Vinyl sound quality?

[madmeesh]

That was a damn informative post, static!

Is it true that certain tones that sound just fine in the digital version (such as, for example, a sub bass, a strong kick and a tribal drum all hitting at once) can be problematic as content to be pressed to vinyl. In other words, vinyl is much pickier about bass content than if it remains in 010101001 world.

On the flip side of this, could it be that sub bass that is geared towards ultra-clean vinyl pressings is sometimes superior bass (Mala, DMZ, etc.)

[deadly_habit]

it's not that them all hitting it once that's the problem, it would be if they are in stereo below a certain point
if you're technically minded and don't mind nerding out some more
http://www.gearslutz.com/board/masterin ... vinyl.html

[rob sparx]

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.

This debate is tired - ive made all my points on older threads and can't be bothered to go there again but I will say this: If your playing high quality 24bit WAV/AIFF recordings (ie. recorded on very expensive sound card/hardware) of laquer (can be recorded before it has been sent for pressing)/acetate/vinyl then there is very little noticable difference in sound quality if any between the digital recording and the physical one.

I'm sure Loefah wouldn't be recording all his acetates to serato if there was any noticable loss in sound quality between physical recordings and top quality digital recording (ie. not mp3 and recorded from a vinyl type source not just plain digital) played thru good quality equipment eg. the latest version of serato not the older version not the older one which is probably what your familiar with

Although serato can play 24bit and a cdj only 16bit this doesn't necessarily mean serato will sound better it depends on the A-D D-A converters (the difference between the old and newer version of serato) which will make a lot more difference than the difference between 16/24bit - dither a 24bit recording to 16 bit and you won't hear any difference unless its classical/jazz/real quiet music of the non dance variety. I suspect that cdj-800/1000s actually sound nicer than the new serato but I haven't properly compared them yet so can't say for sure.

[staticcast]

Is it true that certain tones that sound just fine in the digital version (such as, for example, a sub bass, a strong kick and a tribal drum all hitting at once) can be problematic as content to be pressed to vinyl. In other words, vinyl is much pickier about bass content than if it remains in 010101001 world.

Very much so, but not that particular example....

* It's difficult to cut low frequency content that's not mono -- low frequencies cause a much larger excursion of the needle (ie bigger "wiggles"), and because the sum (L+R) signal is cut laterally and the difference (L-R) signal vertically, out-of-phase bass can make the cutting stylus literally either "jump" into the air or go all the way through the acetate and hit the aluminium below. You CAN cut stereo bass, but at quite small amplitudes. Most vinyl MEs work in M-S rather than L-R, and just high-pass everything above 300Hz in the Side signal (effectively making the bass mono). It's even more of a problem in playback, as I'm sure you've experienced before when back-cueing a kick drum.

* Very high frequency content takes a lot of energy to cut and can trip the fuses on the cutting lathe if you've got a LOT of 16kHz or so. And as you get towards the centre of the record -- especially at 33rpm -- the "wiggles" of a high frequency signal get much closer together, to the point where the needle can't track them and just slides over the modulation instead (I think this is called tracing distortion but I might've got my terminology mixed up). This effect is VERY noticeable on a good speaker system -- grab a 33rpm 12" that's cut up to the label, and listen to the hihats on the first track, and at the end of the last track. The highs roll off and distort in a way that's not subtle, particularly on a spherical DJ stylus. Sometimes it sounds nice (old house records etc), sometimes it's not what you want.

Generally speaking most of the distortion happens in playback.

On the flip side of this, could it be that sub bass that is geared towards ultra-clean vinyl pressings is sometimes superior bass (Mala, DMZ, etc.)

I think the really stripped back stuff can benefit most from being pressed to vinyl because there's a lot of space to hear the extra artifacts that cutting to acetate (and playing back) induces. It's easy for something very clean to sound a bit sterile and vinyl tames that edge a bit. Vinyl crackle too, IMHO, has quite a strong psychoacoustic effect when the music is sparse enough to reveal it.

