Innovation or e-waste? Apple rumored to ditch headphone jack

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Conan46

Here is a site to check an album's dynamic range:
http://dr.loudness-war.info/
As someone who has listened to Rush and am a fan, beginning with them on Vinyl all the way back to their Fly By Night album. I definitely notice the noise and mess of a song like this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLNfkVsW1Ck
here is the dynamic range chart of the song
http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/li...m=vapor+trails

And there you have it: one of the reasons why people sometimes think vinyl sounds better than CD's.

Is vinyl superior to CD? No. If they are both mastered the best as can be achieved on each medium, the CD is *much* superior. However, it is very easy to greatily **** up a CD or digital file (see the crap DR of even the HDTracks file), while it is very hard to crap out vinyl in the same way. At some point, you can't get the vinyl to compress the range more and become louder; it just distorts. Going louder just becomes physically impossible without doing damage to the record.

Also, sometimes vinyls are mastered better/more correctly and with more care than the CD to create a collector's item.

So many people who are claiming that vinyl sounds better than CD's are listening to badly mastered music. It's technically impossible for vinyl to outperform a perfectly mastered CD.

Please note that this does not have anything to do with someone preferring the sound of vinyl, which can be different to the CD. That is taste. I'm talking solely about the technical capabilities of the two media.

Also see the great DR of the Unmasters version. I wonder why artists and producers seem to still master at the highest volume possible. It makes no sense, because everything is brought back down again by volume leveling such as ReplayGain, so one just ends up with a crap record instead of a loud one.

[jbjb]

Originally Posted by jhowell

Adding a bit doubles the number of possible voltage levels. This is a log10(2)=0.3 bel (3 dB) increase. However, power increases with the square of voltage (for a fixed load resistance) which means that dB of sound intensity are double dB of voltage, or 6 dB per bit.

That's not quite right - dBs are normally calculated differently for powers ratios and voltage/field ratios specifically to avoid the confusion you describe.

For a voltage ratio, dBs are calculated as 20*log10(V1/V2). For power ratios, it's 10*log10(P1/P2). This means that when comparing two signals, you get the same dB value irrespective of whether you compare their voltage or power.

Hence adding a bit adds 6dB to the DR, whether you're talking about the voltage or the resultant power.

/JB

[jbjb]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

While you're right, the same dude as I quoted before essentially says: "It doesn't matter. Quantisation noise is so low with 16 bit already that stepping up to 24 bit is useless." (For listening, not editing.)

I've agreed with that all along - as I said before, 16 bits @ 44.1 kHz is plenty for listening.

/JB

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Shane R

What sort of music are you FLAC aficionados listening to?

Lossless meaning CD quality or better..

[jbjb]

Originally Posted by Conan46

As someone who has listened to Rush and am a fan, beginning with them on Vinyl all the way back to their Fly By Night album. I definitely notice the noise and mess of a song like this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLNfkVsW1Ck
here is the dynamic range chart of the song
http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/li...m=vapor+trails

Oh yes - Vapour Trails is a classic loudness wars victim.

(I'm a big Rush fan too.)

/JB

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by jbjb

Oh yes - Vapour Trails is a classic loudness wars victim.

(I'm a big Rush fan too.)

/JB

The entire Dire Straits oevre is a loudness war victim. While ripping my CD-collection, I've replaced *many* CD's with older versions; sold my own version, rebought an old version second hand (Amazon.co.uk Marketplace).

I've seen rips jump from a DR of 7-8 to a DR of 12-14.... from 'crap' to 'excellent'. And yes, such a difference can easily be heard; much more easily than a difference between 192 kbps and 320 kpbs mp3's.

[jbjb]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

"It *might* have been more important if the CD had been 14 bit, as originally planned.... maybe."

My first CD player only had a 14 bit DAC, and it still sounded better (to my ears) than the (rather good) turntable I had at the time.

/JB

[Phogg]

Originally Posted by jbjb

My first CD player only had a 14 bit DAC, and it still sounded better (to my ears) than the (rather good) turntable I had at the time.

/JB

I was in Japan when the Sony CDP-101 came out. I bought one and took it to the New Sanno hotel where I was staying and cued up "Us And Them" from Dark Side Of The Moon through a period Koss headset. I feared it was broken as the time display began to count down and no sound was with the volume turned up. Then the music kicked in...

