Analog vs Digital Audio | The Truth About Which Is Better...
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- Опубліковано 27 тра 2024
- What's the difference between analog and digital audio? Is vinyl better than CD or MP3? What makes one better than the other? In this video, you'll learn about the benefits and drawbacks of analog and digital audio. By the end, you'll be able to answer these questions for yourself.
Full Post (Audio University Website): audiouniversityonline.com/ana...
Videos Mentioned In This Video:
- D/A and A/D | Digital Show and Tell - Monty Montgomery (xiph.org) - • D/A and A/D | Digital ...
- Samplerates: the higher the better, right? - Dan Worrall (FabFilter UA-cam Channel) - • Samplerates: the highe...
- Lossy vs Lossless Audio - Audio University - • Lossy vs Lossless Audi...
Download the free Speaker Placement Guide here: audiouniversityonline.com/spe...
00:00 - Intro
00:14 - Analog Audio Explained
01:24 - Digital Audio Explained
02:55 - Analog vs Digital Audio: Pros & Cons
03:19 - Noise
04:30 - Fidelity
07:50 - Aliasing
08:55 - Harmonic Distortion & Non-Linearity
10:52 - Production & Editing
12:33 - Portability & Durability
13:36 - (Free) Speaker Placement Guide
14:08 - Subscribe To Audio University!
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If you watch contemporary recording studio tours and interviews with professional audio engineers, the vast majority utilize hybrid recording and mixing techniques. They view devices as a "color" or "flavor" tools and utilize the best of both analog and digital tech.
Well said!
I think a huge limitation using analog for recording is track limitations. I am very green on all this but there's a limited number of tracks to record on meaning the band may have really long takes.
Oh, he mentions this. Nevermind.
The points you make or incredibly valuable, there is one cadence I would like to bring up is the amount of quality in actual music being the artist itself along with the lack of real instruments is incredibly discouraging, but you are spot-on when it comes to colour and flavour along with the texture of various instruments playing in an off of the surroundings, something not so easily duplicated in the digital flat realm
That's true. And it happens because they're sensible people who makes sensible decisions in order to solve concrete real life audio problems. But this is Internet and we come here to argue about our own taste and preferences as if they were facts in order to feel better than other people or justify to ourselves our unnecessary spending of money 😁
@@patsow4797 Philosophical question: what's a "real" instrument?
Great video! I wanted to point out another reason digital got a bad rep: the "compression wars." Many studio engineers realized that they could use high levels of audio compression (NOT digital data compression) that weren't possible in the analog realm to achieve greater loudness (apparent volume). This lead to the life (dynamic range) being squeezed out of many classic recordings when they were originally remastered for digital. People with good ears heard the difference and thought it was a limitation of digital when it was just a case of engineers abusing the power of digital. When used properly, digital has all the fidelity of analog.
Thanks for sharing, Todd! Great point - and very well written!
I disagree about the "good ears" part. Bashing digital is a favorite pastime of audiophools and the audiophool press. These people don't have good hearing at all, but like to pretend they do. For them it's not about music and enjoyment, it's about snobbery and possessing expensive things. An ego stroke, in other words.
"high levels of audio compression (NOT digital data compression) that weren't possible in the analog" ...but they were.
The worst culprits of the Loudness Wars used banks of vintage analogue compressors to achieve their results.
@@gustavmeyrink_2.0 Yes, the compression could be achieved with analog gear, but analog MEDIA (particularly vinyl) couldn't reproduce it. Digital could.
@@gustavmeyrink_2.0 being "vintage" has nothing whatsoever to do with it. A compression ratio of infinity was and still is easily achievable in the analog domain. And when the loudness wars started back in the 1960s, the Optimod compressors used were brand new.
Back in the '80's I gave my vinyl albums to my ex, and replaced my then small collection with cd's. I now have over 600 cd's, no more turntables and disc washers, zero stats, etc. A decent amp with good headroom, same same for the speakers, and you can,(as I do), bliss out to beautiful music all day and night. I'm in my 70's and well remember most of the equipment I used to have, including 3 reel to reels routed into a pair of AR 4X's. Now my modest Onkyo system satisfies me immensely. I couldn't be happier with my collection, and my modest gear. Rock on peeps...
I'm in my 70's also, and my hearing, especially the high frequencies, is not what it used to be. I use headphones and earbuds that allow the equalization to be adjusted, so I boost the treble. Mine are Soundcore Space Q45 and A40, but many can do this. Also, on a Mac, Audio Hijack can adjust the equalization of all sounds.
An excellent and well-presented analysis. Essentially it is what I tell people. I have been working with audio - recording and PA - since the late 1960's. I have used everything from 78 rpm records (actually, I had some 80 rpm discs from the late 1800s too), 45 rpm singles and 33 rpm LPs, open-reel tape (2 and 4-track), audio cassettes, up to to my current iMac Pro with a Sony digital recording system with both analogue and digital mixing, and a 40-year-old Technics audio system. I often think how much my late-father would have enjoyed the non-destructive editing and mixing I can now do. Yes, I still have and use my vinyl records and audio cassette tapes.
I really do agree with you that the most important aspect in a good audio system is positioning of your loudspeakers along with reducing interference from local electrical systems and an intelligent use of the audio controls on your amplifier. Quality matters, but knowing how to use the equipment is actually more important. Thankyou for your video.
Good points. Well said.
Excellent video. I'm an audio nerd born in the late 50's and I've had all the formats. I think the biggest difference in what I hear comes down to the production quality/mix. I get asked this question a lot about which format is better but personally I think the digital format is way superior in so many ways. Yes I can pick the difference in something digital that is overly compressed but digitally remastered music from previous decades generally sounds way better than a mass produced vinyl record of that time for example. In fact there are limitations with vinyl too in replicating all the original frequencies because of the very narrow grooves, so there's that. If I had the original master on 2" wide tape I might change my mind but I've moved on from those days.
Great video. There is one "quality" difference that you do not mention, and that is cost: I used to own almost 5000Lp's and I had an expensive hand-built turntable, with a lovely tone-arm and cartridge; I had sunk quite a bit of cash into my analogue rig.. and it sounded great, but the cost-to-performance ratio was pretty low. Now with digital, you can get a pretty good sound for a fraction of what I spent, whereas good quality analogue still costs a lot. I'm not talking about the cheap spinners being sold on the internet now; I'm talking higher quality equipment. So for an experience anywhere near good digital, you need to spend a lot of money on analogue. On top of the actual player, you also need other things, like quality inner-sleeves and if you're serious; a good LP-cleaner with solutions, a.s.o. Honestly the only thing I miss about LP's, is starting spinning my LP, and lowering the needle down into the track, watching it move at 33.3; a very zen experience.
Hobby costs.
An excellent, well-balanced piece. As an Electrical Engineer, I particularly appreciated the overview of sampling, Nyquist rates, and so on.
All of this is based on the Fourier transform, a mathematical operation that converts the amplitude of a signal that is some function of time (t) to the amplitude of an analogous signal that is a function of frequency (f). The rub is that a time-varying signal also has a phase (phi).
There is one missing aspect that is perhaps worth mentioning -- phase linearity. It is worth mentioning that no physical amplifier can perfectly reproduce both amplitude and phase. Most analog amplifiers use feedback from the output back to the input at each amplifier stage to provide predictable and linear gain from that amplifier stage. That feedback introduces phase distortion, however. Even worse, the phase distortion is a function of frequency, so that the phase distortion of a high-frequency signal is different from that of low-frequency signal.
Similar phenomena happen with speakers -- any transducer introduces phase, as well as amplitude, distortion into any audio signal. One of the reasons that flat-panel radiators have dramatically better imaging than cone speakers is that a flat panel has dramatically lower phase distortion.
Consider a mono signal split in half and delivered to an ideal stereo amplifier and speaker system with perfect amplitude and phase linearity. The listener will hear a single source directly between the two speakers. Now consider what happens if the polarity of one speaker is reversed, so that the left channel is 180 degrees out of phase with right. That tight single source will turn into a diffuse sound that floats all over the room with no apparent direction.
That's because our ears and auditory system use phase differences between our ears to determine where sound comes from.
One challenge with the original CD sampling rate is that it is difficult to reproduce the phase of the input frequencies. An audio system with excellent phase accuracy in the amplifier chain AND in the speakers may have better imaging and sound stage for a high-quality analog recording than for a CD digitized from the same recording.
