Why CDs May Actually Sound Better Than Vinyl
- Thread starter Steve Williams
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You can clearly see the superiority of digital. Its graphs are in color and the LP in black and white!
As I said, case closed.
Understanding the different objectives of high-end audio at the outset of the debate is the key to untangling seemingly irreconcilable opinions and posts which talk past each other.
Amir sees these graphs as proving the superiority of digital. Amir is correct (for Amir) because I believe Amir subscribes to objective 2) "reproduce exactly what is on the master tape."
David finds irrelevant that digital produces a cleaner test tone output than vinyl. David is correct (for David) (and for me) because I believe David subscribes (as do I) to objective 1) "recreate the sound of an original musical event."
I believe that reading members' opinions through the prism of "what is your objective of high-end audio" is illuminating and helps untangle conflicting posts.
Because I subscribe to objective 1) "recreate the sound of an original musical event" I could not care less how superior to vinyl is digital's test tone on an oscilloscope because I am interested in the convincing sound of a musical event, not a test tone.
But for someone who believes in objective 2) "reproduce exactly what is on the master tape" a clean test tone from a format is very important because it is viewed as being highly probative that that format will reproduce accurately what is on the master tape.
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It's the old debate of accuracy Vs believability
Diapson summed it up nicely:
It also strikes me that accuracy is overrated i.e when we play back the recording in our room how close to the mic feed is the sound?
If the goal of reproduced audio is to emotionally touch us - then "believability" of the illusion has to be the first step & we judge believability not according to how accurate it is but how much it correlates with our experiences of similar sounds in the physical world.
F1 also captured it nicely when he stated that the cutting of LPs enforced a technique & certain manipulations that coincidentally may enhance our feeling of "realism" of the sound as experienced half way back in a concert hall. So the small cut in HF, the slight amplitude increase of quiet sounds giving better hall ambience cues all add to a better feeling of "realism"
If the focus on accuracy sacrifices believability then it's time for a rethink, methinks
Diapson summed it up nicely:
It also strikes me that accuracy is overrated i.e when we play back the recording in our room how close to the mic feed is the sound?
If the goal of reproduced audio is to emotionally touch us - then "believability" of the illusion has to be the first step & we judge believability not according to how accurate it is but how much it correlates with our experiences of similar sounds in the physical world.
F1 also captured it nicely when he stated that the cutting of LPs enforced a technique & certain manipulations that coincidentally may enhance our feeling of "realism" of the sound as experienced half way back in a concert hall. So the small cut in HF, the slight amplitude increase of quiet sounds giving better hall ambience cues all add to a better feeling of "realism"
If the focus on accuracy sacrifices believability then it's time for a rethink, methinks
Ron,
I understand the points you are making, and probably you are right with the above statement, that's how people view things.
Yet while it is obvious that digital, even the cheapest CD playback, can reproduce test tones much more accurately than vinyl, my claim is:
Most digital does NOT accurately reproduce what is on the mastertape.
The reason for this is that the mastertape of recorded musical performances contains not test tones but, well, music. Test tones are one thing, complex harmonics of instrumental timbres, which constitute music, quite another.
Some instrumental or vocal timbres are more challenging for digital than others. The worst performance of digital in my view is not even on solo violin tones, but on tenor and baritone saxophone, which also produce harmonically very rich and complex sounds. While analog has no problem with those timbres, almost all digital that I have heard, including mine, fails on saxophone -- quite badly, in fact. On my Berkeley Alpha 2 DAC, which while not being SOTA is quite highly regarded, these timbres are thin and harmonically emasculated. On other DACs the same sax recordings are not quite as thin sounding, but still harmonically poor.
There is one exception, the dCS Rossini, which was extraordinarily convincing on tenor and baritone saxophone timbres (I haven't heard saxophone on the dCS Vivaldi). The Berkeley Reference DAC was the only other DAC that came relatively close, but in my view did not quite make it in comparison. So digital CAN do it (even on Redbook CD!) when correctly implemented, but most digital cannot.
This problem must have to do with the complexity of the timbral spectrum of instruments. On other timbres my DAC does not sound thin and harmonically poor at all. I find, for example, the gutsy sounds of trombone and bass tuba very convincing through my DAC on my system.
Correct me pls if I am wrong but since around 30 years all vinyls are made from master studio files , not master tapes.
There is a special technique called Direct Cut developed by Stockfish Recording, but still their vinyls are made from DSD files if I am not mistaken.
