Which is best - vinyl or CD ?

MikeEnRegalia wrote: Frequencies below 20 Hz are called "sub sonic" for a reason ... you can't hear them.

Numeric is responsible of the fact that most people don't listen to music anymore (except as a background
noise through MP3 in the public transport or in the car). In the mid 80's, when CD arrived, marketers succeded to convince people that CD was the perfect sound. If Cd is still the worst source among the four real hifi ones (CD, tape, tuner and vinyl), it was even worst cause there were the first generations of CD players and were really awful sounding.
So people had no pleasure at all but were told that thay had the perfect sound with CD (that's where it's very perverse).
That's why hifi doesn't interest people anymore since the 80's, and it explains the explosion of Home cinema since that time: people go towards video cause high fidelity doesn't give them pleasure anymore.

I've noticed that some people feel personally wounded when one say that numeric is bad.
While hifi has made great progress in many areas (cable, power issues, vibration control), numeric has been a huge regression and the negation of good. But fortunatly, analog goes back in force.

Edited by oliverstoned - May 26 2007 at 01:46

"I say that both analog and numeric can sound awesome."

It's somehow true: a 45 000€ Mark Levinson digital setup will work wonderful, but less good than a good 4500€ vinyl deck with a moving coil...

...But CDs are more useful in the cherry trees to scare the birds.

darqdean wrote: MikeEnRegalia wrote: Frequencies below 20 Hz are called "sub sonic" for a reason ... you can't hear them. This is true (the 20Hz chosen for the Red Book CD Audio standard was purely arbitary - based upon the perceived threshold of 50% of adults - obviously 50% of aults and most younger people can hear below this threshold). However there are two ways in which you can hear sub-sonics - the first is obviously by feel, the other is by their interaction with sonics. When two notes are played together, they interact, creating harmonics (i.e a chord); the same happens with a sonic and sub-sonic, the resultants are sonic. A musical instrument creates these sub-sonics naturally, the interaction between them and the sonic frequencies are what goes towards making the overall timbre of the instrument (there are obviously a myriad of other factors, but sub-sonics are one of them). Remove the sub-sonic and you affect the timbre. This is one of the reasons people perceive a difference between CD and vinyl. MikeEnRegalia wrote: And about the issues darqdean has with mastering: All valid points, but hardly against the medium which is used to store the mastered audio. Again, true - however, it is the medium (CD) that has fuelled this trend of over-mastering. Producers and sound-engineers would not apply anything like the degree of compression they would use on CD to tracks they are mastering for vinyl.

All that is true. Thanks to bring the harmonic's issue (showing that sound and human perception is much more complex than just a matter of measured frequency range) and the over-compressed digital issue which is a real plague for the ones who owns top level equipment.

Edited by oliverstoned - May 26 2007 at 14:35

MikeEnRegalia wrote: oliverstoned wrote: "I say that both analog and numeric can sound awesome." It's somehow true: a 45 000€ Mark Levinson digital setup will work wonderful, but less good than a good 4500€ vinyl deck with a moving coil... And my computer + 80 EUR speakers play the music so nicely too ... I'm so glad that I can appreciate music this way. You're free to make these high demands to anything from power cables to sacks of sand hanging on the walls ... each to his own.

BTW, i just add granite plates on my drive/converter/preamp
-which have seven levels of vib cancelling below each device- and the upgrade is incredible, one of the biggest i made.

If the vinyl is from digital source and playbacked on poor equipment...both will be bad.

oliverstoned wrote: If the vinyl is from digital source and playbacked on poor equipment...both will be bad.

how convenient for you ... there is always something you can blame it on! But if all parts of the "equipment chain" must be perfect in order for it to sound good, why do you keep encouraging people to buy budget hi-fi systems? I mean, without the seven ton granite vibration cancelling they'll miss out on the "incredible" difference!

^ do you enjoy watching DVD? If so, you should know that the video signal is even more compressed than mp3 audio. If digital compression is a flawed concept per se, then why is it that nobody complains? Or take digital photographs as another obvious example ...

You have to face the possibility that a digital recording may be perceived as being identical to the original if the resolution is high enough ... applies to video, images and of course audio too. And what's the correct resolution? Well, fortunately for audio there's the Nyquist theorem which is not a "theory", but a well proven fact of science.

Sorry, but you're just sounding like the people who rejected tape recorders in the 60s ... you've built yourself a world of false assumptions and preconceptions, and you've spent so much time, efforts and money in the process that you now can't accept simple facts like the ones I presented above, as accepting them would imply that you've been wasting your time. I sympathize, but in some situation the only way to advance is ... to go back (simple example:  A dead end street).