Cooking vinyl
 

Just been pondering the question "Should vinyl recordings be cleaned up ?"

None of the automatic noise reduction programs are particularly good with vinyl and remove too much of the musical content, particularly on older, well played records which are already under stress. I've done some heavy weight noise reduction by hand, but usually as a big favour to friends, it's a very time consuming process to make a good job of it, and I tend to just give my own recordings a very light working over.

I think that some clicks and scratches are O.K., part of vinyls charm. They often become part of the song after a while and I'd miss some of them if the were removed. I often see my record collection as a kind of diary, because of the associations that spring up when I play a particular track. Some of the scratches have become no less a part of the record than the music itself, and a reminder of old friends and past disasters.

And rumble, it wouldn't be a proper LP without a bit of rumble would it.I've noticed this with CDs I've bought of records I used to have, they just don't do it like the old LP, always end up feeling that something was missing.

Are we getting far too digital ? I still prefer playing and listening to live music whenever I can, no matter how bad the acoustics and how crap the PA.

UJ

'Keep Music Live'

"Which came first, the chicken or the egg?"

Your going to have just about as much success with that debate.

Live music can be good, but usually only when it really is live. Rumble? Scratches? Personally, i prefer to hear the music as it's supposed to be heard, with distort and the like only there if the band wants it. If you mean cleaned up as in taken to a sanitary zone and burnt then yes, definitly.

I only buy CD's when vinyl's not available or more expensive. I can burn CD's of the records anyway, and $7 or $8 per LP is too good to pass up.

Anyway, as far as sound quality I like vinyl better too. It sounds warmer and richer, and that's more important than barely-audible little clicks. Then again I barely listen to many really old records, and when I do I really do notice that they.. sound like shit. But I think that's more the original production being poor than a limitation of the medium. The difference in fidelity between CD is not that great on newly produced vinyl.

Sorry, unless i've misunderstood you, you've misunderstood me - I prefer CD, 'cos vinyl isn't as close to how the band wants it.


The scratches become part of the *song*?? So if one of the pages of a novel gets a big stain over it so you cant read some of the words, thats OK because it becomes part of the story? Sorry, i prefer digital music by far - and live - thats *live* as in happening in front of me, here'n'now - even more:D

When the pages of a book become all dogeared and faded, it becomes the character of the book. It makes the book unique, and more enjoyable.

I was replying to ujay, not 7icha7d. My connection's not that fast.

OK, bad example... if a video has a bit where the sound goes, or the picture gets really bad, thats good? albums have their own unique charachter and feel, they don't need to be mauled first.

8mm has a charm all it's own. Even pre-Talkie movies have their own distinctive character.

Don't get me wrong I've nothing against clean digital music, I just don't think it's the be all and end all of the story. As I was trying to say before, music is far more complex than just the notes and the spaces in betweem.

As for the big stains on your novels, that is a matter for you and your conscience :D

UJ

It's absolutely true that vinyl has something that CDs just can't get.
Let me explain:
On CDs, music is recorded in samples, to save on space. A sample of sound (ie. the intensity of the sound wave at that point in time) is recorded as a number every whatever fraction of a second. But think about this: If you have a frequency that is higher than that of the sampling rate, the samples only catch parts of that sound.
Picture:
http://www.davidmear.com/Temp/sampling.gif
The grey bars are the points in time where the sound level is measured.
The red a green frequencies come out fine, but the blue frequency ends up sounding like something much lower than it actually is and you end up with a low beating sound, that has to be taken out from CDs.
Because vinyl is analogue, it doesn't lose any frequencies.

You probably all knew that, but I was bored and I felt like making useless pictures and telling you boring things. 'k?

oops///

[edit]

If you record in digital in the first place, there would be no difference (frequency wise) between the CD and Analog version, except for CD's 20khz lowpass.

/me likes anolog and digital

For what it's worth...:)
I'm getting ready to put my record collection onto CD.
And some of the songs I'm gonna encode to MP3 to share.
I'm telling my age, but that's no big deal.
I grew up with records.
My record collection started around 1965 with the Beatles.
Every record I have (500 or so) were bought at time of release.
Allot are out of print and no longer available in any format.
And most have been played to the point of being thin :D
But they all still sound great, pops, crackles, hisses and all.
I'm gonna clean them up to a point.
But I hope to be able to leave some of the pops, crackles, hisses,
and noises in there.
That's the proud character and history of vinyl.

Labour of love, Papadoc, a labour of love.

