The great thing about vinyl isn't necessarily the sound quality, it's the experience. When you decide to listen to a record, your mind is on it. You have to choose it off of a shelve, remove it from the sleeve, maybe clean it, and set the needle. You are primed to really listen. Then you have the cover and the liner notes to peruse. You are committed to it. The ease and convenience of digital music cheapens the experience. It's disposable.
I experienced something close to that.I was stuck at my house when the wifi went out and lived in a valley with shit signal. I had an old CD player and my late uncle left Outlandos d'amour in our living room before he died. I immediately had a huge appreciation for boomer music when I heard the first track.
@@bkkersey93 Yeah, the vinyl sound is just bigger. It's louder. I don't know what the technical reason for this is, but you could have a record and CD of the same music and with the stereo set at the same volume, the record will be louder than the CD. Higher dynamic range?
@@vagabondarcade7633 vinyl has a limited dynamic range, cause you can only cut so deep. CD has a bigger dynamic range if you really want to hear what CD is capable off buy a classical CD and compare it to the vinyl. The CD wil sound better because of the bigger dynamic range that CD can deliver. That is why vinyl did not get affected by the loudness wars because you cant clip audio like that on vinyl. So there is a positive side to vinyl that it did not get affected by the loudness wars, but on the other hand CD is more capable of performing better than vinyl. Just take a daft punk vinyl and CD and compare them, the cd will win. Because daft punk made sure that the CD release would as good as it could get and that is way better than the vinyl release.
That was the best way I've ever heard someone describe what the best, of most experiences, should be like. I don't remember the following two minutes because my dumb brain was still shell shocked from that quote.
@@Madrrrrrrrrrrr Yes the question wasn't really specifically answered. First, it's not true that vinyl is the closest to the master, but he also explains that digitally mastered songs mean that a lossless audio file is essentially identical to the master. I think the real answer is that records aren't the best audio, but people like the ritual of putting on the record, of looking at the huge record cover, the pop and hiss of the needle going on, having to get up and flip the record.
Love the irony of Rollins having a 1/2 million $ stereo in his house while all the Black Flag records sound like they were recorded on a cassette deck in the bottom of a dirty kiddy pool.
“What does it take to engineer a machine, that’s invisible to the experience.” Very well said. And he had me at Bill Evans, waltz for Debby is a masterpiece
@@increase9896 good FLACs are higher fidelity than vinyls. and anything more than 24/96 on FLAC is a waste of hard drive space. but a lossy 192kbs file that was encoded from a lossless format sounds the same to the human ear which is referred to as "transparent".
You need magic rocks wrapped around your silver plated RCA cables if you want the best sound quality. Telling ya, the vocals so pronounced and the soundstage is out of this world when you add magic rocks to your collection!
Chris McCartney you should listen to Jack White talk about vinyl, it’s fucking beautiful, he even has his very own factory where they make records in the back, sell them in the front. The guy from myth busters has a video where he visits and makes his own record, it’s good shit.
He wasn't talking out of his ass; he was talking out of someone else's. Digital is superior and capable of producing any waveform analog can. You would not be able to tell the difference between a high-quality digital signal versus an analog one. Mathematics and science support this conclusion. It has nothing to do with subjectivity.
I've heard a sound system like he's explaining that costs $150K. If I remember right that system was upwards of $200K and most of that was the speaks and I really wish I could remember the brand. It's incredible. I listened to an orchestra recording and if you closed your eyes it was like being in the room with them. You could point to the individual players/sections in the orchestra. I've never experienced anything like that. The imagining of the audio was unreal. This was a system playing a FLAC digital recording.
My first stereo in the house was a victrola and it was the wood that made the speakers sound great. My own first stereo was a small $149 dollar with a turntable, eight track, and FM radio and a plastic cover and it was the best experience ever, I was 14 years old and my moms knew how much I loved music and purchased it for me, nothing can replace that feeling, sort of like your first kiss.
Far better than what 14 year olds hear today. To get the experience you had at 14 it would cost thousands today and only those with real money can afford it.
