LP vs CD, Another Perspective

Just read the article below. An interesting perspective. Please click on the link and read the ADDITIONAL discussions following this too.

http://www.avguide.com/forums/lp-vs-cd-another-perspective?src=Playback

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.

what i know both cd/lp need a ton's of money to make it more umppphhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!

Just play the music and enjoy....

p/s-1 bank duit pun x akan cukup oooooooooooo!!!!!

Carz...

Music CD's produced locally... are horrendous in sound quality compared to the ones from over the sea.

As what you have said....it creates a vacuum and the business minded / manufacturers see this and develop / make products to fill this vacuum. (i.e DAC / Phono stage ) And some of this products prices are way way beyond a persons reach.

Then we would go into another session of the amount of time spent R&D, marketing, design and so forth discussion to justify the price. So its a never ending cycle.

End of the day its an individual taste and preference.

cheers

No matter how great the CD recording is, it still required digital to analog conversion. anyway, if you like the CD sound, then just enjoy it.. nothing is better than other in hifi world. just a matter of taste

wingman,
>>>>As what you have said....it creates a vacuum and the business minded

Those are not my comments nor my article. I am just posting the article as-it-is, just for interest sake.

Nor do i agree the DIGITAL CD redbook can neccessarily be better than LP.

Hirez digital music at a high enough resolution will most probably equal or beat LP, but at what resolution, it is still debatable. It is just like film vs digital pictures. At a high enough resolution the dots in a digital picture will be equal or surpass film....have we reached there yet ? I don't know.

Will the mainstream music industry adopt and release music in the ultimate hirez format .... that is to be seen.

Carz....

No worries.....End of day its all left to the industry players to decide which direction they stear the "Music Ship" and in what ever format they desire.

cheers

carz, please ignore my PM. I missed the first sentence and thoiught you wrote the article yourself.

We have gone through this before didn't we ? But there were no firm conclusion back then. Maybe I will summarize it this time to avoid another long winded debate.

A lot of arguements of LP vs CD seems to be centered around the issue of 'musicality'. Now, musicality is a very intangible measurement of music. We can measure music by many parameters but not musicality. This is because musicality is a human perception.

Scientists have tried for centuries to analyze, understand and measure human perception. Emotions such as joy, anger, etc. We think we have made some headway recently but the truth is we still don't fully understand what makes emotion. It is the same with the perception of musicality.

Musicality differentiates a piece of music. A music examiner once said to a student sitting for his music exam "you played that piece exactly to the score. Therefore I am giving you a PASS". The student protests "why do I get only a pass ? You said I played it exactly to the score. Which meant I played it perfectly". The examiner says "what you just played was a love song. What I just heard was not a lover serenading the love of his life but a student following the score mechanically. There was no love in the music. There was no emotion, no feeling at all".

There is currently no known way to measure 'musicality'. However, many people believes it has to do with rythm, pace, etc. And many of these relies on the concept of timing.

I just bought the soundtrack of "Jekyll and Hyde". I bought it only for 1 song, "Once upon a dream" sang by Linda Eder. She is not the only singer who sang this song. There are also lots of other Jekyll & Hyde soundtrack (including broadway plays). But I -must- have this once because I -must- have this song and it must be sung by Linda Eder. Why ? Because of her superb rendition of the song, full of emotions. The musicality is superior. And if what we currently believes is correct, then a lot of the magic of her rendition is based on her interpretation of the song's timing.

When Linder Eder starts the song with "Once", she sets the start of the song. In scientific terms, we can even say she has set t=0seconds with that word. Now the musical score is written to a specific timing "4/4 or 2/4" for e.g. and a certain speed "how many beats per second". So mechanically, the start of the song "Once Upon A Dream" are sang in exact timing, with an exact interval between each word at exact times. This is the exact interpretation of the song. When Linda follows on "Once" with "Upon", she does NOT follow the timing exactly. She is unable to do it perfectly anyway. But more importantly if one has listened to her rendition, you will know that this phrase repeats many times in the song and each time/each place, Linda Eder sings it differently, with different emphasis and different TIMING. This is what sets the greatest singers apart from the merely good. Their interpretation of the music score in a way as to inject the required amount of emotion into the song. To stimulate and lift the heart and mind of those who listen to it.

Now back to the Redbook CD format. Digital is by necessity based on discrete. The actual music is a natural continous entity. This is because time itself is continous. I will not divert into the pure science tangent this time. But suffice to say that time moves continously. But because of the limitation of our technology, or our science, we NEED to make the music discrete before we can treat it with our technology. So we -sample- the music. We divide the music into a number of slices, of samples. The important thing is this conversion process, from continous to discrete, is made according to a fixed, rigid 'time grid'. Put it in a clearer way. Time runs continously but to get to digital, we need to first divide each second into 44,100 intervals (this is the Redbook CD standard - sampling rate = 44.1KHz). I.e we convert the contiously occurring music and map it to a fixed time grid of 44,100 samples per second. The most important factor here is that by doing this mapping, we set the artificial reality that nothing exists IN BETWEEN the samples. I.e. we only get something 'real', at exact intervals of 1/44,100 seconds. From 1/44,100 to 2/44,100 seconds, IN BETWEEN, the music does not exist. Put another way, at 1/44,100 second we have a musical note. Then at 2/44,100 seconds, we have the NEXT musical note. At 1/44,101 seconds, no music exists, NOTHING exists.

