Cds have more dynamic range than vinyl?

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by thegreenmanalishi, Jan 27, 2015.

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  1. Cracklebarrel

    Cracklebarrel Forum Resident

    Location:
    Atlanta, GA
    Not to open a whole new can of worms, but playable discs can also be made that don't conform to that Redbook standard, which is how we got expansions of the format as well as some nasty forms of copy-protection.
     
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  2. Havoc

    Havoc Forum Resident

    Location:
    Poland
    I was only using the term so it didn't get confused with SACD or any other disc format. Just your plain ol' cd which has been a godsend for me. Welcome to the site, there's a lot of great knowledge on this topic here that you'll be fascinated with if you like the subject.
     
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  3. Havoc

    Havoc Forum Resident

    Location:
    Poland
    Point! I guess anything with great potential only has benefit when that potential is taken advantage of, otherwise it's just something with great potential. See how I found a way to make your point using completely different language? :bdance:
     
  4. Robin L

    Robin L Musical Omnivore

    Location:
    Fresno, California
    Consider Mahler's Third Symphony. Massive orchestra. Lots and lots of very quiet passages where the music is one or two instruments surrounded these massive mountains of sound, a Symphony Orchestra so overstuffed with extra instruments it might as well be two orchestras, blaring full out. So, being audio purists, we choose to set the recording so the peak level is zero and there's no compression, original master recording being 24 bit. Can't do it on an LP without the surfaces intruding. The lowest levels will be far down enough to indicate the musical usefulness of 24 bit encoding. I recommend the Riccardo Chailly/Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra SACD on Decca.

    Good article.
     
    Last edited: Jan 27, 2015
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  5. ggergm

    ggergm another spring another baseball season

    Location:
    Minnesota
    Of course CDs have a greater dynamic range than LPs. As has already been pointed out, this is hardly new news. It's a 30 years old fact.

    Where LPs excel is in dynamic contrasts. Listen to a good recording of drums on the two formats. The subtle, momentary bursts of sound from the drums are better defined on the LP.

    Dynamic range compares the loudest passage in the music with the quietest. Greater dynamic contrasts means you hear more subtle volume changes. Can a loud, vibrant recording, for just a split second, get louder still?
     
  6. Tyler Eaves

    Tyler Eaves Forum Resident

    Location:
    Greenville, NC
    On the other hand vinyl has been proven to have WAY more bandwitdth ;)

    Quadraphonic setups require accurately picking up frequencies as high 45khz, and I know tests have shown pickup of freqs as high as 80khz
     
  7. Robin L

    Robin L Musical Omnivore

    Location:
    Fresno, California
    Or a file made from a CD or a file made for a CD. It's a statement of specifications, the most important being 16 bits, 44.1 khz sampling.
     
  8. Robin L

    Robin L Musical Omnivore

    Location:
    Fresno, California
    Yeah, but somehow matrix decoding of PCM offers more stable multichannel imaging in surround.
     
  9. Analogman

    Analogman Well-Known Member

    Since all of the wind bags are busy pontificating, here you go:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_Digital_Audio

    Clearly just an overview; I will try and find the complete Red Book papers if you are interested (my filing system sucks)

    Analogman
     
  10. PhilBiker

    PhilBiker sh.tv member number 666

    Location:
    Northern VA, USA
    Technically speaking CD does have more dynamic range.

    CD and vinyl both sound really great when the mastering and playback is up to a certain standard. For that matter other formats like SACD, DVD-Audio, Blu-Ray audio, and yes even MP3 can sound great as well. Again, the mastering and the playback system competency are much more important than any format issues.
     
  11. tmtomh

    tmtomh Forum Resident

    Reading may of the comments here, I was expecting a hack-job of an article, similar to the recent Gizmodo post about how high-res is allegedly a waste of time. But this article is well-written, balanced, and contains a good deal of interesting commentary from folks like Bob Ludwig and Bob Clearmountain. I think it's a very good article.

    I'm sorry, but No. There are many things to recommend the sound of a well-mastered, well-pressed, well-cleaned LP played back on a good system. But what you are claiming here is that the vinyl medium allows for faster transient response and more gradations of volume change, and there is not a shred of evidence to support that claim. The "more subtle volume changes" claim in particular smacks of the old canard that digital is not "smooth" because it's "chopped up samples" and allegedly sounds like the stair-step drawings we often see (themselves misleading) of digital waveforms.
     
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  12. Jackson

    Jackson Senior Member

    Location:
    MA, USA
    :laugh:
     
  13. Archimago

    Archimago Forum Resident

    Yeah, although it's old news... It bears repeating these days given the hype around vinyl and the numerous quotes from folks like White and Young which go unchallenged. Some things are just *true* whether some folks believe/feel that it is or not.

