I was in Fred Meyers today and for the first time, I actually saw a tiny display full of Brand new records.
The records in the display were
Lots oF Metallica
Master of Puppets and Kill em All.
Def leppard- Hysteria
Eric Clapton
Nine Inch Nails
Paul Mccartneys new album
It looked like a lot of them had been picked over, meaning there were a lot gone so I'm wondering what other albums they had.

The price on each record was $29.99, which seemed spendy to me, but I'm really not sure if thats a good price or not.

If I had more time I would have asked the guy If I could order some of the records off a website.

That's actually kind of interesting. I would like to have heard how that decision was made.

Vinyl's resurgence would be a poor investment unless you buy them and leave them sealed as a collectors item. Unless you have a very high end turntable/cartridge/styli, records still are vulnerable to damage and degrade through normal usage (even with said high end gear).

Fad. Nothing more.

I don't know if this is a fad, I know a lot of people who love the sound of Vinyl over digital, and it looked like the albums at Fred Meyers were selling well because there were not a lot left.

Fad? No.

Vinyl is still gaining ground. 180 gram pressings are hard for distributors to keep in stock. There are more new models of high quality turntables, tonearms, cartridges and styli available now than there have been since the late 1970s. It is wonderful and ironic, since every other physical medium has seen sales plummet through the floor with the advent of mp3.

Record pressing plants have been unable to keep up with demand for quite awhile. They are completely backlogged with reissues. Even the major labels are having to wait in line for new releases. Google "Doors Vinyl Box Set" and you will see one of the reasons why. Seven inch singles are also enjoying a rebirth with independent artists.

Vinyl -- and to a lesser extent reel to reel -- is still popular as a limited edition format for release. In the last five years, it has been steadily growing in popularity. It is not just a romantic fancy or a brief throwback. It is because most digital sounds like absolute ass. Many CD reissues are a crime against art and have been since the late 80s.

I would take Vinyl Over digital ANY DAY!
The warm sound of Vinyl is awesome! Plus people don't just buy vinyl to have in a collection, people actually buy them and listen to them.

But how will Vinyl fit into my computer so I can transfer it to my Ipod?

Or into my car cd player?

Costco sells a USB turntable that allows you to rip to MP3 as it plays.

http://www.ion-audio.com/ionttusb

ION also make a USB cassette player.

http://www.ion-audio.com/tape2pc

That's really cool technology.

My dad has a bunch of reel to reel tapes he and I are going to digitize using an old TEAC A-3300SX.

Wonder if anyone has put a USB port on an upgraded R-R machine lately?

AC/DC's new album "Black Ice" is going to be on vinyl as well.

That is VERY COOL!

I have "Back In Black" By ACDC On Vinyl and it sound so much better on Vinyl than on a CD!

Setting the sonic argument aside for a moment, don't let me bring anybody down by reminding everyone that vinyl's resurgence is a fad, by definition.

"an intense and widely shared enthusiasm for something, esp. one that is short-lived and without basis in the object's qualities;"

Intense? OK, I agree to the point within the small percentage of music dollars left to spread around. Face reality, sales of CD's and DVD's are down because of downloading, legal and illegal.
The vinyl fad is being embraced by a relatively small bunch of throwbacks that don't care what it costs.

It's always been about money, and once the early adopters peak out on this it will fade faster than a pair of cheap jeans in hot water. This resurgence is not based in supposed better quality.
I'm sure some of you think it is, but it isn't.

Start here: Live music is the standard to which all recorded music must hold itself. Studio recordings can embellish and provide color, but few artists have ever succeeded based on studio recordings only (another topic altogether). Analog recordings and transcriptions evolved over a long period of time, reaching a pinnacle somewhere in the late 70's - early 80's. In comparison to the first digital recordings, high end analog was clearly superior. Advancements over the 80's and early 90's to digital recording techniques and medium delivery methods have thrust digital recordings into two significantly different groups.
Quality and quantity. Just like with analog. When I was a teen I had a meat grinding record player that totally thrashed my records. By the time I left vinyl behind me, my equipment was a lot better, but the inherent weaknesses in the medium were never going to go away.

A tonearm tracking at 1.25 grams with a typical elliptical stylus produces a downward force of 15,000 psi. It stretches the groove which if left alone for 12 hours will recover approximately 90 to 95 percent of its original shape. The next time you play it, this happens again, only the recovery peak loses a few percent. After 10 or so plays, you've lost high frequencies and low frequencies and some separation of stereo channels. It is the nature of the beast. This is why towards the end of the vinyl era, people would record the vinyl on first play to a cassette and listen to the tape, keeping the vinyl mileage as low as possible. Nothing has changed. This is one of the key reasons this is only a fad.

Many criticize digital recording techniques, saying uninformed things like "it turns music into a bunch of 0's and 1's." Well, I got news for you, when they cut a master to press a vinyl record from, they are turning the sound waves into a bunch of mechanical movements that approximate the energy differences in the audio spectrum being recorded. It is no "purer" a representation of the original live sound than quantization.

Socially speaking, every 20 years fashion and gizmos repeat themselves. In the 90's it was the 70's. Now in '00's it's the 80's. The 80's were the decade where vinyl did a slow crossfade with compact discs. It seems only appropriate that it (vinyl) is having a mild resurgence.

Bottom line, what is killing CD and DVD sales is availability of the medium online. Vinyl sales can not circumvent this brick wall. Most people don't give a hoot about high fidelity, clearly evidenced from the willingness to accept videos on youtube and low rate digital audio to load on their iPods (and the two people that bought a Zune).

Soooo ..... if you have thousands of old, stretched groove records with a top end of 12k, what good does a new release on vinyl do you? Even buying new playback equipment doesn't rejuvenate your collection. And if you think this isn't all a fad, you would have to be doing an 8 way hit of LSD to think that the recording companies are going to remaster all those old titles to press new records for the small part of the consuming public that thinks this is "cool."

