LP vs CD, Another Perspective
gmgraves -- Mon, 01/24/2011 - 18:11
Most audiophiles seem to be of two minds with regard to the
question of which is more "musical", LP or CD. There is also a third point of
view (mine) which says that both have their place and both are viable music
sources and can be enjoyable. The recent surge in activity (and I don't mean
disc jockeys at dance clubs) with regard to LP tells me that I'm not alone in
this view.
In spite of what those dedicated to the LP might say, the bare facts are simply that
theoretically, technologically speaking, CD is better. It just is. Setting
aside, for the moment, such obvious advantages as lack of noise, durability
(CDs, generally speaking do not deteriorate with each play, given reasonable
care. LPs OTOH, do deteriorate irrespective of the level of care given them)
and a total absence of such vinyl bugaboos like wow, flutter, running at the
wrong speed (unless the analog tape source for the CD had these problems - a
not unheard of phenomenon), not to mention inner-groove distortion, and
general mistracking, CD is just capable of flatter, wider frequency response,
lower distortion, wider dynamic range and better stereo separation. This
being the case, why is there any debate on this issue at ALL? And make no
mistake, one runs upon people all the time who will tell you that even after
almost thrity years of development, that LP is better. Just recently, I was
reading the letters-to-the-editor section of the British "Hi-Fi News and
Record Review" and found a letter from someone who finished his pean to LP playback (Via the venerable Garrard 301) with the words "I wouldn't have a CD player if you gave me one." Surely, such passion has some root. We can't put it all down to luddite-ism. Interest in LP is growing - even among the young who weren't even around in LPs heyday. I recently obtained a newly released integrated amplifier from a respected hi-end source which sports both MM and MC
cartridge inputs as well as a built-in 24-bit/192 KHz dual differential DAC
and an ADC (for record out)! So why is LP still seen as a viable alternative
to CD?
Well, I know my reasons for continuing to enjoy LP (the best LPs sound spectacularly musical) along with CD, SACD, DVD-A and high-resolution downloads as well as internet radio, the reason why many don't find CD to be superior to LPs is based on a very simple reality. While CD should be superior to LP, and certainly can be superior to LP, it is usually not as good.
The fact is that most commercial CDs sound simply wretched. They are overproduced
(or indifferently produced), compressed, limited and generally aimed at the
lowest common denominator. This problem isn't just limited to pop music
either. I find that it crosses all musical genres and barriers. The average
CD is just junk in my humble opinion. And I know that it doesn't have to be.
See, I do a lot of recording using decent quality equipment. I do this for fun, and not for commercial gain, but often I do get paid for my efforts making me a "semi-pro" these days. This wasn't always the case. A number of years ago, I was the archive recordist for a couple of major symphony orchestras and did a lot of location music
recording for National Public Radio and the Musical Heritage Society - and
actually have a number of records to my credit.
When I make CDs from my masters (which are recorded in the DSD format)they sound
gorgeous and NOTHING like 99% of all the commercial recordings one buys. If
all CDs sounded like the ones that I burn on my PC from music files off of my
DSD recorder, there would be no debate about CD vs LP. CD is simply better.
Unfortunately, as long as the commercial record labels continue to make such
unmitigated garbage and sell it as state-of-the-art CD recordings, many
people are going to prefer LPs because it looks as if the signal processing
needed to make an LP is, in the final analysis, less damaging to the music
than is the signal processing routinely applied to commercial CD production
these days.
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I wholeheartedly agree with you! The very recent CD players, in particular, sound like real music...at last!
