Faith-Based Electronics (IMO Addendum)

[rjb]

I'm posting this just to reply to a discussion with David in the closed "IMO" thread in the Beginner's Corner.

I have A/B'd an *old* vinyl Howling Wolf LP with the same album on CD, and the CD sounded like crap. Total loss of definition. And balls.

Possible explanations:
1) The master tape used for the CD deteriorated faster than my vinyl LP.
2) The master tape got lost, and the CD was mastered from an LP that was more worn out than my LP.
3) The chi life force so essential to Chicago blues thrives in an analog medium, but is weakened when quantized by the A/D process.

...But even if you sample at 44.1 kHz/16-bit, which is the Red Book standard for audio CDs, you will have no quantizing or resampling when you encode for the CD....

David, perhaps you are unaware that chi pulsates at frequencies above the visible light spectrum?

OK, I'm done.

Later,
-rb

[soundguruman]

Sometimes I heal amps by casting out demons. One time we hired a medicine man to exorcise a radio transmitter...
Although, the Karma is sometimes so bad that there is little hope. Then we buy parts.

[rjb]

Sometimes I heal amps by casting out demons.

I have occasionally cured inanimate objects by laying on of hands.
It doesn't work, I give it a look-over, can't find anything wrong, now it works.
IMO, it was lonely, just craving human touch.

On another note,
Have you ever picked up a used guitar and found yourself playing something you've never played before?
It happens because the tunes are stored in the instrument's memory.

Later,
-rb

[Steve Conner]

I have occasionally cured inanimate objects by laying on of hands.
It doesn't work, I give it a look-over, can't find anything wrong, now it works.
IMO, it was lonely, just craving human touch.

Me too, I find that taking the battery out and putting it back in again works wonders.

And on the vinyl vs. CD thing:
4) The master tapes were postprocessed by an experienced engineer at the vinyl cutting lab to account for the limitations of the medium, which just happens to make the result sound better. But when it came time to do the CD reissue, the same master tapes were transferred straight to CD or even "improved" by some young upstart.

Anyway, I bet if you did a vinyl rip of the Howling Wolf LP and burnt it to CD, you would be pleasantly surprised with the result.

[tedmich]

Familiarity accounts to at least 80% of perceived audio preferences IME. I'll often prefer a familiar recording when compared to a newer production, mix , sampling etc. Its only because I'm human, which is devilishly hard to control for, scientifically.

[Possum]

Thats the dirty little secret about CD's, vinyl was always better. When CD's first came out I bought one that I had the vinyl version and compared them. Vinyl was so much better, I doubt there's been much improvement. Worse yet, tube hi-fi gear is still the best on the planet, too. Analog cell phones sounded way better, such is the advance of technology, faster, smaller......worse......

[JoeM]

Familiarity accounts to at least 80% of perceived audio preferences IME. I'll often prefer a familiar recording when compared to a newer production, mix , sampling etc. Its only because I'm human, which is devilishly hard to control for, scientifically.

I was fortunate to once have a master guitar class with the great session and jazz guitarist Howard Roberts. He told the class "When someone says 'I know what I like', they really mean 'I like what I know'"

[Joe Gwinn]

I have occasionally cured inanimate objects by laying on of hands.
It doesn't work, I give it a look-over, can't find anything wrong, now it works.
IMO, it was lonely, just craving human touch.

Many a machine has repaired itself when I approached with a BFH in hand and murder in my heart.

Percussive maintenance - Wikipedia

[Mike Sulzer]

Thats the dirty little secret about CD's, vinyl was always better. When CD's first came out I bought one that I had the vinyl version and compared them. Vinyl was so much better, I doubt there's been much improvement. Worse yet, tube hi-fi gear is still the best on the planet, too. Analog cell phones sounded way better, such is the advance of technology, faster, smaller......worse......

Very good snark, if that is what it is. If you believe it, you have just lost all credibility.

[David Schwab]

Thats the dirty little secret about CD's, vinyl was always better. When CD's first came out I bought one that I had the vinyl version and compared them. Vinyl was so much better, I doubt there's been much improvement. Worse yet, tube hi-fi gear is still the best on the planet, too. Analog cell phones sounded way better, such is the advance of technology, faster, smaller......worse......