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.

Christ, this is a misconception that I thought had died out years ago. Audio coming from a sound card is NOT digital. It's analog. It's analog as soon as it leaves your D/A converter.... hence, uh, digital-to-analog converter. All soundcards have a reconstruction filter after the D/A converter that smoothes out the waveform from a "staircase" to a continuous curve, and if you have a good sound soundcard then it will be indistinguishable from the original signal. If you look at the audio coming out of your PC on an oscilloscope it's not like you're gonna see lots of little jagged edges just cos it's "digital".

TJ

[staticcast]

Although serato can play 24bit and a cdj only 16bit this doesn't necessarily mean serato will sound better it depends on the A-D D-A converters (the difference between the old and newer version of serato) which will make a lot more difference than the difference between 16/24bit - dither a 24bit recording to 16 bit and you won't hear any difference unless its classical/jazz/real quiet music of the non dance variety.

I've never tried it in person but I've heard nasty things about the D/A on the older SL1 box, so that might be why a lot of people say it sounds like shit.

I suspect that cdj-800/1000s actually sound nicer than the new serato but I haven't properly compared them yet so can't say for sure.

I've never done a side-by-side comparison, but I'm not sure this is true -- even the mkIII is a good 4 years old now and the mkIII is 7 years old, so I wouldn't necessarily count on it. A friend who used to work at Pioneer said that the CDJ1000 converters weren't really its strong point. No idea about the new 2000s though.

From what I hear, the SL3 converters are much better, and the Audio 8 is pretty decent as well, though I'm not sure I'd trust the phono preamp on either for anything other than timecode.

[test_recordings]

You can't beat the sound quality of analogue with a digital reproduction, it's like wearing clothes with loads of thin holes in (an analogy of analogue's continuous waveform being solid material and digital being separated by the sampling frequency).

Go to listen to a good dub sound system spinning dub plates and it makes EDM sound weak in comparison!

[rob sparx]

Although serato can play 24bit and a cdj only 16bit this doesn't necessarily mean serato will sound better it depends on the A-D D-A converters (the difference between the old and newer version of serato) which will make a lot more difference than the difference between 16/24bit - dither a 24bit recording to 16 bit and you won't hear any difference unless its classical/jazz/real quiet music of the non dance variety.

I've never tried it in person but I've heard nasty things about the D/A on the older SL1 box, so that might be why a lot of people say it sounds like shit.

I suspect that cdj-800/1000s actually sound nicer than the new serato but I haven't properly compared them yet so can't say for sure.

I've never done a side-by-side comparison, but I'm not sure this is true -- even the mkIII is a good 4 years old now and the mkIII is 7 years old, so I wouldn't necessarily count on it. A friend who used to work at Pioneer said that the CDJ1000 converters weren't really its strong point. No idea about the new 2000s though.

From what I hear, the SL3 converters are much better, and the Audio 8 is pretty decent as well, though I'm not sure I'd trust the phono preamp on either for anything other than timecode.

You may well be right im just a bit of a pioneer fan as for using in spazzy rave situations cdjs are a lot less hassle despite not looking as good as serato - not sure if there's any truth in this at all (may well be bullshit) but ive heard that the combination of pioneer cdjs and mixer makes for better sound reproduction (than other manufacturer combinations) bcos its the same manufacturer??

400/800/1000 deffo sounds miles better than the old serato anyway

[rob sparx]

You can't beat the sound quality of analogue with a digital reproduction, it's like wearing clothes with loads of thin holes in (an analogy of analogue's continuous waveform being solid material and digital being separated by the sampling frequency).

Go to listen to a good dub sound system spinning dub plates and it makes EDM sound weak in comparison!

Don't be a sheep though go out and put that theory to the test in the way I've described ie. make a high quality (£1000+ soundcard) recording of a dubplate and play through a decent cdj or the new serato in a club, see if you can actually hear any significant difference. I very much doubt you've actually ever done a proper comparison you've probably just compared a vinyl to an mp3 of the same tune which is an unfair comparison as one has the benefits of vinyl sound quality whilst the other is just digital, if the mp3 was a high quality recording of the vinyl they would sound pretty similar.