A benefit of the higher-res audio (24 vs 16 bit samples, 96K/sec or more sample rate) is that the region of pronounced phase distortion is translated high enough in frequency that the human ear doesn't hear it.
"One challenge with the original CD sampling rate is that it is difficult to reproduce the phase of the input frequencies."
As long as the Nyquist criteria is met this no problem
True, phase is an issue at the upper band. I think of it as the chance the sampler will snapshot exactly at a node in the sinusoid and therefore lose it. This guy's good though, just finishing a course in DSP and he's on the money
Excellent comment! Thank you very much.
I am an electrical engineer as well, and this is pretty much exactly the discussion that was being had about 30 years ago when digital was first hitting professional analog studios widely.
You’ve summarized it very well here. 👍
Today, the additional topics of cramping and aliasing - especially with newer tools being widely available to measure it - are getting a lot of traction, as they very well should.
I wish more people were discussing PHASE. A lot of problems and solutions would be revealed if we did.
😎👍👍
@@elkeospert9188 Sorry, but I have to courteously disagree with you. The Nyquist criteria specifies frequency response -- it does not address phase at all.
@@thomasstambaugh5181 And I have to disagree with you:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem
Theorem - If a function x ( t ) x(t) contains no frequencies higher than B hertz, then it can be COMPLETELY determined from its ordinates at a sequence of points spaced less than 1 / ( 2 B ) seconds apart.
....
Equivalently, for a given sample rate fs , PERFECT reconstruction is guaranteed possible for a bandlimit B < fs / 2
But feel free to show your version of the Nyquist criteria....
I always hated the inner groove distortion that affects the last few tracks on each LP as the record turns slower and the resolution takes a nosedive. It was great when I could finally hear my favourite records on CD and have consistent quality throughout
I've been collecting vinyl for a couple of years and, though I love them, I've been feeling increasingly that same hate of inner groove distortion. Is it me or is it worse on newer releases? I've got some old records were it is almost unnoticeable, and newer records were it's been just disappointing.
@@Teleausencia I seem to remember that they would choose a track listing to minimise the effect. It affects louder tracks more I think. I suspect it’s not a consideration any more and they maintain the same track order as a CD release
@@Teleausencia ju
Just buy microline stylus and IGD is looong gone
@@deda92sm This is so true in my experience (using AT440MLa)
You sir have explained this and other subjects the easiest way to understand that I have ever come across with! You have great talent for explaining things!
As a mastering engineer, I sometimes pass a track through my analog loop purely for the DA/AD conversion. Doing so can take the edge off of certain music that has mostly been created digitally. Most of my clients are independent electronic music artists, and it isn't uncommon for me to receive a song that has zero analog sources in the mix. Just pushing it through the analog domain can sometimes be just what it needs. It's amazing how just a quick analog round trip can breathe life into an otherwise sterile tune. I'm not entirely sure exactly what this phenomenon is, because my DA/AD conversion is exceedingly transparent in terms of THD+N (-114dB), frequency response, phase, impulse response, and everything else I can measure. Perhaps its just confirmation bias, but my ears definitely perceive it.
@@teedesigns9022 I use a Lynx Hilo for DA/AD.
Easy: Just pass it though a Abbey Road Vinyl preset!
...just joking tho but it could do the trick if you aint got that juicy analog stuff
Is it just the little bit of stereo distortion, which giveth breath to a sterile digital signal? Tiny differences between R and L induced by the "imperfect" analog circuits?
Haha now your talking
@@l0gaRythm I doubt it because I'm not introducing any. At least not any that is able to be perceived. My L/R channels are calibrated to about 0.03dB.
What is interesting here is how music is analysed by waveform and not by what one actually discerns with his ears. The one thing I have concluded is, yes there exists different distortions in both recording, type of circuitry, etc. However, should one have suffient quality listening equipment can one begin to make a comparison between a disc and LP from the same group and same song. In my personal experience, the LP is much more dynamic, more involving and in essense the major thing is, it's more fun.
I am a vinyl music lover myself - there is something about the experience of vinyl playback that gets you just closer to the music - but I have to disagree on the "dynamics" part. Technically speaking, it is impossible for vinyl playback to reach the technical specifications of dynamics that a digital system is able to offer. But I'll give you that: on an LP, the sound engineers simply can't brickwall the dynamics compression like they do with their unholy loudness war in the digital realm. So yes, when listening to music like Metallica (whose songs barely go below -3 dBFS for their duration), a vinyl copy will indeed sound more "vital" and "dynamic" because it simply has to 😆
Another aspect that is usually disregarded when comparing vinyl LPs to CDs is the placement of songs (think angular error and innergroove distortion) and the number your particular LP had in the manufacturing batch. If you are unlucky enough to buy an LP from the last specimen of a batch, your sound experience will suffer. I have reproduced this myself with multiple LPs of the very same release - it went as far as one being perfectly fine and the other being almost unlistenable at times. And that with a turntable that was really well set-up in terms of cartridge alignment, stylus pressure, vertical angle and whatnot. But that is just part of the fascination and the hobby.
@@svenschwingel8632 --- Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I simplified it by using the Ellen Wood Speed Reading Technic. Vinyl is the only consumer playback format we have that's fully analog and fully lossless. The analog format allows for artists to transport their music from magnetic tape to LP to your speakers or headphones without the complications of digital conversion. This, ideally, is the closest one can get to what the artist intended. Digital music engineering, particularly for radio-bound music, is often marred by a volume arms race, which leads to fatiguing, hyper-compressed songs that squish out the dynamics and textures that give recordings their depth and vitality. Vinyl's volume is dependent on the length of its sides and depth of its grooves, which means an album mastered specifically for the format may have more room to breathe than its strained digital counterpart. There's basically nothing you can do to make an hour-long album on one record sound good, This is why some LP's are cut at 45 rpm and some elect to release double album. Yes, there are problems with vinyl and digital, but I've taken the best of both formats and A - B'd them and I favor vinyl. Now, that for reading my simpler dissertation.
@@svenschwingel8632 I disagree with your statement of the engineer brickwall compression on vinyl not possible. It is. I have some records that are brickwalled. Check out Rush Clockwork Angels. Sounds just as brickwalled as the CD. I have both. They can donit because they only put 2 songs per side on a double LP. Lots of space to do it.
@@svenschwingel8632 You are getting lost in the semantic weeds. Again, Trust your ears. The dynamics won;t be discerned in a piece of old Motorola console or even a military acquired Pioneer or Kenwood based system. It can only be experienced with the a suffient system of quality sound.
It's not always about the physics, sometimes it's about the feeling, and that's difficult to quantify. I grew up in an analog world and was an active participant in the digital revolution. Truth be told I've been to far too many concerts and my hearing isn't what it used to be so I can't tell any difference. But when I fire up the Harmon Kardon tube amp and put an album on the Dual 1249 and hear that crackle and hiss it makes me nostalgic for that time when nothing was perfect but life was good. Digital sounds great and is very convenient but it doesn't live within me.
As you mentioned, the technology has eliminated a lot of the limitations we used have, like the number of tracks, and this has resulted in the music changing. Kind of like how people started singing differently when they got electric microphones, songwriters and producers can now do things that were impossible before. This is not a bad thing, but sometimes it's the working within whatever limit you have set for yourself that results in art that would not have been achieved if you'd have had no limits. There's no reason why someone can't limit the number of tracks they use in a DAW, but speaking for myself, it's a lot easier to stay within your limits if it's impossible to exceed them. People started taking pictures differently once they no longer had to worry about how much film they had, or how much it cost to develop it. I think it takes awhile before people no longer get any benefit from old tech. Eventually, this talk about the limitations of the technology resulting in different music will be irrelevant and seem quaint. Or, maybe not; maybe artists will always go back to the old ways of doing things for a fun challenge. I know I enjoy doing stuff like trying to get a good sounding recording with one microphone, for instance.
You forgot to mention the "autotune" that is used in an exceed way bc most artist are lazy nowadays.
Well said.
I do think it's worthwhile to work with analog recordings at least a few times, even if you plan on using digital for everything. It gives you a better understanding of how sound reproduction works and what modifying waveforms actually does.
