Question about cd and vinyl mastering ( no not that *other* debate)

Let's see if I can word this correctly.

While going through various threads I have noticed that many times a person will say " Yeah but have you heard the vinyl version of that title?" ( in comparison to the cd). Now I am not talking about the old analogue versus digital debate. But rather a digital recording with the same mastering sounding better on vinyl.

Im not sure I understand why this would be? One of the prime examples that brought this to my attention is the White Stripes albums.Someone mentioned that the vinyl sounded better than the cd. So I went and bought a couple of titles on vinyl( I have the cds). Now, from what I understand there are no mastering differences yet the vinyl versions do sound.. mmmm .. "wider" sounding.. for lack of a better word. Like the band is a bit fuller sounding.Two piece though it is.

Yet its the same engineering , mastering etc. Doesnt make sense to me.Why is this so? I could see it if say steve had mastered the vinyl version ( such as the case with the Red Hot Chili Peppers) and the cd was done by someone else that sucked the life out of it with compression and such. But in this case it doesnt make sense.

Any words of wisdom?

Excuse my ignorance if this has been answered a million times.

johnny

 

On his web site (http://www.musicangle.com/), Michael Fremer often write that modern digital recordings sound better on vinyl. I remember he made this comment about Brian Wilson's Smile, for example. I don't remember if he tried to explain that.

 

I've compared a couple of things from vinyl vs. SACD, and the vinyl won both times. The first time was with the Creedence 45rpm discs Steve Mastered. I compared a DVD-A recorded 24/88.2 from these vinyl records to the SACD's Steve mastered, and the vinyl sourced versions had a wider soundstage.

The second comparison was with Synchronicity by the Police. I had another DVD-A made from an unknown vinyl source, again 24/88.2, and the soundstage was wider here as well than the SACD.

I was amazed to hear this, but that was my experience. It was very easy to hear. I was playing both discs from a Pioneer Elite 59AVi run to my receiver with the iLink connection. Granted, the vinyl was made for me by someone with an incredible system, but it showed me that the vinyl could sound better when played on a good system.

 

I think sometimes the mastering appears to be the same, but in reality it's a little different. I've seen a few albums where the CD and LP have almost identical "tonality" but the CD is hard-limited but the LP is not. So the LP sounds more alive, with more snap to the drums, etc.

Of course, some vinyl setups are tailored to color the sound in one way or another, so that could make something more appealing. I don't buy into the theory that "vinyl's inherent distortions" cause some people to enjoy vinyl more than CDs.

 

There's another very simple factor to consider. Most digital studio recordings have sample rates and resolutions much greater than CD (44.1kHz, 16 bit). SACDs have greater (IIRC 48khz, 21 or 24 bit) which is the minimum studios have used generally. This means that standard CDs have to have a further 'mastering' layer which is applying truncation and a 'standards conversion' to the sound, in order to fit the 48,000+ samples a second into 44,100. This effect is rather like the smearing you see when American TV shows are converted to European standards and vice versa, because there is different temporal (time period) and dimensional resolution.

When a digital studio recording reaches CD then, the sound has had to be 'downconverted'. However, a digital master can be sent to a vinyl cutting room without that downconversion, as the digital source will be getting converted back into the analogue domain at the same bandwidth and resolution as the original recording.

This in itself will make a pristine pressing of said vinyl sound much better than the CD. However, as said above there is plenty of scope for engineers to make decisions about other 'tweaks' that they feel will need to be made to make the sound 'optimised' for vinyl vs. CD.

BTW When I got the 12" of Pet Shop Boys' Fundamental remixes, I noticed moust of the sound was distorted and sounded very much like digital clipping rather than analogue from the cutting. Looking at the wave in a wave editor, it certainly looks like the compressed digital CD master was simply pumped through to the cutter at a level way to high for the lathe to handle properly, with clipping occuring most probably at the input stage. This is probably what would happen with any vinyl that was cut using the same 'master' as the CD.

 

True, most initial studio recordings are done at higher resolutions than the CD standard. But the better recording studios offer 96kHz/24-bit recording if they do PCM. DSD is the new format and the standard that the SACD format uses, and it's resolution is much greater than the CD format than you state. It's not directly comparable to PCM as it uses a totally different sampling method. It uses a 1-bit system but the sampling rate is along the lines of 2.8MHz.

Either way, all those higher resolution recordings do indeed need to be downconverted to the CD standard format. Various methods of "noise shaping" (this is not "noise reduction") is employed that supposedly shifts the resulting downconvertion dither noise into the upper frequency ranges where they are not as noticable.

If a vinyl mastering house knew what they were doing, they would request the non-downconverted hi-res master to master any LP with.

Then, as already noted, any mastering tweaks done there may still happen.

 

And downconversion aside, some people just might find the sound produced by a needle dragging through a groove to be more pleasurable than the sound of a DAC spitting out electrons. I imagine a record might come out on top in an A/B test even if the material never existed at a resolution better than 16/44.

 

I find that vinyl has a physicality to it that digital doesn't. I prefer vinyl as it's a bit livelier and open sounding. A bad record is still a bad record but usually more tolerable than a bad cd. I've heard it described as "the vinyl factor".

 

I find that's a very good explanation for the vinyl sounding better than CD with modern digital recordings.

 

No doubt they work with whatever they're given but any professional mastering engineer would always use the highest resolution source possible. BUT, like George Marino(?) says on Michael Fremer's DVD, there are cases where vinyl is cut from 16 bit sources (downloaded off the net in his story) and it's out of the engineer's hands. Still, he said people told him it sounded better than the CD.

I honestly don't know if most people can tell a difference between properly done 16 bit and 24 bit. Would you be able to pick it out 10 out of 10 times? I highly doubt I could.

 

I wonder if bass summing and/or de-essing contributed to the LP winning out over the CD in those cases?

The other day I was comparing my two Steve-mastered LPs with their Steve-mastered CD counterparts. I was very hard pressed to tell the difference between the two. I would think that if the extra harmonic distortion of vinyl played a big part in people preferring an LP to CD, it would be easily noticeable when doing those sorts of comparisons.