Sure there's a load of theory as to why analogue is better than digital but doesn't mean they won't sound pretty much exactly the same when recorded and played back with quality kit - digital recordings should be after all transparent recreations of sound so if you record a vinyl then it will sound like a vinyl, ok sample rates etc may mean when speed is changed the character of the sound is a bit different but its not very noticable

[mashmash]

You can't beat the sound quality of analogue with a digital reproduction, it's like wearing clothes with loads of thin holes in (an analogy of analogue's continuous waveform being solid material and digital being separated by the sampling frequency).

Go to listen to a good dub sound system spinning dub plates and it makes EDM sound weak in comparison!

Don't be a sheep though go out and put that theory to the test in the way I've described ie. make a high quality (£1000+ soundcard) recording of a dubplate and play through a decent cdj or the new serato in a club, see if you can actually hear any significant difference. I very much doubt you've actually ever done a proper comparison you've probably just compared a vinyl to an mp3 of the same tune which is an unfair comparison as one has the benefits of vinyl sound quality whilst the other is just digital, if the mp3 was a high quality recording of the vinyl they would sound pretty similar.

/thread

[rob sparx]

You can't beat the sound quality of analogue with a digital reproduction, it's like wearing clothes with loads of thin holes in (an analogy of analogue's continuous waveform being solid material and digital being separated by the sampling frequency).

Go to listen to a good dub sound system spinning dub plates and it makes EDM sound weak in comparison!

Don't be a sheep though go out and put that theory to the test in the way I've described ie. make a high quality (£1000+ soundcard) recording of a dubplate and play through a decent cdj or the new serato in a club, see if you can actually hear any significant difference. I very much doubt you've actually ever done a proper comparison you've probably just compared a vinyl to an mp3 of the same tune which is an unfair comparison as one has the benefits of vinyl sound quality whilst the other is just digital, if the mp3 was a high quality recording of the vinyl they would sound pretty similar.

/thread

I'd like to see someone fit a vinyl in a cd player!

[deadly_habit]

god i love people arguing from sheer ignorance
why these threads are so tedious every time they pop up
least static and rob know their shit

[mashmash]

You can't beat the sound quality of analogue with a digital reproduction, it's like wearing clothes with loads of thin holes in (an analogy of analogue's continuous waveform being solid material and digital being separated by the sampling frequency).

Go to listen to a good dub sound system spinning dub plates and it makes EDM sound weak in comparison!

Don't be a sheep though go out and put that theory to the test in the way I've described ie. make a high quality (£1000+ soundcard) recording of a dubplate and play through a decent cdj or the new serato in a club, see if you can actually hear any significant difference. I very much doubt you've actually ever done a proper comparison you've probably just compared a vinyl to an mp3 of the same tune which is an unfair comparison as one has the benefits of vinyl sound quality whilst the other is just digital, if the mp3 was a high quality recording of the vinyl they would sound pretty similar.

/thread

I'd like to see someone fit a vinyl in a cd player!

lol, i don't know what this guy is on, some of his videos are funny though

[pompende]

* 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.

uhhhhh yes i can do that. set up a test if you like. You could have 1 wav and 1 320 transcoded to wav of the same tune, host them both, and collect responses.
Do you not know what the compression algorithm looks like? mp3s are 'pixilated' across both frequency and time. This results in transient 'noise' being averaged out. And because the compression is based on a psychoacoustic model (one that targets speech and the kind of periodic tones that come from live instruments) the compression ALWAYS and NECESSARILY removes data pertaining to transient noises (esp the more inventive and irregular percussion samples) and aperiodic tones (like the synths you find in those new tearout tunes with the 8 different patches slapped together).

don't know why/how you could think that they are non-differentiable...