I'm not an old fud. Point is that the argument of analog versus digital recording has already happened. Digital won for a whole host of reasons. Remember, vinyl is a petroleum product. Records use mechanical energy to reproduce music and degrade themselves in the process. And in the digital world of 196kHz sampling and 24 bit depth and signal to noise ratios well beyond the limits of analog, there just isn't a sound set of reasons you can give me to support the notion that this isn't just a fad.

I invite you to try, though.

It's a fad that hasn't ever stopped.

But it has slowed down. I'm not oblivious to that.

I could care less if people are calling Vinyl a fad or not, I know Plenty of people who still buy Vinyl and I still buy it myself. So Fad or not, I still seek out Vinyl! To me it has a much superior sound than digital. I hope Fred Meyers continues to sell it.

I would think there is some demand for Vinyl or else new artists would not release their albums in Vinyl.

By the way, Does anybody know if we can pre-order the new ACDC album on Vinyl?? I want that album so bad on Vinyl, and I'm guessing there will probably be a limited amount of copies.

LIke with any fad, there is demand or they wouldn't make any.

If you compared a high end amplification system with a virgin vinyl (first play) with uncompressed digital audio (aiff, aif) on the same system, you would find the only difference is that the digital recording has a higher s/n ratio. For the same reason that guitarists prefer tube amps over solid state, some folks like yourself prefer the analog source. The reason is you are more comfortable with higher noise and low end distortion. It's not about "music missing" which is how many describe it, rather it is the comfort level some have developed in the more noisy environment. Again, referring to my other post, in a live music situation there is always noise and hum. Studio recordings have always been cleaner than live, even in the analog domain. However, the comparison is one of a more perfect recording being less liked by some doesn't make it, as you put it, "superior." In fact, digital recordings are of higher fidelity (true to the source). The absence of noise, hum and other distortions are a difficult transition. In addition, the younger generation have adopted highly compressed digital audio which does have a loss of information, so in that case a first run vinyl would have better quality.

Considering the name of this web site, it's noteworthy to point out that analog radio transmissions have less fidelity, lower frequency response and higher noise than all but the slowest MP3's. New digital transmission improves upon that but we are a long way off from dumping analog radio (another topic altogether).

http://blog.oregonlive.com/breakingnews/2008/06/fred_meyer_returns_to_vinyl_to.h tml

CDs are a fad.

Imbedded chips that play directly into your pineal gland is the next thing.

I'm just sure Steve Jobs is bankrolling the iGland.

Wish they'd bring back the colored/pictured vinyl

I will start off by saying that Andy is correct about the limitations of vinyl records. Playing them causes the grooves to deform from friction and from the pressure of the stylus. They have various sources of noise that are not present in digital media. To keep from going into the realm of pseudoscience when discussing sound recording and reproduction technologies, one has to understand the characteristics and limitations of each.

I have a turntable and records, and I do buy records at thrift stores if they appear to be in good condition and the price is low. I consider this a gamble, but the low price makes the risk worthwhile. To me, the sound of a clean record in good shape is very acceptable, but I don't believe that records have any "magical" properties, in much the same way that I don't think that vacuum tube amplifiers are "magical." I would not buy one of those $29.99 LPs at Fred Meyer because I don't consider the "vinyl sound" or large-format liner art or bonus posters to be worth the extra money. I would not buy the same LP to keep as a collectible, either, as that is a gamble in itself, and having to keep the album sealed would prevent me from being able to enjoy the music, liner art, and posters.

In the early to mid 1990s, a lot of people in the punk rock and indy communities had almost a religious devotion to vinyl records. Of all the reasons given by the punk rockers and indy people back then for why records were so great and CDs were so terrible, the only one that I considered to be valid and fairly important was that at that time, the costs associated with mastering and pressing CDs were such that it was not feasible to do small production runs of 250-1000 copies. This was an era before companies like DiscMakers and certainly before CD-Rs would become an affordable alternative. Thus, cassettes, records, and--for the really low budget punkers--flexible "soundsheet" records were the way to go. The other reasons given were either what Andy would have labeled uninformed (i.e. "you can't expect music to keep its integrity if you turn it into 1s and 0s and a computer plays it back to you") or aesthetic reasons that engineers can't justify. The "aesthetic" reasons would include claims that vinyl has a "euphonic crunch" (this is a term that somebody once used to tell my why he thought vinyl was so great) that makes electric guitars sound good. What that guy was trying to say was that the distortion of some cheaply pressed records enhances the sound of distorted electric guitars in rock music. Others liked the grungy cheap record sound because it presented the low-budget image that they wanted to present. That is a completely subjective claim because to me, that same distortion is a sound that I associate with damaged or failing equipment (worn out records, damaged speakers, etc) or incompetence (levels set too high, radio station processing set up with excessive clipping, etc.) When we're talking about aesthetic preferences, we might as well be talking about whether holes in blue jeans look good or not.

By the way, a few weeks ago, we had another thread in this message board about the records at Fred Meyer. There was a link to a newspaper story that explained why Fred Meyer had started carrying records: the store initially ordered some LPs by mistake and decided to put them on the shelves. Some people bought the records, so the store decided to add more records to its selection. In my opinion, the fact that they are getting away with charging a premium for the records seems faddish.

"Wish they'd bring back the colored/pictured vinyl"

These were fun! I have several... but did you ever see a vinyl 78 rpm picture disk? Vogue records made some around 1946-1947.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogue_Records

Please forgive me for being a little bit insulted by the tone of some responses. One should avoid using the word "fad" while waving the latest computer miracle in my face. I am speaking of an established medium that has enjoyed steady popularity since before any of us were born. It might not be the latest and greatest, but it is a vital living outlet for musicians and fans alike. I remember when CDs were $30 and nobody batted an eye. Perhaps it was because they were a fad.

The most important part of a mass marketed recording medium is the ability to reproduce what was captured. If a recording was made using an electromechanical method, the only true reproduction will also be an electromechanical method. Even the original master might not sound right to folks who want hospital style sterility, but I have yet to see a live concert in a soundproof hospital.

