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Okay, I've been reading up quite a bit in the last few hours and that includes the linked thread above.
First off, Trancegeek, you state that vinyl is 92KHz, but this is incorrect. 92KHz refers to a sampling rate, which only digital sources have. An analog source has no sampling rate because it is in an original wave form.
This argument is basically, which is a better medium, vinyl or cd. The problem with this arguement is that no one ever defines what "better" is. My idea of better is obviously different than trancegeek's, as shown in all of our posts on this thread and various others.
I believe that Trancegeek is defining better as the medium which has the better capability of reproducing the original source, at this moment in time. Please correct me if I am wrong.
I define better as a collection of convenience, storage requirements, cost, longevity, and future capability in addition to future potential markets.
Given that I have not misinterperated Trancegeek's definition of "better" I still belive that cds are better, according to my definition. We are both correct though, given each of our definitions.
Currently, vinyl does have the ability to reproduce sound better than CD, but it does not have the longevity that CD does. That cannot be argued. CDs are sampled at 44.1KHz, and therefore lose some quality. Believe it or not, the quality loss is not as great as you think, though! To understand why, you first have to understand what a digital sound is, and how it gets to be a digital sound and what happens to it after it is read by the source (cd-player etc). But I shall touch on this in a minute.
The problem with vinyl is fidelity. Fidelity is the the degree to which an electronic system accurately reproduces the sound or image of its input signal(www.dictionary.com). The key words here are "electronic system". This problem is due to the fact each and every time you run the needle through the groove, the needle melts the groove as it passes by. Any dust, smoke or other air particles that are in the way, will then fuse to your record and become part of the surface as it quickly cools. There isn't any point in dictating an exact number of times that you can play the record and notice the quality different. There are too many variables.
First off, if you are in your bedroom, with a computer, dj equip, stereo equip etc, the items in the room have a negative charge due to all of the current running through them. This negative charge will attract dust particles, smoke etc because most of that stuff is positively charged. This is how ionic air purifiers and swiffer works! In clubs, you have a LOT of smoke, a huge amount of dust and other debris floating around. So, no matter where you spin, you are subjecting yourself to an atmosphere which is riddled with the very things that will destroy your records the fastest.
Secondly, even if you manage to keep your records spotless, you still cannot change the fact that you are melting your record groove every time you play the record. (To learn how to preserve your vinyl the best, click here ). This format will inately loose its fidelity over time, making it inferior to any medium that will not loose its fidelity.
Thirdly, there are two more things to consider--that of frequency range and of dynamic range. Frequency range is the difference between the highest pitch and the lowest pitch, which the audio medium is capable of handling. This is typically 20Hz-20,000Hz for most electronics. So can vinyl handle more? Yes, I think that it can, but I cannot confirm that. But, does it matter that vinyl can hold more? Maybe not, and that depends what mixer and what stereo system you have. There are some mixers that only have a master output of 20Hz-20,000Hz. In fact, the vast majority of cheap to decent mixers have this--and even some good ones. There are several other high end mixers made by Rane TTM 56 ( 10Hz-30,000Hz) and Allen & Heath Xone 464 (20Hz-40,000Hz), though if you spin vinyl, how does your mixer stand up? Is your signal degraded from the original source when it leaves your mixer? Chances are, you are eliminating an advantage of vinyl here. The human ear also has to be considered as well as the rest of your system. Does the signal get clipped as it leaves your reciever, your amplifier or your speakers? If not, then surely, you have spent quite a bit of money. Then you have to be able to hear it accurately, which no human can hear up to 40,000Hz anyway, and you can't "feel" that frequency like you can the lower ones.
Another interesting thing is that digital signals flow easier through wires than analog signals because the signal is much more organized and coherent.
So what about dynamic range? Dynamic range is the difference between the loudest sound and the softest silence. Vinyl has the advantage here too.
How much do all of these advantages of vinyl really matter? Some of that is up to personal preference of how you like to hear your music. To a degree it is not subjective though. It has to be enough to outweigh all of the other advantages of CDs, which I will get into later in this post.
So we are back to the DAC/ADC (Digital-to-analog converter/Analog to Digital Converter). There are two important concepts in digital audio. The sampling rate, which controls how many samples are taken per second, and the sampling precision, which controls how many possible different gradations (or quanitizations) are allowed. The sampling rate standard for normal CDs is 44.1KHz, or 44,100 samples taken every second. The sampling precision standard for cds is currently 16-bit, which means that there are 2^16th or 65536 possible quantizations per sample taken. Is this a lot? Well, compared to vinyl it is not really all that good if you are an audiophile. But that is not the end of it. That just covers the conversion of the data to a digital source. You cannot hear a digital signal, so it must be converted back to an analog signal.
