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Way back in the day I bought Elvis's Golden Records Volume One and volume two when they came out. Since then I have seen them on cassette, 8-track, CD, and now on new vinyl! Record companies will make a lot of money reissuing old albums.
Back in my day the only time we started panic buying was when the bartender shouted "last call"!
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Each method of recording amplifying and playback has its own distortion. There is no reproduction system (yet) that reproduces voice or music without distorting it.
I do like the sound of vinyl, especially through tube preamps and amps. The distortion caused by that circuitry is pleasing to my ears.
What I don't like about vinyl is the surface noise. Static pops and clicks seem to build up over time, no matter how careful I am with the records and turntable.
I hated 8-tracks and never owned one. A friend had one and in the middle of a long cut it clicked a few times, changed tracks, and continued the song after that. Splitting the song in the middle to change tracks is heresy.
Cassettes have a loss of fidelity and tape hiss. I used to record my LPs on cassette to listen to them in the car. IMO, that's all they were good for.
CDs have distortion of the tone, they cannot reproduce all the harmonic overtones properly. Furthermore, they add harmonics of their own. The bit-rate isn't high enough, so the tone is edgier.
SACDs were much better, but the public didn't embrace them.
MP3s leave things out in the compression, WAV files are much better but still distort the harmonics.
So what you listen to depends on which distortion bothers you the least.
I'll listen to an LP, CD, WAV or SACD with no problem. A 192 or higher mp3 is ok for casual listening too.
I hated 8-tracks and never owned one. A friend had one and in the middle of a long cut it clicked a few times, changed tracks, and continued the song after that. Splitting the song in the middle to change tracks is heresy.
Good points sir! I actually owned an 8-track recording system in the early 80s. They were rare as far as I knew and the one I had was the integrated 8-track into the AM/FM receiver and turntable unit. I had thought the recordings I had made were pretty good compared to pre-recorded tapes and at the time only reel to reel was better (my opinion). The very unfortunate downside was that there was no control to stop your recording before the 8-track switch. If you didn't know how far time-wise you were into the track, it would just keep recording to the next 8-track channel. Therefore you would have the annoying track switch in the middle of your song.
Those technologies that came before are the same technologies that lead us to be able to make better comparisons now. In reflecting, everyone of them delivered something useful.
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This topic has to be free of comparison to each other for only the fact that none of the comparisons are apples and apples. The vinyl army goes on and on about the sound being better, but how does it do in your car? The 8 tracks split long songs because the segments of those 8 track tapes had to be 1/4 of the length of the tape with no ability to make one segment 3 minutes longer and the next 3 minutes shorter to compensate. It had to break songs or pad it with dead space. Cassettes were awful because of that awful 1 7/8 tape speed. When tape is on heads at that slow of a speed you aren't getting any highs at all. But again, when were car 8 tracks and cassettes in vogue?
I liken it to this. I once had a Compaq computer. I wanted to upgrade it to a faster processor. I looked and looked and finally discovered that the CPU socket on the motherboard did not allow for expansion. I wrote a nastygram email to Compaq and called them every name I could think of. Someone finally responded. That response included logic that made me apologize to them. It said (paraphrasing) "When that computer was built, the motherboard and CPU were the best available at the time. Now 3 years later processor speeds are available that were not available then. What you are asking from us is the ability to know what the state of the art will be 3 years into the future. Nobody can do that."
At our age we have lived long enough to see the evolution of sound recording. I was THRILLED to have an 8 track in my Camaro in 1969 and at the time the sound that came off those tapes was GREAT! 53 year older Eddie now understands analog vs digital and knows that what was great then stinks now by comparison. When you apply context and the whole "anachronism" thing, what we had and the changes we made every half decade or so meant we had the best available at the time.
Good answer Eddie, I I think it reflects on my (albeit short) comment about how things evolve. We can only compare what we've got now to what we had previously. We can't compare what we've got now with anything that may or may not be available at some future time. In the future, some things will undoubtedly be better, and some not so good.
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Someday, someone will invent the perfect recording and playback medium that will accurately recreate the exact performance as it was intended ... and someone will not like that either! LOL. All good points here. Reel to Reel was always supposed to be the best, then vinyl was really good, with the proper equipment. Portability gave us 8 tracks and cassettes and given the environment in most cars and road noise, the sound was as good as it could be I suppose. The CD's came along and people thought it was great, not realizing the A to D and D to A stuff that had to happen and the losses associated with that process, at least you didn't have to worry about the tape getting all caught up in the machine and ruining it! Then we just got rid of any kind of physical medium and made it magic. Now we are back to vinyl, as all the digital ears get to hear it for the first time and love that sound (the distortion that Notes was referring to is very pleasant to most ears). Who knows what the future will bring us. Can't wait to see it though.
My wife asked if I had seen the dog bowl. I told her I didn't even know he could.
I felt this video was far more about the compilation that the medium, though the medium was important.
It's the same message that Adele recently gave by demanding that Spotify make their default setting to not shuffle; That her album was a compilation of songs intended to be played together in the order she'd put them.
I have an album from a couple or so decades back by Savourna Stevenson (Celtic harp), called "Tweed Journey" and it's a collection of instrumental pieces reflecting a walk along the river Tweed from its source (in Scotland) to the sea. Each piece stands alone, but the sounds evoke that journey, from the stream in the hills, down through the villages, forest and towns. To listen to one piece is to miss a large part of the point of the album. It's similarly true of many other albums.
I despair the accelerating trend towards shorter and shorter attention spans, which seems to me self-reinforcing, self-fulfilling. I find it deeply frustrating and more than a little troubling.
