Skip to main content

Notice

Please note that most of the software linked on this forum is likely to be safe to use. If you are unsure, feel free to ask in the relevant topics, or send a private message to an administrator or moderator. To help curb the problems of false positives, or in the event that you do find actual malware, you can contribute through the article linked here.
Topic: Can the same master used to press a CD be used to press vinyl? (Read 23915 times) previous topic - next topic
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Can the same master used to press a CD be used to press vinyl?

Reply #50
Kruger -> Krueger

...as if it wasn't intentional or the shoe didn't fit.

Tripling down on your blunder doesn't help matters for you, either.

Modern dynamic range compression is routinely pressed to vinyl.

Can the same master used to press a CD be used to press vinyl?

Reply #51
Kruger -> Krueger


and I'd say that despite the times I've been asked whether I was that Krueger, I never deduced it. Not for lack of experience with it.

Quote
...as if it wasn't intentional or the shoe didn't fit.


I don't know what that means.

Quote
Tripling down on your blunder doesn't help matters for you, either.


What blunder?

Quote
Modern dynamic range compression is routinely pressed to vinyl.


Not what I said.  Goalpost  moving noted.

Obviously anything that you tune to be pressed to vinyl can be  be pressed to vinyl.  The art of fitting just about anything onto vinyl is about 5 decades old.

Doing it transparently, is a different matter.


Can the same master used to press a CD be used to press vinyl?

Reply #52
No, it is what someone else said and you told him he was wrong. I can't believe I'm having to say this again. It's as if I was arguing with a certain designer of organic-sounding DACs.  Instead of owning up, you attempt redefine the argument (or misdirect, or use it as an opportunity to deflect from some other previous idiotic thing you did, or...).  I can guarantee you that I'm not the only person around here who sees this and is disappointed that someone who does often demonstrate competency will sink to these levels just to protect his own ego.

Pathetic, full-stop.

I'll leave you alone about this now, since I'm supposed to be a moderator.

Can the same master used to press a CD be used to press vinyl?

Reply #53
No, it is what someone else said and you told him he was wrong. I can't believe I'm having to say this again. It's as if I was arguing with a certain designer of organic-sounding DACs.  Instead of owning up, you attempt redefine the argument (or misdirect, or use it as an opportunity to deflect from some other previous idiotic thing you did, or...).  I can guarantee you that I'm not the only person around here who sees this and is disappointed that someone who does often demonstrate competency will sink to these levels just to protect his own ego.

Pathetic, full-stop.

I'll leave you alone about this now, since I'm supposed to be a moderator.


Given your long term frequent propensity to making personal attacks, we've got a clear case relating to foxes and henhouses.

When you accuse me of moving a goalpost that I have always defined in terms of a listening test that I am so intimately associated with it is hard to give that claim any credibility.

Did you seriously expect me to not use ABX as my global reference standard? Now, that would be pathetic!

Can the same master used to press a CD be used to press vinyl?

Reply #54
It is expected that someone won't resort to changing the subject when erroneously disagreeing with someone else just so he could look as if he were right.

Can the same master used to press a CD be used to press vinyl?

Reply #55
I can guarantee you that I'm not the only person around here who sees this and is disappointed that someone who does often demonstrate competency will sink to these levels just to protect his own ego.


/me raises hand.

Sometimes I really feel as if an intervention is needed to stop these all-too-frequent episodes.
Creature of habit.

Can the same master used to press a CD be used to press vinyl?

Reply #56
Given your long term frequent propensity to making personal attacks, we've got a clear case relating to foxes and henhouses.

When you accuse me of moving a goalpost that I have always defined in terms of a listening test that I am so intimately associated with it is hard to give that claim any credibility.

Did you seriously expect me to not use ABX as my global reference standard? Now, that would be pathetic!


Of course ABX testing is the global reference standard for audibility of artifacts and assessing fidelity in audio systems. But that is not what we were arguing in this thread!

Allow me to summarize this thread: The OP asked about the audibility of jitter. Then the discussion branched out into discussion of wow and flutter, and how mastering for vinyl is done. If you read my very first post in this thread, it should be quite clear to anyone that I am no vinyl bigot, and that I like the format for reasons not related to sound quality or the lack thereof. Then we talked about a practical way to ABX a digital vinyl rip against the original 'live' vinyl playback, followed by a discussion about sound quality in the inner grooves vs. the outer grooves.