Let's see... on one hand we have a piece of plastic with a mechanical transducer bumping around in a groove. Invented in 1877! The low end had to be reduced, as well as the overall level to keep the stylus from bounding out of the groove. The signal went to a power amp, and then to small speaker coils to move the cutting head. Right away the sound has been altered and we are several generations from the original. Plus the disk gets dirty and worn and you have all kids of surface noise and mechanical wow and flutter. And the outside cuts on a record sound cleaner than inside ones because of the geometry of the disk. Perfect.

On the other hand we have a medium that sounds EXACTLY like the master tapes, as if you were sitting in the studio listening to the playback, assuming your stereo system was good enough. There is no flutter or even ripple because the disk is setting it's own timing.

Oh yeah, vinyl was always better.

[David Schwab]

Me too, I find that taking the battery out and putting it back in again works wonders.

And on the vinyl vs. CD thing:
4) The master tapes were postprocessed by an experienced engineer at the vinyl cutting lab to account for the limitations of the medium, which just happens to make the result sound better. But when it came time to do the CD reissue, the same master tapes were transferred straight to CD or even "improved" by some young upstart.

Anyway, I bet if you did a vinyl rip of the Howling Wolf LP and burnt it to CD, you would be pleasantly surprised with the result.

Yeah, this is why the early CDs didn't sound so good. I mentioned that in the other thread. They used the wrong masters! When stuff has been remastered for CD you can really hear the difference.

I have a lot of music that was transferred from vinyl, and they sound fine in the digital domain, but you have to brighten them up and remove noise. I also have rips from cassettes that sound better than the vinyl rips!

[FunkyKikuchiyo]

Yeah, this is why the early CDs didn't sound so good. I mentioned that in the other thread. They used the wrong masters! When stuff has been remastered for CD you can really hear the difference.

I have a lot of music that was transferred from vinyl, and they sound fine in the digital domain, but you have to brighten them up and remove noise. I also have rips from cassettes that sound better than the vinyl rips!

I have several vinyl/CD parallel recordings where the vinyl just blows the CD away. It isn't just in a vague sense, but immediately noticeable. "Call It Sleep" on Vai's first album Flex-Able is a great example. Listen to his amp and the reverb. It is very obvious. On the vinyl you can hear his left hand releasing notes and the reverb is quite vivid. On CD, you aren't even aware he's using reverb. My pet theory is the same as it is for guitar amps... digital devices tend to have way more components and longer signal chains, and that alone introduces more problems than A/D conversions or bit rates or whatever.

The only records I have that DON'T sound way better than the CDs are the Zappa albums. Zappa supposedly put a lot of work into remastering stuff for CD when that time came. I have no idea what he did differently, but it worked very well. The CDs sound every bit as good as the records.

You may make fun of Possum (as you always do), but he has a point... if I'm reading him correctly, anyway. It isn't a matter of technology, but just of marketing. When was the last time something other than hi-fi gear was being sold as having great sound quality? It is all about miniaturization, mass storage, bells & whistles, etc. and when the actual sound does play in, it usually is just to have more bass for ghetto blasters or car sound systems. Ask a store clerk which MP3 player SOUNDS the best, or the guy at the cellphone kiosk... you'll probably get blank stares. With all of the technology available, not a whole lot of effort has been exerted on superior sound quality, and frankly it shows.

[Possum]

Of course they make fun of me, most of these guys were born after 1980 ;-) and don't remember tube hi-fi's or vinyl records, never played a 45 hit single, sad to say ;-) never put a quarter in a jukebox to hear the Twist, LOL ;-) When I was 8 years old I was already getting shocked taking tube radios apart, saw Jerry Lee Lewis play ten feet away from me rip the shit out of his piano in France. There IS a reason that vinyl records actually never ceased being produced and that those who buy them have very high end stereo gear, like McIntosh TUBE amps ;-) Sales of vinyl records goes up every year, hmmmm, wonder why that is?
McIntosh 275 Tube Amplifier | eBay
There are still rock bands and blues guys who go out of their way to record at studios with all tube gear and analog tape and those studios flourish with bookings.
Vinyl is great but unfortunately they wear out. We have yet to see how long CD's are gonna last, when they first came out they guestimated about 10 years, well that was wrong. CD's dont even sell anymore anyway, its all iTunes now.....

Unfortunately putting together a vintage stereo system has problems, the real good tubes aren't made anymore and NOS ones are getting real rare, rectifiers in particular can cost hundreds of dollars. I wonder if good stylus and phono cartridges are hard to get too, maybe NOS rules that world too.

