Article: "Spin Me Round: Why Vinyl is Better Than Digital"

Playing a record is like looking through a window. You're not really there. You're on the other side of a wall, looking through glass. Layers and layers of glass. Some of them clear, some colored, some optically perfect, some wavy as hell. The scene is bent and blurred and colored and far from perfect. But its perfectly clear to your brain. To your brain this is no different than looking at a fish in the stream. Yes the water is wavy, murky, muddy, maybe even. But for all that there is no doubt in your mind, not the slightest shred of doubt, that there is a nice tasty trout in the stream.

When we push play on a CD we get a video on a screen. And the picture we see, it went through all the exact same layers of distortions as the record. Only now in addition to and on top of all that its been converted to video. No matter how sharp the contrast, how vivid the colors, there is never a doubt in the mind, not the slightest shred of a doubt, that we are looking at a video monitor. There is no trout. Maybe never was. Could be really good AI. Who knows?

If digital is so wonderful then why do you think it is that all the best movie directors and actors try so hard to film on location, to actually perform their stunts? Its because the brain is uncannily good at figuring out what is fake, what is fraud, and what is real. When we play a record, whatever it was and however good or bad it sounds, at least we know its the real deal

@millercarbon  this is really good actually.  Some things are hard to explain.  A verbal explanation of the sound of analogue records is probably better left to a poet.  The adamant engineer types and the music production professionals want to reduce the discussion to the limits of their empirical understanding, which, it seems to me, is often lacking in emotional depth (present company excluded of course).  

My inner voice is telling me to say what I really think about this statement, but in the interest of being nice, I will just say this is really silly and shows a considerable lack of understanding of what a "signal" is.  I can take your favorite record Miller, recording it, and play it back to you on a digital playback system.  As long as I have a turntable running in that room, you will assume that you are listening to the record. You will not know it is digital. Digital can capture everything that can come off a record. The opposite is not true.


p.s. When they film on location, odds are very heavy they will be using digital cameras. The number of movies shot on film drops every single year, and today, technically, there is little reason to use film. Want a film effect (grain/noise), add it digitally. 

When we play a record we don't know it is the real deal, we know for sure it is fake (i.e. a recording).

If digital is so wonderful then why do you think it is that all the best movie directors and actors try so hard to film on location, to actually perform their stunts? Its because the brain is uncannily good at figuring out what is fake, what is fraud, and what is real. When we play a record, whatever it was and however good or bad it sounds, at least we know its the real deal

Timbre exists, or accurately the relationship between the various harmonics and their attack and decay. However, the properties that mahgister attempts to assign don’t exist. His failure to understand the underlying mathematical composition of signals and hence why digital is able to capture anything that can be called "timbre" in far greater accuracy than any current analog equipment, causes him to assign "ethereal" properties, that do not exist.

I NEVER affirm in this thread that analog can do something superior to digital, only different...I never affirm also that digital cannot do what analog do for the timbre perception... Then dont put in my mouth what others speak about but not me...

And the adjective analog or digital must be associated with many things that will intermix digital and analog qualities for example a vinyl digitalized read by a dac that will retranslate it, but also the vinyl that will play digitally masters vinyl, or digital cd playing a tube only audio system, the list is way greater of all possibilities etc...



In my first point in my discussion with you i only put the fact that the perception of timbre is acoustically conditioned BY THE ROOM where timbre is evaluated, be it by analog or digital audio.... And the electrical and mechanical embeddings of the digital or analog audio system and the acoustical embeddings of the system in the room will have more impact on the timbre perception than the choice of a format digital or vinyl whatever...

And no need of doctorate to know that the mathematical description of timbre by many mathematical descriptors is one of the most complex problem in acoustic linked to music, linguistics,neurology etc, then the engineering problem of the digitalization of any analog sources and the decoding of these digits to made them analog anew is ANOTHER problem tough linked to the first for sure....



My second point was only that digital cannot supersede analog phenomena completely, they are 2 linked faces of the sound phenomena in audio electronic, in the room and in the brain.... Like atoms which are particule and waves at the same time, sound is modulo Fourier analysis of time domain and frequencies particule like and wave like....