[rob sparx]

* 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.

uhhhhh yes i can do that. set up a test if you like. You could have 1 wav and 1 320 transcoded to wav of the same tune, host them both, and collect responses.
Do you not know what the compression algorithm looks like? mp3s are 'pixilated' across both frequency and time. This results in transient 'noise' being averaged out. And because the compression is based on a psychoacoustic model (one that targets speech and the kind of periodic tones that come from live instruments) the compression ALWAYS and NECESSARILY removes data pertaining to transient noises (esp the more inventive and irregular percussion samples) and aperiodic tones (like the synths you find in those new tearout tunes with the 8 different patches slapped together).

don't know why/how you could think that they are non-differentiable...

Not saying your wrong but you won't be able to actually hear any difference at least not with loud dance music, mabeye different with jazz or classical as they are much quieter. I've done this test with loads of tunes its very hard to tell any difference in blind comparisons you can read all you like about how the data has changed but in the real world its real hard to hear any difference with most tunes, BTW if your not using a decent mp3 converter like Lame then of course the 320s are going to sound shit

[jarmzeyboy]

If the OP spends like 20K on a decent system then the difference will be amazing, vinyl will sound better than mp3's but wave's and mastered cds will sound great as well

[rob sparx]

If the OP spends like 20K on a decent system then the difference will be amazing, vinyl will sound better than mp3's but wave's and mastered cds will sound great as well

Was chatting to my mate who owns a huge soundsystem about this yesterday - we agreed that if you played a top quality recording of a dubplate thru pioneer-2000s on such a system there probably wouldn't be much difference in sound quality betwenn the original and the recording but definately something worth testing out. Also worth mentioning that if your using a laptop and serato on a system with over 20K of sub bass then you really should spend a good £200-300 shock proofing your computer so the hard drive doesn't get damaged by sub bass.

[summersault]

Thanks everyone for sharing your perspectives!

After reading these comments I've decided to wait with the gramophone player. My motivation for buying a gramophone player was mainly due to my interest in electronic music but now it makes sense to me that digital isn't going to sound that much better on vinyl (unless you really are enthusiatic about the percieved warmth/colour) and with my level of experience, I'm believe I'm better off spending the extra money on speakers.

But feel free to keep the discussion going if it hasn't already been debated enough.

[pkay]

this thread is jokes.

SOURCE>MASTER>MEDIUM

Dubstep is a bad test subject for this argument as Vinyl vs Digital is usually a debate of quality of production/label/mastering/quality control.

Same tune, same source, same quality mastering, only medium being the differentiating factor the difference is minute at best. Especially when .wav/flac/etc are available.

@original poster: do what suits you best. Most people on this forum are just trying to chat shit for internet cool points. Though there is some sound quality difference between vinyl and the average digital medium, it is not as crucial as speakers, mixer, or other items in the line of user end audio reproduction

[wolf89]

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.

This guy is EXACTLY on point

[Basic A]

* 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.

uhhhhh yes i can do that. set up a test if you like. You could have 1 wav and 1 320 transcoded to wav of the same tune, host them both, and collect responses.
Do you not know what the compression algorithm looks like? mp3s are 'pixilated' across both frequency and time. This results in transient 'noise' being averaged out. And because the compression is based on a psychoacoustic model (one that targets speech and the kind of periodic tones that come from live instruments) the compression ALWAYS and NECESSARILY removes data pertaining to transient noises (esp the more inventive and irregular percussion samples) and aperiodic tones (like the synths you find in those new tearout tunes with the 8 different patches slapped together).

don't know why/how you could think that they are non-differentiable...

Not saying your wrong but you won't be able to actually hear any difference at least not with loud dance music, mabeye different with jazz or classical as they are much quieter. I've done this test with loads of tunes its very hard to tell any difference in blind comparisons you can read all you like about how the data has changed but in the real world its real hard to hear any difference with most tunes, BTW if your not using a decent mp3 converter like Lame then of course the 320s are going to sound shit

This answers both this question and the digital vs. analogue debate... Rob is right btw.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYTlN6wjcvQ