HydrogenAudio

This is a split of a discussion (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?s=&showtopic=27691&view=findpost&p=587228)Hancoque and I had, which desperately needs to be elaborated on.

First of all, I've dumped my thoughts on the matter into the Wiki: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...Vinyl_Mastering (http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Vinyl_Mastering). Please comment on it.

A couple of the points there are explicitly worth starting this topic off:

• There is no consistent, unambiguous way to identify the provenance of a vinyl master. Most methods - but most of all, the zoomed-out waveform plot - are inaccurate in one way or another. Visual examination of clipped samples is fairly telling, but not applicable or effective in all cases. How can a vinyl master be accurately observed as being the same or different as a CD master?
• Even if a difference exists, whether or not it is audible is another question entirely. IIRC, brickwall limiting of 3-4db, correctly applied, may not be audible. If so, Hancoque's Slayer waveforms might not mean anything, because his peaks are all within 4db of the CD peaks. What audibility thresholds exist for clipped signals?

That said, I may be eating a hearty dinner of crow tonight, as I just examined one of the records I thought was of the same master as the CD (Battles - Mirrored), and I was able to observe pretty strong differences in clipping between the vinyl and CD versions. I'll reply later with some visual examples.

I have to admit: You are right. The vinyl version of Slayer's Christ Illusion seems to be mastered from the CD. While taking a closer look at the waveform I found severe clipping in the CD version. After looking at the corresponding positions in the vinyl version I realized the terrible truth. Look at these two images:

CD (http://www.devir.de/temp/slayer-ci-closeup-cd.png)
vinyl (http://www.devir.de/temp/slayer-ci-closeup-vinyl.png)

You will quickly notice the similarities where the clipping occurs. Now I know why the sound is so harsh. It's some kind of crackling noise that's much more prominent on the vinyl version than the CD version. Until now I thought It would be related to my quite cheap turntable but now I know that it's the recording.

I have to admit: You are right. The vinyl version of Slayer's Christ Illusion seems to be mastered from the CD. While taking a closer look at the waveform I found severe clipping in the CD version. After looking at the corresponding positions in the vinyl version I realized the terrible truth. Look at these two images:

CD (http://www.devir.de/temp/slayer-ci-closeup-cd.png)
vinyl (http://www.devir.de/temp/slayer-ci-closeup-vinyl.png)

You will quickly notice the similarities where the clipping occurs. Now I know why the sound is so harsh. It's some kind of crackling noise that's much more prominent on the vinyl version than the CD version. Until now I thought It would be related to my quite cheap turntable but now I know that it's the recording.

Though I am surprised at how bad the LF tilt of the clipping on the vinyl actually is. I guess that's why you didn't see square wave photos from LPs back in the days.

My guess is tha both the CD and the viinyl were made for the same bad master.

FWIW, the audio department where I work does some laybacks to HDTV tapes and just this week had tracks for a film that while not as clipped as your example, did have enough clipping to get some management action from the client. It was their error,  not ours BTW.

G²

Bump for massive schadenfreude at Gearslutz, where Dave Collins admits that the vinyl release for "Down on the Upside" was sourced from CD, and at least one other record besides, with a timeless quote of a clueless (and nameless) Stereophile reviewer.

http://www.gearslutz.com/board/mastering-f...side-vinyl.html (http://www.gearslutz.com/board/mastering-forum/502795-soundgardens-down-upside-vinyl.html)

I've updated the wiki summarizing known information about vinyl sourced from CD masters at http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...Vinyl_Mastering (http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Vinyl_Mastering).

I once had a reviewer from Stereophile call and was raving, raving I tell you, about the sound of an LP done the same way: I sent my eq'd CD master and someone else cut the lacquer.

"The depth, the detail, the microdynamics are beyond compare, it's just more proof of the superiority of analog"
"But it was cut from a 16 bit digtial source."
"Impossible."
"I was at the session."
"Don't you tell me what I'm hearing!"
"Uh, I gotta get back to work......."

This is a split of a discussion (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?s=&showtopic=27691&view=findpost&p=587228)Hancoque and I had, which desperately needs to be elaborated on.

First of all, I've dumped my thoughts on the matter into the Wiki: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...Vinyl_Mastering (http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Vinyl_Mastering). Please comment on it.

A couple of the points there are explicitly worth starting this topic off:

• There is no consistent, unambiguous way to identify the provenance of a vinyl master. Most methods - but most of all, the zoomed-out waveform plot - are inaccurate in one way or another. Visual examination of clipped samples is fairly telling, but not applicable or effective in all cases. How can a vinyl master be accurately observed as being the same or different as a CD master?

One has to get the info from the source, the mastering engineers. You will be pretty hard pressed to find examples of CDs and LPs that are actually mastered from the same exact feed. That would be in effect be the same "mastering." The one prime deliberate example still being the James Boyk Pictures at an Exhibition" LP/CD comparison package. Steve Hoffman tells us he performs certain tweaks to each version when mastering the same title both for LP and CD and/or SACD in an attempt to get them to sound as much alike and like what he wants them to sound as possible. So he masters the two differently in an attempt to make them as similar as possible and to his ears as good as possible. There are a lot of mastering engineers that will offer up a great deal of info on how they mastered various titles. But you won't get anywhere through forensics IMO. That won't tell you what a tape they used, what deck they used to play the tape, what they did to get the propper alignment, etc. etc. There is a fair amount of general info on the mastering that went on in various facilities and on various labels throughout their histories when it comes to vinyl. That can be marginally useful.

But after all that one still has to consider the often stark differences in the sonic signatures of various vinyl playback systems. This renders results far from universal. Any results you get have to be with an asterix stating that this is with whatever specific vinyl playback equipment was used.

"There's this idea floating around that vinyl records must have intrinsically different masterings than CDs of the same material."

I am really not familiar with this myth. While most *do* have different masterings I am completely unaware of any myth that it must be so for technical reasons. Certainly one can find certain extremes inwhich one can't cut the signal to a laquer. But they tend to be extreme and rare. For the most part the same signal can be cut on laquer and mastered to CD. Who is saying otherwise?

Axon,

The wiki page says "The CD and vinyl masters might just be exactly the same: the same signal that goes on the ADC goes on the cutting head." which can't be true, since the signal cut to the LP must have the standard RIAA pre-emphasis applied. Just add "via the RIAA pre-emphasis".

(I know it's a wiki, but my account isn't verified, and I'll forget!).

Cheers,
David.

Axon,

The wiki page says "The CD and vinyl masters might just be exactly the same: the same signal that goes on the ADC goes on the cutting head." which can't be true, since the signal cut to the LP must have the standard RIAA pre-emphasis applied. Just add "via the RIAA pre-emphasis".

(I know it's a wiki, but my account isn't verified, and I'll forget!).

Cheers,
David.

It would be more accurate to say the same signal goes to the ADC and the preamp that feeds the cutting lathe.

Quote from: 2Bdecided on 2010-06-23 12:19:59

Axon,

The wiki page says "The CD and vinyl masters might just be exactly the same: the same signal that goes on the ADC goes on the cutting head." which can't be true, since the signal cut to the LP must have the standard RIAA pre-emphasis applied. Just add "via the RIAA pre-emphasis".

(I know it's a wiki, but my account isn't verified, and I'll forget!).

Cheers,
David.

It would be more accurate to say the same signal goes to the ADC and the preamp that feeds the cutting lathe.

A quality LP would rarely if ever made that way, because you need to condition many if not most of the signals you would record on a CD to make them fit within the limited dynamic range of the LP. The dynamic range limits of the LP conditioned the entire music production business back in the day. Music was even sometimes arranged and played so that it would "fit".

Please read the page we're discussing. This description is of one of many ways of mastering vinyl. It's rare, but does happen, which is partly the subject of the page.

Cheers,
David.

Quote from: analog scott on 2010-06-23 23:12:20

Quote from: 2Bdecided on 2010-06-23 12:19:59

Axon,

The wiki page says "The CD and vinyl masters might just be exactly the same: the same signal that goes on the ADC goes on the cutting head." which can't be true, since the signal cut to the LP must have the standard RIAA pre-emphasis applied. Just add "via the RIAA pre-emphasis".

(I know it's a wiki, but my account isn't verified, and I'll forget!).

Cheers,
David.

It would be more accurate to say the same signal goes to the ADC and the preamp that feeds the cutting lathe.

A quality LP would rarely if ever made that way, because you need to condition many if not most of the signals you would record on a CD to make them fit within the limited dynamic range of the LP. The dynamic range limits of the LP conditioned the entire music production business back in the day. Music was even sometimes arranged and played so that it would "fit".

Yes it is rare to be sure. Even when the same mastering engineer is mastering for both versions that mastering engineer generally pays attention to one version at a time. I think one would have to be of the same mind set that was behind the Boyk Pictures at an Exhibition comparison package to go through the trouble of simultanious unfettered mastering direct to both the ADC for the CD and the preamp to the cutting lathe. Not really the best time to be mult-tasking. I can't see any reason to master that way unless one is making a deliberate choice to make a comparison package like Boyk did. His is the only one I know of.

Please read the page we're discussing. This description is of one of many ways of mastering vinyl. It's rare, but does happen, which is partly the subject of the page.

I just read the wiki, and what is says does not change what I just said. 

The wiki looks to me like it was written by someone who did academic-style research heavily weighted on internet chatter, It seems to dealing with a limited set of misapprehensions. The author does not seem to have the kind of understanding that would come from a good understanding of how vinyl works and its limitations.

For example it mentions elliptic filters as an explantion for bass summing. Elliptic filters are just a kind of filters like Butterworth filters. They have steep slopes. There may have been a popular implementation of bass summing that was based on elliptic filters, but that choice was irrelevant to the basics of the process wihich was to minimize vertical modulation because vertical modulation was more distortion prone and had far more limited dynamic range.

Another example:

Under "How many different ways can a CD master differ from a vinyl master?"

"The vinyl master may be sourced from a 24-bit version of the CD master." 

If a 24 bit master exists, then the CD was almost certainly sourced from it as well.  There would rarely if ever be any difference in this regard.

Bottom line, this wiki needs so much work that it would be difficult to do it via a posting to HA because of HA's limit on blocks of quoted text.

Bottom line, this wiki needs so much work that it would be difficult to do it via a posting to HA because of HA's limit on blocks of quoted text.

I don't think that's the usual way of working on a wiki

(Though I can't remember how to get access to this one either).

Cheers,
David.

Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on 2010-06-27 10:25:53

Bottom line, this wiki needs so much work that it would be difficult to do it via a posting to HA because of HA's limit on blocks of quoted text.

I don't think that's the usual way of working on a wiki

(Though I can't remember how to get access to this one either).

I guess my real point is that that particular wiki IMO does not need just some edits. It needs to be re-architected. I don't think the author has any real audio production chops.

For openers, IMO any discussion of mastering needs to start out with a discussion of well, mastering. This one dives into a current controversy about mastering that is very narrow.

"There's this idea floating around that vinyl records must have intrinsically different masterings than CDs of the same material."

I am really not familiar with this myth. While most *do* have different masterings I am completely unaware of any myth that it must be so for technical reasons. Certainly one can find certain extremes inwhich one can't cut the signal to a laquer. But they tend to be extreme and rare. For the most part the same signal can be cut on laquer and mastered to CD. Who is saying otherwise?

I think that sort of thinking is inherent with the belief that vinyl must necessarily be cut from a less hypercompressed/clipped master than was used for the CD, to avoid boogaboos like mistracking/overheating cutting head/etc - so therefore (this line of thinking goes) vinyl purchases are safer than CD purchases for the purpose of avoiding hypercompression. I think that's a very pervasive myth but I'm going to take enough time with this reply that I'd rather not go through actually digging up an example of it right now... certainly it ought to ring a bell to everybody contributing to this thread?