[David Schwab]

I have several vinyl/CD parallel recordings where the vinyl just blows the CD away. It isn't just in a vague sense, but immediately noticeable. "Call It Sleep" on Vai's first album Flex-Able is a great example. Listen to his amp and the reverb. It is very obvious. On the vinyl you can hear his left hand releasing notes and the reverb is quite vivid. On CD, you aren't even aware he's using reverb. My pet theory is the same as it is for guitar amps... digital devices tend to have way more components and longer signal chains, and that alone introduces more problems than A/D conversions or bit rates or whatever.

The only records I have that DON'T sound way better than the CDs are the Zappa albums. Zappa supposedly put a lot of work into remastering stuff for CD when that time came. I have no idea what he did differently, but it worked very well. The CDs sound every bit as good as the records.

You may make fun of Possum (as you always do), but he has a point... if I'm reading him correctly, anyway. It isn't a matter of technology, but just of marketing. When was the last time something other than hi-fi gear was being sold as having great sound quality? It is all about miniaturization, mass storage, bells & whistles, etc. and when the actual sound does play in, it usually is just to have more bass for ghetto blasters or car sound systems. Ask a store clerk which MP3 player SOUNDS the best, or the guy at the cellphone kiosk... you'll probably get blank stares. With all of the technology available, not a whole lot of effort has been exerted on superior sound quality, and frankly it shows.

Listen to percussive things, like drums and bass. Vinyl is softer and mushier sounding. You lose all the transients because vinyl is mechanical, the signal was limited and it just can't do it. People like vinyl because the high end is missing and it sounds "warmer" but you are not getting an accurate reproduction of the music. You might be hearing more of the guitar precisely because of there missing high end, and there might be an upper mid bump. And it depends on your sound system. AND you hear the reverb because of all the compression added to the vinyl master. But that's not what the real recording sounds like. Run your CD player though a compressor if you want to hear it like that.

I can hear all kinds of things on CDs you can't hear on vinyl. Check out some of the Beatles stuff like the White Album. So likely you hear the guitar better, but I'd bet if you went into the studio that's not what the recording sounds like.

AND, the outside of the record sounds better than the inside. Thats a fact.

Signal chain makes no difference at all on a digital recording. None! The signal is intact from beginning to end. You also do not get errors on any modern A/D D/A converters, even cheap ones. Don't believe me?

60 generation audio converter tests

After listening to Benchmark's 20 generation A/D-D/A test held at Avatar Studios during the 2007 AES convention,

I decided to run a "worst case scenario" test for myself.

I have Benchmark DAC-1s and several MOTU HD192s but my lowliest converter is my MOTU 1296.

The MOTU 1296 is a 12 channel A/D and D/A based on the AKM5393, a 96k converter with 117dB A/D and 120dB D/A s/n ratio.

I unpatched the gear from this 12 channel box and connected the inputs to the outputs of each converter channel.

Out of sheer laziness, I did this by connecting the cables at the gear end rather than using short patch cabled at the converter end.

I did say "worst case"...

Some channels went through several XLR->TRS cable to ->TRS->XLR barrel-> then XLR->TRS barrel to->TRS->XLR cable.

All cables were piled up behind the rack on top of 3 power supplies and 2 outlet strips... Like I said "worst case"

I imported 44.1 24bit audio files into my DAW, and inserted the 6 stereo pairs of conversion in series across the channel strip.

Each pass I bounced the file through the converters , imported that file, and -normalized it- (Like I said "worst case")

and repeated this process ten times to get 60 generations deep.

So go and listen to the two wave files he posted. One is an overhead drum mic, and the other is a piano. You hear the original, and then 60 generations later. You don't hear any difference, and I think I like the after piano better, even though they sound the same.

Sorry, but digital is an exact reproduction of the source.

Also, if you look it up, the Apple iPod has exceptional audio reproduction. Tests were done. I use them to test out new mixes on different audio systems like the car, boom boxes, etc. before that I had to burn a CD every time. I'd never play music on a cell phone (well maybe an iPhone). But I like it that I have 17,000 songs on my iPod.

[David Schwab]

Of course they make fun of me, most of these guys were born after 1980 ;-) and don't remember tube hi-fi's or vinyl records, never played a 45 hit single, sad to say ;-) never put a quarter in a jukebox to hear the Twist, LOL ;-)

Sorry, but I was born before 1960, had a tube record player and TV, etc. I still have 45s.

I would have avoided the twist however. I'm not a fan of a lot of 50s music, especially doo-wop.