I want to love vinyl, but...

Man.

So again, my point is simply this and only intended to help anyone in the same predicament as the OP:

If you decide to get back into vinyl and aren't sure if you prefer it to CD, make certain you hear some vintage analog pressings of your favorite records before making any determination on whether vinyl is for you. Don't just start buying reissues without any research.

I am not arguing the merits of mastering to vinyl from digital instead of CD or that it can't be superior if done right. My point is a more basic one. Vinyl is first and foremost a vehicle for pure analog sound. To attempt to get back into it and make any judgments without hearing what you are certain are AAA pressings makes zero sense, IMO.

 

I think CDs will come back too, give it time.

 

Yes, nearly every physical format that has been popular becomes popular again some day... it’s like fashion. Retro style.

 

Here's a question for the experts.
Does vinyl have 3 axis in which to store information?
Along the radii, call it Z
Perpendicular to the surface, Y
Direction of rotation, X or time
So the stylus transcribes 3 dimensions in space.
Think a cork screw turning

Where as the digital domain has two.
time or sampling rate
Magnitude
Only 2, or planar

Could this account for any difference in Sonics?
A loss going from 3 space domain to 2?

 

Do you have any electronic music from the 80s/90s? I would say the majority of those records share the same warmth as analog music from earlier eras. I’m convinced it’s modern mastering and cutting techniques that’s the main culprit for ‘digital’ sounding records.

 

Sure, there have even be mini, niche surges of interest in the old ipods, and of course interest in old video game consoles, etc. At some point you will likely be able to find some enthusiasts
for a discarded technology.

But if we are talking about CDs staging a "comeback" or "revival" like anything on the scale of vinyl, I think there are plenty of reasons to doubt it. The large size of the vinyl format which shows of album artwork in a way that you won't get from a teeny CD. The retro-cool of turntables, and the tweakiness that can keep people engaged. The way vinyl works - squiggles you can see in the big piece of vinyl that represents the music - has a retro conceptual appeal that CDs do not. CDs are just a version of digital sound, which everyone can get all day long, where vinyl is a major form factor and conceptual departure. Also the way vinyl forces people to pay more attention - the care for the vinyl, of the turntable, the having to flip the record - all often cited even by newbies. And the fact many like the sound of vinyl vs digital, where CD offers no such distinct departure from streaming. It's just more digital sound.

So I wouldn't anticipate a CD revival that remotely mirrors the one from vinyl.

 

Most of the stuff on cable sucks though... haha

 

I don't care how close something is to the original source. All that matters is that it sounds pleasing to "my" ears. Can be vinyl or digital but preference is to vinyl for all the reasons that have been repeated here many times.

 

I resonate with this point.....

 

Yeah, especially the news these days....

 

True, true and true.
There is also a collectable factor.. One can make an absolutely identically sounded copy, bit-to-bit indistinguishable from the original, tiny matrix number notwithstanding.
Of course there are CD collectors out there, and some of those special CDs can be very pricey (and I have some pretty pricey sets myself) - but for a casual dude they are absolutely identical.
Soundwise you can simply rip it on your computer and stream it to your dac. You will never know if source was original or fake.
Not to mention pirate sites which will let you pretty much recreate any CD...
With vinyl records, outside of handful of very special "fakes" for collectors, it is almost never an issue.

 

You’re trying to apply intuitive thinking to a concept that requires analytical thinking.

The grooves pressed into an LP contain a physical representation of the physical action that was done by a cutting head, thereby preserving a reasonable facsimile of the original physical magnetization of the master tape or decoded digital file that was used to guide the cutter head. Note that some LPs were and are mastered from digital files.

A CD is stamped with pits that represent a digital encoding of the master tape or master digital file. The data has no dimensionality of any relevance to physical audio, and unlike an LP a transducer (i.e., a phono cartridge) cannot be used to decode the data. The data cannot be read in physical space by anything other than a light beam.

Digital encoding includes all of the information that is on a master tape or master digital file, and when done properly (and when the data exists in the original recording) can provide even more dynamic range than analog media such as LPs. Whether or not someone prefers a particular analog transduction and preamp chain over a digital decoding chain for a given mastering is entirely a matter of personal preference and the quality of the mastering.

There is no comparative dimensionality between an LP and a CD. One is a physical analogue of the music, the other is a digital encoding of the music with the potential to hold more audible detail and range and so on compared to analog. Whether or not the digital encoding of a particular album makes use of the full depth and breadth of the technology is a whole other matter.

Anyone who is satisfied with an analogue system . . . should be. High quality analogue systems push and can exceed the boundaries of most people’s hearing. The same is true for digital with the added potential for greater dynamic range. Thinking of the comparison between the two types of recording and mastering and reproduction systems in terms of the dimensionality of the physical media ends up leading in the wrong direction and a dead end.

 

Actually it was more conceptual in nature but based on the physical parameters of each media type.

I have a good bit of education/experience in signal analysis. I liken digital to television, it's 2 dimensional (the image and movement or time) vs. a hologram where the illusion of a third dimension.

I'm trying to wrap my head around the space(s) available in which the information can be stored and is there an inherent quantitative advantage.

I'm an engineer and according to my lovely wife I am INCAPABLE of intuition.

 

What his appearance has to the information he provides? Gee, you were asked to point to a single inaccurate statement he makes, and you would not do it.

 

How it a cutting head making a groove from a digital master (via digital to analog conversion) different than listening to a digital file via digital to analog conversion?

 

Seek ye a Technics SL-QD33.

 

This is much better:

 

The stuff on my cables is nice, especially the stuff on my phono and HDMI cables

 

Depends on how you define fake.
I consider the European grey market to be full of fake releases.
Those are just pressings of randomly downloaded crap as a master, neither the original publisher nor the artist gets anything.
It’s like burning a CD with crap from piratebay, wrapping it in some picture art and putting it up for sale.

 

When comparing vinyl with PCM, I don’t see any ‘difference in dimensions’... They’re just represented in different ways.

One channel has up/down in voltage, which is diagonal up/down movement in a cartridge coil. Or with digital the bit value getting higher or lower.
Then there’s time.
For vinyl, that’s the waves in the grooves (analog data) passed per time in the groove.
For digital it’s the amount of samples (digital data) passed per time.

When displaying audio in an graph:
High/low is y-dimension on a graph, time is the x-dimension in the graph.

So I’d say both vinyl and PCM are two dimensional.

Edit: don’t let the physical space mislead you; the coil movement in respect to the grooves is diagonal when looking at the front of the cartridge, so it’s going both up/down the groove as well as sideways; those are two spatial dimensions.
But these get ‘lumped together’ into one dimension of a two way movement (high/low).

 

The Green solution is to ban all physical media.

Distribute all music as high resolution PCM or DSD.

So at least we can continue to argue which is better 24bit 192kHz PCM or 5.6MHz DSD.

 

Is Streaming Music Dangerous to the Environment? One Researcher Is Sounding the Alarm

 

Who mentioned streaming?

...and if that is what I think it is, it is a load of ....

Distribution of Records, Tapes, CDs etc. is far more dangerous to the environment.

 

When listening to an LP, you are in part listening to two mechanical transducers: the turntable cartridge and the loudspeakers.

When listening to a digital file or stream, you're in part listening to one transducer: the loudspeakers.

Derive from that specific (physical, mechanical) difference what you want. It's not what @Ingenieur was talking about.

 

Indeed there are some "unofficial" stuff out there on vinyl. But they clearly different from original, not just packaging. With CDs there are identical to official CD.