Random Noise
I read a lot of posts, comments, articles and audiophile blogs over the course of my week. Some are entertaining, some illuminating and other utterly ridiculous. Today I thought I would offer up a collection of some of my favorite items from the last week or so I (and no, I’m not going to included the HRA Definition press release from the DEG, CEA, NARAS and labels…I’ll let you figure out which category that piece fits in!).
Here’s an item from emusician.com (Electronic Musician), an online magazine that is targeted to musicians and their interests. It’s an interview with the head of Disc Makers’ CEO Tony Van Veen about their decision to re-enter the vinyl pressing business, a segment they abandoned 15 years ago. During the interview he answers questions about the resurgence of vinyl from a “micro niche” product, the difficulties of getting their pressing lines back in operation and the fact they outsource their disc cutting because they sold their own Neumann lathe years ago.
However, when asked, “what’s the most important thing for artists to know if they’re considering releasing on vinyl?” he answers:
“It’s not a CD, it’s not a download, it’s not digital. You can’t compress and limit the crap out of your music to have it sound as loud as possible, and still have it work on record. It likely needs to be mastered separately for your vinyl project. Your music will sound different on vinyl than in digital form, and benefits from more dynamic range. Also, the amount of time per side becomes a limiting factor. A 65-minute CD can’t be squeezed into one vinyl LP. But it feels oh so good to slide that 12-inch platter out of the protective paper sleeve and drop it onto a turntable.”
Tony is obviously not an audio engineer. He’s right that mastering for a vinyl release is different than for a CD…it means having to adhere to the RIAA curves and avoiding stereo in the entire program amongst other things. Things that aren’t good. The same stereo mixes CANNOT be simply cut onto a vinyl LP without compromising some of the parameters of the sound. And the comment about dynamic range is completely wrong. Vinyl LPs cannot even come close to the dynamic range of a CD.
Here’s the link, if you want to read the entire interview.
My second favorite read this past week is so amazing that it might just warrant a “Tweaky Award”, my recognition of an accessory or process that is complete nonsense. The site is Eric’s HiFi Blog in Singapore and he’s talking about Essence of Music – Two Step CD Cleaner and Treatment Kit. I’m not going to bother with the claims about the product (I recognize that CDs, when damaged or mistreated can be cleaned but the cleaning doesn’t enhance the sound) but go straight to the paragraph at the end. Read for yourself:
“Optical discs are a tricky bunch. I keep two identical files on my computer, one ripped normally, and one ripped from a disc that was treated by an Acoustic Revive RD-3 CD demagnetizer, followed by the SK-CD electrostatic excluder immediately prior to ripping. All of my visitors have commented on the obvious sonic differences between both tracks, despite both files being digitally identical.”
Eric needs to learn how optical discs work…and understand that they are not “tricky”. For anyone to claim that two identical digital files have “obvious sonic differences” challenges the basic concepts of information theory. It is interesting that he acknowledges that the tweak accessories that he purchased and uses result in files that are no different than the simple rips. Duh.
Here’s the link to the entire blog post, if you’re interested.
And for a unique Asian flair, try Sally’s Sesame Solvent and Solution. Just rub any CD or DVD with this solution and you’ll find that despite identical mastering, the musical content will take on the distinctive harmonics of the Far East.
Wow, that last one is just amazing. Identical digital files that sound different.
Also the use of a demagnetizer and static eliminator shows that he has no concept of the physics behind reading an OPTICAL disc.
And his friends all heard it too.
This is NOT the first time I’ve heard someone claim that identical digital files ripped (somehow) differently sound different, though digitally identical. I even had a guy email me two files, one ripped a “standard” way, one ripped “the right way” and claimed the sounded completely different, easy for anyone to hear. I, of course, couldn’t hear any difference. I even subtracted one from the other using Audition, got a perfect null. This guy’s test was, of course, heavily biased, and fully sighted. Long story short, he eventually gave up trying to convince me saying I was biased. Now, isn’t that interesting?
Beliefs are powerful things. You want to get them on YOUR side.
I’ve seen it before too…
Regarding the vinyl topic and dynamic range comment. i think the author was referring to point that tracks mastered for vinyl often have greater dynamic range compared to when they are mastered for cd.
In this hobby, people hear what they want to hear. It is as simple as that.
Heh! It would seem that our culture is in the midst of turning the corner and entering a time that will be referred to as “the Bizarro Renaissance.”
Instead of exiting the dark ages and into the age of scientific enlightenment, we are exiting an age of significant scientific advancement, and trolling down into a new, dark age of mysticism, magic and parochial audio beliefs.
Go figure.
I’m guessing the upper limit of the dynamic range is established at the time of the recording, and I also assume that this range could be reduced during mastering (e.g. with compression?). The reason I bring this up relates to Tony’s quote “[vinyl]benefits from more dynamic range”. I agree this is more inaccurate than accurate, but can be ambiguous. The “potential” qualification is important here. I will agree that the potential dynamic range of digital will always be higher than analog, it also seems possible that due to the mastering, which as we know is different for CD and vinyl, the dynamic range for CD releases could end up smaller than the vinyl release.
I’ve always wanted to compare this by spectrogram analysis as several vinyl releases now include the CD as well. And I must say in my subjective listening, several times there have been high frequencies (such as cymbals) that the mastering process must have muted in the CD version, but were left prominent in the vinyl version. I suppose this is personal preference, but this is just one example of why certain vinyl pressings might have a more appealing listening experience in the end, and why many assume that the fidelity of vinyl is superior to CD. If this is a common occurrence and if the available fidelity of the Redbook format is rarely used (3-4db), then of course vinyl will often “win out” in a listening test (unless the pressing has horrid background noise). I agree with many sentiments on this board that we need either a more balanced mastering process or two distinct masters.
You’ve got it right. The key word is the potential of each format. Vinyl LPs do not have the same potential for dynamic range as a Redbook CD but it is not uncommon for the mastering engineers to smash things further on CD than vinyl.
I think that if you were to compress the audio and boost the overall level that the resulting record would sound more distorted because of the needle’s velocity would always be higher than a record with less compression and level boost. Does that make sense?
There seems to be a misunderstanding here about the supposed immutable nature of digital copying of CD. CDs are effectively copied as a bitstream, programs such as dbpoweramp capture the bitstream (as a rip) and compare it to previous rips; if the checksums compare then it deemed to be a “perfect copy”. It’s quite possible to make a CD rip which is not a perfect copy and depending on the nature of error correction, may be audible, possibly as subtle timing errors. File based copying from a hard disk or optical media is different as the location of every bit of information is known, in this instance as long as every bit has been copied the file will be identical.
That should read other optical media, ie DVD or Blu-ray.
I will cherish Eric’s remarks for the rest of my life! Oh, my…