How Science Got Sound Wrong

geoffkait

... it’s very hard to find a CD system that is better than the average vinyl system ...

I don’t know whether that’s true or not. It certainly wasn’t true when CD first debuted. It was the proliferation of cheap turntables and tonearms that helped fuel the rise of the CD. When users found a medium with no pops and clicks, no feedback, no skips, no risk of damage to fragile styli, they jumped right in. For them, the CD was a huge, genuine step forward. Many of those with better turntable systems heard the CD’s deficiencies immediately and were more cautious.

The whole LP/digital debate is really a silly one today. If you build a fairly neutral system around neutral speakers and amplifiers, and you then use any of today’s better analog and digital equipment, the qualities of LP and CD are remarkably similar.

There are a few noisy advocates on either end of the CD and LP preference spectrum that would have you believe one is substantially superior to the other. They’re both wrong.

If I were starting an audio system today from a completely blank sheet of paper, I’d frankly never get into LP. It’s just too much of a nuisance. But I acquired many LPs in the pre-digital era and - because their master tapes have degraded over time - even the best digital transfer of these albums pale compared to a good LP copy. (The Mercury Living Presence recordings are a good example of that.)

Oddly, the highest quality pressings of many releases today are often the LP, because the CDs tend to be more compressed.

mapman

Lots has been done to squeeze the most possible out of that inherently old technology since resulting in very expensive players ...

Quite so!

Way more people have access to very accurate sound these days, more accurate than most anyone would ever need, than ever for very modest cost.

Agreed!

Thank you science and technology!

Right - science and technology have made these improvements possible in both analog and digital formats.

atdavid

... So basically Cleeds you have no point at all?

Hey, atdavid , read up just a few posts and you'll find this:

... your assertion that LP isn’t "accurate" doesn’t withstand scrutiny ...

That was my point. You can't really defend the claim, so instead you defend yourself against arguments that you invent, and then claim I made.  Have a nice day.

atdavid673 posts12-07-2019 10:17am

Oh Cleeds you totally crack me up. You 100% believe that every specification w.r.t. turntables and vinyl 100% correlates to our understanding of human hearing but you will jump through logical hoops and distort math, physics and reality in an attempt to claim digital cannot achieve the level of detail or accuracy of vinyl sort ...

Oh no, I've never claimed that "digital cannot achieve the level of detail or accuracy of vinyl." Ever. Anywhere. That's just another silly "argument" that you are trying to advance because, it appears, you enjoy arguing for its own sake.

atdavid

This notion that we cannot measure electrical signals with enough detail to match human human is false.

I haven’t made that claim here, so this is just a red herring.

.... if you like the way that a turntable and the whole vinyl process modifies what started as an electrical signal in a measurable way, there is nothing wrong with that.

Golly, thanks for your permission.

Just don’t call it accurate, as it is not.

That we can measure limitations in LP playback doesn’t support your claim that the performance is not accurate. W&F, for example, can be well below the level of audibility. There’s no need for it to perform any better than that. LP can achieve S/N levels in excess of what is required by the music. There’s no need for it to perform any better than that. Sure, CD can achieve S/N ratios that are tens of dBs better. But so what? That can have value on the production side of things, but not on playback. (As an exercise, have you ever measured the S/N level in your listening room? The results might surprise you!)

Perhaps the one area where LP specs look really deficient is channel separation. But in the real world, there’s really no such thing as 90dB channel separation - music doesn't happen that way in real space. Again, the LP can achieve channel separation that exceeds the need.

So your assertion that LP isn’t "accurate" doesn’t withstand scrutiny - nor is it consistent with actual results when a fine recording is properly played back - because an audio component needn’t be perfect to be "accurate." Your "argument" looks at the numbers without correlating them to the real world. That you can’t understand this is a consequence of your bias, and that’s the nature of measurementalism: Your preoccupation with numbers introduces a bias so profound you can’t even recognize it.

Of course, lots of LPs sound awful. But that’s a separate issue entirely.

atdavid

I never made an anti-LP argument ...

I understand that you really believe that. It’s your measurementalist bias on display to the extent that even when it’s explained to you, you can’t see it. That’s ok; that’s how profound bias sometimes works. No one should interpret it as offensive.

I just pointed out the many ways that LPs are not and cannot be accurate ...

Exactly! Have a nice day.

atdavid

You can spend all the money and the world and ... the channel separation will still suck as it is inherent in the implementation, you will never have de-equalization perfect since you don’t know the exact equalization curve, you can’t fix wow/flutter that occurred at cutting, and your dynamic range and signal to noise will still be comparatively low ....You can paint a pig all you want, but it is still a pig.

It’s clear where you’re coming from - you’re a measurmentalist. You are so absorbed and infatuated with numbers and graphs that should you listen to even an extraordinarily outstanding turntable system, your profound confirmation bias would prevent you from enjoying the sound. For you, LP will always be a pig.

That’s a fine preference to have, by the way, and you have a lot of good company! But I’m glad that I can enjoy music from a variety of sources.

Your anti-LP argument is filled with illogic, btw, but no matter. A preference is just that - it doesn’t require any elaborate explanation to justify it.

atdavid

. Apparently there are people in this world who find vinyls lack of dynamic range, destruction of channel separation, equalization/de-equalization oddities, low SNR, and a host of other artifacts enjoyable.

That may be true, but it would apply to only a tiny minority. Audiophiles who play LPs work hard and often spend considerable money to avoid these "host of artifacts" that you reference. The notion that those qualities are what attract people to LP is silly.