Hi-fi Mp3

[iignotus]

It's strange how the difference you're hearing is physiologically near-impossible. At least 90% percent of people who say Vinyl is better than CDs are complete story-tellers. The other 10% simply have a better analog rig than digital one (which may include badly mastered CDs).

it also depends on how the album itself was made. a well-made thick record has all of the "resolution" of a cd, and for an album that was recorded & mastered analog, you don't have to put up with whatever's introduced by the digitization process.

on the other hand, it's not really fair to compare a CD side by side with the LP unless the CD is a remaster...often the CD releases are just rush jobs...

Completely correct. That's why I've said that you can easily hear the difference if you have a badly-mastered CD. There are plenty of people/companies that have no idea what they're doing in ADD or AAD conversion. Many think that louder is better, and couldn't care less about clipping. They also do insane things such as bass boost, brightening, or other audio filters to the music they're in charge of, in order to make it more 'attractive'. All these things are usually not an issue in Vinyl recordings (mostly since they're now generally out of production, and certainly out of widespread production).

However, to say that there's actually a noticeable difference between CD and Vinyl simply because one's digital and one's analog is ludicrous. Mastering and production values have nothing to do with format specification, and the CD was created specifically in mind of being a replacement to Vinyl and Tape, which has the requisite of being just as good or better than its predecessor.

Edit: Well, you've changed most of your post, but I believe what I wrote here still stands.

 

[iignotus]

It's strange how the difference you're hearing is physiologically near-impossible

Therefore, they will sound different.

Well of course they will. They're not the same thing.

Well if they sound different (I meant perceptually by a human; though, you may have meant by an oscilloscope), people are going to say that one sounds better than the other. I am saying most people will say vinyl sounds better.

Most people will say vinyl sounds better because they think it's the right thing to say since they've heard so many self-titled audio experts claim likewise. Double-blind testing is often not even an option since Vinyl records sound much different than CDs, without even considering 'quality', and subjectivity and bias will immediately come into play.

But you do, after all, only have two ears, so even that's not neccesary.

Have you ever heard a sound from behind you? How about in front of you? to the side? just a little off center? You may have two ears, but you can still hear in 3 dimensions. Multi-channel recordings are used because it would be an incredible technical achievment (next to impossible) to be able to get accurate 3 dimensional sound from two speakers, and multi-channel is the easy way to recreate a 3 dimensional sound experience.

Multi-channel setups are still unneccesary in most situations. If they don't augment the source audio, then all they do is seperate channels based on frequency; something your brain can already do. If they do tamper with the source audio, they make artificial 3D coordinates based on some arbitrary ruleset. The only way that any audio setup with more than 2 channels will be different than one with only 2 channels is if the source audio was recorded with that number of channels in the first place. Nearly every studio music recording in the past 40 years has been made with stereo equipment only. The only important development in multi-channel sound has been in video games, where you can program what stream goes to what channel, and (I believe) movies.

 

[god_at_hell]

Hm .. i think most of the "vinyl is better than CD" speaking is psychological, because there are people like Drak which don't have such a good hearing and most people don't have good amplifiers ... BUT if you have very good equipment and good ears, there is a slight difference.

Like most people should know the CD-format has the parameters 16bit per sample and 44100 samples per second. The theorem from Nyquist and Shannon says, that your samplingrate has to be at least two times higher than your frequency you want to digitalize. Otherwise you'll get aliasing-artefacts. If we say that a young person can her up to 18000 hz, this means you have to sample with at least 36000 hz to get the specific frequency. Now there comes the problem, that the harmonics (i don't know if this is the right expression ... google gave it to me .. the german word is "Oberschwingung") of a sound influence the effect the sound has to individual people. In the interval from 1 to 22000hz the sampled music with 44100hz samplingrate has the same sound like the analoge sound, but for the listener the sound produces slightliy different impressions. You could analyse if the bitdepth of 16bit isn't enough to, but i have no information about this .
To catch the harmoics the format SACD and DVD-A were introduced. For example with DVD-A you have 24bit samples and 192000 samples per second (stereo). This should be enough to catch every relevant harmonics.

The whole effect is much smaller than the influence of bad DA-converters, so you have to get good equitment to hear this ... there vinyl has an advantage, because you don't have to convert the signal.

 

[rokdcasbah]

Edit: Well, you've changed most of your post, but I believe what I wrote here still stands.

gotta learn to wait till i'm done thinking to hit reply

edit: god_at_hell, harmonics is the correct word. and i've heard that before, about people being able to "sense" the presence or absence of higher-order harmonics rather than hear them outright.

donny: you shouldn't have said "with cds are digital, vinyl is analog, therefore they are different". they are indeed VERY different, but it has more to do with the shortcomings of each medium than an inherent difference between digital and analog audio. remember that to your ears, there is no such thing as digital audio. a DAC turns the impulses back into waves (well, rather squarish looking wave-things anyway) so really with vinyl vs cd you are traiding certain kinds of "distortion" for certain others. although i tend to agree with the idea that the higher-order frequencies are missed by your ears on some level. but i have to admit that it's more on principle...i don't have any great desire to spend my days doing ABX testing