1141/

It is colourisation. Nothing more, nothing less. Vinyl is a high quality medium, but assuming it magically makes electronic music sound better is just nonsense.

Acoustic or analogue music is a different story entirely. But the moment you introduce digital into the chain, you can forget about any benefits it offers.

Stuart Hawkes one of the worlds most respected mastering engineers vs dr h off of dubstepforum
I know whos opinion I trust.

fuck opinions, learn the facts. send an email to stuart and ask him the benefits of putting a digitally produced and render wav onto vinyl. unless he wants a sale, he'll explain why it won't improve the quality of the music and will instead just colour it.

stop being a little retard sheep and learn the science. that's all i can say. if you idiots want to continue believing that giving a cutter a wav file and putting it on vinyl makes it sound better, then continue to do so.

i used to get my records cut at heathmans before it closed and they were some of the best vinyl engineers in the uk. however, not a single tune sounded better on vinyl than it did on the mastered wav they sent me, exactly because i produced all the tunes digitally.

read this: http://www.mobineko.com/pricelists/uk-m ... 2009v3.pdf

"IT IS IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND THAT POORLY MASTERED AUDIO WILL SOUND WORSE ON VINYL"

shite in, even shiter out basically.

[badger]

Im not going to get in to this debate but this is the reason I sold my Serato. When mixing from a vinyl to an MP3 the MP3 just sounded shit.

Im not saying one is better than the other. All I'm saying is in my opinion vinyl will always be number one. The serato playing record just sounded terrible in comparison.

to be fair this is also an issue with the sound quality of the serato box as well as the sound quality of mp3s. i assume you had SL1 and SL3 does sound better

but i fully agree about vinyl. i love it personally for far more reasons other than it's sound but that's a massive thing in its favour

[Basic A]

Stuart Hawkes disagrees with you
" Vinyl is an extremely high quality medium "
http://redbullmusicacademyradio.com/shows/1141/

It is colourisation. Nothing more, nothing less. Vinyl is a high quality medium, but assuming it magically makes electronic music sound better is just nonsense.

Acoustic or analogue music is a different story entirely. But the moment you introduce digital into the chain, you can forget about any benefits it offers.

It's got nothing to do with magic, it's to do with the limitations of digital technology in it's representation of waveforms especially at 44.1/16

Dude, quit arguing with him, hes right, and your not reading him thoroughly. Hes saying that vinyl isnt going to be of the same quality as whats coming out of your DAW, because this music is made DIGITALLY. Hes not arguing that if you recrded something organic, like a guitar, or a drum, that it would sound better preserved as a waveform in wax. Hes saying that 9/10 times, electronic dance music is being made with 16bit or 320kb drum samples, 32 bit output synths, ect. And that vinyl is in no way going to improve it.

What your essentially trying to argue is that if I take a 192k mp3 I rip off youtube, send it to a cut house, and have a dub pressed, its no longer going to be youtube quality. thats just not true man. Vinyl in relation to electronic music is just colored upsampling.

[Input_1]

Unless you're listening to WAVs, vinyl is quite a lot better. It'll sound even better in comparison if you're playing standard MP3s through a shitty soundcard from your computer too. The whole vinyl collecting thing is a massive money sink though, incredibly addictive. It's good being able to bag those limited press vinyl only releases though.

It is costly, but you can't beat the feeling (as i'm sure loads will know) of slipping a shiny new record out it's sleeve, hearing the little static crackle
and enjoying the tune in all it's glory. Personally, i love having a physical collection of my music, i'll keep it for the rest of my days.

Hospital records have started giving away free MP3s to those who buy the vinyls, because they realise people invest in decks and the music, so they should have to spend hours recording it back into MP3.

But at the end of the day, it's down to whether you want to spend the money, MP3s are a whole lot easier/ practical sometimes, and they don't scratch or wear out over time.......

[101010]

Stuart Hawkes disagrees with you
" Vinyl is an extremely high quality medium "
http://redbullmusicacademyradio.com/shows/1141/

It is colourisation. Nothing more, nothing less. Vinyl is a high quality medium, but assuming it magically makes electronic music sound better is just nonsense.

Acoustic or analogue music is a different story entirely. But the moment you introduce digital into the chain, you can forget about any benefits it offers.

Stuart Hawkes one of the worlds most respected mastering engineers vs dr h off of dubstepforum
I know whos opinion I trust.

fuck opinions, learn the facts. send an email to stuart and ask him the benefits of putting a digitally produced and render wav onto vinyl. unless he wants a sale, he'll explain why it won't improve the quality of the music and will instead just colour it.

stop being a little retard sheep and learn the science. that's all i can say. if you idiots want to continue believing that giving a cutter a wav file and putting it on vinyl makes it sound better, then continue to do so.

i used to get my records cut at heathmans before it closed and they were some of the best vinyl engineers in the uk. however, not a single tune sounded better on vinyl than it did on the mastered wav they sent me, exactly because i produced all the tunes digitally.

read this: http://www.mobineko.com/pricelists/uk-m ... 2009v3.pdf

"IT IS IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND THAT POORLY MASTERED AUDIO WILL SOUND WORSE ON VINYL"

shite in, even shiter out basically.