And then we get to the discussion about mastering, in which several people asserted that basically no one today bothers to make an extra special master for LPs, they just use the CD master with the bare minimum effort needed from their side to put it on an LP (ie. mono bass and no subsonic content). This is what we were discussing, where Greynol looked at my samples and could say with relatively high confidence that they originated from the same master. You disagreed and asserted that vinyl production needs a very different master, but you haven't yet produced any proof, not even based on my samples, which you say are clearly based on different masters.

At no point did anyone ever question the validity of ABX testing, or assert that an ABX test could not be used to distinguish between vinyl and CD. However, it would not be a very good test if you want to tell two masters apart, when the two formats in question are so very different in fidelity. It would be a test of vinyl vs. CD, and not a test of one master vs. another.

Can the same master used to press a CD be used to press vinyl?

Reply #57
Greynol looked at my samples and could say with relatively high confidence that they originated from the same master.

With one of them, at least.  I'm welcome to disagreement, but I would hope it would be on firmer grounds than simply along the lines of  "because I say so and since not we can't synchronize them, everything that follows is meaningless speculation."

Can the same master used to press a CD be used to press vinyl?

Reply #58
Greynol looked at my samples and could say with relatively high confidence that they originated from the same master.

With one of them, at least.  I'm welcome to disagreement, but I would hope it would be on firmer grounds than simply along the lines of  "because I say so and since not we can't synchronize them, everything that follows is meaningless speculation."


Fair enough, the jury's still out on the second track.

I'd love for someone else to take a look at them as well. From a pure listening perspective, both LP and CD are very similar in the overall sound, so if there really are two different masters, they are still quite similar.

The biggest point of interest for me is whether the masters used for LP production are routinely as clippressed as the masters used for CD production. It would seem that they are often just as bad, although I can see why it's not easy to say on the Lamb of God track.

Can the same master used to press a CD be used to press vinyl?

Reply #59
Are you suggesting that mono-izing bass necessitates a separate master?


It may not, because the bass mixing is usually hard wired into the rack with the cutting electronics.

Neumann white paper about vinyl cutting

"
Up until around 1953, Neumann built disk-cutting lathes for phonograph records with a constant groove pitch. Between 1953 and 1955, Neumann developed a method of varying the groove pitch depending on the recorded amplitude. To this end, an additional playback head was mounted on the tape deck. This additional playback head determined the groove amplitude to be recorded approximately one half-rotation of the turntable in advance and fed this value to the cutting lathe as a control signal via a corresponding drive amplifier. Of course, this also required a separately variable pitch drive. For the first time, this made it possible to extend the playing time of an LP phonograph record to approx. thirty minutes.
"

Your post's quote of the Neumann link does not address the topic at hand, mono-izing bass for vinyl or bass mixing as you put it, it addresses a completely different problem with bass on vinyl which limits the safe play time per side. Your Neumann quote is regarding the problems associated with the needle's horizontal wiggling, and the actual topic at hand is regarding the much more important need to limit its vertical wiggling. The former addresses maximum play time per side while maintaining a constantly changing, but safe spacing between the groves and the latter has nothing to do with play time but instead dictates trackability when playing back with modest quality cartridges/needles.

We address "too loud L+R (mid) bass passages" via a constantly changing spacing between adjacent groves through the process called variable pitch, which is what Neumann is talking about here, and it is a completely independent problem, with a different applied solution, from how we address the much more dangerous, hard for styli to track "too loud L-R (side) bass passages". You seem to be conflating the two in this post since the Neumann quote addresses too loud L+R problems but the real discussion is too loud L-R problems.

The bass mixing to mono that is applied via an elliptical equalizer, EE, or as some prefer the VAL method [vertical amplitude limiting] addresses excessive vertical wiggling of the stylus. This should not be confused with how we address loud L+R bass passages, which is to read the incoming signal ahead of time, either with a secondary read head placed on the magnetic tape a few feet forward of the actual playback head (or in modern times by use of a digital delay line) however it is important to note that no modification to the bass signal itself is applied by this monitoring system, instead all that it does is momentarily increase the separation between adjacent grooves, by moving the cutter head across the cutting surface more quickly during this loud, bass heavy passage.