Hi Audio University, thanks for the speaker placement guide and for the whole video before it. You just gave me a reward for watching a video you clearly put a lot of effort into the production of that helped me, a lot and your other videos have completely changed the way I not only listen to music but also the way I look at and experience music and it's changed what I look for in headphones, DACs, amps, IEM, speakers - I even approach cables and sound treatment in a completely different way because of all the knowledge you have so generously shared.
Thankyou Audio University
Good analog is better than bad digital and vice versa. Good digital is superior on every level. However, audio is very subjective, so that superiority does not mean better sounding to everyone.
This is one of the best, most concise explanations I’ve seen, Bob. Well said. I completely agree. Thanks!
Thank you for explaining what I've always understood in an intuitive way and how my ears hear the music. I've always maintained that when people say "warmer" they mean "more like the way I remember it sounding when I played it on older media", even though they believe they mean "better".
Also, I'm not discounting people that prefer the older, noisier versions. While it isn't my taste in music, it is very often my taste in movies. A movie shot on film with noticeable grain can evoke emotions for me that no digital movie could. If I were to think of a remastered version of say Bullit or The French connection with all grain removed and color profiles altered to reflect modern camera sensors, I would cry.
Without any science, working with both worlds - analogue does sound better. It gives that 3d dimension and smoothness and roundness that sounds like a record and something that digital equipment cannot yet recreate. That is why in pro world, recording is always done with analogue, while mixing is now becoming increasingly in the box. The quality of modern digital plugins is superb and one doesn't need 20 pultecs to EQ tracks. Editing and production is another advantage.
When Pro Tools first came out, everyone was apprehensive of this new beast. But ,ultimately, it turned the audio world upside down when everyone realized how much easier it made the production stage. However, the consensus still is that recording should remain analogue. Using the best consoles, mics, pres, compressors, EQs etc... to capture that depth and warmth and then into the digital domain - DAWs and stuff. This is why professional studios using insanely expensive digital converters: it preserves the analogue nature of the record.
Digital audio is here and it wont go away. It only will keep getting better and keep making our life easier. Will it ever completely replace the analogue ? Unlikely.
Lemme see vinyl do 3d 7.1 sound
analog media will degrade with each year adding more distortion (warmth) and you will keep telling to yourself and wrongly educate others that digital is not better while ignoring the best feature on purpose, digital will keep that initial quality of the recording studio intact forever until the media device gets replaced by another due to damage, corruption or wear & tear of the silicon which is expected to happen but will take way longer time to degrade and malfunction, while not altering sound quality, analog isn't better than digital and you're just justifying degrading media containers as perfect for preservation as you tell in your comment.
get over it.
I have never believed digital audio was bad. My introduction to it and my reaction to it was entirely positive,
and, while I wasn't financially prepared to adopt it right away, I wanted to. It has never failed me like records have.
That said, I am happy to continue to acquire old records containing material that will never be available any other way.
Life without music would be a mistake. A true gift, showing that someone somewhere - really does care about us.
I love digital, sims, samples, and all that. Those things made me the artist my budget could have never allowed me to be.
I'll give you credit because you said "stylus" and not "needle", and didn't confuse logic circuits with "digital". I've suffered through too many videos of self-appointed experts mansplaining that "digital is square waves" and other such nonsense. Nice to see someone get it right for a change. One correction though: magnetism doesn't have a charge; charge is electricity. And that sine wave with lines and dots, that's not PCM. It's a good graphic for sampling, but PCM is quantization, not sampling. That's the number that represents the amplitude at a certain point in time.
Now there is such a thing as data compression, but you shouldn't confuse it with psychoacoustic (or "lossy") compression that is not data compression. Compressed data can be restored to its original state, lossy compression cannot.
The difference between analog and digital is that digital is a perfect copy within the set bounds. You can't get better than perfect. Yes, you can set the noise floor to any arbitrary level by adjusting bits per sample, and that's one parameter. Sample rate is the other. It determines the high frequency limit of what you can record.
Actually it's the Nyquist-Shannon theorem because Claude Shannon made some corrections. The sample rate must be _greater_ than twice the highest frequency, not equal. So at 48 kHz the maximum frequency without aliasing has to be _less_ than 24 kHz. The CD sample rate of 44.1 kHz was chosen to give up 20 20 kHz, with the difference used for the anti-aliasing filter. The reason for 48 kHz sampling is not to give extra padding, it's because it was for television, and the television industry needed a sample rate that worked well with analog TV standards of the time. Music ends at about 16 kHz, so the CD rate is more than enough.
No, you don't impress a magnetic tape into vinyl to make vinyl records. Records are stamped from negatives that are copied in a specific sequence from a single master copy that's cut on a lathe. Using the lathe to make the master copy is called mastering. A lot of people who have no clue about the process will insist that mastering is some kind of post production (like sweetening) but that's not true. If you're not making physical disks, there's nothing to master.
I glad to hear someone telling the truth. Most music or ruined by recording it. If you use only one microphone to record drums , you can’t go back after 30 years and fix it. I got rid of all my vinyl years ago. I stream most of my music.
Outstanding video. So glad I came across this. Very helpful! I’m now subscribed and ready for more.
I can't claim to be an expert, but I did take some signal processing courses for my engineering degree back in school. This is pretty good and fairly thorough . There are only a couple things I want to add.
The biggest limitation for both is physical media storage. Distributable analog media are horrendous quality and while digital is better, CDs are far from perfect. Information is recorded on a tape by magnetizing finely ground rust and you can only grind rust so fine. Tape hiss is caused by the physical resolution of the rust particles. Similarly, vinyl is susceptible to dust at all points in its lifespan, even during manufacturing, because it's impossible to get something 100% clean. The pops and cracks and hisses on vinyl are generally caused by dust or physical imperfections in the disc itself. CDs suffer from similar limitations to both vinyl and tape but generally have less strict storage requirements and some level of built-in redundancy. People that complain about how CDs are fragile or whatever are glossing over dust, scratches, and warping on vinyl and stretching, tearing, and dust on tapes. All physical media are fragile and will eventually wear out, but analog media unavoidably degrades with every use whereas digital can be more easily protected with care. The only measurable advantage analog has in this regard is you don't have to worry as much about storage capacity; digital media had to use compression because uncompressed digital audio is big and hard to transmit.
Digital manipulation is not as scary as it might sound. Mathematically, DSP does exactly the same thing as any analog manipulation but with less error. Analog components are horribly imprecise. All analog components change properties with temperature and humidity. While you can mitigate the effects and manufacture with tight tolerances, you can't avoid it entirely. You can use the exact same make and model of analog equalizer on the same day and in the same room and the center frequencies might be slightly different for the same filters. Similarly, you can use the exact same analog equalizer on two different days and end up with different results from what should be identical settings. Digital does not have this problem. Barring a bit switch from random quantum fluctuations or cosmic rays or some crazy crap like that, you will get mathematically precise filters every time until the machine just stops working.
The vast majority of music these days is digital at some point before it gets to you, so a preference for analog is generally not about the quality of the recording, even if the people with that preference think it is. For older people, it could be nostalgia for the "simple days" back when they were younger. For young people, maybe it's the aesthetic. Humans are highly tactile creatures: we like being able to touch and manipulate things. You can't touch or smell a digital file the way you can a vinyl record. There's a classic aesthetic about having a turntable in the room. There's certain satisfaction from turning it on and setting the arm in the groove, or the tactile click of the door on the tape player as you close it. For some people, these outweigh and cover up the unavoidable imperfections inherent to analog media.
I agree - except for one point:
"The only measurable advantage analog has in this regard is you don't have to worry as much about storage capacity; digital media had to use compression because uncompressed digital audio is big and hard to transmit."
You can buy a 512 GB microSD card for about 50 Euro which could store about 780 audio cds without any compression - so to store one Audio CD on such a microSD costs only 6 cent!
If you use lossless audio compression you can improve that values to 1300 audio cds and 4 cent storage cost per CD.
From a cost perspective that is much cheaper than everything possible with analog...
And while I microSD has about the size of a fingernail the space requirement to store 1300 LPs is anything but negligible
@@elkeospert9188 Two points:
1. You're not going to go to a music store and buy a thumb drive of music. You'll buy it on a CD.
2. CDs were a work of magic back in the day. The CD format was literally the densest digital data storage available. It only got there due to high precision manufacturing and incredibly clever compression. And it was still bigger than a cassette tape. You might be able to store uncompressed data on a 512GB SD card today, but that wasn't the argument, and the people who care about compression simply don't care about modern solutions.
