Which is best - vinyl or CD ? |
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MikeEnRegalia
Special Collaborator Honorary Collaborator Joined: April 22 2005 Location: Sweden Status: Online Points: 21162 |
Posted: May 27 2007 at 10:02 |
^ it's fun!
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oliverstoned
Special Collaborator Honorary Collaborator Joined: March 26 2004 Location: France Status: Offline Points: 6308 |
Posted: May 27 2007 at 13:27 |
-First, the view sense is less developed than the ear.
So digital is more bearable in that domain. Digital is less catastrophic in the video field. Cause the human eye is easier to fool than the ear (and the whole body cause we feel sound with the whole body, especially extreme low) But a top level (S)-VHS machine beats a DVD player in term of color's beauty, at less. Digital has its artifacts, its visible on some DVDs. Through a great DVD player (such as a high end Pioneer) the difference is huge from one movie remastering to another. Pink Floyd's More is awesome for example. BTW, high technology cabling, power and vib-cancelling optimization aplies to video as well as to audio. -Blue ray disc works better than DVD cause more info (always the same).
Edited by oliverstoned - May 27 2007 at 13:29 |
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MikeEnRegalia
Special Collaborator Honorary Collaborator Joined: April 22 2005 Location: Sweden Status: Online Points: 21162 |
Posted: May 27 2007 at 13:42 |
The human ear is quite easy to fool ... of course it is more demanding than the eye, because we communicate by sound. That's why the compression rate of video is usually much higher than that of audio ... or in other words: The greater sensitivity of the ear is handled by increasing the sampling frequency and dynamics. BTW: Listening tests show that even on very high level equipment (certified by audiophiles) most participants are not able to tell the sources apart ... the most simple and almost impossibly to defeat point against your claims. Of course you can always say that you hear a difference ... but I rather trust a combination of common sense, science and anonymised testing than one person. |
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paolo.beenees
Forum Senior Member Joined: March 30 2007 Location: Italy Status: Offline Points: 1136 |
Posted: May 27 2007 at 13:52 |
Maybe I've got some unknown handicap, but I find it very, very, very hard to perceive any difference between vinyl and CD. The only things I can tell you for sure are that, on vinyls, the tracks which are closer to the centre of the disc always tend to be somehow disturbed or noisy, and after the - say - 80th listen CDs do not fry.
On the other hand, I really miss the old good wide covers, and I'm really disappointed about the CD price policies (at least in Italy).
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Dean
Special Collaborator Retired Admin and Amateur Layabout Joined: May 13 2007 Location: Europe Status: Offline Points: 37575 |
Posted: May 27 2007 at 21:24 |
I knew I shouldn't have put the phrase about feeling sub-sonics in my reply ,
The reason why this is doubly important on Digitised sound is because the signal is quantised in the Frequency Domain. This quantisation means you do not get an infinite number of frequencies across the spectrum - you get a finite number of descrete frequencies that are sub-harmonics of the sampling frequency. Hence, the sampling frequency used on CD's (or on any digital media) will only accurately reproduce frequencies that are an exact division of the sampling frequency - all other frequecies are spread into adjacent sub-divisions and require all those subdivisions to recreate the original.
This goes beyond Nyquist - Nyquist simply states that the maximum frequency you can digitise is half the sampling frequency. Or, to put it another way, the Nyquist frequency is the first sub-harmonic of the sampling frequency. Try and digitise a frequency a few Hz below the Nyquist frequency and you will generate a whole spectrum of descrete frequencies that are sub-harmonics of the sampling frequence all the way down to 0Hz and you need to put all those frequencies back to recreate the original.
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What?
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MikeEnRegalia
Special Collaborator Honorary Collaborator Joined: April 22 2005 Location: Sweden Status: Online Points: 21162 |
Posted: May 28 2007 at 03:06 |
^ nice post!
I agree with most of the technical details that you mention ... but I draw different conclusions. First of all: There can be no doubt that whatever recording technique used (analog tape/vinyl, digitial) the original signal can never be recreated with 100% accuracy. The question is: Can the average listener tell the reproduction apart from the original ... or, since the original is usually not available (the original in this case being the master tapes), can the average listener tell the different formats apart which are used for reproduction? I don't think so. As I explained earlier many people are biased towards a particular format and will tend to exaggerate its advantages while competing formats will receive a negative bias. Especially when comparing vinyl to CD you almost immediately recognize the vinyl - not necessarily because of the superior quality but because of the background noise, small pops (you cannot remove every particle of dust) and other particularities. Therefore you really can't conduct a double blind test between CD and vinyl ... About the technical aspects of the low frequencies ... consider this excerpt from hydrogenaudio.org: " How low of a frequency can LPs produce?
BTW: I found a nice website which allows you to experiment with fourier transformation ... I'll create a separate thread. |
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