I am a digital guy. Unlike the analog camp who can be downright arrogant and rude on this issue, I do not "diss" those who love LP's, turntables and tube gear. I will concede, based upon Robert Harley's observation, that a properly set-up high quality turntable system sounds better (or musically better) than digital. Before CD's, LP was all there was and I was happy with that. I dutifully cleaned my LP's with Last before play, sprayed the LP with Zero Stat, cleaned the dust off of my stylus, lifted the tone arm at the end of play and I didn't really mind that. And early digital was bad. As digital improved, I moved away from LP's. I don't have a "listening seat" - it is background music while I do other things. Nor do I accept the view that taking all of the foregoing steps forces me to get more into the music. Nor do I accept the fact that after buying the best highest priced and/or best turntable, tonearm, cartridge and phono pre-amp and playing 180 gm vinyl after cleaning with expensive VPI vacuum cleaners, I can still hear pop and clicks. Those who say that they can look (or hear) past the pops and clicks to the music, after spending this kind of money, have no credibility with me. Although I cannot afford DCS upsampling DAC's, Simoon Audio Intergrated amps or SooLoos music servers, my entry to mid-level gear sounds very good to me. Whether or not it achieves concert hall reality, I really don't care - it just sounds fine and I can still manage to get into and enjoy the music. Let those who enjoy everything analog continue to enjoy their music in their preferred format. I hate to read those letters to Stereophile and Absolute Sound putting down digital in the same arrogant way Beta Max lovers put down VHS and Mac lovers put down windows PC based systems. Can't we all just get along?
I wouldn't write off the quality of digital. 44.1 may be on the edge, but 192 is better, no ifs, ands, or buts -- the first recording medium in history that's so transparent recording engineers say they can't tell the difference between the recording and the live mic feed. What a difference from early digital, when an engineer for a major label told me that when, during a recording session, they switched from the mic feed to the confidence head on the analog backup master, listeners' expressions turned to one of dismay, and that when they then switched to the digital master, they turned to expressions of horror.
I can certainly understand, given the limited availability of high quality digital material, why some people would choose to continue using their turntables. I personally find it easier to ignore those ticks and pops than I do to bad digital. But at this point, I think it's unfortunate that that's necessary. We can do so much better.
I appreciate this post. Earlier this summer I was struggling with whether to stay all digital or go vinyl. After hearing my brother's vinyl rig (Linn LP12 through ARC electronics to Maggie 20.1s) compared to ARC cd player and Ayre QB9 DAC, I decided I wanted to get back into vinyl. So now I have a PS Audio Perfect Wave DAC and Bridge with iPad app as controller and that couldn't be easier for the digital end of the spectrum, then have a Basis table, Vector arm and Benz cartridge with Herron phono preamp for the vinyl end of the spectrum. I totally enjoy both, and even though I spend more time lately listening to vinyl, I am very glad to have the convenient at-a-touch digital that is very close in sound to analogue. Especially with well recorded CDs or hi-resoultion downloads, the difference in sonics (and musical enjoyment) is very similar for me between the formats. Digital for convenience, dynamics, silent backgrounds, etc. Analogue for the experience and warmth/organic/dimensional sound and energy.
If you think the Bridge sounds good, try out the PWT, I and others find it better than the Bridge. Initially I bought ONLY the Bridge, until my dealer lent me his PWT and the PWT with the PWD, in my and other opinions, is better than the Bridge.
In any case the new direction of "digital" is an exciting one.
Hard to imagine something sounding better than the Bridge but now my interest in PWT is peaked -- what areas does the PWT excel at? I wish it played SACD, as my shelf space for a transport holds a XA777es player so I can play my SACDs.
You are right about SACD, but with the new high res stuff, it will be phased out but your current transport serves it's purpose.
For some further insight I will provide you with a link regarding my experience and you read the thread as to some other comments. If your dealer can loan you one, you should try it:
http://www.psaudio.com/ps/forum/viewthread/1619/P30/
Thanks, that is a helpful thread. I love the fact PS Audio's CEO engages so directly with consumers. He is keeping it real for sure.
I originally posted the following a couple of weeks ago (probably under the wrong section) but hope it's relevant here.
I've been lucky enough to be involved in the high-end audio industry for the last five years (I'm not currently, so please don't read the following as an attempt to drum up business) but for at least the last year or so I've been utterly dismayed by the fact that it's impossible to open up a hi-fi magazine withouth the 'DEATH OF CD' gleefully being pronounced. Why am I perturbed? Because over the last 2-3 years the performance of the CD format has improved exponentially. Players like Esoteric's K01 or K03, Audio Research's CD8, Gryphon's Mikado Signature, Wadia's 581 - all of them (and yes I have heard all of them) offer lifelike sound with large dollops of emotional involvement. And none of them bear the thumb print of the dreaded digititis.