The fact is that you will never hear a recording like it is in the studio because the room is just as big a factor as the speakers and amplifiers. Studio monitors are not like Hi Fi speakers, which are generally colored in various ways and then add to that different home room environments and the sound will be altered in so many ways from what was heard in the studio. Not all studio monitors are the same either and not all studios have full acoustic treatment. And vinyl records do NOT accurately reproduce what was recorded because of inherent physical limitations, especially in the low end frequencies. The best recording quality will be at the same recorded bit rate - usually 24 bits and not 16 bits like a CD - and the same sample rate, ie: 44.1kHz or higher if it was recorded at a higher rate. Almost all studios now master everything digitally, while using various analog equipment or plugins, which are now virtually indistinguishable from analog. So getting a digital master guarantees the best possible sound 'source' and the rest depends on your setup and room, which will all contribute to altering the original sound in various good and bad ways.
A good sounding system and a well treated room or at least having the walls filled up with furniture or books will enable you have an excellent near to studio experience. Remember he is talking about near to the experience and not exactly saying it is the same standard.
I know exactly what he's talking about too. I was at a home electronics expo about twenty years ago. There was an sign with an arrow pointing up a flight of stairs to the "high end audio" section. I got to the top and could hear music faintly playing. Then, I must have walked right into the sweet spot. The music suddenly got louder and clearer, and I felt like the music was emanating from the air around me. Totally surreal. It sounded _better_ than live music to my recollection. At first I was looking around me to try to work out where the music was coming from, even though the speakers were right in front of me, because I just couldn't comprehend that the it was coming from them. Normally you can kind of _feel_ that the music is coming out of the speakers, but these just looked like inanimate objects, and the music was just 'there'. That's the first time I listened to electrostatic speakers, and I'll never forget it.
I bet the room the audio gear was in was treated acoustically too. Treatments are often overlooked and can make a much more modest system sound excellent.
I love collecting old records from garage sales and used bookstores for a buck a piece. Some of the records I bought were hardly ever played and in exceptional condition. They were mostly jazz, crooners and old rock and roll records. Quite a blast playing them.
Absolutely. I don't know of any recording artist who doesn't use the car as the final word. That's where we compare our stuff to everything else. If it sounds good in the car you're golden!!!!!
Widely known amongst recording artists and engineers alike! Dr. Dre wont throw out a beat if it doesnt sound right in his 89 civic with that old Alpine 5" mids with tweet 2 6x9s working the rear deck/hatch and the RF sub 😆😆😆
@@jeb419 man... when i was stoned for the first time and threw the thriller record on, listening to human nature, i couldn't believe my ears! it's most definitely the ultimate improvement to the sound
@@Ghoopty nope people don't master their audio in those speakers in studios nor do they are true to real life They can be nice sounding tho because they are made more for experience/feel rather than technicality or them being realistic
Strangely, I noticed Reggie Watts when he was on TV in Australia, before he started appearing more on U.S. TV shows. His music and improv is amazing. I could listen to him talk all day about music, and music tech and not get bored
You will find this type of deep-cut Music Store Audiophile in New York, Los Angelas, Chicago, and Miami... but if you want an auditory religious experience find an old-school audio engineer from Nashville.
I’m going to help y’all out a little bit here. I’ll start with record wear. One variable not considered is the quality of phono cartridges. Some needle assemblies (a needle in a phono cartridge is usually referred to as a stylus) are way lower mass than others, meaning they do less damage over time. Phono cartridges are critical because they’re the phase other than speakers or headphones where there’s a translation between mechanical energy and electrical energy. A device that does that is called a transducers, and transducers generally influence sound more within similar price ranges than electronics do because of the mechanical component. This means pay a lot of attention to phono cartridges when you buy a turntable; in actuality, the phono cartridge makes more of a difference in the sound of your record than the rest of your turntable does, unless it’s really lousy. Making equipment sonically invisible is expensive and not easy. Why is vinyl under ideal conditions closer to perfection than digital? Think of the difference between a painting and seeing the painting on your TV set. The painting is basically infinitely detailed, the TV picture is not because the TV picture is comprised of pixels. The more pixels you can fit per square inch, the closer you get to reproducing the painting perfectly. At some point you get enough