The Vinyl Effect

Discussion in 'Music and Recordings (vinyl , 8-track, etc.)' started by velvetx, Nov 12, 2015.

  1. Stuff Jones

    Stuff Jones Friend

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    MAybe a dumb question, but do rips of vinyl sound better than from CDs? My guess is no but then I've seen people advertise that a rip is from vinyl.
     
  2. Merrick

    Merrick A lidless ear

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    Vinyl rips to digital can be great if:
    The ripper has a clean, high quality issue of a record
    The ripper has a revealing, well calibrated, high end analog front end
    The ripper takes the time to meticulously review the ripped files and correct errors

    Vinyl rips can sound better than CD if:
    The CDs are poorly mastered
    The CDs have EQ choices that negatively affect the sound
    The CDs are sourced from less than pristine materials

    So, that being said, here's what I think about vinyl rips vs CD/hi-res:

    In theory, CD should trump vinyl. It has a larger possible dynamic range and isn't constrained by having to physically press the recording onto physical grooves. However, many CDs sound worse than vinyl, and IMO a lot of that lies in the mastering.

    The good vinyl mastering engineers learned a lot of tricks to get the best sound out of vinyl. On top of that, the bulk of 20th century western music was made with an eye towards making it sound best for vinyl.

    When CDs came along, producers and engineers had to learn a whole new way of working, and the results were a very mixed bag. Throw poor first gen ADCs and DACs into the mix, and you often got a lot of bad results. Some early CDs used 2nd or 3rd gen copies of the master tapes. Others got flat transfers of the tapes when there had been EQ on the vinyl, or new, different EQ applied when transferred to CD. It was a real grab bag. Some early CDs sounded great, others sounded awful.

    By the time the CD became ubiquitous, the record companies had the bright idea of remastering albums to sell people the same albums over and over again. The first major wave of remasters happened in the mid to late 90s. I recall the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd catalogs getting major releases for the remasters around 1994/1995. Remasters from this period are generally not too bad, as the engineers understood the strengths of CD better, and played to those strengths. Most importantly, remasters from this period generally weren't overly dynamically compressed.

    Once MP3, the iPod, and iTunes dominated the musical landscape, things changed. People began to buy CDs just to rip them to their iPod in a lossy format. Portable MP3 players became the norm, and people listened to music more on the go. A big complaint was that a lot of recordings were too quiet. The CD has a wide dynamic range, so wide that on many recordings, setting the level so the loudest sections had no clipping meant the quiet sections were very quiet.

    The response to this was to compress the dynamics, so that the quieter sections became louder, and to set the levels louder, so the overall track was easier to hear on cheap equipment used on the go. This is the main cause of audio fatigue, where listening to music became a grating and you have to take a break.

    Because the practice became to cater to MP3 listeners, new releases as well as newer remasters became dynamically compressed. This has led to a market where a vast majority of the albums someone wants to buy sound like crap, and it's possible that even the old CD releases had issues too.

    Okay, so this was about vinyl rips, why have I spent all this time discussing the CD and MP3? This was my long winded way of explaining why vinyl rips have become desirable. If the current CD sounds unlistenable, and the old CDs have problems or are prohibitively rare/expensive, then vinyl rips become a useful source to get a digital copy of an album that has good dynamics and better mastering. Even newer albums often have different mastering for vinyl, and some prefer those over the CD or hi-res (although a lot of new vinyl is sourced from hi-res, so don't automatically assume that vinyl is always the best).

    I've heard some amazing vinyl rips. Rippers like pbthal and kel bazar and a few others have incredible rigs and take time and care to do things right. Some rippers go out of their way to track down rare mixes and versions that were never released on CD, certainly a valuable resource for people to hear music that may never be commercially released again.

    However, vinyl ripping has its own problems. I've heard rips with absurd amounts of surface noise, tons of pops and clicks, albums ripped at the wrong speed due to poor calibration, etc. On top of it, you're now dealing with copies of a copy, and one that is only representative of a single person's system. Some people feel that converting the recording to digital robs it of the special feeling that comes with hearing it from the actual vinyl, and there may be some truth to that if there's something inherent in digital that our brains respond less positively to compared to an all analog chain.

