The truth behind vinyl records

what's the truth behind vinyl records whoa boy here we go John and Bucharest Romania writes to me and he says hey Paul because of the tons of snake oil out there I would ask you how much is accurate from the following text regarding vinyl records and how the music is stored edited recorded and reissued and the text reads analog music is the ultimate listening format for audio lovers unlike digital recordings analog audio captures the entire sound wave with no information loss or digital sound compression there is no digital conversion or coloration the result is a more accurate reproduction of what was originally recorded well I just love it when people write stuff like that it's not snake oil but it's also not accurate because it is just it's too sweeping you first off I mean I could pick apart almost anything in there Digital does not compress okay there is no compression in digital unless the engineer decides to add it so first off digital does not compress second off vinyl does not capture everything nor does analog there's a lot of missing information dynamic range analog traditional analog is dynamically challenged so shall we say a typical tape recorder maybe you're gonna get 70 DB of dynamic range out of it where the the even a CD has a hundred ninety-six so let's not confuse the facts of technology with our conclusions that one is so much better than the other because as soon as you do that you get into trouble you get people like me who have an engineering background and say that's just horse patootie that that is not accurate it is not true and therefore we throw out the entire statement which is a mistake because the truth is so much depends on the actual piece the recorded piece I'll give you some examples high resolution audio whether you believe it or not sounds better than standard resolution CD okay tit for tat if you take a 1644 recording that was originally made at 16 bits 44 point one kilohertz sample rate and at the same time with the same microphones the same everything you also made a 192 24 and you made a DSD version you got all three recorders going from the same feed handled the same way if you sit in our mastering studios at octave records and you listen to that you don't have to have golden ears to hear the difference I don't care what Mark Waldrop has to say about that because in many cases mark is correct that upsampled makes no difference whatsoever simply raising the sample rate doesn't help the sound but done properly it does now words are going with that okay I can also make the claim that I have a number of 4401 Redbook CDs that sound far better than two-thirds of the high-resolution recordings that I have do I then suggest that CD is better or the same as high resolution on you know that's silly that is silly we have this great VPI turntable and our stellar phono stage excellent piece excellent piece I've got some records in here that will just blow your socks off just I mean I and and the CD version of it sucks does that mean CDs suck nope does that mean vinyls better nope what it means is this particular recording this particular master played on this particular system outperforms the others that are not identical we're not comparing apples to apples or oranges to oranges and that's the problem so no this cannot be said and accepted as one giant sweeping Proclamation because there are so many variables that have to be taken into account so many instances where I can show you exactly the opposite I just think we need to be careful with our words and not jump to conclusions like that because it's not snake oil this is all good stuff and it depends on the mastering the recording blah blah woof woof all right enough soapbox talk to you tomorrow bye [Music] [Laughter] [Music] you

Channel: Paul McGowan, PS Audio

Views: 127,150

Keywords: paul 44, Paul 35

Id: ulSLbQTMM_w

Length: 6min 16sec (376 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 16 2020