Everyone agrees...

shasha said:
Far too many other factors to consider even though they addressed a good number of them. First and foremost is placebo because the sad truth is that much of the early digital gear just wasn't very good. Once that stigma is assigned it becomes a predisposition. The other is that digital didn't have any of the natural compression of say tape which has a saturation point and tends to sound warmer. People were recording with lower quality converters and at 16 bit which is fine, but they were also recording and mastering very conservatively and with the old school though. Just listen to early original CD releases compared to remastered releases and the volume is much louder....louder equals better to a lot of people including myself at times.

The really big one to me though is the public's tendency to classify MP3 and other lossy formats with CD or just assigning it all to "digital" where if you have good quality converters and use the right levels and use a lossless or low compression format the quality is very, very good. Just the difference between 128kbs and 192kbs in MP3 turns a track from unlistenable to great for me.

And lastly the fact that digital has made recording very accessible because of cost means that we went from a highly trained and skilled group of engineers and producers to any chucklehead being able to put out a track. We had a lot of bad recordings and still do sometimes. Another is that because of the ease in which we can manipulate audio from bad or mediocre into passable means that performances suffer....and any time you manipulate the audio in that manner you are going to introduce some kind of anomaly. Instead of working for a perfect take we have people editing a perfect take.
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All good points. Especially the last one.
 
Anywhoooo I've heard stunning digital recordings on CD and I've heard plenty of shite as well (c'mon, you can't argue well that the '84 remastered CD release of Dark Side of the Moon doesn't slay the album copy -- especially after you've listened to it the requisite 100 times in a row!). But I've also heard the same on vinyl (great: Roxy Music's Avalon for example, shite: Quiet Riot's Metal Health comes to mind).

It's less about the medium and more about the end-to-end artistry in using it IMO.

Edit: I forgot to add the name of the album that was remastered released on CD in '84! Mon dieux! :D
 
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Ben.Last said:
I'd love to see you have someone set this up for you as a blind test.
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Depends on the mood you're in, environment noise level, dynamics and compression of what you're listening to. Not sure you, me or anybody at each and every time would make the difference between an Axe Fx and a 25€ pedal also; still it is there.

Personnaly I agree that MP3 does a lot of harm to listening pleasure, especially the lower kb/s bitrates.
 
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I embraced CDs as soon as they were released in the early 80s. Luckily they fixed the early mastering problems after a few years. I liken vinyl to regular film stock. I think it implies a certain level of pleasing distortion to the output. I think digital is far more accurate, and just like the AxeFx, there are so many other applications that just add to its preferability. I understand the whole fetishization of vinyl with the bigger album sleeve, liner notes, etc. I still have a vinyl collection from the pre-cd days. I definitely prefer that physical experience, but that also had a lot to do with the fewer entertainment options in those days.
 
Who is listening to low bitrate MP3s anymore? Seriously...variable bit rate solved most of the problem and the near-ubiquitous high speed connections we have now have made delivering them a snap. When you do your critiques at least critique current consumer standards -- I'd say whatever Apple is selling in iTunes now -- they're all far from low bitrate encodes.
 
lauke-lux said:
Personnaly I confirm that MP3 does a lot of harm to listening pleasure, especially the lower kb/s bitrates.
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"Agree," not "confirm."

And, again, I'd love to see you guys do some blind tests. Of course listening scenarios are going to change things, but if there's actual science to back up your statements then the results would be repeatable a reasonable number of times.

And of course listening to crap at 128kb/s or whatever is going to be atrocious, but, as iaresee just stated: "Who is listening to low bitrate MP3s anymore?"
 
Ben.Last said:
"Agree," not "confirm."

And, again, I'd love to see you guys do some blind tests. Of course listening scenarios are going to change things, but if there's actual science to back up your statements then the results would be repeatable a reasonable number of times.

And of course listening to crap at 128kb/s or whatever is going to be atrocious, but, as iaresee just stated: "Who is listening to low bitrate MP3s anymore?"
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Ok corrected. Somewhere in 2008 I converted a CD to MP3, I didn't care the slightest bit about bitrates by then and even less if WMP had the option to choose by then. When listening back it was a deception to see how much grain of distortion guitar just had become some POD "pudding". I actually threw away the CD I graved it on. Sure, nowadays with a 16 or more GB card on a smartphone I'd rather go for the 300+kb/s option. Remember that 250Mb USB keys were top notch not that long ago.
 
I'm not often with the herd and wasn't in this case either.
Maybe because I never had a top of the line Hi-Fi in the 70ies-80ies?

