Cds have more dynamic range than vinyl?

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

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  1. audiomixer

    audiomixer As Bald As The Beatles

    I guess you're the "authority". I'm fine with that & I'm more than fine with my own opinions as you are with your own "opinions".
     
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  2. missan

    missan Forum Resident

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    Stockholm
    What has matching to do with damping? What is the need for 'properly matched with a suitable cartridge', if the arm is sufficiently damped, it´s not making sense.
     
    Last edited: May 12, 2015
  3. Scott Wheeler

    Scott Wheeler Forum Resident

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    Again, you go right for the personal attack. Do you want to talk about audio or not? Cause right now you aren't doing it
     
  4. Scott Wheeler

    Scott Wheeler Forum Resident

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    Wrong question. The question is what do damping and matching have to do with audible wow. And I already answered it
     
  5. chervokas

    chervokas Senior Member

    Yeah, that's exactly my understanding. Maybe one of the engineers here can clarify.

    I think with PCM audio each sample has X number of bits, that X being the bit depth of the recording.

    So 44.1/16 audio has 44,100 samples per second, and each of those 44.1K samples has a binary number 16 digits long associated with it that's used to encode the amplitude of the signal at that 1/44,100th of a second. It's not like a low amplitude sample has 1 bit of data and a high amplitude sample has 16 bits of data. All the samples have a 16-bit binary string associated with them, that means for every 1/44,100th of a second of music there are 65,536 possible amplitude levels that can be encoded in a combination of ones and zeros 16 digits log, the primary effect of different bit depths being increases and decreases in S/N ratio and quantization error.

    That's already a a wider dynamic range and lower noise floor than anything the best vinyl can achieve, which would be more like 70dB of dynamic range and the equivalent of 11 or 12 bit digital audio.

    Now quantization -- the rounding off or truncating of the amplitude of the sample to the nearest digital value to represent it -- produces noise that's non-linear and an artifact that's unique to digital, and that's what dither is designed to address -- to replace the non-random rounding up or down to the nearest digital value with a random rounding up or down, creating less objectionable artifacts. This digital noise and distortion almost certainly has a different character than analog noise and distortion -- and it's not like in analog recording and playback we're not also introducing noise and distortion -- and even at the extremely low levels we're talking about here, these differences may account for the differences in character we hear between digital and analog audio (beyond the additional differences related to the mechanical noise and eccentricity related to vinyl playback).

    But I think it's not quite accurate to say analog has "infinite resolution" -- it obviously has limits at the noise floor and at some peak level where clipping occurs; nor to say that low amplitude samples in PCM audio files have fewer bits than high amplitude samples.

    We have to have some digital audio engineers or algorithm designers or something around here who can straighten at least this out as a matter of fact.
     
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  6. missan

    missan Forum Resident

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    You haven´t answered anything. Why should we match a cartridge to an arm, if the arm is damped enough?
     
  7. Robin L

    Robin L Musical Omnivore

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    You pretty much covered it, as far as I can tell. There's inherent distortions in analog tape, there's inherent distortions in the LP media, there's inherent distortions in PCM and DSD recording. They are all different. Different people respond to these different kinds of distortions in different ways. Any number of possible factors why people would respond differently. Many different reasons why some go on and on and on and on . . . .
     
    Last edited: May 12, 2015
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  8. audiomixer

    audiomixer As Bald As The Beatles

    Sorry. No, I no longer want to talk audio with you.
     
  9. Scott Wheeler

    Scott Wheeler Forum Resident

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    I thought you knew why. Are you quizzing me or do you not understand the problems you get when the arm/cartridge resonant frequency is too close to other specific frequencies regardless of how well damped any tonearm may be?
     
  10. Scott Wheeler

    Scott Wheeler Forum Resident

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    "no longer?" You never started
     
  11. missan

    missan Forum Resident

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    Stockholm
    Possibly isn´t it possible to choose any of the 65536 possible values. That would mean the resolution would be linear, which is maybe not so, as I see it.
    But someone could possibly clear this out.
     
  12. audiomixer

    audiomixer As Bald As The Beatles

    whatever...enjoy yourself...
     
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  13. missan

    missan Forum Resident

    Location:
    Stockholm

    What You are saying doesn´t really make much sense. Matching a cartridge is about getting the res freq within certain limits, what limits can be discussed and isn´t crystal clear. The idea if to keep the res freq away from possible exciting freq.
    If the arm is damped these limits have to a large extent lost their meaning. If You don´t mean getting a res freq between 4-15Hz is matching, it isn´t in my book.
     
  14. audiomixer

    audiomixer As Bald As The Beatles

    Especially since you have nothing listed on your profile page.
     
  15. chervokas

    chervokas Senior Member

    Resolution is linear, quantization noise isn't.
     
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  16. missan

    missan Forum Resident

    Location:
    Stockholm

    It´s good if it is linear when recording. But as I understand it that is not what some people here are rather firmly saying. Noise isn´t really any problem, with proper dithering it´s a non issue.
    Is the so called lower resolution in principle only a problem, and introduced, when mixing.
     
    Last edited: May 12, 2015
  17. Scott Wheeler

    Scott Wheeler Forum Resident

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    You need to know what equipment I personally own to discuss audio?
     
  18. audiomixer

    audiomixer As Bald As The Beatles

    Steve Hoffman and the other forum members appreciate it. Ask him.
     
  19. chervokas

    chervokas Senior Member

    Well, probably the differences we're hearing in analog vs digital -- like I said, even if we can set aside the mechanical noise and distortion of vinyl playback -- have to do with the different nature of the distortion and coloration of the recording process, and quantization noise and presumably even dither noise, is different than just the tape hiss and thermal noise and whatever harmonic distortion we've gotten used to and learned to listen around or even like with analog encoding and playback, and it may be having some impact on our experience of what digital audio sounds like. I mean, it's all still recorded music, it's still a facsimile of the original acoustic pressure waves in the room and the process is creating something on tape or disc. It's not that it's a non issue -- even if it is at what we assume is very low levels, something has to be responsible for the differences we hear -- but maybe it's not exactly the issue that people think it is. You know we use the word "noise" and hear that word and presume that means we're actually going to hear hum or hiss or maybe ringing or aliasing, but there are also things that maybe just present as a loss of detail, or sense of "hardness" to certain frequencies or something. I dunno, it's part of that challenge of correlating what we hear with what we can measure and vice versa. But I think a lot of people -- myself included and maybe even some audio engineers who are audio engineers and not computer scientists -- don't have the same kind of understanding of digital audio as they do of analog audio
     
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  20. missan

    missan Forum Resident

    Location:
    Stockholm

    Another thing is of course that we really don´t know know what is introduced in certain stages of the production, it´s for us totally unknown. So to have any real definitive answer to what we hear is very difficult.
     
  21. chervokas

    chervokas Senior Member

    Sure, in terms of deliberate production elements. But we've all probably a) heard enough live and recorded music; b) heard enough of the same music in multiple formats; and in the case of some of us c) have some experience making recordings -- whether at home or in pro or semi pro situations live and in studios, to have some meaningful idea of the character of certain things even if we haven't all done extensive controlled experiments.
     
    Last edited: May 12, 2015
    Robin L likes this.
  22. missan

    missan Forum Resident

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    Stockholm
    Well I´m not arguing in any way, but there are of course many different opinions how it should sound, or not. Never mind studio time.
     
  23. Hubert jan

    Hubert jan Forum Resident

    Are you the guy responsible for those ****** CD's ? I thought mixers and masteringpeople were the erudite well educated kind with golden ears.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: May 12, 2015
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