Vinyl and CD: the taste and color

The annual honoring of vinyl records receives many complaints related to business issues, but this is nothing compared to the spirit of the day, which encourages people to explore and buy new music. In addition, vinyl is more attractive as a format than an MP3 or CD. Something inside is happy when the needle goes down on the plate, or you turn it by hand to rewind it. In a world where at a party, anyone can change a playlist and play their favorite music, it's nice to have a format that is not so easy to replace.

However, let's not fool ourselves. Vinyl is a great music format, but the idea that its sound is better than the sound of uncompressed digital recordings is ridiculous in itself. The bottom line is that they sound different, that's all.
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What can't vinyl

From a theoretical point of view, there is no reason why vinyl should sound better. When recording music on vinyl records (some of the difficulties of mastering vinyl are perfectly explained in the video ), you need to take into account a number of features, one of which is the way of encoding sound that has no equivalent in CD format. Also, vinyl is limited by the properties of the material, but it must reproduce the entire spectrum of the sound wave, without causing distortion. This condition limits the dynamic sound range - in other words, the range of frequencies that you can hear.

If you record notes that are too low, this will mean that a shorter recording will fit on the plane of the record. If the sound tone is too high, there will be distortions, since it will be very difficult to create the corresponding track. Therefore, when creating a master disk for vinyl recording, engineers often cut off unnecessarily high or low frequencies using different methods , each of which affects the sound of the music.

For example, a simple example of high frequencies on a recording is the interference that occurs when pronouncing sizzling consonants, or consonants “with” or “h”, which can produce a whistle effect (for example, in words: “zip”, “shack”, “sap "). This creates serious problems for professionals working with vinyl, so they are often forced to eliminate the excess of high frequencies on the recording, making the whistling sounds less pronounced during the editing process, or asking the vocalists to pronounce problem areas differently during the recording process.

Audio processing techniques that eliminate too high frequencies are widely applied to other recording formats, but they are vital when recording to vinyl. If you intend to keep the loud hiss for any aesthetic ideas, and want to make a vinyl record with such a record, then you are out of luck. When you have to get rid of the high frequencies, re-recording vocals, it can greatly affect the sound. Vocalists are forced to perform compositions less "strongly", and as a result, the expression level is lost.

What can CD

The sound engineer at the audio console mixes the sound. Denmark, 2011. Photo by PYMCA / UIG / Getty Images

Since the CD format is the original analog audio signal that has been sampled, it has some frequency limitations. Vinyl records, in theory, immediately encode a smooth audio wave, while CD measures the value of an analog quantity at certain intervals at various points, and then combines them. “It doesn't matter how high the sampling rate is,” wrote Eliot Van Buskirk, an employee of Wired magazine, “it’s impossible to encode all the information represented by an analog recording.”

The statement of Eliot Buskirk as a whole is true: this is how the CD format works - it selects many samples from the original audio wave and builds them sequentially. But this view is erroneous for two reasons. First, when creating vinyl records, errors occur, due to which a compressed track does not work out as an exact copy of the audio wave recorded on the reference plate, and frequency restrictions are not the last reason for this. The truth is that a CD cannot exactly recreate a reference audio wave (in most cases it cannot — the Nyquist-Shannon theorem claims that this is possible), but the vinyl record cannot do this either.

More importantly, the volume of the samples should be sufficient to create a copy that the human ear can hear as if it were an original recording. The sampling frequency of the CD format is 44.1 kHz - this means that the values ​​of the reference recording 44 100 times per second in the audio frequency range up to 20 kHz are read - this is the limit of hearing of the human ear. At least one experiment confirmed that listeners do not notice the difference between recordings in which there are frequencies above 21kHz and those that do not contain those. You may think that you are able to hear frequencies that are not supported by the CD format, but most likely it is not.

After some time, the engineers came up with how to squeeze the most out of 44.1kHz. Scott Metcalfe, head of the Department of Art and Science of Recording at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University, explains that engineers began to use "oversampling" when creating digital files whose frequency value is much more than 44.1kHz. Then the recording is compressed back to the frequency of the CD-format. “The signal is captured at a much higher sampling rate, which is then reduced to 44.1 kHz using mathematical transformations,” says Metkalf, “this allows for more accurate preservation of the recorded information.”

Metcalf told about another problem related to the incoming criticism of the CD-format. Even if the sound recording method used supports frequencies above 20 kHz, it is useless if you do not have a microphone capable of recording such frequencies and there is no such speaker that would reproduce them. Most studios do not have microphones that are sensitive to frequencies higher than 20 kHz, and the speakers reproducing them are even less common. In fact, most audio systems are equipped with low-pass filters that cut all frequencies above that specified. The fact is that a CD format can create an even more accurate copy of the sound wave than vinyl.

