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This isn't zero sum. It isn't "streaming or vinyl." The two things are complementary.

If a great indie band can survive the lean early years while they develop their sound, they might actually make it to your Spotify or YouTube Music station. You might have heard the streaming version of your favorite song, but do you have the vinyl record of the live performance of that song that you saw in a dive bar outside Nashville?

Vinyl sounds different. Not everything needs to be super high-fi.

@mekkaokereke I thought the point of vinyl was that, being analogue, with its infinite bitrate and zero sampling loss, it effectively /was/ super hi-fi?

@conniptions

You have "software engineer" and "musician" in your bio? That means I probably shouldn't try to 'splain to you how (I think) vinyl works. I've learned from previous (gentle!) spankings that this is generally not a good idea.

That's how I find out which of my friends worked on CoreAudio, who owns a modular synth, and who was in a rock band and played with bands like Life House before they suddenly said "C++ is cool, I wanna work on Spanner, tell me about the atomic clocks again."

@conniptions

Instead I'll politely wait for someone else with "software engineer" and "musician" in their bio to show up, and they can tell both of us how it really works!

My (probably wrong?) understanding: the noise of vinyl gives it an effective bitrate. As in, there's minimal audibly detectable loss relative to vinyl if digitizing above bitrate X.

@mekkaokereke I'll answer this with my 'music fan' hat on rather than the 'musician' or 'software engineer' hats.

I am lucky enough to have copies of several albums both on vinyl and digital.

Repeated A-B testing reveals that I prefer the vinyl playback every time without exception.

I don't really care if - as Adrian has pointed out - "digital audio is more accurate to its input". Maybe so.

In that case, perhaps accuracy-to-input isn't so important after all. Something else is going on.

@conniptions @mekkaokereke
I’ll take this one.

Vinyl does not have “effectively infinite bitrate.” All sound reproductions introduce error, including analog. The question is: What •kind• of error? How much?

In the case of digital, much of the error comes in the form of •quantization noise•: the difference between the “stair step” shape of digital and the actual signal. (Good image of it here: http://davidswiston.blogspot.com/2014/11/adcs-dithering-when-adding-noise-is.html) There’s also some error that comes from circuitry etc. 1/

@conniptions @mekkaokereke
Vinyl lives in a whole different universe of error: harmonic distortion, noise, surface defects, etc. No quantization noise!

But here’s the thing: the noise vinyl introduces is •orders of magnitude• larger than the noise CD-quality digital audio introduces. Like 20-30dB more.

There is basically no perceptible sound an LP can produce that a CD can’t reproduce (much less higher-quality digital audio). There reverse is not true.

Yet LPs •do• often sound better! Why?
2/

@conniptions @mekkaokereke
On top of that, there’s the fact that in the early days of CDs, labels were cranking out CDs as fast as they could, without proper care.

When you master an LP, you have to crank the high end up way too high. And many early CDs came straight off the LP master — but unlike an LP, the CDs accurately reproduced that high end!

Result: CDs got a reputation for being “crunchy” or “brittle,” when it was the masters and not the CDs that were the problem.
4/

@conniptions @mekkaokereke
ICYMI, this painful story bears out the above: expensive boutique remasters claiming to use an all-analog chain, which people luuurrrrved, actually had digital in the chain.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/music/2022/08/05/mofi-records-analog-digital-scandal/

But you know what? I’ll bet they really did sound better. Not because they were LPs, but because better mastering sounds better!

–––

P.S. I LPs, just not for the sound. The album art! The physicality! The ritual! And yes, often, the better masters!
/end

@inthehands @conniptions @mekkaokereke

+1 on mastering/remastering.

been interesting seeing what remastered albums have come out and how much clarity there is. got some jethro tull that i knew the albums inside out. amazing what was hiding in the original recordings.

and the dvd mixes, like eagles hells freezes over dvd or the steve wilson remixes of yes albums.

@paul_ipv6 @conniptions @mekkaokereke It’s true! The new mixes (like the asteve Wilson or the 2017 Sgt Pepper) are particularly interesting because they cross into the realm of new artistic decisions.

Also, always happy to find another Yes fan.

@inthehands @conniptions @mekkaokereke

so true that the mix is part of the art.

there's a reason some musicians were so involved in the production side of their music.

also shows in some of the classic studios having such a signature sound, like motown or muscle shoals. it wasn't just the choice of studio musicians; the engineers/producers were part of the magic.

been interesting as we've gotten to a resolution beyond human hearing where the tweaks really matter. it's no longer what the magnetic tape could hold.

@nuthaven @paul_ipv6 @inthehands @conniptions @mekkaokereke Absolutely true in general.

HOWEVER…. there are genuine mastering artisans working today, like Heba Kadry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heba_Kadry).

And of course Giles Martin, though it’s a little unfair because he got to start from his remixes.

But still…. it’s a mostly-lost art that’s worth paying attention to and supporting the people preserving it and passing it on.

@curtosis I had no idea Giles Martin was a mastering engineer in addition to his regular production, engineering and mixing talents. What, for you, are the standout releases he was the mastering engineer on?