The thing is, we can easily accommodate loud L+R bass content this way (up to a point) because it is represented exclusively by the horizontal wiggle of the stylus in the grove. The valley walls of the grove are nice and deep throughout this large, heavy horizontal wiggling, hence there is a firm grip to the walls, whereas the stereophonic bass problem I am discussing, which can only be cured by mono-izing the bass, is the L-R component of the music [which as you know, using our Westrex 45/45 system of making the stereo vinyl grove is represented exclusively by the up/down, vertical motion of the stylus], controlled by pinching the valley walls together to raise the stylus on the waveform peaks, and it is here where the smaller valley size causes problems because it has less grip, less control of the stylus even if it is a very good one. Reading ahead of the current music with an advance head (or similarly using a digital delay line instead) does nothing to prevent or precondition the vinyl surface for the torturous, loud L-R content it is about to receive a moment later. We must stop this loud L-R bass problem before it gets here, i.e. in the mastering.

Can the same master used to press a CD be used to press vinyl?

Reply #60
We must stop this loud L-R bass problem before it gets here, i.e. in the mastering.

...and I have to again question why this must necessitate a new master instead of simply being done on the fly, how often a new master is made and where the examples demonstrating the supposed ubiquitous usage are*.

(*) AJ might be of some help here since he seems to advocate stereo bass and therefore should be able to provide leads on suitable content.  I imagine that you may have to limit your scope to genres that are more acoustically-oriented.  You probably won't be able to argue over "majority" anymore (and perhaps none of us should if we have to be genre-specific), but that's OK.

Can the same master used to press a CD be used to press vinyl?

Reply #61
Quote

We must stop this loud L-R bass problem before it gets here, i.e. in the mastering.

...and I have to again question why this must necessitate a new master instead of simply being done on the fly, how often a new master is made and where the examples demonstrating the supposed ubiquitous usage are.


So the real question you personally are after is not: "Is the sound cut into LP records the same as for the CD?", but is instead, "Are the masters different?". Did I get that right? I don't see how that's important, at least it isn't to me. I think the question is: "Do CD's sound different than LPs, under the same conditions?" To me that's what matters and I already have my answer: CDs are better. [Although I can respect that some LPs have a different version of some recording that some people prefer.]

Regarding your request for examples, I'm not even sure what exactly you are asking for. You want me to supply you with links to images of snapshots of oscilloscopes depicting Lissajous patterns of the L-R/phase content taken from the exact moment in time from an LP record and a CD of the same recording?

Are you old enough to remember how disastrous that turned out to be when Carver did exactly this in the early 80's, like I am? [Please don't take any offense to my not knowing how old you are or if you followed audio back then. I have no idea how old anyone here is with the exception of Arny.]

Quote
(*) AJ might be of some help here since he seems to advocate stereo bass and therefore should be able to provide leads on suitable content. I imagine that you may have to limit your scope to genres that are more acoustically-oriented
You have to limit your selection to recordings that aren't vinyl (and have stereo low bass).

David Ranada had a list of stereophonic low bass CDs that I think might have been posted at Nousaine's site, which is now, alas, no longer with us except through the Waybackmachine, I would assume. The list also made it to a forum post IIRC but I don't know when or where.

Can the same master used to press a CD be used to press vinyl?

Reply #62
Are you old enough to remember how disastrous that turned out to be when Carver did exactly this in the early 80's, like I am? [Please don't take any offense to my not knowing how old you are or if you followed audio back then. I have no idea how old anyone here is with the exception of Arny.

I would guess that greynol is about 40.

Can the same master used to press a CD be used to press vinyl?

Reply #63
By far the majority of modern releases on vinyl use the exact same master as the CD or download version, so there's no real difference in sound quality apart from what the LP format itself imparts.

My understanding was the exact opposite, that nearly every single LP made has the deep bass blended to mono (to be more tracking friendly to needles) at the very least. High frequency attenuation I thought was also common but not as nearly as universal as mono-ized deep bass.

