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Comment by arielweisberg | Hacker News Reader

The two analog mediums I mentioned are both pretty flawed and difficult to get clean sound out of.

Digital isn't inherently bad. There was a time when recording engineers salivated over stereo CDs and all the problems that just went away. Sure we use compressed audio now, but I can't really tell the difference in any real listening scenario if I am being honest.

Even with a headphone amp and some nice headphones.

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One of the non-obvious reasons vinyl albums often sound better than their digital counterparts is that the mastering process for cutting vinyl is extremely “hands on” and is typically performed by senior mastering engineers working with top of the line equipment. The very act of having an old set of ears listening critically to each track, and making subtle changes like shelving equalization, surgical multiband compression, and stereo width reduction in the low end (to keep the needle from bouncing), will often improve the sound of an album before it’s even sent to the vinyl cutting machine.

This is underacknowledged.

A bunch of early CD pressings were pretty bad, because they just issued CDs with the mastered-for-vinyl recordings without considering how the medium affected playback.

Fortunately this mostly got resolved in the first 10-15 years of CD; I think the last domino (at least for people my age) was when the first Zeppelin box set finally dropped. Listening to those tracks was stunning -- the new remastered discs sounded SO MUCH BETTER than the original mid-80s CDs we'd all had previously.

Great digital is absolutely best approach if you want great sound.

You CAN get really lovely sound out of an analog (vinyl) setup, for sure. But it's going to be expensive and fiddly, whereas the digital shit tends to just work.

And nobody can reliably differentiate between high-bitrate streamed digital and CD source. It can't be done.

Not trolling, but can you elaborate on vinyl's flaws? My understanding is that the width of the groove corresponds directly to the frequency. Issues of dust etc are just implementation problems, which can be resolved by placing a small vacuum near the stylus (for example). But maybe I don't fully understand how it works.

Off the top of my head:

For the disks: Vinyl can get permanently scratched. The disks can get warped. The playback needle can put too much force on the groove and damage it.

For the playback: It's incredibly difficult to get a motor to spin the disk at a perfectly uniform rate, so you get distortions in the frequencies being played back known as "wow" and "flutter". The groove is not the audio exactly as recorded, but instead equalized to lower bass frequencies so that the needle doesn't skip out of the groove. This RIAA equalization has to be undone for playback, and if it is done with analog components, it's never going to be exact.

I'm desperately trying to find the exact source, but Zappa [allegedly(!)] stated that he preferred his lps to be 18-22 mins due to that being the best audio quality available, given the physical size of a disk versus the size/ quality of the grooves thereon.

Closest I can find so far - https://www.musictimes.com/articles/6349/20140526/7-great-al...

Yes (depending on the modulation), just as the bits on a CD corresponds directly to the frequency.

Vinyl records have limitations determined by design decisions and physical properties.

For example deep bass and stereo separation are reduced on vinyl or the stylus would jump out of the groove.

And vinyl records have a lot more noise than good digital formats.

Temperature and Humidity literally warps the Vinyl.

Even if you had perfect humidity control + temperature control vacuum chambers storing these things, they'll still degrade over time due to other aging issues.

It doesn't even take that much time before these older technologies (vinyl, tape, etc. etc.) degrade permanently.

They have inherent noise that you can't escape nor can they faithfully reproduce low frequencies. Variation in all of the mechanical parts affects the sound reproduction and they are damaged on every playback.

I think implementation problems is a good summary of vinyl’s flaws. In theory, it’s great.

For some genres of music, clean sound is not what you want.

True true. I like the sound of music from the early days of recording ... foxtrots, rags, blues ... that only sound right with that pre-tape, pre-mike ambience. A 'cleaned-up' 1909 version of "Shine on harvest moon" is a crime against humanity. (Like colorizing 'Citizen Kane', or Laurel and Hardy.) That's the way people heard it then. And (up until the depression, anyway) they bought it and danced to it by the millions.

Squeaky-clean 'fidelity' can work against good music. It's like purple fluorescent lights ... antiseptic.

You want you music to sound less like what was recorded? That doesn’t make any sense to me.

I think we're talking across purposes, I was referring to recording on tape.

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