    If all things were equal, same mastering and EQ choices along all formats, no dynamic compression or clipping, I'd go with the hi-res 24/96 version of a recording. I think that 24/96 has the least amount of constraints as a format and does the best job of representing the master tape. Then secondly I'd choose the vinyl and the CD last. My reasoning for that is there's an emotional connection that vinyl engenders that CD simply doesn't. That may be just me. I'd choose a vinyl rip in this case only as a last resort. Why would you even need it?

    If all things aren't equal, and they usually aren't, then you should go with the version that sounds the best, regardless of source. Just be aware that a vinyl rip won't necessarily give you the "vinyl effect" that we've been discussing here, although some vinyl rips can sound excellent.

    The above is all IMO and YMMV and so on.
     
    Last edited: Feb 24, 2016
  3. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    Don't worry. You will still get a lot. Keep in mind that even a lowly HD650 fed from a EC ZDS / VPI made me lose interest in digital.
     
  4. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    Not a dumb question at all. Generally no, given equivalently good mastering. Vinyl rips almost always sound a little bit worse, all things being equal. The AD process destroys fidelity, and the subsequent additional DA process destroys even more fidelity. Best to keep digital things digital and analog things analog as much as possible.

    As an aside, there is one very well known dude who rips vinyl for "backup" purposes. I don't think highly of his rips in terms of retaining everything from the vinyl.

    I have heard very high quality CD remasters sourced from vinyl which sounded better than the CDs available for purchase on Amazon, etc.
     
    Last edited: Feb 24, 2016
  5. SPS

    SPS New

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    What is VPI ?....I now I am stupid!
     
  6. shaizada

    shaizada Friend

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  7. SPS

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    hmmm...stupid me...I thought it was some super cheap competitor of ZDS and started drooling. :oops:
     
  8. Stuff Jones

    Stuff Jones Friend

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    Interesting. The question came to mind listening to this vinyl rip, which sounds about as good and "vinyl-y" as I've ever heard the recorded acoustic guitar sound.

     
  9. Stuff Jones

    Stuff Jones Friend

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    Thanks for this. It basically confirms my novice opinion that the lowest hanging fruit in SQ is recording quality - not the audio reproduction medium or equipment. Which begs the question - why is there such variance in recording quality? Way OT, I know.
     
  10. shaizada

    shaizada Friend

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    Damn it....video is blocked for me. I don't want to use a proxy either...oh well.
     
  11. Merrick

    Merrick A lidless ear

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    I was just given a very strong lesson in this very fact earlier today. I stopped by @shaizada's house to get a new cartridge and headshell installed on my turntable, and he was generous enough to also show me his music room and let me listen to some records.

    He put on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars at my request (the new AAA reissue), and I am not joking when I say I got misty eyed at the sound of the opening piano chords. As we listened, when I closed my eyes I could almost see Bowie and the Spiders performing in front of me. It was incredibly realistic, besting anything I've heard from any headphone setup in my life.

    I already suspected I wasn't going to pursue digital much farther than I already have, and today's listening session confirmed that. I doubt I'll ever be able to get to the level of shaizada's system, but that's the direction I want to go in. I want my system to sound like I'm really there, and for all the tech and gear to melt away when I listen.
     
  12. Psalmanazar

    Psalmanazar Most improved member; A+

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    The Vinyl Effect is the high and low pass filtering, sub-bass compressed and centered to mono with upper bass boosted to counter the roll off, and the amp that drives the cutting lathe automatically compressing high frequency transients. The LP will always be more compressed than what you started with, the extra dynamic range is actually just noise, and there's been digital intermediate steps since 1970s digital delay lines. If the LP was direct metal mastered there almost certainly was an digital step somewhere but even LPs direct metal mastered from the commercial CD can sound good as vinyl mastering engineers are very skilled at what they do.
     
  13. shaizada

    shaizada Friend

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    ... and yet digital never connects with me like a vinyl does. The perfect digital medium must have really bad mastering engineers.
     
  14. Psalmanazar

    Psalmanazar Most improved member; A+

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    It's more that the sound has to be changed to sound like "vinyl" for the vinyl to actually play rather than digital mastering engineers doing poor work most of the time. Remember for the standard DR 6 or so modern computer pop master that the mastering engineer is mainly giving his employers (the label or artists) what they actually want, not helping the recording sound better on lo-fi systems (cars, earbuds) that sound compressed to begin with.
     

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