The " ethereal" properties you accuse me of associating with timbre perception are this subtle properties modified by an environment that constitute the fabric of instrumental music, and the fabric of phonology and phonetic complexities in all human languages... Assessing mathematically these subtle perceived properties with mathematical models are not a fad, but pretending like you that all these problems are answered once and for all, thanks to the mathematics of digital coding /decoding and filters, is simply confusing many problems and reducing them to one....

By the way these "ethereal" properties associated to the timbre perception are so real, that it will take neural networks and deep learning A.I. to appropriate them for recognizing purpose....Not only the Fourier analysis coding and decoding of digital tech.....The reason is simple: humans LEARN to perceive timbre....This learning process cannot be replace by digital codes only, the learning being associated with an acoustical environment....

Each format digital or analog has his advantages in audio perceived by some and not by others....Myself i think that digital is able to be on par with analog or vice versa with right choice of dac or turntable, but MOSTLY by a rightful triple embeddings of the system....

By the way when you speak of signal noise ratio dont forget that this concept and fact are not limited to electronical digital or audio component.... The signal noise ratio is also increased or decreased by the mechanical, electrical and acoustical embeddings of the audio system in a specific noisy electrical grid in a specific acoustically qualified room....The ears are also a measuring apparatus of signals/noise ratio....

This is WHY embeddings methods produce a greater impact on the listener than only the change of a turntable to a dac or vice versa....

Then my opinion being more subtle than what you caricature describe, i will be grateful to read it adequately put in your post....

By the way i dont doubt that you are more competent than me in audio, but that dont justify your rejection by the back of your hand of any other human experience because being illusory.... Audio it is my experience is more complex than we think....And some limited mathematics dont explain all sorry....

I just put my hand on this book :

They dont say that rigorous description of timbre by digital coding exhaust the subject matter at all...On the contrary ...They dont say either that only  the microphones locations is enough to capture the butterfly of timbre in the net of digitalization engineering....😊 They seems to speak about this "ethereal" properties that the ears/brain of humans must learn to survive...

https://www.amazon.com/Timbre-Acoustics-Perception-Cognition-Springer/dp/3030148319

So much so for the non existent qualities or "ethereal" one i speak about speaking of timbre, it seems they exist :

«In short, timbre lives not in the audio signal or in a musical score but in the mind of the listener.» P.20 of this book....lower in the post...

I will precise in the specific ears/ specific brain/ specific room of the "learning" listeners to be understood here by some....

Then to digitalize something so analoglike than timbre we must first recognize the phenomenon and define it with many descriptors....

The scientific theory of these mathematical descriptors is in progress say this first book about all aspects of the concept of timbre....I guess the digitalization modelization of timbre will progress also compared to the actual state indeed....

But it seems that it is possible that actual dac engineering being able to mimic analog turntable are not necessarily superior on all counts, all times, with any dac, in any room against any audio system....Too much factors.... Anyway it is each times our ears that decide if the timbre reproduction is natural or not, not an engineer on audiogon for us all, once for all, it seems....

Each/brain/ears/room are different, without speaking about the different dac, and different audio systems possible....

In one word: TIMBRE is not an "object" that engineers modelized easily once for all thanks to the Nyquist Theorem , it is first and last a learning complex process in variable acoustic environments for human ears....It is then human ears that decide if the timbre is rightly perceived or not ( it is also an objective/subjective interface problem)....The theorem is only about the relations of coding and sampling analog signals...Timbre is not simple signals sampling it is a bundles of acoustical phenomena in relation to an hearing system....


https://www.amazon.com/Timbre-Acoustics-Perception-Cognition-Springer/dp/3030148319

@audio2design you literally said timbre doesn’t exist... that’s severely discrediting

my musical and sound system engineering includes quite a bit actually such as concerts and installations

Analog is actually 4 dimensional while volume reproduction in digital creates loss bc there is no amplitude

It’s not natively sampled in 3/4D while analog is. Was. Pure modern digital can maybe keep up but we can’t tell bc few record on analog anymore. 
What IS nearly definitive is that older recordings, even when remastered digitally, are better in analog delivery.
I’m not arguing this point so much as to explain why so many believe digital sounds inferior (perhaps to those preferring a live performance sound granted).