Cds have more dynamic range than vinyl?

Go away, grown ups not allowed ; - )

 

Interesting stuff. Never seen that. Thanks for posting.

 

Redbook= The specific standards set by Philips and Sony about what comprises a Compact Disc/Digital Audio. And these specifications are housed in a book with a Red Cover. Any disc which does not meet these standards can not be called a Compact Disc/Digital Audio Disc. They are specific. Copy protected compact discs nor DualDiscs are not RedBook CD. Orange Book covers the CD-Recordable or CD-R medium. Scarlett Book covers the SACD.

 

This is a perfect example of the myth - NOT a fact. CDs are just the format. They have no dynamic range. However digital has the potential to reproduce more dynamic range. But in order for a CD to have 'more dynamic range' than a record, the music contained on/in the CD would have to have more dynamic range than the music on the record. And the sad fact is that the majority of recorded rock, pop, and jazz music lacks the dynamic range to make the best of the CD format.

Steve has posted before that vinyl is capable of 75 db range, as compared to 96 db for the Cd format. Now what popular recordings, outside classical recordings, have even 75 db range?

Besides, I love Steve's old post on this tired subject:

Thank God forum members with their penchant for big dynamic range don't master music.

 

I don't get what you mean about silent backgrounds. When classical concerts are recorded the background noise, including people coughing, the musicians adjusting their sheet music, chairs clacking, all of that is normally left in.
That stuff is there no matter what medium it is stored on.
Vinyl doesn't magically add that noise. CDs do not magically eradicate it.
Classical music recorded in the studio will not have background noise, whether on vinyl or CD ( other than of course the inherent noise that comes with vinyl).
That background noise is simply not created by the format. Other than, like I say, the tracking and extraneous noises inherent to vinyl.

 

You've been posting a long time now - enough to get a sense of how you live, your various sound gear, older turntables etc. plus the convenience of being able to pop in CDs which is your preference. Don't begrudge you there. I'd probably be doing the same thing. But your comments on vinyl tell me you've probably never heard a good modern TT rig set up right. Thats all.

 

Bottom line is, until you've heard vinyl done right, well....you've not heard it right. Pretty simple.

And...... it does not take a year or 2 of your salary to get killer sound from it.

I'm 45 years into vinyl, nearly 33 years into CD, I think I've had enough time to sort out what I'm hearing from both.

Vinyl can rock, CD can too. Neither IMO is superior over the other, both have strengths and weaknesses.

 

Thats about it. Good post!

 

Be a good point to shut this down.

 

Someone pull the pin, quick.

I just realized I've been listening to records for over 50 years.

jeff

 

Ok, I am not sure how you dive into this one. I liked the article generally. I picked up some different insights and there were some respected heavy hitters chiming in which was cool; albeit, what kind of corner do you write yourself into when you say “Unsatisfied with the standard needles of the day, he used cactus needles, which he sharpened with sandpaper, to play the first LP he purchased: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade.”? Did he borrow LPs from the Public Library to figure out he was unsatisfied with standard needles of the day before harvesting cacti and buying his first LP?

I am clearly evading the question. What was the question? F-it. I have been wildly impressed at times with each format and I have at times been seriously disappointed by both of them as well. Admittedly my vinyl experience ended at the end of my college years and my playback was uber-pedestrian to be sure. But I have seen enough to know you can chase any sound any which way and with the right kind of eyes you can feel that high-aural mark.

For me it is the convenience of CD, although it better be damned well mastered first to get close to impressing; or even more so the much-better-done-these-days SACD. I am jealous of the gardening like experience you would have nurturing a greenhouse of vinyl. I am going to credit who said this in a later post, but yeah, let’s face facts, at times an audiophile just loves the gear—at least until we can convince ourselves it is really about the music. The care and feeding and tactile love of vinyl I do miss; the vast expense it would take to pull off what level I would expect to achieve through vinyl I could do without. But there I go, taking sides, and I did not want to do that; but damn if those are not my decisions.

As for the numbers and the dynamic range and the argument and the noise floor, well it all works any way you want it to and it will always be what makes the platter spin. I have learned a ton here about why both of them work my goat in their different ways, and I want both of them in my life, but I will live with my choices for the time being. I chase all the preferably reproduced redbook and hi-res notes I can play in my listening room for this hobby; but then, because I love the place, I find myself in a bar around the corner on occasion, and my favorite SoBo mixologist just so happens to have a yard of taste in 60’s UK-centric Garage Pop Rocks vinyl, and man, on that working man’s hi-fi, oh does it all soak right deep into my bones. While it is never wrong doing so, it is also quite fun not to worry about this stuff.

Ok, enough of that, who am I kidding—I will have either offended someone with this or will begin worry about it all very soon, it is just a matter of which one will happen first. SHF-on y’all.

 

The best part of this thread for me was the roll Dennis0675 has been on.

Kudos pride of Cucamonga.

 

Somewhere around 1988 - when I had no dog in the fight for myself - I did a very unscientific experiment: having both the CD and LP of Sgt. Pepper and Wish You Were Here, I played each format simultaneously and a/b'd 'em. Apart from a tiny bit of extra warmth in the Pepper LP, I heard essentially no difference in sonics or in enjoyment. A few ticks & pops from the vinyl, of course ...

