Intelligent Design vs Science, analog vs digital, CD vs LP--and the winner is?
Natural sound as we hear it in "real life" is pure analog, but recorded sound is, with few exceptions, chopped up into digital bits. So other than live music concerts pretty much every note you hear is digital. Whether you're listening to an iPod, the internet, TV, CDs, DVDs, or the radio, they're all digital in one way or another. We have as a species evolved over the eons to hear analog sound, and it's only over the past 25 years that digital has taken over. And it hasn't been very pretty. The only currently available analog exception is vinyl, but only those hip enough to seek it out have any idea what music is supposed to sound like. I have thousands of LPs, but my job as a home theater reviewer sometimes cuts me off from my turntable for weeks or even months. I start to accept digital as the norm, and it sounds fine.
When I get a chance to hear vinyl after long bouts with zeros and ones analog always surprises me. It just sounds better--nicer--and more, well, musical. You folks who love music and have never experienced vinyl, you literally don't know what you're missing. No one's saying analog's perfect, there are distortions, scratches, noise, and dirt that dig-o-philes never deal with. It's just that digital seems to miss the natural warmth that analog seems to capture so well. Maybe we're "designed" for analog and digital is just too unnatural to fully enjoy.
And it's not just the hardcore audiophiles who think analog trumps digital, some major and indie record labels are joining the fray. Matador's Patrick Amory sounds like a true believer to me, "For many of us, and certainly for many of our artists, the vinyl is the true version of the release...The size and presence of the artwork, the division into sides, the better sound quality, above all the involvement and work the listener has to put in, all make it the format of choice for people who really care about music." I pulled that quote from Eliot Van Buskirk's excellent Wired commentary, Vinyl May Be Final Nail in CD's Coffin.
And decent turntables are cheap enough, I found this groovy Audio Technica AT-PL50 turntable that comes with a built-in phono preamp for $75 at JR.com. What are you waiting for?
Steve Guttenberg is a frequent contributor to magazines and Web sites including Home Entertainment, Playback, and Ultimate AV. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. 
If you want to experience the 'real' analogue experience, plug a pair of headphones into your soundcard - yes, don't be surprised to learn that it most certainly does produce an analogue signal - and run your favorite music player with the equalizer randomly messed around with. Add some generated noise and presto, you've got an LP on your computer.
Sound in its natural form is analog. In order to convert it to a digital signal you must sample the audio signal. Sampling the signal is a process that records an instantaneous portion of the audio and then waits, and records another portion. This process leaves out a majority of the actual analog signal. The faster the sampling rate the more tidbits of audio the converter records, but it can never no matter how fast the sampling rate is, record the complete song.
Another thing that analog to digital converters do is apply a filter to the analog signal. For example in order ot save "digital" space the converter may cut out all sounds below and above a certain frequency. Thus creating a tunnel effect on the digital audio. The best example of this is using an off the shelf FM transmitter. The highs and lows of the digitized signal being sent to your receiver are being drastically cut out to save bandwidth, and even to the untrained ear, one can tell the difference.
Even with the modern 'efficient' digital storage methods of today one would be disastified with how fast their memory can be sucked up by broadening the bandwith of recordings and increasing the sampling frequency.
Now onto the process of recovering that digitized tunnel music and outputing it to your headphones you plugged into your computer. The computer reproduces that "original", and I use the term original loosely, analog signal by taking the recorded samples and playing them together with dead space between them. Let's say you recorded the audio with a sampling frequency of 60Hz (Completely unreasonable, CD's use a frequency of 44.1kHz). This would mean that every second the computer would produce an audio sound. Then nothing would be produced by the computer until a second passed.
So you dig-o-philes keep buying your CD's which represent a "Sample" of the actual song played in the recording studio. I'll stick with my "low-quality" and "least efficient" and "Complete" music.
View my whole post on the next page for a fuller explanation...
I didn't, I grew up with good old analog tape, and it sucked.