@@hawkeye2816 "1. You're not going to go to a music store and buy a thumb drive of music. You'll buy it on a CD."
Some music I bought indeed on CD and ripped it to some digital storage. From time to time I meet with friends having also copied their CDs to HDD - and know you can think what happened....(it was definitly legal to share music in such a way at that time in Germany....)
" It only got there due to high precision manufacturing and incredibly clever compression."
I not understand what you mean with "incredibly clever compression" when it comes to Audio CDs.
Audio CDs do not use any kind of lossless or lossy data compression.
"Clever" was the concept to add additional bits which allowed error detection and in most cases perfect error correction ("Red Solomon Code") - but this methods were already known before the development of the Audio CD started.
And this error correction system reduced the production cost of an Audio CD dramatically because you not need to produce a 100% error free CD to provide the customer a 100% perfect result.
you sir are my new fave yt channel. discovery of the 2021. seriously.
poped up in some speaker comparison videos with your balanced vs unbalanced signal explanation and I subscribed immediately. thank you for your content.
The thing I love about analog is that every time you hear it, the analog source physically changes and that experience can never be duplicated.
Yeah, right, like you notice enough difference between one play and the immediate next for you to perceive it as a "new experience." You'll likely get more difference between one _live_ analog performance and the next of the same thing, and not even notice _that._
@@HelloKittyFanMan. Everyone listens and feels music differently. Some people pick up things others don't, plus im a recording engineer / musician so my ear might be able to perceive a difference, either way cool topic of discussion.
OK, @@goredzilla, then why do you treat these miniscule, barely-present differences from one play of an analog recording to the next as if they're a bigger deal to you than going from one concert to the next of that same band when they play the same songs at one concert and the next (I'm not trying to compare the differences between studio and concert here)?
@@HelloKittyFanMan. Im not. My only point was that source analog degrades over time because of the physical limitations of tape and vinyl giving the listener a different experience both good and bad over the long term with the same analog source.
ITS THAT MAGICAL MOJO.
I took the audiophile pill almost a decade ago, and I can not tell you how many times I had to explain to someone that actually no, just because it's an analog medium doesn't make it the best, and vinyl especially has a lot of compromises (mainly some heavy high passing on the master to prevent wider, deeper, grooves to fit more music on each side), when I switched to lossless digital for the fidelity boost.
It's funny because I use a lot of analog hardware (synths and a few compressors mostly) but like a lot of people are saying, I use them for flavor. Mixer clipping is fun and it doesn't take long to bounce a track from the computer back into ableton and see if processing it from there is better than processing it in the box.
Fantastic video!
I’m 60, and have been collecting and listening to vinyl records since I’ve been around eight, I think, and although I’m used to the analog, I like the digital CDs as well and listen to both these days. There are pluses and minuses on both ends of the scale. I have very minimal, component-wise, systems. Are the LPs bulky? Well yeah, but I love ‘em, and I can’t say that I’ve noticed too much in any degrading of sound after each listen.
SUPERB content! Many congrats, keep on the great work!
Thanks for the guide! Btw thanks also for all the videos you posted on UA-cam. So much objective information gained from your videos.
Good video. I’m a fan of digital audio however sound engineers have abused the format because the digital format will accommodate that whereas in the analog world strict rules have to be followed. This is one reason why people are rediscovering the beauty of analog such as vinyl.
I was going to make this same argument. Digital can be brickwalled. You can't really do that with analog in the same way.
I think the biggest benefit for analog is something being physical. We live in a physical reality. Humans like tangible things we can touch. We like to collect and display things. Nobody cares about your mp3 collection. Even if its uncompressed lossless wav files.
@@EvanVincent. I too prefer the physical world. There’s something about having a milk crate full of 78’s and rediscovering treasure’s I’ve forgotten about.
I see the same thing with streaming movies, movies I like I want physical blu ray copies that I can touch.
I love your channel! Thank you so much, all your videos have been super helpful! I'm basically bingewatching all of them!
Thanks a ton!!
vinyl has another problem: the fidelity gets worse the closer the tracks are printed to the middle. the track gets shorter and shorter for one cycle, so the audio imprinted gets less space, which leads to a high frequency loss.
Interesting! I had not heard that before. Thanks for sharing, marek.
Yep. This is correct. Classical works that have a very loud finale at the end of the record can often suffer from sibilance because or this effect.
Yes. My first album back on Christmas 1975, "The Best of Carly Simon" has the song "Haven't Got Time For The Pain" last on side one which concerned me cause of the slower rotation toward the inside. The song is extremely busy with percussion and strings and loud singing. Thank God for the digital version. Problem solved 😌 👌
Not to mention the whole RIAA curve inserted to bring back the lows that recording engineers had to pull out of the recordings in order for the needle to stay in the groove. Vinyl is inherently lossy and can only hold about 20 minutes of music a side without suffering even further. It boggles my mind that so many are returning to a medium we couldn't wait to throw in the garbage back in the 70s/80s.
@@jefffoster3557 Exactly!!! Those K-Tel records could hold 30 minutes per side with compression equal to AM radio. Hahaha 😅 😅 😅 😅
Love this and the other AU videos. One parallel in analog or digital is that the faster you record to a media the better audio you get. On pro tape decks they could run up to 15 inches of tape per second, that got expensive and bulky quickly. On a phonograph, the "best" tracks were recorded nearest the outside diameter because they are moving the fastest. We barely even notice the obscene bit rates we record today due to the storage media we have.
Nearly all instruments start out being recorded with an analog signal. Before our antiquated human ears can hear a signal it has to be converted back to analog. Analog is alive and well!
Analog technology has been at least near-perfected and now well complements the digital recording and mastering process. You still see preferences for tube amplifiers and I've personally yet to see a recording artist use a USB microphone (not saying it hasn't been done). I'd also recommend watching "Sound City". It's an entertaining documentary featuring Dave Grohl and even Rupert Neve! ua-cam.com/video/kREXK5sVjQ4/v-deo.html While our tech today is superior, ALL of the greats of the last century were recorded analog and they produced many masterpieces (and also a lot of crap). The century before that, the most technologically advanced recording was a cylinder phonograph, and before that, sheet music...
2:38 Digital audio was not popular amongst "audiophiles" when it was introduced; this was primarily because DACs (and presumably ADCs as well) were not that good back in the 1980s and could produce an unpleasant "digital" top end (high frequencies sounding thin and harsh). My first CD player (a Sony, 1989) sounded horrible when compared to a good turntable/arm/cartridge combination. However, that all changed very quickly and (for me) by the start of the 90's digital audio was audibly superior to analogue in every sense of the word. 7:27 A must watch. 8:16 What "aliasing" means is that if you don't stay within the band limit of the sample frequency, to adhere to the Nyquist theorem, then there will be more than one mathematical solution for the sampled waveform.
Good video! I thought I was back in the 90s when people where just learning about digital LOL!
I think the question relates more to which is better for production versus listening.
For example, digital audio definitely has the fidelity and the easy of use advantage for most people today when used for listening. Most people are seem perfectly happy listening to digital audio online / streaming on their phones etc.
On the flip side, alot of people producing audio know that the anaolg realm adds alot to the production. For example. there are many of analog emulation software for processing audio, and alot of audio engineers just end up using real analog equipment. The coloring or harmonics etc that the high-end analog equipment produces adds alot the to mix, and even though it may not all come thru in the final product, there are things people pickup on.
Well said, m9! Thanks for watching and leaving this comment!
Wow … nice presentation and exceptional resources … it’s been a beat since my college engineer classes for RTVF … thank you
Just some points: 1.) Every single sound U hear ends in analog, and if we're talking about real "recording", than it started in analog. U can simply not miss out the analog part. 2.) Noise is not determined by level, or distortion, or anything else engineering, noise is determined by the definition, that U don't want it to be there. 3.) If U are talking about music, U are talking about art. And despite U have to know the basics (or advanced) of engineering, its way more important to have ears, to have creativity, to have talent. 4.) (most important) It doesn't matter if we are talking about the harmonics of the voice of Tina Turner, or the distortion of a tubeamp, U can (re)produce only the things, or changes that U know, and what U understand exactly.
