Vinyl/CD

[Martin Czech]

I shouda have responed off list ;->

First, I believe what you have found:

It is possible that vinyl recordings sound better then CDs.

The question is why ?

So you want me to believe that vinyl offers more then 60dB S/N?  I'd say
70 dB would be very good for the table/record rumble, given a masive
10kg table, off course.  And dust particles, electrostatic discharges
and scratches will add to that. So, you may have a quite good analog
resolution, but the lower end is drowned in noise and thus not useable.

So the usefull unmasked dynamic range of vinyl should be about 70dB
maximum.  This depends also on how long the recording is, because longer
pieces need less spacing for the spiral, thus more problems.

OTOH have you ever listended to 1 bit PCM audio?  You will notice that
this sounds like normal bandwidth signal, but very noisy.  The one
bit signal is PWM modulated and noisy, this is a different to a
periodic harmonic square wave.

I remember that this was an exiting experience when I heard this for
the first time. You can not derive anything from the squarish waveform,
it juist sounds different.

So,if you listen to a digital recording fading out, and if you listen
very loud with headphones, you'll notice the signal fading away into the
noise. That's all. No obscure artefacts are audible, because they are
simply masked by the noise. There are problems when digital zero is detected
to shut off the DAC, a trick that is often played to fool idle noise
measurers.  This makes the idle noise suddenly drop into silence, this
is the main annoying artefact of badly designed DAC hardware.

And some early straight forward DACs had of course problems with filtering
the sidebands and there was shurely HF energy which could eventually
be mixed down into audible regions, not detectable as frequency but as
"poisoned" metallic noise.

So, by theory and more important by listening practise, I can absolutely
not hear or see in general that analog recording is better then
digital, in terms of fidelity. I've always experienced the opposite.

It may well be that the vinyl/needle adds something to the signal,
some nonlinear distortion and some linear distortion as well.
It may also be that this sounds pleasant for some recordings.

Of course, the CD player will not have this feature, and you'll miss
something , then. BUt then we are into the region of personal taste.
And these artefacts may also be harmfull to other types of music.

And the digital signal chain will sound brighter, since it really goes up
to 20kHz, this may be too bright for some listeners that are used 
to "darker" analog recordings. There is a lot of habit in there.
This is described as digital cold then. 

Listening to some Hendrix CDs from the original masters still shows the
limitations of the tapes, but this music would never sound the same
if Jimi could record it today with digital equipment. These pumping,
distorting, limiting effects would just be missed. I don't think that
it was intentionally recorded at this time, they simply did the best
they could with their equipment.

I think the reason for bad sounding CDs is simply greedy sloppy
re-mastering.  And if the master tapes are old they'll suffer from
severe demagetisation, pre echos, copying effect and high frequency loss,
if not the magnetic carrier sheet will simply fall off from the tape...
little brown particles on the floor. This is really an issue, I know that
some music publishers have severe problems with historical recordings
from the 50s allready. Magnetic tapes are getting old and finally die,
like you and me.

There are examples for very good craftmanship when restoring old tapes,
for example Sgt. Pepper's from the Beatles.

m.c.