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Topic: [TROLLBAIT] Dare I start another vinyl topic? (Read 41312 times) previous topic - next topic
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Re: Dare I start another vinyl topic?

Reply #50 –
Problems with the test files:
If you're trying to isolate the effects of vinyl, you can't do that with samples made from analog tape masters which are already two or more generations down from the original.  Many of the issues with tape and vinyl are similar in several aspects, and will thus it would be difficult or impossible to differentiate between a vinyl copy of an analog master vs a digital copy of the same master, assuming pristine vinyl once surface noise and ticks are eliminated.

If you want to isolate vinyl differences you have to start with masters better than vinyl in all aspects, and that would most likely be a digital master. 

You might also number the files so people posting their "results" with files 1, 2, 3...etc... will have some means of definitive identification. 

I'm not sure what validity there is in evaluating a vinyl that has already been noise reduced and de-clicked, as those are the big issues.  What's left after that is distortion of various kinds, much of which exists in the analog tape chain as well.  So what you're actually asking is if we could identify second or greater generation analog master transferred to vinyl vs a similar master transferred to digital.  Essentially, "can you see if my window is dirty by looking through this other dirty window?"  I don't know what that proves, or even what the point is.

In my own tests of vinyl and CD made from the same digital master with no changes (and with the lacquer cut conservatively so as not to "push" the limits of the medium), I could get first-play pristine vinyl to sound exactly like the CD on the outer half of the vinyl, up until the area between tracks where surface noise was the tell, or where a vinyl imperfection was audible.  However, past several plays, there were other issues creeping in, and our material didn't stress separation much at all.  So it got down to surface noise and ticks, then groove wear distortion.  Inner grooves of course were a different story.

I guess it goes without saying that comparing a CD and vinyl of the same recording is just an exercise, as they've taken usually entirely different mastering paths.

Re: Dare I start another vinyl topic?

Reply #51 –
Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on
Looks like they were originally lossy compressed. How else to explain the brick wall @ 16 kHz?
That's explained in the readme file, but I'll repeat it here anyway:

I noticed that the vinyl rips (made at 44.1kHz using a M-Audio AP2496) had energy up to 22kHz, whereas all of the CD rips seemed to have nothing above the 20kHz mark. So to remove the possibility of seeing the difference using a simple frequency analysis, I decided to brickwall everything above 16kHz. I used CoolEdit's FFT filter to do that. The files were not passed through a lossy compression step.

Re: Dare I start another vinyl topic?

Reply #52 –
Quote from: old tech on
Not very confident of my results.  I listened in front of my PC rather than streaming the files to the hi fi but here it goes...
1. Vinyl                  5. Digital
2. Digital              6. Digital
3. Digital              7. Vinyl
4.Vinyl                  8. Digital
Thanks for taking the trouble, but since I didn't number the files, I'm not sure which files your numbers refer to.
Assuming it is the order they are found in the ZIP file, then we have:
1. Eberhard Weber
2. Frankie
3. Gordon Giltrap
4. Kevin Ayers
5. King Crimson
6. Queen
7. Saint-Saens
8. Tchaikovsky
Does my numbering match yours?

Re: Dare I start another vinyl topic?

Reply #53 –
Quote from: bennetng on
Then the test files are vinyl rips with laborious digital restoration applied.
They are indeed.

Quote from: bennetng on
These files are just as invalid as Atmasphere's revolutionary mic rip, if the purpose of the test is to demonstrate "live" vinyl playback, as AJ mentioned.
The purpose was NOT to demostrate "live" vinyl playback.

I feel like I'm having to repeat myself, but let me try and explain once again:
I got the impression that there are some forum members who feel that vinyl has a whole raft of problems *in addition to* simple surface noise, ticks and pops. Their characterisation of vinyl as having high distortion, poor frequency response, bad crosstalk, etc. suggested to me that they believed that even if vinyl had no surface noise, it would still be grossly inadequate and easily identifiable. My challenge is therefore for those people (who I now accept may be a figment of my imagination) to identify vinyl after it has had the obvious tell-tale noise removed.

Re: Dare I start another vinyl topic?

Reply #54 –
Quote from: cliveb on
Quote from: old tech on
Not very confident of my results.  I listened in front of my PC rather than streaming the files to the hi fi but here it goes...
1. Vinyl                  5. Digital
2. Digital              6. Digital
3. Digital              7. Vinyl
4.Vinyl                  8. Digital
Thanks for taking the trouble, but since I didn't number the files, I'm not sure which files your numbers refer to.
Assuming it is the order they are found in the ZIP file, then we have:
1. Eberhard Weber
2. Frankie
3. Gordon Giltrap
4. Kevin Ayers
5. King Crimson
6. Queen
7. Saint-Saens
8. Tchaikovsky
Does my numbering match yours?
Don't reveal anything yet, worked 16hrs yesterday, so I'll listen some time today.
Loudspeaker manufacturer

Re: Dare I start another vinyl topic?