Recently I heard the following system: ML 512 SACD / 326S pre / 532 power amp and ProAc Carbon6 loudspeakers. Now I can safely say I had NEVER heard sound like this before. Previous great systems I'd experienced might have been able to match up to it on one specific genre or another, but irrespective of whatever type of music I threw at it, this system (well, to me at least) represented a new frontier. I've seen Donald Fagen's 'Nightfly' album described before in the hi-fi press as a compressed 80's recording - well, not this time round. Here this 'compressed' recording opened up and bloomed in a startling glue-you-to-your-seat manner. I imagined that this is how it must have sounded in the control room of The Village Recorder, maybe even better (I've been in a lot of recording studios!) It was just so supremely pleasurable; how I wished all the high-end nay-sayers out there could have heard it even just for one minute.
The same hi-fi press who are so gleefully collaborating in the attempt to bury the optical disk have conversely been the main cheerleaders in the vinyl revival. Why is it worth all the endless faffing about? For one simple reason: it sounds better. Well I've got news for you - it doesn't! There's a review online of the 512 (I think it's Home Theatre.com or something like that) and the reviewer opines that the 512 is the first CD player he's experienced that actually surpasses the performance of the mega price-ticket turntables. Am I allowed to repeat such a sacriligious assertion here on the hallowed territory of The Absolute Sound!
I'm not immune to the appeal of hi-res downloads, and I can appreciate a space-saving set up that's high on useability and low on messing about. But I've auditioned both a full-fat Sooloos system as well as a Macbook (with solid state drive)/ Ayre QB9 and neither matched up sonically to the players I've mentioned. Yes they both sounded great, but not OMG great. And isn't OMG great the goal all of us audiophiles are meant to be aiming for.
So, to anyone out there planning on spending their next thousand free evenings burning music onto a computer - don't bother. Instead visit your local dealer and ask him to let you listen to a CD player that he thinks is really good. Then buy it, take it home, and let the music flow. And don't bother about the fact you can't control it from your ipad. I mean we spend all day as it is staring at screens, do we really need to do more goggling when we get home, just to enjoy our music collection?
Somewhere in here is a mystery I can't solve. As mentioned previously, a sad percentage of commercial CD's sound awful. However, many of these I'd almost thrown in the trash (rubbish bin in the UK) sound reasonably musical on my Meridian 808.2 CD player. Somewhere I read that this is the player actually correcting faults on the CD recording itself. I can't for the life of me figure out how this can be achieved. Does anyone have an explanation?
And in the context of this threads' original theme I find myself still playing lots of music from LP's and enjoying it immensely. There's the artwork to ogle too and, as yet, no digital medium has equalled that. Maybe that's part of the future for the iPad?
Whoever told you that is partially right. The player corrects for "read errors", though, not faults. IOW, nothing can make a poorly recorded, poorly mastered CD sound good, but the system has been designed to deal with errors resulting from the laser/disc interface not being perfect. The system is designed using two protocols for dealing with soft errors (those resulting from the laser misreading a sample as it plays. soft errors are not actual disc flaws, and usually do not repeat, IOW, the same sample probably won't be read in error if the disc is played again), and hard errors (read errors caused by flaws in the disc and scratches and dirt on the disc). The first of these is called "Cross-Interleaved Reed Solomon Coding" or CIRC. This is really difficult to explain without a lot of maths, so I'm not going to try, but suffice to say that the CIRC can tell when a sample has been misread, and as long as the error doesn't cover too many samples in a row, it can actually replace the faulty sample, on the fly as the disc plays with the correct missing information (remember, in CD audio, there are forty-four thousand, one hundred 16-bit samples for every second of audio). When there are too many errors in a row for CIRC to work, the system falls back on a second-tier error correction methodology called interpolation, and essentially this means guessing. As an example of this, I give you row of numbers: 12, 13, _, 15, 16, and asked you to guess the missing number, you can tell, by the CONTEXT, that the missing number is probably going to be 14. You know this by looking at the value of the numbers in the sequence preceding the blank space, and the numbers in the sequence occurring after the blank space. In this case, the chances of your guess being correct are, for all intents and purposes, 100%. This is exactly how interpolation works. it looks at the samples before the missing information and after the missing information, and it "fills in the blanks" with an educated guess. In digital audio, interpolation only occurs in errors too large to be corrected by CIRC method and probably represent scores, perhaps hundreds of misread samples in a row. Since each sample represents an instantaneous amplitude (1/44,100th of a second), obviously a long string consisting or scores or hundreds of missing (or wrongly interpreted) samples are going to be harder to "guess" correctly. In this case, interpolation will introduce distortion as the "guesses" it makes are likely fairly uncorrelated to the actual musical performance. And, of course, at some point, a large enough error is going to cause the laser to literally lose its place causing skipping or sticking. Practically speaking, soft errors, corrected on the fly by CIRC, are generally benign and affect the sound quality not at all. Interpolation, OTOH, since it occurs on much larger (usually hard) read errors, is damaging to the sound, and while the disc might "play" OK, it will sound significantly poorer than a pristine disc with little or no interpolation. I hope this explanation helps.