I've not seen much evidence in the way of samples that supports your understanding of the exact opposite of what KozmoNaut said, regardless of whatever reasons you're providing.  Perhaps the majority of modern releases already have deep bass collapsed.  Perhaps it can be done with simple processing of the existing master during cutting, I really don't know.  You seem to be quite sure of yourself, however.  Realizing that I'd like to see some actual examples.  If the majority of modern releases on vinyl come from a different master you should easily be able to demonstrate it.

Oh I see. You want to play gotcha, I bet, because I didn't say, more precisely, "The sound recorded onto LPs is, in the majority of times, different". Is that it? I had no idea this picky detail was important to some.

Can the same master used to press a CD be used to press vinyl?

Reply #64
For the benefit of anyone interested in why Carver was pushing these Lissajous images it was to promote his products which addressed the L-R content. Here's a  demo of it that you need to listen to with speakers, not headphones:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRNoUJcxQhY

I don't endorse this but when dialed in more judiciously than in this demo I've heard some of these products that had, let's say, an interesting effect of added spaciousness and sound beyond the confines of the L and R speakers. Not my cup of tea but YMMV.

Can the same master used to press a CD be used to press vinyl?

Reply #65
Whoever wrote this page explaining how we came to use the Westrex 45/45 groove shape when we evolved from mono [lateral groove wiggles only] to stereo LPs, I got this image from (which I encourage all to click on and read) seems like English may not be their first language, however there's nothing inherently incorrect about what they say at the link, and at the bottom of the page the image motion perfectly demonstrates the problem with having loud, bass heavy L minus R content (or L-R) [remember, L-R is the vertical amplitude of the stylus motion]:
http://www.vinylrecorder.com/stereo.html

Sorry, I'm not computer savvy enough to bring the properly proportioned, multi-part image here. You'll have to inspect it there.



See how incredibly tiny the groove valley becomes half of the time (the waveform's upper peaks) when attempting the loud, bass heavy out of phase stuff (L-R)? That means while the recording is making it wiggle all around due to other content, this loud L-R stereo bass that's going on is pinching the stylus upward into a tiny little valley which it can easily pop out of due to the other simultaneous motion forces.
Loud, bass heavy L-R = no control of the needle, asking for tracking problems, distortion, and possibly even skipping. So why is this not a problem? Because we never record loud stereo bass on vinyl! It is verboten. Or as the link puts it: "Vertical modulation: More distortion ! Large amplitudes, not possible !"

Can the same master used to press a CD be used to press vinyl?

Reply #66
I asked some simple questions and all I got was more of the same testimony.  Yes, mzil, I heard you the first time: these amps go to 11.

In case you didn't get it already, "masters for vinyl aren't ever/are hardly ever/are generally never the same as those used for CD" is a dog whistle for me.

I'm not interested in playing gotcha, I'm interested in having a conversation that requires something a bit deeper than regurgitation on your part.  If all you want to say is that a falsifiable claim doesn't comport with your understanding, that's your prerogative.  Don't be surprised when someone questions whether your understanding is adequate enough to reject the claim because it isn't supported with any tangible examples.

Can the same master used to press a CD be used to press vinyl?

Reply #67
I explained my beliefs on mono-ized bass in post #77 and I stand by them. I can also think of at least four examples where there is no need to mono-ize the low bass for a master used for an LP, although there could be more:

- the recording in the groves is made at an unusually low level which consumers would be upset about ["I hate that I have to crank my volume up and hear my phono preamp hiss whenever I play this LP! Argh." -not a real quote]
- the entire recording is mono
- the recording has no bass content, for example an LP record of solo flute
- the mix is prepared such that all of the instruments which contain bass are panned away from the sides to the center, from the get go, despite the musical group's actual positioning on stage, say in an acoustical setting

I also explained the reason why this is done:
(to be more tracking friendly to needles)

You seem to be dubious of my claim, dismissing the first link I provided as:
Quote
Anecdotes aren't evidence

So I'm sure greynol won't care much about this, um, complete nobody's anecdote either.    But I certainly found it amusing and it just goes to show that if you simply don't care about the tracking, including on Ahmet's daughter's turntable, then another approach is to just go ahead and "cut it hot"...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOW3Ep_T_Jw
...although you may be risking your job.

Can the same master used to press a CD be used to press vinyl?

Reply #68
Given your long term frequent propensity to making personal attacks, we've got a clear case relating to foxes and henhouses.

