Why CDs May Actually Sound Better Than Vinyl
- Thread starter Steve Williams
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Steve,
I have to say that I absolutely dislike this tittle for mixed reasons. IMHO what many people call the "Return of the vinyl" is purely nostalgia and a respectful reaction against the "digital way of life", that should not be mixed with the use of vinyl by many audiophiles and music lovers because of sound quality. For promotional reasons all arguments gets stirred in a pot and give a false image of the reality, and simultaneously opens an way of entrance of trojansin the vinyl community, using powerful arguments such as that the return of vinyl is mainly dominated by digital issued LPs ... I think (I can be wrong!) that the high quality analog sourced LP issues are profiting from the movement, but are a minority.
The SACD community has a site keeping a list of the pure DSD recordings and the "hybrid" ones. It would be great of the vinyl people could have a similar list. Do you remember the good truthful days of the AAD, ADD and DDD?
IMHO this "return" is not a proof of superior sound quality, but mostly a very interesting social event and should be explored separated from sound quality debates, perhaps in separate thread if there interest in it.
Well stated micro. Totally agree with you. This "what is best" discussion is a black hole with no useful conclusions.
Thanks for the story. It is another example of taking a test and giving ourselves a score of A+. So let me tell you my story where I got an F.
A few weeks ago we had a potential customer referred to us by a friend and very happy customer of our company to come and listen to our JBL M2. The potential customer was from the audio industry so I wanted to make sure we put the best foot forward. So I go 15 minutes earlier to listen to the system to make sure all was OK. To my horror and shock the high frequencies were gone. All gone! I quickly drag my chief designer in and say the system is broken and asked him what he had done. As a way of background the JBL M2 is a fully programmable system with built-in EQ and Room correction. So I thought he may have recalibrated the system since the many other times I had heard them where the power and cleanness of the high frequencies was one of the highlights. Now it sounded like someone had put their hands on the tweeter/horns.
Poor guy comes and swears that not only has he not done anything but that the amount of correction in high frequencies was something small like half a db. I tell him to defeat that and see what happens. He was running the JBL software in his office which was away and completely out of sight of me sitting in our listening room. He says he defeated it and all of a sudden the highs came back. Not all of it but it definitely made a big difference. I happily go and tell him only to see that tiny correction he had defeated at frequencies that are long past my ability to hear! I say let's repeat the test of enabling/defeating of that filter.
Due to distance between me being in the theater and him, and trying to talk over the music playing, we quickly got confused as to what I had told him to do, i.e. turn on/off, and what he had done. It then became very clear that I was imagining any difference being there due to that filter as the measurements and my own knowledge of what I could or could not hear had predicted. Now I am in state of panic because right then I hear the clients walk into the door. I tell my designer who by the way, is a recording/mixing engineer with much better ears than me to put everything the way it was and see what happens.
Clients came in with their own music. We played half of hour of it and they loved everything about the sound! This was a husband and wife team, and both thought there was not a thing wrong with the system.
They leave and a I am left reflecting on what happened and realized what was going on: I had not taken my allergy medicine that morning and my ears were plugged up. When that happens I lose a ton of my high frequency hearing. So it was that, and not some mysterious change in the audio system which had made me think there was something broken in it. What was broken was me. Being over confident in knowing cause and effect.
Luckily I relied on experience in relying on someone else's judgement and objective facts and did not do the unconscionable. That is, boosted the highs to compensate for my plugged ears. Instead I trusted my design engineer's ears and experience that all was likely well, and that the system should sound as superbly as it had always sounded in previous times.
Now you see what I say about having someone else score your exam. None of us are god like in our full experiences that include every bit of personal bias, poor knowledge of technology, using all of our senses instead of just ears, to walk into the situation you walked in, and tell USB was the problem. You should have told the salesman to swap between USB and S/SPDIF and have you guess which is which without him telling you. If the sound was so appalling, you should have had no problem repeating that outcome. But you did not. You gave yourself a score of A+. Maybe you are that good. We won't know. Perils of giving yourself the grade in exams....
Thanks again for sharing the story with us.
I believe that my statement is not a tautology. The assertion is not universally, necessarily correct.
Let's divide the universe into people who experience fatigue from listening to digital and people who do not experience fatigue from listening to digital. These sets are mutually exclusive. Everyone is in one set or the other, and no person is in both sets or in neither set.
My statement means that for the set of people who experience fatigue from listening to digital it is obvious to them that digital is the source of their fatigue.
But your criticism is correct in that my assertion goes too far. I should not have assumed that everyone who experiences fatigue from listening to digital believes that the fatigue is caused by the digital.
When people experience fatigue from istening to digital they might believe that the fatigue is being caused by some source or mechanism other than the digital music to which they are listening.
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Well, I had a very useful one - I am not alone in my subjective findings about the good sound quality of some vinyl. It seems many people feel the same and explained why in interesting posts. And sad ones: it seems that there is little hope that CDs (just simple CDs) will soon replace all the vinyl in my system. And no one referred to easily available CDs of chamber music that outclass the best LPs.
Thanks, Amir, for that story. Happens to me all the time that my ears change. When I come home from work the system sometimes seems to sound particularly warm, with glowing mids and suppressed highs, but I know that is just from the fatigue of the day. On the other hand, sometimes early in the morning the systems sounds too lean and airy to me, but I know that's also my ears. I discussed this with another audiophile who had the exact same experiences. You just have to live with the fact that your ears may not always consistently perform during the day.
Once I found my system suddenly sound really bad, but then I realized that the blood circulation around my ears started to seem funny, I could just feel it. So I trusted that it was not the system but my ears, and I stopped listening for the day. The next day everything sounded fine, as usual.