Your hearing is limited by a finite resolution, meaning your ears effectively "sample" sound according to the Nyquist?Shannon theorem. If you are old and male, which most audiophiles are, your hearing resolution is probably not so good.
If digital audio reproduction is merely a disgustingly cold and inferior "sampling", then I declare the electromechanical response to grooves imprinted in warm vinyl an imperfect "interpretation" of music.
Don't get me wrong, I like vinyl, but comparisons to digital are like apples and oranges, so let's be honest.
Can digital be improved? It has been and still can be. I have enjoyed recorded music infinitely more since the digital age than I ever could before. Just in case your wondering, I enjoy my multi-thousand dollar surround-sound home audio system with three powered sub woofers very much.
The digital world has made this idea a much more achievable goal. Concerts and movies are now recorded with numerous audio channels or tracks. Technology also, for us vinyl lovers, has made the transportation of music much easier. I love not having to dig through my car looking for cassette tapes or CD's, and being able to turn on my iPod and have access to my complete music collection.
Vinyl does have its flaws as well, such as warping, wearing needles, and the worst of all scratches. My preference when sitting at home, listening to a stereo audio source, where size nor storage matters, would be to select a vinyl record over a cassette tape, CD, or my iPod.
So for those who may still have shelves full of vinyl records which they haven't been able to listen to for fear of thowing hundreds of dollars into a record player, this $70 record player may be just what they are looking for.
Sure, vinyl has a higher noise floor (but those that are complaining about horribly intrusive pops, clicks and skips, you haven't listened to a decent turn table that was set up correctly with a good piece of vinyl - don't judge the medium based on your dad's crappy set-up that was in storage for 15 years), less dynamic range, and a narrower frequency response range but when it comes to reproducing a life-like performance, sorry - CD will lose. CD isn't as fussy but neither is it as smooth, fleshed-out and palpable as vinyl.
I wish people would read an entire comment before rebutting, as I do go onto say I enjoy vinyl. Yay for audio.
Similarly, just because the format is "analog" doesn't mean that's the reason it sounds better or sounds. Certainly, much vinyl produced today was not recorded with a 100% analog signal-chain start to finish. As with vacuum tube preamps, 1/2" tape, etc, the warmth of sound is likely caused by harmonic distortion that happens to be aesthetically pleasing, not because the medium is inherently more accurate. There are literally hundreds of digital tools that exist to simulate and model this sort of harmonic distortion for pure-digital recordings (and these tools are some of the armament in the "loudness war").
And the loudness war is a whole other problem. Digital recordings can be tweaked and brickwall-limited to truly staggering levels of perceived loudness, which is often exceptionally fatuiging to the ears over time. Vinyl as a medium doesn't support that sort of tinkering as well, so as an advantage, recordings for records end up with more dynamic range preserved - but again, that's the processing and not the medium itself.
So that's a few things to keep in mind. The appeal in vinyl might not be in its analog-ness, but in its own limitations and quirks as a medium.
I really think the record industry screwed this up. Had they made either of these formats a standard, this discussion of "Vinyl or Digital" a moot point. Something tells me this bit of stupidity will also play itself out in the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD wars.
Just set a freakin' standard, put out some product and let us enjoy it. Jeez, you'd think these people would be bright enough to figure this out by now.
The giveaway in articles like this is always the snide, sometimes subtle sometimes not, insinuation that it's oh so cool. "only those hip enough to seek it out have any idea what music is supposed to sound like." Right. More fashion. Don't worry, audio geeks, someday you'll be cool.
Plus, throw in a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with it. "the division into sides" of vinyl? Nice concept, but it has nothing to do with sound quality.
I suspect that anyone that "hates" either medium has not heard it well reproduced. Open up your ears. There's nothing wrong with walking on both sides of the street. Don't diss the other view just because you don't understand it.
Piece,
Dave
--Nah, man, I'm too peaceful to kill anyone.
