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
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