Yes, interesting stories, thanks
But Amir, I would point out that you didn't do a DBT test either so I think you are failing to recognise the same issue with your anecdote as you are pointing out to Fiddle Faddle?
You don't know if your allergy medication is the cause of your reduction in HF perception - unless you do a DBT with your pills, you can't make that claim.
It could well have been your anxiety & fear of failure that was causing your perceptual change!
Here's the link:
http://www.psaudio.com/pauls-posts/the-sound-of-vinyl/
BTW, does your RoomPlay service include adjusting the client's LP gear?
It is, because either
1) you are someone who does experience it, and it is obvious, in which case the obviousness is redundant or repetitive(making it a tautology)
or
2) you are someone who does not experience it, in which case it is not obvious. This also is redundant (making it a tautology)
I understand the point you were trying to make, you just chose a poor way to express it, IMO. Better might be: if you experience digital fatigue, you know what it is; if you don't, I can't explain it to you because it is so obvious to one who does.
Don't know if it's my age or the elevation where I live (6,000) but I've found that when I listen to music, there is a large variation in "sonic" signatures until I re-pressurize my ears. Pinch you nose, close your mouth and then breath out through your nose. Takes care of the issue immediately and all sounds good. I do this on a ten to fifteen minute interval when I am listening.
Something to try.
Yes, it seems likely that the stress of blind conditions can make your ears not function properly and you do not hear differences that under relaxed conditions you might discern; at least this is also one of the main criticisms of blind testing.
On the one hand, ears are the most sensitive measurement tools that we have; if I can repeatedly hear an artifact on different days and under different circumstances, but objectivists say they cannot measure the phenomenon, I trust my ears over their measurements, which apparently are not good enough. On the other hand a lot of psychology can play into auditory judgment as well, and at some occasions it can downright fool you -- especially at one-time events or when making comparisons over the long run just from memory. And psychology may play a role in BOTH sighted and unsighted comparisons.
There was a thread here:
Meditations on the Limitations of Hearing and Listening
It is a nice story, but the situations are not comparable at all - Fiddle Faddle is reporting a comparative audition and you are reporting an absolute listening without any reference. Once I was sleeping in a plane and when I awake ten minutes before landing at low altitude for a little time I was asking myself why people were being so respectful and only whispering. Only when I realized there was no engine noise at all I understood what was really happening. My hearing only become normal again in the airport. Does it make me an F listener?
It can be scheduled - but I never want to touch the table until I know that I will be able to hear as much as possible, from voicing the system/room first.
I do that religiously now to make sure my ears are not so plugged that I am hearing differently.
That was not the point of the story. The point was what I told him: you need some way of grading your listening ability that is devoid of yourself. You can't say X sounded a lot worse than Y and I was right! Who says you were right? In my case, I had another person with very good listening abilities, i.e. my designer saying my impression was wrong. And so were two clients. In the case of Fiddle, who says he was right and not the salesman?
To make this more concrete, I will donate $1,000 to Fiddle's favorite charity if he can pass that same test he mentioned without knowing which interconnect is in use. That USB sound was appalling relative to S/PDIF. There is not a bone in my body that accepts that conclusion as anything but a faulty conclusion. Or else I would not make that offer
.The problem we face is that our total opinion of audio is built on a number of faulty tests and incorrect conclusions. That then forms a basis of strong bias leading to statements such as noise being 140 db down makes digital sound bad. I am sure Fiddle has strong conviction on that and it is as solid as anything else he would say about his life experiences. But that doesn't rise up to any level of factuality when the protocol to get there was beyond unreliable.
When I am told one configuration sounds appalling relative to another, no amount of stress should make that difference go away. If it does, either that difference doesn't exist, or it is far, far smaller than the person expressed. We can't have simultaneous "night and day difference" and "oh, I can't tell the difference blind." These things don't go together.
I agree, Amir.
There tends to be a lot of hyperbole involved when people make audio comparisons.
Fortunately. It is now part of the hobby. The problem is not the hyperbole per se, it is the unjustified hyperbole. If people give details and explain it becomes just style.
Clearly, Amir was under a lot of stress because these clients were coming over. That stress effected his ability to hear correctly because he did not even notice that his ears were clogged until further reflection later and then remembering that he did not take his medications. Compounding this was that he does not trust his ears in general, as he has shared with us many times, yet he trusted them enough to go over 15 minutes before the client arrived to confirm that everything was alright with his system before this important audition meant to impress someone.
It is further interesting that Amir does trust the ears of his assistant while not trusting the ears of those on this forum who repeatedly share their observations that they think vinyl replay can sound closer to real music and those who report that they hear digital artifacts which cause listener fatigue. I can understand trusting the listening abilities of someone you know over others, but with all of the reports in these forums about great sound from people with a lot of experience, surely we should be able to trust in the listening skills of many of our members.
Another interesting issue is that about self grading one's listening skills. Amir criticizes those who "give themselves an A+". Amir did not give himself an F until he learned that his assistant thought everything was fine while he thought there was something clearly wrong. If asked to grade himself initially, i.e., when he first heard something amiss, and before he asked the assistant for help, he may have given himself a high grade, given his confidence that he heard something wrong with the sound and that he was sure a slight change in filter effected the sound.
I'm also reminded of the recounting of the PNW audio meeting in which Amir expressed some surprise that only two listeners identified the problems with the sound in one channel that evening. Amir heard it and reported it with confidence. Are we to trust that report? Does this mean he would have given himself an A+ grade because he heard something the rest of the audience failed to hear or simply did not want to report in public? Would he have given the others an F grade?
There seem to be some inconsistencies with who is qualified to do this self grading and whose ears are with trusting.
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