Yes, 78 RPM records are an inferior medium for reproduction, however, a greater portion of those releases still survive because they were cut to disc. Yes, 33 RPM records might not always have that sparkling bright modern FM sound that is so fetishized, but even in poor condition they continue to play and give pleasure to the listener many decades after release.

Compact discs are already showing signs of deterioration and instead of making a pop, or skip, they skid along with all the musicality of a vomiting robot. They also do not reproduce in real time, but are buffered by increasingly cheap CD players. Discs over ten years old are often unplayable even in pristine condition. The average life span for most CD-Rs is still less than three years. Many skip to the next track, or do not play at all. So, what is a greater compromise? Lower fidelity or nothing at all?

Recordings made on cylinder, lathe and analog tape have survived many years, but recorded material from the 1980s and 1990s is already hampered by major compromises in the digital tape. When a channel drops out, or the speed is off, or phase issues are present, an analog source can be repaired. When the master digital tape or other digital storage medium is compromised, it is gone. Forever. The backup DATs of most popular releases are already unplayable garbage.

Digital is hardly true to the original source. No compelling argument has been made that convinces me that a buffered signal going through multiple stages of conversion, all the while being riddled with digital artifacts and suffering mounting latency is superior to a real time analog recording. It is not. Greg Sage recorded directly to recording lathe, just like Les Paul in his early days. Funny thing, nobody hears their music and gripes about fidelity. It is about the music.

Nor will anyone convince me that a popular song with a host of sampled percussion and synthesized squeaks living up in the top end, a huge expansion of bass filling out the bottom end and an insane amount of compression to cover up all of the other crap in the mids is good. Is this "modern approach" of cramming as much as possible into a tiny bit of real estate more listenable than something recorded years ago at Chess, or Ardent, or RCA Nashville? No. Not by a mile.

The most popular outboard recording tool in the world right now is called a Distressor. Gee, I wonder why big studios are having to go to so much expense to "rough up the audio" in order to make a person sound like a person? Gee, I wonder why they are still paying thousands of dollars for leviathan tube compressors that pump like all get out and were left to rust in tranny shacks until a few years ago?

The most sought after microphones on the market right now for digital recording are ribbons. More top quality models are available from folks like Beyerdynamic, Peluso, AEA and Royer than any time since the heyday of Bing Crosby. The legendary RCA models demand a premium on the used market. Repair shops are busy rebuilding old velocity models from Shure, E-V, Amperite and Reslo. Gee, I wonder why folks want a natural sounding mic that loves tons of clean gain, has a slow musical reaction to loud transients and a nice gentle high end roll off with response curves that can be shaped by variable impedance? It might be because that is what our ears do.

I will not even go into the hundreds of "plug-ins" that have been developed in an earnest attempt to do exactly what my Ampex, Scully or Tascam does to the signal when printing to tape. It is also unnecessary to rig up complex notch filtering to remove a computer fan from analog recordings.

Tubes are not "warmer" unless you touch them. They do have a whole lot of headroom, are very clean until the edge of the distortion curve, and once past that threshold, they add third harmonics rather than clipped squares. Discrete transistor circuits are "warm" sounding. Although it can be sometimes tricky to find enough headroom, like tubes, well-maintained 30 to 40 year old units are far superior to any op-amp or chip based junk put out today.

Vinyl is not going anywhere. Silver emulsion photography is not going anywhere. Oil painting is not going anywhere. Archival paper is not going anywhere. Real honky-tonk pianos, real acoustic guitars, real rock and roll drums, real jazz upright bass, and real symphony orchestras are not going anywhere. They are all here to stay. Other options may continue to be developed, but the original mediums are always going to have a following.

Here is an article from the NYT that illustrates some of the points LS has made.

You know you guys can talk up the CD and computers and all that digital stuff all you want.

Nothing tops a well mastered 12" single, wide groove, vinyl recording.

Sorry.

The S/N ratio and overall sonic accuracy is higher on computers, particularly if one goes 24 bit and with the higher sample rates. No question.

However, it comes down to what sounds good.

Ever listen to the horrible albums produced these days as they try to do with digital what comes easy to analog? Yeah, that's right clipped waves, where it's not just distorted some, but flat out missing!

(and that should be criminal)

Hear, Hear Littlesongs!

Now, let's go through the digital crimes shall we?

Digital radio.

We've traded signal to noise and multi-path for the perception of good sound. It isn't really good sound. Temporal accuracy is fairly lousy, unless the recording is very well processed. (that's the watery artifact sound) Spectral accuracy suffers too!

We've got the receiver generating over half the bandwidth!

CD

Attempts to get louder and louder have totally ruined a lot of CD recordings.

Clipping, failure to allow for any reasonable dynamic range, higher frequencies being inaccurate in phase with one another, are just a few of the things we see on CD quite often.

At least with the CD, if the mastering engineer knows their stuff, and is allowed to do it right, the CD packs quite a punch --almost as much punch as that 12" does.

On that note, S/N is higher on the Vinyl, but overall sonic impact potential is off the charts compared to the lowly CD. There is a reason why some DJ's still carry and use vinyl. Go on the dance floor and experience it. You won't be sorry.

Compressed digital audio.

Temporal and spectral problems with all but the lowest of compression ratios. Many horrible encoders mangle vocal tonality.

Limited dynamic range, and often errors in the overall speed of reproduction are seen far too often in compressed audio.

If the recording is somewhat messy, gritty and has some texture to it, expect a lot of that to get cleaned, as if it's noise. Ugh...

There is an art to audio. For quite some time we've been able to essentially reproduce audio better than most of our ears can fully appreciate in terms of sheer bandwidth. The digital holds the edge there, but that's about it.

The art of it is not "perfect" sound, but "good" sound. There is a clear difference and that's exactly why tried and true, time tested means of reproduction are not going anywhere fast.

Actually, I'll amend that!