When you accuse me of moving a goalpost that I have always defined in terms of a listening test that I am so intimately associated with it is hard to give that claim any credibility.

Did you seriously expect me to not use ABX as my global reference standard? Now, that would be pathetic!


Of course ABX testing is the global reference standard for audibility of artifacts and assessing fidelity in audio systems. But that is not what we were arguing in this thread!

Allow me to summarize this thread: The OP asked about the audibility of jitter. Then the discussion branched out into discussion of wow and flutter, and how mastering for vinyl is done. If you read my very first post in this thread, it should be quite clear to anyone that I am no vinyl bigot, and that I like the format for reasons not related to sound quality or the lack thereof. Then we talked about a practical way to ABX a digital vinyl rip against the original 'live' vinyl playback, followed by a discussion about sound quality in the inner grooves vs. the outer grooves.

And then we get to the discussion about mastering, in which several people asserted that basically no one today bothers to make an extra special master for LPs, they just use the CD master with the bare minimum effort needed from their side to put it on an LP (ie. mono bass and no subsonic content). This is what we were discussing, where Greynol looked at my samples and could say with relatively high confidence that they originated from the same master. You disagreed and asserted that vinyl production needs a very different master, but you haven't yet produced any proof, not even based on my samples, which you say are clearly based on different masters.

At no point did anyone ever question the validity of ABX testing, or assert that an ABX test could not be used to distinguish between vinyl and CD. However, it would not be a very good test if you want to tell two masters apart, when the two formats in question are so very different in fidelity. It would be a test of vinyl vs. CD, and not a test of one master vs. another.


I never said that anybody questioned the validity of ABX testing, they just claimed that I moved the goalposts when I used it as a standard to judge whether two audio files were significantly the same or significantly different.

I think that xheap rhetoric and personal attacks aside, the real question is whether a LP can be made that can't be ABXed from a very clean unprocessed digital version of it. If it can be ABXed  then it unimpeachably sounds different and the probable cause is the well-known additional processing required to fit modern recordings onto the highly technically limited LP format.

As usual, you're making up questions, answering them, and then confusing their answers with what other people are saying.

And lets go back to the conundrum you are trying to answer.

"And then we get to the discussion about mastering, in which several people asserted that basically no one today bothers to make an extra special master for LPs, they just use the CD master with the bare minimum effort needed from their side to put it on an LP (ie. mono bass and no subsonic content). This is what we were discussing"

The problem here starts out with the word Master.  Depending on when you say the word and where, a given recording that is released in multiple formats may have a dozen or more "masters".  Without some other added verbiage how do we know one from the other?  Furthermore, along the way the number of physical masters was reduced when people started using hardware that combined the function of what used to be a bunch of boxes into one. I'll argue that those masters still exist in a virtual sense, its just that the need to prepare and catalog them as physical entities went away as the technology moved along.

Having been away from the discussion for about a day, it looks really stupid because at different points people are using the same word (master) to describe about six really different things. Some times the same person uses the same word to describe a number of different things in quick succession all by himself. I also am pretty sure that I'm probably the only person in this discussion who has actually touched  an operational HS tape machine,l LP cutting lathe, prepared lacquers or LP pressing dies. For the rest of you, it likely is all just a bunch of pictures and abstractions. I'm probably also the only person who routinely produced original recordings for mass distribution (100s of copies).

Obviously, that qualifies me to be schooled by the lot of you, and when you can't follow my casual comments, its because of my mental failings.

Can the same master used to press a CD be used to press vinyl?

Reply #69
Arnold: So now you are redefining the word master?

Mastering, a form of audio post-production, is the process of preparing and transferring recorded audio from a source containing the final mix to a data storage device (the master); the source from which all copies will be produced (via methods such as pressing, duplication or replication). In recent years digital masters have become usual although analog masters, such as audio tapes...
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_mastering

In simpler terms: a thing that comes before it becomes lp or cd or mp3.

Obviously abxing lp vs cd will not prove a thing, this is a place where you would have to use your 'objective' measurements.

btw: The original question was: Is there a special master for lps.

p.s. & Arnold: Personally I will refuse to read any responses that are longer than 5 lines.
PANIC: CPU 1: Cache Error (unrecoverable - dcache data) Eframe = 0x90000000208cf3b8
NOTICE - cpu 0 didn't dump TLB, may be hung

Can the same master used to press a CD be used to press vinyl?