pixels not to be able to detect the difference. The same is basically true of digital audio. Sampling rate is like pixels: the more times you sample per second, the finer your detail. The main problem here is that CD’s were released to the public before the sampling rate was quite as high as it should have been, and that’s why vinyl remains better. Actually, right now the bigger problem is that MP3’s are worse than CD’s. But there are advantages to digital, particularly if you can get the sampling rate high enough. Digital is encoded, and there are some benefits to this. The first is that as you make other copies you don’t wear anything out - it’s the same set of ones and zeroes no matter how many times you duplicate it, which is not true of record pressings. Another is that once encoded the signal isn’t susceptible to added distortion. Dust on a stylus harms the sound because it affects the movement of the needle, thereby becoming part of the sound. Dust on a CD, however, isn’t encoded, and thereby can’t be read as noise. Scratches aren’t read as noise either whereas on vinyl they are because they move the stylus. As to headphones vs. speakers: the advantage of headphones is that you can get better sound out of headphones than out of speakers for the same money. The headphone has to do a lot less and the headphone has the advantage of being unaffected by the acoustics of the room you’re playing back in. Also, when listening to headphones you’re always in the ideal listening position. However, there are a lot of disadvantages to headphones. You always listen alone. You can’t talk to anyone. You’re always wearing something on your head, and the best ones have a wire attached to them. And whenever you turn your head, where the stage is moves with your head. As to the variables in speaker design, that one takes a while. Suffice it to understand that, as is often true with anything, making a difference in sound is more related to the proportionate increase in price than to the actual increase in price, i.e. the difference you hear between a $500 speaker and a $1,000 speaker is way more than between a $10,200 speaker and a $10,700 speaker. Diminishing returns. By the way, the observation that listening to stereo will get you a better result than going multichannel for the same money is absolutely true and most people don’t realize that. Automotive listening: I don’t care how good your system is, you have two intrinsic obstacles. The less important one is that you’re not listening in the center of the room. The more important one is that the environment isn’t quiet because of ambient engine noise and wind noise.This makes a huge difference listening to classical music. You’re listening to a quiet passage, you’ve got it turned up loud enough to hear over the ambient noise, a loud note comes through and you’re blasted into the back seat. The soft parts have to be too loud in order not to be masked. The normal way around this is something called compression, which means reducing the loudness differences between the soft parts and loud parts. However, compression takes impact out of music and it will sound a lot more flat (not in pitch, in overall sound) than an uncompressed signal which you can listen to at home. Really covering this would probably take a book but these basics should help.
Hey @koshersalaami just wanted to say thank you for the insightful message. I’m new to vinyl and your message taught me so much about music and audio that I didn’t even know existed. I appreciate you and hope that you’re doing well!
Really good audio can be super cheap if you get into it and spend a few months learning the basics. As one example, you can spend $10k+ on a few different models of commercial hifi speakers that use a shared formula: A high sensitivity 15" woofer paired to a 15" wide shallow waveguide and sensitive, low distortion compression driver. The drivers they use are less than $650 for the pair. The formula is so common in various DIY forums that there are detailed writeups for constructing your own pair, measuring their response with a $70 calibrated microphone and using those measurements to build a crossover-or simply upload them to a $100 DSP. Crude youtube jigsaw skills and a lightly used recent model table saw will have you with a fantastic pair of speakers that save for low end extension and top octave detail will compete with many a new car-priced commercial design. Putting a box together, learning simple free tuning software and either soldering together a dozen things or using a DSP to type in some numbers for no soldering needed costs 10-20 hours of time plus another 5 or so for a first try box. To save 8 grand, cool. Next you need an amp. One company, Hypex, makes the boards used in a whole bunch of ~$7-15k amps for years. Great sounding boards, reliable, efficient and cool running with loads of power on tap. Then Hypex opened up to the DIY market. Now you can get those same amps and power supplies in different boxes for 500-600 bucks used. At least two companies sell the newer version of the same amps for 900 dollars or so in nice boxes with warranties. There are lots of fabulous used preamps in the $800-1000 range with sound within spitting distance of esoteric high priced new stuff. If you want digital, a great DAC is no longer obscenely expensive. I have two popular DACs from the same company, one $350 (Schiit