But you're not a sound engineer and you're just regurgitating facts you picked up so why would anyone trust your opinion over Stuart Hawkes.

[dr h]

jesus, i give up.

[danoldboy]

Stuart Hawkes disagrees with you
" Vinyl is an extremely high quality medium "
http://redbullmusicacademyradio.com/shows/1141/

It is colourisation. Nothing more, nothing less. Vinyl is a high quality medium, but assuming it magically makes electronic music sound better is just nonsense.

Acoustic or analogue music is a different story entirely. But the moment you introduce digital into the chain, you can forget about any benefits it offers.

It's got nothing to do with magic, it's to do with the limitations of digital technology in it's representation of waveforms especially at 44.1/16

What your essentially trying to argue is that if I take a 192k mp3 I rip off youtube, send it to a cut house, and have a dub pressed, its no longer going to be youtube quality. thats just not true man. Vinyl in relation to electronic music is just colored upsampling.

I'm not arguing that at all mate, I'm saying that colouration isn't the only reason vinyl can sound superior to cd.

[prism]

gramophone 1200.

[rinseballs21]

there is a major sound difference from mp3 to vinyl.

as ive noticed over time from all the shows i have attended, vinyl dj's tracks sound much much larger on a rig, 320's at times feel as if their is a wall in front of the speakers blocking some frequencies from getting noticed. everytime i see caspa i enjoy his sets a shitload because all of his tightly pressed vinyls sound so fucking amazing on a system.

this is not a slight on digital dj's, 12th planet fucking murders it everytime i see him spin, as does rusko and plastician to name a few. also i have recently been impressed with skream and benga who have since switched to cdj's.

the time i started realizing this was recently when i went to see skream and benga, they dropped coki's plate, horrid henry, that shit went off so proper rewinded 3 times. But it was in mp3 or wav format (couldn't hear difference), and i could tell that some of the song was missing frequencies it sounded a little flat, i can only imagine what horrid henry sounded like at DMZ on a well mastered vinyl. mmmmmhmmm

The only people who can tell a difference in reality are music heads like us, producers, dj's etc. you need a trained ear, but after a while you can hear the difference.

[staticcast]

Bullshit thread is bullshit. I don't often join in the vinyl-digital debate so I'm gonna step into the fray. I don't want to come across as a dick, but this is my actual field of work -- my background is electrical engineering and I'm now an audio DSP developer by trade. I've spent the past few months working on the Traktor timecode, and a large part of that was researching exactly what goes on on a vinyl record.

Here are some truths:

* On a mixdown peaking around 0dBFS, you're not gonna hear the difference between 16bit/44khz WAV and anything better.
There are good reasons to produce and do processing at higher bitrates and samplerates, but on a final mixdown, you will absolutely not hear the difference. 44kHz can accurately represent frequencies up to 22k, which is higher than you can hear. And quantization noise at 16bit is at -96 dB, which is quieter than you can hear. That's time and amplitude sorted, and there's nothing else to it.

* I defy anyone to tell the difference between a 16/44k WAV and a 320kbps mp3 in a double-blind test on any speakers apart from very, very good monitors in a very well treated room.
There is a difference, but to say it's noticable in a club - or even on your DJ monitoring setup - is ludicrous. Very expensive headphones on certain types of audio content, maybe. Monitoring mid-side separately, maybe. Mastering studio, maybe. Apart from that - no.

* To say that vinyl is more "accurate" than MP3 is absolutely fucking ludicrous, ESPECIALLY using a DJ cartridge which is anything but accurate.
Cut a WAV to vinyl, play it back (even on the most expensive system in the world), and compare the waveform with the original. Compare this with encoding to 320kbps MP3 and examining the waveform together with the original. Neither will null 100%, but the MP3 artifacts will be negligible, whereas the vinyl will invariably distort to quite a large degree, especially if you're using a sub-optimal setup. (Technics 1200s and Ortofons are not "optimal".)

....HOWEVER.....

* To say that vinyl "sounds better" -- this is ENTIRELY plausible.
The reason is not "accuracy" or "fidelity", or at least, it's not that vinyl is more accurate or faithful. In terms of accuracy and fidelity, digital - even compressed digital - shits all over vinyl (and to a lesser extent tape). It's called "analog" for a reason, and that's because the reproduction is an "analogy", not a "copy", of the original.