It would be more accurate to say the same signal goes to the ADC and the preamp that feeds the cutting lathe.

Jesus, ok ok: when I say "the same signal goes on the ADC goes on the cutting head", I meant to say "the same signal goes on the ADC goes into the inverse RIAA filter and then to the cutting head." Sorry - with these sorts of discussions, in my head, I think of the "quality" of the signal as being in some sense invariant across all linear operations, in the sense that people generally care less about linear differences between different masters than they do nonlinear differences. Obviously that's not true from any remotely formal point of view of the signal itself.

A quality LP would rarely if ever made that way, because you need to condition many if not most of the signals you would record on a CD to make them fit within the limited dynamic range of the LP. The dynamic range limits of the LP conditioned the entire music production business back in the day. Music was even sometimes arranged and played so that it would "fit".

I never said this situation was "usually" the case, only that it might be the case. My understanding of current practice, flawed though it may be, is that this is indeed almost never the case - at the very least acceleration limiting and tape delay are always present to prevent accidental cutting head blowout. But there isn't any fundamental reason why you couldn't formulate a PCM signal with a peak acceleration under required limits, formulate another PCM signal to control pitch width (if that is even necessary for the application), apply inverse RIAA digitally, and wire the DAC directly up to the cutting amplifier in passthrough mode. I have asked a mastering engineer about this possibility and he said it is definitely possible.

(I know it's a wiki, but my account isn't verified, and I'll forget!).

The wiki forum has instructions - I believe the only instruction is "PM Jan for an account".

The wiki looks to me like it was written by someone who did academic-style research heavily weighted on internet chatter, It seems to dealing with a limited set of misapprehensions. The author does not seem to have the kind of understanding that would come from a good understanding of how vinyl works and its limitations.

For example it mentions elliptic filters as an explantion for bass summing. Elliptic filters are just a kind of filters like Butterworth filters. They have steep slopes. There may have been a popular implementation of bass summing that was based on elliptic filters, but that choice was irrelevant to the basics of the process wihich was to minimize vertical modulation because vertical modulation was more distortion prone and had far more limited dynamic range.

Yes, I know what an elliptic filter is, I still have those EE textbooks (and reread them from time to time). The fact is that bass-summing filters are known as elliptic filters in vinyl mastering parlance. I don't dispute that it is confusing and archaic terminology, but I did not make it up. (http://www.gearslutz.com/board/mastering-forum/279721-elliptical-filter-plugin.html) I can change the terminology to read "bass-summing" instead of "elliptic" if you think that is clearer.

Another example:

Under "How many different ways can a CD master differ from a vinyl master?"

"The vinyl master may be sourced from a 24-bit version of the CD master." 

If a 24 bit master exists, then the CD was almost certainly sourced from it as well.  There would rarely if ever be any difference in this regard.

Duh - but that's the right answer to the wrong question. In terms of strict generation trees or signal flows, there is a quite unambiguous difference - the vinyl mastering is sourced from the parent of the CD master, rather than the CD master itself.

I don't dispute that the audible difference ought to be pretty close to (if not precisely) negligible, but I don't believe that is pertinent to this discussion.

I guess my real point is that that particular wiki IMO does not need just some edits. It needs to be re-architected. I don't think the author has any real audio production chops.

For openers, IMO any discussion of mastering needs to start out with a discussion of well, mastering. This one dives into a current controversy about mastering that is very narrow.

Ummm.... guilty as charged Arny, I'm about as ivory tower as they come in terms of never actually producing audio in any meaninful sense, but you'll have to forgive me for writing this wiki entry to only deal with answering the questions that people actually care about on the subject, and in such a way as to appeal to the broadest possible audience - ie, leaving questions of audibility on separate pages, and focusing primarily on intrinsic qualities of the masters in question. The changes you seem to be proposing would alienate anti-TOS8 people for no good reason and go into minutiae of mastering which are not at all necessary for explaining the important topics. I don't dispute that audibility discussions need to be on the wiki in one form or another but I think that they ought to be separated from discussions about format/processing intrinsics, because so much of why people care about vinyl is due to intrinsics rather than sound quality, and there isn't necessarily anything wrong with that.

This is not an encyclopedia entry on the static topic ("Vinyl Mastering"). Perhaps that means it needs a new title, such as "Differences between vinyl and CD mastering" or whatnot.

Quote from: analog scott on 2010-06-22 13:27:36

"There's this idea floating around that vinyl records must have intrinsically different masterings than CDs of the same material."

I am really not familiar with this myth. While most *do* have different masterings I am completely unaware of any myth that it must be so for technical reasons. Certainly one can find certain extremes inwhich one can't cut the signal to a laquer. But they tend to be extreme and rare. For the most part the same signal can be cut on laquer and mastered to CD. Who is saying otherwise?

I think that sort of thinking is inherent with the belief that vinyl must necessarily be cut from a less hypercompressed/clipped master than was used for the CD, to avoid boogaboos like mistracking/overheating cutting head/etc - so therefore (this line of thinking goes) vinyl purchases are safer than CD purchases for the purpose of avoiding hypercompression. I think that's a very pervasive myth but I'm going to take enough time with this reply that I'd rather not go through actually digging up an example of it right now... certainly it ought to ring a bell to everybody contributing to this thread?

.

You "think this line of thinking is inherent...?" That is a prime ingredient for a strawman. If people are actually pushing the idea that "vinyl *must* have intrinsically different masterings than CD of the same material" Then there should be some actual evidence supporting that *this myth* is being spread by people who actually believe it. Not by folks who suspect this is the underlying line of thinking of other (kinda dumb) people.


There are sprinklings of individual facts throughout your post, it is possible to hypercompress a CD to the point that the same signal could not be cut onto vinyl. But your allusions to these particular "lines of thinking" do not ring a bell. Maybe there are a few people who have come up with such convoluted lines of reasoning and made the gross error in making some universal "rule of thumb" that mistakenly extends to all CDs even ones with no compression. But I have not seen this aleged myth anywhere but in the Wiki aticle. If it is a "very pervasive myth" as you claim we should find it spewed all over the place in audio forums, no? So once again I would like to see this pervasive myth expressed somewhere other than this thread and the wiki article by someone who actually believes it if I'm going to buy into your claims of pervasiveness.

If it is a "very pervasive myth" as you claim we should find it spewed all over the place in audio forums, no? So once again I would like to see this pervasive myth expressed somewhere other than this thread and the wiki article by someone who actually believes it if I'm going to buy into your claims of pervasiveness.

I have posted comments in the past which could be construed as supporting this myth. The gist of my argument is this:

*IF* you cut a vinyl LP from a hypercompressed master, *THEN* you will either get very little playing time per side *OR* you have to seriously limit the levels which compromises the (already woeful) S/N ratio available from vinyl.

On reflection, it occurs to me that when the source material is hypercompressed there is little need for any kind of decent S/N ratio. So perhaps turning down the levels to achieve sensible playing time isn't the big problem I had previously believed it to be.

Quote from: analog scott on 2010-06-29 08:10:54

If it is a "very pervasive myth" as you claim we should find it spewed all over the place in audio forums, no? So once again I would like to see this pervasive myth expressed somewhere other than this thread and the wiki article by someone who actually believes it if I'm going to buy into your claims of pervasiveness.

I have posted comments in the past which could be construed as supporting this myth. The gist of my argument is this:

*IF* you cut a vinyl LP from a hypercompressed master, *THEN* you will either get very little playing time per side *OR* you have to seriously limit the levels which compromises the (already woeful) S/N ratio available from vinyl.

On reflection, it occurs to me that when the source material is hypercompressed there is little need for any kind of decent S/N ratio. So perhaps turning down the levels to achieve sensible playing time isn't the big problem I had previously believed it to be.

1. The real issue is there comes a certain point with hypercompression of certain signals where the cutting head physically can't cut the laquer from the same signal without burning out.
2. While your comments are novel and interesting on a theoretical basis they  really are non issues in the world of vinyl since no one is actually doing what you are talking about there.
3. The myth on wiki states "vinyl records must have intrinsically different masterings than CDs of the same material."
There is a pretty substantial nonsequitor between your comments and the aleged myth.
4. Even if there was some irrational connection between your comments and the aleged myth it would again depend on some unstated inherent line of reasoning of others since clearly you are not pushing the aleged myth that "vinyl records must have intrinsically different masterings than CDs of the same material" based on your comments.

If the myth as stated in the Wiki article is pervasive it ought to be called out. But if it is pervasive it ought to be easly cited as described in the article in the form of claims by people who actually believe it.

Since you are looking for comments and the thread has become a bit more active I'll take on a few things.

>> How many different ways can a CD master differ from a vinyl master?
1.The CD and vinyl masters might just be exactly the same: the same signal that goes on the ADC goes on the cutting head.
2.Acceleration limiting might be used on the vinyl master.
3.Elliptic filtering (bass sums to mono) might be used on the vinyl master.
4.The vinyl master may be sourced from a 24-bit version of the CD master. (However, the high noise content of vinyl generally makes this a meaningless distinction.)
5.The vinyl master may be sourced from a higher-sampling-rate version of the CD master. (However, the demonstrated inaudibility of frequencies above 20khz makes this a meaningless distinction.)
6.The vinyl master may be EQ'd differently to account for equalization differences in the cutting head, electronics, or playback devices.
7.Finally, the vinyl master might be sourced from a master with less dynamic range compression or limiting than the CD master. This is the only distinction between a vinyl an CD master that is meaningful - in the sense that information exists on the vinyl master, in terms of reduced compression, that does not exist on the CD master. >>


this particular segment seems kinda stuck between general reasons which can be broken down even further into the most basic catagories and specific reasons which are far more numerous than 7.

As I see it the two most basic catagories of reasons why the mastering may be different can be divided into two
1. Diffferences in the signal fed to the converter and cutter preamp.
2. Differences in how any given converter or the cutting lathe that was used will handle that signal.

Differneces in the signal can stem form choice of source, equipment used for the source, and deliberate manipulation of the signal ie compression, summing bass to mono, noise reduction, eq, other signal processors etc etc.
Differences in how a given converter or cutting lathe handles the signal can depend both on the equipment itself and the signal being fed to it. One can not forget that over the span of the existance of CDs and vinyl there have been any number of changes and variations in this hardware.

If you start citing specific causes for differences you will end up with a very long article.

I think it's a waste of time to argue that this myth doesn't exist. Maybe "myth" is the wrong word, but Axon wrote the page specifically to counter claims by people that X, Y or Z vinyl release sounds better than the CD because it's cut from a less compressed master - whereas the truth was that the same "bad" mastering appeared on both.

Cheers,
David.

>> How do you know if a vinyl master is audibly superior than the CD master?
You ask the mastering engineer what he did. Other that, that, generally, you don't know. There are certainly many wrong ways to determine this, which can lead to false positives and false negatives.

