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Cd versus vinyl side by side


Harleywood

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19 hours ago, Harleywood said:

 

Both are Depeche Mode Music For The Masses releases. The CD came from the same analog master as the album. If anything since the CD was released after the LP version you'd expect it to be better. 

 

When was this made? Many 'made from the same analog master' CDs meant they used the two track that had eq applied to make the audio work on vinyl, i.e., the bass was highly rolled off, riaa eq applied, etc., and more. Mastering eq, multiband compression and/or expansion/ gating that is applied on a mixdown tape can totally mess with the phase relationships of individual multitrack tapes individual tracks. (Read through the posts by @Chris A on unmastering to understand more of what is going on).

 

Next, as was mentioned, you have your different playback systems being recorded on an iphone.

 

Bruce

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Hot topic with no concrete answer, too subjective. I personally prefer vinyl but CD's can sound absolutely fine with proper DAC. Only way to correctly compare between the two is in a professional environment with trained ears and equal high quality playback equipment. Even then there will be different opinions. Why not just enjoy both without worrying about which is best?  I like my new turntable with moving coil cartridge and also like CD's played back through my latest DAC. 

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2 hours ago, Marvel said:

When was this made? Many 'made from the same analog master' CDs meant they used the two track that had eq applied to make the audio work on vinyl, i.e., the bass was highly rolled off, riaa eq applied, etc., and more. Mastering eq, multiband compression and/or expansion/ gating that is applied on a mixdown tape can totally mess with the phase relationships of individual multitrack tapes individual tracks. (Read through the posts by @Chris A on unmastering to understand more of what is going on).

 

Hi Bruce!

 

20 hours ago, Harleywood said:

The CD came from the same analog master as the album. If anything since the CD was released after the LP version you'd expect it to be better. 

 

This is the type of assumption that a lot of people make, unfortunately.   They believe that the record companies are working in the best interests of the hi-fi enthusiast.  Of course, it turns out that this is not true. In fact, it is the opposite, in my experience: the more the record companies stand to make from the recordings, the more they tend to abuse the format in order to "make it sound better on anything that you play it on".   This is of course the problem--you cannot make the original recording sound better...only worse. 

 

The digital medium can be abused much more than vinyl, and vinyl has real issues within the format itself that keeps the record companies from completely squeezing the life out of the music.  So what you end up with is a choice among two poor alternatives, one being much more abusable than the other.  This is the bottom line that's been told over and over again on this forum and others:

 

 

 

I personally don't believe in spending large sums of money on turntables and cartridges (modest amounts of money--less than $500 is sufficient), even if you think that there are a lot of cheap used records out there. My turntable gathers dust in between the once-a-year or so times when I listen to a record that's not available in better digital format.  The prices that these extreme-price turntables command (and their required recording cleaning devices) will buy you literally thousands of inexpensive used CDs that play without any degradation and can be fairly quickly demastered.  These demastered tracks will almost always provide the highest quality music tracks that are available for recordings that were originally made before 1991. 

 

If we are talking about music originally recorded before 1991, I always look for the oldest CD that I can find on Amazon Marketplace (usually priced below $4) and demaster it to remove the poor mastering EQ used during its mastering to make it louder--using the techniques of that time before multi-band compression, limiting (clipping) and other "enhancement effects" that make extremely compressed tracks "sound louder". 

 

The initial demastering process takes about as long as it does to play the disc all the way through, once you've become familiar with the process and diagnosing the current state of the CD tracks, demastering each track one at a time.

 

[For recordings made after 1991, I think that you'll find that 99% of them will be permanently trashed, and these do not constitute "hi-fi" recordings--but rather lo-hi and mid-fi, at best.]

 

To the OP: trying to listen to the lossy formats in the linked video that you posted is actually not terribly useful since whatever fidelity was present in either version of the tracks was further degraded by the automatic conversion to AAC or MP4 (lossy formats) during the YouTube video upload process. The audio tracks will always be in a lossy AAC or MP4 format

 

Chris

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Hi Chris... I knew you would be awake sooner or later. 😁

 

The best chance for a good outcome is having the original multitrack to work from. A lot of thse tapes simply no longer exist. Two inch tape, used for 16-24 track recording was/is expensive, and many studios basically rented you the tape, so that after a certain length of time, if you didn't buy it, it was erased and reused for another session. In that case, all we have are two track tapes, or possibly four track sub mixes.

