I love when an expert weighs in to correct bad information. Thanks for that clarification Doug.
I threw away all of my CD cases and put them in unlabeled paper sleeves to save space. I like digging through them just as much as flipping through the lps. I've never organized any of my music , I just start flipping until I find something I feel like listening to. It also keeps me from listening to the same albums all of the time.
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Interesting thing is that a disc player works for ages without much interference or expense involved. On vinyl you have expensive ( often VERY expensive) consumables .
The stylus doesn't last more than 500 to 100 hours and is always in danger of being damaged easily ! Since ,often ,stylii cost almost as much as a new cartridge it's better to buy a new cartridge and really good ones can cost as much as a new CD player ! It's like replacing a disc player every 1000 hours or less or just thrown away if you are careless during that period !
Not to mention that the medium (vinyl) itself keeps getting worn on every play. Faster if it collects dust and that's hard to control.
Optical discs can also get scuffed and scratched or suffer from CD rot but typically can last as 'new' longer. However scratched vinyl can still be played but optical discs will come to a dead stop after a point of physical damage !
AND the vinyl market is growing again !
One Singapore shop seller of vinyl said that most buyers were youngsters !
MP3 to vinyl...of course they got it right. But are they aware that there is good digital audio also ?
The stylus doesn't last more than 500 to 100 hours and is always in danger of being damaged easily ! Since ,often ,stylii cost almost as much as a new cartridge it's better to buy a new cartridge and really good ones can cost as much as a new CD player ! It's like replacing a disc player every 1000 hours or less or just thrown away if you are careless during that period !
Not to mention that the medium (vinyl) itself keeps getting worn on every play. Faster if it collects dust and that's hard to control.
Optical discs can also get scuffed and scratched or suffer from CD rot but typically can last as 'new' longer. However scratched vinyl can still be played but optical discs will come to a dead stop after a point of physical damage !
AND the vinyl market is growing again !
One Singapore shop seller of vinyl said that most buyers were youngsters !
MP3 to vinyl...of course they got it right. But are they aware that there is good digital audio also ?
Sooooo? Has anyone tried mixing out of phase noise into a digital track to hear if it adds something good? Any suggestions as to the type of noise and its spectrum?
I have removed the out of phase signal below 200Hz on a few vinyl rips, but am not at home to hear it on speakers. Did not make much, if any, difference on Sony earbuds.
I have removed the out of phase signal below 200Hz on a few vinyl rips, but am not at home to hear it on speakers. Did not make much, if any, difference on Sony earbuds.
I will also confess that I physically feel much better when I am forced to get up periodically to deal with...
Maybe you're not yet geezer enough! Natures's call gets me out of my seat about every cd album's worth.
BTW, my experience has been nearly opposite to some stated here. I can and often do listen to FLAC files all day. But was at a 'phile's house for a group listen recently. Racks of vinyl incl numerous 4s, turntable and cartridge that cost more than my car, the other boxes costing many times what my house did.... sounded good, impressive, nice, but nothing like actual live music. Mushy bass, vague, kind of unstable ambience, living like but plasticy fake. I was tired of it after the first few 45s really but stayed (carpooling). Pretty much, one or two albums of vinyl has always been my limit of tolerance.
Anyway, my point is that not everyone hears vinyl as generally better!
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No, they don't
But really good vinyl on a very good turntable and cart - can sound almost as good as tape.
Here's a swift and rough spectrum analysis of in-phase versus out-of-phase rumble.
The recording is of a 3kHz test tone from a test disc. TT is EMT 938, well respected broadcast TT.
Using Audacity, stereo track folded to mono, resampled at 8kHz (slowest avail), and 1min30s sample analysed with 64k FFT.
Result posted below shows that there is low level low frequency audioband out-of-phase content, exceeding that of in-phase noise. There are also spectral artefacts which are unique to out-of-phase content.
Appols the vertical scale of these graphs is not the same due to autoscale of Audacity, so read carefully!
The recording is of a 3kHz test tone from a test disc. TT is EMT 938, well respected broadcast TT.
Using Audacity, stereo track folded to mono, resampled at 8kHz (slowest avail), and 1min30s sample analysed with 64k FFT.
Result posted below shows that there is low level low frequency audioband out-of-phase content, exceeding that of in-phase noise. There are also spectral artefacts which are unique to out-of-phase content.
Appols the vertical scale of these graphs is not the same due to autoscale of Audacity, so read carefully!
Attachments
Just to suggest a small error in thinking. It has been said arm LF resonance is a factor if prefering LP over CD. The same resonance more or less is found in the cutting playback arm which most likely will be a SME 12 inch and Shure M97. The EQ is adjusted to suit the LF resonance by ear. What some may not realise is that the cutting master sent to be cut is what the producer wants. Some say the cutting engineer transforms it into something better. That might be in a small way true as the cut has to suit the lathe. A good engineer gets it very close. The LF resonance of most of our hi fi system arms will be like the cutting lathe playback arm. If you try a SME arm damper you might find the playback a bit bass light.
Nope. Take it from an old analog recording engineer, that was always caused by the tape print through. It is simply the magnetic tape imprinting to the layer underneath on the reel. It could and did happen on the 2 inch multitracks as well as the half inch masters, especially after long periods of storage. God I am glad those days are long gone, save for retro tape recording idiots. Geeze have I really been around that long that only here seem to know this standard info? Crap. I think I will edit my wrists with a razor blade now, demagnetized of course, and at a 60 degree angle.
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And almost as good as digital recording done with nice Weiss or Lavry or Mytec et al AD converters. Around 2005 we achieved parity with the finest analog.It happened when the converters reached around 116 snr, this figure also indicates that jitter is well out of the picture.We are now looking at 32 bit converters with figures of 127 or better, approaching theoretical infinity. As far as DA is concerned, $100 will buy you pristine conversion on ebay if you know where to look.No, they don't
But really good vinyl on a very good turntable and cart - can sound almost as good as tape.
Interesting. Assuming no warp wow effects how much of the out of phase is resonances of arm and cartridge? And can they be effectively damped mechanically?
Hi Pete,
Thanks for adding to this thread.
I'll bite: Where does one look for pristine DA conversion on eBay for $100?
Cheers,
B B
Not much of that will be associated with the main cart compliance/arm mass resonance, except for the stuff down below 20Hz or so. Though there are excellent pitch stability and trackability reasons to control that resonance via damping, it can't explain the rumble spectrum in those plots which is squarely in the lf audioband, a good few octaves above the cart/arm resonance.
The miracle of the main c 10Hz cart/arm resonance is that for stylus motion below the resonant frequency the headshell follows stylus motion in-phase. Above the resonant frequency, headshell pretty much stays still so cartridge transcribes stylus motion which is then always out-of-phase wrt headshell motion. This is why the whole system works, and it's so simple, just a physics property of mechanical resonant systems. The penalty is that at the resonant frequency there is poor stability, which is generally tolerable but open to improvement.
Most of the out-of-phase spectral content in those plots is audioband lf, not associated with the cart/arm resonance though. That audioband content seems far more likely to convey pseudo-ambience, if any such effect is real.
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Or, put another way, it spans the spectral range at the bottom end of what most domestic replay systems will reproduce ..........I'm coming round to thinking there might be something in Douglas' OP hypothesis about pseudo-ambience!
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