For example there are electric guitars. In the recording industry U very rarely find a guy, who wants to record it 1:1 pure from the line. Instead U attach a (tube)amp, a speaker box and microphones in the signal line. Why? Is it linear, or transient? No way. But its the sound U (as a guitarist/producer) want to hear. Can U make it digitally, from 1:1 record? Good Luck! Once I saw the studioroom of Moby on a picture. There were hundreds if not thousands of different small analog gear in it (compressors, effects etc.), just because he sometimes needs some of them to get to the sound he wants to get.
What I want to say we are not developing sonars for submarines. What U hear is way-way different, than your measurement microphone "hear", just because U have 2 ears and a brain. (Try it! Listen to something live, than a mic from the same place with headphones.) In the music scene engineering is an important part, but U shouldn't approach it only from that way.
It’s like asking What reads better, a physical book or an e- book via an electronic device? Or should you write with pencil and pad, or using a laptop? There’s things about both that the other will never be able to truly replicate. And you have to decide which parts of those things are important and what works for you
I loved the straight-forward, no-nonsense explanation with decent visuals.
Great video - some of the illustrations helped me to understand the 360 degrees of a wave cycle.
My rule is :
Analog for original recording (laying down tracks, creating the "master tapes")
Digital for mixing, editing, and final mastering.
I've been dabbling in audio engineering (mixing, editing, etc) since I was a teenager, and everything I "know" is self-taught and "learned the hard way". Lots of trial & error to figure out what works & sounds good, and what doesn't.
I find that a lot of the original CD albums sound more "natural" (due to their analog origins and digital remastering) than the more modern discs that were done all on digital from start to finish. The latter tend to create way more pops and clicks and other audio glitches than analog ever did (apart from maybe the pops and clicks of vinyl). In editing, a digtized analog file will show with much more definitive accuracy where these annoying pops and clicks are based on the signal flow ; these disturbances are easily identified, isolated, and removed. The all-digital files, however, are so "jagged" (and often distorted due to people pushing the peak limits, just cos you CAN go all the way to 0dB doesn't mean you should) that everything looks the same and those foreign sounds are harder to identify and isolate. Talk about trial & error - I came close to finding out if the "Undo" button could be worn out on a few projects.
That all said, another rule is to keep the output signal peak at around -4dB. If a level meter was a see-saw, then -4dB is where the pivot bar is located. The range between -4dB and 0dB is where the "spillover" can go ; those sudden "kicks" of sound that disrupt the gentle "ebb & flow" of a consistent level.
Given that I have no formal training, I'm not using proper "technical jargon" and so I don't know if my explanations make clear sense or not, and I imagine anyone with years of formal training will be eager to pounce all over me for why I am "wrong" about any given thing. I'm just reporting what works for me.
Anyone who has received one of my custom compilation CDs has always stated the volume (output) levels are near perfect ; not too loud, not too low. And because I take great pains to determine where these peak levels SHOULD be on various types of music and sounds (and modify the levels accordingly in editing), and making sure everything conforms to the same range, people appreciate the "set it and forget it" benefit where they can set their volume control to a desired level, and never have to worry about sudden fluctuations in volume from track to track, or even disc to disc.
No more issues of setting your volume, only to have the next track suddenly go so quiet that it's inaudible (and then having to raise the volume) only to be plagued by the next track following that is suddenly so loud and blows out their speakers/ears and they have to scramble to turn it down - which, with most modern volume controls also being digitized (no more physical sliders or dials to do a FAST adjustment), that can take "forever". A person has to wait while the "meter" (SLOWLY) ticks down, segment by segment til it reaches a proper level.
If I had an actual recording studio, all sound would be originally recorded to analog tape, "laying down tracks" as they say.
After that, the tapes would be converted to digital for all manner of mixing, editing (to lossless digital files, such as WAV), and mastering (to CD and/or MD) thereafter.
But that's just me.
My dad was a sound engineer at Little Mountain Sound Studios in Vancouver and recorded with groups such as, Aerosmith, Bon Jovi, the cult, Brian Adams, Sarah McLaughlin, and many many more.
Despite how easy it is to make music nowadays it’s amazing how horrible new music is, God of the days of the clean sound and raw energy of actual musical instruments and singers performing without autotune, these do we have really into the audio product you were going to be getting regardless of medium you’re receiving them on.
Moreover, the quality of your stereo system including your amplifiers, your head unit and your speakers or of the utmost importance, And to a degree the cabling and wires used, I know this is a lot for the majority of your fan base to understand but these are all time-tested and true, analog recordings along with tubes offer the listener a warm and yet natural experience
It's good that you can make your own music your own way and listen to it then..
@@d_vibe-swe If you wanna listen to SH1Tit’s your choice but don’t refer to it as music #FunFact
@@patsow4797 So you can't make your own music then?
You are one of those rare good Kyles. Good work dude!
Another way to think of Aliasing, where a frequency higher than the Nyquist frequency gets "read" as a much lower frequency, is strobing. This is the same thing that happens when a video camera's shutter frequency is close to a exact divider of the frequency of some visual occurence. For example, we've all seen a spinning wheel on a car appear to slow down, stop, and even move (slowly, usually) in reverse. Our own visual perception systems have a natural frequency, and when the wheel is turning at close to an exact multiple of the visual frequency, we see the wheel appear to slow, stop, and reverse.
This is all because one is sampling visually, something that occurs at a fast rate than the visual sampling rate. You "see" something moving at a much slower rate than it actually is - the wheel is spinnning fast, but you see a different, slower frequency. Alisasing is the same thing - audio sampling rate is "phasing" along the period of the waveform.
So, can aliasing result in a lower frequency reversed sound, like the wheel appearing to spin backward? Good question, and one it would be fun to experiment with.
"Our own visual perception systems have a natural frequency, and when the wheel is turning at close to an exact multiple of the visual frequency, we see the wheel appear to slow, stop, and reverse. "
That is not the reason for the spinning wheel phaenomea.
Think about an analog clock which you are filming with a frame rate of 1 picture every 59 seconds which is of course very slow and definitly no problem for the human eye to follow.
Now "playback" that photo sequence with the same frame rate of 1 picture every 59 seconds on a TV.
It will appear that the second hand is moving backwords.
If you do the same but using a frame rate of 1 picture every 60 seconds the second hand will not move anymore in the playback.
If you look (without recording and playback) to a real constant spinning wheel it will never change direction or speed - the only thing that happens is that at some speed details are smudged
Analog is my favorite, but from a recording standpoint digital is easier most home recording studios don't have access to a full band
I notice that when I get vinyl copies of CD albums I've owned, they often come split onto two records (and sometimes includes an extra track). I thought that this was done as a sort of luxury thing, because the vinyl copies are generally have packaging, artwork, etc that's nicer than the CD version, but then I worked out that vinyl stores 44 minutes (22 per side) where most of the CD albums are slightly longer.
Sneaker Pimps Becoming X is an interesting case. It comes on two full-sized records, and the records are explicitly labelled 33 rpm, but you have to play them at 45 rpm to sound normal.
Great video. So much information. Thank you.
Great video - very interesting. There are other advantages to digital that I think you didn't have time to cover. For instance, dynamic range (much greater in digital than in vinyl or tape). Also the related problem that vinyl has to be processed in both the recording phase and the playback - the RIAA curve. Then there is the fact that vinyl is recorded and played back with constant angular velocity, which means that the linear speed changes, and thus the resolution. There is a limit to the highest frequencies that can be recorded, and playing back will physically wear the record down more at these frequencies than the lower ones. And too high a frequency and the stylus will skip over the waveform. Then there is, of course, the surface noise. TBH it is amazing that vinyl performs as well as it does. But the preference for vinyl that some people express is because of - or despite - the inherent and considerable flaws in the medium. All these things could be reproduced in the digital domain, if required.
Excellent video, and yeah I've done analog editing on a 1/4" Open Reel machine. It can sound great, but just rocking the reels back and forth to find that right kick or snare to start your edit is a major PITA.
Great style. Good to see you support other creators.
Moreover, some mixes on analog were just not availible/ are different on digital. Even some SACD mixes were changed for blu-ray releases like "Janine Jansen - the four seasons". isnt that right?
Unrelated, I wonder, (even if far fetched) is there an extra element unaccounted for to sensing the vibrations other than limit of human hearing?