Digital music was a huge change for me.
So much more durable as a medium and I was a person who tended to wear out vinyl on things that I like.

[ApK]

My first CD player (circa 1990) was a "bitstream" player. 1 bit, 256x oversampling. Or something like that. I loved it. I may still have it somewhere.
Of course, before the CD player, I primarily listened to music on cassette tape, so the sonic improvement did not require one be an audiophile to appreciate.
My actual record collection was, and is, roughly two dozen pieces of vinyl.
(Not counting the 45s I grew up with.)

[DuckieTigger]

The real problem with digital, at least with uniform PCM is that you store logarithmic data in a linear file format. Sure, adding a bit will add 6db to your dynamic range. But once you go to a more silent part of your music you lose resolution exponentially. A CD has 96db dynamic range on paper? You wish, since going to the range of -90db to -96db your resolution is one single bit - on or off in that whole 6db range - in practice completely unuseable.

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by Conan46

Here is a site to check an album's dynamic range:
http://dr.loudness-war.info/
As someone who has listened to Rush and am a fan, beginning with them on Vinyl all the way back to their Fly By Night album. I definitely notice the noise and mess of a song like this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLNfkVsW1Ck
here is the dynamic range chart of the song
http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/li...m=vapor+trails

No Working Man? (I lived in San Antonio from 1960 to 1990)

[Conan46]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

No Working Man? (I lived in San Antonio from 1960 to 1990)

That song always sounds good
http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/view/63156

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

And there you have it: one of the reasons why people sometimes think vinyl sounds better than CD's.

Is vinyl superior to CD? No. If they are both mastered the best as can be achieved on each medium, the CD is *much* superior. However, it is very easy to greatily **** up a CD or digital file (see the crap DR of even the HDTracks file), while it is very hard to crap out vinyl in the same way. At some point, you can't get the vinyl to compress the range more and become louder; it just distorts. Going louder just becomes physically impossible without doing damage to the record.

Also, sometimes vinyls are mastered better/more correctly and with more care than the CD to create a collector's item.

So many people who are claiming that vinyl sounds better than CD's are listening to badly mastered music. It's technically impossible for vinyl to outperform a perfectly mastered CD.
one.

The sample rate on a CD is 44KHz which limits the High end. A [B]Hard cutoff

OTOH The top frequencies on a Vinyl recording roll off.

When I was a Bit younger, my hearing went a bit past 21KHz (I could hear the Horizontal Oscillator in a TV, Ultrasonic Motion Detectors). I noticed the difference on things like the Triangle chime. The brightness was gone.

To me, the modern subwoofer feels (literately) wrong. 1/10W/ch into my 1960's speakers reaches a measured (music) SPL of 96 at my desk. You do not want to be in my office at 5 Watts

[LovesMacs]

I'm not sure whether this thread is still News or if it has morphed into General Discussions or even Lounge material. Anyway...

Another consideration about dynamic range is the listening environment. Lately I've been listening to a lot of classical and opera, both genres which have been traditionally been recorded with a wider dynamic range than pop or rock. That's great if you are listening in a quiet room but sometimes awkward if you are listening in the car or anywhere noisy.

[jbjb]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

The real problem with digital, at least with uniform PCM is that you store logarithmic data in a linear file format. Sure, adding a bit will add 6db to your dynamic range. But once you go to a more silent part of your music you lose resolution exponentially. A CD has 96db dynamic range on paper? You wish, since going to the range of -90db to -96db your resolution is one single bit - on or off in that whole 6db range - in practice completely unuseable.

That's just the point at which the signal disappears into the quantisation noise floor (the bit-step quantum is significant compared with the signal amplitude). Vinyl would have given up long before that (the typical DR of a vinyl record is around 70dB - a factor of at least a hundred worse in terms of linear power dynamic range) so it's hard to see how that can be classified as a disadvantage of digital. It's not perfect, but it's much better than the analogue alternatives.

Logarithmically compressed PCM, of course, has it's own issues which are much worse (IMHO) for music reproduction.

Katsunami has it right - CD is technically massively superior to vinyl, but those advantages aren't always apparent due to a tendency for them to be royally messed with excessive DR compression etc.

/JB