Vinyl - Digital vs analouge

All depends on the quality of turntable/CD player.

A Manticore Manta will sound better than CD 3.5, but a CD 555 will sound better than a Manticore Mantra.

quote:

Originally posted by fatcat:
All depends on the quality of turntable/CD player.

A Manticore Manta will sound better than CD 3.5

Not if the Manticore Manta is playing Phil Collins and the CD3.5 is playing Shirley Collins, well at least not to me in any case: Garbage in, garbage out as they say.

Now ..now ..chaps,. Hasn't poor Mr Phil suffered enough ?



BB

He started it

Simon

I don't think there is a simple answer to your question. A lot depends on who is doing the (digital) mastering.

I have some Motown records that were given the digital treatment when they were reissued in the early to mid 80's, and they sound quite good, in some ways even better than the originals. Generally, I try to stick to the original company that issued the record. My feeling about the Motown's is that they simply took the original tape, dumped it into the digital hopper, and mastered it like any other record with no attempts made at "improving" the sound.

Some of the boutique labels tend to offer reissues, that lose something of the vitality, in an attempt to improve the original. Sundazed has issued a lot of soul titles from the 60's that I dearly love, but after hearing the undifferentiated mess they made of an Otis Redding issue, I have not been tempted to buy their product since. Simply Vinyl is another case where the results are too bland for my tastes.

As you can see I'm no expert on reissue labels. Warner Brothers has done some recent work, the Madonna Immaculate Collection for instance, that I liked very much. Rhino, is another company, that has done serviceable Lp reissues. The Classic Records releases, though expensive, might be worth investigating as they issue their records in analogue remasters.

Original issue records always seem to keep their value. By original I don't mean 1S pressings but records that were done from the original masters. The RCA issues of Bowie, Lou Reed ect from the 80's (with the black label and little nipper) sound fairly great to me. Even some,though not all, of the mid 70's dynaflex, sound approprately gutsy to me, though purists don't seem to care for them.

I think I should point out that there is no such thing as a "digital" record, as the sound has to be converted to analogue at some point. Given half a chance, I believe Lps offer superior musicality and performance.

Hope all this helps.

Regards

BB

quote:

I think I should point out that there is no such thing as a "digital" record, as the sound has to be converted to analogue at some point. Given half a chance, I believe Lps offer superior musicality and performance.

BB

Obviously I understand the above, but the question is, once the anaologee masters have been converted to digital for tinkering, and then convered back to analogue for re pressing - is there any point, or should we just leave it in the digital domain and make a cd?

The conversion from analogue to digial to analougue must be a destructive process....

Perhaps those in the industry might be able to explain

Simon

quote:

Originally posted by Big Brother:
Now ..now ..chaps,. Hasn't poor Mr Phil suffered enough ?



BB

NO, NO, NO, and I say NO!!!!!

Jono

Simon

Technically (and I'm not an engineer or an industry insider) you would be correct in assuming a CD being a digital medium would be the superior storage medium for digital info. But before you can hear the CD it has to be converted back to analogue again by the processor in your cd player. So your back to where you started.

Then it's just a question of, is your cd player better than the D/A converter used by the record company in the digital mastering ? Also, obviously, there is the question of which is better, your CD player or your record deck.

Converting a analogue tape into digital and then mastering an lp with said info converted to analogue again is tantamount to breaking an eggshell into a million pieces, and then glueing the pieces back together again. So I think you are correct in assuming this is a destructive process.

The reasons the reissue labels use digital mastering is that it is cheaper and safer for a company like warner Bros. to send a digital copy on a disc rather than a master tape. Never mind the dangers of sending a master tape that could easily be lost stolen or damaged.

But really the whole thing is complicated by the fact that a needle scraping a record and 1 & 0's being converted to electric signals are going to sound very different. My point was that the needle scrape thing sounds better (ie. more natural)


BB

PS. I'm sure your aware of all of the above, I just have a beef with the record companies using digital mastering.

I totally agree with you that the "needle scraping" provides more music.

The CD is showing its age in the digital world. I have found increasing (but still far to few) examples of musicians releasing the full 24-bit master for download. This is surely the way forward. SACD and DVD-A showed us that consumer interest in higher quality (even if this can be argued in the case of SACD) ... consumer interest is low. Too low to pay for a new hardware class.

But selling 24-bit files on the net can be done today and require no extra investment, just use the existing master file. A very small group (like hifi-nerds) should have no trouble making it work economically.

quote:

This is surely the way forward. SACD and DVD-A showed us that consumer interest in higher quality

All depends on the quality of DVD/CD player.

I use a Pioneer DV 717 and a heavily modified Rotel 965 Discrete CD player.

Bozz Scaggs “Fade into light” was released as a CD and DVD.

This album sounds a lot better played by the Rotel than the Pioneer.


I agree that “needle scraping” provides more music, but with the addition of the term “pound for pound”

Again. All depends on the quality of turntable/CD player