@conniptions I was giving him some mastering credit for the Beatles remixes, which is apparently not accurate for all of them. It’s unclear from online sources who mastered Sgt Pepper and Abbey Road remixes; Miles Showell is credited for mastering on later ones.

It is clear he was closely involved, at any rate. The best example I know of is Ringo’s hi-hat triplets in “Good Morning”. Totally revelatory, and only partially due to the (new) mix.

@paul_ipv6
@inthehands @conniptions @mekkaokereke

Brought it home, put on my good headphones and popped the CD in and hit play. Was literally drooling within 20 seconds. It was in a whole different universe from the original CD. Never compared it side by side to the vinyl (Didn't/don't have a turntable anymore lol) but I know the vinyl is better.
2/2

@paul_ipv6 @juliewebgirl @conniptions @mekkaokereke
It really does come down to the skill, taste, and constraints of the people mixing and mastering — far more than the medium or the tools, I think.

One of the best audio engineers I’ve ever known (http://www.mikeolsonmusic.com) has always been curiously uninterested in the latest shiny tech for exactly this reason, and I have to say, the results he gets suggest he’s correct.

@juliewebgirl @paul_ipv6 @conniptions @mekkaokereke There is no deeper rabbit hole!

@inthehands @airwhale @conniptions @mekkaokereke this is such an interesting thread!

@inthehands @conniptions @mekkaokereke

We got in this mess because loud mastering is proven to grab listener's attention and appear as a better product

The mastering engineers are providing what people will pay for.

As you've alluded, vinyl is a terrible format to store recorded music.

It remains relevant to music nerds like us because it's physically incapable of storing the information required to keep up with digital mastering tricks

@jaimzuber @inthehands @conniptions @mekkaokereke I remember one of the more bizarre moments in the loudness wars was when Metallica's 2008 album Death Magnetic was released. It was okay as far as late Metallica goes but was compressed into an unlistenable mess and people hated it. But then some of the tracks were used on Guitar Hero III, and the mastering on those tracks had a ton more dynamic range and sounded way better. Here's a pretty good article about it: https://www.audioholics.com/news/metallica-death-magnetic-sounds-better-on-guitar-hero-iii

@inthehands @conniptions @mekkaokereke and due to the fact that cd quality audio is outside the bounds of human hearing, we’ll never actually notice that quantization noise. 16-bit audio has a 96dB dynamic range (well enough to blow your eardrums out), and 44.1kHz accounts for nyquist-shannon at the maximum of human hearing plus a bit for the low pass rolloff at the top. audiophiles who claim otherwise are victims of pseudoscience and placebo marketing

@inthehands @conniptions @mekkaokereke that said, i do own some vinyl records, not necessarily because they sound better (although because of mastering differences, sometimes they do), but just because they’re cool lol

@baishen @exchgr @conniptions @mekkaokereke This is exactly right. And in a good space! Most people who spend thousands of dollars on speakers would be better off putting that money into acoustic treatment.

@inthehands @conniptions @mekkaokereke i can understand 48, but what’s the argument for 96?

@exchgr
It’s controversial, but the argument is that our ears hear some transients in a way that’s not well modeled by raw frequency response, and thus much higher sample rates capture transient features that are still perceptible even if they exist in parts of the frequency domain that are not.

Not sure how true that is, or if it’s well-researched, but it’s at least a credible hypothesis.

@conniptions @mekkaokereke

@inthehands @conniptions @mekkaokereke i would love to see some listening test data on this if it exists

@exchgr Me too!!

@conniptions @inthehands @mekkaokereke yeah, i think that’s not really true. when sampling, it goes through a low-pass filter that discards frequencies above something slightly lower than half the sample rate. i think the same is true for downsampling https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/44,100_Hz#Human_hearing_and_signal_processing

@exchgr @conniptions @mekkaokereke The argument is that process error accumulates: reduction at every individual processing step introduces more cumulative error than computing at higher precision and then reducing at the end — just like rounding floats to int and then summing ≠ summing floats and then rounding to int.

This is trivially true for bit depth, and almost certainly true for sample rate.

@inthehands @conniptions @mekkaokereke just so i understand what you’re saying, for instance: 24/96 would be useful for mixing and mastering, and then only at the final bounce step would it be wise to bounce to 16/44.1? i would tend to agree, since in the daw, one is constantly fiddling with levels, effects, panning, and even slowing/speeding, operations that would require higher precision than the end listener

@exchgr @conniptions @mekkaokereke Yes, exactly. DAWs these days even use 64-bit floats in their internal busses, which is probably overkill, but why not? But certainly having source recording at a quality that far exceeds human perception is a reasonable precaution.

@inthehands @conniptions @mekkaokereke yep, that makes a lot of sense. but i think distributing the end result at anything higher than approximately cd quality is just kind of a waste of bandwidth

@exchgr There’s a very solid case for 48 kHz, and also a solid case for 24-bit just for high-dynamic-range (e.g. classical) music. There •might• be a case for 96 kHz for listeners with young ears on high-end equipment. Beyond that, I agree.