Many people look at large-scale waveform plots, like those available in Audacity and Audition, and compare the waveforms across the entire piece of music. This does not work. The distortions present in vinyl - everything from subsample delays in the recording process to phase errors in the analog electronics to tracking and tracing distortion - ensure that even if the vinyl is cut with the exact same master as the CD, the peaks will be considerably higher, even during regions of gross clipping. Thus this technique is generally not acceptable, even though it is by far the most popular.
RMS loudness estimates, such as the industry standard RMS figure and ReplayGain, are ineffective because they require a reference level to compare the vinyl and CD versions against. No such reference level exists.
Experimental dynamic range estimators, such as pfpf and SparkleMeter, are useful in teasing out substantial differences in dynamic range, and may be quite useful in estimating when they become audible, rather than . pfpf, in particular, is designed to be immune to moderate levels of clipping distortion, under the expectation that clipping is either going to be inaudible or going to affect the timbral character of the music, not the dynamic range.
The one consistently accepted method of showing reduced compression is to show the individual samples in a clipped waveform against the same waveform in a different master that is not clipped. But again, this method is not foolproof: Various distortions can mask the clipping so that it is not consistently at the signal peak, yet still retains its characteristic distortion. However, clipping may not exist obviously in hypercompressed music, and even if a difference exists, it very well may not be audible. >>



This section implies some pretty bold specific assertions about what is and is not "better."

How do you really know if a vinyl master is "better" than a CD? You listen, compare and choose a preference. It really is that simple
The tricky problem is stting up an aural comparison in a way that is most fair.
Blind?
Level matched? How does one level match different masterings?
Choice of playback hardware?

I think it's a waste of time to argue that this myth doesn't exist. Maybe "myth" is the wrong word, but Axon wrote the page specifically to counter claims by people that X, Y or Z vinyl release sounds better than the CD because it's cut from a less compressed master - whereas the truth was that the same "bad" mastering appeared on both.

Cheers,
David.

But that actually has happened quite frequently. Vinyl releases of the same title have been issued without the hypercompression used on the CDs of the same titles. So why try to counter something that is actually a real world phenomenon by completely misrepresenting it and then branding it a myth?

2. While your comments are novel and interesting on a theoretical basis they  really are non issues in the world of vinyl since no one is actually doing what you are talking about there.

Not sure I understand what you're getting at. Are you saying that my comment is not relevant because in the real world nobody actually cuts vinyl LPs from the same hypercompressed master as the CD? The impression I get from what others have said is that this is precisely what seems to be going on in some cases. If that isn't what you're saying, can you try and rephrase?

But that actually has happened quite frequently. Vinyl releases of the same title have been issued without the hypercompression used on the CDs of the same titles. So why try to counter something that is actually a real world phenomenon by completely misrepresenting it and then branding it a myth?

Oh for goodness sake man!

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...ter_than_the_CD (http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Vinyl_Mastering#Some_known_examples:_Vinyl_releases_with_a_different_master_than_the_CD)

It's like you have this irrational response - "someone might be dissing vinyl here - I must argue with it" - like a clockwork toy that gets wound up and just can't stop!

Cheers,
David.

Quote from: analog scott on 2010-06-29 10:20:30

2. While your comments are novel and interesting on a theoretical basis they  really are non issues in the world of vinyl since no one is actually doing what you are talking about there.

Not sure I understand what you're getting at. Are you saying that my comment is not relevant because in the real world nobody actually cuts vinyl LPs from the same hypercompressed master as the CD? The impression I get from what others have said is that this is precisely what seems to be going on in some cases. If that isn't what you're saying, can you try and rephrase?

Compression is not a black and white issue. I will as a matter of logic assert that when the compression is so severe that the cutting heads will burn out that *yes* there is no real world vinyl cut form such masters. Are there CDs and vinyl cut from identical masters that are already compressed first? yeah of course. It happens both ways.

Quote from: analog scott on 2010-06-29 11:25:15

But that actually has happened quite frequently. Vinyl releases of the same title have been issued without the hypercompression used on the CDs of the same titles. So why try to counter something that is actually a real world phenomenon by completely misrepresenting it and then branding it a myth?

Oh for goodness sake man!

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...ter_than_the_CD (http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Vinyl_Mastering#Some_known_examples:_Vinyl_releases_with_a_different_master_than_the_CD)

It's like you have this irrational response - "someone might be dissing vinyl here - I must argue with it" - like a clockwork toy that gets wound up and just can't stop!

Cheers,
David.

Wow, you use pure ad hominem and call *my* response irrational? How about offering a logical argument that is supported by facts like I did instead of pure personal attack? Maybe we have very different ideas about what is irrational. I didn't really expect that from you. I don't really care if people like vinyl or not or dis it. But what we have here is a claim of a myth that seesm to me to be eroneous. Your rationalization of it was even worse than an eronous claim of a myth. I'm gonna give Axon enough credit and presume he really didn't take blatent factual errors, apply gross logical fallacies and turn it all into a strawman. I really would like to think that axon is refering to claims that actually have been made and that I am simply unaware of. But to say there is a pervasiveness to it implies that someone like myself who pays attention to the vinyl scene would have seen ot by now. I haven't. So if someone can show me what I have been missing I'll happily concede the point. But if what we have here is a construct of assumptions about what other people are thinking then maybe it is kinda out of place in a wiki article. Axon did invite ciritque did he not?

Wow, you use pure ad hominem and call *my* response irrational?

You argued something that was already in the article. I provided a link.

But what we have here is a claim of a myth that seesm to me to be eroneous. Your rationalization of it was even worse than an eronous claim of a myth. I'm gonna give Axon enough credit and presume he really didn't take blatent factual errors, apply gross logical fallacies and turn it all into a strawman. I really would like to think that axon is refering to claims that actually have been made and that I am simply unaware of. But to say there is a pervasiveness to it implies that someone like myself who pays attention to the vinyl scene would have seen ot by now. I haven't. So if someone can show me what I have been missing I'll happily concede the point.

Again, you ask for something that's already in the article!

e.g. this link...
http://www.gearslutz.com/board/mastering-f...side-vinyl.html (http://www.gearslutz.com/board/mastering-forum/502795-soundgardens-down-upside-vinyl.html)
...guy assumes vinyl must have been from superior master because it sounds so good - mastering engineer tells him it wasn't.

I've certainly read...
a) assumptions that vinyl can't be cut from brick-walled CDs masters, therefore it must have less limiting - so it should sound at least a little better - backed up with erroneous waveform comparisons which, when examined more closely, show exactly the same limiting on vinyl and CD!
b) statements that a given release sounds better on vinyl than CD, followed by assumptions that it must be because it's better mastering - then found out that it's the same mastering.
...but I didn't bookmark these, and wouldn't know where to start to try to find them again.

That anyone would choose to argue that something isn't a myth (or whatever) because they haven't heard it is just silly.

Or else it's just subtle trolling. I don't know. Either way, I've failed because I've joined the very argument I described as silly!

Cheers,
David.

Quote from: analog scott on 2010-06-29 14:10:41

Wow, you use pure ad hominem and call *my* response irrational?

You argued something that was already in the article. I provided a link.

Quote

But what we have here is a claim of a myth that seesm to me to be eroneous. Your rationalization of it was even worse than an eronous claim of a myth. I'm gonna give Axon enough credit and presume he really didn't take blatent factual errors, apply gross logical fallacies and turn it all into a strawman. I really would like to think that axon is refering to claims that actually have been made and that I am simply unaware of. But to say there is a pervasiveness to it implies that someone like myself who pays attention to the vinyl scene would have seen ot by now. I haven't. So if someone can show me what I have been missing I'll happily concede the point.

Again, you ask for something that's already in the article!

e.g. this link...
http://www.gearslutz.com/board/mastering-f...side-vinyl.html (http://www.gearslutz.com/board/mastering-forum/502795-soundgardens-down-upside-vinyl.html)
...guy assumes vinyl must have been from superior master because it sounds so good - mastering engineer tells him it wasn't.

Yeah I read that too. I don't see anything in there that supports the assertion that there is a pervasive belief that  "vinyl records must have intrinsically different masterings than CDs of the same material."
What I see there is *one* example of a reviewer in disbelief that *one particular* LP was sourced from a CD master because it sounded so good to him. I don't see how this is in any way the same thing as believing " "vinyl records must have intrinsically different masterings than CDs of the same material." and on top of that the guy who recounts the story did not actually master the vinyl so we don't know that the CD and the vinyl were actually mastered from identical *signals* only identical *sources.* There easily could have been some fancy EQ and other niceties on the vinyl not to mention a nice sprinkling of euphonic colorations from the reviewer's equipment.

I've certainly read...
a) assumptions that vinyl can't be cut from brick-walled CDs masters, therefore it must have less limiting - so it should sound at least a little better - backed up with erroneous waveform comparisons which, when examined more closely, show exactly the same limiting on vinyl and CD!
b) statements that a given release sounds better on vinyl than CD, followed by assumptions that it must be because it's better mastering - then found out that it's the same mastering.
...but I didn't bookmark these, and wouldn't know where to start to try to find them again.

That anyone would choose to argue that something isn't a myth (or whatever) because they haven't heard it is just silly.

Or else it's just subtle trolling. I don't know. Either way, I've failed because I've joined the very argument I described as silly!

Cheers,
David.

Maybe if you cut back on the rhetoric and stick to the subject it will be a bit less silly. Bad day or something?

Wow, can this get MORE silly? 

I think most of us can agree:

-- vinyl masterings are OFTEN -- maybe TYPICALLY -- different from the corresponding CD release
-- but by no means NECESSARILY different

And that these are the most salient points.

By extension, the belief that the masterings are 'intrinsically' (i.e., necessarily) different, would be wrong.  This belief definitely exists among audio consumers.  Whether it is 'pervasive' enough to rise to the level of 'myth' strikes me as a matter of concern mainly to pedantic, semantic nitpickers.  But out of humanitarian concern Axon should modify the wiki language to prevent a tragic twisted-underwear-induced injury to sensitive readers.

I was in my local, rather good, secondhand record store and general hipster emporium. They are meeting the vinyl craze, selling lots of those funny old 12" pizza plates, and there's a prominent ad, put out I think by Projekt or one of the turntable manufacturers, saying "MUSIC SOUNDS BETTER ON VINYL" (shouting in poster). Now, it doesn't say anything about mastering, but if anyone wants evidence of pervasive myths, I offer that as a sighting in the field.

Whether it is 'pervasive' enough to rise to the level of 'myth' strikes me as a matter of concern mainly to pedantic, semantic nitpickers.

So, of paramount importance to most HA members then

Wow, can this get MORE silly? 

I think most of us can agree:

-- vinyl masterings are OFTEN -- maybe TYPICALLY -- different from the corresponding CD release
-- but by no means NECESSARILY different

And that these are the most salient points.

By extension, the belief that the masterings are 'intrinsically' (i.e., necessarily) different, would be wrong.  This belief definitely exists among audio consumers.  Whether it is 'pervasive' enough to rise to the level of 'myth' strikes me as a matter of concern mainly to pedantic, semantic nitpickers.  But out of humanitarian concern Axon should modify the wiki language to prevent a tragic twisted-underwear-induced injury to sensitive readers.

OK that was funny. agreed on all points.

Quote from: Arnyk link=msg=0 date=

For openers, IMO any discussion of mastering needs to start out with a discussion of well, mastering. This one dives into a current controversy about mastering that is very narrow.

Ummm.... guilty as charged Arny, I'm about as ivory tower as they come in terms of never actually producing audio in any meaninful sense, but you'll have to forgive me for writing this wiki entry to only deal with answering the questions that people actually care about on the subject, and in such a way as to appeal to the broadest possible audience - ie, leaving questions of audibility on separate pages, and focusing primarily on intrinsic qualities of the masters in question. The changes you seem to be proposing would alienate anti-TOS8 people for no good reason and go into minutiae of mastering which are not at all necessary for explaining the important topics. I don't dispute that audibility discussions need to be on the wiki in one form or another but I think that they ought to be separated from discussions about format/processing intrinsics, because so much of why people care about vinyl is due to intrinsics rather than sound quality, and there isn't necessarily anything wrong with that.