Include high speed analog tape. It's just as good, though it's distortion characteristics are different.

Both pack one hell of a punch, when used to their potential, compared to most any digital means.

More importantly, I thought It was FRED MEYER

The whole chain is also FRED MEYER

LIKE KROGER

or DEER

and

Ibanez picked up an RBI today after a THREE RBI day on Saturday

He had 1 RBI
He had 3 RBI (actually RsBI) but not RBIs

He bought a record at Fred MEYER. (no s)

I thought we cured this in another thread?

I is so glad, I am perfekt grammarly?

Now, here is where you comment on my flaws.*

*limit 5 flaws per post.....

Subjectivity rules this argument, however a few technical items have been misstated or ignored.

Not in any order:

We listen to music in the analog domain. Plug vinyl or CD into a crappy amp or run it through a crappy speaker, and you have crap.

Vinyl and analog tape are noisy. Period. You don't have a signal to noise ratio until you amplify something. Records and tapes and optical discs and magnetic discs have noise, but there is no signal until you "read" and amplify. So don't be comparing s/n of source media. It's not a valid concept. The grooves of a record are not "signal."

Separation: Digital storage of stereo provides infinitely more separation than any common analog storage medium. IMD is the largest part of noise that you hear. IMD occurs both inside a channel and in combination with other channels if they are electrically or mechanically close to each other.

Rumble: Hum: Other low frequency garbage: Turntables contribute way more noise than reel to reel tape machines which contributes more noise than CD players. Clearly when there are fewer moving parts, there are fewer contributors to low freq. distortion.

****************************************************

Subjective considerations:

There are two arguments in the thread: One is about which is "better" and the other is which is

Technical considerations:

technically superior based on actual measurements.


You can't mix them up like most of you do. I play my guitar through a tube amp with a single 12" speaker when I practice at home because it sounds "better." Clearly, a Les Paul through a Fender Blues Jr. is full of distortion. My Fender Princeton Chorus is 3 times the power, stereo, 2 by 10" speakers, and loud. It's solid state ... clean, punch, and great for a room that's a little big for a Blues Jr. or when jamming with power players and their large Fenders and the like. But I'm not going to sit here and tell you that the Blues Jr. "is" better, rather, to me it sounds "better."

Get the point? We can measure sound in the air many ways, but how your brain interprets it is more subjective than bio-electrical.

Now when it comes to measuring electricity of an audio nature before it hits the transducer (speaker) is not open for much argument.

LS: "The most important part of a mass marketed recording medium is the ability to reproduce what was captured."

True. The fidelity, however, of a reproduction is the faithfulness of the recording to the original. The Allman Brothers Live At The Fillmore East remastered to CD sounds infinitely better than the vinyl. Why? Because it sounds closer to being there, all the little sounds and noises are there, otherwise missing from the vinyl. Both from the same analog tape source.

" If a recording was made using an electromechanical method, the only true reproduction will also be an electromechanical method."

What? Are you high? Name me one recording method that isn't electromechanical? Did you use a microphone? Dynamic, condenser and ribbon are all electromechanical. Mastered to a tape? To a hard drive? All electromechanical. Duh.

KSKD says:

"Sonic accuracy" Sorry. No such specification exists. If you mean "fidelity" that's subjective. If you mean "lowest distortion" then say it. Clearly digital has superiority if all your talking about is lowest distortion. You have to keep the subjective argument separate from the specification comparison, at least reasonably so.

Yes, it is all in the mastering. It's ruined lots of recordings regardless of medium.

Compression. Guess what, buckos, compression was abused by the analog world before there was a digital world. The Beatles, The Who, etc. used copious amounts of analog compression to make their master recordings as loud as possible. What you heard off your album was not what it sounded like in the studio.
Live albums tended to be less processed until multi-track opened up the ability to overdub live albums. Always read those liner notes to find out the real deal. Compression has its place, but its abuse ruined a lot of analog recordings so don't be pinning it's flaws to digital.

"On that note, S/N is higher on the Vinyl, but overall sonic impact potential is off the charts compared to the lowly CD."

Again, vinyl has no S/N. "sonic impact potential" whazzat? How is that measured? Sorry, you can't mix subjective and objective analysis in that way, anyway.

"Many horrible encoders mangle vocal tonality."

I think you mean that different codecs have different effects on frequency response and dynamic range. Encoders do not mangle anything. In the analog world, a cheaply designed phono pre amp does the same thing.

"For quite some time we've been able to essentially reproduce audio better than most of our ears can fully appreciate in terms of sheer bandwidth. The digital holds the edge there"

That's been my point from the get go. The fact that many ears, including my own, find low end distortion pleasing to the brain doesn't make it more accurate, clearly it's not.

There isn't any doubt that aggressively sampled deep bit depth uncompressed digital audio specs out better than anything. The bottom line is what and whom does with it that makes it sound one way or another. I see a lot of misconceptions about both analog and digital audio amongst you. I'm not an audiophile (I think audiophile's are like Republicans, they think they know a lot about something until you give them control of the machine and then it all goes to hell in a hand basket). But I am a guy that not only has studied the theory, but played with all the gear from Sears Silvertones and Empire Troubadours through Marshall stacks and Crown amplifiers. I've fixed them. I've seen them all with their clothes off. Quality gear is only as good as the source material, and if one thinks there is a "tremendous" difference in sound between the technologies, fine. That and $2 will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks. If you really want to know what is going on, send $19.99 for my learning CD "All I ever didn't want to know about signal, noise and distortion" (also available on vinyl and cassette). P.O. Box 44.1kHz, Portland , Oregon. (s&h $4.95) Not available in stores.

An interesting point is alluded to above: Are there any subjective specifications for the output of lossy audio codecs? Since this is software that is designed to exploit properties of human hearing, it seems to me that it would be difficult to come up with some agreed-upon metrics to gauge the output quality.