500 LPs is a mammoth task - I wish you the very best of luck in getting through them all.

UJ

Thanks ujay.
I seriously doubt I'll ever get all of them done.
But I'm gonna work on the oldest, rare, and best ones
to start with.

There is a plugin (calles i-zotope vinyl i think), with that you can add scratches and warp to mp3's. it's quite cool really

good job, papadoc
preserve the music

Lucid, vinyl is an extremely primiitive medium which fails to capture true frequency anyway. If you are recording a sound so high pitched that it cannot be stored to a CD, then it will not record properly to vinyl, either. It would probably not even record, and assuming anything at all got imprinted, it would be a distorted jumble of pops and crackles.

Vinyl is far more limited as far as storing frequency and volume. That's where CDs excel, and all previous mediums fall short.

Personally, I'll take the highest quality recording I can get. I see no reason to accept distortion into my music. If the music you are listening to needs character added to it, then you need better music.

The truth about records vs CD's is that records are actually superior... that is, when you're using very expensive equipment.

On a typical setup, CD is better than vinyl. On a $1000+ setup, the 2 are about equal. On a $2000+ setup, for instance using one of those turntables that reads the vinyl via a laser rather than a needle, vinyl is superior to CD's. The reason for this being that vinyl is true analog, possibly higher than 96kHz (I don't know), whereas CD's are digital and cannot contain any more than 44kHz of sound data.

Of course, I never buy records because
a) My stereo and turntable are just run-of the mill and more than 15 years old.
b) Not all music these days is available on vinyl!

i personally prefer vinyl, and i'll tell you why-

the music i listen to is made for vinyl (old blues & jazz recordings, modern indie rock [which is recorded lo-fi])

i have found that the music on vinyl is a lot closer, meaning more intimate than is cd recordings--> take two of the same albums, one on vinyl the other on cd, and you'll hear the difference

maybe its just me, but cd recordings seem to have a strange distancing aura to them, while vinyl jumps, and chugs forward really close to you

plus everything i listen to is available on vinyl, sometimes way before it is on cd

---> if you're ever in Rochester, NY make sure you vist, The Bop Shop they specialize in blues, jazz, soul, and indie rock-- lots and lots of out of print material (plus the owner knows EVERYTHING about music)

Yes Vinyl is good (that's all I am going to say)

now if I had money to have good vinyl playback...

i beg to differ.

If it needs character, then it does not have its own character.

By definition, music should have character.

Without character, sound is not music, only noise.

So, if it needs character, then it has no character, and is noise, not music.

Neo, I still don't believe that vinyl can produce better sounds. If unplayed, it could be close, but I believe that the medium is too primitive to fully hold any information. I'm not an expert, though.

The point is fairly moot. I'm not planning to ever spend $2000 on a single stereo component.

this is what you fail to understand
vinyl doesn't hold information as digital does
vinyl doesn't use 0s and 1s
vinyl holds music

vinyl is analogue(you know that) and therefore stores the sound physically.

CDs playback up to 20KHz (22KHz theoretically, but no one does this)
Vinyl is able to play up to 20KHz and above, therefore adding character to the music, filling in what is missing, even though you will not able to hear these frequencies, you will "feel" the richness of the music.

A book holds information. A book is analogue. When I use the word information, I'm not generally referring to digital data.

I don't believe that vinyl could properly represent a musical wave. Vinyl is a soft substance, which I have trouble imagining could be properly imprinted with an accurate musical wave, at leasy not by a huge stamp. I would think that vinyl's frequency range should be quite a bit shorter than that of a CD. I'd expect that any extremely high or low frequencies would either not be recorded at all, or distorted horribly.

Neo said that you need a laser-reader to properly pull the songs from a record at high quality (which is probably true). Funny thing is, I'd wager that any device using a laser is reading digitally. The medium being read may be analogue, but I'd imagine that it is being converted to digital long before it's ever heard.

also.. (no, I am too lazy to edit)
 

not true.
as you read above, CDs are able to hold frequencies up to 20KHz
vinyl stores more than that.
and instruments and music are made of frequencies inaudible to the human ear but are there that add to the music.

CDs do not do this.

so uh as JohnM said:
I beg to differ, sir!
(not the sir part)

if neo said that, it's not possible
imagine the loss that happens when converting from analog to digital
perhaps he meant laser guided

Read my post above.

I'd like to see some actual documentation showing that vinyl can hold higher and lower frequencies than CD.

By the way, my point about character was that adding noise (hisses, cracks, pops, etc) should not be necessary. I still maintain that music that needs added character is not music.

