On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 05:56:17PM +0100, Rainer Buchty wrote: > On Mon, 22 Nov 2010, Stephen Sinclair wrote: > > >("Vinyl just sounds.. different.. better.. but I couldn't tell you > >why.") > > Jumping on this (being a long-time lurker on this list), I never > believed the above statement until I bought some LPs which I also had on > CD. Until I had my own kind of "revelation" playing the old Art of Noise > LPs and CDs in comparison...
My own CD-vs-LP "revelation" came a few years ago when I bought some sufficiently high-grade analog/digital IO gear, and had a go at digitising some of my favourite LPs. I noticed two things immediately: 1. replaying the PCM sounded *exactly* like the LP, and 2. the mean recorded level (in PCM) was *significantly* lower than the normal signal level of pre-recorded CDs. I could get the signal level back up towards "CD-level" by using compression of various sorts, but in doing so the result wound up sounding like the CD version, rather than the LP version. The obvious conclusion is that the LP mastering process has to use a different paradigm than that for CDs, since the limitations of excursion and dynamics are different. I have high hopes that pervasive use of replay-gain, sound-check or (better) ISO loudness normalization in on-line juke-box playback systems will encourage popular music to be mastered more like tape or LP, and some more dynamics might come back. Cheers, -- Andrew -- dupswapdrop -- the music-dsp mailing list and website: subscription info, FAQ, source code archive, list archive, book reviews, dsp links http://music.columbia.edu/cmc/music-dsp http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/music-dsp