I kept on with LPs and CDs until the mid-'90s, by which time I was buying mainly CDs; sold off most of the LPs in my dad's estate sale. I do miss all the big artwork; but I get just as much enjoyment musically from the CD. The (potential) dynamic range , Nyquist Theorem, 80 min. playing time and 16/44.1 sampling work for me, seemingly.

 

I can't bear to read every post here but I did keep running into if you have a high end turntable with excellent cartridge vinyl will knock the socks off a well mastered cd. Lets say you have 5k into your turntable and you compare it to a cd player that also is in the 5k price range I wonder how the comparison would be then. You cant compare the sound of a 5k TT to a cd being played on a entry level cd player or dvd player for that matter and have it be a fair fight.

 

I respectfully disagree. This doesn't happen in my world, filled with defects and lousy pressings.

 

My vinyl and CD rigs for my main system are more than comparable head to head in a realistic price range, in fact my CD rig has a much more expensive CD transport than my turntable.

Turntable: A classic Empire 698 with Shure Ultra 500 cartridge, about $600 total back in the day, so let's say we have $2600 in 2014 inflation adjustments total. Critically setup and maintained by me, the original owner dating back to new in 1976.

CD: Pioneer Elite PD-S95 CD transport, about $3k new in 1993, but I'll give digital a break and not adjust price to inflation due to digital costs "rolling down" since 1993. But go ahead just try and find a transport built like this tank in 2015 for less than double that cost. DAC is a Musical Fidelity late model M1 DAC, 24 bit/96k about $800. A well respected, recent unit. So $3,800 total for CD rig, EASY.

Cash wise my digital has the upper hand easily.

Cables are well matched for each setup. I've used quite a few different preamps on and off to give the line level and phono sections some advantages of diversity.

And in the end I'm right back to my earlier post:
"Bottom line is, until you've heard vinyl done right, well....you've not heard it right. Pretty simple.
And...... it does not take a year or 2 of your salary to get killer sound from it.
I'm 45 years into vinyl, nearly 33 years into CD, I think I've had enough time to sort out what I'm hearing from both.
Vinyl can rock, CD can too. Neither IMO is superior over the other, both have strengths and weaknesses."

And it's fair to say none of this equipment puts any format at a disadvantage, all of it at a minimum garners reasonable respect. But if pressing the issue cost wise digital has the upper hand in my system.

 

If a media format wouldn't have had any benefits over the other then it simply would not exist. I like Streaming and Vinyl and both have their place in my home for different purposes.

 

I have many many examples where you just don't hear any ambient hall sound.

Except when it's not which is pretty common IME.

Who said anything about magic? Why use prejudicial language? Vinyl does add noise and digital can miss low level information. No magic required.

No doubt, there are plenty of CDs and digital recordings of classical music that have very weak ambient room sound or none at all. But you are wrong about studios being silent. They are not. They record classical music in rooms that have a room sound. That you are not hearing it should tell you something is missing. I only know of one recording that was done in an anechoic chamber as an experiment. The lack room sound was so disconcerting that it made it nearly impossible for the musicians to perform the music.

 

I read this several times and I have no idea what you are talking about. What do you mean that "the noise for vinyl is concentrated in a very narrow portion of the frequency spectrum"? What do you mean by "real pratical dynamic range"? What do you mean by " levels of distortion for the first couple of bits of CD"?

 

now that you mention it, I think I really resolved the debate from my insightful and cogent remarks. How this thread had been able to continue to this point is really a testament to peoples desire to hear themselves talk.

 

For me, yes. Accuracy is intrinsically valuable to me because, well, you know, it's . . . accurate. ;^)

 

It's been said enough but CDs physically have more dynamic range than vinyl, but it's a moot point if they brickwall it and make it so loud that there is hardly any variation between the quiet and loud parts. The higher points should be for the highest spikes of the waveform and not have the whole thing jacked up there. The balance on vinyl is more listenable because (if done right) they have to dial down the treble and thus it is closer to the bass in the mix. Yes you can artifically increase either if there is an issue. And yes obviously, clipped vocals and instruments are not going to magically disappear.

Yes I know about inner groove distortion, skips, pops, crackle, but as someone who has dealt with really poor condition records (largely from the Caribbean) and archived them, it is all relative. A 12" 45 single pressed in the UK, Germany or US in the 80s is frequently right up there in terms of sound quality.

 

Vinyl noise or surface noise is a pretty specific phenomenon. It isn't pink noise or white noise nor is it hum or hiss. It is not happening from 20 Hz to 20kHz. it actually happens in a pretty narrow band.

The actual ability to hear a signal at it's lowest level to it's loudest level from 20 Hz to 20 kHz

Think about it. The last bit of 16 bits represents a 1 or a 0. What sort of distortion do you think you encounter on that last bit? Second to last bit adds up to 4 third to last bit 8 fourth to last bit 16. At what point do you think you get less than 3% distortion which is the threshold put on any other measure of acceptable distortion? Then look at how the dynamic range of digital is measured. Of course dithering does a lot to alleviate low level distortion but it is still there.

 

...a particularly annoying narrow band.

 

That IMO that sounds like an audio neurosis. Doesn't make you a bad person but unless you have more than a tautological explanation then that is what it looks like.