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Comment by explodingcamera | Hacker News Reader

This seems kind of counterproductive for the (I think) vinyl target group. If I listen to vinyl, I want the kinda retro feeling "real" analog audio signal, else I'd just get a CD or online download. A mid-range stylus is completly sufficient for a great experience without any noticable noise and next to no real wear on the records.

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I'd add that the ritual around vinyl (i.e. manually adjusting tone arm, touching a vinyl and placing it on the platter, etc) is the part that people like the most, not the actual sound. I don't think anyone would be able to discern a new vinyl from a cd in a blind test.

Strongly disagree.

A major reason is that you can't really get away with the crappy loudness war style mastering on vinyl. Just because of that they sound way better than most digital masters.

This is not the problem of a medium (be it a vinyl or a CD). You can put the same crappy mastering to a vinyl.

I thought vinyls needed to be specially mastered to prevent the needle from basically being pushed to the adjacent grove by an amplitude that's too high on the track.

Yes, but that's no barrier to compression, which reduces the dynamic range. Compressed material is all at about the same level. The reason people speak of the "loudness wars" is that after compression, even the parts of the music that would have been quieter are now almost as loud as the peaks.

It's actually quite ironic, I think, that compression has become such a fad only now that we have digital media with their much lower noise floor. We have more dynamic range available, but we're using less of it.

> Yes, but that's no barrier to compression, which reduces the dynamic range. Compressed material is all at about the same level. The reason people speak of the "loudness wars" is that after compression, even the parts of the music that would have been quieter are now almost as loud as the peaks.

The point is that if you want to make a vinyl sound "as loud as possible", you're best off not compressing it, since you can have higher peak volume in one groove if the adjacent groove is quiet. Whereas when mastering a CD, the way to make it "as loud as possible" is just to crush everything up to 0dB.

This doesn't make sense to me. When I say "the parts of the music that would have been quieter", I'm mostly not speaking of softer passages vs. louder ones. I'm referring to the fact that even within the span of a single measure, the original signal will generally have had significant peaks and valleys. I don't think it's possible, given the number of pairs of adjacent grooves on a vinyl record, for a recording engineer to ensure that no two adjacent grooves have peaks at the same moment.

What makes compressed music sound "loud" is that there's some sound present to the ears at full volume, or nearly so, at all times. It's not that it simply has a higher peak level. Indeed, it's the listener who controls the peak level of the sound that reaches their ears, not the recording engineer — they can always turn the volume up or down as they please. The reason compressed music sounds "loud" is that it has a higher average volume than uncompressed music of the same peak level.

> This doesn't make sense to me. When I say "the parts of the music that would have been quieter", I'm mostly not speaking of softer passages vs. louder ones. I'm referring to the fact that even within the span of a single measure, the original signal will generally have had significant peaks and valleys.

I don't think that can be right - sound is a waveform so even the loudest notes will oscillate around zero. "Loudness" would usually be defined as something like root-mean-square amplitude, but if we zoom in to talk about a single note (sine wave) then the peak amplitude and the RMS amplitude are in a direct relationship with each other. On the scale of a whole piece, yes there's a difference between average and peak, but on the scale of one groove to the next - a couple of seconds - I don't think there's any practical difference.

The complaint I've heard about "loudness wars" e.g. Californication is precisely that there are no soft passages - every bar is pushed up to full volume. I'm not aware of anyone talking about the effects of compression on a smaller scope than the couple-of-seconds scale.

> sound is a waveform so even the loudest notes will oscillate around zero

Sure. When I refer to "peaks and valleys" I'm talking about the envelope of the waveform. I think that's standard usage in audio engineering.

I think you should download Audacity or equivalent and look at some waveforms of both uncompressed and compressed music. I think you'll see that there are loudness variations on a much shorter timescale than you expect, and that compression reduces these considerably.

I'm speaking mostly about compression. It's the worst part of the loudness war: we lost dynamic range even though we have technically superior mediums.

Well... you can. You just can't make them as loud on the absolute scale. But there's nothing preventing you from compressing your audio to death, then reducing the overall volume before you press it to vinyl. Once people turn up the volume, they still get the compressed audio that was the input of the process.

There's also the well-known effect where the process of recording and playing a vinyl creates dynamic range (as measured by various tools) where there is none. Some vinyls that are known to be from the same master as the CD still get much better scores on http://dr.loudness-war.info/

A very nice technical discussion of this myth is here: http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_(Vinyl)#Myt...

This is basically my position; I buy lots of music on vinyl and I hold no illusions that it's "higher quality" or "better fidelity" or that I could tell the difference between a song played off one of my records and the same song played from a CD with my eyes closed.