Thanks for the detailed explanation. Re-reading the blurb given to me when auditioning the 808.2 at the retailers I'm still puzzled about some of the jargon used. They say "Data is upsampled to a 176.4kHz sample rate and 24-bit depth by Meridian's proprietary Resolution Enhancement algorithm before going to delta-sigma DAC chips. Data is then subjected to an "apodizing" filter device."
Googling "Apodizing" brings up technical papers from the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society. These managed to completely confuse me. Not that that's hard to do as I have zero maths skills. Maybe I should just forget all about it and just enjoy the music?
That's probably best, yes. By the way, the Meridian Apodizing filter is just their "market-speak" name for a fast-Fourier based smoothing filter for the stair-step analog output of a DAC. All DACs use smoothing filters. but most aren't the fast -Fourier variety. BTW, lots of DACs up-sample, but most up-sampling schemes stop at 24-bit/96KHz even with 192 KHz DACs so 176.4 is a 4X upsampling scheme (not to be confused with over-sampling).
Digital theory is NOT simple and it is very math intensive.
As long as the very intensive maths gets the results I'm now enjoying, from a medium I once loathed, I'm happy. I'd spent so much money on irritating, unmusical CD players over the years I almost gave up completely on the Redbook medium. I again find myself thinking about that idiotic slogan they fed us at the beginning of the CD era. "Perfect sound forever" . Maybe it should have read 'Good enough forever but still not perfect'.
16-bit/44.1 KHz Red Book CD will never be perfect, but it CAN be perfect enough for any practical consideration. As long as humans are involved in the recording, mastering and manufacture of CDs, there will always be ample opportunity for a screw-ups. Believe it or not, there are performing musicians who have some really weird ideas about how their ensembles should be presented in a recording, record producers who cannot hear, engineers who are more interested in using the "toys" they have to play with than they are in making a perfect replica of the musical performance that they are supposed to be capturing, and finally corporate executives who are so busy chasing some marketing segment that they lose sight of (or don't care about) what should b their primary directive - to make and sell accurate representations of the the music being played.
I think that's an excellent point, which reinforces a conclusion I've gradually reached on my own. Not that you can't hear the effects of 44.1/16 -- ABX testing demonstrates that -- but with a good setup, the difference is very small. And recording engineers have been reporting that 192 sounds identical to the mic feed. One of the main reason high res releases sound better is apparently that they've been mastered with more care, for an audience that has better equipment. I sincerely hope the record companies will recognize the commercial opportunities in producing an uncompressed, unequalized mix and offering it online in high resolution surround format. The audiophile market may be a small one, but it's dedicated and unlike the typical MP-3 stealing kid, eager to spend money for good sound. At say $15 a pop, with no physical medium or distributor/brick-and-mortar markup, It wouldn't take very many online sales of a high definition version to pay for a new mix.
WOW! What a great thread. I don't really have time to write today... but I have to. This is such an important topic to me. I'll try to be brief... but no promises.