How possibly then the vinyl made from digital source may sound better than master studio digital ?
I agree that analog subjectively is often more close to our perception of live music but it has IMO more to do with the way we perceive and process the sound in our brains, not with the format itself.
There is a special technique called Direct Cut developed by Stockfish Recording, but still their vinyls are made from DSD files if I am not mistaken.
How possibly then the vinyl made from digital source may sound better than master studio digital ?
I agree that analog subjectively is often more close to our perception of live music but it has IMO more to do with the way we perceive and process the sound in our brains, not with the format itself.
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Al M., if a test tone can't be reproduced correctly, then there is no hope of a recording being "accurate". However, as you point out (obviously), that is not a sufficient criterion for accurate reproduction, it is just one of many (most probably not quantifiable).
Yes, being "subjectively close to our perception of live music" to my mind, should be the starting point of any analysis as this is the reason we listen to audio - to fall for the illusion, to be transported.
With such an analysis t may turn out that the "believability of the illusion" is simply because of the processes required in the production - as F1 pointed out.
Or it may be that there are other yet undiscovered strengths that vinyl implementations have when compared to digital audio implementations
As AL says, to him, there are only a couple of convincing examples of baritone or tenor sax - why? What is it that dCS are doing which gets it right? It doesn't seem to be the format but rather the implementation of it that needs more attention
+2 (its already been plus oned!). But also the actual disk itself in my experience. If someone had told me two years ago that the actual disk itself could be a factor in the quality of CD reproduction (assuming identical data), I would never have believed them. Then I read a Wilma Cozart-Fine interview where she said she received test disks back from several factories for the first batch of the RBCD Mercury reissues and they all sounded different! After experimenting a lot with this myself over the last couple of years, I would venture to suggest the disk itself is possibly even more important than the transport in many cases (within reason of course, no wonderful physical disk will turn my Rega into a dCS).
Yes, i never claimed that vinyl is capable of technically accurate reproduction of master tape. It just isn't. Case closed, as Amir would say.
Yet nonetheless, for some reason, vinyl retains the complexity of the harmonic spectrum of certain instrumental timbres much better than most digital.
But what level of "accuracy" is actually needed? Auditory perception isn't about accuracy - there are all sorts of non-linear distortions & processes involved in our perception - perhaps accuracy is overrated, particularly when it is isolated & measured with single tone test signals. In the two measurement examples above how do the two platforms compare when a dynamic music signal is played? Is there some "perceptually unnatural distortion" occurring in a lot of digital audio implementations when handling complex signals that is maybe bettered by vinyl? I don't know but the question needs to be asked.
Menuhin developed bow arm issues relatively early in life. His early recordings portray a magnificent bow arm but at some stage it became quite poorly controlled, especially on the down-bow change. That gave it the "sawing away" character which in my opinion is actually a very good laymans description for what is happening. It did not help that his left hand technique was sometimes inconsistent and his vibrato in later days actually could accentuate the bow arm issues he had (because it became a bit narrow and "soupy" which tends to do a lesser job of hiding other technical sins).
Yes , I could agree with that but IMO we ignore in this approach that we also perceive the sound differently.
And we all the time develop our skill to listen to audio signal in the process of learning and processing through our former experience.
This is why someone who listen 90 % of time to vinyl does not like digital and vice versa.
Only those who have enough expertise with different formats and sources may have a bit less " source driven" opinion.
What I want to say is that when you spend say 100 hours only to evaluate different native DSD recordigns of tenor and baryton sax you are able to make any judgemnet wheter analog is sitll - or not- better.
One time experience is not enough to change the perspective, again IMO.
But I don't believe this is correct. I believe that we all have pretty much the same internal model (which is a very complex set of aspects & relationships that defines how auditory objects sound & behave in the external world - I'm trying to simplify it). It's very like the model of how we learn correct grammar - we aren't taught it, we learn as toddlers by constantly hearing how others (adults - the practised ones) speak & we imitate, eventually subconsciously incorporating a a model that allows us to construct grammatically correct sentences - I suspect that this is done more by what sounds right than by adhering to "rules of grammar". This model is more or less the same for everyone, we are all exposed to the same examples (speech) everyday, although there are outliers.