This is not an encyclopedia entry on the static topic ("Vinyl Mastering"). Perhaps that means it needs a new title, such as "Differences between vinyl and CD mastering" or whatnot.

Axon, you've mde up a straw man called "A discussion of the mintuae of mastering" and are now arguing with yourself. What I was talking about is an overview of the purpose of mastering - a paragraph or so.  If one understands the basic purpose of mastering, much of the rest of this discussion makes a lot more sense.

One of the best introductions of mastering I've ever seen is online in a document called "The rec.audio.pro FAQ"

Quote from: cliveb on 2010-06-29 11:55:39

Quote from: analog scott on 2010-06-29 10:20:30

2. While your comments are novel and interesting on a theoretical basis they  really are non issues in the world of vinyl since no one is actually doing what you are talking about there.

Not sure I understand what you're getting at. Are you saying that my comment is not relevant because in the real world nobody actually cuts vinyl LPs from the same hypercompressed master as the CD? The impression I get from what others have said is that this is precisely what seems to be going on in some cases. If that isn't what you're saying, can you try and rephrase?

Compression is not a black and white issue. I will as a matter of logic assert that when the compression is so severe that the cutting heads will burn out that *yes* there is no real world vinyl cut form such masters. Are there CDs and vinyl cut from identical masters that are already compressed first? yeah of course. It happens both ways.

This is all  pretty ironic becase back in the day, compression was widely used to cut vinyl to help circumvent its limited dynamic range, and CDs were less likely to be compressed because the medium was up to just about any signal you could send down a wire.

Hypercompressed audio can definately be recorded on vinyl, all you have to do is cut the recording levels. Music that is both hot and hypercomressed can also be put on vinyl with appropriate reductions in recorded level.

Today, compression is essentially an artistic, not a technical choice, if we're talking about digital media. Hypercompression is not being done for technical reasons.

Currently, new vinyl releases are specialty items that are not intended for the general market of music lovers. Furthermore, the number of new vinyl titles is such a thin fraction of all new releases that anybody who just listens to vinyl is missing most of the action.

Music sounds better on vinyl, music sounds better on CD.... yadda yadda. depends on the circumstances and the judge no?

No.

I think all he's trying to say is that it's the eye of the beholder.  Some people have a preference for coloration, others don't.

Frankly, I am getting quite annoyed at the possibility that a thread dedicated to creating an accurate and informative wiki article may devolve into a pissing match over the sound of vinyl.

Quote from: krabapple on 2010-06-30 06:56:33

Whether it is 'pervasive' enough to rise to the level of 'myth' strikes me as a matter of concern mainly to pedantic, semantic nitpickers.

agreed (on all points)

Good, I binned your subsequent post potentially starting the cycle once again and will give you the chance to either be constructive or leave the discussion.  Seriously, these are your only two choices.

Oh for f*cks sake people. I don't mind pedantry - this entire topic is all about splitting hairs - but this is getting a little weird.

I think most of us can agree:

-- vinyl masterings are OFTEN -- maybe TYPICALLY -- different from the corresponding CD release
-- but by no means NECESSARILY different

And that these are the most salient points.

I can agree with these points, buuuut... I really am asserting something much stronger than this.

I don't claim to have much of any hard evidence for my beliefs here, besides counterexamples.. Such is the life of of the amateur researcher. But I will claim that there isn't any hard evidence arguing the contrary position. And the soft evidence I do have is pretty damn strong TYVM. 
So here I will try to outline precisely what I am trying to argue here, as a hypothesis, which is both quite falsifiable and not impossible to find hard evidence for assuming it's true.

---

For the class of vinyl releases with a "hypercompressed" CD of the same material released simultaneously, where there are no public claims one way or the other about the processing chain of the vinyl master (ie, at which point does the signal flow of the CD and vinyl masters diverge): let's say that some proportion of these vinyl releases' masters are sourced from a signal less hypercompresed than the CD master. Let's call this proportion Plh.

(As a point of reference, the "myth" claim that analog scott originally objected to, I believe, represents the belief that Plh=1 - that, due to restrictions on modulation velocity/acceleration, cutting head temperature limits, tracking etc, no hypercompressed material is allowed on vinyl. I think krab's post settled everybody on that point.)

Hypothesis: Based on all available evidence, Plh << 0.5. That is, for albums with simultaneous CD/vinyl releases, where the CD is hypercompressed and the vinyl is of unknown mastering provenance, one would expect very few vinyl masters to be less hypercompressed then the CD masters. Therefore, buying a vinyl release, in order to (primarily) avoid hypercompression that is known to exist on the CD, is not likely to do so.

• There is no conclusive empirical evidence supporting the position that Plh >= 0.5. AFAIK, there isn't even evidence that Plh > 0.5 in any reasonably sampled subset of vinyl releases that fit the class of releases being discussed - like, what one would find in a given record store, or for a particular genre or even label.
• There is much anecdotal evidence supporting the position that 0 < Plh < 0.5. In fact, from anecdotal evidence, Plh ought to be predicted to be fairly close to 0. I base this claim on the following points.
  
  • Based on my own (very limited) analysis comparing digital transcriptions of vinyl to CD versions that I have access to, every hypercompressed CD I looked at looked clipped to exactly (or almost exactly) the same magnitude on the transcription. IIRC, this is for perhaps a sample size of roughly 2-3 albums. For albums with mild or nonexistent hypercompression on CD (a much larger number), all of the equivalent vinyl transcriptions I've looked at had no additional dynamic range and no unambiguous improvement in limiting/clipping magnitude.
  • The impression I get, from reading comments made by cutting engineers on forums, is that the overwhelming majority of the sources they receive for vinyl mastering are the same as the equivalent CD masters.
• A priori, there are reasons for believing the near-certainty that Plh < 0.5, and there are decent reasons to believe Plh << 0.5.
  
  • My understanding of the vinyl mastering process is that, overall, it is typically more expensive or more time-consuming to source the vinyl master from a separate audio signal than the CD master, particularly if it is to be meaningfully separate (ie, does not contain hypercompression present on the CD release).
  • If extra attention was paid to the vinyl mastering, in the sense that it was less hypercompressed, assuming this represented an added expense in production, it would be reasonable to expect that this would be prominently featured in the marketing for the vinyl release, to best capitalize on the investment. This was most certainly true of, eg, Steve Hoffman's mastering of Icky Thump, of the mastering of Mudcrutch, etc. I have no idea what proportion of Plh for which this is actually true, though.
  • My impression of the opinions of "a significant fraction" of people - perhaps "most" - who prefer vinyl over CD on sound quality grounds, are going to base their belief more on the intrinsics of the formats, rather than the quality of the masters being used. (It would not surprise me if most producers/musicians with such preferences believe the same thing.) From a return-on-investment point of view, this is an incentive for a label not to use a less hypercompressed master for vinyl, because such a feature simply would not sway the buying decisions of some/most customers and thus not provide a significant return on investment. It is worth noting that the belief that hypercompression is inimical to vinyl as a format plays into this incentive.
  • Fundamentally, this is not a sound quality that consumers have terribly accurate accuracy in estimating. IIRC, Bob Katz estimates in Mastering Audio that transients can usually be hard limited to -6db down without audible insult. Moreover, even trained and well-respected mastering engineers will prefer vinyl even when it is hypercompressed to the same degree that the CD is (http://mastering-media.blogspot.com/2008/10/metallica-death-magnetic-vinyl-sounds.html). And most music listeners only know about the "loudness wars" only in the context that their CDs mastered in the 1980s sound much quieter than those in the 90s/2000s - sound quality itself tends to be a secondary discussion. That leads me to believe that, while hypercompression in itself is often audible and ABXable, believing differences in its magnitude are consistently identifiable is very unjustified.
    
    This matters because IMHO product quality in a market is positively correlated with the accuracy in which consumers are able to estimate it. When there is little reason to believe that consumers will consistently tell the difference when a vinyl master is less hypercompressed than a CD master, there is little reason to believe that most labels and producers will go to such troubles.

By "hypercompressed" here, I mean that multiple points exist in a 44.1khz PCM signal, where there is constant (or nearly constant) slope for over 0.5ms (22 samples) of the waveform, and such constant slope is best explained by aggressive hard limiting or outright clipping at some point in the signal flow (from recording to mastering). A signal which is significantly "less hypercompressed" than another will have correlated peaks but much smaller durations of constant slope.


---

OK - does that make sense to everybody? Is this a reasonably cogent argument? How may this be full falsified (or proven)?

But out of humanitarian concern Axon should modify the wiki language to prevent a tragic twisted-underwear-induced injury to sensitive readers.

Point taken, and after this argument is over with I am certainly going to rewrite the page in places, including with this issue. But there are some pretty fundamental issues people are having with the page as a whole that need to be discussed first.

Scott, all flaming aside, I would like to thank you for your detailed criticisms of the page, and I am working through them as I find the time/words to say.

As I see it the two most basic catagories of reasons why the mastering may be different can be divided into two


1. Differences in the signal fed to the converter and cutter preamp.
2. Differences in how any given converter or the cutting lathe that was used will handle that signal.

Differences in the signal can stem form choice of source, equipment used for the source, and deliberate manipulation of the signal ie compression, summing bass to mono, noise reduction, eq, other signal processors etc etc.
Differences in how a given converter or cutting lathe handles the signal can depend both on the equipment itself and the signal being fed to it. One can not forget that over the span of the existence of CDs and vinyl there have been any number of changes and variations in this hardware.

If you start citing specific causes for differences you will end up with a very long article.

.. Eh. I think the complete list of possible differences is going to be very long, but I can't imagine how listing the detailed differences which account for 95% of all mastering cases would be a whole lot larger than the ~7 we're talking about. Some classes of differences, like acceleration limiting in the cutting amplifier and pre-eq in the master to compensate for frequency losses in the cutting/playback process, tend to be ridiculously complex and/or have very obscure behavior at a detailed level, but their general audible effect seems easy enough to explain, as is a basic model of behavior (with a little handwaving of course).

Regardless, I think it's very important to explain to people the down and dirty of what goes on in the vinyl signal chain, precisely because of misapprehensions from both sides of the debate - some people think that there's any sort of purity in what goes on in cutting a record, and others think it's some ridiculously dirty sausage-grinding fest that is wholly unsuitable for the reproduction of audio. The truth is obviously well away from both, and I think that even if only a subset of detailed differences are discussed, all readers will benefit.

This section implies some pretty bold specific assertions about what is and is not "better."  How do you really know if a vinyl master is "better" than a CD? You listen, compare and choose a preference. It really is that simple. The tricky problem is stting up an aural comparison in a way that is most fair. Blind? Level matched? How does one level match different masterings? Choice of playback hardware?

Fair enough. I've got a really abstract idea in my head of what "quality" means, particularly with respect to limiting/clipping artifacts, and it's pretty clear here that when I was discussing audible sound quality in that section, I should have said something to the effect of "quality of the signal with respect to limiting/clipping". Or something like that.

I'd like to say that I tried hard in other wiki pages on vinyl to step around issues of strict sound quality/superiority to make the information more meaningful to all readers, and I think I broke that rule here. This was a really poor choice of terminology on my part and you are correct in calling me out on it.

But that actually has happened quite frequently. Vinyl releases of the same title have been issued without the hypercompression used on the CDs of the same titles. So why try to counter something that is actually a real world phenomenon by completely misrepresenting it and then branding it a myth?

Two reasons.

