Yes, Coppertop is talking out of his keister. Modern audiophile records and re-releases aren't necessarily cut with the bass summed to mono or the treble fiddled with to prevent mistracking. I too have compared LPs directly to master tape dubs and they are very, very close. A good LP rig gives up very little to a master tape played on a Studer studio tape recorder. CDs on the other hand...
John
I read recently something pertinent to this discussion & something worth pondering:
"Perhaps, in fact, none of these things (CDs, vinyl records, speakers, microphones) work well at all - perhaps all the magic lies in the ear which extrapolates across errors, fills in imperfections and delivers to our conscious mind a remarkably consistent audio picture where a great many “details” are actually psycho-acoustic “patches” over an imperfect signal."
So perhaps what is being discussed here should not be about which format measures better than another but rather which format most closely matches the expectation of the active system we call hearing. It strikes me that unless we know exactly how hearing works, no measurement can be used as a means of determining which will "sound better" or "more realistic" - the only instrument we have at our disposal is our sense of hearing. Until we have a complete understanding of how this instrument functions, it would seem to be arrogant or stupid to try to substitute other instruments or use other instruments to determine what is important to the sense of hearing.
"Perhaps, in fact, none of these things (CDs, vinyl records, speakers, microphones) work well at all - perhaps all the magic lies in the ear which extrapolates across errors, fills in imperfections and delivers to our conscious mind a remarkably consistent audio picture where a great many “details” are actually psycho-acoustic “patches” over an imperfect signal."
So perhaps what is being discussed here should not be about which format measures better than another but rather which format most closely matches the expectation of the active system we call hearing. It strikes me that unless we know exactly how hearing works, no measurement can be used as a means of determining which will "sound better" or "more realistic" - the only instrument we have at our disposal is our sense of hearing. Until we have a complete understanding of how this instrument functions, it would seem to be arrogant or stupid to try to substitute other instruments or use other instruments to determine what is important to the sense of hearing.
Iit always struck me how so called objectivists were trying to use instruments to prove that A measured better than B when in fact it never dawned on them (or they never allowed the fleeting thought to cross their scientific mind) that the criteria for hearing may have nothing to do with linearity at all.
why do you think 'objectists" who have designed the tech missed that
"create a synergistic system" with Your Loudspeakers in Your Room?
to extend Self's "Niceness Knob" - analogy - you really need your own mixing console - not a just the choice of SET or SS
"create a synergistic system" with Your Loudspeakers in Your Room?
to extend Self's "Niceness Knob" - analogy - you really need your own mixing console - not a just the choice of SET or SS
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But... if instruments and measurements are useless for understanding electronic audio reproduction, what do you propose to use to understand the criteria for hearing? Instruments and measurements?
"Perhaps, in fact..."?? Which is it? Perhaps or in fact?
"Perhaps, in fact..."?? Which is it? Perhaps or in fact?
That's why I specifically laboured the point about the master tape having been messed about to begin with. Didn't I say that?
You're all waxing lyrical about something that has been *arbitrarily* messed about to suit the fragility of the medium. And even if there was no specific mixing of bass to mono, de-essing etc. on a particular disc, that may be because Billy Ray Cyrus was already 'vinyl friendly' music. It may also be that the producer or engineer knew that the recording was going to vinyl and said to the band "Sorry, but you can't make a feature of that bass effect, because it will disappear when they master it".
And I already established with one of your number that he is prone to psychological bias when he knows what he's listening for - as am I. So even if you *think* that vinyl reproduces the (messed about) master tape best, unless you can state why that is (apart from nebulous hand waving phrases) then it is highly likely you're imagining it.
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That, I don't necessarily deny. But if it is the case, what were the criteria that the developers of this miraculous vinyl system used when designing it? Can you point to a springy bit of metal in the cutting lathe and say "Look, there's the psychoacoustic patch"?
As far as I can tell, those 'philistine' engineers used conventional measurements of distortion and noise and frequency response when developing their system, and would have laughed themselves to death reading this forum.
Not sure who wrote this but clearly he is not aware of the vast knowledge on sound perception. It is very naive to think of the ear of anything more than a transducer; we know for decades that the perception is shaped, created and fudged in the brain, and that whatever the ear delivers to the brain is just a small set of all the inputs that are used to shape that perception.
Common knowledge, and there just for the taking/reading.
jan didden
IMO to reach a good sound reproduction we need a very large bandwith. Even if we are not hearing the higher or lower frequencies, they are present in the real world and should be also present in the recordings. (We can feel low bass can we not?)
The recreation of a large soundstage highly depends of the subliminar information existent out of our claimed hearing bandwith 20 ~20khz.
LP does not have a 20khz brikwall and the groove modulations are continuous (not digitized) so it is normal that it can recreate a more pleasing soundstage.
Even cassette sounds better (more real) than CD in most cases.