On sound quality, cassette and 8-track were always poor, no matter how good the machine and the tape. 3-3/4 ips open-reel was rarely much better.
Vinyl & CDs were capable of good quality, but the former needed fiercely costly cutting machines, turntable, arm, cartridge and stylus, together with good RIAA equalisation throughout. The latter didn't really become comfortable until ADCs and DACs were well sorted and able to oversample both for record and playback. With CDs it was never that much about the data itself, it was far more the limitations of the filtering used at both ends. It's infeasible to filter and then sample at 44.1kHz or 48kHz and avoid passband ripple, ringing, upper-sideband and phase-shift. It only really cleaned up when things were routinely sampled at 96kHz or 192kHz or higher and then resampled intelligently to or from the 44.1kHz or 48kHz. Even quite low-cost DACs do that now.
"Notes" observation that vinyl and tubes introduce distortions that are "pleasing to the ears" is quite right and a well documented phenomenon. Gentle second-harmonic distortion adds warmth and richness to the sound. Whether or not is should is left to the discretion of the reader :-)
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Dolby C cassettes, recorded on a Nakamichi home unit were capable of 20-20KHz when played back on a Nakamichi home unit or a Nakamichi automobile head unit.
No matter how limited the technology, somebody will come up with a device to extract almost every ounce of goodness from the source material. (Audio, video, almost anything)
I feel very fortunate to be living now with our wonderful recording / playback technology and the internet ability to quickly access recordings made even 100 years ago.
I treasure my vinyl (because of the music). I treasure my CD's (because of the music).
I prefer CD's (or now wav files). I agree with Notes about surface noise and ticks on vinyl.
After faith, and family, music makes me the most happy.
Way back in the day I bought Elvis's Golden Records Volume One and volume two when they came out. Since then I have seen them on cassette, 8-track, CD, and now on new vinyl! Record companies will make a lot of money reissuing old albums.
Curious, which album did you like better, Vol. 1 or Vol 2?
I think Volume 2 has one of the all-time great titles and covers!
(50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong) with multiple Elvi on the cover in gold lame suits!
My favorite all-time cover:
from Herb Alpert: "Whipped Cream and Other Delights"
I find the arguments of “best recording/playback methods” almost amusing. Almost nobody has perfect hearing therefore there will almost always be some form of distortion (even if the listener can’t hear it). Does it matter? Even live acoustic performances with no electronic or other components will be altered by the weather or a dog barking a sneeze or whatever.
I think some folk place far too much emphasis on the methodology rather than the pleasantness of a performance. Sure methods have improved but just how good do they have to be to really enjoy a performance.
Tony
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I think some folk place far too much emphasis on the methodology rather than the pleasantness of a performance. Sure methods have improved but just how good do they have to be to really enjoy a performance.
Yes, a fairly reasonable appraisal. Unless we're doing our listening in one of these:
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LP.... And I thought they were talking about the LES PAUL guitar. Those are really heavy but they do sound sooooo good..... but no.... this is talking about the old Long Play album. The old black vinyl disk. Commonly, simply referred to as "a record". ( Pronounced: reckerd) Oh, and not all vinyl is black. I have ELO Out of the Blue on clear blue vinyl.
I still have a nice collection and a platter to spin them on. I do occasionally dig one out and reminisce. Clicks, pops, and skips aside.... it was a great experience.
I'm on the side of things that say digital is totally acceptable to me because.... it's super portable, and there's no skips, pops, or clicks that were inherent in almost every vinyl disk that had been spun a few times in the average listener's house.
As far as hoping it comes back into style.... sure. Why not? If there's a market for it, it will happen. I remember when the digitally recorded CD first came out. And reading in Guitar Player magazine, a record review of TRIO... the first CD from Dolly, Linda, and Emmylou. The review was on the musical instruments and the artists playing on that CD, and yes, they did explore the outstanding vocals..... but the comment that stuck with me from that entire article was "this album was the reason the CD was invented". The crystal clear, pristine sound of the acoustic instruments was unrivaled by vinyl to that point. Indeed, listening to that CD album with headphones or on a nice Cerwin Vega speaker system was a delight.
I'm wondering what the next step in the evolutionary scale of music reproduction will be.
You can find my music at: www.herbhartley.com Add nothing that adds nothing to the music. You can make excuses or you can make progress but not both.
The magic you are looking for is in the work you are avoiding.
What I see different today is not so much about the medium but what it is played out on. High-end stereo used to be much more common. Speakers that were fantastic, marvelous tube amps. We also had some pretty poor sounding stuff coming out of the push button Am radio in the 56 Chevy...lol
I don't think it makes much difference if it is vinal, two-inch tape, or MP3 if you have a cell phone headset stuck in your ears.
Perhaps it is even worse for many of us who spend hours listening to studio monitors or studio headsets leaving little time to listen to the high-end stereo gear that a few of us actually still own.
I find that VSTs are so convenient that it is easy to forget about the truly high-quality tube guitar amps I have setting here that I have spent hours designing and building. Well the VSTs are modern and convenient and I do like them but I have never listened to one that sounded like one of my custom tube amps.
I have vinal but I get lazy and it is just so much less work to grab the song off youtube. For many reasons we now live lives around lower quality stuff made in China and made in America.
The music does not have to be great sounding to be fun to listen to. I still have a 1950's transistor pocket radio.
Billy
“Amazing! I’ll be working with Jaco Pastorius, Charlie Parker, Art Tatum, and Buddy Rich, and you’re telling me it’s not that great of a gig? “Well…” Saint Peter, hesitated, “God’s got this girlfriend who thinks she can sing…”
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