Piece,
Drew
^_^
Ray player (wow), and my Acura TL even plays DVD-Audio. Sounds
groovy-baby! My favorite speakers (out of the three complete sets I
have, NHT's, Mirage's and two Spica TC50's), are the Spicas. Oh m'God
those Spicas are smooth-with deadly imaging. But there is a limit. All
this worship of analog will just encourage those 'hold outs' and we'll see
a 'comeback' of that much maligned video format. The totally GROOVY
RCA Video Disc. Now there was a great analog format! That together
with an 'old fashioned' CRT tele. Video Heaven!
Ron K.
Yes, analog has no "gaps" like digital, but it is distorted. Enough so to be very obvious. Know those clicks? They're examples of the distortion. The distortion is constant, to the point that at essentially every point in time there is a level of distortion. No matter how high quality the vinyl, it will always have distortions at a hearable level.
High enough quality digital, on the other hand, is indistinguishable with live music being pumped through speakers. That includes most digital in fact. Digital music is "chopped up," and the end result is a certain pitch being played for a set amount of time, then another pitch for a set amount of time, then another, etc. While, in theory, this is not the true sound, these amounts of time are so small that the human ear cannot distinguish it from analog sound. It has THOUSANDS of these per second, something that the human ear cannot even come close to distinguishing between, and the fact is that even at digitals most inaccurate point in time, it is actually still more accurate than analog.
To put this in perspective, imagine a perfect circle. Then imagine a computer screen that has, rather than the couple hundred, millions of pixels per square inch. The computer screen draws a circle. Yes, it is in pixels, but the slight innaccuracies cannot be even remotely seen by the human eye. Then imagine drawing a circle with your hand, while on a train (to simulate crackling). If you are really careful, it will be a good circle, but a bit distorted, with numerous little bumps because of the train vibrations and such. The hand drawing is analog and the screen is digital; which is better?
The fact is that digital is too precise to sound any different to the human ear. I have a very good ear, being a musician myself, I can tell the difference between two different versions of the same model of a piano made in the same year, while most people would have a hard time distinguishing between any two pianos.
Actually, a test was done once (with musician participants), where they had a blind testing between top notch vinyls and those same vinyls recorded onto regular CD's, and just plain CD versions of the same songs. All of them being hardcore audiophile vinyl fans, the plain CD versions lost miserably, and the recordings of vinyls won with a small margin over the real vinyls. While the small margin was probably nothing, the participants picked out the sound strictly because it had crackles in it; they couldn't tell any difference at all between the vinyls and their CD copies.
A hundred thousand clicks per second sounds no different to the human ear from one clear pitch of analog sound. Sorry.
- by hunterwf2002 December 8, 2007 8:17 AM PST
- I pity the fool!
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(22 Comments)I'm with you WhyFi. Don't knock what you haven't tried... lately and with a good rig (sorry but IMHO the $75 AT-PL50 rig just won't do).
I have a fine CD rig, a decent SACD & DVD-A box and high-res sound system. My LP setup - a modest one by high-end standards - easily beats digital. This is not 70's HiFi. I have over 2000 LPs that I've collected since I bought my 1st one back in 1970 (none are warped or scratched and all are clean). Many are old and many are new. The pressings made today are much higher quality than those from back-in-the-day.
Top it all off with a S.E.T. Amp (300B tubes are my favorite) and high efficiency speakers (all properly setup of course) and you are in for a real treat. Warm? Who cares. Listen to that resolution, that soundstage width & depth and that glorious midrange. It's like the Santana band is right there in the room... okay, how about J-Lo or Alecia Keys...
If you are in doubt find a high-end dealer and have them show you what I mean. You don't have to go with vacuum tubes, solid state will do nicely too. Have a dealer setup a system with a digital front-end and a comparable analog (LP) front-end. Have both digital & LP software of the same music and do a test for yourself.
Try it, you'll like it!