An interesting tangent was raised by Littlesongs and Edselhr: that is that simpler storage technologies are more likely to be useful for archival purposes. This summer, I was visiting the Ouray, CO town museum. There, they had some old photographic plates that were shot in the late 1800s, when the mining industry had just begun there. Despite these images being 120-130 years old, they still had pretty good contrast and few or no visible blemishes. Holding the plate up to a light source is all that is required to view the image. Likewise, vinyl records that are in existence today, assuming that they haven't been worn out, melted, or broken, could be playable long after we are all dead. Could the same be true of audio recorded on magnetic tape? That depends on whether the binder material doesn't break down. Could the same be true of audio recorded on CR-R? With dye technology currently in use, the answer is no. Could the same be true of audio recorded on flash memory chips? No; these devices are typically only rated to retain data for about 10 years. This is because Flash memories represent data by injecting charge onto a "floating" MOSFET gate. Given enough time, the charge leaks away, erasing the stored data.

No storage medium is bulletproof. None. The cave etchings of the ancients were worn down by the elements. The writings of the ancient civilizations survived but not in anywhere near the shape they were in when they were new. As a result, what they say is forever in dispute for more reasons than we need to go into.

Vinyl recordings were developed for mass distribution, not archiving and rightfully so, since they are so fragile and certainly no longer space efficient. Magnetic tape, like film, must be kept in areas of strict environmental control or they, too, will degrade.

The industry considers the shelf life of storage media to be 30 years. This is a generic, and not a specific.

http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/continuity/features/article.php/3411131

Optical disc has limitations when burned, but be careful to treat replication technology differently than burned discs or copies thereof ("duplication"}. Like albums, replicated optical discs are stamped from molds made from a master disc. if kept out of the sun and rain they have a long shelf life. The disc gets the nod here because when you do play them, the act of playing does not degrade the source info like vinyl. Replicated discs don't last forever, but they have a distinct storage advantage over burned discs.

Most strategies talk about decades of storage. Concerns have shifted away from the medium and to the concern over playback hardware and software not living as long as the data.

CD-ROM, CD-R, and WORM are generally considered the best strategies provided by digital methods.

http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/bytopic/electronic-records/electronic-storage-med ia/critiss.html

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid5_gci1231026,00.htm l

I like you Andy. I also appreciate that you take great sport in being right. I am an artist and you are an engineer. Our priorities are going to be different. I still see nothing "electromechanical" about recording on a memory card or the sounds stored by chips in mp3 players. I am all ears if you know something "new" and "magical" about it. I am not high, but thank you for asking.

Digital replaced the editing block with ease. Everything else is purely subjective. I could pretend that my old ARP Omni-2 is the technological miracle that makes me the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, but it does not. It makes an interesting approximation of string sound that is still pleasing to the ear. When digital tries to "approximate" it falls flat on it's shiny little ass.

What is quickly forgotten by the egghead developers is that "recorded music" is not about squeezing every last decibel out of a medium or using all the real estate in a format. It is about sharing a moment. More often than not, analog does the job for many years in a way that is pleasing to the ear. Recorded tape and vinyl are both pretty durable formats. Digital cannot make that claim. It is fancy sand painting.

If a medium goes bad after a few years it is worthless garbage, so most modern formats are worthless garbage. Hammer away at how cool the new stuff is if you must, but until there is demonstrated longevity in a recording, reproduction or storage medium, it is all potentially worthless garbage. My Scotch 111 and 78s are holding up fine, my CD-Rs are not.

Signal to noise ratios are better now than they have been since the advent of recorded sound, but folks are still shooting for perfect. If I think that imperfect humans waste far too much time on being perfect, I am entitled to that opinion.

"The fact that many ears, including my own, find low end distortion pleasing to the brain doesn't make it more accurate, clearly it's not."

I am glad you admitted that you ask machines whether something is right rather than trusting your ears. I will let you get back to your aneotic chamber and your "perfectly silent" John Cage CD reissues. It should be noted that we are on the same page in many respects. We will simply have to agree to disagree on others.

Fair points on "sonic accuracy" Andy.

Of course there is no formal specification! That's buried in an aggregate of many more precise technical metrics. Harmonic distortion, type of harmonics generated, at what loads, into what loads, audio response curves, bumps, notches, resonances, noise, etc...

I don't think it's possible to differentiate the two in a way that matters, practically speaking. (technically superior and subjective)

Of course the technically superior is digital. I would argue the more REAL is the analog, and REAL happens to resonate with me as an analog being more than technically superior does.

Either discipline, rendered poorly is a mess.

The art of it is where my preferences for audio lie. Even there, some forms of the art are offensive and less pleasurable.

The careful removal of frequencies over time that wavelet encoders employ is one of these things. Sure, it's a technical marvel and it's great for casual listening, but it's just not all that real.

If you take a holistic view of the impact a given reproduction has, then that's probably the closest you can get to "sonic impact potential".

And this is a tough line of reasoning for everybody. Humans appreciate art. We also appreciate perfection.

The technical merits of a given recording speak to the perfection. Considering it as a piece of recorded music, that may or may not have the potential to significantly impact us, speaks to the former.

I live in a noisy world that is less than perfect. The sounds I hear exhibit these qualities despite the very best engineering efforts to date. Because of this, I tend to focus on the impact the various technologies have on me. How REAL did it sound? Was it immersive, as in, "did I lose myself in the moment, did I feel there?"

Here's the thing about high-speed tape and vinyl, compared to the CD. Typical expectations regarding noise and distortion for the vinyl are 70 - 80+ dB right? For the CD, that's 95-100 dB.

Say you want to just overdrive the tape and vinyl just a bit? When you do that, you get a total potential of over 100dB and that has some color and tone to it. There's the art!

You *can't* do that with a CD. Either you add more bits, or lose precision as you amplify more.

The difference between the two is the "impact potential" I wrote about. It also has a lot to do with how REAL and immersive it is. It is actually less than perfect, but that's not a consideration, GIVEN IT'S ARTFULLY DONE!