Great video, thanks! People do get overexcited about whether it's analogue or digital! I had a Sonos Amp and DALI Oberon 5, completely digital. Bought a nice turntable and Marantz integrated amp, my vinyl may have sounded better. But then tried a Sonos Port plugged into the Marantz and the same digital stuff notably better coming through a better amp. Then upgraded to Wharfedale Linton Heritage speakers and a mate came round. Even with CDs and streamed it brought back memories of his late father's high end vinyl system and "analogue warmth". Half of it was because they had nice big speakers back then!
Enjoy it while you can! I am 76 and my hearing is shot, nowhere near what it was even 30 years ago.
always super info and superbly explained 🤘
I agree with a lot of your points but one thing that needs to be said about digitial recording. With editing to perfection now (moving and cutting attacks of transients to the grid) you take away the human element of feel. That's why so many new recordings sound like a machine and drab. Perfection isn't a good thing sometimes, especially when it comes to record a human playing an instrument. I like analog records mainly for nostalgia. Digital has it's place, but let's stop taking the human element of out of recording. We aren't perfect, so stop making it sound perfect. A lot of guys still record drums and bass with analog and then dump to digital. I love digital recording. I use Pro Tools and I was focused a long time on making things perfect (Melodyne and editing to grid). I'll stop that now. Humans playing instruments should be imperfect. Why do you think old Beatles records sound great. It was them playing live. Mistakes and all. Let's get back to that.
Adele’s latest is an example of this. Great point.
Over production is slowly ruining everything. We have something that only an obsessive compulsive or autistic maniac could love. By simplifying and reducing the real sound, we end up losing all of its value. We could paint a canvas all black, or all white, then say "Viola, it is symmetrical and perfect" but what is it? Nothing.
Nothing is natural anymore, nothing has warmth or value. Everything is white washed, truncated, reduced, sterilized, obsessively turned into nothing to remove all theoretical errors to make it "perfect", and in the process, absolutely and completely destroying it. Making nothing.
Everything is over acted, and ruined. Modern music is as you describe, and is worthless to listen to so much of the time (modern pop music is just noise, not even music), and the list goes on. Sports and competitions are over regulated to make them more "competitive" and manage to ruin them in the process (might as well sit at home and flip a coin all day), and so on.
We have achieved perfect garbage.
Great comment!
Production is completely unrelated to the final format though. There’s no reason why you can’t listen to a live performance on CD and electronic music on vinyl. Mastering for digital doesn’t correct any human errors in the performance
To all of you guys...you forget there is not reason to argue....the new generation is taking the industry and most do not even play music and in the digital world which for them copy and paste is Art and original ...things change
If you copy a record onto a CD, the CD will sound exactly as the vinyl. The fact that CD versions of LPs don't sound as good as the original album, is because the "engineers" went back to the original tape and felt compelled to EQ, compress and process the hell out of it.
My preference on this whole Digital vs Analog debate isn't about sound. Both have their advantages and their usecase. They're tools and are meant to be used to benefit the user. The only reason why I side with Digital is mainly because of the corporate side of things.
Without Digital, literally none of us would be here to discuss this. Because if only analog was available, it would be barred behind a massive cost which only certain groups are able to afford. And even then, these groups are more than likely to keep it to themselves. We've seen it happen when these groups tried to scramble to monopolize digital formats because it messed with the status quo.
Digital gave these monopolizing corporats the middle finger. And that's why, atleast for me, digital is superior.
Great presentation, well balanced and concise.
Your findings are always honest.
Great video, mate. Well done.
07:39 I really believe that, at first we used to ignore a lot of things, same as we listen to some one we miss or ignore a lot of expression and meaning what he/she gives but if we consider think about again (re visit back in time or getting in the mind space) really makes us realize more and more each and evetime. 🙂
and thank you Kyle, Really appreciate your gift
Thanks for watching, Haharu Records!
Well done and we’ll explained. Thank you!
I agree with everything accept the storing part it is nicer to see a shelf with LP' s than a shelve with harddiscs or servers. The overall presentation counts. And the durable part when you dont have power you can play in theory your LP's. The music is still there.
it is simple...take a song and record the same...same headroom, dynamic range, low end high end and print it in a CD and then in a Vinyl....which one sounds better?
Regarding the SND of analogue making it "sound" better, with digital you can run a mathematical transform on it and add the 3rd order harmonics of a valve amplifier. Also high quality audio is dithered in the analogue domain before digitising mainly to reduce sampling distortions of very quiet signals. Basically if you record something near the noise floor that results in only a few bits variation from one sample to the next then the distortion of that signal is many percent but of course is largely inaudible because the distortion artefacts are below the sample size. The dither lifts the lower signals so that they are moved in and out of detection resulting in what the ear recognises as white noise.
By far the most important aspects affecting sound quality are the recording, mixing and mastering and, in the case of records, the lacquer cutting (unless DMM), pressing process and vinyl quality. CDs can and do sound fantastic outside of the loudness wars times and hi-res digital can also sound phenomenal. However, both formats can and do sound terrible… it depends on all of the rest.
All things being equal and in high quality, though, I have a strong preference for the sound of records. I just prefer it… to me it generally sounds more natural, warmer, less fatiguing… just nicer to listen to for me.
Thank you for a fair objective analysis of this subject I love my CDs!
Glad you enjoyed it, Bob! Thanks for watching.
VERY CORRECT CONCLUSIONS! BIG RESPECT!
You are definitly my music theory teacher 👏!
The average listener is oblivious to all of the excellent points you've made about the recording process, whether it be digital or analog. The real tragedy here with the advent of digital was the disappearance of the DJ, the wonderful artwork that came with vinyl LP's, as well as the lyrics printed on the sleeve or inside the jacket....not that the info isn't on CD jackets, it's nearly impossible to read. Radio is how most of us were introduced to the music, and the DJ, who had about 50 minutes out of every hour to introduce us to the players, has all but vanished. Coming home with a new album was a very exciting experience, reading the lyrics as the music played. I'm glad you touched on speaker placement, soundstage, channel separation and the "magic triangle." Long ago an audio expert told me to set the stereo up in a room first, then add the furniture.
DJs haven't disappeared
Actually every time you listen to a record (vinyl OR shellac) the sound quality gets better! It adds warmth haha 🌈
Good summary. I love tape and can make some great recordings out of it. But at the same time I am well aware of its limitations and wouldn't dream of giving up the advantages digital audio has given us.
You seem to have forgotten or never learned that tape isn't just an analog option. Remember professional DDD (digital-tape recording and mastering all the way through) and DAT and DCC?
@@HelloKittyFanMan. or don't care. What was the point of your patronising comment.
@@Seiskid: 1. My comment _wasn't_ "patroni[z]ing." 2. The point of my NON-patroniZing comment was that you referred to tape as if it has the limitations of being only an analog medium, when that's incorrect.
@@HelloKittyFanMan. I found DCC to be a fun medium that provided the best of both worlds. For that matter the old “digalog” cassettes cranked out a similar experience.
That was very informative thanks.
Good video. Points for clarification: 1) magnetic tape does not store charges. It stores differences in magnetic flux. 2) digitized signals are never as precise as analog signals since they are captured by a finite sample-rate. However, because your ear cannot hear anything above about 20kHz (and my ear can barely handle anything over 11kHz), the human cannot hear the difference given a high enough sample rate. That is probably the best way to understand the issue you discuss around 7:20. Finite sample rate is fine as long as you only care about a finite bandwidth (and, as you say, the sample rate is over 2X the highest frequency you care about).
Regarding your 2nd point: The important message to get across to audiophiles, who still believe that AD and DA conversion is the act of computational approximation, is that a digital signal _always_ leads to a precise 1:1 reproduction of the org. analog signal, if the org. signal lies within the bandwidth constraints of the digital signal's sampling frequency. This is the insight (and audiophile enlightenment) that makes Monty Montgomerys video worth watching - again and again! :-)
Its not because "the human ear cannot hear the difference" its because they are converted back from digital to analog in the perfect inverse of how they were converted from analog to digital. Neither your speaker nor your ear are receiving approximations.
All true and accurate. However, the availability of full 24/96 recording material to the general public is minute. Most of what is available is severely compressed material. However, the same is true of vynil, which aside from select audiophile level recordings and pressings are not of the optimal quality that can be achieved by the medium.
well done........ So many people misunderstand and ignore the problems of analog audio.
Gracias por el aporte , amo el vinyl desde hace 65 años.