 

Importing analog tracks into digital systems does allow for some easier manipulation to fix some things, like dc offset on a track, or shifting the phase between different tracks to avoid phase cancellations between two or more tracks/instruments.

 

Of course, a good studio will now do all that when the initial tracks are recorded.

 

Bruce

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19 hours ago, Shakeydeal said:

 

That's a very small collection, you must be young and getting started? As for your cdp, I say ditch it completely. Rip your music to a hard drive and buy a good dac and some sort of streamer. A raspberry pi or bluesound node 2 are two good choices. This will sound better than most cd players.

 

 

Not young just married for 23 years and had to put my hobby on the back burner until the kids were on the downhill slope of higher education. I purchased a Rotel integrated about eight months ago. It has a wolfson onboard dac that I assume would be sufficient for what you're discussing. Not to saavy with all the digital options available but I do prefer media I can touch and show when guests are over. I guess that's the 1970's kid  in me showing through. :) Appreciate the streamer suggestions. I have an older computer in a closet not being used now. It has a great soundcard, I had it built for gaming, and I was actually using that some years ago to digitize LP's through the tape out RCA's on my Kenwood with Nero software into lossless wav files and burn CD's. Extremely tedious process and I got bored with it after a while. 

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34 minutes ago, Harleywood said:

 

Not young just married for 23 years and had to put my hobby on the back burner until the kids were on the downhill slope of higher education. I purchased a Rotel integrated about eight months ago. It has a wolfson onboard dac that I assume would be sufficient for what you're discussing. Not to saavy with all the digital options available but I do prefer media I can touch and show when guests are over. I guess that's the 1970's kid  in me showing through. :) Appreciate the streamer suggestions. I have an older computer in a closet not being used now. It has a great soundcard, I had it built for gaming, and I was actually using that some years ago to digitize LP's through the tape out RCA's on my Kenwood with Nero software into lossless wav files and burn CD's. Extremely tedious process and I got bored with it after a while. 

Remember that purchase and may have recc. the Rotel. Anyway, hope you are liking the integrated. Enjoy!

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Want the best of both worlds. Record your new vinyl onto a quality CD recorder. A nice moving coil cartridge will give you the sound, the CD will give you the ease of digital, and no wear to your albums. Just be sure to spring for the better quality blank disc's, the cheap ones go bad after a year or so.

Sent from my N9131 using Tapatalk

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20 minutes ago, Moosee1955 said:

Want the best of both worlds. Record your new vinyl onto a quality CD recorder. A nice moving coil cartridge will give you the sound, the CD will give you the ease of digital, and no wear to your albums. Just be sure to spring for the better quality blank disc's, the cheap ones go bad after a year or so.

Sent from my N9131 using Tapatalk
 

That's the first thing I do to a new CD, make a copy of it.

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1 hour ago, Moosee1955 said:

Want the best of both worlds. Record your new vinyl onto a quality CD recorder. A nice moving coil cartridge will give you the sound, the CD will give you the ease of digital, and no wear to your albums. Just be sure to spring for the better quality blank disc's, the cheap ones go bad after a year or so.

Sent from my N9131 using Tapatalk
 

 

While you are at it, you could follow Chris' unmastering thread before you burn your CD, so you can get back some of the bottom end and dynamics. 🤔

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On 9/29/2018 at 11:23 AM, Harleywood said:

 

Both are Depeche Mode Music For The Masses releases. The CD came from the same analog master as the album. If anything since the CD was released after the LP version you'd expect it to be better. 

Why?  CD mastering is a completely different process, and the early process has a whole host of problems that were worked on over time (dither for one).

 

They could have added eq during mastering for vinyl that isn't present on CD.

 

They could have smooshed (compression) the CD version.

 

It also depends which version LP, and which version CD.

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I've never had any problem with bass loss on Lp's. Actually on older recordings like Beatles and singers like Sinatra and Tony Bennett, the albums sounded better. I have a Tom Jones album I recorded to cassette years back, that blows away my CD version of same songs. Problem with a lot of albums, is the person doing the recording didn't care. Can't tell you how disappointed I was after purchase. Just sat in my collection. Back in the days Tower records or whomever wouldn't take it back just because it didn't sound good! Like buying fruit, no return.

Sent from my N9131 using Tapatalk

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On 9/30/2018 at 4:45 AM, wdecho said:

Hot topic with no concrete answer, too subjective.

 

On 9/30/2018 at 4:13 AM, Don Richard said:

This is a good example of how to run an invalid test. The second example is louder than the first and that difference in level makes this "test" worthless. Levels must be balanced to within .1 dB to get any sort of valid comparative data.