As far as noise goes, I removed the output mutting transistors in my CDP and I know that CD is not so silent after all.... I can hear the dac nasties in low volume passages.
File music is better because it has more definition but it is not comparable with analog master tapes.
The recreation of a large soundstage highly depends of the subliminar information existent out of our claimed hearing bandwith 20 ~20khz.
LP does not have a 20khz brikwall and the groove modulations are continuous (not digitized) so it is normal that it can recreate a more pleasing soundstage.
Even cassette sounds better (more real) than CD in most cases.
As far as noise goes, I removed the output mutting transistors in my CDP and I know that CD is not so silent after all.... I can hear the dac nasties in low volume passages.
File music is better because it has more definition but it is not comparable with analog master tapes.
Insight in the effects of social/cultural/regional differences would be a nice addition to the databank.
To be fair, I think the term "ear" in this case was intended to mean the hearing system in its totality, including the brain..? I don't draw such a clear boundary between transducer and processing as you do, Janneman. Aren't there various stages of pre-processing involved, some of which are actually in the ear itself? Don't the famous 'hair cells' correspond to different frequencies, like some sort of instant parallel frequency transform? (I don't know much about, but I know that I don't know much about it, if you see what I mean!)
Going back to the topic, I could accept that there are some ways in which the vinyl process *could* convey the illusion of live sound better than CD, 'by accident'. Maybe, for example, bass crossfeed might in fact be a good thing when using two speakers in a typical listening environment because without it, the ear/brain realises there's an unnatural gap in the middle... or something like that! If such a phenomenon existed, though, it wouldn't mean that it couldn't be reproduced in digital form, just that no one has worked out what it is yet.
(I won't hold my breath, though! But I could be persuaded by a sensible argument, and not just airy fairy wine tasting-type descriptions of pseudo-scientific listening 'tests').
Of course many discs are pressed from digital masters, anyway, or pass through digital delay lines at the cutting lathe..? (So I understand). And pressing plants demand restricted top end frequency response, anyway (I saw one that specified everything above 16 kHz to be removed, but it may not have been a very good plant!)
I take the point, though, that, LP does not have a brickwall filter inserted, and that noise and distortion components may therefore extend smoothly to some indeterminate frequency that the ear(/brain) somehow finds more natural. Another example of the 'accidentally' miraculous properties of vinyl?
You're missing the point - unless we understand how hearing works using instruments to measure sound that is important to hearing is just flailing around in the dark, possibly missing critical elements of sound that the ear considers more important than the measurements would lead one to believe.
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So you think of the ear as a transducer, simply capturing sound waves & presenting them as nerve impulses for the brain to interpret? You know of no papers/studies that have modeled the ear as an active, non-linear transducer? And so this is what you are basing the whole argument on?
Again, you don't understand what's being said - VINYL designers/engineers don't know more about the working of hearing than DIGITAL designers, both are flailing about in the dark and as a a result some will hit on a factor that "sounds" better i.e more realistic to the ears. It may not have anything to do with linearity! So perhaps we should all agree that we are all stumbling about in the area when we don't have an agreed, accurate model of hearing?
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Hmmm. Did you read the same post I did?
I was taking issue with this statement:
"perhaps all the magic lies in the ear which extrapolates across errors, fills in imperfections and delivers to our conscious mind a remarkably consistent audio picture where a great many “details” are actually psycho-acoustic “patches” over an imperfect signal"
If you read the pertinent documentation you will see that the ear is a transducer that turns vibrations into electrical impulses for the brain. Now, the brain doesn't just sit there to wait for whatever it gets from the ear. From all the clilia in the ear, the hair cells that transform vibration into elctrical impulses, 80% is actually under control of the brain and provides feedback to the sensitivity and other parameters of the 20% that DO provide one-way signals into the brain.
So the ear itself is a pretty passive sensor but its working is heavily manipulated by the brain. There's extensive two-way traffic between ear and brain and the whole process (which we should in this context call more perception than hearing) is pretty complex. But the point I was making was that the ear itself doesn't do any manipulation or whatever to present 'interpreted sound' to the ear.
The ear can present whatever it wants, but it's the brain that accepts it, ignores it or downright manipulates it to suit its own agenda. (Which is the way it happens with all senses, and then some).
The ear does not "extrapolates across errors, fills in imperfections and delivers to our conscious mind a remarkably consistent audio picture". Its not the ears that do that, it all happens *between* the ears.
jan didden
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If the same vibrations of air are reproduced at the ear as would have been experienced 'live', then it doesn't matter how the brain/ear works, or perceives sound. I always thought the designers of vinyl and digital were trying to do exactly that, not understand how hearing works.
Maybe that basic premise is wrong, and without factors like the sensation of subsonic vibrations, or the 'DC' air pressure component of wind instruments, or the smell of the performers (!) and audience, it is pointless even trying. Maybe the ceremony of vinyl and the smell of burning dust from a valve amp in some way compensates for the missing factors!
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