Fantastic video overall. The Nyquist theorem definitely proves that you can represent a frequency by sampling at least at twice that rate, but as you mentioned that's why the sampling is done at more than 40kHz to avoid distortion and aliasing. I'd add a disadvantage to digital media files. If your file gets corruoted there's normally no way to fix it, so the music/content is gone for good. With analog media you may be able to recover most of it (e.g. a song may skip once or twice but most of it will be there, and it may be even physically repaired). In the end I think having backups always helps in case something goes wrong, so you should tape your vinyl records, and/or digitize your analog music collection, and keep a backup of your digital files, a little bit paranoid but better safe than sorry lol 😆
Backup, backup, and backup again! Your copies will be perfect every time. I realize, though, that it only works if your original file isn't corrupted. All this talk about Nyquist. Nyquist only applies if your filter is perfect, and it isn't. The problem is that 22.05Khz is way too close to 20Khz to be able to design and build a perfect filter that steep. They should have made the sampling rate 100Khz and make the CD's physically larger. Then it would be so much easier to make a good filter. If you backup all your analog music like I did, then there's a lot of second-guessing later. Should I get a better turntable/cartridge/preamp and do it all over again?
" If your file gets corruoted there's normally no way to fix it, so the music/content is gone for good" If it's just the file, can be recovered on almost all formats.... Of course it all depends. If the physical support is totally corrupted, no, there's no way. But that's the same in analog.
I just had a discussion with a hifi store. I simply wanted to buy a bluetooth adapter for my old CD-player and happend to mention that I also wanted to play vinyl records via BT. They went off like a rocket telling me off about destroying all that good analog sound! Their sollution was buying a complete amp setup with speakers for $800+ and all I had as an answer was no, thanks! Have a nice day! I understand they need to sell and they're selling the myth of the perfect analog sound. But saying that digital is audibly inferior, well you covered that here! Something also to consider, at 48Hz no speaker will actually send out 48000 individual signals per second through the room. I highly doubt there is any home use speaker that actually can do that, instead because of material and design the signal becomes an approximation, a mush, a smooth wave (if it isn't turned into that before the speaker already), so you obviously don't hear Lego brick sound because it's digital but you hear it as analog because it comes out of the speaker as analog. Secondly, the best of us have trouble hearing over 20k Hz. What anyone is actually after listening to vinyl isn't the analog sound, it's taking the record out of the sleeve, putting it on the player, listening to a little bit of crackle, turning it over when it's done, listening to the original mix of the music (which more than likely has been remastered 10 times on digital format by now), and putting the record back into the sleve at the end of the day. But analog sound? Please... Asking at a nerdy hifi store for digital sollutions is like asking in a church if there is an alternative for god. A question to everyone who is convinced analog is the way: If you cancel out a digital audiowave with the corresponding analog wave (if that was possible without digitizing the analog wave on the way into the computer program to match the two), what would the remaining sound be that you hear after you cancelled both of them out? Because that exact sound is supposed to be this magical thing that makes analog superior to digital. Let's call those remains the "gold-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow-wave, or GATEOTRW for short and sweet. :P It's not there, and I don't need it.
The only thing I have to say on the topic is that it makes me shake my head, how many people will buy a contemporary, digitally recorded and digitally mastered album that was released on vinyl, and then praise it's analog sound. If someone says that they prefer the "warmth" of analog recordings, I'm not going to dispute them, but for gods sake, that's only an argument for albums recorded Analog/Analog/Analog.
I agree, mk. At the end of the day, I think there are many things to love about analog delivery formats, but accuracy and transparency is not one of them. If it’s recorded digitally, I want to listen to a digital copy.
The imperfections of vinyl are sometimes positive. And the difference in mastering for vinyl is sometimes positive. These are not always positive, but often they are. Digital is always more accurate as long as the resolution is high enough. However, very often analog is more pleasing. They, simply put, sound different. A vinyl record can't be as compressed or have as much bass, for example, because of the limitations of the mediums involved. While yes this is limitation, it can lead to a more desirable listening experience.
If I record a vinyl record onto my computer in high resolution, the digital playback sounds identical to what I monitor analog during recording. Digital is capable of perfectly capturing what it is about analog that I enjoy. The key thing is that I often enjoy what analog adds. Digital may always be more "true" and accurate, but often the additional analog step (or steps), has a more pleasurable end result. That a vinyl record cannot be as hot can be a good thing, and often is. And as mentioned in the video, the distortion etc can have a desirable effect in the end.
As far as noise floor and dynamics, there of course is no comparison. Digital is far superior. But again, sometimes noise can add to the experience in the end, as well as dynamics limitations.
Some people that sample to create music, prefer to sample analog source material. This is because of how it sounds. The same ideas apply to how music is recorded. Using analog gear may sound better even if it is not technically as accurate a capture or recreation.
It simply comes down to preference. And it should be taken in a case by case basis. Analog recording gear may sometimes have a preferential sound to an artist. Analog playback mediums may sometimes have a preferential sound to creators and/or listeners.
A photograph is far superior to a painting in terms of accurate representation. When the representation is an artistic representation, the artist may prefer the medium of the painting in some cases, and you as the viewer may prefer a painting in some cases.
CrazyLazyDave Totally agree with everything you’re saying, but I’m not sure what I said that you are responding to… My point is simply that a recording that has been produced digitally at every step except the last, and then printed on vinyl, is not the same as a recording that was recorded, mixed and mastered on tape, and then printed to vinyl. Some people are buying new albums by contemporary artists and acting as if the artist did an “old school” recording, and they are mistaken, is all I was saying.
@@darwinsaye it is at that point an analog recording of a digital recording. The equipment is imperfect and adds character that may or may not be desirable. Plus the music is mastered differently for vinyl. You can't assume that the end result on vinyl is not what was intended and desigired by the artist. Often it is. Often it isn't. Case by case.
Sometimes noise is added digitally for effect. Distortion is used in many ways creatively during recording (and performing). Often digital products are created and used to emulate analog. Perfect is not always the ideal. Sometimes the flawed is what you're after.
A vinyl record does not sound identical to the digital source. We agree on that. It is often intentional and/or desirable difference.
A digital recording of a vinyl record sounds the same as the vinyl record. Because it's digital. The vinyl record, and recording of it, sound different than the original digital source because there were analog steps involved in making it.
@@darwinsaye for the sake of analogy....
A digital synthesizer is digital. A VST Plug In synthesizer in a computer obviously is digital. If you play it back accurately it sounds one way. If instead you play it back inaccurately it sounds different and possibly better. Say you run the synthesizer out of your computer and through some analog pedals and a tube amp. It will sound way different. It may sound way better.
Even a clean guitar. It may sound better on a clean tube amp than a clean solid state amp. The solid state amp may more clean and accurately produce the sound. But the tube amp may sound better. I realize that was a completely analog scenario. Throw some digital pedals in there. Same thing. The amp at the end of the chain is still imparting a sound. The vinyl process imparts a sound at the end of the chain.
Main "benefit" of online streaming is - full control over listener. They can track his activity, they can cut off any content whenever they want. With physical media this was not possible, because you can listen your vinyl anytime. The music on physical media cannot "disappear" even if distributor decides to publish the music no more - there would be still enough media circulating among the people. Online streaming doesn't gurantee that music will be even available tomorrow. Reliance on online whatever is dangerous for historical memory of mankind.
Honestly, for a true audiophile enthusiast like myself who already owned hundreds of records when the CD first came out, there was never a choice of either/or. I enjoy both, and accept the limitations of each. My old records sound fantastic, now that I have a new, high quality phono cartridge. My only grip is that whenever I have replaced one of my old LP's that I did not care for very well in my younger years, the replacement involved some nutcase who could not help himself once the music was converted into the digital form, and reproduced it excessive EQ that absolutely ruined the final result. I have taken a number of them and copied them into mastering software in an attempt to remaster them so that they sound correct, meaning as close as possible to the original LP. In one case, a few of the songs were actually sped up, which absolutely made my head explode, and I had to use a recorder that had variable speed control to recreate it and burn a new CD of it. Then there is the CD version of Fleetwood Mac's Tusk LP with the radio play version of Sara, so I had to find the full length version of that song on another CD, and then remake that CD. I could go on. In one case, I just gave up and went back to the noisy LP's (Santana's Caravanserai and Welcome) simply to enjoy the proper mix, and let the CD versions of these sit and collect dust.