 

While the judgments of the individual participants are subjective, the method doesn't have to be, if the two sources are compared properly; the group results would not be "too subjective."  Controlled tests in perception, aesthetic preferences, memorability, etc., and the variables that affect these are done frequently.   See Berlyne,* and any experimental psychology text, in the section on "true" experiments (independent variable(s) manipulated rather than "found," and participants randomly assigned to groups, if there are groups).   If there were a  test tone of the same frequency, or. perhaps, a band limited pink noise signal recorded at a standard level on each medium, then there would be an opportunity to set them to the same SPL level.  I would think that within 0.25 dB would be close enough, but if there is evidence that within 0.1 dB is needed, so be it.  Of course, who knows of a CD version and a vinyl version of the same music, in the same recording, that also contains a standard test signal?  The experimenter would also have to counterbalance for order effect and carry-over effect, if applicable.  Double blind would be a necessity.  The comparison could be either a single participant study in which it is determined whether one lonely audiophile prefers one or the other, over a series of trials, or a study in which participants are randomly assigned to either the CD group or the vinyl group.  There are many other configurations that would be possible, providing that the experiment is controlled.  

 

We all know of recordings, or "transfers," [sic] that are screwed up.  What if our CD or vinyl "transfer" is one of these, and the other isn't?   We would need many exemplars of each format.  May as well do a full blown multivariate experiment with every variable we can think of and an N as great as all outdoors.  But it wouldn't be subjective.  It would be a probabilisticly objective result (say at the .05 level, or better) of a comparison of subjective judgements of preference (or some other aspect).

 

Since the CD, SACD, DVD-A, vinyl, and other physical media we can have at home will soon be dead ducks, replaced by streaming, maybe we should do our research on that.  But, subjectively I don't like streaming thus far.  Besides I can't get Mystery of Time on streaming.

 

*Aesthetics and Psychobiology by D. E. Berlyne

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On 10/1/2018 at 10:58 AM, Moosee1955 said:

Like buying fruit, no return.

 

Ah, but we used to be able to go to the fruit stand, or old fashioned grocer (sometimes they went door to door), and pinch the fruit, and eat one peach before buying, if we judged it up to snuff.   That was an essential part of Adam Smith (the real and old one) Capitalism, known as "the market check on quality." 

 

By far the best Lp store in the SF Bay Area was Stairway to Music, where they would separate out a "Store Copy" of nearly every Lp to play for customers on there high end (for then) system (JBL 154C woofers, 375 midrange, and 075 tweeter, the later Hartsfield components, but in a much bigger horn).  When you bought an Lp, you could return it, no questions asked.  The owner was so helpful and liked, few would take advantage of his flexibility.

 

Our local equipment dealer would let us take equipment home from Saturday night to Monday morning, to try it out.

 

The local camera shop was the same way.  I borrowed an Exacta, and returned it.  I made it clear that I had no intention of buying, but just needed a single lens reflex with a fast lens for a project.  They were fine with it.  Of course, I bought a lot of stuff from them in later years. 

 

The market check on quality.

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On 9/30/2018 at 7:45 AM, wdecho said:

Hot topic with no concrete answer, too subjective. I personally prefer vinyl but CD's can sound absolutely fine with proper DAC. Only way to correctly compare between the two is in a professional environment with trained ears and equal high quality playback equipment. Even then there will be different opinions. Why not just enjoy both without worrying about which is best?  I like my new turntable with moving coil cartridge and also like CD's played back through my latest DAC. 

 

I always wondered what trained ears were looking for. I think I can hear distortion as well as anybody.

JJK

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Fruit you can sample before you buy, reminds me of the Seinfeld episode when Kramer says this fruit has no taste! I too am old enough to remember Stereo stores that would play a few cuts of an album on their Ess heil speakers, or JBL. But it always seemed like it was such an imposition for them. Especially if it didn't sound right and you said no! Oh the look on their face when you walked out. You didn't dare suggest a second album.

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A lot of romance surrounding vinyl. Had a massive collection at one point. Was an early CD adopter and always preferred them. Still buy all sorts. Don’t miss snap crackle and pop, new stylus and or cartridge purchases , static guns, antistatic sleeves, disc washer brushes or getting up after 20-25 minutes to flip the damn things. Folks can jump on the bandwagon, I jumped off it in 1983 with a little help from an NAD player.

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