But I like the rituals around it: taking the album out of the sleeve and looking at the artwork; placing the album on the table and setting it to spin; lowering the needle. I like how I have to purposefully listen to the music - you can't just set up a playlist and walk away, you have to pay attention to the songs and flip over the record once the side is finished, or put the second disc on.

Why is using a laser not real analog audio?

Since "real" was in quotes, I assume they're talking about the change to sound quality that is caused by the physical touching of the devices. It's not necessarily more clear or better, it's just different, and that's the point of doing something so retro. But if you aren't actually doing that thing, it loses a lot of the psychological value.

It's similar in some sense to the reasons why people go to see live concerts. The sound quality isn't better, it's just different, and feels "more real", although for concerts it is also helped by the fact that you're actually there.

Maybe true for rock concerts. Definitely false for classic or jazz live performances.

Which part is false? "Feels more real" or "sound quality isn't better"?

I suspect you mean the latter, though with modern audio tech, well-mic'd and mastered recordings can easily sound ... if not better, then more intense, than live performances.

Though there's nothing like seeing the music being performed live.

Yes, excuse the ambiguity.

To me a philharmonic concert sounds... very different than recorded audio. I'm confident I can double-blindly 100% tell the difference. And so can everyone else. This is one experiment I'd be happy to participate in.

I don't even really listen to music and I could do that.

And the obvious difference: live 'rock' etc. is still coming through speakers.

Steinway Lyngdorf

> To demonstrate the veracity of Lyngdorf's "Is it real, or is it Memorex" claim, Birkelund invited the trio to begin performing. After playing for what felt like, at most, 30 seconds, the musicians began to fade out as the volume of a pre-recorded track of the same music was turned up. Although the much too short demo left many in the room a gasp at how remarkably close the live trio and tuned-to-the-room system sounded, Birkelund failed to mention that the Model D system was never silent.

https://www.stereophile.com/content/steinway-lyngdorfs-elega...

> The sound quality isn't better

For some bands, I'd actually disagree with that. Both what they are playing is better, and their released material is compressed to hell and back[1], which seems to be less prevalent live (though far from gone).

No doubt they _could_ do that recorded (anything you can do live you can match in a studio), but they _aren't_ doing.

There's also the non-musical elements - there's a difference between just playing some music and putting on a show.

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

In a very concrete way, the inability to apply hard-clipped brick-wall limiting and extreme compression is why vinyl often does sound better than CD - the physics of the needle-in-groove mean that there are limits to the amplitudes you can try to encode without bouncing the damn thing out.

So vinyl masters often (but not always) avoid the loudness war and have a wider dynamic range.

Hmm, this seems to be a common idea, but I don't think it's true. As I said above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20914699

The problem isn't with the compression part per se, but rather with clipping. The two typically go hand in hand for modern needle-in-the-red CD masters.

>It's similar in some sense to the reasons why people go to see live concerts. The sound quality isn't better, it's just different, and feels "more real", although for concerts it is also helped by the fact that you're actually there

As I don't have thousands of dollars worth of stage speakers, amplifiers and audio equipment, there's a very noticable difference in sound quality between live shows and recorded music, depending on the venue.

You're also missing out a pretty big part of live shows, there's a difference between hearing a musician play a song live vs a recording. A recording is almost never one single take straight through and, depending on the artist, can be a fairly different rendition of the song.

An example, last concert I went to was cypress hill, they had a different DJ with them that mixed their tunes up pretty differently so the performance was.nothing like listening to one of their albums.

I don't see how CDs, in the abstract, can really be different from records, in that, surely you could apply a suitable filter to a CD decoder to make the output sound exactly like a record. Especially given modern computing power. It's just that, I assume, people have chosen not to.

same reason even the best CRT emulation shaders on a 4k screen still don't look as nice as a SNES game in a good CRT TV

That's largely because no currently available 4K screen can replicate the decay curve of CRT phosphors. MicroLED screens could theoretically manage it.

I would guess (could be wrong) that the laser turntable involves some DSP and a DAC.

Normal turntables have a very simple analog signal path, with the needle moving electromagnets which emit the signal.

There's no reason they would have to be digital - Laserdisc was pure analog (until later discs added digital stereo sound)

> "real" analog

Best oxymoron I've seen in a while ("analog" literally means "simulating something else")

Audio recording and reproduction always has to be an analog of the original vibrating air molecules ( unless you can somehow perpetuate that vibrating air by storing it in a jar or somesuch)

Oxymorons aren't based on etymology, but on meaning.

The casual and dictionary meaning of analogue today, in the context of vinyl and music technologies, is the opposite of digital (and technically that which "uses a continuous physical variable like voltage to represent data") not that which is simulating something else.

So "real analogue" just means "mechanism based on the actual use of a continuous physical variable like voltage to represent data" (as opposed to a digital version of such).

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