Time for vinyl to get back in its groove after pressing times
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I have an extensive vinyl collection, but I'll be the first to tell you that the actual physical format is vastly inferior to CD.
The only benefit is that a decent amount of vinyl releases do not have the same mastering as the CD, due to the perception that many of the vinyl purchasers are audiophiles and want the higher dynamic range master or are only buying the vinyl to display it somewhere and never listen to it, and don't care about the DR on the release. But plenty of releases are also lazily done and are just the shitty CD masters with the RIAA curve applied and pressed onto an LP.
The Loudness War ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war ) needs to go away so I can go back to happily buying digital formats and stop dealing with all of this bullshit.
according to your link, it is going away:
"Analysis suggests that the loudness trend may have peaked around 2005 and subsequently reduced, with a pronounced increase in overall and minimum album DR (crest factor) for albums since 2005."
This tracks with what I hear on new recordings.
One of my favorite albums from 2014 has perhaps some of the absolute worst mastering I've ever listened to.
http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/view/69622
The dynamic range is so low you actually hear clipping on the CD version.
The same album, on vinyl?
http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/view/91768
Now, because of the way DR is scored, a vinyl album will almost always score higher on a DR test, but you can generally see this right away without even listening, because everything will have a pretty uniform 3-4 DR boost. But this one is a dedicated vinyl master, and the score increase comes from that.
(For more in depth on this specific release, the guys at AngryMetalGuy wrote up a lengthy review/screed about the loudness war/etc http://www.angrymetalguy.com/fallujah-the-flesh-prevails-pre... )
Mainstream rock is still really bad about it, and less-mainstream metal is some of the worst.
Hold up, what? As far as technological potential is concerned, CDs have a far higher dynamic range than vinyl! Just listen to classical music if you don't believe me. The only problem is the way they are mastered.
The way DR is scored by automatic tools will give a needle drop a higher DR than a CD version even if they have the same original master with the same DR.
I'm saying that just because an vinyl rip of the same song has a higher scored DR doesn't automatically mean it actually has a different master with more dynamic range.
Edit: Metal-Fi guys have a good article on it http://www.metal-fi.com/vinyl-doesnt-measure-up/
I agree. In my experience as a heavy metal show radio host from 2009-2013, it seemed like a very significant proportion of heavy metal is mastered to have almost no DR whatsoever. When we would load up songs to sample for IDs and promotions, every song would be a gigantic solid rectangle of sound.
Wait: There are two masters? How many bits is the higher DR master?
So, the situation is that some vinyl recordings are just vinyl versions of digital recordings? Does this happen in the other direction? I've wondered if some of the turntables and speakers are just digitizing the output from the vinyl prior to playing the music. So in this case, you'd be vinyl-izing a digital source, and then digitizing the vinyl source. Does this happen at all?
If you have any particularly good link/sources to read up about this, please let me know, I've had a passing interest in it for a while.
Vinyl is a bit like Instagram purposeful alteration of the original for artful purposes.
I have a bunch of minidiscs that I'll lose access to when the player dies. (Which is fine, I still have all the content in other forms).
http://3dprintingindustry.com/2014/12/03/3d-printed-hand-cra...
I think that's also a lot of the charm of vinyl: the technology is transparent, direct and simple, and a child could literally build a functional player in two minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJa6Ik6xmiU
78s were mono, and the data was encoded via a vertical movement of the stylus. A needle-and-paper-cup player will work fine on one of these.
Modern records are stereo, and the data is encoded as two channels, so the needle moves in two directions; these directions are diagonal to the plane of the record. The only real way to build a needle that will play these is via a magnetic pickup on the other end of the needle. These are rather non-trivial to build.
Once you've done that, there's an additional complication, which is that the dynamic range of the vinyl isn't up to reproducing the audio signal; low notes at high volume require large displacements and the grooves are too close together to allow this (even if it can move fast enough, which I'm unsure about). So you encode the audio signal in a standard way before pressing it onto the vinyl, compressing the low frequencies and... expanding? the high ones. The record player then undoes this encoding after reading the signal off the disk. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization for the full details.
Of course, getting a decoder is as simple as ordering the standard part and wiring it in. But now you've got a full electronic system, and it's decidedly non-trivial to build.
Modern vinyl has a lot of subtlety and sophistication to it. If you use a needle-and-paper-cup player on a 33, it'll make noises that sound a bit like music, but actually playing it properly is highly non-trivial.
If you used a consumer deck to record something onto a MD, it was flagged, and that meant that the only way to get it back out was via real time playback and the analog hole.
Never mind that if you could lands your hand on a professional deck, the flag would happily be ignored. And you could transfer anything at whatever speed topped out first, USB or the read rate of the deck.
If they had simply sold it as a improved floppy, i think the tech would still be with us. But at the time Sony was being wagged fiercly by their Sony Music tail...
Strange style choice, when "Pacific Northwest" is available. Does not seem like British English rules for cardinal directions should supersede the region's proper noun place name.