Vinyl is on its way back
This is a great video, your tonation is very calming and keeps interest. If you don't mind me making a suggestion, could you do a video about bluetooth quality regarding 5.0 & 5.3 etc as I don't understand it. Also, what would be the best audio format for storage if we were to rip CD's for example to get optimum sound considering we are not looking for audiophile quality with speakers in a kitchen etc.
There is no better analog and digital both have there place in the audio world.
Great set of videos. Really looking forward to watching Monty's video on DACs. I can see how using the Nyquist frequency would allow a DAC to reproduce the original waveform but only if it was build assuming that it's producing a simple sine wave. I'm really curious to know how well using the Nyquist frequency as a sample works for more complex waveforms. Even something as simple as a two sine waves with different frequencies summed. Or a sine wave with a triangle or square wave.
Google search on Fourier Analysis/Transform. ANY shape waveform no matter how complex in the time domain can be decomposed to a set of sine waves of varying amplitude in the frequency domain. That is a law of nature that very few making comments seem to know about or understand.
Excellent video, great content and better presentation.
*Personally, I will always favor analog over digital.* To me analog is closest to the "real deal", digital is more like -a fake- an artificial thing trying to fool my ears. That said, I respect the opinion and feelings of those who favor digital. At the end of the day, both techniques allow us to enjoy sound and video. Peace!
I dont think that its about artificial or not. These are completely wrong categories when talling about analog vs. digital.
Our ears cannot hear the information stored on vinyls, and they cannot hear bits and bytes. So, both technologies are in need for complex writing- and reading-mechanisms, and speakers to "translate" these information to our ears.
Therefore, analog and digital have nothing to do with artificial and non-artificial - they both do not exist in nature and are invented by human minds. As he said in the video, its just about storage technology.
But both, analog and digital audio-storage, do not contain directly useful information for our ears. Ears cannot hear scratches on a vinyl for example.
If you lose the "key" to the information (that is the knowlege about how these informion is read and writen) then the information is completely useless.
You'll always need manmade artificial translaters of high quality, which are constructed in the exact right way to fit the used storing-technology.
You may better understand how analog mechanisms work than you understand how digital2analog converters work - maybe this is what can be meant by "artificial".
Or, in other words: being on a lonesome island I would like to have a guitar with me; both 1000 vinyls and 1000 CDs get completely useless without proper power supply and manmade machines.
@@sascha8669
_"Ears cannot hear scratches on a vinyl for example."_
Well, I may have _"super ears"_ because I definitely can hear the scratches on my records. I can tell you that.
Eyes can see these scratches, but your ears cant hear. What you hear is the sound your reading-device sends to the speakers, while reading the "false" information at the scratch.
"At the end of the day, both techniques allow us to enjoy sound and video."
I agree that good analog audio equipment is "good enough" for the human ear but no analog VHS or Betamax playback comes even near to a blue ray disc.
Kyle thank you great presentation
Its strange to me that some audiophiles pay a lot of money for reference audio system components that provide 'purity' of playback...but then they put vinyl on and claim the snap, crackle and pop of their constantly degrading playback medium is just fine!!
Interesting point, and just as interesting is that you received no responses.
I think there is a very important fact that contributes to the generalized myth that "vinyl sounds better than CD" and is the bad remasterings of many records that were made during the 80s and the 90s, in part due to the Loudness War; remasterings that were excessively compressed and taken to high volumes that almost clipped or saturated the sound.
So, in many cases, it is true that the vinyl version of a certain record sounds better or "warmer" than de CD version, but this is not a consequence of the format itself, it is a consequence of the awful remaster for the CD version.
I am quickly becoming a massive fan of this channel. Your videos are spot on, factually correct, and a pleasure to watch. Your delivery is perfect as well. You are right up there with the likes of e.g. Dan Worrall.
Wow! I’m a big fan of Dan Worrall! That means a lot, Matthijs. Thanks!
There are actually several things he got wrong. See my main comments above (in newest-first sort mode).
@@HelloKittyFanMan. - I carefully read through all of your comments here, and man, you sure sound nit-picky. What you fail to appreciate is that videos like this need to concentrate on condensed information, stick to the main, important points, in order to hopefully get as much of it across in less, rather than more, time. Because people have busy lives, and cannot always be expected to sit through a 14-hour tutorial video, just to learn what the main advantages and disadvantages of digital and analog are. Most of what you write (in a multitude of comments) is completely irrelevant, and if those factoids would have been put in the video, most people would have switched over after 2 minutes to the next cat video instead. So, instead of following your "advice", I am glad that Audio University sticks to facts that matter, and has omitted the fluff.
Oops, @@matthijshebly, it's not at all "nit-picky" to show that he completely ignored the progression of analog editing from slicing to copying, for example. There's a BIG difference.
It's not at all "nit-picky" to show that he completely ignored that MUCH digital recording _was_ done on TAPE, because what he has done is misleadingly created his fake little world where "all analog recording and editing are inconvenient" and "all _digital_ recording and editing is quick and easy." But in reality it's not that simple. It's like he tried to paint a picture tha puts them on extreme ends of each other in the work flow, but that's not how it really is.
Neither is my mention that not only is vinyl physical, but tape (analog and digital) and CDs (digital only) are physical too. Again, the picture he tried to paint with that, as if vinyl's physicality is a "disadvantage" under those that tape and CDs have, as if they're "not also physical," is false. Not nit-picky; there is a _big_ difference. Same with the rest of those.
You don't even know what a factoid is. That means "like but not actually a fact." Those things I wrote are not "-oids"; they're _actual,_ silly guy.
And no, just getting those things right would not have made an hours-long video, silly guy. And there's nothing mentionably special about expressing those in several comments, either. That's a normal thing that plenty of people do: comment about one thing at a time as we go through the video.
@@HelloKittyFanMan. > it's not at all "nit-picky" to show that he completely ignored the progression of analog editing from slicing to copying, for example
It's completely irrelevant to the topic of the video.
> It's not at all "nit-picky" to show that he completely ignored that MUCH digital recording was done on TAPE
It's completely irrelevant to the topic of the video.
> Neither is my mention that not only is vinyl physical, but tape (analog and digital) and CDs (digital only) are physical too.
It's completely irrelevant to the topic of the video.
> Again, the picture he tried to paint with that, as if vinyl's physicality is a "disadvantage" under those that tape and CDs have, as if they're "not also physical," is false.
It's completely irrelevant to the topic of the video.
> silly guy.
Always make sure to put an insult into any response you make on the internet.
I have a long rant I could type about this, but I'll keep it relatively short for a comment here.
Every step in the recording and playback process introduces changes and distortion of some sort. Microphones distort, cables have signal loss, tape compresses and distorts, channel strips and mixers add their own color to the sound. There's no such thing as perfection in recording. What there is, is the skill of producers, musicians, and engineers in using the studio and all its tools.
And when it comes to listening, the quality of your home system and speakers matters. An LP played on a high-end home system might sound better than a CD coming through my computer headphones. But sometimes those headphones are good enough for me.
And I'll admit to often seeking out vinyl recordings, but usually it's either collectible or nostalgic, or things that either don't have a digital release or were changed. (One example I like to use is ZZ Top - the drum tracks were changed on later versions of their early recordings, and to me it ruined the sound. I'd rather seek out original vinyl pressings than the later butchered versions.)
(PS. Yes, this is a long comment, but it's the short version of what I'd LIKE to say. :D )
One of the best no nonsense videos on the internet.
100% in agreement with everything you said. At last, honest analysis without the BS.
Thank you.
These 2 compliments each other for precise calculation and natural dirt combined to give you musical (DNA) The fact that you can send signal cleaner than a bill of health while having the ability to dirty something up in a controlled by the way via analog (Natural compression) is a godsend!
"Compliments"? So you're saying that one of them tells the other how good it is in some area?
Nicely explained!
Got a chuckle from me seeing a dude editing analogue tape. I haven't had to do that since about '96, I guess! But I still have my splicing block sitting in a cupboard at home. Sheesh... guess I'm old now, huh?
Excellent, this is exactly what I have ben telling my students!
Records or cassette tapes have a soul
If it’s recorded and mastered well it’ll sound great no matter what format
The sampling clock actually AM modulates the input signal. As an result you get sidebands above and below the sampling Frequency. But there is a rub, if there are higher frequencies than the sampling clock they too will wrap around the sampling frequency and appear as an overlap directly into the audio band. This effect is called aliasing.