What is behind a "warm" or "vinyl"sound?


I found an interesting article in The Saturday Toronto Star's entertainment section on the resurgence of vinyl.

What I found most interesting in this article was a description of why people describe vinyl as "warm". Peter J Moore, the famous producer/mastering engineer of the legendary one microphone recording of the Cowboy Junkies' Trinity Sessions recording says it all comes down to the fact that humans do not like square waves - ie. when you go from super quiet to super loud at no time at all. He gives the example that if someone was to slap two pieces of wood together right beside your ear would be about the only time one would feel a square wave - and that would make you jump right out of your skin! He says digital, particularly MP3s reproduce square waves like crazy, which triggers fear which also produces fatigue. He says if those same two pieces of wood were slapped together across the room, the square wave would be rounded off by the time the sound reached our ears. Turntables cannot reproduce square waves due to through time it takes for sound to get though the length of wire and the magnet that the wire is wrapped around in the cartridge. By the time the signal gets through that the sharpness, he ugliness, has been rounded and that, he says, is what people are talking about when they describe vinyl as "warm" sounding. Interesting!

I find there are a bunch of digital manufacturers, like Lumin, that are striving for a vinyl sound. I wonder if they are somehow rounding off the square waves in the digital signal to do so? If this is the case, "perfect" reproduction may NOT actually be beneficial to the sound...at least for someone who really wants a vinyl sound experience. Better may not actually be better when it comes to digital sound reproduction!
camb
"in fact digital can round the square wave more than a cartridge in some cases"

This has to be some piss-poor digital design....

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
02-04-14: Audioengr
"in fact digital can round the square wave more than a cartridge in some cases"

This has to be some piss-poor digital design....
Steve, my comment which Charles referred to had to do with the fact that redbook CD cannot capture or reproduce frequency components in a signal that are greater than 22.05 kHz (half of the 44.1 kHz sampling rate), while many cartridges certainly can. The quality of the digital design has nothing to do with it.

As I'm sure you realize, elimination of high frequency components from a square wave signal corresponds to a slowing of its risetimes and falltimes.

Regards,
-- Al
This is an interesting question and I don't think there is a simple answer to it because nobody really knows how and why the ear hears what it does in reproduced music. I agree that, in general, vinyl and tubes do have a "warmer" sound compared to digital and solid state.

I listen mostly to classical music and to my ears, tubes do a better job of recreating the sound of a live performance in a concert hall, at least as I hear it. I don't necessarily agree that tubes sound warm because the high frequencies are rolled off. I have laboratory test equipment at home and I have measured the frequency response of my tube amp (ARC VS115) into my actual loudspeakers (SF Cremona M). The rolloff at 20 kHz is only -0.5 dB. My high frequency hearing (at age 62) cuts off sharply around 11-12 kHz, so it's really doubtful that rolloff is audible to my ears. My solid state amps, by comparison, are down about -0.2 dB at 20 kHz, yet they sound much brighter.

Digital does something to the sound of massed violins, a real acid test for sound reproduction, that can make them sound harsher and grittier than vinyl does. This is not an original observation, but on the other hand, vinyl captures the sound of the actual instrument more accurately as I hear it. However, in truth I do most of my listening to digital because of the convenience and the fact that LP surface noise becomes bothersome when you are used to the silent background of digital.
A quick Google search shows some well documented cases and images of square wave tests with CD and the limitations there due to bandwidth, especially at higher frequencies.

Can't find much at all for a similar phono test. Stereophile apparently had a test record with a square wave test signal once. How does that measure.

Digital can do it better with greater bandwidth than redbook no doubt. How much does it matter practically though I wonder.

Show me the perfect square wave audio reproduction system and I am there, dude. At least as fast as material becomes available and I can afford it.

RTR tape maybe?

I know the best RTR puts CD and vinyl to shame. No doubt there!
"Digital does something to the sound of massed violins, a real acid test for sound reproduction, that can make them sound harsher and grittier than vinyl does. "

YEs, has a lot to do with jitter though I suspect.

The best massed violin CD reproduction I have heard came off DCS source equipment, which I consider to be pretty much SOTA.