Reply #55 –
My guess:
Kevin Ayers - Day By Day - vinyl
All others - digital

Re: Dare I start another vinyl topic?

Reply #56 –
Quote from: cliveb on
The purpose was NOT to demostrate "live" vinyl playback.
But that's exactly what the focus hocus pocus hypothesis kerfuffle was all about.

Quote from: cliveb on
Their characterisation of vinyl as having high distortion, poor frequency response, bad crosstalk, etc. suggested to me that they believed that even if vinyl had no surface noise, it would still be grossly inadequate and easily identifiable.
Might be helpful for you to cite actual quotes of Their, lest they be a strawman in your head.
Or at least that's my hypothesis.
These haters spoke out against your digitized "cleansed" vinyl??
Loudspeaker manufacturer

Re: Dare I start another vinyl topic?

Reply #57 –
Quote from: dc2bluelight on
If you're trying to isolate the effects of vinyl, you can't do that with samples made from analog tape masters which are already two or more generations down from the original.  Many of the issues with tape and vinyl are similar in several aspects, and will thus it would be difficult or impossible to differentiate between a vinyl copy of an analog master vs a digital copy of the same master, assuming pristine vinyl once surface noise and ticks are eliminated.
That could very well be a valid point. I don't have enough experience with analogue tape to know whether it has much the same issues as vinyl. Anyone else care to offer an opinion?

Quote from: dc2bluelight on
If you want to isolate vinyl differences you have to start with masters better than vinyl in all aspects, and that would most likely be a digital master.
Unfortunately very little of my music collection was originally recorded digitally.

Quote from: dc2bluelight on
You might also number the files so people posting their "results" with files 1, 2, 3...etc... will have some means of definitive identification.
Yes, good point. See my earlier response to old tech.

Re: Dare I start another vinyl topic?

Reply #58 –
The point of CDs, or digital in general, is transparency. So digital doesn't have a sound of its own. The sound will be the one of the source.
Vinyl is not transparent, by far. That's the whole point.
If you take a vinyl rip, and then you compare it with a CD rip, you're only comparing your modified vinyl rip with the source of the CD, not with the CD per se. So this whole exercise is pointless.
I guess your point is that vinyl can be "transparent enough". Of course, that will depend on the quality of the source. If it's a modern recording, it won't be enough. You took care of that possibility choosing bad quality recordings.



Re: Dare I start another vinyl topic?

Reply #59 –
Quote from: ajinfla on
Might be helpful for you to cite actual quotes of Their, lest they be a strawman in your head.
Or at least that's my hypothesis.

Here's a few that I found (emphasis added by me):

Quote from: Shostakovich on
It doesn't make any sense to say that the most intrusive audio format, vinyl, with all its sonic distortions, favors concentration. Digital is transparent, it doesn't interfere with the listening experience. Just imagine listening a vinyl when you know where every distortions are, and instead of listening to the music you're just waiting for them.

Quote from: pdq on
There is no "digital sound" because digital can easily recreate sound which is accurate well beyond the limits of human hearing.
OTOH vinyl can be shown to distort sound in a way that is easily perceivable.

Quote from: saratoga on
Digital recording is more or less exact.  You record something and then play it back and you get what you recorded.
Vinyl is not.  You play it back and you get something that is fairly different from what you recorded.

Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on
No you have not. Vinyl inherently adds so much noise and distortion that anything approaching realism is technically impossible.
The perception that vinyl can possibly even vaguely approach sonic realism has to be a consequence of a sighted evaluation.

Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on
Most digital is probably chucked out even more carelessly, and can still be sonically perfect. Vinyl sounds bad no matter how carefully you attend to it.

Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on
Compared to any old CD you randomly or intentionally  burn, the LP format is pi$$.  It's got relatively massive amounts of just about every kind of distortion known to man. If you think that jitter is problem with digital, you ain't seen nuttin' until you see what LPs do.  It's about 3 orders of magnitude worse.  There is a reason why nobody does technical tests on LP playback systems, and that's because the results are so horrific as numbers.

Quote from: ajinfla on
I mean music, like certain orchestral works, with the widest dynamic range, deep bass (below 20hz), etc., played at realistic levels, to expose the limitations of vinyl...which electronic/rock/pop music that vinyl clutchers mainly listen to, won't expose.
Remember, not talking "preference" here, but the physical reality limits of the soundfield, that only the audiophile deaf could miss.

Re: Dare I start another vinyl topic?