Bifrost Uber), the other $150 (Modi Uber). I think the price difference should be more like $50. Comparing their $850 DAC on lone, it feels like it should be priced like the mid tier unit, you really don't need to spend lots on this piece. A well tuned, well isolated turntable with a good cartridge and a used phono pre lets you get a cheaper Rega or similar and have better sound than an ill-tuned very high end turntable. Also, if you can built a speaker box, you can build a turntable stand that's ultra-isolated and a serious upgrade for very little money. You can splurge for cables, but why not use some of the better quality stuff used by the same studios making your music? I like Neutrik Profi RCA connectors on Mogami microphone wire. $60 for a 6 foot cable that will last forever. A hifi brand (nordost) used the same connectors in interconnects that sell for $1000+ used! Use your calibrated mic to tune your DSP to the room. For 200 bucks you can get a DSP that takes 2 channels of digital in and lets you create crossovers for 8 output channels to feed 4 dacs. Combined with 2 ~$150 range dacs and it's a scary nice sounding digital front end that can be tuned in realtime from your computer and leave 4 channels of DSP free for later distributed bass. A huge part of sound quality is the room. Ever walk into a Best Buy and hear their nice Bowers & Wilkins speakers that cost as much as a new hatchback and feature diamond tweeters on $6000 McIntosh amps? They sound like poop. In a properly set up room, they sound incredible. Build your own bass traps and absorption/diffraction panels. Even easier than making those boxes. A sound system that will put a band in your room, capable of insane output with no compression or distortion (around 100 decibels from 1 meter with a single watt- and you have 250w available, for roughly 124 decibels of continuous output and very understressed amps at normal listening volumes. Virtually identical to a $20,000 commercially bought stereo for $4000 and a hobby. Alternatively get a $80 tripath chip amp with bluetooth, pair it to a DIYSG bookshelf speaker kit you just glue together and have a $300 system that is glorious in small rooms. Just regained awareness, super stoned thought I was somewhere else, sorry mates
Mastering is what matters. Vinyl is very flawed and uses its own means of compression techniques. Hi res formats are vastly superior. Vinyl grooves can only be cut so deep or wide. Sacd, dvd audio,blu ray audio like dts and dolby true and standard dolby and dts can record in ways vinyl can and cant. No two vinyls sound the same and when you remove the rumble and his and shit people think something is missing. Ya the shit that shouldnt be there. Burn in is bullshit too. That being said i do love vinyl but i dont pretend that its something its not. Reel to reel is superior to vinyl too. And yes i have about 15 to 20 grand in my main setup and have flipped tons of gear.
So full of shit. I've heard plenty of hi res files, and NONE of them have sound better than vinyl. Neither is superior and I bet you wouldnt hear any differences in the right setup.
@Mr Vespa So you would rather spend thousands on a audiophile turntable setup that sounds no better than a decent CD player from the 1980s? No thanks. I love records as much as next person but I'm not going to be the idiot that claims vinyl records are objectively superior to CD, because they aren't even close. You know what records sound really amazing though? Records that we're digitally recorded, go figure. I'm not saying vinyl sucks but the digital age came and it made things better for sound. Vinyl records are a hobby of mine, but I won't discriminate against CDs either.
@Mr Vespa Like I said, I enjoy vinyl records as much as the next person but I also enjoy digital formats. I also don't mind the quirks of vinyl records but I will never say it's objectively superior to CDs. Lower noise floor, much greater dynamic range, higher fidelity, less prone to physical damage, easier to store, cheaper to get quality sound. Those are all traits of a CD. I love music on any format as long as the source master is not terrible.
Burn-in/break-in is real! Speakers sound better after they have been played for a while. speakers have moving parts and are very stiff when first purchased, but after playing awhile they become more sensitive and sound better! sometimes way better!
I love that Reggie described Bill Evans’ music as “holographic” because that is exactly the term Evans described what he strived for in his improvisational style. When you’re dealing with music that transcends the boundaries we’re used to, you gotta make sure your system is tuned to capture that transcendence!
I really think Reggie Watts is really a music guru, he chose comedy instead pursuing music he can sing and create beats. Watch all of his IFC episodes and Conan show. I’m really a big fan, he really knows what he’s talking about.
@@phise1 This. You would also have to hire all of the bands in your music library, at any given moment, as often as you'd like, for a setlist most artists would not want to play. So it's much more convenient and a fraction of the cost.
My neighbor bought some absurdly expensive speakers. They don't sound any better than cheap chinese ones. Basically all audio gear reached perfection over a decade ago. Those outrageous looking expensive speakers are just a placebo.