• "Quite frequently" != "most of the time". Just because there are several very prominent examples of such uncompressed releases does not make it a good policy to always buy vinyl for such reasons.
• As I mentioned before, almost all of those releases were prominently advertised one way or another: Usually somebody chimes in on sh.tv about it, and AFAIK, some mention of it is made on the packaging of the record itself. When you already know the provenance of the mastering you can obviously decide one way or another how that matters to you. The situation of the unknown master - where you don't have knowledge of the vinyl mastering signal chain w.r.t. hypercompression, at least until you buy the vinyl - is, I believe, a far more common situation (in terms of records available at record stores), and sort of makes those marketed/well-known releases moot as counterexamples.

I think all he's trying to say is that it's the eye of the beholder.  Some people have a preference for coloration, others don't.

No. It's a lot simpler than that (and like I just said my poor terminology did not help here).

PREFERENCE IS SUBJECTIVE AND DOES NOT NEED TO BE JUSTIFIED FOR ANY REASON.

So I think scott was in a very large sense right for the quoted statement in his original post, or at least the quoted bits of it (the rest I see has been moderated).

However, if one does decide to justify a preference, it can be for good reasons, or it can be for sh*tty reasons. Rationalization crosses the boundary from the subjective to the objective and as such can be accepted or rejected in terms of the objective reality shared by all people.

Unfortunately, the particular technical details of vinyl vs CD - IMNSHO, combined with the age-old geek wangfest of desiring better specs on one's equipment than the Joneses / hipster douchefest of being more authentic a listener than the average fan - invite a whole lot of very sh*tty reasons for justifying vinyl. And I think it's very important (and not at all contradictory!) to categorically reject such poor reasoning while respecting peoples' subjective preferences and opinions.

I need to get back to work so that's probably going to conclude my comments for the day.

PREFERENCE IS SUBJECTIVE AND DOES NOT NEED TO BE JUSTIFIED FOR ANY REASON.

I'm totally cool with that! (no need to argue over how one arrives at complete de-coloration, or some other angle for similar needless argumentation).

I think all he's trying to say is that it's the eye of the beholder.  Some people have a preference for coloration, others don't.

If the claim is that some people prefer colouration, then of course that is an observation that is true; and while it is possible to discuss preferences in a reasoned way, it's foolish to just say they're wrong, and I can understand circumstances in which vinyl would be great.

On the other hand, to claim that whether or not something "is better" depends on the judge is not the same thing. There are entirely reasonable meanings for "sounds better" that can be usefully contrasted with "is a sound I prefer." You can run through a long and winding road of argumentation about the relationship between the two statements, but a lot of unenlightening heat rises from arguments which are sometimes conducted as though there is some public, agreeable meaning for "better," but which then retreat into the inviolability of personal preference when the going gets tough.

And that's before you get into the difference between engineering criteria and aesthetic criteria.

OK - does that make sense to everybody? Is this a reasonably cogent argument?

As an argument based on speculation, it makes sense. The problem is that you appear to have not much experimental evidence to back it up - I get the impression that you've compared a few CD/LP releases, but not that many.

How may this be full falsified (or proven)?

By taking a statistically meaningful sample of concurrent CD and vinyl releases and testing them?

It would also prove instructive to try and sample releases from different periods in history. My guess would be that the proportion of vinyl releases that are mastered differently to their CD counterpart was higher in the past, and has been progressively falling as time goes by.

OT-ish, but...

Moreover, even trained and well-respected mastering engineers will prefer vinyl even when it is hypercompressed to the same degree that the CD is (http://mastering-media.blogspot.com/2008/10/metallica-death-magnetic-vinyl-sounds.html).

Assuming the preference remained in a blind test, and assuming these same people could be taught to understand and accept what they're hearing (unlikely!), then there would be a market for an accurate "vinyl simulator".

If some people prefer
CD master > vinyl > player > amp > speakers
...over...
CD master > CD > player > amp > speakers
...then it would seem to make sense to simulate the vinyl experience digitally, and use it as a fb2k plug-in when listening to music - rather than go to the hassle of buying vinyl!

Cheers,
David.

...then it would seem to make sense to simulate the vinyl experience digitally, and use it as a fb2k plug-in when listening to music - rather than go to the hassle of buying vinyl!

It would be nice if there was such a plugin, but the available ones that I have tested are all crap. They add selectable amounts of noise, rumble and some simple distortion (in the best case non-linear), crackling, and sometimes even hum. The result is ugly most of the time and you instantly want to switch it off. Take the LP version of the same CD and its euphonic distortion will sound much more pleasing even on a cheap turntable (though still not necessarily better than the CD). I prefer CD resolution digital files most of the time, but there are certainly releases that could use some euphonic treatment.* I think the positive aspects of euphonic distortion are severely under-researched.** Why are these plugins incapable of delivering what they are trying to model? They do try to implement all aspects, which are considered to be altering sound on vinyl, still the overall picture doesn't fit. I do think that, not for euphonic distortion in general, a turntable's pattern of distortion could be deciphered completely. But the physical models would have to be much more refined than what is available for purchase today.

* I do not consider this a CD vs. LP issue, but the result of sterile mastering, that can be somewhat fixed by "degrading" the record manually.
** Maybe it never will be, when the number of variables is so high that scientific analysis cannot be successful, so that only artistic approaches turn out to be able to handle them.

OT-ish, but...

Quote from: Axon on 2010-07-01 02:18:47

Moreover, even trained and well-respected mastering engineers will prefer vinyl even when it is hypercompressed to the same degree that the CD is (http://mastering-media.blogspot.com/2008/10/metallica-death-magnetic-vinyl-sounds.html).

Assuming the preference remained in a blind test, and assuming these same people could be taught to understand and accept what they're hearing (unlikely!), then there would be a market for an accurate "vinyl simulator".

If some people prefer
CD master > vinyl > player > amp > speakers
...over...
CD master > CD > player > amp > speakers
...then it would seem to make sense to simulate the vinyl experience digitally, and use it as a fb2k plug-in when listening to music - rather than go to the hassle of buying vinyl!

Cheers,
David.

Isn't that what the device in this thread was all about? http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....rt=#entry593049 (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=66445&pid=593049&mode=threaded&start=#entry593049)

Scott, all flaming aside, I would like to thank you for your detailed criticisms of the page, and I am working through them as I find the time/words to say.

Quote from: analog scott on 2010-06-29 10:51:30

As I see it the two most basic catagories of reasons why the mastering may be different can be divided into two


1. Differences in the signal fed to the converter and cutter preamp.
2. Differences in how any given converter or the cutting lathe that was used will handle that signal.

Differences in the signal can stem form choice of source, equipment used for the source, and deliberate manipulation of the signal ie compression, summing bass to mono, noise reduction, eq, other signal processors etc etc.
Differences in how a given converter or cutting lathe handles the signal can depend both on the equipment itself and the signal being fed to it. One can not forget that over the span of the existence of CDs and vinyl there have been any number of changes and variations in this hardware.

If you start citing specific causes for differences you will end up with a very long article.

.. Eh. I think the complete list of possible differences is going to be very long, but I can't imagine how listing the detailed differences which account for 95% of all mastering cases would be a whole lot larger than the ~7 we're talking about. Some classes of differences, like acceleration limiting in the cutting amplifier and pre-eq in the master to compensate for frequency losses in the cutting/playback process, tend to be ridiculously complex and/or have very obscure behavior at a detailed level, but their general audible effect seems easy enough to explain, as is a basic model of behavior (with a little handwaving of course).

Regardless, I think it's very important to explain to people the down and dirty of what goes on in the vinyl signal chain, precisely because of misapprehensions from both sides of the debate - some people think that there's any sort of purity in what goes on in cutting a record, and others think it's some ridiculously dirty sausage-grinding fest that is wholly unsuitable for the reproduction of audio. The truth is obviously well away from both, and I think that even if only a subset of detailed differences are discussed, all readers will benefit.

i think it would be a noble endeavour to cover the "down and dirty" but I really think we are talking book material not article material. I'll give you a few examples off the top of my head. Please bear with me this is off the top of my head so I'm not providing links or references. Buuuuut when I am done traveling from Bulgaria to the U.S. I will do my best to provide you with some interesting reference material.

One example, right over on Stevehoffman.tv there is a discussion of dynamic range that has veered off into a discussion of the classic golden age RCA LPs. Steve Hoffman made a reference to the big switch RCA made from the Scully cutters to the Nuemanns and mentioned that some of the "magic" was lost. Well, the magic is pretty easily identifiable colorations form that particular lathe and cutting head. Steve goes into some detail about the resonances in that cutter and how it affected the RCA sound(on an older thread). This is a sound that is much loved by any number of audiophiles. RCA since that point went on to reissue those titles in a few different incarnations all with their own sound. Then The Chesky Bros did a vinyl reissue series with very modern equipment (at the time) with mixed results. Then Classics took a stab with mixed results. Classics hit their stride and did some highly regarded 45 rpm masters cut by Bernie Grundman on his custom Scully lathe with a tube cutter. If you want to get down and dirty you would probably have to go into some depth on the sonic signature of the old Scully system used by RCA in the 50s and the affect that each renovation in equipment had on the RCA titles. Then what? Details on the Cheskys and the multiple incarnations from Classics? you can take one title and have a whole lotta material. I didn't even get into the variations of each cut that can be found on the "original shaded dog" versions that are much beloved by some audiophiles.

Here is another even more complicated example. The amazing London/Decca catalog. Arguably some of the most amazing full bodied orchestral recordings were made under the Decca banner. These LPs were mastered in the Decca mastering lab by a team of legendary cutting engineers over a period of well, since the 50s to now. If you are looking for a classic myth in mastering the London/Decca label has a great one. The myth goes that the Deccas are intrinsically superior to the Brittish cut Londons made for export to the U.S. Fact is over that 50 year period both were cut from the same masters in the same facilities by the same legendary team and after the fact one label or the other was slapped on. But the thing is there was substantial variation between different cuts of the same titles over the years due to differences in engineers and equipment not to mention laquer quality. It gets really complex. There is a terrible rule of thumb in audio that "original" means "better" and there is no better example of this not being true than with the Deccas. Many of their best "recordings" were done in the early sixties but it seems that their best cutting equipment went on line in the late sixties and IMO many of the best sounding versions were somewhat later cuts by particular engineers of earlier recordings. If you want to get down and dirty the equipment used and the engineers who did the cutting are well documented. but it is a lot of information. Then.... we have the great reissues by Speakers Corner and King Super Analog each of which had their own equipment chain and philosophies on mastering and each of which wrought some great results all be it very different results.

You will find similar stories with just about every label. Mercury, Blue Note, Impulse, Reprise, Atlantic.... Just a sample from Atlantic. I am an avid Yes fan. I have literally 13 different masterings of one of their albums, Close to the Edge. they all sound different and clearly all went through very different chains. My favorite version was cut by mastering legend George Piros. he actually cut three different versions over the years of this one title and all three are different!

I'm tellin ya this is a book, not an article.

Quote from: analog scott on 2010-06-29 11:16:15

This section implies some pretty bold specific assertions about what is and is not "better."  How do you really know if a vinyl master is "better" than a CD? You listen, compare and choose a preference. It really is that simple. The tricky problem is stting up an aural comparison in a way that is most fair. Blind? Level matched? How does one level match different masterings? Choice of playback hardware?

Fair enough. I've got a really abstract idea in my head of what "quality" means, particularly with respect to limiting/clipping artifacts, and it's pretty clear here that when I was discussing audible sound quality in that section, I should have said something to the effect of "quality of the signal with respect to limiting/clipping". Or something like that.

I'd like to say that I tried hard in other wiki pages on vinyl to step around issues of strict sound quality/superiority to make the information more meaningful to all readers, and I think I broke that rule here. This was a really poor choice of terminology on my part and you are correct in calling me out on it.

