Which is best - vinyl or CD ?

"Most audiophiles aren't able to tell sources apart (vinyl/CD) in properly conducted listening tests, but still claim that there is an "obvious" difference in quality."

That what your stupid article written by jealous says.

i'm pleased to see my old thread has been revived for discussion, and that you have a new sparring partner, Olivier!!(and Mike!)

Edited by mystic fred - October 11 2006 at 15:15

Heavyfreight wrote: Also remember; as soon as you start talking about a "warm sound" you are talking about a deviation from the original sound.  In this case less high frequency and "soft clipping" which is a rolling off of the loudest parts of the signal peaks (simply because the vinyl cannot have a peak or trough that deep, the magnetic tape is reaching saturation (all particles magnetised so none left to carry more signal) or if using a tube/valve amplifier the maximum signal for the cathode area (i.e. no more electrons available) being reached).

exactly. It's true that for most people tube amps sound "warmer", but in fact it's all distortion. Of course being a (metal) guitarist I'm the first to admit that distortion can sound really nice and tubes create much better (read: harmonic) distortion than transistors, but the fact remains that the warmth is added by the amp - it is not like the tube amp reproduces the warmth of the original recording while the solid state amp destroys it and replaces it with "harshness". The original recording sounds harsh, that's the truth.

This really is a pointless arguement with a lot of nonsense being talked, along with some very interesting points.  The truth of the matter is that neither system gives a faithful reproduction of the original.  Very expensive mics with the A to D converter built in going through top quality digital equipment and being fed to an excellent speaker/amp combo with built in D to A will give the closest reproduction to the original sound.  There is no scientific doubt about that.  However it might not be the sound that you like personally.  All this talk about vinyl giving a better representation is just total tosh.  Any analogue recording system is inherently imperfect, this is purely down to physics.  All analogue systems suffer from poor performance diminishing to no performance at all at the lower and upper frequency limits.  These are compensated for by electronic filters at the recording stage and also at the playback stage (which are also imperfect and add their signatures to the signal).  You can spend more and more money on better and better analogue electronics to try and improve the linearity of the system (and you will get some improvement) but it follows the law of diminishing returns.  The advantage of the CD format is that the quality of the output starts off as good as most people will ever want.  Yes you can sometimes hear faults if you are very discerning and obviously if the mastering is rubbish then the CD will reproduce that rubbish.

Edited by Heavyfreight - October 10 2006 at 11:58

OK, so that's normal.

...if your CD is better than your vynil, your turntable must be a ridiculous plastic toy!

You have a turnatable as poor as your CD source, so you don't hear analog's potential.
    

Edited by oliverstoned - October 06 2006 at 15:12

Vinyl <3



but i use digi a LOT more for convenience, like iPod and such.

^ you know that I recently bought some vinyls ... I still think that the accuracy of the reproduction is not better than that of the CD. Nevertheless I think there are certain signals which can sound much better on vinyl ... the new Opeth album for example. In fact I think that all heavily distorted styles of music *can* sound better on vinyl (if they're recorded/pressed properly), because they contain very complex waveforms.


Edited by MikeEnRegalia - October 06 2006 at 11:16

MikeEnRegalia wrote: But some people are convinced that there are huge quality differences between CD players ... well, whatever a player does, it can't extract more info than what's stored on the disc: No.  But it can certainly extract less.  Cheap CD players miss whole groups of samples, due mostly to poor mechanical construction, and then guess what should have been there.  Also poor D to A converters introduce noise and distortion.       Analog signal -> 24bit/96khz digital master -> 16bit/44.1khz CD -> Analog Hi-Fi system See? The analog signal is compressed to 16bit/44.1khz no matter what is done during mastering. No technical gadget whatsoever can recover the lost information ... it is not stored on the disc. So all the "musical" CD players can do is to simulate the lost information - that is called "interpolation" and "upsampling". Surely the result sounds better than the unchanged 16bit/44.1khz signal, but it is not a more accurate reproduction of the original signal. You are correct that some information is lost from the 96KHz master but the CD player doesn't try to simulate the lost information; it doesn't even know that it existed.  The reason that 24bit (and above) is used in mastering is because digital mixing requires more headroom.  (Add two 16 bit numbers and you'll get a 17 bit one etc. etc.).  A faster sampling rate is used to avoid audible aliasing between mixed signals.  When the final master is produced you can happily throw away the eight least significant bits as they represent sound quieter than the human ear can detect compared to the more significant bits.  (It's not exactly like that, you throw away some of the most significant bits instead  if the audio level doesn't use them).   16bit 44.1KHz decoded by a decent CD player gives a far more accurate analogue waveform when directly compared to the original sound than any vinyl reproduction.   44.1KHz is historic and comes from an era before DAT tapes when Sony Betamax tapes and PCM 601/701 codecs were used and 44.1KHz stereo neatly fitted into a video frame space on the tapes.

Edited by Heavyfreight - October 06 2006 at 09:45