I believe that this same type of subconscious, internal model building applies to sound - we have heard so many examples of a particular sound in so many different circumstances that we know the grammar of that sound - how we have learned it behaves in the auditory world - we therefore know what sounds right & it is universal. Harman's speaker blind preference test shows this - where the same relativity of preferred speaker was universally chosen.
Now preference is a different thing & we may have different preferences - some favouring imaging over anything else, etc.
OK, you are really talking about training & becoming accustomed to a particular set of tonalities &/or artifacts. Yes, we can be unaware of what a particular distortion sounds like but still be able to prefer the device with the lesser distortion - it just doesn't sound "right". If we look at the Harman graph of speaker preference - the "trained listeners" group still scored the speakers in the same relative order but marked them all lower on the preference scale compared to other groups
But I agree, long-term exposure to systems helps to hone the listening skills & gives one a better ability to make a comparative judgement of sound
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Paragraph 1 .. Yes.
Paragraph 2 .. No. portraying the "timbre" of instrument is the acurate reproduction of the harmonics they create, there is no magic to it. Keep all the harmonics intact and with no distortion and you will likely recreat the timbre. If you are distorting it you will not recreate the original. The end result might however be pleasing and even more so than the real thing.
I have hesitated for a while to venture this:
There is an Audiophile aesthetics. A way that we judge things that is not very remove from what the real thing sounds like, an objective that is very removed from an objective reality whatever our tastes and differences in auditory apparatus. This is very difficult to put in words but let's try and hope that I don't fall too hard on my face
.Let's take the notion of reproducing instruments: I have already discussed about the piano .. Digital wins to my ears hands down... But the violin. the supposed big producer of harmonics... To my ears a very strident instrument to quote Ambrose Bierce: “an instrument which tries to tickle human ears by the friction of a horse’s tail on the entrails of a cat.” In real life that is as accurate as can be... I will however read over and over than the sweet sound of violin .. Digital would tend to do an excellent job on violin since it will get all the Harmonics up to 22.05 KHz as clearly as possible but truly most of us may end up not liking the end results. For those who have tried to listen to a microphone feed of a violin .. they may tell you that this is a far cry from what they hear on most records, especially on Vinyl. Not that someone cannot elicit heavenly sound from a violin.. Oh Boy! some can but Violin on records and violins in real life are different sounding and violin on Vinyl (notice I din;t say analog) is quite far from the strident and potent version of the real thing.
Let's take the notion of imaging in a concert hall. If we look at the orchestra in a concert hall, we can make a mental effort to put things into some position in space. In my experience , in most concert halls, isn't what we hear a big gob of sound with no clear Left, Right front back and /or depth.. Yes we hear some sounds left and right but overall.. Symphonic music seems to me to be a vast mono affair in` real life ain'it? On records .. Depth, precise "information" of layered things ... An art form in itself...You bet. Reproduction of the real event? I have my doubts.
There is in our recordings be it vinyl or CD a lot of editing goin'on and we get used to it. It becomes our reality and perception of reality is shaped by certain experiences. I understand that many of us go to concert and Vinyl is our references in that regard and I can understand that too but ... How far a CD is from LP.. Often very different.. Aesthtics preferences? How really far are some CDs from it? How far are for example the CDs from the Mercury, RCA, Harmonia Mundi, Lyrita and Decca to take these examples are from their vinyl counterparts? ... If some effort to remove the biases is applied? Of course there is the issue of reproduction chain. It is difficult to pinpoint what is what, what contribute to the final sound but ... I think this needs to be put in perspective when discussing CD vs LP. The objective superiority of Cd can only be debated with subjective intonations... We wil wait a life time for someone to come with anything objective aside fromthe famed 50 KHz bandwidth obliterated roundly by 192 Khz with its 96 KHz bandwidth but this i not CD Redbook so
... If that is Vinyl you prefer fine .. And to your ears it is subjectively superior , Fine. We can live with that calling its reproduction superior as an absolute is not backed-up by anything objective. OTOH ....Dear Ron,
To be honest I don't hear drastic differences between the top digital contenders, of course some are better in some areas than the others but the nature of digital is what it is and there's no masking it. It's one of the conversations we had with bonzo when he visited. My own digital front end is about 13 years old and I don't feel at all compelled to change. But if I was starting today, along with the dCS I'll look at CEC and Weiss again as well as Meitner, Nagra and Neodio, you won't make a mistake buying any of them. I didn't mention Lampi only because I have no direct experience with it.
Edit- Forgot about Zanden, it should be on the list.
david
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