First, to 'gmgraves' -- Thank You for starting this. I absolutely agree with you that DSD masters are outstanding - often better than the finest half-track analog tapes. Even Redbook CDs which are recorded in DSD and re-mapped to 16/44 sound superior; even approaching SACDs. Hi-Res digital masters can be nice too, but the best recordings I've heard in the past few years started as DSD masters. Let's hope that 'priaptor' is wrong about the ultimate demise of SACD. When even HP admits that they rival- and sometimes exceed - the sonics of his beloved LPs, we're on to something!
The other factors are, of course, the quality of recording/mastering/mixing engineers, and - VERY important - production of the disc. That is what makes XRCDs sound so good. They start with Akira Taguchi and his proteges, and master in 24/96. But it's careful production of the XRCD discs that reduces read-errors and jitter (and, sigh, jacks up the price) ... and most of us have heard the exquisite results.
We all know that digital media CAN sound better than LPs, and the best of digital media & on the best players already does. To start, digital media do not have the same restrictions on frequency extension & dynamic range inherent to LP. Wow & flutter are replaced by jitter, by we've seen that jitter can be reduced almost to zero in the best or the best.
To Fred Dag -- It's BOTH the CDs and the players that have improved. 'gm' is right that nothing can make a bad recording sound good. But a better player CAN make it sound better. A more advanced transport, DAC, and output stage can find a bit more music on that mediocre old CD. But keep in mind that a more revealing player may also reveal the inherent crapiness of a bad recording (especially when compared to better CDs).
'gm' gave you some excellent information. But let me pick a few nits... The Meridian 'Apodizing Filter' is based on fast-Fourier, but also handles some phase-distortion, which causes a phenomenom called 'pre-ringing'. Ayre players now use a 'Minimum Phase Filter' which is essentially the same thing. HOWEVER... I've heard players that do not seem to have this 'pre-ringing' problem, and sound better than either of the above. (I'll mention my favorite below.)
One more thing... There are now some DACs which will upsample to 24/192. Esoteric and dcs even have upsamplers to DSD (though I'm not quite sure how you do that). But, by the same token, one of the best DACs I've heard (Concert Fidelity) does not updsampling or filtering at all. (Too bad it costs $10K. And with no filtering or jitter rejection, you need an incredibly good transport, which will cost another $10K or so.)
To Billy Armstrong -- 100% agreed about Sooloos and other servers. First of all, they are only as good as the DAC and output stage they're used with. Second, they WILL eventually sound better. Fact is that the laser assembly & transport are the 'weak link' in the digital playback chain. Replacing them with a magnetic hard-drive (or better yet, solid-state electronic memory) should THEORETICALLY reduce jitter and virtually eliminate read-errors (and the need for error correction). Right now, I agree that a good player sounds better than any server. But just as CD players evolved, I expect we will someday have true 'high-end' servers that sound better than any laser-based player.... someday.
MY PLAYERS -- The best CD player I've ever heard is the E.A.R Acute (about $6K). This player has all the warmth and dynamics of analog, with all the many advantages of digital. It is an Arcam player, modified by the great Tim d'Paravicini. It uses a Wolfson DAC which upsamples to 24/96, but the real show is d'Paravicini's incredible tube-based output stage , featuring his own hand-made transformers.
For SACD playback, I am using a Sony/Modwright XA5400ES. The stock Sony player is quite nice - the best-sounding one they've made, at least since the SCD-1 and SCD-777ES. And what a bargain @ $1,500 (and you can easily find one for $1,200). Dan Wright of Modwright Instruments damps the transport, upgrades the clock, and adds his own tubed OTL output stage (based on Alan Kimmel's 'mu stage' design). The mods run $2K, but the resulting player sounds more like $8-10K... or more! The best SACD playback I've heard so far, and damn nice on Redbook CDs too!
Happy Listening to all!
Too add to my prior post. Digital has vastly improved since the 1980’s when “perfect sound forever” first appeared. And so have vinyl records and the equipment to play them and listen to them. I have enjoyed the improvement in CD playback with the help of a decent outboard DAC upsampler a good integrated amp and speaker system including decent tweaking accessories e.g. digital cables, interconnects and power conditioners.