Now, take the digital and add more bits! Now, we've got more headroom than the analog means, but we still lack the art! I don't know how to speak to it any other way.


Alfredo, take a look at the MAME project and Google for some of the discussions surrounding that subject. There was a ton of discussion at one point. More than I could consume!

Also do the same for OGG Vorbis.

Both camps worked really hard on metrics and improvements to the wavelet codecs. In the case of LAME, it significantly outperforms the fraunhauffer reference model. In the case of OGG, it's not so much a matter of out performance, but a very different set of trade offs.

Encode the same source audio with OGG, LAME, and MP3ENC and marvel at the many subtle differences!!

What is even more entertaining is that you will find die hard fans of all three!!

As always, thanks for the feedback.

""The fact that many ears, including my own, find low end distortion pleasing to the brain doesn't make it more accurate, clearly it's not."

I am glad you admitted that you ask machines whether something is right rather than trusting your ears."

That's taking what I said out of context. The word "right" (or wrong) appear nowhere in what I said. Your ears can not label sound waves as signal and distortion until you teach them by eliminating or separating those components which is sometimes not possible. If what we are discussing is which methods and which media make a recording most like the live experience, no single answer will cover the wide breadth of possible live sounds that can be created and recorded. Pianos and cymbals create large challenges for any technology. Guitars put out gobs of square waves to begin with ... there are enough details in this discussion to choke a horse. Suffice it to say that your statement
does not reflect what I said, rather how you wish to interpret what I said. That's OK. I can't hope to be perfectly articulate
in all matters especially when subjectivity prevents a universal answer. Although I'm primarily an engineering type, I am sensitive to artistic issues because I have two good sides to my brain and prefer playing music to getting caught up in discussions about the technology of recording. I still stand by my original input to the thread: Vinyl's resurgence is a fad. No it never faded out totally but neither did hula hoops nor bell bottoms. Still, in the land of consumer goods, it's hard to believe that everyone is going to dump their iPods and CD's and replace them with vinyl that they already dumped down at Django's ten years ago. It's just not going to happen.


"Say you want to just overdrive the tape and vinyl just a bit? When you do that, you get a total potential of over 100dB and that has some color and tone to it. There's the art! "

Nope. When you exceed the maximum signal to noise ratio you are in clipping and noise rises exponentially. "Signal" in a signal to noise ratio represents the largest undistorted signal that can be achieved. Push it any more and you clip. That's why S/N is always expressed with a reference signal. You can't "push" an analog circuit beyond the point where the reference signal clips because any components within the full spectrum signal greater to or equal to the characteristics of the reference signal will also clip. That's why we have compression, expansion, limiting and AGC. We aim to take those offending parts of the spectrum and reduce them so they don't clip. A little bit of processing goes a long way to achieve what you described, but it's not accurate to describe it as achieving a higher S/N because you aren't.

"Suffice it to say that your statement does not reflect what I said, rather how you wish to interpret what I said. That's OK."

Actually, that is not OK. I do not want to take you out of context. I will retract my statement. My experience with people married to what their computer monitor says -- rather than what their ears say -- led me to that conclusion. I will refrain from lumping you in with those people.

The argument may not be nearly as much about S/N ratio, as it is about noise floor. Some listeners need it pristine without a shred of evidence that a note was played in meat space in real time, or indications that an electromechanical process captured or is reproducing the moment. Again, I apologize for accusing you of being part of that "silent majority" crowd. :0)

Everyday life has a noise floor that has covered up the shortcomings of vinyl for decades, so I am not as concerned as some folks about it. Because the medium falls well within the norm for pleasing the human ear, it is still a viable quality format for releases.

The loudness wars in broadcasting were silly, but understandable and somewhat justified. However, when that disease spread to recorded formats, the music suffered. The loudness wars in CD mastering have become perverse. Right now, most big houses are pushing sounds from 20 to 20,000 Hz and turning the "spectrum" into a big wall with the edges ground off square by hard knee compression.

It seems that dynamics are viewed as almost quaint. The depth of sonic potential has been robbed by ego and technology. Check it for yourself. The screams of Nirvana's "Nevermind" are 6-8 db quieter than a new mushy ballad created for the K-103 secretary pool. There are no spaces left in a new release for a song to breathe, or for a room to decay, or for anyone to lose themselves in a melody.

When compact discs are consistently produced and mastered to reflect the natural properties of sound, the disciples of digital will have a compelling argument. Until then, many of us will continue to experience the kind of listener fatigue that only digital recordings released on a digital format can induce.

LOL!!!

I totally mangled my post above!! Andy, you are of course correct on your points made. (I know better too, but was posting quickly and without really thinking

So, having done that. Here's perhaps a better way to approach the discussion.

I see digital sound as virtual sound. It is a precise and quantifiable means of representing sound. It's a lot like the memory of a sound.

Often we hear a less than perfect recording, then recall it sans those imperfections.

When we play a digital sound, it's more or less the same sound to within the limits of the devices we use to convey it to our ears. These differences typically are very small and very consistent.

When we play a record on a turntable, it's a somewhat different and to a degree lesser experience each time. There is wear on that which encodes the signal for us, and that changes over time.

The virtual sound in our head is the ideal, our perception of perfection that really we cannot achieve. These days, I would argue that perhaps we can, but maybe we just shouldn't!

And that's where I was speaking to the art.

When I hear something live, it's messy, but I'm there, as close to the moment as I'm capable of, and that's about as good as it gets.

When I hear a recording, and it isn't messy, it's a different kind of experience. Technically, I can appreciate the clarity and consistency of it, but I may not always be connected with it, immersed in it, like I would the live recording.

Analog devices, with all their problems and flaws, do a better job of conveying that sense of immersion, that sense of "realness", and that has value to me in that the quality of the experience is a tempoary thing to be enjoyed there and then as it might not ever be the same experience again.

This aligns well with most of my real world, valuable experiences I tend to bother to remember, filter and see the perfection in, but after the fact, not while consuming.

