http://nwavguy.blogspot.com/2011/03/dac-listening-challenge-results.html
vinylripper said...
"There are some technical advantages to certain old vinyl releases versus certain CD releases of the same music. That's a topic I hope to cover in a future blog article." -- NwAvGuy
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This is something I've observed for several years in comparing my own vinyl LP rips [using a high quality analog playback front end and Apogee Duet A/D/A converter] with the CD versions of the same recordings -- in many cases the vinyl rip sounds much more 'musical.'
I believe this is so because the vinyl pressings were usually manufactured relatively soon after the analog studio tapes were recorded and hence the signal strength on these tapes was high relative to tape noise. However, the old analog tapes from which many reissue CD's are derived are at least 20+ years old and by that time the effects of tape aging has taken its toll. My own collection of old commercially recorded open reel tapes bears this out.
In addition, many CD's were manufactured in the '80's and early '90's using A/D converters which were not of the same quality as are available today.
The difference between a hi-res vinyl LP rip [at 96/24 or 192/24 bit] and later CD reissues clearly illustrates the ability of well-cared-for quality vinyl recordings to preserve the original full beauty of older recorded music. It seems that vinyl is less prone to aging than magnetic tape in my experience -- sort of analogous to the ability of amber to preserve fossils for millions of years!
March 18, 2011 11:19 PM
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NwAvGuy said...
Vinylripper you are 100% correct and that's part of what I was hinting at above and going to cover in a future article.
Keith Johnson, a long time well respected audio engineer, gave a talk I attended at an Audio Engineering Society conference. He worked at Ampex back in the day when Ampex was making many of the studio tape machines. One of his key points was the degradation of studio master tapes used in CD mastering.
Magnetic tape deteriorates with time--especially the high frequencies. So later CD's issued from old master tapes are at a significant disadvantage. And to make things worse, especially in the early days of CDs, a lot of the engineers used high frequency EQ to try and "restore" the lost high frequencies due to the age of the tape. That HF EQ boost, combined with the tape's distorted HF content, was a big part of the original "harsh digital" sound that audiophiles branded the CD format with.
And you are also correct about the early digital hardware. The equipment used varied a lot in quality and not everyone even knew how to get the most out of what they had.
For years early digital recordings used magnetic tape and were "edited" using a razor blade to crudely cut the tape. In 1983 when the CD was introduced to the public, the most powerful computers available, like the CRAY, had only 4 MB of memory. That's not enough for even 1 minute of CD quality audio so digital editing, mixing, etc. wasn't a cost effective option.
As a result, early multi-track digital recordings required a lot of additional steps in the analog domain compared to today's digital workstations. Today everything is converted to digital only once and 32+ bit software processing is used for all the mixing, editing, etc.
But it's worth noting vinyl also ages and is prone to all sorts of problems--especially if it's mistreated. Things like warping, brittleness, groove wear, mis-tracking damage, and surface damage cannot be removed by any sort of cleaning. But, on the whole, well cared for vinyl can certainly age more gracefully than magnetic tape.
March 19, 2011 7:15 AM
