7mo ago

Sacrilege rule

127 comments

D/A and A/D | Digital Show and Tell (Monty Montgomery @ xiph.org)
This is a video about the digital vs analog audio quality debate. It explains, with examples, why analog audio within the accepted limits of human hearing (20 Hz to 20 kHz) can be reproduced with perfect fidelity using a 44.1 kHz 16 Bit digital signal.
There is no audible difference between an analog and digital audio signal.
Among other things, xiph.org maintains the .flac and .ogg vorbis audio formats - they know a little about audio encoding and reproduction.
- "they're part of BIG DIGITAL!"
- It's actually because of the limitations of analog media that analog audio might sound better. For example, you can't compress the signal as much when mastering for vinyl instead of digital, since you risk the needle jumping between adjacent grooves. As a result, the vinyl version of a song can sound more dynamic.
  
  It’s the opposite, no? Vinyl can’t handle the explosive dynamics common in modern music (especially electronic) due to the skipping issue, so any sharp peaks like that need to be compressed to make the overall mix more mellow
- digital signals aren't audible

Just don't mention the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem. Last time I did that I barely made it out of the record shop alive
- Physics? In my record store? GET OUT!
  
  "Noise floor? Don't be silly, it's analogue, there is no noise floor!"

One of the sillier reasons I still purchase vinyls is that it feels like I'm getting a cool poster along with the music
- I buy CDs for the booklets (and am massively disappointed if there is none)
- It's like a large trading card that you can use to play music

For me it is less about the sound and more about playing music in a way that is devoid of any real software or internet connection.
I don't have to worry about ads, updates, connections, etc. Just other analog things like a bent needle or dust on the record.
It's like camping. No I don't like sleeping on the ground specifically but sometimes it is worth doing so to be somewhere else: disconnected.
- Or you could just buy a CD/DVD player or audio file player and have the same ad-free experience but with modern signal quality and for a fraction of the cost. Heck a saved library on a laptop running some kind of audio player like WinAMP and disconnected from the internet would also give you that experience. Could even use Windows XP or a classic Linux for that nostalgia since it wouldn't be internet connected.
  
  Yeah, or have a meticulously organized multi-terabyte flac collection in your NAS you stream your music from...
  
  I also have that set-up. Which is likely why there is something to enjoy from a purely analog sound system: I enjoy how the technology works, which isn't necessarily a sound quality experience.
  
  Just download SoulSeek and download your songs in .flac. You literally only have to do it once and keep them forever.
  
  What you are looking for here is something from the OG iPod line. There are some guides out there on how to build something similar with a raspberry pi.
- I really like the comparison of analog media with camping!
  Since owning a CD player i use my CDs more now than i did in 2010. Unfortunately Discogs shipping fees mean i can't buy most of the things i want
  
  CDs are digital media, not analog. I actually mentioned them in a reply to this guy, that they are both cheaper and better audio quality because they are digital.
- I highly recommend MusicBee for windows. It works well out of the box and has tools to organize your library for you and do other tasks. It's all local and free. (You need to bring your own music files)
  
  I got 20+ years of harddrives on my local server. I use an old rig in the main room with fubar2000 and milkdrop plugin, all hard wired on LAN. It works just fine for when I am not in my office.
  But separately I have my dad's old phonograph and some records for when I'm working in the garage. Unfortunately that setup suffers on the speaker end more than anything. Poor things been through a dozen moves across cities and states.

To think that analog mediums are superior to digital requires a fundamental misunderstanding of signals and the human range of hearing that you can only get from ~~placebo enthusiasts~~ "audiophiles"
(I am by no means shitting on actual audiophiles btw. I consider myself an amateur audiophile.)
Edit: should also clarify I'm not shitting on people who enjoy records. I'm shitting on people who strictly think analog is better than digital.
- It used to be in the 80's when D/A converters were shit compared to the great 70's and 80's vinyl and tape players. Or in the 90's and 00's when most of the CDs were mastered loud and ugly. Nowadays it is what you say: digital really sounds better...
- How come they're in quotes but you're better than them
  
  If you're referring to audiophiles, I believe it's because they are acknowledging they know enough to say they are an amateur but recognize there are people who call themselves an audiophile just because they say "vinyl is the superior sound" without any justification of that opinion, which is an accurate observation of the divisions amongst audiophiles.
- If you grew up hearing the crackle, then to have it removed is pretty jarring. Some stuff feels to me like it benefits from it because it's kinda old-timey stuff anyway, and it sets the mood better - like the Beatles or Frank Sinatra. But it's not an audiophile thing in that case, just vibes.
  
  Yeah, it's one thing to like that slight amount of noise, and another to say it's higher quality.
- A pure analog recording can be superior to digital recordings. But those are so rare these days, we don't have a good comparison.
  There's things like "bass bleed" and cross talk that made analog so interesting to listen to.
  As long as the original recording is 48kHz or higher, digital recordings are awesome. We might not be able to hear beyond the 20Hz - 20kHz, you can most certainly feel it. Especially in the lower end.
  
