vinyl pressing?

[Dr ZEE]

Someday, us analog guys (and gals) should band together and put out our own compilation on vinyl.

-MD

HUH! Cool . - count me in.

so, let's get our masters ready

 

[toobalicious]

Yes, an 11khz wave gets sampled only 4 times. And that's enough. A 20khz wave gets sampled only twice. And that's enough too. You are right about the number of samples but wrong about the result.

Actually a 11khz saw wave will mostly be rendered as a sine wave, just as it is in any audio chain that is bandwidth limited to say 20khz, whether it's a digital chain or an analog chain. And a 20khz saw wave will only come out as a sine wave, again, because that's the bandwidth limitation. Even if it came into the CD recorder's input as a saw wave! A saw wave has harmonics in it well above its fundamental, as does a square wave.

CD audio, like any system with an upper limit of 20khz, simply cannot render a high frequency as a saw or square wave. If it did it would be reproducing supersonics. What you say is the opposite of what happens.

The "digital treble" you speak of is a fallacy. Even the supposedly humble CD is very good at reproducing audio right up to about 20khz. Better than vinyl certainly. Other higher sample rates can indeed reproduce higher frequencies, but only if they are there in the first place.

Cheers Tim

perhaps i got the waveforms backwards; it is true that my memory gets a little hazy on occasion.... also, i wasnt looking to start another debate. i do believe there to be a difference in the upper registers between cd audio and well-recorded, full-frequency analog. perhaps my ears were playing tricks on me, but i could hear it. a certain brilliance that is lost on the cd version. and nearly every time that i believe i have noticed it, it was a similar and repeatable experience. i happen to have a few very good pressings of very good albums as well as their cd counterparts (steely dan aja and donald fagen the nitefly, for example, as well as much newer stuff like radiohead). the nitefly is an interesting one, too, because it was recorded digitally (in 1982), however the commercial cd has no low end and is pretty quiet overall; the wax sounds like a different recording. i have compared different pressings of the same material, compared those with the commercial cd, and made cds of the vinyl to compare with. not a single one of them sounded the same, and overwhelmingly, i preferred the vinyl. the cds of the vinyl sometimes sounded better than the commercial ones, sometimes not. not a scientific test, but one in which i believe in strongly.

a

 

[Tim Gillett]

Sure.
Traditionally the sound for vinyl is "mastered" (processed) to more easily "fit" onto the limitations of vinyl without distorting or getting lost in the surface noise. So we would generally expect a difference between vinyl and CD of the same recording, if the vinyl mastering engineer has done his job.

Thanks for not jumping on me, as has tended to happen here in the past. I was just trying to clear up what is a common theoretical misconception that sampling of high frequencies requires similarly intense sampling rates to sampling of low frequencies.

I have a soundcard that can sample at 192khz, way above CD rates, and can record supersonic audio (is that an oxymoron) up to about 4 times what CD's can reproduce and humans can usually hear.. (bats might be able to tell the difference)
I never use it at anything like those rates. And most others never do either.

Best wishes, Tim

 

[Beck]

i do believe there to be a difference in the upper registers between cd audio and well-recorded, full-frequency analog. perhaps my ears were playing tricks on me, but i could hear it. a certain brilliance that is lost on the cd version. and nearly every time that i believe i have noticed it, it was a similar and repeatable experience. i happen to have a few very good pressings of very good albums as well as their cd counterparts (steely dan aja and donald fagen the nitefly, for example, as well as much newer stuff like radiohead). the nitefly is an interesting one, too, because it was recorded digitally (in 1982), however the commercial cd has no low end and is pretty quiet overall; the wax sounds like a different recording. i have compared different pressings of the same material, compared those with the commercial cd, and made cds of the vinyl to compare with. not a single one of them sounded the same, and overwhelmingly, i preferred the vinyl. the cds of the vinyl sometimes sounded better than the commercial ones, sometimes not. not a scientific test, but one in which i believe in strongly.

a

You're not alone in these observations.