@@mitchelloliver3704 Nope, I have a degree in audio engineering and psychoacoustics. I have heard so many more rigs than the average person, and have seen many studies, etc. Frequency response is all that matters really, and even very cheap modern chinese stereo speakers have flat responses. I am not talking about laptop or bluetooth speakers, but full range speakers. The technology matured many years ago, just like digital recording media. Some people are just not comfortable with perfection though, because it means there is nowhere else to go.
@@34672rr sorry, total rubbish. I work as a mastering engineer and speaker performance is very different from box to box. This is easily measurable. If you want a very flat performing speaker, something mix and mastering studios require, then any old cheap home stereo speaker won't cut it. In fact even the best speakers are not flat. They are incrementally closer to flatness. This is why in a recording or mastering studio, we will take measurements of the room and apply room treatment, diffusion, bass trapping, absorption, to get the sound at the listening spot as flat as possible. Different speaks use different drivers, different crossovers, these things have different performance ratings... A ribbon tweeter does not perform the same as a soft done tweeter, for example. Speaker accuracy HAS improved in general for sure, as technology is cheaper and better. But speaker design is a fine art. So many elements combining, porting or closed box? Transmission line? Active or passive crossovers... So many decisions that effect the sound, it's a fine science.
Yeah man. Reggie’s friend could have played that album on a Bluetooth speaker shaped like a banana bought from a gas station, and it would have still been a transcendental experience for everyone.
Such a talented dude. It’s painful to see how little the late show utilizes his skills and creativity. His stand up was some of the most entertaining shit ever
The way I think about it in my head is in making a vinyl it's taking the physical sound and, unlike taking a digital reproduction. I know that's kind of a silly explanation, but that's how I visualize it
@@Gucc111 I'm no expert in the actual science behind it but essentially from what I understand that as a FLAC file is being played back it is being "decompressed" back into a lossless source before it hits your ears. There are all kinds of arguments online about all this stuff and some might say that going WAV (uncompressed) to FLAC and back to WAV means loss of quality but I think at that point it's getting ridiculous. I'd be willing to bet in a double blind experiment that 99% of people out there wouldn't know the difference between 320 mp3 and WAV let alone FLAC and WAV. Having said that, I'll rip WAV every time...lol.
@@doublestrokeroll Thanks, compression/decompression sounds inherently bad. To your point, I've never noticed any consistent difference in wav, flac, or mp3.
@@Gucc111 You wont notice a difference until you're on very expensive speakers. I can't tell the difference between flac and wav either, but I can definitely hear the difference between mp3 and flac on my studio speakers.
Just be careful- a lot of turntables from that era can be record eaters, and its deceptive because they will sound killer. They sound good because they're putting way too much pressure on the record.
@@korryramone yeah I haven't played any records yet. It needs a needle never got around to getting one. It's crazy because I say some months later I seen one from like the 70's at the same thrift store and it had a price on it for 200 dollars. I was like what.
@@Eye2Eye24 Main things to look for are an adjustable counter weight, adjustable anti-skate, and then a good stylus. You really want to dial it in, then look into aligning the cartridge. There are videos on RU-vid that walk you through all these things.
@@lutello3012 I moved cities 15 years ago and my Akai turntable and 80w stacker stereo unit is still wrapped up in a box in the garage...along with 4 cartons of vynel ... from The Who to Uriah Heep to America .... all in mint condition...once a month used to pour a glass of red and wash them with a sponge and warm soapy water.
Vinyl might be be the closest thing to mastered tape from the 50’s, and it does have some whimsical allure to it, but it’s definitely not the most accurate source nowadays. Both vinyl and tape have frequency range limitations, and a high resolution digital wav file will be more true to the source.
definitely one of the better guests, I started to get really into high end home and car audio systems in 1992 and I agree with pretty much everything he said on audio.
While I agree that great Hi-Fi Audio System is crucial for a great listening experience, including modern music. More importantly, is room treatment! Treat your your room with good and strategic acoustic panels, then get your expensive Hi-Fi System, and be submerge.
Also there is a significant loss in dynamic range when using vinyl which technically makes it a lesser resolving source than what your able to get from a digital source.