When I can see the fine craftsmanship on the playback device, hear the result of the engineering, and be immersed in the experience as a whole, it's just perfect. It's human, and it seems very real.

Which is why I will easily say a well mastered 12" vinyl recording is just perfection for me!

I do have to take exception with your statement that codecs don't mangle things. I know mangle is not exactly a technical term, so let's just use lossy.

When we take complex music and subtract specific spectral and temporal elements, it's not the same as simple filtering is. Decisions are made, and those can change the intent of the sound. Sometimes those changes are significant enough to be noticeable.

That's the "mangling". I hear it most in higher frequency spectral profiles, where what I do hear sounds great, but isn't what was supposed to be there. Frankly, I don't mind this one because the higher frequency stuff is difficult enough to discriminate that it all comes out in the wash, for all but the purists.

The more annoying "mangling" comes from vocal sound being pushed through these codecs. Music with a strong vocal presence, when encoded with many encoders, loses some of that presence as artifacts of the vocalization process get confused with noise, or are determined to be too minor and are simply removed.

I generally enjoy compressed audio for ordinary listening. When I'm wanting to really listen, at higher levels, the compressed audio is lacking in many ways.

Hate to say it, but it lacks "impact"!






I love this thread!

Not all codecs are lossy. Uncompressed digital audio as per the Red Book criteria uses cross interleaved Reed Solomon Code. "Reed-Solomon error correction is an error-correcting code that works by oversampling a polynomial constructed from the data. The polynomial is evaluated at several points, and these values are sent or recorded. Sampling the polynomial more often than is necessary makes the polynomial over-determined. As long as it receives "many" of the points correctly, the receiver can recover the original polynomial even in the presence of a "few" bad points."

In lay terms, nothing is lost (lossless).

Red Book
Reed-Solomon Error Correction



This is separate from the argument comparing what uncompressed digital audio on a CD sounds like compared to the same material on a typical vinyl pressing, which is not the best vinyl pressing in fact. Direct to disc recordings are the best reproductions of that medium. But most albums are just pressed copies made from molding the master. It's the same as what I referred to earlier about burning CD-R's versus replication techniques. If every album and disc in our collection was a master level original on a non-destructive material immune to aging, the sun, earthquakes, and gamma radiation then maybe all the problems of eternal archiving would be solved, but I digress.

Algorithms employing compression codes that are lossy do remove material. As a result the file size is greatly reduced.
But when you consider I can ride around on my bicycle with 10,000 songs in my pocket, maybe a little lossy compression has its place, too.

****************

In a vinyl pressing, it was possible using compression techniques to make albums that were longer in length by sacrificing bandwidth (freq. response). Most vinyl had about 20 - 23 minutes max per side. Those that had more had to give up maximum fidelity to get the trt longer.

**********************

There are flaws in any method or recording audio, video or blocks of data. In the analog domain we face THD, IMD, hum, flutter, tube noise, transistor noise, etc. In the digital domain there is bit error rate. It's not any more of a miracle one way or the other. It's just a different method to get to the same result.
Even in the "live" sense, not everyone "hears" or "sees" the exact same thing when hearing a piano recital or looking at a great work of visual art. Thats what art and art appreciation investigate and discuss. Once you start to put quantitative labels on it, then you need a measuring stick otherwise there is no "standard" with which to compare.

**********************************

If you think audio is a complex issue to get concurrence on, you should try discussing analog color (NTSC) transmission standards, how white should white be, how black should black be, etc. Sony jacks the red up. Why I don't know. Sony has it's own standards. When you have the biggest market share (broadcast video cameras), you can bend the rules. (Microsoft did it for a long time in the computer software world, let's not go there). Now that set of NTSC arguments is being replaced by digital video compression comparisons. Let's not go there, either. Please.

It's also worth mentioning that records are far from a pure system. If it wasn't for years of playing with different pre-emphasis/de-emphasis curves, LP's never would have sounded as good as they do. But it takes some non organic manipulations to pull it off. The problems of cutting masters require some special equalization to get a usable final product:


"A record is cut with the low frequencies reduced and the high frequencies boosted, and on playback the opposite occurs. The result is a flat frequency response, but with noise such as hiss and clicks arising from the surface of the medium itself much attenuated. The other main benefit of the system is that low frequencies, which would otherwise cause the cutter to make large excursions when cutting a groove, are much reduced, so grooves are smaller and more can be fitted in a given surface area, yielding longer playback times. This also has the benefit of eliminating physical stresses on the playback stylus which might otherwise be hard to cope with, or cause unpleasant distortion.
A potential drawback of the system is that rumble from the playback turntable's drive mechanism is greatly amplified, which means that players have to be carefully designed to avoid this."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization

To really appreciate vinyl's sonic potential, you need an excellent turntable that is adjusted properly. Back in the 70's between radio gigs I worked at Fred's Sound Of Music, and frankly, most turntables were not of the highest quality and not maintained until they stopped working altogether. I think the Compact disc player has made for an overall increase in the quality of sound reproduced on the average home consumer system over the days of records. It's a separate issue, but worth mentioning.
Like I said, I have little respect for audiophiles, Republicans, and Philips Electronics. Most everything else I'm always open to discuss alternative views.

Thank you and good night.

Send $19.99 for my learning CD "All I ever didn't want to know about signal, noise and distortion" (also available on vinyl and cassette). P.O. Box 44.1kHz, Portland , Oregon. (s&h $4.95) Not available in stores.

Thanks for that follow on info.

You are quite right too, regarding video stuff. It's more ugly than the audio discussion will ever be.

I've little respect for the above as well. Maybe add COBY and APEX to the list of $%&#)(*%&$# consumer tech companies / brands I find lacking.

I'm not an audiophile. Frankly, I too carry around a lot of music and it's just great. Wouldn't go back, but there are times I miss elements I *know* should be there. Only matters when I want that immersive experience, and that's not all that often.

I like the Reed error correction in tandem with compression. It's robust and just works. What bothers me is some CD players just ignore that correction in their playback, when it's just a software bit! Stupid.