Reply #60 –
If you're listening to a bad quality recording, you can not know if the limiting factor is the source or the medium.
So posting bad quality files is useless.
If you posted good modern recordings (jazz, classical) samples, it would be different.
With pop-rock, from any era,  it's mostly futile, the mastering quality is consistently garbage.
As a side note, that's why vinyl is not a classical but a pop-rock thing, the loss in sound quality is marginal there.

Re: Dare I start another vinyl topic?

Reply #61 –
Quote from: cliveb on
I'm not suggesting that an LP and CD of the same recording would be indistinguishable - of course they would sound different (and especially so for classical).

Quote from: ajinfla on
I mean music, like certain orchestral works, with the widest dynamic range, deep bass (below 20hz), etc., played at realistic levels, to expose the limitations of vinyl...which electronic/rock/pop music that vinyl clutchers mainly listen to, won't expose.
Remember, not talking "preference" here, but the physical reality limits of the soundfield, that only the audiophile deaf could miss.
So you disagree with this, yet your tiny snippet classical rips deliberately didn't include widest dynamic range, deep bass (below 20hz), etc.
No 1812 canon shots, no Firebird suite etc. Plus appear to admit yourself (above) there are differences with classical.
Interesting. Do you consider yourself a vinyl hater based on your own quote above?

Ok, my guesses
1. Eberhard Weber - Vinyl
2. Frankie - too terrible SQ to guess
3. Gordon Giltrap - ditto
4. Kevin Ayers - ditto
5. King Crimson - ditto
6. Queen - ditto
7. Saint-Saens - CD
8. Tchaikovsky - Vinyl

Loudspeaker manufacturer

Re: Dare I start another vinyl topic?

Reply #62 –
Quote from: mmrkaic on
I am eagerly anticipating the results of this experiment, using ears etc.
As we do yours. Where are they???
Loudspeaker manufacturer

Re: Dare I start another vinyl topic?

Reply #63 –
So we've established that a CD sourced from a poor quality master can sound pretty crummy, perhaps no worse than cherry-picked examples of vinyl.

What we haven't established is whether vinyl is a sonically transparent medium, capable of faithfully representing the original source used to author it.

The samples presented do absolutely nothing (zip, zero, nada) to support the hypothesis that processed vinyl playback is transparent.

Can processed vinyl playback sound pretty good?  Maybe, but the samples presented aren't exactly compelling.

Re: Dare I start another vinyl topic?

Reply #64 –
Quote from: Wombat on
Kevin Ayres, scratch ~6sec, vinyl
Sounds like a glitch in the master or a bad rip to me.  This isn't exactly uncommon in CD releases from the '80s and early '90s.

Quote from: Wombat on
Eberhard Weber, precise bass vs sax but crackle ~28sec, vinyl
Again, this could easily be a problem with the master or rip.

Re: Dare I start another vinyl topic?

Reply #65 –
If it is a bad rip or master the samples are even more pointless. My in ear click detector reports it as vinyl if the question is what of them is vinyl.

Edit: I just listen Pink Floyd's Wish You Where Here. Someone offer the first 30sec of that one from vinyl?
Is troll-adiposity coming from feederism?
With 24bit music you can listen to silence much louder!

Re: Dare I start another vinyl topic?

Reply #66 –
Quote from: arthursho on
If you're listening to a bad quality recording, you can not know if the limiting factor is the source or the medium.
So posting bad quality files is useless.
If you posted good modern recordings (jazz, classical) samples, it would be different.
With pop-rock, from any era,  it's mostly futile, the mastering quality is consistently garbage.
As a side note, that's why vinyl is not a classical but a pop-rock thing, the loss in sound quality is marginal there.
Well that clears things up - the reason I find that I can enjoy vinyl is because I listen to poorly recorded rock music.
If only I was a jazz or classical fan I could enjoy the benefits of properly recorded high quality sound. My loss, I guess.

Re: Dare I start another vinyl topic?

Reply #67 –
Quote from: cliveb on
I don't have enough experience with analogue tape to know whether it has much the same issues as vinyl.
You have more than you think if you have a collection of vintage vinyl.  Both mediums become progressively less linear as level goes up, but the resulting distortion is different in character.  Both mediums have an audible noise floor, again different in character and level depending on a host of variables.  However, analog "masters" used to cut lacquer masters is/was hardly ever first generation tape, so whatever issues it has becomes compounded with each generation.  Thus, it is more than likely that the tape master used to cut the lacquer would be audibly inferior to the best that can be had from vinyl, and thus mask vinyl's contribution to the whole mess. 
Quote from: cliveb on
                           
Unfortunately very little of my music collection was originally recorded digitally.
So...you have mostly recordings made pre-1978 then?  The industry rapidly swung to digits after that.  Even vinyl released in the late 1970s through the end of the first vinyl era was recorded digitally first.  The thing is, you have to know or you can make any valid assumptions (or test files).