Vinyl as a medium is not actually better sonically. It actually has quite a bit of limitations. This is the main reason why it sounds "better" to some people. I am a sound engineer and have mastered for vinyl. When you're mixing/mastering for vinyl, you cannot push maximizing limiters to make the recording 'extra loud' the way you can on digital (this includes flac, so flac and vinyl have little in common). You also need to roll off a lot of the low bass, like 30hz or below. The reason for all of this is more bass takes more space on vinyl, also can literally cause skips. If the recording is maximized too much, it can cause vinyl distortion and also flaws in the pressing. Mastering for vinyl is a careful process, which gets ignored often in the digital world, where people just slam the volume up as loud as they can. This actually makes records as a whole more dynamic since they have certain limitations on the way they can be mixed and mastered.
Love me some FLAC. Used to buy CD's for decades and finally started getting into vinyl a few years ago. Had no idea it could degrade that quickly though.
Vinyl is pointless unless your a collector, i know vinyl heads re record it all to FLAC anyway so not to damage record when playing, ill just take the Flac ty.
Good digital to analog converters. That is what needs to be added to this conversation to make it complete. Records are good for the ritual, a high performing DAC can produce what an audiophile wants, unless it is ritual they are after.
Film is so interesting the pixels if you can call them that, resemble pores on skin, very organic patterns thrown all over, and the resolution can range anywhere from a 4k - 5k(in the high-end) depending on how its rendered into digital form. So the picture including the colors and movement and lighting it all feels more natural and warm and familiar
a lot of flirting with real information but unfortunately most statements he makes are incorrect. Vinyl has a lot higher noise floor and is a lower fidelity medium than digital audio. this doesn't mean digital audio is better, vinyl has a a character and a sonic texture that sounds warm and lovely to humans. but digital audio has more dynamic range , a wider frequency spectrum and can be ultimately way more transparent than vinyl. Most modern music is recorded on to hard drives via analog to digital converters, probably less than 1% of the music out there is actually analog meaning never converted to digital through the production process (recording/mixing/mastering/production onto medium). so the purity he mentions of analog to analog is close to non-existent in the modern world. As a record label owner and mastering engineer 100% of the time a digital master is cut onto vinyl at the pressing plant. It's rare to send tape reels .
Agreed. As an audio engineer who has spent many decades daily making recordings - a lot of what he is saying is innacurate - oversimplified or even wrong. There's a lot more going on. It's not always about accuracy.
Should add that even theoretically perfect analog to analog has no advantage over a digital recording for humans at 44.1khz, which captures all information upto 22.05khz perfectly. Wiki page for Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem lays out maths, key word to look for is "perfect". Misconception is that digital is some sort of grid over audio waves, like a blocky bitmapped image, whilst analogue results in "perfect" curves... but digital output is also "perfect" curves.
We record to tape and our records you buy have never been converted to digital. Really makes a difference when you make a record fully analog instead of emailing the record manufacturer a digital file.
I remember the first time I experienced true imaging and soundstage. It blew me away. When you hear your favorite artist manifest in front of you it's such a cool experience. I love music. I love hifi. I love sound. If you're a music lover, not just a casual fan, I always say it's worth looking into getting a proper set up (headphones, stereo, whatever). Gear is so good now that even budget gear kicks ass.
I like old music that was originally released on vinyl, but prefer them on uncompressed digital formats. Albums remastered on Dvd and Blu-ray sound amazing.
The information given here that a vinyl is the closest to a final master you can get is just a 100% lie. When transferring to vinyl, you loose a lot of the bass and the highs, and there is also going to be a big loss of stereo width on the bass. CD format 16bit 44.1k audio has less distortion, more bandwidth and dynamic range. Higher resolution digital is just leagues above vinyl. The only reason why some people love vinyl is that the distortions that are inherent in the format can be pleasurable.
I agree with your accessment. People like vinyl for the same reason they like tube amps. Because they add 2nd order harmonic distortion, which is psycho-acoustically pleasing.
Hi kelainefes. Thats not always true what you say about vinyl records exhibiting less bass. I use to have vinyl records and the bass on the actual audio coming through the speakers was better than digital cd's of the same tracks that i bought from stores when i switched over to digital in 2006. And yes, i did play them through the same amp and speakers. I just disconnected the old record player and connected a cd player to the same amp when i bought the extra cables when switching to digital. You must be talking about very high quality digital stuff - as opposed to the standard mass produced cd's that people purchase from regular music stores Also, a good pressed vinyl will always sound better than a regular mass produced digital cd, in terms of atmosphere, as the hiss on a vinyl record helps to add atmosphere to the track. The real test should be in term of comparing the highest quality digital format - against the highest quality vinyl records - in a head to head sound comparison when BOTH played through the SAME stereo system. Then you would be right in your analysis on sound.
