Can digital get to vinyl sound and at what price?
- Thread starter ScottK
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I like pizza too !View attachment 136763
I hope the green marker ink does not come off on the pizza and spoil the taste. Sorry, that was pretty cheesy.
It is not only opinion to to discuss digital recording quality. That is just a mechanism to shut down discussion. It is not enough for you to say “you hear something “ in digital you don’t like and then damning the whole format. Have you explored the outer boundaries of either digital or analog? Have you taken one much further than the other? Have you made your own recordings with both analog and digital in parallel and then compared (i have done this)?
The music business is much different during the digital era compared to the early stereo era. When stereo first appeared in the late 50s, most of the mainstream record labels were what we today consider audiophile labels. Mercury, RCA, Decca, HMV/Columbia, Columbia, Blue Note etc. Sound quality was a selling point and a major competitive advantage. Today, the so called "audiophile" labels are all small independent outfits. This is because audiophiles make up just a tiny fraction of music consumers, and sound quality makes little difference to the sales of mainstream music. If we still have the depth of talent and the financial muscle of those early record labels behind the mainstream music releases, we should have a much high level of sound quality, digital notwithstanding.
Well, I don't know about you but the majority of my listening with new music is recorded by those smaller labels or classical music labels. The only pop/rock music I listen to regularly is old stuff from before 2000 (mostly 70s and 80s). Major label popular music doesn't factor into my diet.
In the car I am listening mostly to YouTube videos, often of live performances or older music.
So, I am not struggling with this sound quality issue because I find music I like that is also well recorded and produced.
Both digital and vinyl, even though most of the new vinyl recordings are from digital masters.
Yes, there's been a huge change over since the start of stereo. Major recording labels had their own orchstras, conductors, and performers, several of whom were 'stars'. Those days are gone. Nowadays orchestras, such as the London Symphony, the Concertgebouw and Berlin Philharmonic, the Cleveland, Chicago and San Francisco Symphonies survive by having their own labels. Orchestra performances even of public domain works are copyright protected.
You like digital more than I do (assuming it's not because you sell digital gear). We hear differently, that's all. Why are you trying to say my opinion is wrong? Just accept I am dissatisfied with MOST digital recordings so naturally would like to see something done about it.
The company I represent sells analog equipment as well, so that is a total non-issue. I am saying your opinion is perhaps based on incomplete information about what is possible with digital, both recording and playback. Most analog recordings aren't great either. I never said that most digital recordings are good. I would say simply most recordings are not great whether digitally made or on analog. Plenty of bad recordings from the 50s-80s that are all analog.
Careful how you judge the old analog recordings by listening to the original vinyl records. Quite often, it is the mastering that is at fault. I have many recordings where the LP sounds nothing like the master tape. DGGs and EMIs from the 1970s are particularly bad. Those made in Holland Decca LPs from the late 1970s onwards are also inconsistent. Many modern reissues don't sound quite right either.
The same could be said for digital based of analog tapes...my point was that there are good and bad of both formats.
i just cleaned and listened to 1800 classical pressings from 1958-1988, all analog and across the board for labels, over an 8 week stretch. 96%-97% (maybe higher) really well done performance and recording/mastering quality. don't have the tapes of any of them, but to my ears the quality gets better and better the more recent the pressing. early and mid 80's are fantastic. lots of early all analog reissues are very fine. not that many DDG's and EMI's....but some. i think that the engineering and process got better and better as they went along. certainly it did not get worse. mostly these are not the big label war horses, rather more on the margins where the aim was quality and not so much commercial.
just how it looks from my experience. not exactly a small sample size and my sonic expectations are pretty high.
if i was assembling a collection i would be gung ho if it's all analog regardless of label or year. OTOH i did sell off 350 digitally sourced pressings without cleaning or listening, they might sound pretty good. but not worth the effort to clean + liner + jacket cover + shelf space. i previously had enough experience with digitally sourced classical pressings that i'm as happy with files in almost all cases. my digital is pretty good, maybe if not i might see that differently.
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Sure. But there was a steady, marked decline with each decade since the late '50's in the quality of both the pressings and the recordings. But it got really bad in '79 across the board.
Sure, there are stand-out albums made between '80 and '82, but nearly all the rest since '79 sound like Phil Collins albums if you know what I mean.
I’ve been listening to music live and recorded for a long time and I know what it’s supposed to sound like when in a good venue or from a good recording. When everything is reduced it’s “ it’s only your opinion” it becomes pretty meaningless.
I have done some comparisons of Decca LPs that were initially pressed in England, and then repressed later in Holland. The English ones tend to sound better overall, but the Holland ones usually have lower noise due to more advanced equipment. I think the QC in the Holland pressing plant was problematic, and apparently some Decca engineers complained about it. The later DGG LPs, distinguished from the earlier ones by only having a plain circle instead of tulips, often sound anaemic and shrill. The RCA "Dynaflex" from the late 1970s is legendary for its awfulness. One factor is the use of recycled vinyl in the 1970s due to the oil crisis. If you have good sounding LPs from this era, you are pretty lucky.
Barely any of the Holland LPs in the SXL 2xxxs are as good as the English ones or the London CS.
I think part of the reason is also those later LPs used early transistor equipment, whereas the original SXL2000s used mostly tube equipment. The early transistor cutting amps used a large amount of NFB.
There is something to this. There was a paper published in the mid 70s where a recording engineer had noticed the decrease in sound quality from studios he knew and went looking for the reason. He found that those studios had switched to transistor mixing boards and microphone preamps. He focused on the preamps because they directly handled the electromechanical interface of the microphone where signal levels can be extreme and there is a high potential for over driving the preamp. He found that opamp based preamps had the worst sonic characteristics as they are being overdriven and were the easiest to overload. Discrete transistor a bit better but unsurprisingly, tubes were the best at coping with real world inputs from the microphones.
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no, it does not. it depends on which later pressings you are comparing. to which earlier pressings. i realize that some of those spendy rare early pressings are wonderful. but none the less i also can hear how the quality of some types of classical pressings gets better and better especially with the the original instruments. that area of classical got better both performances and process over time through the latest later 80's one's i have.
so we are both right. i'm not diminishing the quality of what you refer to. it's not the same music.
i can only speak to my experience. it's not comprehensive. but it's not nothing.
i went into this project expecting to reject the later pressings as lesser, but i found they mostly were the best ones for the original instruments. certainly on par at least with the earlier ones. lots of really great London's and RCA's (more later compositions) that sounded very good too, but would expect that the originals were likely mostly better. but was happy to have them.
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