Reply #70
Arnold: So now you are redefining the word master?

Mastering, a form of audio post-production, is the process of preparing and transferring recorded audio from a source containing the final mix to a data storage device (the master); the source from which all copies will be produced (via methods such as pressing, duplication or replication). In recent years digital masters have become usual although analog masters, such as audio tapes...
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_mastering

In simpler terms: a thing that comes before it becomes lp or cd or mp3.


To complete your work, please number and name how many things come before it becomes a  lp or cd or mp3.

Quote
Obviously abxing lp vs cd will not prove a thing, this is a place where you would have to use your 'objective' measurements.


Obvously? To whom?

I get it. In your world the final arbiter of sound quality is a technical measurement.

OK, so define that measurement and give boundary values for it.

Quote
btw: The original question was: Is there a special master for lps.


Prove that there always is or that there never is. Otherwise the right answer is YMMV.

Quote
p.s. & Arnold: Personally I will refuse to read any responses that are longer than 5 lines.


I'll try to keep my response within the tiny limits of your reading comprehension. ;-)  This is the 6th line.  You'll stop reading before you read it, right?

LOL!

Can the same master used to press a CD be used to press vinyl?

Reply #71
the real question is whether a LP can be made that can't be ABXed from a very clean unprocessed digital version of it. If it can be ABXed  then it unimpeachably sounds different and the probable cause is the well-known additional processing required to fit modern recordings onto the highly technically limited LP format.


No, the question we are trying to answer is whether special masters with less clipping and compression are routinely prepared and used for LP production, compared to the masters used for CD production. So far the answer is "no, the masters used for LP production do not have higher dynamic range and less clipping compared to masters used for CD production".

The whole discussion is about whether a special (higher dynamic range) master is prepared before it is submitted to the LP production process, not what happens afterwards during that process.

You cannot determine that by ABX testing between an LP and a CD, because of all the other differences between LP and CD, including the LP production process, which you keep harping on about for no reason.

Can the same master used to press a CD be used to press vinyl?

Reply #72
(*) AJ might be of some help here since he seems to advocate stereo bass..

I could, but this once "jitter" thread has long past this point:



Loudspeaker manufacturer

Can the same master used to press a CD be used to press vinyl?

Reply #73
The whole discussion is about whether a special (higher dynamic range) master is prepared before it is submitted to the LP production process, not what happens afterwards during that process.


New to me, but I can adapt.

Do you think that it is at all possible to create a digital master that would cause problems if submitted to the LP production process?

Stipulated: In this day and age, the LP production process could be automated and perhaps should be automated to the point where any master will be sufficiently automatically bludgeoned in terms of dynamic range, channel separation and spectral content so that it still in some sense works.

If that is what is being talked about, then as a firm believer in computers and automation I agree, especially if you don't make me listen to the results. ;-)

Can the same master used to press a CD be used to press vinyl?

Reply #74
The whole discussion is about whether a special (higher dynamic range) master is prepared before it is submitted to the LP production process, not what happens afterwards during that process.


New to me, but I can adapt.

Do you think that it is at all possible to create a digital master that would cause problems if submitted to the LP production process?

Stipulated: In this day and age, the LP production process could be automated and perhaps should be automated to the point where any master will be sufficiently automatically bludgeoned in terms of dynamic range, channel separation and spectral content so that it still in some sense works.

If that is what is being talked about, then as a firm believer in computers and automation I agree, especially if you don't make me listen to the results. ;-)


Well, one could certainly try, but I'm pretty sure the LP production process is robust enough to beat down any digital trickery before it gets to the lathe. If nothing else, then to protect the equipment.

As far as I can see, we are actually in agreement now. The studios do not habitually produce masters with higher dynamic range and less clipping for vinyl editions, they use the same clippressed source. Any audible differences occur because of the LP production process and inherent limitations in the format.

Which exactly disproves the common misconception that if people are interested in sound quality, they should get the LP version, because vinyl shortcomings aside, a better master is "required" for LP production, and thus the sound will be better.

Which is what we were talking about, in this long-winded derail from the original topic.