It's very possible to read a record via laser. It's sort of like using sonar, only much higher quality.

Converting from analogue to digital does not always result in quality loss. If the conversion captures more information than a human can detect, then there is no quality loss. I've used scanners which could scan high enough resolution to make the "dots" on a photo visible. You can't say that there was lost quality.

In fact, air itself is a limited medium. No matter how detailed the information you pump into the air, a good bit of it will disappear long before it ever hits your ear, even if your eardrum is only centimeters from the source (headphones).

done. now what? ;)

there's probably many, I'm not in the mood to do an extesive search.

right and I maintain that music that has no added character is not music.

I don't believe a digital source could properly represent a musical wave. I mean it's numbers. :P

I rest my case, that is all.










*http://www.btinternet.com/~n.moffatt...inylhist15.htm

did you just contradict yourself?

and yes I understand that converting from analogue to digital has no loss, but you lose the analogue signal (with the limitations of digital), that is what I was trying to say

I don't know about character, but I know that I have downloaded quite a few Mp3's with skips in them, and when I finally hear the song on the radio or on tv or whatever.. the skip is missing and it just ain't the same..

::keeps her mp3s::

note: I'm not feeling like playing with the quotes, so I'm just going to reply. It should fairly obvious which of my responses is referring to which of your responses.

No, I don't think I contradicted myself.

I know that you lose the analogue signal. If you save enough of the information, it doesn't matter.

Music with added character is distorted music. Beethoven's music sounds better live than it does on any recording I've ever heard, CD, vinyl, or otherwise. Live music has no added character. It has only the character given to the music during its performance. If you think adding vinyl pops to Beethoven improves it, then quite honestly, I pity you.

A digital wave can represent a wave well enough that a human cannot tell the difference. The most accurate way to represent a wave is through numbers. Waves are just curves, and we can record curves 100% accurately through math.

I'll look for some info later about vinyl quaity, I guess. Here's the way I see it: In double-blind tests, almost no one can even detect the difference between a 20khz-max recording and a 19khz-max recording. If almost no one can detect (hear, feel, whatever) anything above 19khz, why should we ever need anything higher? Maybe pull it up to 19.5khz for those few freaks, but who needs 35khz?

well then, if according to your logic, who needs live performances?

Live performances sound better for a number of reasons. Mics cannot capture perfectly. Speakers cannot reproduce sound perfectly. Etc.

I don't recall saying anything about needing higher frequencies in live performances. My point about live concerts is that they don't have added "character."

Please note, when I talk about character, I'm not talking about frequency range. That has to do with sound reproduction.

Regardless, recording higher frequencies does not add character. You could argue that it records the character that is already there, but adding character is another thing entirely (ie: noise).

Interesting Fact
 

Cooking Vinyl are also a record company.

Cooking Vinyl also smells really bad. :D

Well spotted Bilbo

UJ

How come, when I listen to old-timey music, such as bluegrass and old jazz, do the recordings sond better on my old vinyl then the new cd version I go out and get? Because the entire process that delivered the music to me affected how the music ended up sounding/feeling to me. The choice of location of the recording (studio/live), the state of mind the people were in doing the recording(sober,drunk,stoned,angry,upset,etc.), the qualities of the microphoes/pickups(cheap expensive, special purpose), the equipment used for editing and mastering, the choice of the recording equipment (was it pressed correctly onto quality vinyl?)...etc.etc.etc.

All these things effect what I'm going to eventually experience.

Digital takes a lot (but not all) of these things out of the equation. This is arguably good and bad. Good because unintentional things can happen to the sound that aren't desired with all these things going on. Bad because, some effects are only achiveable with analog techniques.

A lot of music sounds fine on a cd because the music was designed to sound fine on a cd. But, at both the high and the low end, I see good reason to use vinyl. In music that will "age", like new bluegrass (bluegrass is experincing a new wave right now, probably due to O, Brother Where Art Thou) and in on the opposite end if the specrum, in techno and music that has a lot going on at the upper and lower ends. For the record, vinyl IS A BETTER MEDIUM than CD for music. But, CD's have a lot of other qualities that make them desirable. Like their life (debatable because they're still too new), the ability to hold other information than music, smaller size, higher resistance to destruction (of most kinds, I haven't tried microwaving a record :) ), and lower production cost (I think...)

-=Gonzotek=-

I've been surprised by the number of people out there who have a fondness for vinyl ( do I really mean that:D )

UJ