It does distress me somewhat me to read comments like those of Robert Harley, in his newest High End Audio Guide (4th Edition) (page 212) that “…it has become standard practice for mastering engineers to severely compress a recording’s dynamic range so that it sounds ‘louder’ when played on the radio. Record producers feel the need to make their ‘product’ more ‘competitive’ when played alongside other recordings. The result of these ‘loudness wars’ is, in my view, an unnecessary and tragic destruction of so much of the music’s expression.”
It was also unsettling to read Michael Fremer’s comment in January’s Stereophile, when reviewing the DCS Debussy DAC that .. “You really can’t fight it, not should you: The Blu-Ray disc excepted, the future of digital storage and playback is not any sort of silver optical disc. Rather, it will be hi-rez files downloaded from the Internet, stored on a hard drive, and decoded by an outboard, multi-innput D/A converter…”
Not so fast - I think CD’s will continue to thrive for quite a while notwithstanding the younger generations embrace of low res downloads from iTunes etc. and the high-end embrace of high quality music servers. As long as niche Studios like Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab stay true to their name, we’ll be OK as companies continue to produce quality players and transports for a reasonable price and in any event, at least until the cost of music servers comes down to the level of the common man and woman.
This has been my mantra since this thread began. This practice (high compression rates) is widespread and crosses all musical genres. I was at Paul Stubblebine's studio in San Francisco several years ago when he was working on transferring Mark Aubert and Joanna Nickrenz' landmark "Vox Box" recordings (analog) of Ravel's 'Complete Works for Orchestra' with Skrowaczewski and the Minnesota Orchestra to digital for Mobile Fidelity. He would fiddle with the equipment, while playing the analog tapes (which sounded magnificent) of 'Daphnis et Chloe'. Then he would play back the digital transfer. Immediately, I asked him why the digital copy sounded so compressed (it did. The compression had robbed the music of all of its fire, passion and majesty). He shrugged his shoulders and said "That's what the client (Mobile Fidelity) wants!" I could hardly believe my ears. I could, perhaps, understand this request had the material been some rock band, but this is classical music, fer crissake, the composer INTENDED that it have these dynamic contrasts! This isn't just some arbitrary marketing decision about how to "package" product, this was downright musical desecration. Yet it is standard practice these days. Funny thing is, the LPs of these performances don't sound anywhere near as compressed as the Mobile Fidelity CD, yet there was ample technical reason to compress wide dynamic range material in vinyl days, but there's no technical reason why it has to be done today.
There was a misconception, when CDs first hit the American market in 1983, that their excellent linear response and signal-to-noise ratio (measured under static conditions) made audio sources that were "perfect forever", to repeat that infamous phrase. It took about 25 years to discover that those quantitative measures, which were difficult to achieve in the analog domain, were really not sufficient (or even necessary) for great audio reproduction. Today, we're finally learning what needs to be improved in the digital domain to make it superior to analog. Once that is accomplished consistently (it's already here on many broadband professional recording masters, but it only sporadically passes through to the consumer side), we can then put analog aside. It's important to appreciate that the lessons learned from 100 years of analog recording needed to be re-learned when a new format came along--that the end-product must replicate real music with high fidelity, regardless of the technology used.
RonLev
Philly
All true but until and unless high-definition audio ( be it analogue or digital) is available at real world prices hi-fidelity (remember that term?) will remain the province of devoted, extravagant idiots like you and me
Fred,
The problem we have today is that most consumers have been inured to low-fi lossy codecs (MP3, etc.). When a new high-capacity medium is developed, the bandwidth is dedicated to video, gaming, iPOD downloads, etc. instead of high-resolution audio, which already resides in many master recordings today but which are unlikely to be heard by consumers. Look at the poor reception SACD received! We need to do two things: first, educate younger people about the advantages and enjoyment of great audio recordings; and two, we need to stop relegating great audio equipment manufacturing (and high-end audio journalism) to a bunch of "extravagant idiots" as you say, and make it cost-effective and easier to appreciate.
RonLev
Philly