What is behind a "warm" or "vinyl"sound?


I found an interesting article in The Saturday Toronto Star's entertainment section on the resurgence of vinyl.

What I found most interesting in this article was a description of why people describe vinyl as "warm". Peter J Moore, the famous producer/mastering engineer of the legendary one microphone recording of the Cowboy Junkies' Trinity Sessions recording says it all comes down to the fact that humans do not like square waves - ie. when you go from super quiet to super loud at no time at all. He gives the example that if someone was to slap two pieces of wood together right beside your ear would be about the only time one would feel a square wave - and that would make you jump right out of your skin! He says digital, particularly MP3s reproduce square waves like crazy, which triggers fear which also produces fatigue. He says if those same two pieces of wood were slapped together across the room, the square wave would be rounded off by the time the sound reached our ears. Turntables cannot reproduce square waves due to through time it takes for sound to get though the length of wire and the magnet that the wire is wrapped around in the cartridge. By the time the signal gets through that the sharpness, he ugliness, has been rounded and that, he says, is what people are talking about when they describe vinyl as "warm" sounding. Interesting!

I find there are a bunch of digital manufacturers, like Lumin, that are striving for a vinyl sound. I wonder if they are somehow rounding off the square waves in the digital signal to do so? If this is the case, "perfect" reproduction may NOT actually be beneficial to the sound...at least for someone who really wants a vinyl sound experience. Better may not actually be better when it comes to digital sound reproduction!
camb
Hi Al,
How ironic given the article author's premise, that in fact digital can round the square wave more than a cartridge in some cases. This is opposite of his explanation. Thanks for your input.
Charles,
Interesting indeed!
However, DSD is the closest I've ever heard to Vinyl.
DSD sounds warm, inviting, natural, easy flowing, you name it, just like a high-end Vinyl rig does.
Interestingly enough DSD is perfectly capable of square wave reproduction.

Go figure. :-)

Best,
Alex
In the digital domain, as long as one starts with high quality source material, almost anything can be made to sound like almost anything else relatively easily, if done well.

Christy Brinkley is a beautiful woman still, but does she really look like that magazine cover photo in person? Inquiring minds want to know....

Analog is more limited in this regard, though anything is still usually possible. Where there is a will (and a budget), there is usually a way. Just look at what Ray Harryhousen was able to achieve! Still beats a lot of SOTA CGI effects in effectiveness, if not technical execution.

"in fact digital can round the square wave more than a cartridge in some cases"

This has to be some piss-poor digital design....

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
02-04-14: Audioengr
"in fact digital can round the square wave more than a cartridge in some cases"

This has to be some piss-poor digital design....
Steve, my comment which Charles referred to had to do with the fact that redbook CD cannot capture or reproduce frequency components in a signal that are greater than 22.05 kHz (half of the 44.1 kHz sampling rate), while many cartridges certainly can. The quality of the digital design has nothing to do with it.

As I'm sure you realize, elimination of high frequency components from a square wave signal corresponds to a slowing of its risetimes and falltimes.

Regards,
-- Al