Hacker News Reader

Comment by hashkb | Hacker News Reader

As long as nobody is claiming they sound better, and it's just for fun and nostalgia, I'm all for it. It really bugs me when vinyl buffs try to argue their rig sounds better or warmer or whatever than the same rig with a digital (or non-vinyl analog) source.

View on HN

But it can sound warmer and to some people that sounds better. You just seem annoyed that some people enjoy things that you don't.

Please define "warmer" and compare to how 100 other vinyl buffs define it. It's meaningless, if you just admit it's an emotional preference then I'm fine with it.

Define jovial. Define melancholic. It's music. The entire point is to evoke an emotional response. I can't define "warm" but people know what I mean when I say it and that's all that matters.

Music can be jovial or melancholic. Not recording technologies. Technologies can have varying ability to carry certain kinds of music, but we can describe that ability with objective terms.

Do people actually know what you mean by "warm"? Are you sure it's not just a way of saying "the things you like about vinyl (varying per person)"? Because a definition like that would be a perfect example of something that's an association-based preference rather than a attribute-based preference. Which like hashkb said is perfectly fine to have, but makes the term pretty meaningless.

The question them becomes, where does that preference come from. The answer to that is what would cause people to think something is warmer. When someone says something is warmer it is due to a few factors. The first is a bump in volume in the frequency range from 280hz to 900hz. The second is a quality that causes sounds to separate or mush together. I think that is due to format resolution or frequency range. I think the second factor is what really separates digital and analog recording. Digital generally does not allow for sounds to mush together it keeps things separated.

I think it largely depends on the recording and mastering process. I have lots of friends that use a fully analog process end to end, which changes the way you approach your sessions and the recording gear itself plays a huge part in the sound. You're then mixing and mastering for a playback medium that isn't just radio or mid-quality streaming on iPhone earbuds.

All of that has a very real impact on the end result and lots of old albums were recorded, mixed, and mastered for a fully analog playback medium.

If we're talking about music made in a fully digital studio and then pressed to vinyl at the end, then yeah, there really isn't a difference. Maybe it even sounds worse. But if your musicians and engineers are thinking about an entirely analog end result, then I do think it sounds different (and in my opinion better).

You forget production values.

Compare vinyl to CD editions of some tunes.

There are real differences and it's not about how perfect the reproduction actually is. It is about how the music was mastered, the art of it.

Those vinyl limits bring out some really great art.

That is a lot of where "better" comes from in these discussions.

A similar thing happened when AM radio was a music medium. It's all about the production values. Some 70s era music just feels great!

Of course one can put that all on a CD, or digital track and enjoy it.

Honestly, more producers should be exploring these things. Perfection isn't what most people crave.

I see this trend toward vinyl as a value add to music. With the return of more if the art also comes more value.

We nailed audio reproduction long ago. All but the most crappy gear can perform better than humans can.

It's just not about that, and this trend seems to resonate with what people like, not what is technically superior.

The physical limitations of vinyl had a direct effect on the sound. Although the Loudness War [1] started on vinyl, the move to CDs let it step up to a whole new level [2].

Without getting into the merits or detriments of loudness and DRC, the physical medium of vinyl enforced a constraint on the sound.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

[2] https://www.cnet.com/uk/news/compression-is-killing-your-mus...

"Better" is also a very subjective terms. From an engineering standpoint these days, digital indeed these days will be a more accurate representation of the sound (discounting artificial post-processing like the loudness wars that primarily affected pop and rock music).

But it's possible to like vinyl's imperfections and coloring of the sound purely for personal preference reasons. Nothing wrong with that.

From a technical point of view I get why the argument is stupid, but playing a well pressed/mixed record has a visceral pleasure that is hard to explain. It's kind of like driving a manual car. Sure, it's dated and we've invented safer, easier ways to change the gearing while driving, but people who like experiences like that all know it's something more than a "hipster" indulgence. It's simply adding a level of complexity to something you love.

I could even argue it's something akin to the reason people use Vim or Emacs over JetBrains or Atom ha

The manual transmission and vi are both different in ways that power users can take advantage of. (I use both of those, and digital music)

Except JetBrains and Atom are disastrously slow which is the only real reason for preferring one text editor over another.

It sounds like (as others are saying) the limitations of vinyl as a medium had social effects that made it sound better (similar to the limitations of older video game consoles.)

That may be true, but you could just not use gross compression on your digital tracks to achieve loudness and it'd be moot.

Right, that's why it's a social thing and not a technical thing.

In reality, it could be that a randomly selected record sounds nicer than a randomly selected CD track, even though it really has little to do with the media itself.

This sort of thing happens all the time, just look at the culture that has developed around windows software development compared to the equivalent with GNU/Linux. It's not really a technical thing, there's very little that each OS isn't capable of. But the way the average piece of software for both platforms is designed, documented, and marketed is totally different.

I like to think of it as being a form of dithering -- the objectively higher noise floor can actually make the whole work sound more coherent.

Better sound quality can be debated endlessly. Although being a part of and having friends in the recording industry for over six years, I can assure you that the consensus is that vinyl does sound better. If a record is pressed well it does sound more pleasing.

Play the vinyl, and record that onto a CD.

Now play the CD. You have exactly that "pleasing" sound.

True. Now if only someone would make a vinyl emulation, that would be great.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com