Shauni Gothic TV vinyl does lose both high and low end, but mostly high end. The needle cannot move fast enough to produce high frequencies well. The hiss is can be perceived as “atmosphere”, sure. But when it comes down to it, it’s just not supposed to be there. Many people prefer vinyl because it’s warmer from the loss of high frequencies, and that’s fine, but a high quality digital format will better reproduce the recording.
I hear that if you have a DJ turntable that plays records backwards at half speed and a digital output to your PC and play the LP then sound file backwards to play it normally you get whole new sound dimension to vinyl. This is also a good way restore sound to damaged LP's and 45's. It's like playing a whole new record.
Vinyl, bass up, subwoofer, in a trailer home lol, really sounds amazing...the raised floor allows rippling/resonation of the bass purr. Especially early 70's prog organ bass👌
Playing a record on a record player is so much more magical to me than just streaming a song on a digital device. Just the fact that wondrous and complex music can be conjured into the ether from physical grooves on a record seems like magic.
You can play vinyl at least 500-600 times before you notice any changes to the sound quality. Plus it also depends on the needles you play your Vinyl with.
By any tangible metrics like signal to noise ratio, dynamic range, distortion then digital is way better than vinyl but I guess there are other factors that might lead people to prefer vinyl (retro coolness, the fact that it's not as mainstream, nice sleeve art and form factor, turntables look cool and have a certain theatre to actually putting a record on). In the end the sound that comes out from a speaker is analogue regardless of how it was recorded.
Music is tangible from a theoretical standpoint, but we generally don't perceive it as such, until it's either loud enough to be physically felt or we are lucky enough to get locked into it where we can physically perceive the waves. That generally takes a very good sound system and some extra curriculars help. I've only been lucky enough to experience the latter a couple of times, but when it does occur, it's a unique experience.
I'm a huge vinyl fan and I love collecting it. But seriously nothing beats high Res digital files in terms of quality. It's absurd to say vinyl has higher quality, just look at the numbers and you'll see digital high res FLAC files have way much higher clarity. Without surface noise. But vinyl is a much more engaging and enjoyable experience.
Vinyl records can sound better with analog recordings. With digital recordings, it is a different story. However, there are a lot of factors, such as the quality of the vinyl, the turntable, the stylus, the amplifiers, and the speakers. Each person should experiment and find what suits him or her best.
While it's true that Vinyl does wear down a bit over time this can be minimized if your turntable is set up properly and you use a high quality cartridge/stylus .
CLAYTRON this is very, very well known. A speaker is a physical system with many different materials. Particularly, the suspension will soften during the first 100 or so hours of use. This will change the performance mostly in the bass frequencies, because these are the frequencies where the largest displacement of the speaker membrane is required.
@@claytron4679 miles said bass frequencies, but highs too. im telling you as the cone "breaks in" fro movement, the highs get less sharp and more mild. i know that for a fact. you can google it pal, the research is there.
@@robbievalentine8239 if that were true, the manufacturers would do it. It's crazy how many audio myths there are out there, even in the information age
Music instruments are mostly analogue, creating sound waves, same technique used by vinyl, it reproduces the sound waves as found in the grooves, which is why vinyl records most often have better timing in music.
RCA is just as good as any other format except with long lines, like much longer than any normal room setup would require. RCA is a "consumer" format, mainly because of the uselessness of balanced in setups. I think many companies capitalize on this misconception and use XLR or whatever balanced format as a marketing ploy. And along with all of the other BS in consumer audio, it works. There are honestly still people who think cables have a sound.
Sheffield Labs cut vinyl is recorded direct to disk are some of the best pure analog recordings ever... And sound best on discrete electroncs or tube systems! Back in the day they cost 10x more than standard vinyl and came in antistatic sleeves. My dad had MacIntosh and Marantz Gold quadrophonic rack systems and huge Klipsch horn speakers. The Marantz Gold system used gold solder on their discrete circuit boards... Just like they used in our spacecraft programs because gold was the best electrical conductor. I miss vinyl acoustics! Joe, this was one of your best interviews that you've done. Keep them coming.