I know this is a bit over the top scientifically, maybe even a bit philosophical. But I think it is clear now what discrete means.

The issue is the world, REALITY as we know it, and consequently REAL MUSIC does not map into this time grid. Actually it does not map to any time grid we are capable of conceptualizing because our science is not able to map reality exactly. I.e. we are not able to measure the passage of time exactly. We must make approximation.

So back to mother earth, when Linda Eder sings "Once", when exactly does she next sings "Upon". Scientifically, how many seconds EXACTLY does she sing "Upon". (The wonder of human emotion is that we are not bothered with exactly how long but we are able to perceive it). In digital, we FORCE this timing to exact intervals of 1/44,100 (approx 0.000022) seconds. I.e. we CAN ONLY reproduce "Upon" maybe 1.000022 seconds later. But NOT 1.0000225 seconds later. Because we don't sample the music in at that point and it does not exist. Rather it CANNOT exist.

Therefore, however Linda Eder interpretes her song, we WILL HAVE TO RE-MAP it to a time grid of exactly 1/44,100 seconds in terms of intervals of samples.

Now the final point. CAN WE HUMANS HEAR SO ACCURATELY ? Some of you might already be asking and you are right. In the first place, can we actually hear timing differences down to so high a resolution. This then brings us back to the original arguement in mind. The Redbook CD format is based on a sampling rate of 44,1kHz, i.e. mapping to a time-grid of 1/44,100 seconds. It is based on the scientific theory that human hearing is not good enough to hear anything with higher resolution. I.e. we are not able to hear anything that occurs IN BETWEEN the individual points in the 1/44,100 seconds time-grid. Because anything in between represents a frequency higher than 22.05 kHz and to be honest, most of us here can not even hear up to 15kHz, what more over 20kHz.

There ARE people, mainly in the hifi journalism industry who claims they can hear the subtle differences in timing beyond the 1/44,100 seconds resolution. Some claims we humans can PERCEIVE (not physically hear but somehow perceive) frequencies as high as 100kHz or more ! However, it is important to understand that all these claims are 'annecdotorial', i.e. based on "I believe I can hear" and sometimes backed up by some form of indirect tests. But NOONE has actually proven himself to be able to hear beyond even 20kHz. So there are totally NO FACTS to back up all these claims.

So to close off, consider these factors :
1. High Res digital offers a much higher and theoretically more accurate 'time-grid'. The 24/192 format offers FOUR TIMES the accuracy of the CD time-grid, with timing accuracy down to 1/192,000 or 0.0000052 seconds (approx) or around 96kHz in terms of sound frequency. So eventhough we map the music artificially, we are able to more accurately follow its original timing. And many people says one of the biggest improvement they hear from high-res digital is the better 'musicality'.

2. Even analogue mediums like LPs and analogue master tapes are also discrete. Actually our entire knowledge base and thus our technology itself is based on a discrete model. An analogue master tape for e.g., if we go down deep enough, is discrete pieces of magnetic particles imbedded in the tape medium. So, even with analogue master tape, we are in a way, force mapping music to a discrete form as well. HOWEVER, it is not a rigid time grid. Those individual magnetic particles do not align to fixed positions on the tape medium. Our technology is not good enough to do it actually. So they are randomly sprewn across the tape medium. Therefore, we do NOT artificially 'cut' music into fixed time grids of 1/192000 seconds etc. In theory, the accuracy is limited by how close we can get each magnetic particles to. But in reality it is not that simple. I'll be honest. I DO NOT KNOW how much resolution in timing an analogue tape has.

3. For LPs, it is the same as we do not enforce the groove to change at exact time intervals. But in reality, the grooves changes are never totally continous. It is limited by our cutting and pressing technology and limited by the resolution ability of our catridge. I am not sure how accurate a TT playback system can be but the Clearaudio Goldfinger catridge for e.g. is supposed to have a stylus radius of 8 microns (8 millionths of a metre) and this sets the physical limit to its ability to track a groove change (I have not worked out the smallest change a 8 micron radii can track).

I will end by clarifying that I myself have found LP to sound a lot better, in all areas and especially in the intangible 'musicality' department. However I have not heard all of the latest high-res digital equipments yet. My biggest problem with digital vs analog is availability ON BOTH SIDES. Some music are only available on CD (e.g. songs from early 1990 to mid 2000). Hardly anything I like is available on high-res digital. A good LP, often we cannot get the same one as our friend.

So like everyone here, I just enjoy whatever music I have. Life is too short to be be upset about every single tiny thing !!

