Jobbo wrote: Sat Jan 14, 2023 5:22 pmDynamic range of vinyl is physically limited, so the compression does prevent playing problems: it stops the needle jumping out of the groove.GG. wrote: Fri Jan 13, 2023 8:56 pm Dynamic range was not compressed to solve playing ‘problems’ per se but to save space on an LP and then reversed using RIAA curves in the phono amp on the way back out. Just in the same way as digital formats use sampling to save file size and throw away a lot of the information in the sine wave being sampled…
Sampling is not compression to save file size - you’re thinking of MP3, ATRAC etc. Take a look at the theory of sampled music at CD quality; it isn’t just 44,100 discrete values per second, it is a continuous waveform.
You can use a valve amp with a CD player or streamer if you want euphonic distortion. It’s trivially easy to get an objectively better output from your source than vinyl gives you. So don’t conflate the pleasure of handling and using vinyl with it being ‘better’; that debate was done in the 80s and 90s to death. The fact that many people still prefer vinyl is entirely on subjective grounds, but it’s not justified on any objective measure so if you can get your head round that you can have better music reproduction more easily and cheaply. Win!
I'll admit that bass notes at high levels do present tracking issues for vinyl playback but the fact that you only get 4 minutes of recording to a side of LP without EQ was likely a key driving factor...
Regarding digital recording - you're right that sampling isn't the same as lossy compression and my comment was sloppy there, I admit. Equally though even with your reference to CD you've only discussed one of the two key aspects of the digital encoding in the sample rate and there is of course bit depth (rather than bit rate which is culprit in lossy compression) to consider as well. Those two parts of the Red Book standard were indeed chosen because they didn't exceed the amount of data possible to fit on a 120mm CD.
I appreciate that 44.1k is supposed to be indistiguishable audibly from the sine wave (though it doesn't replicate the full waveform - just enough given the frequency of human hearing), but 16 bits is not actually adequate to replicate the full dynamic range of human hearing - hence modern formats and professional digital recording uses 24 bit instead. That's likely splitting hairs (though obviously high definition audio at 24/192khz and SACD / DSD do exist), but its before we get into all the practical difficulties of ensuring those digital 0 and 1s are decoded properly and jitter and other abnormalities aren't introduced. Again, theoretical technical performance does not always equate to reality and what you are saying is that digital is likely more accurate...
... and of course my point was not that vinyl is more accurate than digital, just that it can (and often does!) sound better. In audio playback that is what people want otherwise audio buffs would all buy studio monitors and they don't. Another great thing about vinyl is that much moden music has been remastered specifcally for it and a lot of the compression (amplitude not bitrate...) that recording engineers added to CDs to make them sound 'louder' has been removed. For example the californication album by the Chilis is unlistenable on CD but brilliant on vinyl.
My question to you would be have you listened to a good modern vinyl rig and compared it to the same track on a digital format on the same system to see which you prefer? I've A/B compared many times and nearly always come away with the same answer... The technical debate between digital and analogue is irrelevant - all that matters is the sound!
I realised years ago that there was no point spending thousands on an LP12 with mods when it was just trying to get to the pretty much perfect reproduction of a good £500 CD player (90s prices). In the intervening 30 years we’ve had such massive advances in data processing and handling that all the old concerns about jitter and errors are totally irrelevant; chip clock speeds are so high it’s all easily reviewed and corrected millions of times per sample now. And transport read errors are removed by streaming from memory.
Quite cool though that one of the best tonearms in the world was developed when I was - err - a year old.