I get where you are coming from on the subject of compression but here is another example. recently several Van Morrison titles were reissued on vinyl. One of which several of us over SHF felt was really good but not quite as good as the original. Steve quickly chimed in and pointed out the new reissue was uncompressed whilt the original had 2:1 compression. I couldn't tell from listening that the original was compressed at all. I thought the differences were really kind of subtle and a mixed bag slightly favoring the original. Looks like I prefered the cut with 2:1 compression! I enjoy a clear victor when making comparisons between masterings. All to often you get a mixed bag and I know from group auditions you rarely get a concensus. That is why i think the real issue is making fair comparisons. that is tricky.

Quote

But that actually has happened quite frequently. Vinyl releases of the same title have been issued without the hypercompression used on the CDs of the same titles. So why try to counter something that is actually a real world phenomenon by completely misrepresenting it and then branding it a myth?

Two reasons.

• "Quite frequently" != "most of the time". Just because there are several very prominent examples of such uncompressed releases does not make it a good policy to always buy vinyl for such reasons.
• As I mentioned before, almost all of those releases were prominently advertised one way or another: Usually somebody chimes in on sh.tv about it, and AFAIK, some mention of it is made on the packaging of the record itself. When you already know the provenance of the mastering you can obviously decide one way or another how that matters to you. The situation of the unknown master - where you don't have knowledge of the vinyl mastering signal chain w.r.t. hypercompression, at least until you buy the vinyl - is, I believe, a far more common situation (in terms of records available at record stores), and sort of makes those marketed/well-known releases moot as counterexamples.

I think the *fact* that can be stated is that you can find both. When we start speculating on frequency or other peoples' perceptions on what and why we get into trouble. The water is very muddy there.

Quote from: greynol on 2010-07-01 00:57:53

I think all he's trying to say is that it's the eye of the beholder.  Some people have a preference for coloration, others don't.

If the claim is that some people prefer colouration, then of course that is an observation that is true; and while it is possible to discuss preferences in a reasoned way, it's foolish to just say they're wrong, and I can understand circumstances in which vinyl would be great.

Well that was actually my point. I was literally poking fun at either stance Vinyl sound better than CD or CD sounds better than vinyl. I merely said it depends on the circumstance. Circulstance meaning all the variables, mastering, hardware, listener preferences etc etc. For either blanket hasty generalization to actually be true for any individual would require a profound unwavering flat out irrational bias.

On the other hand, to claim that whether or not something "is better" depends on the judge is not the same thing. There are entirely reasonable meanings for "sounds better" that can be usefully contrasted with "is a sound I prefer."

Of course, there are reasonable "meanings" (plural) which may not only vary but even contradict each other. Once you pick a standard by which to measure excellence you can often find some objective measure. But the choice of standard is ultimately totally subjective.

You can run through a long and winding road of argumentation about the relationship between the two statements, but a lot of unenlightening heat rises from arguments which are sometimes conducted as though there is some public, agreeable meaning for "better," but which then retreat into the inviolability of personal preference when the going gets tough.

And that's before you get into the difference between engineering criteria and aesthetic criteria.

All of which is why I tried to poke fun at the idea. Better to walk away from "better" on a wiki article about mastering IMO. this is such a can o worms.

OT-ish, but...

Quote from: Axon on 2010-07-01 02:18:47

Moreover, even trained and well-respected mastering engineers will prefer vinyl even when it is hypercompressed to the same degree that the CD is (http://mastering-media.blogspot.com/2008/10/metallica-death-magnetic-vinyl-sounds.html).

Assuming the preference remained in a blind test, and assuming these same people could be taught to understand and accept what they're hearing (unlikely!), then there would be a market for an accurate "vinyl simulator".

If some people prefer
CD master > vinyl > player > amp > speakers
...over...
CD master > CD > player > amp > speakers
...then it would seem to make sense to simulate the vinyl experience digitally, and use it as a fb2k plug-in when listening to music - rather than go to the hassle of buying vinyl!

Cheers,
David.

The problem is with the baggage that comes with calling something a vinyl simulator. There is a market for a vinyl simulator. Just look at the prices of the old DCC CDs and consider some of the comments Steve Hoffman has made about how he went to great lengths the make the CDs and the LPs sound as much like each other as possible.

Of course the other problem is you need a mastering simulator to go with the vinyl simulator. Good luck with that.

* I do not consider this a CD vs. LP issue, but the result of sterile mastering, that can be somewhat fixed by "degrading" the record manually.

I think that's true of the vast majority of recordings. The very process of recording and reproducing audio loses so much of the original sound that it's no surprise to me that the final result can sound nicer if we try to put "something" back in, rather than just reproduce what's left as accurately as possible.

I suspect the recordings and systems which maintain the most of the original sound need the least "something extra" to sound "nice", but I could be wrong. Certainly recordings which capture appropriate ambience seem to work better "as is" than dry recordings. Also if the recordings are of "artificial" or electric instruments, which can only be heard through speakers anyway, then adding a little playback distortion may sometimes get you closer to the original sound - as heard by a listener at the time of recording, rather than as captured at the line input to a mixer! If it was captured that way. You can, of course, put a mic infront of a speaker to capture the sound of a particular loudspeaker - but not completely (in the same way as a mic can't capture the sound of a real instrument in a room completely).

Cheers,
David.

Article in the NY Times about Tom Petty's "Mudcrutch", and the difference between the "normal" CD and the less compressed vinyl/CD special edition:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/business...q=vinyl%20audio (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/business/media/23petty.html?_r=1&sq=vinyl%20audio)

The problem is with the baggage that comes with calling something a vinyl simulator. There is a market for a vinyl simulator. Just look at the prices of the old DCC CDs and consider some of the comments Steve Hoffman has made about how he went to great lengths the make the CDs and the LPs sound as much like each other as possible.

Of course the other problem is you need a mastering simulator to go with the vinyl simulator. Good luck with that.

That's it in a nutshell. From the consumer viewpoint the mastering and the baggage that the medium adds all by itself are inseparable. You hear the two inextricably mixed together.  In very many cases the mastering is the stronger effect, but there's no way to know that based on evidence that consumers receive as a retail product.

In the  days of vinyl, the whole process of making a record, often starting back when the music was arranged or even written, was designed to optimize consumer saitifact with the finished product. This was exactly as it should be.

When digital became the primary delivery format, some of the optimization for vinyl logically went away because the develpment process typically remained the same through mixdown.

When someone has a preference for music developed a certain way it would be fanciful to try to break the delivered product down into its individual production steps to try to determine which was the best or even just the strongest determiner of the outcome, because the outcome is just a personal preference.

From an audibility standpoint it doesn't matter whether you are mastering for CD, DVD-A or SACD, so-called high rez formats make no difference. The original source material isn't necesasrily audibly degraded by being 16/44.  Tracking and mxing are the only steps of the production process where hi rez formats could possibly make an audible difference.

Article in the NY Times about Tom Petty's "Mudcrutch", and the difference between the "normal" CD and the less compressed vinyl/CD special edition:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/business...q=vinyl%20audio (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/business/media/23petty.html?_r=1&sq=vinyl%20audio)

Is it known where in the production process forks for the various media - hypercompressed CD, normal CD, and LP?

For this title a "compressed" CD version was mastered first. Then when they came to master the vinyl they cut it compressed and uncompressed. The powers that be prefered the uncompressed LP test pressing and so it was decided that they would use the uncompressed cut. They then decided to include an uncompressed CD packaged with the LP.  The "compressed" version was not "hypercompressed." This was considered to be a good mid point between sound quality and market forces.

Read what I said - my question what about production process, not the chronology of producer's choices.

I read what you said Arny. Not sure how mastering is not part of the "production process." But anyway... The only "fork" was in the mastering. Every version, the compressed CD, the compressed LP test pressing, the uncompressed LP, the uncompressed CD and the MP3 all came from the same master tape.

Article in the NY Times about Tom Petty's "Mudcrutch", and the difference between the "normal" CD and the less compressed vinyl/CD special edition:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/business...q=vinyl%20audio (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/business/media/23petty.html?_r=1&sq=vinyl%20audio)

Has anyone got any comparison samples to listen to?

If it's as reported, this is great - except that to get the decent CD, it seems you have to buy the vinyl! I suppose if the record sleeve was pretty, you could hang it on the wall.

Cheers,
David.

I think it's important to keep the timeline of predominant mastering practices clear in the wiki.

Up to about 1980, as I understand it, it was typical in LP cutting to sum the bass to mono, reduce the low bass, compress 2:1 or higher, and so forth.  Starting ca. 1970, it was typical to make a cutting master that was made from a feed split from what went to the lathe when the LP was first mastered.  Subsequent LP masterings were made straight from this cutting master without other intervention (so they were identical to originals except 1 generation down).  Many first generation cds were made from these same cutting masters.  In some cases, where the actual masters are inaccessible, these tapes are the source for all cd issues.

Around 1980, digital preview heads became prevalent.  These, plus a general proliferation of higher performance phono cartridges allowed less draconian processing of the master tape to fit on vinyl and longer, less compressed records to be cut.  But they mean that almost all vinyl since the 1980s is actually cut from a 16-bit signal.  The differences between 1980s vinyl and CD are quixotic.  Sometimes the LP is very long, say 60 minutes on a (quiet or bass-reduced) single disc.  Other times tracks were cut from the running order.  Often one mastering house did the CD and another the vinyl--and often this was not credited but discernible only from the mastering stamp on the vinyl.  Sometimes the credit on the sleeve is for the vinyl (even on the cd version), sometimes vice versa.  As one example of mastering protocol for high-profile bands, releases from Guns'n'Roses were mastered for cd in-house by Barry Diament, and for LP at Masterdisk.  But often, the same cutting house did both.  In many cases the vinyl was cut from the cd, in other cases from the master tape (or a digital copy) used to make the CD.  There is no firm rule but in general LP vs. CD masterings from this era are very similar in tonality.  [The gearslutz quotes from the Soundgarden mastering engineer reflect what I understand was typical.]

In the 1990s, major labels stopped making vinyl except for a few one-off pressings or licensing for bands that had a vinyl fanbase.  Typically the mastering house that did CD would send 16/44 files to the vinyl cutting house.  Indie labels continued to sell vinyl, and typically used the the same master (and mastering house) for CD and LP.  Again, these usually sound very very close if using top flight equipment.

Thus, the vast majority of vinyl releases made since 1980 were made from the 16/44 digital--either as source tape or as feed from the digital preview.

Things changed a bit with the vinyl revival--which occurred at roughly the same time as the loudness wars.  Sometimes, instead of using a hypercompressed file that is identical to the cd, LP mastering houses are given pre-[CD] mastered files, 16/44 or higher, and thus create a higher fidelity version, though it may also have different eq.  And audiophile reissues often eschew or minimize compression and filtering, as well as eq'ing to taste, creating an audibly different sound.  And that is where this wiki comes in, to explain that in some select cases, the vinyl master is higher fidelity.

As an aside, I believe it is the relatively gentle compression used in LP mastering that is largely responsible for the "sound" of vinyl that people like [leaving aside placebo issues].  I believe this also explains the popularity of "first pressing" and "Japanese first pressing" cds that were often mastered from pre-processed (for vinyl) "cutting masters".

Nice idea usernaim but trying to generalise like that is pretty meaningless. At any given point in time the equipment used in pressing plants was not standard. So a wide variety of equipment of varying levels of quality and sophistication were in use across the industry.  I'm talking about up to the end of the 80's when I left the industry, maybe it's more straight-forward now - and say, since the 90's - with volumes being lower and pressing plants fewer.
Also, while cutting a lacquer is a bit of a black art a cutting engineer would never "sum bass to mono", apply eq, compression or anything else without the OK from the artist or producer. The last thing you want is for your test pressings to be rejected and have to re-cut. Any "preparation for production" like that would usually have been done by the mastering engineer who produced the tape from which the lacquer was cut. That would invariably be a different person, probably working in a recording studio or simlar rather than a record manufacturing plant, though it was not unheard of for last minute adjustments to be requested by the artist or producer at the cutting stage.