The reason vinyl "sounds better" to many people - myself included - is because of the incapability of the vinyl medium of reproducing a sound 100% accurately. There are MANY types of distortion present in a vinyl recording, many of which sound pleasing to the ear. Some of these are introduced at the cutting stage, and can be mitigated to a certain extent by an experience cutting engineer who knows the medium well (eg cutting at 45 rpm, cutting tracks with high frequency content at the outside of the disk, ensuring alignment etc). Most distortion, though, is introduced at the playback stage, which is why it's totally laughable to say that playing back a record on your 1210s (which is not a hi fidelity turntable in the slightest) with a DJ stylus (which is not designed for fidelity either - even the 100 quid ones) is more "precise" than "a bunch of 1s and 0s".

Don't get me wrong. I love vinyl. I just think the vinyl-vs-digital argument is one of the most misguided debates that's plaged the music since the history of recorded audio.

Oh yeah, and remember that 100% percent of dubstep releases are WAVs before they're cut to vinyl. Vinyl's "great sound" is COLORATION. That's not a bad thing. It's just the truth.

[Masocre]

Bullshit thread is bullshit. I don't often join in the vinyl-digital debate so I'm gonna step into the fray. I don't want to come across as a dick, but this is my actual field of work -- my background is electrical engineering and I'm now an audio DSP developer by trade. I've spent the past few months working on the Traktor timecode, and a large part of that was researching exactly what goes on on a vinyl record.

Here are some truths:

* On a mixdown peaking around 0dBFS, you're not gonna hear the difference between 16bit/44khz WAV and anything better.
There are good reasons to produce and do processing at higher bitrates and samplerates, but on a final mixdown, you will absolutely not hear the difference. 44kHz can accurately represent frequencies up to 22k, which is higher than you can hear. And quantization noise at 16bit is at -96 dB, which is quieter than you can hear. That's time and amplitude sorted, and there's nothing else to it.

* I defy anyone to tell the difference between a 16/44k WAV and a 320kbps mp3 in a double-blind test on any speakers apart from very, very good monitors in a very well treated room.
There is a difference, but to say it's noticable in a club - or even on your DJ monitoring setup - is ludicrous. Very expensive headphones on certain types of audio content, maybe. Monitoring mid-side separately, maybe. Mastering studio, maybe. Apart from that - no.

* To say that vinyl is more "accurate" than MP3 is absolutely fucking ludicrous, ESPECIALLY using a DJ cartridge which is anything but accurate.
Cut a WAV to vinyl, play it back (even on the most expensive system in the world), and compare the waveform with the original. Compare this with encoding to 320kbps MP3 and examining the waveform together with the original. Neither will null 100%, but the MP3 artifacts will be negligible, whereas the vinyl will invariably distort to quite a large degree, especially if you're using a sub-optimal setup. (Technics 1200s and Ortofons are not "optimal".)

....HOWEVER.....

* To say that vinyl "sounds better" -- this is ENTIRELY plausible.
The reason is not "accuracy" or "fidelity", or at least, it's not that vinyl is more accurate or faithful. In terms of accuracy and fidelity, digital - even compressed digital - shits all over vinyl (and to a lesser extent tape). It's called "analog" for a reason, and that's because the reproduction is an "analogy", not a "copy", of the original.

The reason vinyl "sounds better" to many people - myself included - is because of the incapability of the vinyl medium of reproducing a sound 100% accurately. There are MANY types of distortion present in a vinyl recording, many of which sound pleasing to the ear. Some of these are introduced at the cutting stage, and can be mitigated to a certain extent by an experience cutting engineer who knows the medium well (eg cutting at 45 rpm, cutting tracks with high frequency content at the outside of the disk, ensuring alignment etc). Most distortion, though, is introduced at the playback stage, which is why it's totally laughable to say that playing back a record on your 1210s (which is not a hi fidelity turntable in the slightest) with a DJ stylus (which is not designed for fidelity either - even the 100 quid ones) is more "precise" than "a bunch of 1s and 0s".

Don't get me wrong. I love vinyl. I just think the vinyl-vs-digital argument is one of the most misguided debates that's plaged the music since the history of recorded audio.

Oh yeah, and remember that 100% percent of dubstep releases are WAVs before they're cut to vinyl. Vinyl's "great sound" is COLORATION. That's not a bad thing. It's just the truth.

Amen.

[Sirius]

there is a benefit of vinyl that hasn't been covered yet.....
when the needle scratches with record... alpha waves are emitted!!! shit makes ya feel good!!

also... the OP never said anything about digital music (although Im sure that was assumed).

when a digital track is put through tube compression.... no longer do ya have a binary representation.
it smoothes out the transitions between the samples.

Its all about the fusion between analogue & digital!!

!!chea