    Someone should tell Fremer - maybe he'll put up a blog post :)

    Nice to see Clearwater and Ludwig chiming in!
     
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  14. tim185

    tim185 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Australia
    Don't say vinyl sounds better they say? Why the hell not? How ignorant! It can and often does sound better !
    Crap article is crap.

    Albums longer than 40 minutes blah blah blah, negates to mention the hundreds of albums released on two LP's precisely to avoid that problem.

    To me,I agree with those quotes in the article IF they are talking about consumer grade tables and cartridges. Put some reasonable money into LP playback and it often slaughters anything digital. But nah...crap article needs to be crap so lets load up on half truths and ignorance.
     
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  15. Dennis0675

    Dennis0675 Hyperactive!

    Location:
    Ohio
    I find that getting a strong bass sound from a record as compared to a CD is pretty tough. Luckily I am not trying to thump the bass or listening to music that requires that aspect. So if we are calling that less of a dynamic range on vinyl, I would say what is there sounds better, more natural and relaxing to my ears.
     
  16. Wolfspaw

    Wolfspaw Forum Resident

    Location:
    Los Angeles, CA
    It is great to see Ludwig and Clearwater speak up.

    This debate has been going on for a long time. The reality is Physics is much kinder to CD's and the limitations of LP's are well known. The best thing that could happen with the LP Renaissance is that engineers and bands speak up and END the "loudness" wars.
     
  17. Robin L

    Robin L Musical Omnivore

    Location:
    Fresno, California
    Our first Dunning Kruger Award of the thread goes to . . .
     
  18. tim185

    tim185 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Australia
    Call it what you want. I have 50 examples that blow that article out of the water. They are not telling lies, but they are missing a lot of convenient facts. Yeah its spot on, if your talking about consumer grade tables, garbage cartridges, and garbage phono stages, as was the case for the majority of people. You put the money in, its a completely different story.
     
  19. Dennis0675

    Dennis0675 Hyperactive!

    Location:
    Ohio
    I had to google that...pretty rough

    cognitive bias wherein unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude
     
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  20. tim185

    tim185 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Australia
    I had to google it as well. Can you feel the irony?? Robin is getting a bit ahead of himself with the fancy insults. lol.
     
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  21. rockledge

    rockledge Forum Resident

    Location:
    right here
    Much as this is true, the opposite can also apply. CDs are the perfect situation to correct rock era vinyl ( or for that matter any style of music that was popular during vinyl days) that was poorly mastered for vinyl.
    Format to format, CD blows vinyl away.
    Studio mixes , mastering, and actually producing an end product, it would seem that it was done much better during the rock era than now.
    Which doesn't make sense. The technology now is so exponentially greater that all recorded music should be shout it from the mountain tops amazing. There is simply no excuse for how poorly it is being done now.
     
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  22. The FRiNgE

    The FRiNgE Forum Resident

    I have been doing a few "needledrops" lately. -just an observation- I do some of these directly to a CD recorder which has an LED meter to -50 dB. Some of my vinyl does not cause the -50 dB to flicker, no background "crackle" residual, no ticks. Most of the quiet passages I have encountered lately are no lower than -40 dB, -50 at the lowest. The quietest vinyl I have is lower than -50, probably -60, but that's a stretch I think. (this borders on a good turntable's rumble spec) If the noise levels are 20 dB below the music level, subjective hearing usually rejects the noise entirely (masking) The advantage of vinyl IME is it's open high frequency range, and musicality. The disadvantage of course is its vulnerability to background noise from contamination and wear... usually from a previous owner who didn't care for, or played on a vinyl eating machine.
     
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  23. Dennis0675

    Dennis0675 Hyperactive!

    Location:
    Ohio
    since this has completely devolved into another digital vs. analog thread...

    I really don't want to like vinyl. The equipment is crazy expensive, records are stupidly fragile, I like to drink and waking up with the table still spinning and the needle down really hurts my feelings. That being said, every time is do a side by side comparison with a CD and record of the same recording, the record always sounds better.

    so enjoy your dynamic range and I'll dig the music.
     
  24. missan

    missan Forum Resident

    Location:
    Stockholm
    For me classical music on CDs really shines, it´s so much better, for most other music it´s no big deal.
     
  25. Havoc

    Havoc Forum Resident

    Location:
    Poland
    I noticed this as well and always thought the higher resolution a cd offers allows you to hear the different components of a classical piece which are normally way more numerous than in standard Pop/Rock music......even a Taylor Swift track or something from Chinese Democracy that have crazy amounts of elements to them. When we recently purchased a turntable I was amped up to hear some vinyl after so many years but was a little disappointed and just concluded that compact discs when done properly offer more to the listener. The digital/analogue argument is purely subjective and I guess I've just embraced digital and to that end maybe convinced myself it sounds better.
     
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