Edit : for clarity (hopefully)

Nice idea usernaim but trying to generalise like that is pretty meaningless. At any given point in time the equipment used in pressing plants was not standard. So a wide variety of equipment of varying levels of quality and sophistication were in use across the industry.  I'm talking about up to the end of the 80's when I left the industry, maybe it's more straight-forward now - and say, since the 90's - with volumes being lower and pressing plants fewer.
Also, while cutting a lacquer is a bit of a black art a cutting engineer would never "sum bass to mono", apply eq, compression or anything else without the OK from the artist or producer. The last thing you want is for your test pressings to be rejected and have to re-cut. Any "preparation for production" like that would usually have been done by the mastering engineer who produced the tape from which the lacquer was cut. That would invariably be a different person, probably working in a recording studio or simlar rather than a record manufacturing plant, though it was not unheard of for last minute adjustments to be requested by the artist or producer at the cutting stage.

Edit : for clarity (hopefully)

It is just as difficult to generalize things from the late 80s on. Much of the "new" vinyl from that point on was actually old titles reissued on vinyl. The sources and methodologies used for those reissues vary widely. As for the digital preview, that does not mean the signal sent to the cutting head has to be digitized. Over at Stevehoffman.tv they compiled a list of cutting facilities that had an all analog path between the cutting head and the input feed. It was a pretty lengthy and substantial list.

Also, while cutting a lacquer is a bit of a black art a cutting engineer would never "sum bass to mono", apply eq, compression or anything else without the OK from the artist or producer. The last thing you want is for your test pressings to be rejected and have to re-cut. Any "preparation for production" like that would usually have been done by the mastering engineer who produced the tape from which the lacquer was cut. That would invariably be a different person, probably working in a recording studio or simlar rather than a record manufacturing plant, though it was not unheard of for last minute adjustments to be requested by the artist or producer at the cutting stage.)

Cutting engineer? Mastering engineer? They used to be the same person. Strictly speaking, they still are. 
Reflect a moment on the LP production process, and from what part the "mastering" engineer took his name.
If you were in the business pre 1980, I'd have thought you'd remember that. Or maybe you're like me - Memory is the second thing to go with age. I forget what the first one was...

Cutting engineer? Mastering engineer? They used to be the same person. Strictly speaking, they still are. 
Reflect a moment on the LP production process, and from what part the "mastering" engineer took his name.

Yes!  "Mastering' was basically invented because of limitations of the distribution media, and the home systems used to play them.

Quote from: botface on 2010-07-07 15:19:40

Also, while cutting a lacquer is a bit of a black art a cutting engineer would never "sum bass to mono", apply eq, compression or anything else without the OK from the artist or producer. The last thing you want is for your test pressings to be rejected and have to re-cut. Any "preparation for production" like that would usually have been done by the mastering engineer who produced the tape from which the lacquer was cut. That would invariably be a different person, probably working in a recording studio or simlar rather than a record manufacturing plant, though it was not unheard of for last minute adjustments to be requested by the artist or producer at the cutting stage.)

Cutting engineer? Mastering engineer? They used to be the same person. Strictly speaking, they still are. 
Reflect a moment on the LP production process, and from what part the "mastering" engineer took his name.
If you were in the business pre 1980, I'd have thought you'd remember that. Or maybe you're like me - Memory is the second thing to go with age. I forget what the first one was...

Well, where I used to work a tape would arrive in the cutting room that had already been mastered elsewhere. The cutting engineer would then cut the lacquer from that tape. The "mastering engineer" was so-called because he produced the master tape. Maybe you called the cutting engineer the mastering engineer because he produced the master disc - well, he didn't really it was actually grown by electrolysis from the lacquer but maybe that's spitting hairs

Scott, all flaming aside, I would like to thank you for your detailed criticisms of the page, and I am working through them as I find the time/words to say.

Quote from: analog scott on 2010-06-29 10:51:30

As I see it the two most basic catagories of reasons why the mastering may be different can be divided into two


1. Differences in the signal fed to the converter and cutter preamp.
2. Differences in how any given converter or the cutting lathe that was used will handle that signal.

Differences in the signal can stem form choice of source, equipment used for the source, and deliberate manipulation of the signal ie compression, summing bass to mono, noise reduction, eq, other signal processors etc etc.
Differences in how a given converter or cutting lathe handles the signal can depend both on the equipment itself and the signal being fed to it. One can not forget that over the span of the existence of CDs and vinyl there have been any number of changes and variations in this hardware.

If you start citing specific causes for differences you will end up with a very long article.

.. Eh. I think the complete list of possible differences is going to be very long, but I can't imagine how listing the detailed differences which account for 95% of all mastering cases would be a whole lot larger than the ~7 we're talking about. Some classes of differences, like acceleration limiting in the cutting amplifier and pre-eq in the master to compensate for frequency losses in the cutting/playback process, tend to be ridiculously complex and/or have very obscure behavior at a detailed level, but their general audible effect seems easy enough to explain, as is a basic model of behavior (with a little handwaving of course).

Regardless, I think it's very important to explain to people the down and dirty of what goes on in the vinyl signal chain, precisely because of misapprehensions from both sides of the debate - some people think that there's any sort of purity in what goes on in cutting a record, and others think it's some ridiculously dirty sausage-grinding fest that is wholly unsuitable for the reproduction of audio. The truth is obviously well away from both, and I think that even if only a subset of detailed differences are discussed, all readers will benefit.

I found this link over at Audio Asylum. Looks like a pretty awesome data base of hardware. Might be a good starting point.
http://www.floka.com/cutpage.html (http://www.floka.com/cutpage.html)

Well, where I used to work a tape would arrive in the cutting room that had already been mastered elsewhere. The cutting engineer would then cut the lacquer from that tape. The "mastering engineer" was so-called because he produced the master tape. Maybe you called the cutting engineer the mastering engineer because he produced the master disc - well, he didn't really it was actually grown by electrolysis from the lacquer but maybe that's spitting hairs

You weren't at the "master plant", then.

Step 1: Recording (tracking), with optional processing (eq, compression).
Step 2: Mixdown to stereo, with optional processing at track and bus levels.
These two steps were often done by the same engineer. For big productions, there could be separate tracking and mixdown engineers. 

Step 3: Cut to lacquer (and process as required to make it cuttable and trackable).
Step 4: Make several copies of the tape with cutting processing included and distribute to other plants.
Step 5: Each plant would then cut from the tape, make a safety copy and pass the tape on to the next plant in the chain.

(But what often happened was that the plant would keep the original and pass down the safety copy. Several generations later, the result at the end of the chain often sounded nasty.)

Note that the processing in Step 3 had to be done using a lathe. It was an iterative process - set up the processing via best guess and experience, cut, examine the result. If not satisfactory, adjust the processing and try again. Some mixdown engineers did have a good understanding of what was needed and could deliver a tape that required little or no processing. 

Step 1: Recording (tracking), with optional processing (eq, compression).
Step 2: Mixdown to stereo, with optional processing at track and bus levels.
These two steps were often done by the same engineer. For big productions, there could be separate tracking and mixdown engineers. 

Step 3: Cut to lacquer (and process as required to make it cuttable and trackable).
Step 4: Make several copies of the tape with cutting processing included and distribute to other plants.
Step 5: Each plant would then cut from the tape, make a safety copy and pass the tape on to the next plant in the chain.

To clarify:

Step 1: Recording (tracking). Sometimes eq and/or dynamics processing would be applied here, but usually not so much.
Step 2: Mixdown to stereo, with optional processing (eq, dynamics) at track, bus and stereo mix stages of mixing. Create stereo mixdown master, evaluate, tweak.
Step 3: Create cutting master by applying additional eq and/or dynamics processing to ensure cuttability and tackability

Step 4: Check cutting master to see if it requires additional tweaking to correct problems that only showed up after cutting the lacquer. If needed, go back to step 3
Step 5: Tested cutting masters are duplicated at the central production facility. Safety copy is kept there and other duplicates get sent to pressing plants.
Step 6: Cutting masters are used to cut laquers at pressing plants as they are needed.

none of this is cut into stone, but this is the baseline path from which everybody deviaated if they deviated.

Quote from: splice on 2010-07-08 23:30:45

Step 1: Recording (tracking), with optional processing (eq, compression).
Step 2: Mixdown to stereo, with optional processing at track and bus levels.
These two steps were often done by the same engineer. For big productions, there could be separate tracking and mixdown engineers. 

Step 3: Cut to lacquer (and process as required to make it cuttable and trackable).
Step 4: Make several copies of the tape with cutting processing included and distribute to other plants.
Step 5: Each plant would then cut from the tape, make a safety copy and pass the tape on to the next plant in the chain.

To clarify:

Step 1: Recording (tracking). Sometimes eq and/or dynamics processing would be applied here, but usually not so much.
Step 2: Mixdown to stereo, with optional processing (eq, dynamics) at track, bus and stereo mix stages of mixing. Create stereo mixdown master, evaluate, tweak.
Step 3: Create cutting master by applying additional eq and/or dynamics processing to ensure cuttability and tackability

Step 4: Check cutting master to see if it requires additional tweaking to correct problems that only showed up after cutting the lacquer. If needed, go back to step 3
Step 5: Tested cutting masters are duplicated at the central production facility. Safety copy is kept there and other duplicates get sent to pressing plants.
Step 6: Cutting masters are used to cut laquers at pressing plants as they are needed.

none of this is cut into stone, but this is the baseline path from which everybody deviaated if they deviated.

And which particular masterings of which particular titles can we actually cite as having gone through this specific pathology? Can we name any specific titles? Recording engineers with first hand accounts of the eq and/or dynamics processing? First hand accounts of the creation of the cutting master? First hand accounts of the duplication of the cutting masters at a specific central production facility? Any first hand accounts of duplicate cutting masters being stocked and used to cut masters at pressing plants as needed? What about the equipment used? What specific equipment was used with any specific titles we can trace? These are the questions that need to be answered if we are going to say anything about how any particular LP was mastered. One can find a lot of info in the dead wax that will tell much of the story but even then we need a lot of info from the mouths of the proverbial horses to even begin to know what processes went into the mastering.

And of course many of these questions are just as relevant to a vast number of CDs out there. I highly recomend the Dennis Drake paper about the work that went into the mastering of the Mercury Living Presence CDs he mastered with Wilma Cozart back in the nineties.

These are the questions that need to be answered if we are going to say anything about how any particular LP was mastered.

Do you have any evidence to suggest Arnold is not right in saying:

this is the baseline path from which everybody deviaated if they deviated.

???

To me it seems you're just trolling again.

Quote from: analog scott on 2010-07-09 15:39:04

These are the questions that need to be answered if we are going to say anything about how any particular LP was mastered.

Do you have any evidence to suggest Arnold is not right in saying:

Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on 2010-07-09 01:23:46

this is the baseline path from which everybody deviaated if they deviated.

???

To me it seems you're just trolling again.

1. Why would you ask for evidence for something I have not asserted? Axon was talking about getting "down and dirty" in citing the differences one can find in mastering. Remember this from Axon? " Regardless, I think it's very important to explain to people the down and dirty of what goes on in the vinyl signal chain, precisely because of misapprehensions from both sides of the debate - some people think that there's any sort of purity in what goes on in cutting a record, and others think it's some ridiculously dirty sausage-grinding fest that is wholly unsuitable for the reproduction of audio. The truth is obviously well away from both, and I think that even if only a subset of detailed differences are discussed, all readers will benefit."