  As long as the original recording is 48kHz or higher, digital recordings are awesome. We might not be able to hear beyond the 20Hz - 20kHz, you can most certainly feel it.
  Someone hasn't heard of the Nyquist theorem :)
- I agree wholeheartedly
- Define "superior".
- Better is definitely relative, but I think vinyl is much more enjoyable and experience for me personally.
  also, I don't like the crackle so I religiously clean each side of the disk to remove any dust before playing and it sounds wonderful. I've gotten compliments to that effect so definitely worth the effort.

I will happily pay the absurd modern prices for vinyl if I know for a fact there is a digital download card inside. Record companies need to put a fucking sticker on albums to let us know this because not getting one feels like an actual scam.
Also pretty much everything is digitally mastered anyway so if anyone judges you ask them if they own ANY analog albums
- Wasn't there even an "all analog" label in the US that claimed to use a fully analog pipeline in their process. People were saying it sounds so much better than the digital garbage we have, until somebody found out they were secretly using digital sources in their process and now the company got sued.
  For all the recording nerds out there I highly recommend the book "Perfecting Sound Forever" by Greg Milner, which offers really good insights from both sides of the analog/digital debacle.
  
  Yeah, Mobile Fidelity
  https://www.audioholics.com/audio-technologies/mobile-fidelity-scandal
- Some have something like a sticker saying there's a digital download on them.
  If there's not.. I put on my pirate hat
  
  to be fair I don't buy a lot, mostly because of the price, but I've never seen a digital card advertised. it's always just been a nice surprise in something I was buying anyway. so I'm saying I'd buy more if it was a standard practice or advertised better.

I like putting a record on for more intangible benefits. It's a bit of a ritual to set everything up just right and get a nice sound out of it. Being so deliberate makes it something of an event where you're saying "I am going to spend the evening listening to music".
- Yep and I like to read the lyrics and any additional content or art that comes with the album while I listen to it. I also like that it forces me to not skip any songs, as when I stream stuff I tend to skip even some good songs in order to get to my favorites faster. The sound quality isn't really the point for me with vinyl, it's more about immersing myself with the album and enjoying it like a movie.
- I do this with my CDs, my ritual is mostly about setting up the ambience in the room though.
  I'd love to have the space for a record player, but for now my vinyls are decoration.

I consume my music exclussively through wax cylinders.
- Purist

Most musical instruments are analog. Digitizing them is inherently lossy. I mean, it doesn't matter, you can get both digital and analog recordings that are orders of magnitude more accurate than human hearing, but claiming that analog is more inherently lossy than digital is just factually incorrect, unless the music is produced purely digitally. Including no human voices, because those are analog.
- Analog is inherently lossy due to the materials and playback method. Vinyl records sound different when they are dusty.
  Digital is inherently lossless because the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem guarantees that, given a sufficiently high sample rate, all information from the original signal is preserved.
  
  Vinyl sounds different per use, since it wears out.
  
  Your speakers are analog. They sound different when they are dusty. Your ears are analog. Things sound different when you have dirty ears. Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem only applies when there are no frequencies outside of the sample range, which doesn't happen in real life. None of this matters, because like I said it's trivial to have orders of magnitude more accuracy than you need. Digital is just way cheaper to copy accurately, so that's why it has become dominant, and that's fine, but the idea that it's inherently more representative of reality is just gibberish.
  
  But isn't live music analogue?
- Digitizing is only lossy once*. Analog is lossy every time you copy it and degrades over time.
  *Assuming you use a lossless digital format
  
  Not just any time it's copied or generally over time, but each playback can degrade the quality. Record pins erode the channels, magnetic heads affect the strength of the magnetic field they read.
  Reads, copies, and time don't (necessarily) degrade digital media, even with lossy compression (time can, but any time it's copied, it resets the clock to as good as the media can give; analog doesn't get that reset). Lossy compression only degrades it on conversion and there's a bunch of control over the shape of that degradation (with the intent of it not being detectable to our ears, though it obviously also depends on the bandwidth available).
  
  That is an actual fair criticism. Well, part of it. All of our current digital media technology actually degrades over time faster than analog ones, but they're so easy to copy that it's not really a problem for things that people like to make copies of. It is a problem for archiving though. I wasn't trying to argue that digital has no advantages. Just that it's not magically better in every way.
- You can sit here and have an argument about Nyquist-Shannon, but it isn't relevant for lots of music made in the past 40 years since it was made or recorded digitally.
  If your work was made with a DAW there's no point to analog.
  I've got a record from a smaller artist somewhere that I swear has fucking mp3 compression in it, because they don't know how to export their shit like an adult.
  