Very good write up, WongKN.

I guess I have a lot to learn from you. Very knowledgeable indeed.

Thanks Mikapoh. I hope others will find it worth the time to read through the rather long winded post. I didn't have a chance to really explain all these last time due to other 'distractions'. Hopefully now many can understand that I wasn't trying to be dramatic or smart-ass as when I say digital can never approach analog (not totally accurate of course, I actually meant to say digital can never properly capture real life music. Actually even analog tape and LPs cannot do so as well). And also some of the inherent handicaps of digital, advantages and disadvantages of digital and analog, and most importantly, the realities of life, i.e. in the end, even if we have a perfect system, if no-one produces music for it, then it becomes meaningless.....

You are welcome.

I certainly did not feel this sharing implies any personal showcase or become "smart-ass" in other way. It is more like educating.....for newbie like me.

I really enjoy reading your post each time you put your thoughts into writing. 2 words to sum up..... "Keep Writing"

Just as Mikapoh has mentioned, you certainly put a lot of thought when replying to certain topics. Very well written. Guess you need half an hour to write that all down.

WongKN wrote:
A lot of arguements of LP vs CD seems to be centered around the issue of 'musicality'. Now, musicality is a very intangible measurement of music. We can measure music by many parameters but not musicality. This is because musicality is a human perception.

Scientists have tried for centuries to analyze, understand and measure human perception. Emotions such as joy, anger, etc. We think we have made some headway recently but the truth is we still don't fully understand what makes emotion. It is the same with the perception of musicality.

This is a very pertinent point you have brought up. We have had a discussion sometime last year on the Harbeth forum on the differences between amps, which the Harbeth designer strongly suggested that all amplifiers sound the same, and there is no form of measurement to show or prove that different amplifiers will sound differently. I then suggested that select amps can get into the soul of the music if properly matched to the speakers, moving the soul and senses of the listener with improved musicality. A forummer brought up MRI scan to measure "soul in music", which I thought as pretty unusual, to put it mildly. Soul in music can be referred to as musicality, and this cannot be measured. We can measure the reactions of the human brain and senses in responding to certain things but we cannot directly measure musicality.

Back to LP vs CD, although quality is important, the music is more important. Sometimes I wish folks would get over this comparison and just listen to the music. Some music cannot be found on CD and vice versa. I do enjoy listening to music that I have on some of my LPs(these music do not exist on CD format).

This is exactly what i told my local dealer to do. He has gone over the line that every CD he bought must be of special recordings or using latest remastering techniques. I just say what if the songs we like do not feature in those special recording CD, then we are deprived much of the enjoyment. Of course, there will be another story if there are options available. But, blames cannot be lay on him as he's doing biz & have to do demos for customers.

Afterall music itself matters the most as pointed out by WongKN.

Personally I find it is very frustrating. The fact is true, that a very good recording is able to reproduce important details and naunces of a recording and they often make the difference between a good listening to a totally exhillarating experience. Classical music fans of Beethoven Symphony No.9 conducted by Wilhelm Furtwangler (my current favourite interpretation) will know what I mean because Furtwangler died in the 1950s and his best performances were in 1942, 1951, and 1954. And the recording technology then was way below par. So we have a very uplifting performance but in poor fidelity. Many wish there is some way to reproduce those in hifi but alas there is a limit to technology.

So the ideal situation for the digital fan would be the best music available in high-res. For the analog fan, the best music in say half-speed mastered and other high quality format (e.g. MFSL's UHQR LPs). Sadly they are not readily available,

My most recent digital purchase was an SACD, a compilation by TAS in DSD format. There are many very nice popular songs there : Tenesse Waltz, In my Life (Beatles), etc. But they were sung by amateur or semi-professional artists. Listening to them was enjoyable as they try to have a different interpretation to make the song unique and interesting. But after only so many times. Eventually, I prefer the Anne Murray version and the original Beatles version for e.g. But THEY are not available on SACD or another other high-res format - AS FAR AS I KNOW. Luckily for music from this era, I have my trusty LPs to fall back on. But what about those music from the 1990s that are only available on CD ? This is where my frustration lies.

off course LP is better but.. considering i cant next previous tracks with remote, do a compilation(s), source plus hassle of playing & keeping LP, i'd go for CD..

iTunes recently announced that it may be offering 24bit music downloads.

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/content/24-Bit-iTunes-Downloads-Coming-Soon

Mugen,
Very quiet and tame lately ???

I thought the world at the most fundamental level is actually digital (discrete), at least light (photons) and sound (vibrating molecules) is, rather than analog. Analog is only what we perceive them to be due to the limitations of our senses.

So if the source is indeed digital, if we slice and dice them at a fine enough level, i.e, at a high enough sampling rate and resolution, then at some point "digital" makes no difference compared to "analog"

What say you Mugen? And at what sampling rate and bit rate will digital equal analog as far as the human senses can tell ?