"In lay terms, nothing is lost"

Perhaps I have missed the point, but how can 44.1 Khz samples produce an accurate representation of a complex high frequency waveform? How can you draw a accurate representation of any arbitrary 11 khz waveform using only 4 points?

"you should try discussing analog color (NTSC) transmission standards"

Hey, I know something about this . . . but most importantly, the more I know, the more I'm amazed it even works.

many of us will continue to experience the kind of listener fatigue that only digital recordings released on a digital format can induce

Not to disagree with this point, however, there are those that like this difference.

Jr_Tech writes: "Perhaps I have missed the point, but how can 44.1 Khz samples produce an accurate representation of a complex high frequency waveform? How can you draw a accurate representation of any arbitrary 11 khz waveform using only 4 points?"

It's about bits per sample.

Current high-quality studio equipment uses 20 bits (1,048,575 quantizing intervals) or 24 bits (16,777,215 quantizing intervals) per sample.

The formula expressing the SNR of a digital audio system is:

SNR (dB) = 6.02n + 1.76 + 10log10 (FS/2FMAX)

where n is the number of bits per sample, FS the sampling frequency in Hz, and FMAX the maximum (low-pass filtered) baseband frequency in Hz. It is evident that higher values of n and FS ensure a better SNR. For example, if n = 24, FS = 48kHz and FMAX = 20kHz, the SNR is 151.24dB. A 6dB SNR improvement is obtained for every additional bit at a given FS.

http://broadcastengineering.com/mag/broadcasting_digitizing_audio_2/

Skeptical writes: Hey, I know something about this . . . but most importantly, the more I know, the more I'm amazed it even works.

Never Twice the Same Color

I think he's talking phase.

With only 4 points, phase accuracy suffers.

(not that I think we can hear it at very high frequencies, but maybe we can at 11Khz)

It's why we use
Oversampling


Quantization error is a problem every A/D converter has along with aperture error caused by clock jitter when quantizing a signal of varying level. (I had to look that one up )

A/D Converters

LOL.

I am enjoying this spirited conversation. Thanks to everyone, especially Andy and Missing. The sharing of opinion, technical aspects and discussion has been an eye opener. With all that said, I think we are all in agreement on a few basic principles. Please, correct me if I am wrong with this short list:

Vinyl will not be taking over the market again, but it is an interesting development worth enjoying.

All mediums have a mix of limitations and charms.

There is nothing wrong with having a portable music source regardless of fidelity as long as it works.

New archival methods must be vastly improved before they will replace traditional methods.

Audiophiles are nuts.

WE ALL LOVE MUSIC!

Am I close to the mark?

Alfredo, I wanted to address a couple of the things that you brought up about records. I think in some cases you are spot on about the more hoodoo reasons that the independent music community embraced vinyl. You are definitely correct about the budgetary considerations of the 80s and early to mid 90s.

There were other solid reasons as well. You probably know all the rest of this too, but I feel a spiel coming anyway.

Many distributors were shy of an independent release that was not available with vinyl as the primary format. Commercial airplay, if it happened at all, was strictly limited to records until the mid to late 80s. Soon, it was limited to CD, but many public and community stations maintain turntables to this day. A cassette only release was never on the radio and often only available in the more esoteric stores like The Ooze or Local's Only here in town. A record could get local spins and put an independent artist into Music Millennium or a chain like Tower. Vinyl legitimized them in much the same way that a bar code does today. Requiring a UPC is largely symbolic, but it still matters to the world of bricks and mortar.

One of the biggest reasons that indie labels and artists wanted records -- and why many still have a positive view of vinyl today -- is because of the longevity factor. Only the most deluded rockers believe in stardom. A great deal of artists simply want to share their music now and well into the future. Many musicians discovered rare and obscure independent releases from years past that never would have survived in another format. The garage sale influence was every bit as strong as the traditional garage band.

Many old LPs and singles that were released with maybe a few hundred or a few thousand copies pressed could still be found for reasonable prices at a spot like Bird's Suite when I was in high school. Beloved and influential regional acts like the Sonics were out of print for many years, but stayed in circulation. Many independent blues, soul, folk, funk, world, experimental and jazz records are still largely out of print. Even the majors have stalled on consistently reissuing big portions of the back catalog. With the exception of indie labels like Ryko and Rhino, not much has changed for widely influential unknown artists since the CD was introduced. However, as long as copies still survive with old fans that pass them on, they will continue to inspire new ones.

To prove my point -- and prove that these folks were on the right track -- garage sales and used record stores today carry obscure gems to a new generation of listeners. In addition to the old crackly Beatles and Stones finds, there are the indie records of the late 70s, 80s and 90s. Because independent musicians put out loads of 45s, and labels like SST, Frontier, Rough Trade, Factory, Jem, PVC, Voxx/Bomp, SubPop, K, Shimmydisc, Caroline, Twin Tone, Flying Nun and a host of others released vinyl albums, they can still be found and enjoyed by a new generation.

Perhaps that is why I am heartened by the embrace of the medium by younger folks. I am glad that turntables, arms and styli are widely available. As much as I disdain commercial hip-hop, I am grateful to the deep roots of the community for keeping vinyl alive and in the minds of youth. The idea that a kid can still stumble on everything from Sarah Vaughn to The Replacements at a thrift store makes me happy.

The fact that I have been able to buy newer vinyl records from East River Pipe, The Clean, Barbara Manning, Neutral Milk Hotel and many others means that they could survive longer than me. When this old geyser kicks it, another generation could very well stumble on those acts in a future time and place. They fit right along side the titles I have from over fifty years ago. That opportunity is slowly lost when the only formats of release are less durable mediums.

Even in the future, I believe it will be hard to find any more accessible, durable or universal long term formats for passing along great art than good old fashioned books and records. The internet may prove me wrong, but we will have to keep it free, open and neutral for our lifetimes. Yeah, I know, good luck with that.