Cooking vinyl

[jgalt]

I've been following this discussion with great interest. I was an engineer during the analogue days. I never could draw and advancing years haven't helped but perhaps these two crude drawings will convey some information. They are both sine waves.

Drawing A is what you would see if an oscilloscope were connected to the output of an audio oscillator. A pure sine wave with no distortion. Analogue recording, depending upon the equipment and the engineer, could very closely approach this.

Drawing B is supposed to follow the complete outline of drawing A but is made up of a series of stairsteps covering the entire waveform instead of a smooth wave form. Drawing B is what you get with a digital recording. The higher the sample rate, the finer the stairsteps and the smoother the sound but, never-the-less, stairstepped.

Many people can hear this "stairstepped" sound. It was a big problem in the early days of music CD's. Reproduced in non-linear equipment, it can produce harmonics from those stairsteps that can mix with the stairsteps of other sounds. The results are called artifacts - new sound that wasn't in the original.

Digital recording has a lot going for it but it also suffers from some shortcomings that must be taken into consideration.

Please note that I didn't get involved in the frequency response part of the discussion. I also want to congratulate participants - no one seems to have called someone else a nasty name because of a disagreement.

[papadoc]

Good post jgalt.
Well...I've got 4 days off from school for some reason.
I'll take it.
My little project is to rip as many of my old records to CD as I can.
I'm gonna try to keep as much of the character of the vinyl as possible.
It will be interesting to listen to the vinyl
and then the same record on CD.
We'll see.
Too bad there's no way to attach a music file like an image file.

btw...I have a Technics turntable I bought in 1981.
Although it was top of the line then, it still spins records better than most turntables of today.
And imagine this...its not laser.
Just a needle on the record.

[DJ Egg]

Originally posted by ujay
I've been surprised by the number of people out there who have a fondness for vinyl

I have a 20,000+ fondness for vinyl.
Anyone wanna help me rip them to MP3

btw, they sound crisper than any CD on my Technics SL1200 Series Turntables

Play loud! Woosh!

[papadoc]

My Technics is a SL-B250 Series.
They don't even list that one anymore.
20 years old and still loud!!!!!!

[gremmlin]

Originally posted by papadoc
btw...I have a Technics turntable I bought in 1981.
Although it was top of the line then, it still spins records better than most turntables of today.
And imagine this...its not laser.
Just a needle on the record.

That's probably because it's a direct-drive table, right? I don't know the date when belt drive tables were introduced, but when they started appearing, direct-drive prices went up. Somebody at Technics, or whatever turntable manufacturer, figured out that they could make 'em cheaper if they used a rubber belt instead of turning the plate directly. The two drawbacks are that the system has more places to fuck up or crap out (as apposed to direct drive tables which pretty much work perfectly forever), and that the belt system *slightly* alters the RPM. But the average Joe Shmoe didn't even notice, and started buying the new cheaper tables. So the only market left for direct drive tables? DJ's who are willing to spend a lot of money for their equipment. Thus, direct drive tables cost a hell of a lot more today, because of a cost-saving measure. Ironic...

By the way, I've heard club music played on those (unbelievably expensive) laser-stylus tables. It retains vinyl's "warmth," and does sound better than a normal needle, but it's not worth the price.

[Curi0us_George]

I was about to go to band when a thought occured to me. I figured I might as well share it, since it helps my point.

Compare the two sine waves that jgalt posted. Thec difference is obvious. The curve jgalt pointed out as being stair-stepped would sound horrible.

Here's the way it really is, though:
The first curve is stair-stepped, too. Because the image is displayed on a monitor, it has pixels in the rendering.

When you look at the first curve, though, you don't see a stair-step pattern. You see the obvious sine curve. Still, the curve is made up of stair-stepped pixels. But, because the pixels are so small, you can't detect them, and your mind believes it is seeing a curve.

The same idea applies to digital music. If the steps are small enough, then you cannot hear them, and it will sound identical to the analogue equivalent.

[ujay]

This has turned into an interesting discussion about the relative merits of CD v Vinyl as a listening source, but the original idea of this thread was to ask about the amount of cleaning up people thought was acceptable. In other words what happens after it's in the digital domain.
I don't mind what I'm listening on really if the music is good, but to my ears there is a difference in CDs and vinyl, something to do with the nature of the harmonics (What C_G might call anti aliasing), the added warmth. CDs always sound as if they've been 'sharpened up' a bit.

If you're recording vinyl to CD then this is inevitable, but it's what happens next that interested me.

I've been looking at automatic noise reduction stuff lately and haven't found anything that does a really good job. Short of doing it by hand, there doesn't seem to be a way of getting rid of most of what you want and at the same time keeping most of what you do.

So where do you strike a balance.

Do you aim to get rid of every last click and scratch? Every last bit of hiss and surface noise? As clean as a CD? Even if the music suffers in the process? Do you really want an old vinyl recording to sound like a CD? Is it going to destroy some of the personal history, memories and associations you have with the old album ?

UJ

[Curi0us_George]

NO DAMNIT! CD WILL ALWAYS SOUND BETTER, BECAUSE . . .

Oh, sorry, I almost went off in another rant.

If you are going to convert the music to digital, I'd suggest leaving at least some of the distortions and noise. I'm not fond of the crackles and pops at all, but if you remove all of them. you'll probably be taking too much of the music out.

Dead, dull-sounding music is worse than no music at all.

Remove as much distortion as you can without harming the overall sound.

I really think you'll have to do most of it by hand. It's sort of like images in this respect. You can use an image editor to fix an image, but for perfection, you'll have to do it manually, possibly pixel-by-pixel.

[SpitLyrics]

Ofcourse CD will always sound better!,lol

[papadoc]

May I weigh in?
I am in the process of ripping from all my old records
and burning onto CD for archival reasons.
I can do maybe one or two a weekend.
Why...beacuse it takes allot of time to do each individual track
The program I'm using is Diamond Cut's DC-ART32.
I'd like to use one of their better programs, but for $99,
it does what I need.
I can remove needle drop/lift, shorten or completely delete the blank space
in-between songs,
and with the use of different filters at different settings, I can leave any amount of noise I choose,
either none...all...or inbetween.
As a matter of learning the first record I did was an old Beatles record.
The source file was the original rip. That remained constant.
The finished file I did twice.
Once with all the filters set to take out everything.
The second with filters set to leave some of the noise and set
for what they call "tube warmth."
The difference was very remarkable.
The CD with everything removed sounds great...
The second CD sounds better...more like the vinyl when it was new.
My point is I guess...is that I'll leave as much of the original sound
of the record there as I can,
removing the worse pops and cliks, because it just sounds better.
I'm learning more with every one I do.
It's great fun.
Long Live Vinyl