Let me make this simple for everyone to understand, the quality of the source material is the dominant factor in the resultant sound quality during playback.
And that goes for both good or bad sound quality.
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Why, oh why, does vinyl continue to blow away digital?
- Thread starter godofwealth
- Start date
Let me make this simple for everyone to understand, the quality of the source material is the dominant factor in the resultant sound quality during playback.
And that goes for both good or bad sound quality.
You would be surprised. You are probably unfamiliar with it but there is a musical genre called Lo-Fi where the sound is intentionally made to sound rough and lower quality. Do research about 8-bit crunching. The recordings producing process is an art form fused with technology. What might sound like it has poor quality to you might be serving the music to a greater extent. The mastering step is the final step that encompasses everything that has come before it and produces what the consumers listen to.
I have never seen a TT at starbucks , not that i come there often .
I like spanish / italian coffee
. arabic/ turkish coffeeMusic stores these days are about 50/50 , 50 % LP s 50 % CDs
LP doing very well
I have never seen a TT at starbucks , not that i come there often .
I like spanish / italian coffee
Music stores these days are about 50/50 , 50 % LP s 50 % CDs
LP doing very well
In New England, there’s often a Dunkin’ Donuts across the street from a Starbucks. I always choose the former. I’ve never seen a turntable at Starbucks. I said sound system. I think they used to sell CDs and play them in the background over speakers in the ceiling.
I don't understand why you would abandon vinyl playback on the basis of one (1) clunker record.
in the Seattle area, the home of Starbucks, many hate them. cuz their founder, Howard Schultz, sold our NBA BB team the Sonics to Oklahoma City in 2007. so who gives a rip about tt's at Starbucks. so when i see $tarbucks mentioned it makes me angry.
don't personally drink coffee anyway....just ask Ked.
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If they set up the cartridge like they do the coffee ( large paper cups filled with brown water ) .
I d definitively prefer digital at Starbucks ( if i would ever go there)
I kept breaking down which meant pulling the tape deck from the stand. With nothing better to do I sat it in the spot the TT was. Then I put Led Zeppelin 4 on. Cranked up Stairway. Then I played Qobuz Stairway. There is nothing wrong with Qobuz. I simply payed the tape and was fantasizing about being on stage so lots of air guitar. Then I played the digital. I was sort of surprised how good it sounded. I have a lot to do and in a hurry, so I didn't do any sort of analysis. Just a perception that digital sounds great.
Maybe you're just in the group that is less sensitive to the digital distortion embedded in most digital releases.
Reading this thread there seems to be three groups of listeners:
1. High sensitivity
2. Medium sensitivity
3. Low sensitivity
Maybe you're a medium.
I think the digital playback is often the culprit of the distortions. Distortions that I attributed to the recording in the past often disappeared as my digital, and overall system, got better. And my room acoustics, frankly.
One analogy that has helped me to understand my struggles to reconcile digital and analog sound reproduction is to look at the corresponding problem of analog and digital photography. The first camera I owned in the 1970s was a Zeiss film camera on which I shot exclusively with black and white film. In the 1980s, I moved up to shoot in color with a Nikon film camera. I’ve used a lot of digital cameras since then, the most pricey being a medium format Hasselblad H6D. By and large I’m disappointed with digital cameras. Color reproduction is not great (go shoot flowers in your backyard!). We get a lot of roses growing in the Bay Area. I’ve tried lots of times and feel getting a good shot of a rose is virtually impossible. What the eye sees is not what a digital camera reproduces.
One fundamental problem with digital cameras is that the CCD/CMOS sensors only perceive gray scale, not color. Color has to be artificially reconstructed using a Bayer color filter. That filter reduces a lot of the light coming in. In film cameras, the film emulsion captures the red-green-blue color spectrum directly. Below is a summary of the way film cameras see color, courtesy of AI Overview from Google. Yes, film cameras are noisier than digital cameras and perhaps not as sharp. But their color reproduction seems more genuine to my eyes. Perhaps it’s my personal bias in terms of film and vinyl vs digital cameras and recording. But I think the brain treats uncorrelated noise (ticks and pops, film grain) differently from instruments that we use to measure reproduction quality.
Search Labs | AI Overview
Learn more…
Film cameras use a three-layer system to reproduce color by breaking down an image's colors into their primary components:
One fundamental problem with digital cameras is that the CCD/CMOS sensors only perceive gray scale, not color. Color has to be artificially reconstructed using a Bayer color filter. That filter reduces a lot of the light coming in. In film cameras, the film emulsion captures the red-green-blue color spectrum directly. Below is a summary of the way film cameras see color, courtesy of AI Overview from Google. Yes, film cameras are noisier than digital cameras and perhaps not as sharp. But their color reproduction seems more genuine to my eyes. Perhaps it’s my personal bias in terms of film and vinyl vs digital cameras and recording. But I think the brain treats uncorrelated noise (ticks and pops, film grain) differently from instruments that we use to measure reproduction quality.
Search Labs | AI Overview
Learn more…
Film cameras use a three-layer system to reproduce color by breaking down an image's colors into their primary components:
- 1. Layers
The film has three layers coated with chemicals that react to different wavelengths of light. The top layer is sensitive to blue, the middle layer to green, and the bottom layer to red. This arrangement mimics how the human eye perceives color. - 2. Exposure
When the shutter is released, light exposes the emulsion to the scene. The interaction of the silver halide, dye couplers, and developing chemicals produces dyes that form a negative image. Color negatives have a strong orange hue. - 3. Reversal processing
The image in each layer is reversal-processed to yield a positive dye image in a color complementary to the layer's spectral sensitivity. For example, the blue-sensitive layer first yields a negative image of everything blue in the original scene and then a positive image of everything that is not blue, which is colored yellow
Too true, and black and white too. Compare the hyper-sharp commercial digital black and whites of today with film black and white “fine art” photos (like those of Ansel Adams) . The first appear to be “more accurate” the second, being artistically dodged and burned during the printing process, less accurate but more pleasing.
Is it not clear that the contemporary aesthetic is just different from the one from the first half of the last century? By that time Ansel was also being criticized by producing over the top representations, due to his extensive use of tone manipulation on printing as you mention... If we forget that part we can't see the position we're in now.
I try not to conflate intent with capability. Digital sensors and tooling are capable of doing everything and beyond what silver has done for decades before. If they do different, it is because we want it to, not because the format is different, incompetent or flawed.
Some photographers today still prefer film, and it's not a question of contemporary aesthetic.
I do prefer film, so I speak from a position of comfort. I roll my own film cartridges, develop and print on my lab. Have a few prints on private and public collections around the world.
From the hundreds of photographers I crossed paths with, I never found one that preferred film over digital because of quality/limitations over the last 15 years. It has nothing to do with the outcome, but about the process itself. The isolation, the slow feedback loop. Same in my case and all others that use film I know of. Of course we can debate if those two things are really separate. I don't think it is appropriate for this thread.
The differences from the 50s to now are about aesthetic and place in history, as there is nothing else to be about. Attributing aesthetic choices and general cultural and artistic movements to gear and tech is demeaning to the people that do the actual work. It is about intent and circumstance, nothing else. Don't let yourself be taken by low-fi analogies.
I am not attributing aesthetic choices to "gear and tech" (it's more a question of enabling, than restricting). You do not get the same results with film and digital. Let's keep things simple.
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