Re: Dare I start another vinyl topic?

Reply #68 –
Quote from: greynol on
What we haven't established is whether vinyl is a sonically transparent medium, capable of faithfully representing the original source used to author it.
The samples presented do absolutely nothing (zip, zero, nada) to support the hypothesis that processed vinyl playback is transparent.
Why do some of you have to constantly misrepresent what I set out to test?
If anyone is setting up a strawman here, it's the people who tell me I'm claiming something that I haven't.
I *NEVER* claimed that vinyl is a transparent medium. Indeed I explicitly stated the opposite.

All I ever wanted to find out is whether those people who think that vinyl is universally bad could spot it when they don't know what the source is. Why is that so hard to understand?

Re: Dare I start another vinyl topic?

Reply #69 –
Quote from: cliveb on
Why do some of you have to constantly misrepresent what I set out to test?
If anyone is setting up a strawman here, it's the people who tell me I'm claiming something that I haven't.
I *NEVER* claimed that vinyl is a transparent medium. Indeed I explicitly stated the opposite.
Now you know how others in this discussion feel.

Quote from: cliveb on
All I ever wanted to find out is whether those people who think that vinyl is universally bad could spot it when they don't know what the source is. Why is that so hard to understand?
It isn't, just like you should understand this was a GIGO endeavor.

Select needle drops can sound as good as a poorly produced CD, but only after they have been
Quote from: cliveb on
carefully declicked & denoised.
What a revelation!

Let's not pretend I didn't point this out earlier, though, OK!?!
Quote from: greynol on
Can processed vinyl playback sound pretty good?  Maybe, but the samples presented aren't exactly compelling.

Rather than be butt-hurt over three pages of pointlessness, realize you're basically only going to find yourself arguing with Arnold.

Re: Dare I start another vinyl topic?

Reply #70 –
Quote from: cliveb on
Quote from: arthursho on
If you're listening to a bad quality recording, you can not know if the limiting factor is the source or the medium.
So posting bad quality files is useless.
If you posted good modern recordings (jazz, classical) samples, it would be different.
With pop-rock, from any era,  it's mostly futile, the mastering quality is consistently garbage.
As a side note, that's why vinyl is not a classical but a pop-rock thing, the loss in sound quality is marginal there.
Well that clears things up - the reason I find that I can enjoy vinyl is because I listen to poorly recorded rock music.
If only I was a jazz or classical fan I could enjoy the benefits of properly recorded high quality sound. My loss, I guess.

Far from you being sarcastic, you're spot on. You, indeed, couldn't "enjoy vinyl" listening to classical music. But for rock, vinyl is more than good enough.

As for spotting samples, it seems it's you who doesn't understand. If everything is bad, how to spot anything?

Re: Dare I start another vinyl topic?

Reply #71 –
Quote from: cliveb on
I *NEVER* claimed that vinyl is a transparent medium. Indeed I explicitly stated the opposite.

All I ever wanted to find out is whether those people who think that vinyl is universally bad
Remind me again, why are you quoting me above in your list of haters?

Btw Clive, when you listen to your cleansed digitized vinyl, do you feel an irresistible urge to surf the net and play games, etc, shortly after hitting play?
Just curious..
Loudspeaker manufacturer

Re: Dare I start another vinyl topic?

Reply #72 –
Quote from: cliveb on

All I ever wanted to find out is whether those people who think that vinyl is universally bad could spot it when they don't know what the source is. Why is that so hard to understand?
The "test" you provided is not capable of doing that because your test files don't represent either medium accurately, nor in isolation from the entire production chain. 

Your test conditions effectively mask and blur the issue you're testing for, so the results become invalid with respect to your original question.

You can set up conditions to test/prove anything, even a difference in mediums that is assumed to be easily detectable.  For example, you could set up a test that makes it impossible for someone to differentiate if he's listening to AM radio or FM radio simply by controlling the conditions. 

Re: Dare I start another vinyl topic?

Reply #73 –
Quote from: arthursho on
As for spotting samples, it seems it's you who doesn't understand. If everything is bad, how to spot anything?
Well, it's not a complete fiasco like Ralphs, but it certainly seems, umm, designed to blur the issue of real differences.
Almost....
Loudspeaker manufacturer

Re: Dare I start another vinyl topic?

Reply #74 –
Just an example of what I consider a good recording, meaning it can be spotted as a CD without any doubt because no vinyl can sound like that. Generally speaking, any good DDD classical music recording would do.