When I started buying the first CD's of records I already had, I couldn't believe the high quality (even the "bad" or noisy ones).
*Worlds* of difference and every night I went to bed with headphones listening to all those details I never heard before.
I was flabbergasted for months by that.
But I'm sure the vinyl side has some explanation for that.
 
My gal & I were discussing this very thing tonite....

And, Guitar Center now has popular Vinyl albums in their new catalog...they might have bins now in the stores.
 
All of this talk of digital... I have to wonder how many of the engineers they spoke to record, mix, and master entirely in a digital environment... I'm guessing there's a lot of outboard analog gear involved in every stage of the process for all of those engineers. Even those that are using digital plugins instead of analog gear are using plugins designed to emulate classic analog equipment. So just what does that say about digital sounding better when one of the main goals in digital recording is to get it to sound more like analog? We're not on this site because we want digital sounding guitar tones, are we?

Regarding vinyl, I think opinions would change quite a bit if they heard vinyl how it is supposed to sound - well mastered and well pressed records that were properly cleaned and stored played on properly maintained turntables. It's quite a different experience from digging that copy of Dark Side Of The Moon and that you used to clean your seeds and stems on and playing it on that old turntable that's been sitting in your garage for years.
 
'CT a very high end computer magazine that's known for their thorough and unbiased tests, did some blind tests with producer, musicians (modern & classic), studio technicians, on their own high end system at their own home.
None of them could tell the difference between the mp3 and the original recording from a bitrate of 260kb and up.
 
Ben.Last said:
Of course that's true. Digital allows manipulation of audio in ways that just aren't possible in the analog realm. The fault isn't with the format though.
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If you would play "Death Magnetic" on vinyl, you would see your pickup needle fly around ;) (and you'll hear "Death Silence"). I think Vinyl has some very special in it, just because of the imperfection. And you got a lot space on the cover, which I think is worth a lot! I can remember the day, when I was 16yrs old, discovering Pat Metheny's "American Garage" album......."A cross the heartland" the first track, on vinyl! What a feeling, what a sound.......the CD does not have that feel because the cover is way too small. The whole package was a true inspiration!

PS: -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFe6IxV0CjA

So, maybe I'm the only one here - I disagree...... ;)
 
NothingButInitials said:
All of this talk of digital... I have to wonder how many of the engineers they spoke to record, mix, and master entirely in a digital environment... I'm guessing there's a lot of outboard analog gear involved in every stage of the process for all of those engineers. Even those that are using digital plugins instead of analog gear are using plugins designed to emulate classic analog equipment. So just what does that say about digital sounding better when one of the main goals in digital recording is to get it to sound more like analog? We're not on this site because we want digital sounding guitar tones, are we?
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There is no such thing as "sounding digital" or "sounding analog." There is just individual equipment sounding pleasing or bad or sterile or lush or realistic or whatever. That has nothing to do with analog or digital. Do you think there wasn't a period of decades during which analog equipment was fiddled with in attempts to get it to sound more "whatever"? It's not that companies are trying to get plugins to sound more "analog;" they're trying to make things that sound like what people already know, and analog gear existed first, so that's what people know (which is also why some companies have the obsession with attempting to make their UIs look like old gear).
 
PacoCasanovas said:
If you would play "Death Magnetic" on vinyl, you would see your pickup needle fly around ;) (and you'll hear "Death Silence"). I think Vinyl has some very special in it, just because of the imperfection. And you got a lot space on the cover, which I think is worth a lot! I can remember the day, when I was 16yrs old, discovering Pat Metheny's "American Garage" album......."A cross the heartland" the first track, on vinyl! What a feeling, what a sound.......the CD does not have that feel because the cover is way too small. The whole package was a true inspiration!


So, maybe I'm the only one here - I disagree...... ;)
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Yes, vinyl does have something special in it; it's called nostalgia.
 
Ben.Last said:
There is no such thing as "sounding digital" or "sounding analog."
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I don't agree. Tape has a natural compression and loses some of the high end, which gives the audio a softer more spongy feel that many people find more appealing than digital which gives you pretty much exactly what you put in. Digital is more accurate but people don't always want accuracy. Why would Cliff spend time with the 'Preamp' emulations in the Axe Cab Block with their Tube/Tape etc types if this was not true.

There are also plugins out there like the Waves SSL one that aim to give you an emulation of the warmer/softer compression and EQ you get from a high quality analog desk, similar idea to the Preamp settings in the Axe, I've seen producers that swear by that plugin for warming up a digital recording.

I'm certainly not one of the 'analog is better' crowd, but certainly it has a different quality to pure digital sound.
I'd rather use emulations to add that warmth in though rather than go back to analog and not have the fidelity and control that digital has.
 
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