So my point isn't to question the baseline path Arny has outlined. My point is to try to make some connection between that outline and what actually went into mastering real world LPs. If one really wants to get "down and dirty" then one has to get specific and gather actual facts. Axon does talk about "detailed differences." What is the connection between this baseline path and the detailed differences in mastering of any real world LP? Without some attempt to make that connection we are not addressing that which Axon is trying to cover in his wiki article.


Now I can actually give you fact filled pathologies of the mastering of several hundred of my own LPs. For the most part there is a substantial disconnect between the actual pathologies of the mastering of those LPs and Arny's baseline path. But that is not meant to say that this baseline path is not the path that many other LPs have followed. Most of the LPs which have a well documented pathology of mastering are of the audiophile/audiophile reissue flavor. Many of the others are from various labels that have gained favor among audiophiles and as a result have been well documented through out the years. I am talking about labels like the Mercuries, London Deccas and RCAs of the golden age of classical recording and other labels like Blue Note and other notables in Jazz. At least we can get "down and dirty" with facts surrounding their mastering and maybe make some corolation between their sound and the mastering that went into them. How can we do that just with Arny's baseline path?  If you want to get down and dirty you have to get down and dirty and disect these things individually based on gathered reliable intel. As it is, Arny's baseline path really tells us nothing about the mastering process of any given LP.

If one really wants to get "down and dirty" then one has to get specific and gather actual facts.

Do you have any reason to believe that the information provided to you by splice and Arnold (two people I believe are far more intimately associated with the music business than either you or I) about how masters for vinyl were typically created is not actual fact?

Now I can actually give you fact filled pathologies of the mastering of several hundred of my own LPs. For the most part there is a substantial disconnect between the actual pathologies of the mastering of those LPs and Arny's baseline path.

Then why not provide us with a typical example from your vast wealth of information to move the discussion along?

At least we can get "down and dirty" with facts surrounding their mastering and maybe make some corolation between their sound and the mastering that went into them.

So what is keeping you?

When all else fails good ole ad hominem....so predictable

The only failure here is your ability to be constructive.  You obviously feel that such an article cannot be written in an informative and terse way.  I'm merely suggesting that it may be beyond your capabilities.  Based on what you've said, it is clearly not within your vision.  If this is the case and if you, Arnold, or anyone else cannot find it within yourselves to provide help without it devolving into a food fight, then my best recommendation for you is to leave the discussion.

Isn't this where you stop me from any further posting?

As I have warned you in the past, if you are here simply to bog discussions down with petty arguing (very little of your input on this forum thus far has resulted in anything more than this), then yes, though this time you're looking at a permanent ban.

As far as the two PDFs that we now have  links to, neither is about how LPs were mastered back in the day.

Somehow this essential point was overlooked.

Don't take this as support for your extremely weak and completely unnecessary off-topic contortion act over EQ and compression, however.

Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on 2010-07-12 19:52:45

As far as the two PDFs that we now have  links to, neither is about how LPs were mastered back in the day.

Somehow this essential point was overlooked.

Don't take this as support for your extremely weak and completely unnecessary off-topic contortion act over EQ and compression, however.

One of the questions asked by Axon in his OP was "How can a vinyl master be accurately observed as being the same or different as a CD master?" Can't really answer that question without looking into how CDs were mastered.

You brought these papers up in a direct response to Arnold's refinement of splice's outline.  If you learned how craft a post with proper quotations and transitional phrases, these things might be avoided.

The bottom line is that we don't need justifications or excuses for posts that have started off-topic conversation.  Be clear, to the point and on topic or don't post.

Quote from: analog scott on 2010-07-09 19:40:32

If one really wants to get "down and dirty" then one has to get specific and gather actual facts.

Do you have any reason to believe that the information provided to you by splice and Arnold (two people I believe are far more intimately associated with the music business than either you or I) about how masters for vinyl were typically created is not actual fact?

Quote from: analog scott on 2010-07-09 19:40:32

Now I can actually give you fact filled pathologies of the mastering of several hundred of my own LPs. For the most part there is a substantial disconnect between the actual pathologies of the mastering of those LPs and Arny's baseline path.

Then why not provide us with a typical example from your vast wealth of information to move the discussion along?

Quote from: analog scott on 2010-07-09 19:40:32

At least we can get "down and dirty" with facts surrounding their mastering and maybe make some corolation between their sound and the mastering that went into them.

So what is keeping you?

here is something from a few sources about the mercury Living Presence LPs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_Records (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_Records)

In 1955, Mercury began using 3 omni-directional microphones to make stereo recordings on 3-track tape. The technique was an expansion on the mono process—center was still paramount. Once the center, single microphone was set, the sides were set to provide the depth and width heard in the stereo recordings. The center mike still fed the mono LP releases, which accompanied stereo LPs into the 1960s. In 1961, Mercury enhanced the three-microphone stereo technique by using 35 mm magnetic film instead of half-inch tape for recording. The greater emulsion thickness, track width and speed (90 feet per min or 18 ips) of 35 mm magnetic film increased prevention of tape layer print-through and pre-echo and gained in addition extended frequency range and transient response. The Mercury 'Living Presence' stereo records were mastered directly from the 3-track tapes or films, with a 3-2 mix occurring in the mastering room. The same technique—and restored vintage equipment of the same type—was used during the CD reissues. Specifically, 3-track tapes were recorded on Ampex 300-3½" machines at 15 IPS. 35 mm magnetic film recordings were made on 3-track Westrex film recorders. The 3-2 mixdown was done on a modified Westrex mixer. For the original LPs, the mixer directly fed the custom cutting chain. At Fine Recording in NY, the Westrex cutter head on a Scully lathe was fed by modified McIntosh 200W tube amplifiers with very little feedback in the system. Older mono records were made with a Miller cutter head. For the CD reissues, the output of the Westrex mixer directly fed a DCS analog-to-digital converter and the CDs were mastered on Sony 1630 tapes. No digital enhancement or noise reduction was used.

The original LP releases of the classical recordings continued through 1968. The Mercury classical music catalogue is currently managed by Decca Music Group through Philips Records, which reissued the recordings on LP and then CD.

In 2003 Speakers Corner Records began issuing 180 gram audiophile quality LP reissues. The LPs are mastered from 2-track tapes made at the time of the original LP mastering, thus one generation removed from the edited session master used to produce the original LP master and the CD master."

This web page has an amazing wealth of information on the Mercury recordings and mastering of the original LPs
http://www.soundfountain.com/amb/mercury.html (http://www.soundfountain.com/amb/mercury.html)

Some information about how the original LPs were cut including citation of George Piros as the mastering engineer

"With minimal editing, the session tape was mastered for LP pressing by the redoubtable George Piros. Using the highest cutting levels he could get by with, Piros found several ways to get cutting levels up and distortion products down. His use of something called "variable groove spacing", proved especially useful in reducing distortion prone inner groove problems. In addition, all details of the cutting process were re-analyzed. The in-house tweaked cutting head boasted a heated cutting stylus and was driven with a custom-designed McIntosh Labs cutting amplifier which allowed higher drive current to the cutting head with lower distortion. Predictably, the variable pitch cutter drive, combined with superb lathes and specially formulated cutting lacquers yielded magnificent results. "

http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue4/pearsall.htm (http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue4/pearsall.htm)

Some information about dead wax matrix codes and how they relate to the mastering of the LPs

http://microgroove.jp/mercury/Matrix6.shtml (http://microgroove.jp/mercury/Matrix6.shtml)

No contortions at all.

Bullshit.  If it weren't bullshit then you'd have said it in your first post rather than ridiculously stumble over yourself parsing words to save face.  I'll put money on it that few if any third-party observers see this otherwise.

I'm not going to answer the rest of your off-topic omniscience about my level of understanding regarding analog tape recording or to what degree the tapes were (mis-)used during the process described in that paper.

My stern warnings to analog scott are equally applicable to you: be constructive or leave.  Test my patience and you will see your posting privileges curtailed.  This is topic is not a debate over analog vs. digital.

EDIT: More off-topic posts binned (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=82158).  If you want them split into a separate discussion, PM either myself or another moderator/admin.

Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on 2010-07-13 01:00:19

No contortions at all.

Bullshit.

For independent iconfirmation of my claims about how analog tape can be used as an equalizer and compressor, please refer to the following document:

A typical set of detailed specs for a typical magnetic tape that might be used professionally (http://www.rmgi-usa.com/page4/assets/RMGI_SM_468.pdf)

Please turn to page 3 and refer to the lower illustration entitled "Input Level versus Output Level at frequencies 1 kHz, 10 kHz and 16 kHz (12.5 kHz at 7 1/2 ips)
and tape speeds 30 ips (76.2 cm/s), 15 ips (38.1 cm/s) and 71/2 ips (19.05 cm/s)."

Perhaps most dramatic are the input/output curves for  7 1/2 ips operation. Note that the reference level for all curves is -10 dB. This means that all measurments were referenced to a recorded level of -10 dB. In general, the input and output track each other pretty well up to 4 dB @ 1 KHz, but only up to -2 dB at 10 KHz and only -4 dB at 12.5 KHz.  This means that the tape functions as a variable low pass filter with a sliding inflection point that decreases as recorded level increases. Now notice the corresponding curve for 1 KHz. This time the tape's input/output characteristic is reasonably linear up to maybe +5 dB, but that it smoothly becomes progressivly more nonlinear with inputs up to +18 dB. 

What the charts don't show directly is that the curves shown are for the tape when it is optimially biased. Using more or less bias than is optimal will generally increase the nonlinear effects.

A related question relates to what recorded levels were actually used. One guide is the recorder spec sheet which frequently used a reference level of +12 dB.  This shows a general expecdtaion that the recorder be routinely used in such a way that the tape was rather ninlinear at 1 KHz and highly nonnlinear at 10 KHz.

If we plotted a similar set of curves for a $20 sound card, all of the plotted lines would fall on the straight diagonal, given that we set FS = +18 dB.

My point is not about some presumed superiority of digital but rather that strong audible frequency response variations with changing recording levels are typical for analog tape, and completely unexpected to modern day techs who only have experience with digital.

Analog tape's nonlinear properties were in many cases a good match to the LP. Tape tended to smoothly remove or attenuate signals that might cause miscutting and/or mistracking on a LP. You can only imagine what happened when people started cutting LPs from digital masters that lacked the preconditioning that was automatic and inherent in magnetic tape. Because of the complex nature of the frequency versus level nonlinear attenuation of analog tape, simulating it with simple analog equalizers and compressors is non-trivial.

Furthermore, if you were to design an analog tape simulator, any particular simulator design whose performance  resembled a certain analog tape at a certain speed, would only be anythng like exact for that tape when it was biased in a certain way.  IOW a good analog tape simulator should have a number of strong adjustable variables - tape speed, tape type, and tape bias. Tape coating thickness and tape head track width are weaker variables.

..... I probably should be reading this thread, shouldn't I.

..... I probably should be reading this thread, shouldn't I.

You could also be updating your Audiamorous Blog... ;-)

*IF* you cut a vinyl LP from a hypercompressed master, *THEN* you will either get very little playing time per side *OR* you have to seriously limit the levels which compromises the (already woeful) S/N ratio available from vinyl.

Seems to be that many new releases are very loud, come on double-LPs even thought they are only 45 minutes long (Ray Lamontagne's new album is about 10 mintues per side on vinyl I think), and cost more.