AW: Vinyl/CD

[Haible Juergen]

	> I shouda have responed off list ;->

Hmm, it's a sensitive topic which leads to flamewars as easily as the tube
topic - if we stick to physics and keep out the religion, we may have a
chance
to talk about it. Only nice letters so far (;->)

Personally I agree with Bill: Vinyl is for HiFi, and CDs are for
convenience.

	>So you want me to believe that vinyl offers more then 60dB S/N?  

Well, I actually enjoy LP's that have a SNR of approx -6dB (peak).
No typo. The signal is weaker than the loudest click. I notice that
often when I copy LP's to CD-R (for convenience): My signal is at
least 6dB down, but an occasional click might trigger the overload 
detector.
And these are nice LPs, not mint, but I'd say "very good". So good that
I transfer them to CDR even though I have bought the CD before.
This is, of course, due to the different mastering, and not because of the
medium, just as Martin said:

	>I think the reason for bad sounding CDs is simply greedy sloppy
	>re-mastering.

Amen to that. 

But I'm quite convinced that there are other differences as well, and
Bill's point about quantizing errors at low volume parts is a very valid
one,
and it has nothing to do with SNR. 
We all learned that stuff about quantisation "noise", and simplified
equations
that asume that the error is some kind of "noise", but if we look closer, it
is not. The signal becomes distorted as soon as quantisation becomes a
factor.
On vinyl, a low volume part will decrease the SNR from -6B to -76dB (peak
(;->))
but the ear will be able to decide the information from the dirt because of
the
different nature of the dirt. Just like you can pick out a certain familiar
voice
on a party with 100 people speaking at the same time.
If the dirt is distortion rather than noise, the effect is different.

	>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. 

How can we fake a good bass response on a small loudspeaker ? Make a
peak and then a steep slope in frequency response.
How does the CD come across its inability to reproduce harmonics beyond
22kHz ? You guessed it.

	JH.