  The only meaningful difference between them is that digital is cheaper to copy. Your ears are analog though, so everything you've ever heard in your entire life is 100% pure analog, and I explicitly said in the post you seem to think that you're disagreeing with that they're both orders of magnitude better than they need to be.
- @zephrc @nifty The character in the drawing is Hatsune Miku, so this is alluding to vocaloid music which could be produced purely digitally as you say.
  Completely agreed otherwise, though.
- Nearly all music is recorded digitally, anyway, and has been for a while.
  
  Sure, and there's nothing wrong with that. They're both plenty good enough, and digital is cheaper to copy accurately. It's also actually possible to make a copy of a copy of a copy digitally and have it still be accurate. I wasn't attempting to say we shouldn't use digital, or that it has no advantages, just that the argument in the original post makes no sense.
- But there's a difference between converting a JPEG to a PNG and re-compressing a JPEG as another JPEG.
  Relevant
  
  True. I wasn't trying to argue that there are no advantages to digital, or even that we should go back to analog. Just that the argument in the post doesn't make sense.

Pristine? I bass boost the shit out of everything.
We only accept low frequencies in this household 🗿
- Hearing discernible sounds < boxing with lungs wrapped around one's fists.
- I have a reasonably expensive audiophile set up (nothing fancy by true audiophile standards mind you) but I still basically just listen to all my music through a pair of Skullcandy Crushers lol
  
  What're you running now? I've been using Sony MX's for a long time now, but I love the idea of the Crushers for those times I want to feel like the walls are made of subwoofers, and they seem inexpensive enough for a decent pair of secondary headphones.

miku miku beeeeaaaam

Just so long as you acknowledge the fact that 99% of digital audio you listen to is not meticulously optimized the point that there's a discernable difference between it and analog sound.
- Yes, but due to lossy compression. Not because of any limitations of digital audio.
  
  Probably due to crappy editing and laziness, not any technical shortfall...
- I mean, the analog audio you listen to is very likely made in the same way, and then turned into a physical record.
  
  It is true that a lot of music is recorded digitally and then put on vinyl. I'm in a band and we did this exact thing for our latest release. The mastering engineer did a special master specifically for vinyl that is different than the digital release master.
  It is possible to do the recording process analog, but it is more expensive and time consuming.
  There's also a hybrid option that some elect to do, where they record to tape (analog) and then edit it digitally.

Dont tell them, but I mixed in protools before outputting to a conversion box to get it on the vinyl
- But vinyl is still inherently lossy, so the argument still applies.
  
  Exactly it makes both camps mad.

CD sales are also going up...
- Barely, and that may have more to do with Taylor Swift than anything else.
  
  may have more to do with Taylor Swift than anything else.
  Can CDs be used as an alternative type of jet fuel?

I just like owning the spirally squiggly music line. Hehehe it spins and sound comes out

Pedant here 👋 "vinyl is the plural of vinyl." I'll see myself out.

I think the cool kid stance is just actual ownership of the medium at this point, anything that the platform can't yank from your collection as soon as their licensing changes is A-okay.
Also, vinyl is immune to bit-rot, so there's that.

omg literally me

Not only are CDs in 16bit, which is noticably lossy - it's a human product. all human made stuff will have mistakes and errors. what about the editing, studio or anything else
- The point is you can replay and copy it infinitely many times with no change in quality.

I don't judge what anyone else listens to, but records are better.
- In your subjective opinion, for sure! The added enjoyment from using this vintage technology and the collectible aspect of vinyl records can bring about a more preferable experience compared to digital audio!
- I'm having trouble connecting my record player to my car stereo over Bluetooth. Also it keeps skipping. Help!
  
  Yeah, the antiskip on the record player I carry on my bikerack also works really poorly, and the record sounds awful when it rains .
  
  I'm sorry I didn't realize convenience was a factor in how good a format actually sounds... MP3 clearly is the winner for "best format when you're on the go", but records sound better.
  I'm more than happy to use both

Here I am using BlueTooth headphones that transmit audio trough vibration over my chin bones into my ears covered with ear plugs.
The best of both worlds
- can you recommend a good brand? been looking for a good pair of those.
  
  I use Aftershokz and have no experience with any other brand. I had mine for at least 2years the battery lasts me 2 full work days on one charge and are excellent in an environment where you have to use ear plugs due to high noise. They are comfy and I don't have to worry about losing them. They however do make audible "humm" noise when standing near working welding machines. I think for this specific scenario they are absolutely perfect for me however I would never use them for their intended purpose which was outdoors sports. At least not without ear plugs as I find them necessary otherwise the surrounding noise (due to passing cars for example) may easily overpower them. For your typical gardening, walk in a forest, etc... they are fine though even without ear plugs as long as there is not too much surrounding noise. I also find the use of an EQ necessary as I found the base to be too overpowering.

Filtered.

Smooth graph better than steps though maybe ear technology will improve and then you’ll see!

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