And what do people prefer?

It is a pity that you can not hold a competition between the CD and vinyl, by analogy with Pepsi and CocaCola. Pepsi Image Owner

A well-known fact: Americans buy digital copies of songs in much larger quantities than other alternative music formats. In this regard, we can assume that they prefer to listen to digital music or CD, rather than vinyl. If we calculate the sales of both albums and songs, it turns out that last year (2013) 243.5 million digital albums, 165.4 million CD albums, and 6.1 million vinyl records were sold. Considering that compressed digital sound is much worse in quality than CD or vinyl, it can be seen that consumers care more about the ease of acquisition and use than about sound quality .

But comparing a CD and a vinyl is a bit wrong, since different people understand the word “convenience” as different. You can not fit a thousand songs on vinyl records in your pocket and listen to them on a run. But what if comparing digital and analog audio with equal, controlled conditions?

Unfortunately, no one tested the comparison of vinyl and CD, but there is a productive experiment by John Geringer and Patrick Dunnigan from Florida, in which CDs and high-quality cassette tapes were compared. Although cassettes sold to customers have worse sound quality than vinyl records, there are no special requirements for the tape during production, and the format itself does not suffer from frequency limitations imposed by the vinyl format in order to avoid sound loss. Of course, this experiment is not entirely suitable for use in our context, but an understanding of how people perceive a high-quality analogue of digital sound should come in handy within the framework of this material.

Geringer and Dunnigan used the same microphones and mixing console settings to record 4 different concerts using digital recording and a high-quality analog cassette recorder (the Nakamichi model MR-3 is widely known among music lovers). Then they asked 40 subjects to listen to the recordings. The participants in the experiment were allowed to use headphones and audio speakers and at any time switch between digital and cassette recordings. The subjects did not know which record was digital and which was analog. Then they were asked to write about the choices they made.

As it turned out, the majority tended to favor digital recording. “The participants in the experiment gave much higher marks for the quality of the low and high frequencies of the digital recording,” said Geringer and Dunnigan. The results of the evaluation of digital recordings turned out to be worse in some points (the recordings of string orchestras were almost the same) compared to analog recordings, but their average score always exceeded the average analog score. Most of the decent analog recordings were excluded from the experiment, since these recordings themselves contained music of such genres that the subjects did not like. However, there were a few people who showed a pronounced preference for "figure" (regardless of the genre).

Why do people like vinyl?

Enthusiasts quickly scan vinyl-recorded boxes on the opening day of the annual record fair held by the non-commercial radio station WFMU in Jersey (November 22, 2013, New York). Photo by Spencer Platt / Getty Images

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about vinyl sounding is that the records change the sound of the original recordings. Many fans talk about the "warm" sound of vinyl, especially in the low-frequency domain. But as Mark Richardson, a journalist with the Pitchfork electronic edition, put it: “That“ warm ”sound that many people associate with vinyl records can be described simply as an inaccurately recorded bass.” Difficulties in accurate reproduction of bass on a vinyl record are due to the fact that the grooves should not be too large, so engineers have to do a lot of complicated operations to change the sound of the bass so that the record sounds normal, which the masses seem to like.

The so-called "heat" is also an effect arising from defects in players. Stanley Lipschitz of the University of Waterloo once explained to Popular Science magazine that the sound dynamics and the needle height fluctuations can cause vibrations in the sound of the recording, which the needle reads and reproduces as a supposedly “warm” sound.

Is it wrong to love this “warm” sound? Of course no! It would be absurd to judge this as a truly correct assessment of aesthetic taste. It's like to blame the upset strings for the fact that they "do not match" the sound of a tuned guitar. Sound distortion can be beautiful, and there is nothing wrong with loving them. But it is also important to mention that it is because of this “warm” sound that vinyl records differ from the sound recorded by the musicians in the studio.

“As a recording engineer, I can say that when working with digital formats you get exactly what you originally planned,” explains Metcalfe. “But when you work with analog sound, the result may differ from the original settings.”

Should I stop listening to vinyl?

Not! For heaven's sake, no. Each format has its own specific charm , and all their differences in quality are most often overlapped by the quality of recording equipment, playback devices and the approach to recording. But if you collect records, you shouldn’t constantly tell your friends about how clean the vinyl sounds. Firstly, this is absolutely swine behavior, but more importantly, this is a lie. Digital recordings reproduce the sound wave much more accurately. This is not the only thought to think about, but it shows the entire failure of the arguments of some vinyl adherents.



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