To get the digital signal back to an analog signal, it must go through a DAC. The converter relies on noise shaping, a phenomenon that takes advantage of the human ear's inability to notice noise when it occurs in higher frequencies. Basically, the human ear is most sensitive to noise at 5 KHz, and is almost unable to detect it at 20 KHz. A key part of the converter is a circuit called a delta-sigma modulator, which takes the binary signal (1s and 0s) from the CD and changes them to a steady pulse, called a pulse train. The pulse train contains an average of the change in the amount of energey represented in the sample. A low-pass filter removes all time-domain information and recovers only the average energy of the pulse train that feeds it. The key here is to understand that the pulse-train waveform is clocked at a very high frequency compared to the 44.1 KHz sample rate. The pulse train is sent through the DAC and changed into an analog signal. Because of this, the digital signal is smoothed out and retains quite a bit of the original analog quality.
The delta-sigma circuit has two main sections:
Delta receives the incoming digital signal and monitors the outgoing pulse train. It creates an error signal, which is based on the difference between the binary signal coming in and the pulse train going out.
Sigma adds up the results of the error signal created by delta and supplies this sum to the low-pass filter.
The error signal is used by the low-pass filter to average the analog signal. Basically, this means that minute adjustments are made to the analog signal to compensate for the differences between the binary signal and the pulse train.
click here if you want to read a very in-depth article about how the 1-bit DAC works.
So this helps put CDs back up to par with vinyl.
Still, it seems like vinyl is kicking some CD-ass. But for one, the fact that a CD signal will never degrade, they are cheap to make copies of, and are more tolerant of storage conditions definetely help put CDs back up on par with vinyl. In addition, you also have to remember that after a while, the quality advantage that vinyl has at the moment, WILL degrade to quality much worse than a CD.
Again, this isn't the end of the story. There are two other audio formats, DVD and SACD that need to be discussed. Remember, vinyl has been around since 1878 when Thomas Edison made his first recording on a tin cylinder. CDs have only had about 25 years to advance in technology.
DVD audio is very similar to normal CD audio, except that it's sampling rate is 192KHz, which is the industry standard for recording. And has a 24-bit rate, which is also the industry standard. Before discussing SACD, remember, that even if vinyl has the capability of handling more than DVD audio has to offer, it is killed at the very source of the recording, and so for any medium, 192KHz and 24-bit is currently the best RECORDED audio that you can possible have. It is moot to argue any other capability other than what the best RECORDED source can possibly be.
Next we have SACD, which stands for Super Audio Compact Disc. This format encodes music at an astonishing 2,822,400 samples per second, a frequency responce of 100KHz (as opposed to 20KHz of CD) and a dynamic range of 120dB The bit rate is now meaningless because Sony has codeveloped a new ADC/DAC called Direct Stream Digital® encoding. You can read more about it here .
This clearly engulfs even the recording standard. It allows for the next standard to exist at peace with even the most thick-headed audiophile. It far surpasses vinyl and normal CDs both.
Part of my definition of "better" is that the cd format has future capability and future potential markets. The capability is right here in SACDs, which ARE currently on the market, though exist limitedly until people have the need to replace the normal cd player that they have now. The market also involves NOT having to replace your entire music collection too. This is one of the main reasons MD flopped big-time! After a dj builds up his music collection, be it vinyl or cd, that dj wants the music to last him his career as a dj.
Can vinyl do this? In short, no. It will degrage with time, and there is no real market for vinyl outside of djs and audiophiles. That may be a decent sized market, but you cannot deny that MOST music (percentage-wise) is pressed onto cd today. You have to take the entire music industry into perspective at this point, not just trance or techno etc. People own cds. People who like trance own dj-mixed cds etc etc etc. The market for vinyl will slowly fade as those djs who use nothing but vinyl now slowly get older and more and more music is pressed onto cd and not vinyl. The fact that vinyl will slowly fade out is because of the market and because superior sounding audio is knocking on our doors.
You only have to wait for more music to be pressed onto SACDs, which most players are backwards compatable, in addition to being able to store normal 44.1KHz CD audio on the same SACD so that any cd player can read it. Sony knows about what it takes to make a market now because it flopped so big-time with MDs.
In short, CD is where it is at. MP3s are a fad that will wear out when pirating music is finally delt with. (SACDs also have watermarks for piracy concerns). NEW vinyl may have the slight advantage today, but tomorrow is coming very soon. Will you be able to transition your music collection easily to the new formats?
Please people, I spent several hours researching this. PLEASE put an end to this year-long arguement!!!
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When you dance, the DJ takes you on a journey, but he or she is usually not the focus of your experience at a club or festival or wherever you hear the music. Dancing is. Music is.
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